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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


11.24.22


Ads for Black Friday, adopted by British and Irish companies, remind me of Thanksgiving. I send an email to my mother, hoping she is celebrating with family. In truth, it all feels so far away, after 17 years in Ireland. Foreign, even.

I forget I’m American until I read about another mass shooting in the news. Then I remember that I was born in a violent country.

Still, I thought of Karen Tei Yamashita’s story or essay “KonMarimasu”: a sansei woman travels with her niece across the country, touring concentration camps where Japanese Americans had been incarcerated during WWII, to “retrace the steps of others, stand in places of their discovery, loss, and misery.” If I am American, it’s not only because I share the collective memory of certain places and cultural events, but also this history of migration and adversity in the face of xenophobic white America. Yet, as the author points out, even in Trump’s America, “in each of those remote sites of Japanese American incarceration, there are monuments, interpretation centres, museums, and real people, volunteers and docents, that all decry the racism, hatred, and fear that unjustly imprisoned citizens and honest, hardworking immigrant families. These sites and their caretakers stand as places of evidence, accountability, resistance, and hope.” That last sentence: that is America to me, too.





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