an epilogue
Stories from mother to daughter and daughter to mother, on the path to find happy endings.
Part two in a series of oral history and nonfiction works by Amanda Ong.
The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.... The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.
Edward Said
Introduction
I first met Gallant in the summer of 2019, though we had probably met in passing earlier. That summer, I was living with three other girls, one of whom I had been friends with since we lived on the same floor of our first-year dorm. She had invited Gallant to a watch party we were hosting to view the first Democratic primary debates. I had no awareness of it at the time, but she and Gallant had been friends since first-year orientation, and though we never formally met I had likely strolled through my friend's dorm room on a few occasions while Gallant was there.
The watch party was a high energy, fun group of people, and the debates too early to concern any of us about the real political future. We ate popcorn and made fun of Beto’s Spanish. I tried to keep track of Gallant’s name after meeting her, as she and my roommates all worked as camp counselors at a camp where they used fake names—I could hardly keep track of “Brie”, “Puffle”, “Wave.” But by the end of the night, Gallant exclaimed that she and I were twins. We both asked, How did we never meet before?
The moment thrilled me with its immediacy. I realize now much of that was Gallant’s consistent character; I have valued her friendship for her excitability, her adventurousness, her energy. She is one of those rare people who maintains a childlike sense of wonder about the world, and her mind seems to move at twice the speed of mine. She has a penchant for enthusiastic exclamations, half-joking bewilderment, an endearing trait I found she shared with mother. I’m not sure she would describe herself this way, but she is a person who can at least appear ready for anything. She is thoughtful, but eager enough to jump at unseen opportunities and adventures. For her birthday she chose to take a group of us to Chinatown on Chinese New Year’s Day—something I would never attempt for its chaos—and even after it started to pour, she impromptu lead the lot of us in a chase after a Lion Dance parade in the streets, and then somehow managed to find us all a table at Dim Sum with less than a thirty minute wait. To me, all of it appeared as a small work of wonder.
Despite differences in our characters, her initial claim that we are like twins stuck. The things we have in common feel uncanny, her instinct probably exceding both of our expectations. She is the only friend I have ever made who is interested in pursuing oral history, who has similar grievances over our Asian American identities, or who has lived in a combination of Hong Kong, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Bay Area, and New York City.
I hadn’t really known much about Gallant’s mom, Melia, until I asked Gallant if I could interview the both of them. My asking had more to do with my oral history connection with Gallant than with the story I did not know would unfold before me. I knew Gallant to speak of her mother with admiration, and I knew Melia was an immigrant, a flight attendant, and was Chinese Indonesian, and for me that all sufficed.
I learned more in speaking to the two of them than I could have ever expected. I didn’t realize how little I really knew about Gallant’s background, about how little we tend to know in general about our friends and where they come from, their relationship to their upbringings, what their world has looked like and how it has shaped them. I found in her the feelings of dissonance, love, fantasy, and gratefulness that pervade of so many children of immigrants. I knew so little about institutional and lived Chinese discrimination in Indonesia just up until the last few decades. Namely though, I learned something that I already hoped to know, but didn’t realize I needed so deeply affirmed. I saw how in us, the immigrants, their children, people of marginal space, there are astounding stories that we often can’t see ourselves. If there is a question of legitimacy, let it be known now: we have a story to tell, no matter where, no matter what, no matter who.
When I asked Gallant if she knew her grandparents, it was not a question I expected her to knit her eyebrows at and pull back, but Gallant can be full of little surprises. “I mean, I think the word ‘know’ can represent such a range,” she said. “I knew my grandfather to the extent that I saw him once a year, but I didn’t know him personally because of the language barrier.”
As far as I was concerned, “know” had meant, “were they alive, and have you met them?” But Gallant’s concern about “knowing” dipped into an awareness of things I had been aspiring to in asking these questions. What was it to know people like our grandparents? To know where they came from, whether that be the version they passed on to us in story, or the nation, the land as it exists now? My anxieties had all been burrowed in these questions of how we might know each other tenderly, fluidly, without presumption or domination, but it was Gallant who brought up the paradox of knowing.
Whatever anxieties I felt, she verbalized. I asked her about her family’s immigration from China to Indonesia: It started with a glass making business. Or there was something about a black and white photography studio? Wow, you can hear the hesitance in my voice. Well really it started with the standard American, no, I guess, Indonesian dream.
She laughs when she tells me about her great-grandfather who immigrated—he had three wives, and, if she remembered right, left two behind and brought only the one who gave him a son. Gallant has been working at international women’s rights nonprofits in all the time I’ve known her, and I laugh too at the distance between her and her distant history. So does her mother when she tells me the same story. The chosen wife was her grandmother.
Everything Melia tells me about her family is sure: My parents were born in Indonesia. Both of my grandparents originally came from China, from Guangdong, in the south. My grandfather was the first of us to arrive in Indonesia, because he had no land and no affinity for laundering in America. And so he came with his third wife and first son. We were glass sellers, we were carpenters, we were photography workers, we worked for the Dutch colonizers.
She speaks with a casual certainty that asserts her sense of home in Indonesia, or, maybe, reflects a childhood spent defending her Indonesian identity.
“Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; the object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.”
Edward Said
Asking Gallant questions feels a bit like watching her finger through puzzle pieces. Before this, I did not know her grandmother passed away when her mother was just a hair younger than us. Gallant has also never told me how she feels that, though Melia is sensitive, they are opposites in how they emote. I do know Gallant though, and I know her feelings can surface in her eyes and on her lips before her mind registers them. Gallant muddles through her mother’s capacity for stoicism, its possible roots in her own mother passing away young or just East Asian sensibility. She fumbles and questions herself twice; unsure now whether it’s appropriate to associate expressive emotion with femininity, or lack of it with East Asian culture. Either way, it is impossible to really understand the ripples of her grandmother’s loss.
We return to the paradox of knowing. A writing professor once told me that to learn to see your parents as people, outside of you, is one of the hardest things you can do. Gallant says to me that no one really knows their parents. Understanding them and who they are is hard enough when you’ve been raised in the same place, much less when thousands of miles and years and nationality stand between your childhoods. Many children of immigrants never see the country their parents came from, origins become fantasy. Gallant is lucky that she grew up visiting her mother’s town in Indonesia, a place that she says is frozen in time. It is rare to find a place at a relative standstill, static to our eyes, but the small changes are still clear to her mother. But for Gallant, it’s mostly the same year to year—the town she sees today becomes a template to imagine the life her mother might have had.
And that’s one of the problems with Orientalism, that it creates an image outside of history, of something that is placid, and still, and eternal … It is a creation of an ideal other.
Edward Said
I remember in my second grade class we followed a mandatory course on civil rights history, vague descriptions of MLK, Susan B. Anthony, passed on to us as well as they could be, racism described to the extent of “white people were mean to black people.” But some boy said to my teacher, whose name was legitimately Mrs. Rash, what all of the kids in class had been raised to believe—that stuff is all over now though, isn’t it? No, Mrs. Rash said severely. In some parts of the South, racism still exists. We all gasped. I went home and told my mother the astonishing news. Did you know they did all of that to black people? And it still happens?
She looked at me like I had a dunce cap for a head. And Chinese people too, was all she responded. I was shocked. But not anymore, right? I asked. No, she said. Still.
Is it in the South too?
Yes, she said. But really anywhere.
My father chimed in then: Especially in Southeast Asia.
Discrimination is a relative novelty to my family, discovered only after arriving upon U.S. shores. For Melia, institutional discrimination has been a fickle reality. Chinese people could not have citizenship in Indonesia. She could not go to public school, she could not travel, she was stateless until her father bought their family birth certificates that identified them falsely as Java Indonesian. Hyphenated identity has subsisted through double immigration.
Are we Chinese or Indonesian? Are we Indonesian or American? Are we home here or somewhere else?
Or maybe the truth: we just aren’t.
“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.”
Edward Said
One of the first times I spoke to Gallant, she described herself to me as “a very good person”. She wasn’t being arrogant. Among all of the twenty-some year old college students I know, I have never seen Gallant give in to even a moment of the hedonist free-for-all we live out. She doesn’t drink, she’s not one for getting in trouble, her default is always to do the right thing the right way. When we took a class together in the fall, she agonized over a reflection due until I told her mine had been less than a page and that I spent under twenty minutes on it. She slapped her own forehead, and said “Gosh, I can just get way in my head being a perfectionist.” On more than one occasion she’s proclaimed herself a goody two-shoes.
Before I learned anything about Gallant’s parents or her family history, she told me once in passing that she was a goody two shoes in part because her parents had messed up so badly and so much, there was just about nothing she could do wrong. I was surprised. At this point I had only met her parents once, when they came to an Asian American cultural showcase the two of us modeled in. To my understanding, her mom had done some kind of study abroad in Wisconsin and started dating her dad. I assumed they stayed together, got married, were for the most part a well-traveled but standard family from upper-class, suburban, Greenwich, Connecticut. My assumptions were all safe assumptions. I did not yet know the half of it. She introduced me to them as her friend, they congratulated us both on the fashion show. She told them I was interested in oral history and her dad, in three minutes of meeting me, pulled me aside and offered me an internship helping him work through some archives, which he explained in depth. It would be unpaid, but I could just live at their house with them! Gallant and Melia clucked and debated “rescuing” me from him in Indonesian. For a short encounter, I saw they were a lovely family with a sense of humor. Nothing about them yet dissuaded my notions of who I thought they were.
Melia’s history of misbehaving and pranks are all a far cry from Gallant. They are also, even if benign, a far cry from the life I assumed she had lived. Shocking teachers, harassing chickens. Melia laughs about her past mischief with a hint of the nostalgia of someone with a memory that is theirs’ alone. Gallant laughs about her mother’s mischief with a hint of the perplexity of the children of immigrants, so many of their parents’ memories unavailable to them and slightly absurd. Grown in urban spaces and suburbs, it’s hard to imagine the threat of a neighbor, angry with you for harassing their chickens.
Even in the silliness of Melia’s pranks or her multiple attempts to run away, her tendency to act out was transparent. What else is there to do when you are not accepted? When you are picked on and battered down? When you are told the only way to avoid a worse violence is to sit there and take it? In another country, I have also been the only Chinese child in a classroom. The teasing I faced was not so explicit, but there is always something that is so deeply sad to me about being so small, small and hurt and unable to comprehend the Otherness that has already been constructed around you. In the first conversations I had with Gallant about Asian American experience, she told me that because of her ethnic ambiguity she wasn’t often targeted specifically for being Asian. But everything I said about my own experiences she was able to relate to through those of Melia in Indonesia. This double immigration, this double discrimination, these experiences carried over two countries in vastly different ways, they were a thread. I listened to Gallant as I listened to Melia later; with a mixture of frustration, speculation and identification.
“In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are, as I said earlier, the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region.”
Edward Said
Gallant has told me more than once that little amazes her more than her mother’s unwavering determination go to America in a town where her dream was laughable. She saw a future no one did, set her mind to the impossible, and then did it.
Melia told me several times that she was a poor student. But, in a story that fits hardworking immigrant tropes tightly, she came to this country through hard work and English was her key out.
A pattern is here. Gallant often talks about the summer she spent with a program in Indonesia, and her commitment to return there is clear in her post-graduate plans. Melia’s determination exists in Gallant, but in reverse—Gallant is steadfast in her hopes to learn Indonesian. She studies and travels and practices all with sharp goals of fluency. She works to reclaim the relationships with her family she could not have before due to language barriers, to uncover an intimacy lost, parts of her mother’s life and family she has been linguistically excluded from.
Melia exceeded in English so she could get out. Gallant learns Indonesian so she can find a way in.
It is a typical love story.
Boy meets girl in America. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl is sent home across the world to Indonesia. Girl uses her English skills to find a 20 in 2000 job as flight attendant and leave Indonesia. Girl reconnects with boy. Boy offers her a citizenship marriage. Boy and girl get hitched in a city hall with a random Australian tourist as witness. Boy and girl celebrate with ramen. Girl accidentally gets pregnant.
Boy and girl tell everyone they are having a baby and have been secretly married for a year. Girl’s family tries to strangle boy. Impending baby offers a band-aid for everyone’s grievances.
They live happily ever after.
Tell me who you are.
I am an epilogue. I was born of bookends, out of the overlap in the story and the finale. What shaped you is what created me. My life exists because of what you made it for me. You endured and I am the proof. I am the product of every mistake. I am the product of the hardships. I am the product of pure determination.
I am the product of your love. Thank you.
"Most important, humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”