Second Act 

As we were walking on it, Laura once asked me why is the track behind the university’s old gym blue, and not red like other tracks? My reply: of course, in this place, the track is blue, because it is an anti-communist track. This premise engages one possible history of border-as-dilemma: how anti-communism is an unevenly yet mutually constructed and awkwardly shared political unconscious in the murky era/region oxymoronically termed Pax Americana, which plays a big part in shaping perceptions of both cultures and individuals. Laura’s question led me to see myself against my conscious political choices as walking on more than one such anti-communist track at once, both literally in the class-revealing locations of my morning fast walks and in my overall life path. Walking back into my apartment, in an older building on a gentrifying block, how do I perceive myself? If I have any self-awareness, I have to perceive myself and know I am perceived by others as a Western, “American” (read US), white, female, white-collar foreign worker and apartment-owner from the US, as a living symbol of encroaching neoliberal gentrification, even if this would never be named as such by my friendly neighbors. Laura’s questions for me are thus utter dilemmas. First, I cannot perceive myself as Mexican, Chinese, or Taiwanese because, given the history of colonial capitalism that shapes experience and perception in the places I have lived, such a claim would be an appropriation and ultimately denial of how I am perceived by others and what possibilities that perception affords me. Second, not to recognize how I am shaped by long experience in Taiwan and in the US near the Mexican border is possibly an even more pernicious form of denial, and risks upholding the also colonially derived monolithic notion of culture that Medina critiques. What I’ve learned so far is that while national borders are tools of neoliberal exploitation and should not be reified as given designators of culture, because the multifaceted border is a technology of the partitioned world I inhabit, it has a historical reality that I must face in order to perceive Laura at all: much relating necessarily happens on many borders at once, and there is nothing monolithic about this or the historical realities that have put it in place. The non-monolithic nature of cultural frames can still be a tool of the reified border.  In such a layered context of dilemma I can only try to refuse both self-ethnicizing appropriation and the reification of cultural difference as mutually constructed border affirming projects of the ongoing Cold War. Perhaps recognizing this condition and its limits affords what possibilities there are for care.

Special Scene

Laura, I would like you to go to a gentrified area in Taiwan and walk around, asking random people questions, and then do the same thing in a less gentrified area. In these places, how do you perceive yourself? How do you perceive others and how others perceive you? How do you perceive Amie?