Race is real

Talk of the Quad: Dance, dance

For as long as I can remember, dance has been a part of my life. My parents are both musically inclined, so naturally there was always music playing in my house. Even when I was very small, I was always moving to that music—or maybe it was moving me.
When I was five and a half, my parents decided it was time to find me some different, better-equipped walls to bounce off—maybe in a place where my exuberance wouldn’t lead to broken glass—and signed me up for dance classes at a local studio. So began my now 14 year-old love affair with dance.
At the studio, it became clear to my instructors very quickly that I was not going to tolerate any horseplay. After a brief stint in some kind of “dance for five-year-olds” class, I moved into a class of all boys. Though I loved (and still love) moving fast and big—something that we did a lot of in this class—I wanted no part in any of the goofing-off that my fellow seven-year-old boy dancer friends were so fond of. My instructors moved me out of that class, and into a more traditional ballet class, comprised of mostly girls. I never looked back.
Through high school, I was a ballet dancer. As I grew up, those elementary school kids in that first ballet class became some of my better friends. We spent hundreds of hours together, during rehearsals and classes that ranged from feeling excruciatingly long to blink-and-you’ve-missed-it short, I’m pretty sure that in my junior and senior years of high school I spent more time with these people than anyone else (including my family). Together we learned to trust each other, take risks together and perform together. Our relationships extended beyond the studio, so when it came time to leave after graduation, it’s no wonder we were all crying.
After I graduated, I couldn’t really imagine dancing with different people. I knew so much about the dancers I grew up with. I knew how they moved, their tendencies, where they needed support in partnering, where they were strong, which way they usually fell while turning. Knowing this information helped us to work together as a team, and helped me to improve as an individual.
I was so used to this intimate level of knowledge that finding a new group of people to dance with seemed intensely daunting. I knew it could never be the same.
My graduating class’s final performance together, our individual farewell solos and our subsequent goodbyes to the teachers who had played such a huge part in our lives, had a note of beautiful, bittersweet finality, and I didn’t quite feel comfortable messing with that. To be entirely honest, I wasn’t sure if I would dance again.
I didn’t dance the summer after high school. When I arrived at Bowdoin, I explored the idea of joining a dance club but never actually got involved. They weren’t really doing what I was interested in, and I honestly wasn’t committed enough to dance to invest the time.
I tried other things, kept somewhat active and thought I was doing fine. So imagine my surprise when I discovered I had a space in my schedule spring semester and the thought of taking dance again filled me with overwhelming joy—so began the next phase of my life as a dancer.
My dance experience at Bowdoin has been very different from my time in high school. Back then, the work I was doing focused mostly on performance. I did very little choreography, and though I found creative expression through the steps that others choreographed for me, I had little influence over what I did. Here, I am beginning to explore my ability to create.
Even in the intense academic environment that Bowdoin fosters, the hardest thing I do here is choreography. The amount of insecurity and self-questioning that goes into making performance art is ridiculous—sometimes I wonder why I even bother. I want to make things that look good, but I don’t want to pander to my audience. I want to make things that I like to do, but I want to reach people as well.
But what do I struggle with the most? Believing that the work I do deserves to exist. The dance world is filled with incredible work, and to believe that I have a shot at making something that has a place there is not easy. It takes a kind of arrogance to honestly think that your art is meaningful and important, yet it takes intense self-criticism and reflection to make anything good.
Artists of other mediums understand, I’m sure, but my dance is made even more vulnerable by the fact that right now I am choreographing for myself. I have to literally stand and answer for my work every time it is shown. There is no hiding.
I don’t know how dance fits into my future, but I know that I am not satisfied. The thought that I may have walked away from dance after high school is now horrifying. There is something deeply meaningful in movement, and I do not feel I have come close enough to figuring out what that is for me to stop.
As the end of college approaches, I, like any artist, am encountering more and more pressure to set myself up for a career—something I always assumed would not involve dance. But now I’m not so sure. When I first walked into a dance studio, something happened, and it’s still happening today. I don’t know if I will ever really be able to stop.

Talk of the Quad: Remembering professor Morgan

I came to Bowdoin for two reasons: the food and the professors. I wanted a place with small classes and brilliant faculty. I wanted professors who would know not only my name, but my aspirations, and who would, however slightly, let me into their world. I also wanted a place where dining halls would serve pad thai. Bowdoin was perfect.
Professor Morgan, whom I first met during Constitutional Law I in the fall of my junior year, was just the sort of professor I had in mind when I came to campus. He would arrive promptly to class at 10 a.m. in a tweed jacket, the chain of his pocket watch dangling from his breast pocket, looking as if he had just stepped out of a Spencer Tracy film.
I remember being astounded during the first few weeks of that class by the obvious breadth of his knowledge about what seemed to be the entirety of constitutional law. Having opened the textbook at the beginning of class, he would proceed to ignore it almost entirely for the next hour and a half as he told us anecdote after anecdote about Chief Justice John Marshall. I remember the look of excitement that would come to his face as he told us a particularly good story, and how he would start to laugh a sentence or two before he reached the punch line.
I didn’t speak much to Professor Morgan those first few weeks—I never had occasion to. But when he handed back our midterm test, I saw that on the back of mine he had written “see me,” with no further explanation. The next day, as I climbed the three staircases to his office at the very top of Hubbard Hall, I wondered what lay in store for me at the end of my ascent. And so when I arrived, I asked him whether I had done anything wrong.
“No, no,” he said. “I just wanted to know who you were.”
And he did want to know. For the next hour, he asked me to tell him about myself: the courses I was taking and my extracurricular activities. We talked about politics, about Bowdoin, and at the end of our conversation, he shook my hand and said, “I’m going to expect to hear from you more from now on.”
I did begin raising my hand more, and he called on me. I don’t recall ever stumping him, but I do remember his smile of vaguely exasperated pride when I would ask a particularly good question, or answer a hard one of his.
As I began to listen to him more closely, I began to see individual court cases not as disparate elements, but as chapters in a larger, fluid story. I started making the trek to his office more frequently and quickly stopped being surprised at how generous he was with his time.
Unfailingly kind and patient, he would discuss his lectures with me and the cases currently before the Supreme Court justices, whom he collectively called “The Supremes.”
Only once did he ever kick me out of his office. I had arrived at 4 p.m., and we had spoken for almost two hours. It was completely dark outside.
Professor Morgan gently rapped his knuckles against his desk and said, “I think I am going to head home soon. I can hear the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass.” I understood myself to be dismissed for the evening.
I don’t remember all, or even most, of the cases that he had filed, encyclopedically, in his head over the course of decades, and which he valiantly attempted to impart to me. But I do remember being consistently and supportively challenged by him, being pushed to think deeply and support my positions.
From Professor Morgan I began to learn patience and nuance and the value of an obsessively detailed study guide. I began to learn how to make an argument without being argumentative, although I did not, perhaps, employ this ability as often as I should have.
Still, these are lessons I will carry with me the rest of my life. He gave me many of my proudest moments at Bowdoin and when I graduated, comfortable and largely confident in my future, it was to him that I owed much of the credit for these emotions.
When I learned that he had passed, I was amazed at all the things I didn’t know about Professor Morgan. His life outside of Bowdoin had always been an abstract concept to me. I didn’t know, for example, that he was a veteran, or a certified Maine guide. I didn’t know that he hunted or fished, although if pressed I probably could have guessed these last two.
I didn’t know these things about him. But I knew Professor Morgan. And I am glad and I am grateful to have had that opportunity.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Hy Khong

Orient Staff

November 7, 2014

“Oh my god, that’s so Asian!”

That’s how a student on my study abroad program responded when I told her how to spell my last name.

What’s so Asian? That it’s not spelled like “King Kong”? Does adding the “h” really make it that much more Asian? I would never tell someone they’re “so white,” because what does that even imply?

I’m studying abroad in Nantes, France for the semester and never have I been so aware of my race. When I walk into class with my hair ungroomed and sticking up everywhere—resembling the hairdo of an anime character or K-Pop star—I inevitably hear “dude you look so Asian today.”

If I receive a good exam score, my friends will say that’s “very Asian” of me (because, apparently, intelligence and race are mutually inclusive). My host family considers me Vietnamese rather than American, and when I tell someone I’m from the States, they re-phrase: “No, where are you from, your family?”

To me, the French are more direct, not skirting around issues considered “politically incorrect” in the States. The attention I’ve received for being Asian isn’t malicious or discriminatory, but it is constant, making me want to untangle what exactly it means being Asian-American—while stateside and abroad.

My parents fled political and religious persecution in Vietnam by boat in 1989. After my sister and I were born, we immigrated to the States from the Kuala Lumpur Vietnamese Refugee Center. I spent the first five years of my life in the heart of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, where I heard more Chinese, Cantonese and Vietnamese than English when walking down the street. In 2001, we relocated across Lake Washington to a predominantly white suburb, where we still reside.

My childhood was a game of switching cultures on-and-off: observing Vietnamese New Year in traditional áo gấm and then watching Tom and Jerry, eating cơm tấm for breakfast and then hot dogs and coleslaw for lunch, and trying to find the English equivalent of Vietnamese words—a struggle I now face with French.

During my mid-teens, my dual-cultured life was the source of a lot of angst. I resented going to youth group with all the Vietnamese families in Seattle, many of whom were recent immigrants—I preferred being with American families. Eventually, my parents gave in: bánh mi was replaced with sliced white bread, and weekly Vietnamese culture and language classes ended.
I was never ostracized at school, but I was tired of being embarrassed when my parents, with their thick accents, had to speak to my teachers or when my friends would tell me that my clothes smelled like rice.

Coming to Brunswick was essentially removing myself from my roots, something I didn’t realize until Winter Break in 2012 when, after I expressed my disdain for having to go to Vietnamese Christmas mass, my sister retorted, “Well, that’s because you’re just white-washed now.”

The Class of 2016 is 493 people strong, with 156 students self-identifying as students of color, including 53, roughly 10 percent, as Asian. Before leaving home, this ratio did make me a little nervous—was I going to stand out? But since arriving on campus, I don’t spend that much time thinking about the implications of being a minority at Bowdoin; my experience in our little bubble of political correctness and support has been comfortable and safe.

The two new diversity initiatives on campus, A.D.D.R.E.S.S. and Inter-Group Dialogue, have been facilitating conversations about race, which I find incredibly important because many people don’t know how to confront racial issues. When people found out there was another short Asian student who wears skinny jeans and likes photography my freshman year, I kept getting compared to him as if we were each other’s competition. Please, there is no competition—we’re two completely different people.

Catalina Gallagher ’16 told the Orient earlier this month that, “Part of the reason that people are on such different pages often is that we just don’t talk about race. It’s uncomfortable.”
And it’s because of this that I was a little apprehensive about writing this article—because it’s uncomfortable and I’m perhaps making it a bigger deal than it is. But this “big deal” is a reality I have to live with.

In the whiteboard photo campaign (organized by A.D.D.R.E.S.S)—which posed the question “what does race mean to you?”—there are responses saying, “It means nothing.” This couldn't be further from my experience with race: it shapes almost every experience I’ve had, and will have, with the world.

It’s undeniable that my experience in France would be different if I were, say, blonde and Caucasian. People wouldn’t stare because I’m the only Asian in a bar, I wouldn’t have to repeatedly tell people I’m not from China, and people I hook up with wouldn’t call me “my little Asian.”

Phrases like “that’s so Asian” are dividing mechanisms, ways to gather all the stereotypes and throw them into one sweeping generalization in order to differentiate us. At Bowdoin, my identity is very much separate from my race; people know me for my personality or skills. The very fact that people have seen me and pulled their eyes back into slits during my time abroad says enough about how my race is at the forefront of my identity. And I won’t even get started on sexuality.

At Bowdoin, I’m Asian-American; in France, for the most part, I’m just Asian. Associate Director of Health Promotion Whitney Hogan wrote “personal narratives” on her whiteboard for the A.D.D.R.E.S.S. campaign, and that’s exactly what’s being disregarded when race is used as the primary identifier: my history, my stories and my experiences are dismissed.

What’s being left out is my parents’ immense sacrifices and struggles to carve out a life for my sister and me; it’s the process of assimilating into American society; it’s my cultural heritage and how my upbringing has given me a more enriched view of the world; it’s how I’m able to share stories about growing up in the States and about Vietnamese customs with my host family.

I’m still trying to figure out what being Asian-American means to me, and it’ll probably take a lifetime, since meanings change as circumstances and situations do.
But after two months in Nantes, one thing I’ve discovered is it’s not so much about definitions or classifications. It’s about how my Vietnamese and American backgrounds interlock and fit together to form just a small portion of my identity.

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