“You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom onehundred years too soon.”

--James Baldwin, My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation , 1963

Dear Elena and Amelie—

 You have not yet encountered mathematics, you recognize some numbers and this delightsyou, as it does us. At one year, I did not go exploring like you do, Amelie, but I banged outrhythms on overturned pots on the carpeted floor. At three years, I didn’t recite longincomprehensible stories to anyone within earshot as you do, Elena, but I rummagedthrough magnetic letters and numbers in a plastic tray, quietly tracing my finger aroundeach unique shape. Your grandparents must have wondered what could possibly come of this behavior. But they remembered the American ideal and let me be, allowing me acertain freedom. Before their eyes I blossomed into a wide-eyed learner, a math team nerd,a band geek, a near-suicidal cynic, a cross-country runner, an overachiever, an activist, amusician, a rebel, a hitchhiking anarchist, a relief worker, a historian, a communityorganizer, a writer, a wide-eyed learner again. Twenty-five years they have watched me.

 You are both so earnest—a little spoiled, too, to be sure—and I hope the arc of your livesmirrors some of mine, even the rough parts. You might even become stellarmathematicians; there’s a good amount of poetry in it, you’ll find. You’re also guaranteed tomeet some badass Asian American kids if you go that route.

At some point very soon you will learn the number one-hundred. It is fun to say out loud.It’s also fun to write, although the zeroes can be confusing. Compared to one through ten,one hundred seems like a regular bonanza. You won’t know what one hundred is becauseyou’ve never had one hundred of anything, but it’s still an exciting thing to think about. Alsoscary.

 There are times when I want to wish you one hundred years, each. One hundred years is awonderful and painful thing to have. It has tired your grandparents out exceedinglywatching your mother, uncle, and aunt for a quarter of that time. We have photographicevidence. Your grandma had such a soft face, your grandpa’s hair was luxurious brown andeven curlier than it is now. The landscapes of their bodies are grayer and cruder now. Theyare strong people, both of them; that is to say, they have known emphatic moments of weakness, and have doggedly weathered through, though not always gracefully. She hasthe Chinese grocery store and heavy Augusta summers in her blood; he, the quiet restlesshazy mornings of Minnesota farm country in the farthest depths of his mind. Nearly seventyyears they have both been here, carrying their own arcs, growing their own stories, lettinggo of some. They, too, have been watched, by a great many people. History is funny likethat. History will not let go.

 You are the only ones on this entire earth whom I have watched and loved your whole lives. You are also the only ones I know of who are growing up in an interesting and terrifying age

 

—which, confounding as it is, grows more interesting and terrifying each passing day. In1963, all James Baldwin could conclude from humanity’s long and painful life was ourmanufactured ability to destroy ourselves many times over. That year, and the onespreceding and succeeding it, saw many seismic shifts, a changing in people’s consciousness.It was not just Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation, and the Anti-War Movement; it was not

 just the Asian-American Movement, the Chicano/Latino Movement, the American IndianMovement; it was not just the birth of ecology, the GLBT and queer movements, the laborstruggles, the internationalist scope of struggle or the national erosion of governmentallegitimacy. They witnessed a rupture, an earthquake, an upending of history, and somethingeven more daring—promise. This was not the first earthquake. Countless others hadpreceded it. Many promises , all. And each one died. Some simply starved. Others werebrutally trampled down. We have strived nonetheless. In the meantime, our landscapeshave grown grayer and cruder. Our faces are tired. We are, all of us, immigrants to a landand time we are helpless to understand.

For hundreds, thousands of years—and those are very big bonanzas of numbers indeed—wehave gotten by on selective amnesia and myopic disposition. We have sustained manycrises, and survived them (although what of the millions who did not survive? and what willcome of the weight of their unsaid stories, in a history that will not let go?). Only now, as Iwrite this, we are at the head of another crisis, and the only difference this time around isthat we are beginning to wise up, and part of wising up is recognizing how much devastationwe have wrought, how little healing we have undertaken, and how breathtakingly quick allthe innumerable consequences will rush to engulf us. Lingering in all our talk of a post-racialsociety, of a world going green, of the new promise of today, we recognize a certaindishonesty that is, at best, irresponsible, and at worst, lying.

 Twenty-five times around this sun now, and I have lived without dignity for most of it. I havehad my head smashed open for being a Chink in the wrong part of town. I have beentaught, managed, processed , in ways unimaginably damaging, ways that seek to destroy myAsian self, my queer self, my creative self, my loving self. I have been held up as a modelfor all the wrong reasons, and bullied for all the right reasons—the reasons that deny myhumanity. It is hard to swallow this, but I have grown to recognize the pattern. I have donea real number on myself during my very short, very tenuous life, and it’s not a big numberlike one-hundred, but it could very well be.

I say all of this in the understanding that the terms I use and the struggles I try andencapsulate will be the same as yours, and yet not quite. By the time you write letters likethese, the language and situation will have changed in ways I cannot imagine. Yet I hopethere is a familiarity all the same. I am half-Asian and look it; you are a quarter-Asian and donot look it. I am queer, and you may be butch or trannie or straight; I am a writer, but youmay find joy in the ridges of seashells, the screams of thrash-punk, the warm skin of a lover.But I know now that these immense struggles—all of them—remain embedded in all of us,and it is our responsibility to honor and support them, whatever way we can, in our owngood time. In you live histories both brilliant and devastating. Hold fast, all the same.

In the meantime, we who raise you are engaged in something like a despair olympics. Itused to be, we muttered over who was more oppressed; now, we mutter over what socialproblem will do us in first. The list is long. You, don’t be afraid. We are doing our best to

 

equip you, we are doing our best to protect what you hold dear. Know that there are a greatmany others, engaged in the same strivings. Not a day goes by I do not thank the ancestorsand mentors that allowed me to stand, all the Asian American activists, the feminists, theanarchists, the queers, the organizers, the writers, the ones driven by sustaining, sustaining.I sometimes like to think that all our theories and arguments and picketing and yammeringand subversive tendencies are just one wide, smooth step we are setting down on thefoundation, in the hopes that you will find it even easier, that hope of transcendence, clarity,intertwinement, dignity, restoration, maybe even something like justice.

 You know, and I know, that the country is still fifty-five years from its next check-up on itsemancipatory health. I must believe that someone will be watching come the time of ourtrue liberation. I hope you will be two of its witnesses.

--Your Uncle Stevie