Asian Heritage Month Statement + Reading List 

Asian Heritage Month Statement + Reading List 

We at Room Magazine, which publishes from a city whose history and present have been shaped by Asian activists, artists, working people, grandmothers, scientists, and movements, are looking back on this past Asian Heritage Month with gratitude and determination. 

While capitalistic interests attempt to reduce Asian heritages to hypercommercialized depictions of de-ethnicized consumer goods, we must remember the broad diversity of Asian communities, as well as how they have historically come together in order to protest racial, class, and gender injustice here and abroad. Room rejects “Canada’s” multiculturalism smokescreen for what it is: a word used to hide the fact that our government has worsened conditions for immigrants. refugees, and migrants, including those from Asian countries; continues to cozy up to right-wing governments that persecute their own ethnic and caste minorities; and has tacitly approved of the destruction the U.S. and Israel have unleashed upon millions of civilians in West Asia. 

Yet meanwhile, hope and determination come together in the Crips for E-sim for Gaza initiative, founded by Asian activists Alice Wong, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Room’s own Jane Shi, which centres disabled cross-nation, material solidarities. As we close out Asian Heritage Month, Room Magazine, urges our community of readers and writers to, like the Crips for E-Sims for Gaza founders, fight anti-Asian racisms wherever they encounter them; to uplift Asian artists rather than the idea of Asianness that corporations wish to push forward as the definitive face of what it is to be Asian; and to draw together in solidarity with Asian communities in so-called Canada and the Global South.

Reading List:

Excerpt from “A Phoenix with Brown Feathers Has Alighted on a Wall Next to the Thames,” by Bhanu Kapil, via The Poetry Society

“The opposite of a colony is the colony’s mother.

A mother is a land mass with a residual vibration.

Do birds orient to this vibration?

In the cloisters beneath Westminster Abbey, there are plaques honouring the ‘brave men and women’ who ‘initiated’ colony life in ‘Malaya’. And India.”

Excerpt from “Eras of Exclusion,” by Ryanne Kap, via Maisonneuve 

“Despite their apparent economic value, they were never truly wanted; anti-Chinese rhetoric was present in Canada before colonization was complete and the country was named Canada. There were few Chinese people then, but those present faced racism. The Exclusion Act was enacted on July 1, and so a day meant for celebrating the nation became a stark reminder of its cruelties. For many Chinese Canadians, ‘Canada Day’ is still remembered as ‘Humiliation Day.’”

Excerpt from “Teeter-Totter” by Shuang Xuetao, via Brick Magazine 

“Liu Yiduo points to the lever at the foot of the bed and says to me, Crank this six times to make it recline and he’ll be able to drink. Twelve times to sit upright, and if he starts to slide, prop him up with a pillow. I say, Have you done that? She says, Ask him yourself. I say, We should prop him up. She says, He’s in so much pain he only understands half the time. Just go ahead and do it.”

Excerpt from “Revolutionary Kiss,” by Tina Chang, via Poets.org

“Born from the urgency of immigrants, how futile all of my years of worrying. I should have known my boy would row his small boat to me, regardless of the sky above that shook down its lightning, and even if the ground was bruised and famished of fruit and even freedom, he would continue on as if a force were lulling him to bedrock. Right here between his eyebrows, there is swell of light, a country where I belong, no longer a stranger to my own skin.”

Excerpt from “Parliaments on the Stoop,” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, via Room Magazine 

There’s nothing like being two kinds of sore-hipped brown femmes

a week after a hate crime,

smoking Parliaments on the stoop

outside a queer Black femme birthday party

with lots of glitter house looks.

It’s safe to be

inside, soft, but we come outside

to be bad brown femmes looking at the moon

smoking in the bushes like we trained for at every wedding we’ve ever been to.

Excerpt from “An Internationalist Front Against Border Imperialism,” by Harsha Walia, interviewed by Léopold Lambert, from The Funambulist

Harsha Walia: …when we think about borders, oftentimes we think about borders, and, you know, border securitization and border controls as happening at the site of the border. Right, so at that, on that line on the map, if you will. But really, bordering regimes are, as you note, they’re multiplying, they’re everywhere, they’re internalized within the nation state, they’re externalize beyond the nation state. And for me, that’s central to understanding bordering regimes because bordering regimes are less about demarcating space and territory, though they’re also about that. But they’re also about creating and reproducing and maintaining systems of power, right, particularly racial capitalism, racial citizenship, imperialism, and more.

Excerpt from “Ghareeb” by Fatimah Asgharm via Poets.org 

“when’d the west set in your bones? you survive
each winter like you were made for snow, a stranger

to each ancestor who lights your past. your parents,
dead, never taught you their language—stranger

to everything that tries to bring you home.” 

Excerpt from “I’m Writing a Novel, but There Is the News” by Amitava Kumar, via Brick Magazine 

“As in all matters, all my projects seeded in guilt, I find myself culpable. But on this issue I have certain others in my sights. This evening, holding my glass of chilled, locally sourced wine, I’d like to be able to tell my interlocutor that the question I’m asking is this: Who among your neighbours will look the other way when a figure of authority comes to your door and puts a boot in your face?”

Excerpt from “We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies,” by Tsering Yangzom Lama, via Literary Hub

“My aunt brought me here—or I should say pulled me here, for that would be the closest approximation of our word—with my first plane ticket and my first passport. “Don’t be too clever when they check your papers,” she instructed over the phone before I left for Tribhuvan Airport. “Say nothing unless they ask you.” Throughout my two-day journey, I pictured a disastrous arrival in Toronto. I imagined being turned away just after landing (it happened to a cousin of a friend) and shuffled into a holding cell, where I’d wait until I could be returned to Nepal. Even after the border agent stamped my passport and I picked up my suitcase, I expected someone to turn me back.”

Excerpt from “Palestine and the Asian American Question,” by Najwa Mayer and Randa Tawil, via The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Margins

“Asian American politics are often defined by an existential dialectic: On the one hand, the anticolonial internationalism that generated pan-Asian coalitionism within the incubator of Global South movements in the 1960s and 70s. On the other, a cultural nationalism that would incorporate Asian Americans within U.S. rights and markets. The latter signaled the political death of the former, while the former still intellectually inspires critiques of the latter. In other words, ‘Asian America’s’ revolutionary internationalism perpetually struggles as a question.” 

Excerpt from “Departures” by Mai Der Vang, via DiaCRITICS

“Say goodbye at a border, a barrier, a checkpoint
fenced with metal gates.

Come back to these spaces. Gather all possessions.

Or don’t say goodbye. There is no measure to hold
minutes when the river has arrived.

The Mekong has made its way. Everyone crosses
with marrow of one another.”