Roughhouse friday, p.19
Roughhouse Friday, page 19
“You’re married?”
“Yes.” Her husband, she told me, was an American. He spent all his time playing video games and riding his skateboard, and he was not kind to her. She had married him for love, but also to stay in Juneau, so that she wouldn’t have to go back home. But now she wanted to get divorced and was just waiting for the papers to come through. “I’m sorry I did not tell you.”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel—anger, betrayal, surprise. But when I looked at Paula, I felt none of those things. All I felt was … sorry. Not pity, not sympathy. I was just sorry that she’d had to go through what she’d been through. That it had led her to Marlintini’s, that it had led her here. That life in America had been less than her expectations. That now she had to decide whether to stay or go back home.
“It’s okay.” I tried to think of a better way to say it, but I couldn’t. This whole time I’d assumed that I’d been using Paula to fill my own void; that I, as a fighter who flew into town for a night on someone else’s dime, was getting the better deal. But maybe we were both here for the same reasons.
Paula pulled closer to me. “Thank you,” she said.
13. MIXED BREEDS
The Monday after my fight with the Banana was Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. Elizabeth Peratrovich was a mixed-blood Sitka woman who, in 1945, worked with her husband, Roy, and the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood to pass the Anti-Discrimination Act through the Alaska Senate. When Americans had first come up to Sitka in the late 1800s, they’d classified Russian mixed-blood children like Peratrovich as simply Russians, which placed them one rung above the Tlingit “savages” in the caste system. Even at the time of Peratrovich’s activism, one state senator had commented that “mixed breeds are a source of trouble,” and that “certainly white women have done their part to keep the races distinct. If white men had done as well, there would be no racial feeling in Alaska.” Another senator remarked, “It is the mixed breed who is not accepted by either race who causes trouble; rather than being brought together, the races should be kept farther apart. Who are these people barely out of savagery who want to associate with us whites, with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind us?” Peratrovich stood before the all-male Alaska State Senate and declared, “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with five thousand years of civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.” Later that evening, after the Anti-Discrimination Act passed, Elizabeth and her husband—the son of a Czech fisherman and a Tlingit woman—danced in the ballroom of the Juneau statehouse, where hours before a sign reading NO NATIVES had hung.
To celebrate the day, many of my students had been given writing assignments to reflect on Elizabeth Peratrovich’s legacy. I read their work with great interest. Donna wrote a beautiful essay about what it meant to be Native, about not wanting to be seen as just another stereotype of a broken Indian. Many of the most interesting stories came from students who I hadn’t even known had mixed blood. Kim, a six-foot-tall basketball player who always came to class in sweatpants, explained that her grandfather was Native and spoke Tlingit at home, and oddly, the moment she said this, my perception of her face began to shift: suddenly I was able to see another face beneath hers, rising to the surface. The same thing happened with Hank, a wrestler, who had jet-black hair and a Russian last name.
And then there was Tayla. She was blond, green eyed, narrow featured, and much smarter than she let on. While I was helping her revise her paper, she mentioned that her grandmother was from the Aleutian Islands—but nothing more. When I pushed her on the topic, Tayla explained that all she knew was that her grandmother had come to Sitka during World War II—apparently as part of a relocation program. The history was otherwise fuzzy. When I asked Tayla if she had any memories of her grandmother, she said she could remember the way she talked, then dropped into an Aleutian accent that sounded like another person had possessed her body. She laughed bashfully and switched back into her daily accent. That’s when I saw Tayla’s features, too, shift and morph into a new face. I would remember her face many years later when I would see my own daughters’ faces carrying the hidden evidence of my mother’s blood.
In the story of Peratrovich’s courage, I saw the power of a single voice to speak up on behalf of her people, to illuminate a better way forward some twenty years before the Civil Rights Act passed into federal law. But I also noticed that I didn’t have clear convictions about mixed blood. A reluctant and confused part of me could understand why people from two different races might be well served to, as the senator said, “be kept farther apart.” Such a belief was based not on principle but merely on feeling. Sometimes, I daydreamed about versions of my alternative selves, in alternative universes unchanged by the force of war. In those worlds, my mother remained in Panomsarakram. She married a man—a Thai man—from a nearby city. Perhaps he was a doctor or a farmer or a teacher. Together, they remained in her village, created a son who grew into a dutiful, respectful young man surrounded by generations of family. With them as models, he understood exactly his place in the world.
In my father’s universe, he graduated from college on the eve of no war, remaining free to consider the terms of his future. Perhaps he married his old high school girlfriend, Sarah Lowry—from Wellesley—and together they settled in the area, happily unaware of the complicated world beyond their suburb, content to watch their young son grow into a vision of themselves. Nowhere in the boy’s life did there exist some shadow of other origins; nowhere in his imagination did he consider the morass of worlds that separated his parents. Had they divorced, the separation could have been ugly or civil, it did not matter. Each side of him would mirror the other. The choice of where he might direct his affection would be based on simple emotions of love and loyalty, tethered only to a single common universe that his parents would always share between them.
It was a stupid, fruitless thought experiment. But sometimes my mind went to those possibilities with a primal curiosity. What fascinated me was the possibility of total certainty—that in those other visions of me there existed some beautiful core of uncompromised self: pastless, historyless, simple and free. Hitting another man in the head, feeling the bones of his skull through layers of skin and padding, told me that such a self did exist—if not in me, then beneath the skin of others.
But the optimism of Elizabeth Peratrovich Day was short-lived. Later that week, Laura called all SNEP employees into her office for a special meeting. She’d gotten some bad news: the school board was holding a vote to decide whether to cut SNEP funding by some one hundred thousand dollars, which in turn meant that many SNEP positions as cultural educators might also be cut. Paul, as the master bead worker, Karen Williams, driving the bus, Donna’s grandmother—their jobs would be defunded. My job would likely go, too, but that was the least of my worries. The memo from the school board brought up larger questions: What was an education? While my Native students were getting plenty of Shakespeare and algebra and Spanish, they were getting little education in a language that was once spoken by people up and down this coast for ten thousand years, and which now was spoken fluently by fewer than two hundred people. They weren’t learning the stories of their people in school. Maybe this was supposed to be stuff they learned at home—but the division was clear, and so was the message: that Native life was on the margins of town life, that Sitka was an American, Western community first.
None of this went over well with the SNEP staff. Dionne Jackson, a SNEP employee and cultural liaison, wrote to the Sitka Sentinel defending the use of the money for SNEP, which did not “sit there” (as one school board member had described it) but was “used to pay the already woefully low salaries of those people who fill the unique role of teaching the traditional songs, dances, artwork, and language to the Native youths of Sitka.” She defended the role of SNEP in providing “positive self-identity” and asserted that without the money the town would see the eventual “demise of the cultural education of our youths in Sitka.” The district couldn’t offer such an educational resource without SNEP. Limiting the work of SNEP in the community, Jackson said, would cause “irreparable” damage. She signed off her letter “Gunalcheesh,” Tlingit for “Thank you.” The next day SNEP ran an ad in the Sitka Sentinel outlining all the ways SNEP improved the community—it offered classes in regalia, language, traditional songs, dancing, and drumming, offered tutoring and preschool and transportation to every kid in Sitka, Native and non-Native—encouraging people to show up to the school board meeting in full regalia. A few days later there was a long list of Native people who had graduated from SNEP’s cultural programs and who had gone on to become important figures in the community. Halfway down the list I saw a familiar name: Victor Littlefield.
* * *
Once I’d watched all of Roo’s fight tapes about a dozen times, I got into the unhealthy routine of watching movies until late at night, sometimes until three or four in the morning. When I realized that I could get through a school day on four or five hours of sleep, take a nap in the afternoon, and still be fresh for training in the evening, it was a hard routine to break.
I rented the movies from a store downtown. I started out with films my father had quoted scenes from—brief performances that he often prefaced with the disclaimer “One day, my son, when you’re a little bit older, maybe you’ll have a look at…” or which I tacitly associated with his generation of American men. Five Easy Pieces, Rebel Without a Cause, The Champ, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider—the titles hung in my memory like the appendix of my father’s young manhood. Yet, like in so many of the books I read that winter, the heroes of these stories—disillusioned white men unable to make sense of the world, tormented by some spiritual disease, willing, eager even, to die in the name of freedom—appeared to me as caricatures of men, as little more than comic book heroes. Their souls were too simple in sentiment, too vacant of substance, too unaware of the delicacy of their own claims, to offer me the convincing model of masculinity I had been hoping for.
Then I started watching movies I’d watched as a kid, amazed that films that had once seemed so sinister could now be so benign and silly. Pale Rider, Tightrope—when I tried to picture my father and me sitting on the couch, eating ice cream while Clint Eastwood stared gravely into the sun, I could only laugh. The biggest shock, though, was watching Excalibur a second time. Though the movie was about ancient Camelot, it was really about the eighties. The metal soundtrack, the goofy dancing women, the highly sexualized male friendships—that I had watched this movie with such intense concentration, in a living room in rural Vermont surrounded by my stepfamily and father, made me cringe for my younger self.
Then I got on a kick of movies about Vietnam. Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Platoon, The Deer Hunter—movies that once had offered me visions of tragic antiheroes laughing in the face of absurdity, of heroic young men facing their hearts of darkness in a Southeast Asian hell, now appeared only as the artifacts and relics of some bankrupt civilization. Every quotable joke, every quip, every betrayal, every single death—all of it disgusted me. One night, after I’d stayed up until nearly dawn watching, back-to-back, both volumes of The Deer Hunter, I turned off my twelve-inch television set and stared into the darkness trying to make sense of the heat in my eyes, the confusion boiling inside my chest. The men coming back from war, the wounded souls. The psychedelic horror of Southeast Asia, set to a butt-rock soundtrack—I hated it all. I sat on my couch for several hours, the images of those films scrolling through my mind’s eye. The story they told of the war that had brought my parents together—I wanted a better one. One that was more complete, one that told me something about … her side of it. The only time I’d asked my mother about how she understood the war was during my senior year of high school, when I was studying Vietnam in my U.S. history class. As a woman from Thailand, what, I wanted to know, was her opinion of America’s involvement in Vietnam? It seemed an innocent enough question—one that carried with it no extraneous longings or baggage. My mother paused, raised her eyebrows—as if surprised that anyone, ever, would care for her opinion. “I think maybe Americans, they underestimate the Vietnamese people. They think they’re small. Maybe weak.” My mother nodded to herself, almost proudly, and I could hear in her voice a tone of gathering conviction. “But Americans, they don’t know how tough those people are. That they will do just about anything to survive.”
But the movie that affected me the most that winter was The Passion of the Christ, the Mel Gibson–directed film about the life of Jesus. The downtown theater was playing the movie for the beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, and with some sixty Christian churches in Sitka, the arrival of the movie cooked up a fervor in town. I knew little about the story of Jesus and had never felt drawn in any way to Christianity, especially in Alaska, where the work of missionaries was so obvious and explicit when juxtaposed with a landscape of such powerful wilderness. You didn’t have to be a scholar of Alaskan history to recognize how closely linked the enforcement of American rule was to the arrival of the Christian faith.
The theater that night was so packed that I had to sit in the very front row. The lights went down, and for the next two hours the theater was completely silent. The movie was as bad as I thought it would be. Jesus never held any doubt in his heart that what he was doing—basically, walking to his death—was the right thing. The violence of Jesus’ crucifixion was overly gory and gruesome: all the whips and chains and torn-up flesh—it made the Vietnam movies look innocent. Compared to the story of the Buddha, the story of Jesus had always seemed to me to be so unnecessarily brutal. Why torture yourself in the desert when you could sit under a bo tree and meditate instead? In the final scene, as Jesus hung on the cross covered in his own blood, the subtitles at the bottom of the screen flashed like a ticker tape. “Father,” he said through cracked, bloody lips. “Why have you forsaken me?”
The words swirled around my brain, faded with an echo. I wanted to stand up and scream at Jesus. He was bleeding out on a fucking cross in the desert, and the best he could do was ask his father why he’d abandoned him? I looked around the theater for some confirmation of how I felt, thinking I might see at least the expression of confusion on a few faces in the rows behind me. But everyone in the theater—I mean everyone—was bawling their eyes out. Grown men. Fishermen. Their wives. Children. Their faces shone with tears, as if they hadn’t known what was coming. I got up from my seat and left the theater just as the boulder was being rolled away from a cave.
* * *
The night before the school board meeting, I went to the gym early, so that I could get in a short workout. With Victor Down South with Miranda, Roo in Australia, and Todd nowhere to be found, the high school boys worked out on their own time, and I did, too.
By then I had been training for six months. I was strong and had endless wind, but I was also growing more certain about what kind of fighter I wanted to be. I was never going to be fast or slick. But I knew I could think and punch at the same time. Victor sometimes told me, “Boxing is the art of controlled aggression, of asserting your will over another man,” and when I thought of those principles, and how they applied to me, I began to gain confidence in my limited gifts. If I had slow hands, then I would make up for my lack of speed with persistence and punch rate. If I didn’t have natural snappy, quick-twitch power, then I’d have to have better wind, to outlast that power with endurance. What was most astonishing about my training was that I didn’t even need Victor there to keep me focused. I had my own goals that drove my hands into the bag. I moved through the silence of the room, repeating the sequences of punches, eyes closed, imagining the attack of my opponent. I did not care who he was. I did not care where he came from. It had nothing to do with the other man. In fighting, I was creating a language—a physical, silent tongue, each punch a word, as complex with mood and feeling as any vocabulary.
I got to the meeting a few minutes late. I sat down in the back row, still sweating, just as the SNEP Gajaheen dancers were performing in front of a packed hall. Donna was dancing, and her little sister was beating a drum. The other kids were dressed in construction-paper hats and felt robes, singing a song in Tlingit while propelling an imaginary canoe with wooden ceremonial paddles. Paul, the master bead worker, was dressed in full regalia, guiding them through the song. Laura sat with her daughter in the front row.
The meeting started with welcome greetings from the presidents of the ANB and ANS, who each introduced themselves in Tlingit, and in traditional fashion: first by identifying their matrilineal clan and house affiliations, then their ancestors and grandparents, until, finally, they gave their given Tlingit, and then English, name. Then it was time for testimony.
One of the first men to speak was Herman Davis. He wore a vest with a frog crest on it, had a long white beard and white hair. He spoke about the power of culture to give a person values and identity, and how important it was to pass this gift on to the young. Ronald Dick cited the low graduation rate of Native students: “It’s embarrassing. The people who are responsible should be ashamed. You don’t deserve our money. We’re doing a better job with your money than you can.” Bob Sam said that his life had improved since SNEP was created. “Old people got together because of my generation. It was critical. They realized there was something missing in our lives, and that was culture.” One after another, members of the Native community—old, young, alone and in pairs—came to the mic, appealing to the school board to maintain funding for SNEP. The school board members nodded after each testimony, but it was hard to say whether the stories were influencing their opinions.
Earlier that week, Laura had asked the few non-Native SNEP employees if we’d be willing to speak up as well. As I sat through the meeting, I tried to think of how I would introduce myself: “I am Jade … of … Maine … and … my grandparents…” I didn’t even know my grandmother’s last name. Sa-Lit, my mother had once told me, in some project for family heritage in elementary school. But I wasn’t even sure that was how you said it. My mother liked to believe she was Chinese—Chinese, good with money!—but I wasn’t convinced of her claim. My grandfather was a medicine man, who apparently had Lao blood. But I didn’t know the meaning of his last name—Muncharoen—and for most of my life, despite the fact that it was my middle name, I’d spelled it wrong.
“Yes.” Her husband, she told me, was an American. He spent all his time playing video games and riding his skateboard, and he was not kind to her. She had married him for love, but also to stay in Juneau, so that she wouldn’t have to go back home. But now she wanted to get divorced and was just waiting for the papers to come through. “I’m sorry I did not tell you.”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel—anger, betrayal, surprise. But when I looked at Paula, I felt none of those things. All I felt was … sorry. Not pity, not sympathy. I was just sorry that she’d had to go through what she’d been through. That it had led her to Marlintini’s, that it had led her here. That life in America had been less than her expectations. That now she had to decide whether to stay or go back home.
“It’s okay.” I tried to think of a better way to say it, but I couldn’t. This whole time I’d assumed that I’d been using Paula to fill my own void; that I, as a fighter who flew into town for a night on someone else’s dime, was getting the better deal. But maybe we were both here for the same reasons.
Paula pulled closer to me. “Thank you,” she said.
13. MIXED BREEDS
The Monday after my fight with the Banana was Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. Elizabeth Peratrovich was a mixed-blood Sitka woman who, in 1945, worked with her husband, Roy, and the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood to pass the Anti-Discrimination Act through the Alaska Senate. When Americans had first come up to Sitka in the late 1800s, they’d classified Russian mixed-blood children like Peratrovich as simply Russians, which placed them one rung above the Tlingit “savages” in the caste system. Even at the time of Peratrovich’s activism, one state senator had commented that “mixed breeds are a source of trouble,” and that “certainly white women have done their part to keep the races distinct. If white men had done as well, there would be no racial feeling in Alaska.” Another senator remarked, “It is the mixed breed who is not accepted by either race who causes trouble; rather than being brought together, the races should be kept farther apart. Who are these people barely out of savagery who want to associate with us whites, with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind us?” Peratrovich stood before the all-male Alaska State Senate and declared, “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with five thousand years of civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.” Later that evening, after the Anti-Discrimination Act passed, Elizabeth and her husband—the son of a Czech fisherman and a Tlingit woman—danced in the ballroom of the Juneau statehouse, where hours before a sign reading NO NATIVES had hung.
To celebrate the day, many of my students had been given writing assignments to reflect on Elizabeth Peratrovich’s legacy. I read their work with great interest. Donna wrote a beautiful essay about what it meant to be Native, about not wanting to be seen as just another stereotype of a broken Indian. Many of the most interesting stories came from students who I hadn’t even known had mixed blood. Kim, a six-foot-tall basketball player who always came to class in sweatpants, explained that her grandfather was Native and spoke Tlingit at home, and oddly, the moment she said this, my perception of her face began to shift: suddenly I was able to see another face beneath hers, rising to the surface. The same thing happened with Hank, a wrestler, who had jet-black hair and a Russian last name.
And then there was Tayla. She was blond, green eyed, narrow featured, and much smarter than she let on. While I was helping her revise her paper, she mentioned that her grandmother was from the Aleutian Islands—but nothing more. When I pushed her on the topic, Tayla explained that all she knew was that her grandmother had come to Sitka during World War II—apparently as part of a relocation program. The history was otherwise fuzzy. When I asked Tayla if she had any memories of her grandmother, she said she could remember the way she talked, then dropped into an Aleutian accent that sounded like another person had possessed her body. She laughed bashfully and switched back into her daily accent. That’s when I saw Tayla’s features, too, shift and morph into a new face. I would remember her face many years later when I would see my own daughters’ faces carrying the hidden evidence of my mother’s blood.
In the story of Peratrovich’s courage, I saw the power of a single voice to speak up on behalf of her people, to illuminate a better way forward some twenty years before the Civil Rights Act passed into federal law. But I also noticed that I didn’t have clear convictions about mixed blood. A reluctant and confused part of me could understand why people from two different races might be well served to, as the senator said, “be kept farther apart.” Such a belief was based not on principle but merely on feeling. Sometimes, I daydreamed about versions of my alternative selves, in alternative universes unchanged by the force of war. In those worlds, my mother remained in Panomsarakram. She married a man—a Thai man—from a nearby city. Perhaps he was a doctor or a farmer or a teacher. Together, they remained in her village, created a son who grew into a dutiful, respectful young man surrounded by generations of family. With them as models, he understood exactly his place in the world.
In my father’s universe, he graduated from college on the eve of no war, remaining free to consider the terms of his future. Perhaps he married his old high school girlfriend, Sarah Lowry—from Wellesley—and together they settled in the area, happily unaware of the complicated world beyond their suburb, content to watch their young son grow into a vision of themselves. Nowhere in the boy’s life did there exist some shadow of other origins; nowhere in his imagination did he consider the morass of worlds that separated his parents. Had they divorced, the separation could have been ugly or civil, it did not matter. Each side of him would mirror the other. The choice of where he might direct his affection would be based on simple emotions of love and loyalty, tethered only to a single common universe that his parents would always share between them.
It was a stupid, fruitless thought experiment. But sometimes my mind went to those possibilities with a primal curiosity. What fascinated me was the possibility of total certainty—that in those other visions of me there existed some beautiful core of uncompromised self: pastless, historyless, simple and free. Hitting another man in the head, feeling the bones of his skull through layers of skin and padding, told me that such a self did exist—if not in me, then beneath the skin of others.
But the optimism of Elizabeth Peratrovich Day was short-lived. Later that week, Laura called all SNEP employees into her office for a special meeting. She’d gotten some bad news: the school board was holding a vote to decide whether to cut SNEP funding by some one hundred thousand dollars, which in turn meant that many SNEP positions as cultural educators might also be cut. Paul, as the master bead worker, Karen Williams, driving the bus, Donna’s grandmother—their jobs would be defunded. My job would likely go, too, but that was the least of my worries. The memo from the school board brought up larger questions: What was an education? While my Native students were getting plenty of Shakespeare and algebra and Spanish, they were getting little education in a language that was once spoken by people up and down this coast for ten thousand years, and which now was spoken fluently by fewer than two hundred people. They weren’t learning the stories of their people in school. Maybe this was supposed to be stuff they learned at home—but the division was clear, and so was the message: that Native life was on the margins of town life, that Sitka was an American, Western community first.
None of this went over well with the SNEP staff. Dionne Jackson, a SNEP employee and cultural liaison, wrote to the Sitka Sentinel defending the use of the money for SNEP, which did not “sit there” (as one school board member had described it) but was “used to pay the already woefully low salaries of those people who fill the unique role of teaching the traditional songs, dances, artwork, and language to the Native youths of Sitka.” She defended the role of SNEP in providing “positive self-identity” and asserted that without the money the town would see the eventual “demise of the cultural education of our youths in Sitka.” The district couldn’t offer such an educational resource without SNEP. Limiting the work of SNEP in the community, Jackson said, would cause “irreparable” damage. She signed off her letter “Gunalcheesh,” Tlingit for “Thank you.” The next day SNEP ran an ad in the Sitka Sentinel outlining all the ways SNEP improved the community—it offered classes in regalia, language, traditional songs, dancing, and drumming, offered tutoring and preschool and transportation to every kid in Sitka, Native and non-Native—encouraging people to show up to the school board meeting in full regalia. A few days later there was a long list of Native people who had graduated from SNEP’s cultural programs and who had gone on to become important figures in the community. Halfway down the list I saw a familiar name: Victor Littlefield.
* * *
Once I’d watched all of Roo’s fight tapes about a dozen times, I got into the unhealthy routine of watching movies until late at night, sometimes until three or four in the morning. When I realized that I could get through a school day on four or five hours of sleep, take a nap in the afternoon, and still be fresh for training in the evening, it was a hard routine to break.
I rented the movies from a store downtown. I started out with films my father had quoted scenes from—brief performances that he often prefaced with the disclaimer “One day, my son, when you’re a little bit older, maybe you’ll have a look at…” or which I tacitly associated with his generation of American men. Five Easy Pieces, Rebel Without a Cause, The Champ, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider—the titles hung in my memory like the appendix of my father’s young manhood. Yet, like in so many of the books I read that winter, the heroes of these stories—disillusioned white men unable to make sense of the world, tormented by some spiritual disease, willing, eager even, to die in the name of freedom—appeared to me as caricatures of men, as little more than comic book heroes. Their souls were too simple in sentiment, too vacant of substance, too unaware of the delicacy of their own claims, to offer me the convincing model of masculinity I had been hoping for.
Then I started watching movies I’d watched as a kid, amazed that films that had once seemed so sinister could now be so benign and silly. Pale Rider, Tightrope—when I tried to picture my father and me sitting on the couch, eating ice cream while Clint Eastwood stared gravely into the sun, I could only laugh. The biggest shock, though, was watching Excalibur a second time. Though the movie was about ancient Camelot, it was really about the eighties. The metal soundtrack, the goofy dancing women, the highly sexualized male friendships—that I had watched this movie with such intense concentration, in a living room in rural Vermont surrounded by my stepfamily and father, made me cringe for my younger self.
Then I got on a kick of movies about Vietnam. Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Platoon, The Deer Hunter—movies that once had offered me visions of tragic antiheroes laughing in the face of absurdity, of heroic young men facing their hearts of darkness in a Southeast Asian hell, now appeared only as the artifacts and relics of some bankrupt civilization. Every quotable joke, every quip, every betrayal, every single death—all of it disgusted me. One night, after I’d stayed up until nearly dawn watching, back-to-back, both volumes of The Deer Hunter, I turned off my twelve-inch television set and stared into the darkness trying to make sense of the heat in my eyes, the confusion boiling inside my chest. The men coming back from war, the wounded souls. The psychedelic horror of Southeast Asia, set to a butt-rock soundtrack—I hated it all. I sat on my couch for several hours, the images of those films scrolling through my mind’s eye. The story they told of the war that had brought my parents together—I wanted a better one. One that was more complete, one that told me something about … her side of it. The only time I’d asked my mother about how she understood the war was during my senior year of high school, when I was studying Vietnam in my U.S. history class. As a woman from Thailand, what, I wanted to know, was her opinion of America’s involvement in Vietnam? It seemed an innocent enough question—one that carried with it no extraneous longings or baggage. My mother paused, raised her eyebrows—as if surprised that anyone, ever, would care for her opinion. “I think maybe Americans, they underestimate the Vietnamese people. They think they’re small. Maybe weak.” My mother nodded to herself, almost proudly, and I could hear in her voice a tone of gathering conviction. “But Americans, they don’t know how tough those people are. That they will do just about anything to survive.”
But the movie that affected me the most that winter was The Passion of the Christ, the Mel Gibson–directed film about the life of Jesus. The downtown theater was playing the movie for the beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, and with some sixty Christian churches in Sitka, the arrival of the movie cooked up a fervor in town. I knew little about the story of Jesus and had never felt drawn in any way to Christianity, especially in Alaska, where the work of missionaries was so obvious and explicit when juxtaposed with a landscape of such powerful wilderness. You didn’t have to be a scholar of Alaskan history to recognize how closely linked the enforcement of American rule was to the arrival of the Christian faith.
The theater that night was so packed that I had to sit in the very front row. The lights went down, and for the next two hours the theater was completely silent. The movie was as bad as I thought it would be. Jesus never held any doubt in his heart that what he was doing—basically, walking to his death—was the right thing. The violence of Jesus’ crucifixion was overly gory and gruesome: all the whips and chains and torn-up flesh—it made the Vietnam movies look innocent. Compared to the story of the Buddha, the story of Jesus had always seemed to me to be so unnecessarily brutal. Why torture yourself in the desert when you could sit under a bo tree and meditate instead? In the final scene, as Jesus hung on the cross covered in his own blood, the subtitles at the bottom of the screen flashed like a ticker tape. “Father,” he said through cracked, bloody lips. “Why have you forsaken me?”
The words swirled around my brain, faded with an echo. I wanted to stand up and scream at Jesus. He was bleeding out on a fucking cross in the desert, and the best he could do was ask his father why he’d abandoned him? I looked around the theater for some confirmation of how I felt, thinking I might see at least the expression of confusion on a few faces in the rows behind me. But everyone in the theater—I mean everyone—was bawling their eyes out. Grown men. Fishermen. Their wives. Children. Their faces shone with tears, as if they hadn’t known what was coming. I got up from my seat and left the theater just as the boulder was being rolled away from a cave.
* * *
The night before the school board meeting, I went to the gym early, so that I could get in a short workout. With Victor Down South with Miranda, Roo in Australia, and Todd nowhere to be found, the high school boys worked out on their own time, and I did, too.
By then I had been training for six months. I was strong and had endless wind, but I was also growing more certain about what kind of fighter I wanted to be. I was never going to be fast or slick. But I knew I could think and punch at the same time. Victor sometimes told me, “Boxing is the art of controlled aggression, of asserting your will over another man,” and when I thought of those principles, and how they applied to me, I began to gain confidence in my limited gifts. If I had slow hands, then I would make up for my lack of speed with persistence and punch rate. If I didn’t have natural snappy, quick-twitch power, then I’d have to have better wind, to outlast that power with endurance. What was most astonishing about my training was that I didn’t even need Victor there to keep me focused. I had my own goals that drove my hands into the bag. I moved through the silence of the room, repeating the sequences of punches, eyes closed, imagining the attack of my opponent. I did not care who he was. I did not care where he came from. It had nothing to do with the other man. In fighting, I was creating a language—a physical, silent tongue, each punch a word, as complex with mood and feeling as any vocabulary.
I got to the meeting a few minutes late. I sat down in the back row, still sweating, just as the SNEP Gajaheen dancers were performing in front of a packed hall. Donna was dancing, and her little sister was beating a drum. The other kids were dressed in construction-paper hats and felt robes, singing a song in Tlingit while propelling an imaginary canoe with wooden ceremonial paddles. Paul, the master bead worker, was dressed in full regalia, guiding them through the song. Laura sat with her daughter in the front row.
The meeting started with welcome greetings from the presidents of the ANB and ANS, who each introduced themselves in Tlingit, and in traditional fashion: first by identifying their matrilineal clan and house affiliations, then their ancestors and grandparents, until, finally, they gave their given Tlingit, and then English, name. Then it was time for testimony.
One of the first men to speak was Herman Davis. He wore a vest with a frog crest on it, had a long white beard and white hair. He spoke about the power of culture to give a person values and identity, and how important it was to pass this gift on to the young. Ronald Dick cited the low graduation rate of Native students: “It’s embarrassing. The people who are responsible should be ashamed. You don’t deserve our money. We’re doing a better job with your money than you can.” Bob Sam said that his life had improved since SNEP was created. “Old people got together because of my generation. It was critical. They realized there was something missing in our lives, and that was culture.” One after another, members of the Native community—old, young, alone and in pairs—came to the mic, appealing to the school board to maintain funding for SNEP. The school board members nodded after each testimony, but it was hard to say whether the stories were influencing their opinions.
Earlier that week, Laura had asked the few non-Native SNEP employees if we’d be willing to speak up as well. As I sat through the meeting, I tried to think of how I would introduce myself: “I am Jade … of … Maine … and … my grandparents…” I didn’t even know my grandmother’s last name. Sa-Lit, my mother had once told me, in some project for family heritage in elementary school. But I wasn’t even sure that was how you said it. My mother liked to believe she was Chinese—Chinese, good with money!—but I wasn’t convinced of her claim. My grandfather was a medicine man, who apparently had Lao blood. But I didn’t know the meaning of his last name—Muncharoen—and for most of my life, despite the fact that it was my middle name, I’d spelled it wrong.
