Selected Prose
On COVID-19 and Clutter within the Asian Diaspora
A personal essay about my father’s debilitating hoarding habits that were worsened with the onset of COVID-19.
Publisher: Return of The Gidra
When my dad wins a couple hundred dollars from a gambling tournament, he’ll come home with bags full of goods from rice crackers, to fruit candy, to pre-ripe avocados. With COVID-19, he’s doubled his bags with items like canned goods and used flats. Things that will last months and months. It doesn’t matter that we already have plenty of food, or that I don’t need any more socks or shoes. For him, a house full of usable objects is the ultimate expression of care.
Over the past couple of months, he also gained a habit of putting avocado seeds in water-filled containers and placing them around every window-sill in the house. Slyly hidden behind sheets of curtains lie rows of floating seeds, bobbing in water like tiny fists.
He hoards avocado seeds and places them in water only to watch them fail to sprout. Every seed-not-grown is an iteration of his hoarding logic: “I will not help this seed grow. But it’s still a seed and has the potential to grow. So I keep it.” This logic extends to broken electronics, outdated encyclopedias, soiled chairs, week-old leftovers, outgrown baby clothes, and old newspapers. Everything that won’t be used, but has the potential to be, is kept and stored, turning our house into a mountainous terrain of items that are destined to be lost.
These seeds grow into fruit. We eat and sell. Get money.
• • •
My dad was born in Sakai, Japan during the 1950s, a time when seafood was cheaper than meat. Obaa-chan would often feed him and my aunt unseasoned whale, along with watery winter-nabe. Through post-war poverty–which began from greedy cisheteropatriarchal powers, both within and outside of imperial mainland Japan–my dad was taught that mounds of usable items, stored and passed down, held love that wished to be held back. So he gained a habit of storing side-lined furniture, abandoned by their owners, in the house; of golfing and coming back with plastic bags full of balls he covertly picked at the field; of keeping empty soy-sauce and tonkatsu bottles, because he believes containers never outlast their purpose.
COVID-19 has worsened my dad’s hoarding. After the pandemic caused my university to close, I returned home hoping to spend my quarantine decluttering the house. But any attempt to clean has only exacerbated his anxiety. When stores were cleared empty of toilet paper, frozen foods, and meat, he became extremely frugal with ingredients, often relying on canned clam chowder to feed us for lunch and dinner.
I grew up exhausted by the proliferation of items. With the privilege to not worry about having basic things, it’s easy to look up to the uncluttered, minimalist lifestyle of organized office spaces, and the cathartic feeling of throwing away piles of things.
However, I’m coming to understand that the cultural zeitgeist of minimalism isn’t a cure-all to capitalist overindulgence. The rise of bourgeois minimalism–popularized by tiny houses, monochromatic lifestyle niches, simple clothes, and the KonMari method–has embedded its philosophy into a young generation that feels ashamed about having too much because they grew up on too little. The “less is more” trope subsequently hardens the stigma behind compulsive hoarders, many of whom are immigrants, refugees, and/or those who were purposefully sidelined and rendered disposable under the violent white cisheteropatriarchy.
For people like my dad–a working class diasporic Asian immigrant raised in poverty–letting go is hard. It takes not only work but certain prerequisites. One needs social capital, community, and access to a well-paying job; all of which are inaccessible to many under a hyper-exploitative capitalist regime. Letting go is even harder under COVID because every strewn item bears a mark of scarcity and usefulness. To throw away items in our near-recession economy would mean to participate in a masochistic ritual of self-sacrifice.
The Asian diaspora have been and continue to be held in a neoliberal chokehold. For us, hoarding is political. Hoarding is subject to our relationship to the capitalist enterprise. And for our respective community(ies), COVID has become ever-threatening because of its biopower and biopolitics over our loved ones. On top of dangerously perpetuating colonial stereotypes of the “disease-ridden Asian”, racist neoliberal policies have and continue to sacrifice Asian lives for corporate interest. In an economy that renders us disposable, it’s difficult to readily abandon possessions as if to reject the scarce advantages by which we obtained them.
• • •
I recognize there are probably many reasons as to why my dad hoards. He might have a mental disability(ies), though my family and I are unsure, mainly because of persisting ableism within the orthodoxy of the Japanese household. He might have underlying trauma birthed from loss and poverty from war. He might be tying his habits to a larger patriarchal violence of greed; of wanting to take and take and take; of having more than he needs, because imperialist Japanese history has taught him: You have the right to more.
There are probably many reasons why he is the way he is, but I don’t know them. Because I grew up understanding grief but not how to translate it. I can’t tell if the vases full of cracked seeds is his way of communicating hope or harm. If the mounds of indoor clutter are his way of communicating surrender or survival.
• • •
When I see my dad deseed avocados–replacing seeds with wounds–I understand how his hands are capable of harm. How his palms, which grunt under the pressure of butchery, carry the weight of warring lots, of men knifing their hands through dark, seizing things they seek to possess: prisoners, land, women. And when I see him cling onto outgrown clothes and shoes, I understand how his hands are also capable of fear. Because for him who grew up with little and having to let go of belongings unwillingly, everything is worth saving. For him, letting go is an act of trust, a trust that has not been gained. And for “us”–the inextricably complicated Asian diaspora–these sentiments may ring true. Because the settler-colonial state grew from taking. The settler-colonial state’s first language was that of violent stealing–land, language, labor–and rehearsing this same logic by day. For “us” to adapt to the American settler-colonial empire, then, is to adapt to this language of harm, of communicating our relationship to communities, the environment, and objects as if we’ll be deprived of it.
• • •
Living in the imperial core and witnessing the effects of its militarist branches has taught many diasporic Asians to hold onto what they can because every little strewn item can be taken, stolen, and never retrieved. A result of this violent language, recently made more visible under COVID, is the belief that every crinkled paper or cracked seed can be used, grown, monetized.
These seeds grow into fruit. We eat and sell. Get money.
Body Caught North
A flash fiction piece about the Japanese superstition that sleeping north can bring about premature death or bad luck.
Publisher: The Pearl Magazine
Image by by Athena on Pexels.com
At the end of Ojii-chan’s dying, his body was buried north. The pits of his eyes, dilated in dark, were like split moons. As if a razor fashioned two slits to his flesh. That day, I remember Mama told me that the soul leaves through the eyes. That pupils punctuate when a body is sentenced; its dark pits inking periods.
I once had a nightmare of Ojii speaking through his eyes; his two mouths molding a swallow with every speech. He stood between a door frame, legs bent in bow, as his eyes ate at the distance between us. Mama says nightmares are natural when you sleep with a head compassed north. Sleeping north is like approximating your body to death.
…
When I was six, my uncle asked me to be his flower-girl for his wedding. So Mama picked me a blush skirt-dress, the kind that bloomed me into a tulip. She said to be careful running my fingers across the hem since a firm clutch could rip the tulle, leaving me unpieced and de-petaled. I remember twirling in front of the body-length mirror, hands waist-up, as I closed my eyes and imagined flowers falling from under. But a few days before the wedding, a floor lamp fell on my face, budding a bruise on my left eye. Having thought I was cursed, my soul now half-sucked through one pupil, I felt guilty if I bore flowers in a body betraying the living.
To compromise for my half-soul, I began taking naps north. At mid-day, when the sun flared through my window, I’d sprout my feet south so my head arrowed towards graves. Heat danced on my back as I daydreamed of being baptized into a greater gold. Mama grew afraid of my habit, and displaced her fear onto me when she started having the same nightmares of Ojii.
It’s known that myths are maternal instincts in disguise. That myths are matriarchal stories that help mold danger into something knowable, perceivable. So when Mama receives my dreams of Ojii speaking through his eyes, that’s her way of kneading us both back into herself; that’s her motherhood clasping us both on a shared shore, where fear and grief communicate our threads together. She stories fear into me, tells me that a curse is something that looms, something that tugs you deeper into the waiting room. But she’s careful to tell me that a curse is not a purpling of the eye. It’s not born from my head pointed towards an after. A curse, Mama affirms, is a body that cliffs; a body that defies maternal warning. It looks like me lying north, not because I signal a dying, but because I’ll grow my wait on death with each face held in defiance against her.
Bad Feng Shui
A flash fiction piece about a daughter who is exiled from home due to her mother’s superstitions.
Publisher: No Contact Mag - Issue 10
I left home with just two changes of clothes and a body-length mirror. I remember whenever my dad got angry at my mom, he’d place the mirror right in front of her bedroom door so bad spirits would enter and haunt her sleep. Once, she said she had a dream of a baby drowning in a creek. How she saw two bloody fists displacing the water; and only when she looked closer did she realize the fists were just fruit trying to grow into a tree.
While my mom did my hair in the mornings, extending the brush so my hair rose like smoke, we’d always sit in front of the window. In the frame, barely holding our faces against the sun, we looked like ghosts. I remember I used to pretend I was a haunting, plucking lemons off my neighbor’s tree, or crushing cars with the front-side of my thumbs. After she’d finish, I’d usually ask her why we had to sit in front of the window instead of the mirror. That mirror is bad Feng shui. We need to get rid of it. My mom’s natural reaction to bad omens in the house was either burning or throwing away the source. That’s why one day she told my dad the same thing about me: That girl. We need to get rid of it.