I feel most afraid of being in America, or being among other Americans. I feel flattened, two-dimensional. In the presumption that there is no gap, I am lost in an open field. I don’t know what to say. I quickly try to establish myself as having grown up overseas, as Other. I try to paint over my whiteness with the Asian places I have lived. ‘Oh, I know Atlanta well,’ another American says to me, at a party in Berlin, when I tell her that’s where I’m from. ‘Well, I’m not really from there,’ I hurry to say. ‘It’s just what I say.’
Just what I say. I expose the mask to put on another, thicker one. The task of masking, its inconveniences — barely seeing through the eyeholes, the difficulty of breathing through the plaster — feels important, noble, modern and sexy. There is something martyr-like about the discomfort, the homelessness I insist upon. In it I am always fumbling, searching for the right word, the right explanation. The joy, when it comes, is of finally being understood, despite language, despite culture, despite foreign-ness, mask ripped off. The opposite rapture, which is always there, in the depths of the trench, the mask my own skin, by now, is the thrill of being unknown, never settling down, dreaming about your old homes in other people’s beds.
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