Set-Up
1
“These findings support our contention that humor, generally used for positive and prosocial purposes, can be co-opted and used by prejudicial people in dominance-relevant ways that derogate others (and keep them in disadvantaged positions).” –Hudson and MacInnis, “Derogating Humor”
2
The older men in this memoir are so serious, without the luxury of turning life into a joke.
3
Things That Signal Caste: Growing up on meat. Insisting on vegetarianism. Relishing, like a Northeasterner, chicken, fish, pork, duck, pigeon, even beef. Making low-caste guests wash dishes on which they’ve been served. Telling us our food is smelly, we are smelly. Praising that stupid thread crossed over Brahmin potbellies.
4
2003-2004: The IBS, which I am not diagnosed with until my late 20s, shows up at Harvard where I am waylaid with bouts of anxiety and exhaustion. It worsens through my fellowship year in Northeast India. There I am placed on three rounds of antibiotics to manage the dysentery which, Assamese people confide, we all get.
5
Things I Eat Outdoors In The U.S.A.! Pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers, mac-n-cheese, and teeth-rotting soda.
6
My earliest memory of an anti-Asian image is that of a 19th c. Chinese worker. He has that dull yellow color and the braid, the buck teeth. He is on edge, maybe fleeing. This specter flashes up in the bumbling caricature of Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the jokes colleagues make about Asians with no personality, the murder of Vincent Chin, the murders of Gurdwara devotees, the murders of sleeping Indians by Dotbusters.
7
Asian Exclusion legislation is a set-up. Ask a bullied Asian/American kid. Ask how those eye corners kids pull mimic lines from law. Ask how often Asian, Indigenous, Author are said together or at all.
8
2003-2004: There are two responses when folks learn I have dysentery.
One set devises remedies from local plants. Jetha and Jethi (my mother’s oldest sister and her husband) fuss over me with soups and teas, insisting I stay in bed. Others offer a rest stop: Borah Auntie, Pehi, the Muslim women staffing the hostel.
Another set demands I adjust to what they all eat: namely the Bengali owner of the first Guwahati hostel where I land. Every morning I ask for boiled water, he instructs me to take tapwater or nothing. I’ll get sick, I say. He frowns at the table of girls: is your blood different than ours? Americans always think they’re better than Indians.
9
You’ve newly defended your dissertation when you meet Bryce the Southern Imp. He is a squat white student who wears a red cap some days—like the day he leaves a deodorant stick on your lecture podium. It is an 8 AM class and the weapon lies atop your worksheets on Indian indenture and Amazonian bondage. The chair, director, and dean acknowledge the bigotry but colleagues can only sit in, swap stories, or rename it hazing. After contesting the B you give him, he pops up in hallways and stairwells like a goblin. Other professors have awarded him As, he argues, but you show your Excel sheet to the director who confirms the math looks right.
10
2003-2004: The hostel girls from Upper Assam sit on the veranda outside my window, sipping morning tea. They gossip loudly about my color, my height, my accented Assamese. I confront them at a dining hall meeting, where the Naga girls side with me and the Assamese Muslim girls study my face. What’s your last name? they ask. As if this will explain my disdain for the tea garden girls who are among the most monied in Assam, who brag that they don’t know how to slice an apple.
11
I grow up devouring New York apples—vivid green Grannies, soft McIntoshes with crystalline cores, just-shy-of-tart Pink Ladies—which my father takes us to pick from upstate trees in the iridescent fall. My mother peels, boils, then cans these apples, leaving our autumns and winters tasting of cinnamon and summer sweetness.
12
2003-2004: I first taste venison with Mintu Dada when we visit a ranger’s home in Arunachal Pradesh. The ranger has shot a deer in my honor (really, in honor of his nephew) from a forest sharing my name. The nephew is courting me, my aunt teases after she receives their bag of rice. My cousin, amused by the uncle’s frustration with my distaste, reveals it is illegal to hunt these protected animals at all.
13
My earliest memories of Black American cuisine involve a mysterious dessert an aunt makes, which everyone repeats is ambrosia. A saccharine stacking of something creamy with something rummy with canned fruit, my sodden bowl suggests Heaven doesn’t pooh-pooh our kind.
14
Things I Learn To Eat From Latin American Women: an Ecuadorian visitor at our hippie commune in Brazil cooks mole, a Chicana doctoral student slices an avocado after I confess it’s a foreign fruit in Davis, street vendors in San Diego stuff their steaming tamales with pork, chicken, pineapple, strawberry, corn, and beef.
15
I drive my MFA friend C to a Haitian restaurant, where M curdles her vegetarian nose at the bouyon bef while C tears up and whispers thank you.
16
In the 80s, I eat my mother’s sandwiches daily, which the Black boys tease is grosser than their school lunches, especially my peanut butter with pickles. They joke that I’m a doll, try looking up my skirt—but are the first boys to congratulate me on my wins.
17
A white boy at Harvard, named Rusty of all things, films me nodding and never speaking in his final project. All other Photography peers are given lines, personalities. I haven’t heard of Rusty’s “art” since though I wonder why no one said anything?
18
2003-2004: I meet Henna Ba, the older cousin I trailed as a toddler, who has been exiled by my maternal uncles. My middle uncle’s unassuming wife, Xoru Mami, arranges it. Don’t tell anyone at home, she says.
After serving us tea, Henna Ba and Xoru Mami chat about my cousin Jumi Ba’s upcoming arranged marriage. I remember rumors that, when Henna Ba’s husband asked for her hand in a love marriage, my uncles beat him up. My middle uncle, who jokes that my fellowship money is my father’s until I clarify it comes from a Harvard grant, complains that I don’t listen. And that, my father says, is how American kids are.
When we return, my uncle confronts Xoru Mami before the dining room: where were you? I blithely wash my hands at the water pump.
19
My bestie in grade school is a Shanghainese tomboy who teaches me to use chopsticks with this anecdote: her father teaches her by placing a bowl of rice between them and you only eat as much as you’re skilled enough to pluck first.
20
An Indian acquaintance of an Indian acquaintance, at her birthday in a San Diego club, gets super trashed, then describes the post-surgery body of an Indian boy she’s slept with. Her Indian friends look embarrassed and I’m glad the guy has slipped through her talons.
21
2003-2004: I celebrate Kati Bihu in Assam, the festival for eating in the midst of winter. My aunt lays out platters of sweets made from rice flour, everything grainy and soft. Til pithas are my favorite, delicate half-moons baked on a griddle until their edges crisp. They are plump with black sesame seeds, gooey with jaggery. My father treats me when I visit the Bronx, rotating half-moons in a pan by hand.
Rubul Dada is alive this Bihu, traveling with other boys from house to café to house, sampling sweets and the smoke of burning huts.
Punchline
1
“Stigmatized people can use laughter to rebel against a hopeless situation, launch social critiques, achieve parity, find relief from distress, or recount traumatizing experiences without appearing as a ‘victim.’” –Sandberg and Tuterges, “Laughter in Stories of Crime and Tragedy: The Importance of Humor for Marginalized Populations”
2
2003-2004: My mother’s brothers have uproarious laughs. They throw their heads back and a full ripple comes from deep within their bellies. I notice this pattern my fellowship year when they laugh over tea, rice, beers with other men. My mother no longer belly laughs and neither do I.
3
Things That Delight: Babies laughing on Instagram. My love’s antics, like a kid’s. Two cups of tea with my father. Roasted meats my cousin shares in an Assamese village. A riverboat ride where we spot dolphins and picnic on cut apples, boiled eggs, and warm roti.
4
You are a Harvard freshman, juggling work-study and scholarship requirements, when Rusty strikes. Your own presentation focuses on Weegee, that wry chronicler of urban crime. Stonefaced Rusty can’t visualize an Asian/American woman with a sense of humor this dark.
Rusty aspires to a tired lineage of filmmakers who’ve asked you to laugh at Asian/American women as punchlines. Me so horny, me love you long time, the Asian sex worker says, chasing her next G.I., her next job. Maybe what you’re writing is you remember a long time for all those ushered into this flammable mirage: Asian/American Woman.
5
San Diego—beach bonfires flicker across my doctoral years. One night, C and I sit with white and Latino peers we’ve met at a fellow poet’s house party. What embers in my mind is Sean leaping up by the fire and into my face, donning specs and pursing his lips to show his teeth. He giggles as if he’s high. Neither C nor I speak—the price of being invited. I wish I had known Yoshizo’s quip: “what humans laugh at reveals their true character.”
6
Things We Joke About When No One Is Listening: How Asian don’t raisin. How we save others’ marriages by saying no. How furious wives spit on hussies rather than husbands. How Black women love Indian hair more than Indian bodies. How hell hath no fury like a white man scorned. How “woke” academics sabotage us even as they cozy up to upper-caste Marxists. How the best food in this country is ethnic, especially Indian immigrants’ in Britain. How tattoo art originates in Polynesia, even when it’s appropriated by skinheads.
7
The cruelest piece of gossip floats between a Harvard peer and me as we walk Brattle Street.
The South Asian American Association has voted on monikers for its members, even those who no longer participate. “X was voted most likely to succeed, Y most likely to fail,” she says. “Can you guess who was voted the one most guys wanted to sleep with?”
I don’t respond, refusing the game’s social violence. Already the dorky boys, led by an obnoxious Jain senior I’ve turned down, joke that “Reema puts the ass in Assam.”
8
2003-2004: So what if they call us junglee, my favorite cousin, Mintu Dada, says in Bomdila. He’s lazing on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, as he says this half-ruminatively, half-derisively. I don’t know why I laugh so hard but he begins laughing too. So what, he says. Junglees also have culture.
9
A college vegan after two stints on permacultural farms, you gorge on endless tubs of hummus and salads, gobble up your roommate’s gift box of chocolates (for sharing, she emphasizes) when you can’t contain your hunger—still, you don’t fit in.
10
2003-2004: In Sikkim, I sin with beef. I hunt momos in Gangtok streets, populated by old women skinning live chickens, brewing noodles and curry. I savor yak balls shot through with cheese, my mouth brimming with juice and brightness. Unlike anything I’ve had in chilly Cambridge, I’m learning to eat again. Even my cousin’s dismay, when his Muslim business friend gloats about the beef I eat, can’t stop me. It’s different in America, we say!
11
2003-2004: Peha, my favorite uncle, travels with me to Guwahati, where we have lunch with a Goswami Brahmin family. They serve us separately while the older gentleman, an otherwise polite man, reads a newspaper at another table. Aren’t you going to join us, Peha says. I’m startled by the caste challenge in his nettled tone—and astonished when the man folds his paper. He clears his throat: of course. Peha smiles: ah, now the food tastes good!
12
The South Asian Rich Boy I date in San Diego yells at me: Assam, Assam, Assam! I’ve explained that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Northeast India means the Indian army can arrest without warrant, shoot on suspicion, has impunity from their crimes.
When I show my mother his photo over spring break, she scoffs at his complete hairlessness. When I confess he keeps asking about having a baby, she retorts, does he think you’re a mail order bride from the village?
13
2003-2004: I learn to enjoy pork through my Naga friends at the Guwahati hostel. We slip out before curfew to hole-in-the-wall cafes packed with men. Sano and Amen silently stuff their mouths with momos and I imitate them, spooning dollops of chili sauce on my greasy plate, wolfing down the largest dumplings I will ever see. Gray and lumpy, these momos are a sweet revelation, juice dribbling down our chins. I feel myself inducted into a temporary tribe, the non-tribal men eyeing me quizzically.
14
My uncles in Tihu send me to cross from one house to another after it rains. The courtyard is a mud sink so I slip, soiling my American dress, confused as to how I’ll reach any house. Sometimes it rains again, though not so hard that it washes me away, as it does many children yearly, as it has a younger cousin.
My uncles sit laughing and laughing, not venturing to help me up, not venturing inside to spoil the fun.
15
God made you out of Teflon, Big Mike says. An older, born-again African American man I befriend the summer we teach in Upward Bound, he chuckles: this is how we say it in the hood!
Later I double-check what Teflon is then am unsure that’s me at all. The Black teachers joke that Big Mike is out there but I hear the lilt in his foghorn declarations: hallelujah without saying it exactly.
Ebony angel, his pastor calls him. I meet Big Mike in a hall, light streaming over us, where he bends over to shake my hand, then swoops into my class to get the kids to listen.
16
Two decades later in Ohio, where I teach creative writing, a colleague shares a COVID statistic. The bots that zip back and forth to students deliver most from Panda Express. I don’t share my own irony—how I’ve felt no difference between COVID years, when people are asked to socially distance, and my contingent teaching years in Virginia, in Philadelphia, in Connecticut.
17
It is always my hair and my smell with Black girls in grade school. My first memory of being betrayed is when a Jamaican girl tells me they joke, over group calls, about my long hair being fake, that it probably stinks because of dripping into the toilet when I use it.
Now when I visit Co-Op City, I sample curry goat or oxtail stew in some West Indian restaurant. I marvel at the heady flavors of turmeric and cumin and chili that those girls likely knew too.
18
In high school, my sister asks me to cut her hair and dashes, when I chop too much, frantic to the bathroom mirror. I laugh at her tears—until she returns the favor in college, sending me off solo to Manhattan in the tightest tee-and-jeans known to man.
A decade later, on my 30th birthday, I arrange a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Queens. My mother and sister laugh mainly with each other—till my sister gifts me a copy she offhandedly says she’s read. Wench is a novel about light-skinned slaves who become concubines in the U.S. South. My father hugs me when we rise from that doomed meal. I’m proud of you, he says.
19
When there’s finally a Japanese restaurant in Pelham Parkway, my father and I hold heart-to-hearts over udon and teriyaki. I weep over edamame shells as he shares his strategies for emotionally surviving.
20
2003-2004: Pehi asks what new words I tell people I’ve learned. She sounds mournful, suggesting that staying in villages hasn’t improved my Assamese which, she notes to visitors, was once fluent.
Oh, I’ve learned lots of words, I say. Crazy goat, stupid cow—animal rhymes that are applied to human enemies. Peha, who’s been sitting in his usual chair, maroon shawl wrapped about him, silently eating his rice and dal, bursts out laughing.
Pehi laughs too. Oh ma, don’t go around telling people that’s what you learned from us.
Why not, I say. That’s the truth and it’s easy to remember!
21
I laugh in a grad class at the phrase rape cave. Readers with perverse humor, my professor says, will find that funny. Vanessa Place has published a book of rape jokes, predictably controversial, unpredictably funny (according to reviews). As a survivor, I can barely get through the Vimeo but recognize the social tapestry. I look up a 2014 op-ed in which Classics professor Corby Kelly quotes Emilie Buchwald: “boys take in misogyny with their breakfast cereal.”
22
Things The Men I’ve Loved Have Laughed At: My first love joked about my body, my ethnicity, my dreams. My disappeared love, who joked about himself, once ogled a fake Benjamin on the dirt while I stood beside him. My big love, whose vocal mimicry I tease is his adoptee superpower, marvels at how someone as educated as me can be so clumsy.
My father is another love entirely—I swim in and out his baleen mouth—he who has crossed oceans and will leave for another before I’m gone. Like the older men in this memoir, he is so serious.
Works Referenced
Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Notes on Zuihitsu. https://aaww.org/notes-on-zuihitsu/
Ed. and Transl. Steven D. Carter. The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century. Columbia University Press: New York, 2014.
Hahn, Kimiko. The Narrow Road to the Interior. Norton: New York, 2006.
Hahn, Kimiko. “The Zuihitsu and the Toadstool.” https://aprweb.org/poems/the-zuihitsu-and-the-toadstool
Hodson, Gordon and MacInnis, Cara C. “Derogating Humor as a Delegitimization Strategy in Intergroup Contexts.” Translational Issues in Psychological Science. 2016, Vol. 2, No. 1, 63-74.
Dir. Kubrick, Stanley. Full Metal Jacket. Warner Bros. 1987.
Sandberg, Sveinung and Tutenges, Sebastien. “Laughter in Stories of Crime and Tragedy: The Importance of Humor for Marginalized Populations.” Social Problems. 2019, 66, 564-579.
Reema Rajbanshi is a creative and critical writer who currently lives in New York. Her debut book "Sugar, Smoke, Song" (Red Hen Press, 2020) is a linked story collection about Asian/American and immigrant lives in the U.S. The zuihitsu essay here is an excerpt from her working travel memoir "A Woman Named Lightning, A Man Named Victorious." A scholar of World Literature, Rajbanshi is also working on a research monograph on "caste." All excerpts, publications, and readings can be found at linktr.ee/reemarajbanshi.