(TW: sexual assault) Letter to My Daughters

To my beloved daughters, my soul sisters, my progeny, my treasures, my kin, Meiko and Katja, and my daughters of other mothers,

 

Your mother is a survivor of sexual assault.

 

And it’s taken her 35 years to wrap her tongue around these words.

 

Such is the degree to which I have internalized and normalized the violating of my body. Such is the degree to which I have accepted the unspoken teachings of the women before me, and the messages of the cultures I have been steeped in, both Korean and American. Such is the degree, I fear, that I have passed on these messages to my own daughters and granddaughters.

 

I wasn’t raped. So all these years I never thought I was a survivor. I thought, and was told, that I was a slut. That I was sexual. You know, Scorpio. But something clicked a few days ago, as I was reading accounts of the latest yoga closings and scandal, that what these survivors were describing was similar to what I experienced in the early 80s, between 19-21 years old.

 

Halmoni was a brilliant woman, resourceful, insightful, wise, and loving, but she left a legacy of silence, about what it meant to be a sexual being in a woman’s body. I fear I have passed on this legacy. In so many unconscious and unintended ways I repeated Halmoni’s patterns, and through the power of epigenetics, have borne the traumas of the generations of women before me.

 

Just like Halmoni, I married straight out of college, and gave birth right away to 3 children in my early 20s. At age 27, after Malachi was born, entering my first Saturn return, I recognized what I was doing, and vowed to break the cycle. But there were still so many more layers to work through.

 

Not only was gender violence completely normalized, but I had deeply internalized white body supremacy, a term I was not using at the time. As a brown immigrant body I was the deviant from the norm, habitually othered, and I carried a pervading unconscious sense of inferiority, like I could never live up, cultivated since middle school, when our family moved from Honolulu, Hawai’i, to Williamsville, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, and where, daily, I was teased and taunted, and made to feel alien and unwelcome. My only recourse at the time was to assimilate as best I could and immerse myself in a crash course in whiteness.

 

I grieve for that little girl. I remember hating those funny smelling blond girls in the new school. I hated their makeup and pantyhose and their music and their Western New York accents. But I also hated the one Asian girl in the school besides me, and heard the rumors about her strange mother, and I hated how she curled her hair and wore makeup too, but could never be as cool as the white girls. My mother tried to help me by trying to help me blend in, but all that did was make me feel worse about myself. Damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t, when I succeeded at feathering my hair just right and making white girl friends, I betrayed the wild brown girl inside, and exiled her. That split in my psyche is what opened the door for trauma to come.

 

***

 

Columbia University Glee Club is on tour. We’re staying at a 2-star hotel in a city I don’t recall. Spring break tour is an excuse to get drunk every night, between a few concerts we give for alums, and make all kinds of trouble. Our director, Warren Halsey Brown is the gang leader. He seems old to us, but he is only in his early 40s. Drinking has aged him prematurely, and he has a distended belly, thin legs, and a gaunt, lined face. We love him, because we are young and we worship talent and charisma and cleverness, much more than we value maturity, compassion, and morality. He has a reputation as a “lush” and a “lecher” (those are actually the words we use, instead of “alchoholic sexual predator”) but in our minds these are offset by his musical brilliance.

 

We’re back at the hotel. We continue drinking. Somehow I end up in Warren’s room. He is all over me. I’m barely sober enough to resist and fawn and make excuses why we should not have sex as he is trying to unzip my pants, and maybe he is drunk enough to let me go, and I am able to slip out the door, mostly unsullied. There’s a crowd of Glee Club members outside the door, like they were waiting for me to come out, and not sure what to do. They seem relieved to see me, and the party continues.

 

***

 

I’m a junior in college, 1984. I have fallen in love with poetry and cannot get enough. I am living in New York City, and apply for an internship at The Poetry Project, the legendary literary center on St. Mark’s place. I like the Smith-Corona electric typewriter there, I learn to mimeograph, they give me a key, and I sit at the reception table at every poetry reading. Seeing a new face, folks ask, are you a poet? At first I am flustered and don’t know what to say. Eventually I realize I should just say, yes. In the early 80s, Poetry Project was a place, like almost everything else in my world, of white body supremacy.

 

It’s an artist-run organization, and my boss is a middle-aged poet, married to an artist whose career is about to skyrocket, and a father of young children. He’s kinda scruffy and cool. I’m happy to work with him, and I adore and admire my other boss, a woman and poet, whose children I sometimes babysit on weekends. I am being exposed to so much every week, and the learning curve is steep, as I engage with the Lower East Side poetry community. It’s all so edgy, and Alphabet City is still grungy, though rapidly changing, and I have an old bike that I ride from uptown to downtown twice a week or more. I feel grown, and I feel like a New Yorker, and I am a young poet.

 

One of the last events I attend is a big fundraiser performance. I have a vague memory of being backstage. Lou Reed was on the slate, and I think, Tom Waits, and many others from the downtown scene of the early 80s. I am wearing a baggy vintage cotton shirt, cropped jeans, and my yellow high top Converse All-Stars. It’s a summer night and I don’t wear anything else under my shirt. My boss is talking to me and standing close, when he reaches over to hug me. He gropes me and sticks his tongue in my ear. I’m creeped out but I act like it’s normal, and that is the extent of the interaction. I’m not even sure I mentioned it to anyone.

 

Some years later, he is working on a poetry documentary. He contacts me because he is touring the country with his crew and they are collecting film footage for their documentary. He’s in Milwaukee, where I was living at the time with my husband and children. I get together with him and his crew one night, and when I drive him back to his hotel, he leans over to kiss me, and grabs my crotch. Like the first time, I don’t remember what I say or do, but I stay in my seat behind the wheel and he backs off and leaves. I don’t even remember if I told my husband what happened.

 

***

Coming of age in the 70s and 80s, we called it “making a pass,” when a guy touched or spoke to you sexually. No consent was required nor expected. He would make a pass, and if you reciprocated, that meant “yes.” If you didn’t, maybe he’d try again, and again, and maybe you’d say “no” or “let’s just be friends” or something equally unassertive. I thought that was how it worked. I thought those were my only choices.

Both these assaults involved older men in positions of authority. I’ve told these stories to some folks over the years, but from a position of internalized acceptance, like “this is what guys do, isn’t that creepy?” Some time later, I remember telling a poet, another woman of color, whom I considered a mentor and kind of an older sister, what happened with my boss at Poetry Project. She knew him well, and she groaned, and joked sarcastically, “Ugh, he must’ve been tired, and he wanted to lie down.” And we both laughed.

Do you see what I was living through? This fucked-up patriarchy of white male body supremacy and our willingness to accept it. I wasn’t raped. So I thought these were just the adventures of a young woman in the big city. I thought I had invited these violations because I was choosing to be there.

Anita Hill rocked my core in 1991, and I will always be grateful to her. Finally I could recognize that I had experienced sexual harassment. I had words. These violations were not ok. Nevertheless I identified the transgressions I experienced as sexual harassment, not assault.

Goddamn, I wasted that fancy Barnard College education by missing the lessons on self-love, self-care, and self-respect as a woman of color. I was a woman of my time and place. I was my mother’s daughter. No type of privilege, coming from a line of prominent doctors and scientists, could save me from white male body supremacy so deeply embedded I could not name it nor dismantle it, until now.

How many friends have I supported through their own sexual assault crises? How many transformative justice sessions have I participated in, and even coordinated and facilitated? How many books and articles have I read? And yet, I have not been able to name my own traumas until now. I credit the pandemic, my age, and finally, finally, the chance to sit in my own body, undisturbed.

I credit God, my ancestors, my spirit guides, my angels, and the beings and forces that surround me at all times, for protecting me from further harm and getting me out of situations that could’ve been far, far, worse. There were other situations, like the time driving home after partying, seated between two guys, friends from high school, who are coming on to me from both sides, and one unzips his pants and pulls out his dick, and so many drunken parties, and other unsafe occasions, when I was impaired, where the consequences could have been so much worse.

I credit myself for whatever grace and grit and smarts I’ve been able to summon. I credit Meiko, for coming into my life at age 22, when I got pregnant, and became sober, and stayed sober.

I credit all my sisters whose stories I had to hear over and over and over again, until something clicked to open the gates of the stories I had not contextualized.

I weep for my young self, wanting to get free and not knowing how, and the messiness of it all.

But most of all I weep for my daughters, and write this for you, my granddaughter, and other girls and women to come, to break the cycle, to say, Don’t let anyone harm you, or I will blow their fucking brains out.

When I picture a 20 year-old woman being violated, especially by men in authority who are 15-25 years older than her, the mother-protector comes out and I want to bludgeon those men. So I am claiming my power right now, right here, to say, Fuck you, perpetrator. I will not let you touch me. I will not let you speak to me like I am your object. I reclaim my power and my body and my agency. Back off, motherfucker.

May it be so, in the name of God, the Goddess, and all beings, seen and unseen, known, and unknown, and in the name of my mother and grandmother, and their mothers and grandmothers, and in the name of my daughters and granddaughters, and their daughters and granddaughters, and the in name of my sons and grandsons, and their sons and grandsons, that they will always respect and revere women and their power.

In love and struggle,

Your Mother