Peter’s Son
The truth of the matter is that I was not well equipped for farm life. I hated being licked by scratchy tongues poking out of fences, getting jumped on unexpectedly by springtime offspring, finding fur woven into my clothes, feeling the oils of sheep wool coating my skin. I envied my sisters who would lunge at the rabbits or cradle puppies without hesitation, while I worried about the dirt under my nails and slime from filleting fish. It wasn’t a great look for the farmer’s kid’s kid, but it got under my skin in the same way that grass poked the underside of my legs.
Imagine being conceived and animated with an attitude of being absolutely No Different than the rest.
Imagine: The genetic difference within us all is so slight but somehow two of you are composed 99% of the Middle Kingdom.
Imagine: You are a boy. You are just a boy from middle-America with blonde hair, blonde eyebrows, and hazel eyes like your father. You are, after all, Peter’s son.
Imagine witnessing through a white haze, with eyes the color of chocolate, the damning heartbreak of looking past what one cannot conceive.
Imagine: Your eyes are dilated because you need new glasses again so you cannot make out the words on the page. You’re not sure whether the words or your eyes are more untrustworthy–porque aún no sabes leer.
Imagine: The genetic difference within us all is so slight but somehow two of you are composed 99% of the Middle Kingdom.
Imagine: You are a boy. You are just a boy from middle-America with blonde hair, blonde eyebrows, and hazel eyes like your father. You are, after all, Peter’s son.
Imagine witnessing through a white haze, with eyes the color of chocolate, the damning heartbreak of looking past what one cannot conceive.
Imagine: Your eyes are dilated because you need new glasses again so you cannot make out the words on the page. You’re not sure whether the words or your eyes are more untrustworthy–porque aún no sabes leer.
The pigs came to our animal farm only in the springtime, as the ice thawed and the cottonwood seeded. They arrived as sows ready to pop and left as a dozen or so squealing beasts. I could never help but notice that those who let them in and out of their farrowing crates were almost always closer to the color of hog’s skin and I, on my best days when I was filled with sun and spirit, closer to the color of what the hogs stood on.
Imagine having audacity so laughable.
Imagine: Such a silly mistake. Didn’t they know infused with your canton blood runs cells of privilege the color of snow? Didn’t they know deferral is a sign of respect?
Imagine: A disoriented little brown girl in the brazen body of a white man.
Imagine: The first language you heard was Cantonese; the first you spoke–English; the first you read–Spanish; the first you drew–Mandarin; the last you studied–French.
Imagine: A moral imperative to speak in tongues. The language is of a masculinity so fragile that occasionally, through you, it fills the entire space for fear of disappearing.
Imagine: Your mannerisms, your articulation, your cadence—all born out of deep observation and practice—feel both foreign and familiar in your body, as it goes whenever somebody else speaks through you.
Imagine: You are never lost in the data, you are always accounted for. You know exactly what to check on the census form.
Imagine: Occasionally telling yourself and others that you’re mixed to help clear up confusion. Though you are not third generation to your grandmother’s mother and a German grandfather, you are the immigrant. Is that why it’s called a white lie?
Imagine checking the back of the fortune cookie just to make sure you can still read it.
Behind me I see clearly the scenes manifested for me and my sisters: dodging grain mice as we scooped corn and oats with cut-up milk cartons before the sun rises; playing tag across hay bales the size of cars flying through the night; picking rocks out of corn fields under the heat of the day to protect the harvesting machinery; moving fresh chicks from incubators to fish tanks while they inevitably pooped on our hands; eating crunchy snacks from our pockets as we watched the cows being butchered in the middle of the barnyard, their legs hung high in the air by chains thicker than our arms so their innards would more easily spill out.
Imagine a made-up disability by the government brought you to the front of the line.
Imagine what a beautiful family you have.
Imagine so desperately wanting to escape an identity that it leaves you clinging onto any other language or culture that is given to you. In a way it was exactly what you needed: a proxy for the real trial.
Imagine: You were cajoled by the illusion of safety and saviorism. Help might not have been needed but you still require gratitude as your absolution.
Imagine being asked if you would rather have been left on the streets to be a pawn of the sex trade, but never truly broaching the cost of shipping to get you from the tropics to the tundra.
Imagine what words might find you in a moment of moral panic; I doubt you can.
From a litter of golden labs that stayed for a season, we chose Chip, a puppy who joined the ranks of the other dogs that lived on the farm. Of all the animals, the dogs were king, they roamed where they pleased, stayed the longest, and were always fed first. Chip stayed tied up while he outgrew his puppy energy and penchant for attacking poultry. Eventually though he started biting people instead of birds. The morning my father brought him to the field for his final run through the pumpkin patch, rifle in hand, was the only time my sister said she had ever seen our father cry.
Imagine being permitted to advance without question. Inevitably a singular truth will come to pass: whether by offspring or upbringing, or both, the act of the oppressor becomes a native performance for generations of limbs to follow.
Imagine: You are the palatable bridge between the lightest and the darkest. You are a comfortable neutral ground. You are fetishized as an escape.
Imagine: In one hand you hold truths as they are given to you and in the other the tails of their unraveling, all while you reap the riches of an inheritance you did not seek.
Imagine: Through a prudent practice of recognition and unlearning on repeat you indict yourself as both perpetrator and victim, and in turn, somehow also arbiter.
Imagine being asked point-blank if racism affects you and, for some reason you can’t quite understand in the moment, you wordlessly continue to grant impunity.
Imagine: A familial silence that is not felt as betrayal but as a loneliness of never truly knowing the individuals of the unit.
I used to fantasize what it would have been like to have grown up in places where I saw myself in the people, where my skin was always its truest color. What it would have been like if we had stayed in Kailua or gone to Palau, to be accomplices in systems I did not yet understand. But, as I was always told, I would not have grown up to know the family I do now——oceans would have separated me from my relatives——and I would never have wished that for my sister. I imagine the chaos of the barnyard is then precisely the mundanity my ancestors that became my ancestors imagined for my childhood. And so it came to be: a childhood of scrambling over mounds of packed snow and tractor tires as jungle gyms, of skating through ice rinks that eventually melted back into pasture ponds.
Imagine: You are told you are safe.