I have a piece that was published on the thirty-first anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen Beijing Spring on June 4, 1989. It’s in INHERITANCE Magazine.
As the editor notes, this piece was written and produced well before the events of the last week in the United States, where the uprising against police brutality, white supremacy, and anti-blackness due to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many others has accelerated into a global protest movement for Black Lives Matter. The truth is that I wrote the piece a few months ago simply to get my thoughts down on my first childhood memory, which is Tiananmen (and which I’ve written about on my old blog in both 2018 and 2019). After a first draft, I got in touch with INHERITANCE, and as we discussed it, it became clear that part of the insight was that learning to feel the world through my body, which my aunties and uncles taught me at the Chinese Christian church where I spent my childhood, could have some things to say about the current pandemic.
Rewriting the piece, I sent it around to some friends and colleagues to see if that link was a stretch. It’s ultimately up to my readers to tell me if it works, but one item of feedback I received from a dear friend was that it was clear that my insights had been influenced by black womanist healers and that I had not acknowledged them. After some initial hesitation to introduce yet another dimension into this piece, I decided that it would be the ethical thing to do to cite black women. The fact that I had to wrestle with this demonstrates that I am implicated in the reflection on anti-blackness that is going on within Asian American communities the world over (‘Asian American’ is not an identity restricted to the United States, but indicative of the global export of American orientalism and its impacts on Asian bodies beyond the nation-state called ‘America’) and that the best work that I can be doing in this moment is not to point fingers at other Asians, but to work from within myself to overcome my internalized racism together with other people of good will.
In this way, this piece is ultimately about the womanist insight, which I learned from reading black writers whose writing intersects with what Alice Walker called ‘womanism,’ that our bodies are the site where wisdom about the world has to be rooted. This is as applicable to my first childhood memory of Tiananmen as it is my discernment about my relationship to the Chinese Christianity of my youth, how I feel about the current pandemic, and how to unwork Asian anti-blackness in this moment of consciousness where we cry together Black Lives Matter. I am especially thankful to my friends for reading my piece to discern what it was really about with me. Special thanks are owed to a new friend I made in the process, INHERITANCE Magazine‘s online editor Kristine Chong, whose incisive comments helped me feel the piece in relation to my body and the world more deeply.
This is my second contribution to INHERITANCE Magazine. My first concerned my conversion to Eastern Catholicism via Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.
Justin K.H. Tse 