Photo credit: Caroline Morris
Interview by Emma Cleary
We are grateful to Jonathan Wei for making time to talk with us about his rhythmically gripping CNF piece, “Dead Languages Or The What,” published in our Winter issue (58.2). Read on for a conversation between Jonathan and prose editor Emma Cleary––about writing away from history, salvaging from violence, how language gives us form––and an excerpt from “Dead Languages.” You can order the issue here to read the whole piece, or consider subscribing to PRISM so you’ll never miss an issue.
“Dead Languages Or The What” details some of your own experiences of desegregation busing as a ten-year-old child in Staunton, Virginia in the 1970s. How did you address this complex history on the page?
History is written by the victors—this is Churchill, I believe (though there are various iterations and attributions). Largely, though, it’s true, if depressing. The version of events that we accept as true is nearly always the version promoted by those who benefitted from those events. One of the things that’s interesting about the era I’m writing about in “Dead Languages,” is that it’s not clear yet who the victors are. The US is still very much in flux, and while there is still certainly a long way to go to attain the equality that was the idealized goal of the Civil Rights Movement, the number of voices and perspectives that are “telling” the story is broad and compelling.
For me, this helps. I’m not very comfortable in an authorial position with these events. I don’t consider them mine. I was—and am—biracial Chinese/Caucasian. These events belong to the people who were the direct subjects of desegregation, i.e., the black school-aged kids of Staunton. In order to make this piece true, I had to focus on my own sense of dispossession, on the isolated and singular character of my experience. I had to think and write away from history, in a manner of speaking, and focus instead on the idiosyncrasy and anomaly of my experience. It’s like one of those pinhole box viewers that allows you to project an eclipse onto a piece of paper so you can watch it without going blind.
On another note, one of the things that I hope for in the piece is that it renders how this particular passage in history destroyed kids. The violence of the society that oppressed black folks, that necessitated the Civil Rights Movement, was manifest everywhere. In the kids, in the teachers, in my parents, in me, in my neighbours and their dogs. Home, school, the street, the playground, church—there was no sanctuary. Kids had to be violent in order to deal with the violence that was being constantly directed at them. They (“we,” but I’m still uncomfortable claiming the experience) were destroyed by this. It was devastating. If we managed to salvage some part of ourselves from it, it was through either encasing the experiences in some kind of impermeable container—like scar tissue—or revisiting them until they stopped hurting so much, which is what I’m doing with this piece. Or both.
It’s really important as well to understand that I was writing this piece against the backdrop of the 2017 riots in Charlottesville by white supremacists. Charlottesville is a half-hour from Staunton. When I first started seeing these events in the news, I thought—without reflection—“Oh yeah—those guys.” They were so familiar, so unchanged. Forty-five years later. Part of the urgency of the piece for me was that, while the events of the time were historic, they are also very much still happening. I was writing about today.
“Dead Languages” feels so grounded in a specific place and time. Can you tell us about your use of newspaper clippings in the narrative?
When I started writing this piece, it was like I was trying to finally address an ailment that I had been denying or ignoring for a long time. And I’d been denying it for long enough that I actually had started to believe some of my denials—that maybe I wasn’t sick, that it was more psychosomatic than not. But as I went deeper into my memories, I couldn’t quite get past how vivid they were. Like, how did I make this shit up? So I started looking back at the local paper, to verify the time frame, and to assure myself about how out-of-hand my imagination had been.
And I found, without trying, example after example of exactly why my experience had been what it had been, from outright racist views espoused as news, to the near perfect erasure of people of colour from the public discourse, to the lauding of white, fundamentalist, religious fanaticism and violence as proper and good. I searched “dog bite,” and found a posting of the city regulations prohibiting people from letting their dogs bite people—in the newspaper. Why in the world does that need to be posted? Oh, right—because people were letting their dogs bite people. A lot. In some ways, the quotes are me saying to myself, “It wasn’t you.”
This is one of the ways that a society that wants to deny some part(s) of itself imprints on its citizens—by creating whole matrices of characterization that undercut the credibility of certain perspectives. Sometimes they are moral, ethical, or legal dicta; sometimes they manifest as pathologies, psychological, even medical diagnoses. Regardless, they have the effect of marginalizing some stories, while foregrounding the narrative—the ‘history’—that is more desirable.
The Civil Rights Movement and desegregation were, in the minds of white, mainstream media and population in the US for decades after, a fever-dream of sorts. Some things that happened, but that are over, and we’re “woke” now, and everything is better. Which is perhaps why all of my white friends were so surprised by Trump and the re-emergence of the views he represents, while none of my friends who are black and brown were. Dismayed, of course, but not surprised. Because I’m a bit more naïve and insecure than some, my response was more like, “Hey, guess I’m not crazy,” than, “And?”
They point to the same thing, though. The clippings aren’t fact. This is clear now, but it wasn’t then. They are a perspective, the expression of an attitude that pervaded, that dominated, that dictated. Because they were the dominant perspective, we called them news—just as we call certain perspectives news now. But they aren’t news because they are factual. They are news through force, through being aligned with the presiding power. This is one of the reasons that the clippings have such a specific feel—because we, as a society, have changed, and we can now see the clippings as of a time and place. This begs a question: what will we see in the clippings of today forty or fifty years from now? What is happening now that seems like truth and isn’t? Who are the dogs, and who is getting bitten?
Your work demonstrates a precise attention to what’s at stake in the meaning of words, the consequences of how we use them. Could you talk about why that’s so important to you, and how you framed your childhood experiences through the acquisition of language?
Words are history; words carry with them all of the meaning that they have accumulated through their repetition, re-use, and revision. The history of a culture is present in its language. In the case of this piece, of central importance was that I had lived through something that had a huge historical profile, and at the same time I’d lived through a part of it that was virtually unrecognizable to anyone but me. In the black/white language of desegregation at the time, just as in the black/white dynamic of the playground, and of Staunton, my experience as biracial, Chinese/Caucasian, was singular. This, at least, was how it felt to me. And still does. I can explain my experiences to people, and I can have them received sympathetically, but sympathy isn’t understanding. (It’s appreciated, for sure; kindness makes the world go around.)
There is great irony in the fact that the language I was learning looked and sounded exactly like the language everyone else was learning, but the experiences that gave my language meaning were not shared. Irony is how it reads in a memoir, at any rate. At the time, for a kid who was ten years old, it was confusing, chaotic, and bizarre. The language was crucially important to me, because it helped me fit in, and it was impossible for me because it isolated me. I fit in just enough for everyone, including myself, to know that I didn’t belong. I was all kinds of messed up.
Another element of the attention to language in the piece is that language acquisition in children is related to virtually every important developmental milestone: object permanence, differentiation, identity. In important ways, I didn’t exist before I moved to Staunton, and probably would have continued on in that formlessness for many more years, gradually assuming whatever my “identity” might have been over the next decade or more. When I see my own son in the piece—and in my life—it’s with this in my eyes. I see his sweetness, his softness, his light, and there is nothing more important to me in my life than assuring him the space to bring that light into maturity. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world. It’s wondrous.
And it was utterly destroyed for me by my experiences in Staunton. The legacy of slavery, the ongoing oppression of an inherently racist society, and the attempt to address this through the lives of children, forced me and every other child of colour on that playground to define ourselves, starkly, precipitously, prematurely, and harmfully. If we didn’t define ourselves, we would be defined, and that enforced definition was nothing anyone wanted. For me, coming late into this system at ten years old, it was very much like being reborn. I had to learn everything again. It was shocking, harsh, radical and utterly formative. The acquisition of language was both literally and analogously true to my experience.
One more thing that should be mentioned in discussing the language of the piece—one of the most interesting, and important, conversations I had with the editorial folks at PRISM was about my using, in the draft I first submitted, the “n” word. It was, without question, a part of the language of the place and the time of the piece. In Staunton, Virginia in 1972, it was part of everyone’s language. It was arguably the centre of the culture. Maybe the foundational word of the culture. Virginia was the state of Washington and Jefferson, a state whose wealth was built on slavery. It had the highest percentage of enslaved peoples in the nation. Moving there, it unavoidably became a part of my language—I learned it before I learned African American, (think about that, if you want to get depressed.) It wasn’t innocent, either. It was a weapon, and you couldn’t use it without feeling that, even if you didn’t understand it. There was a legitimate argument to be made for leaving it in the piece.
And doing so would have accounted for this history, and how the word came to me. It would have failed, however, to account for the history of the word, its accumulated meaning and implication, for black folks—for the people against whom the word had been used as a weapon for centuries. Our conversations about that clarified for me that we had to—not should, not could, but had to—take into account the asymmetrical impact that the word has had, and continues to have, on black folks. Once we did this, it was clear that it shouldn’t be part of this piece. Might I write another piece in which the reasons for its inclusion outweigh those against? Conceivably. Theoretically. But having had the chance to think through this particular situation with the folks at PRISM, it’s hard for me to think of what that might look like.
Ultimately, my relationship with language, both in this piece and in much of my life, is contradictory. On the one hand, I am meticulous and vigilant with it in the way that someone would be with their boat in the middle of the ocean. I’m totally dependent upon it to get, well, anywhere. On the other hand, a boat in the middle of the ocean can be pretty lonely, so there is some ambivalence there as well. I’m lucky enough to have a few people who are in the boat with me most of the time. We talk. We play Yahtzee. Thank goodness for them.
“Dead Languages” impressed us with its powerful use of repetition, rhythm, and musicality. Was there a particular sound you were aiming for? How did you achieve it?
When I was a little kid, if I had to go into the basement by myself, or down a dark hallway or something like that, I’d sing to myself—loudly and probably not very well. As I grew older, this became a reflex. If I was walking alone at night, I’d sing. If I was going somewhere that made me nervous, I’d sing. Even if I was just having thoughts that caused anxiety, I’d find myself humming or singing. I still do. I know a lot of people for whom singing is a singular source of joy. It can certainly be joyful for me. But it’s a lot of other things too.
I don’t know why music makes me feel better, but it does. Music isn’t necessarily comforting. It’s an art, and like any art, it can be beautiful, warm, challenging, disquieting, even destructive—everything. So there’s no particular reason for why it makes me feel better, but it does. It makes the scary stuff easier. I won’t say less scary, but easier. This was very true for “Dead Languages.” It was really, really hard to remember those events, and harder to write them down. Music made it easier. I think this is the most honest answer to this.
There are also other elements to the music worth mentioning. My first training as an artist was as a musician, and I’ve always been drawn to black music: blues, jazz, R&B, funk, hip hop, reggae. Rhythm and chromatics, pulling on time and colouring the notes—these are the things that make sense to me as person, and artist. I employ these sensibilities in my writing as well, and in this piece particularly so. “Ching chang chong,” is a reference to “Lo-li-ta,” (which I make obvious intentionally) and this reference slips between resonant and critical. It’s also consecutive strong stress syllables, a pretty uncommon construction in the English language, but musically evocative of the march. The march is interesting because of its militant and nationalist implications, but also because it is one of the underpinnings of ragtime and second line, both African American musics that took the western form and bent it. The music of empire sublimated to a language of resistance. Hopefully, “Dead Languages,” is similarly bending the epithet to something more positive. “Children, children,” is a reference to Toots and the Maytals—again, a voice of resistance. It’s more obscure, and definitely more personal, but it helped me position myself in relation to the memories. Poets do this kind of work all of the time, and of course, musicians. “Dead Languages” is certainly a hybrid.
It occurs to me as well that I might have had the unconscious thought that, putting all of this into a song might allow people to connect to the story I was telling. Music has that power—to reach across divergent histories and perspectives, to break down barriers and diminish isolation. One of the breathtaking possibilities of this piece’s publication is that I might “find” someone else who had a similar experience, and perhaps is feeling as alone with it as I do.
An Excerpt from “Dead Languages Or The What” (58.2)
AMERICA
…they should declare the causes which impel them.
—Declaration of Independence of the thirteen United States of America, July 4, 1776
And I stood in the centre, watching, and he circled around me, gathering, and the white boys rung us round, shouting, flat space hard dirt beyond the playground blacktop. Yelling, cussing, spitting, grinning, laughing, bloodlust, frustration, boredom, amusement. Anger. White boys. There to see a fight, to ratify with eyes and cries the renewal of fear, pain, blood, loss. No one was innocent. Or everyone.
I look at my son now: sweet slip, sing-song and balletic, he who walks on his toes, he who seeks and fits perfectly into the space just here, under my arm, he who hates to be alone and wants to do it himself, he who has no inkling of knuckles and fury. He who is ten.
And I was ten, and I didn’t know. From the flat years of Ohio, vague and soft under cloudy skies, from marbles and baseball and frisbee, we moved to the corrugations of the Shenandoah Valley, to Virginia, to west Staunton, to busing and bondage, old anger rattling chains. Ten years old and I didn’t know.
Because I was new, because I was small, because I was Chinese, because, because, because, because, because. Brian Davis, sandy-haired with small eyes and a mouth already forgetting to smile, his small eyes fell…on me.
Was I sweet? Was I sing-song? Balletic? Did I walk on my toes? Oh mother, did I?
Our house was at the bottom of two hills, a depression into which all things rolled, sticks and stones and broken bones. Blood. Brian lived up the hill and around the corner. His eyes fell on me. Because, because, because, because, because.
A few days into fourth grade, lined up for lunch, lined up for gym, lined up for class, the tangled lines, Brian’s voice called me out. “Fuckin’ pussy. Fuckin’ chink. Ching, chang, chong.”
Three steps down. Ching, chang, chong. Sing-song, sing-song.
It was all new. I didn’t know. Did he? Did he know his words would gather mass, start to pull? In this universe, who knows? Words pull the unstable particles of others’ anger, others’ hatred, grow larger, pull harder.
Ching, chang, chong. His words grew and grew, until he couldn’t stop them, until no one could, until they pushed him into me in the hallway, until they told me he was going to fight me after school. And my stomach went cold and soft, and my heart started beating and I started sweating. Ten years old.
This morning, when he woke, my sweet boy came to me, breath like hay, milk-skin, curled into my lap, legs and arms folding, asking me to forget their length and strength, head resting on my chest. Ten years old, my sweet boy.
Everyone told me: fight. You fight because you have to fight. The fight is.
Do you remember not fighting? What is not fighting? I don’t remember. Then I see my boy, and I remember.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
Fight. Everything inside of me dissolved, and left behind a waiting space.
My legs shook, my skin prickled. I came out of school hoping the words had gone, blown away, away. But the words had gone grown, had gathered the white boys’, the boys who kept the ways of fists and hate, who had learned them from other boys, who had learned them from other other other boys. Because, because, because, because, because.
The right to bear arms. Bare arms.
And I stood in the centre, watching, and he circled around me, gathering, and the white boys rung us round, shouting, flat space hard dirt beyond playground blacktop.
I made fight hands. I made fight stance. I made fight face. I made fight silence. I waited.
Jonathan Wei is an artist working in performance, writing, and visual media, whose focus, for more than three decades, has been the personal and societal impact of war and dislocation. His work has been staged at Lincoln Center, the Guthrie Theater, and the Library of Congress, and published in the Village Voice, Iowa Review, and Nimrod International Journal, among others. He is a 2019 Interchange Arts Fellow, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, recipient of a Congressional Commendation, National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities support, and other acknowledgements. Jonathan lives with his family in Austin, Texas.