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​02-03-2024

Jason Koo

 

NO REST

“There is a constant drain of energy which
might be better used in redefining ourselves,”

 

says Audre Lorde, and I think about this
any time someone sends me an email demanding

 

I send another email explaining, i.e. repeating,
what I’ve already said in a previous email

 

meant to preempt (but not read and resulting
in) their email, or when a student asks me

 

about something I’ve detailed in a document
such as the syllabus or assignment guidelines

 

that I expressly put together in such a fashion
to preclude that very question, or when I’ve doubled

 

down on my attempt to preclude that question
by going over said document in class and a student

 

asks me something that I literally just provided
the answer to five seconds before I (stupidly) asked

 

if there were any questions and that the sad
document also (stupidly) included the answer to,

 

questions that would’ve been precluded
had everyone simply, i.e. actually, been reading

 

and/or listening at all. Lorde was talking about
something more serious than unnecessary emails

 

and student questions, but there’s a connection,
how the oppressed are expected to teach their oppressors

 

their mistakes, “to stretch out and bridge the gap
between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness

 

of our oppressor,” as when I have to explain how I do
not possess sexuality as an Asian American man

 

in the American cultural imaginary, there being no
representations of Asian or Asian American men

 

kissing or “making love” or god forbid fucking
in American television or film, unless they’re the butt

 

of a joke or with Asian or Asian American women,
and even these instances are few and far fucking

 

between, the thought of a man such as myself
kissing or doing anything deploying this wretched body

 

with another woman of color let alone a White woman
is apparently too much for all ye immaculate asshats

 

to bear, and when I say too much of course I mean
laughable, the idea is ridiculous, unless I’m in a fantasy

 

land where I’m hang-gliding down to White Castle
to binge on thirty sliders and four large Cherry Cokes

 

and Doogie Howser miraculously shows up to pay
for them when he finds out I’ve lost my wallet,

 

allowing me, finally, to unsmirk my jackass boss’s
face and make out with my hot neighbor Maria

 

spontaneously in an elevator, or the earth has been
overrun by flesh-eating zombies and I can capitalize

 

on the dearth of available let alone trustworthy men
—not shockingly even more dire than before—

 

by winning the heart of a lovely, resourceful White
Southern girl who’s happy to stick a knife in the forehead

 

of my enemies, even marrying her in a charming
non-legal ceremony before being bludgeoned by a bat

 

named Lucille wielded by an alpha White male
in a black leather jacket, the charismatic asshole

 

who’s shown up, with gleeful savagery, to restore order.

And then I get a bland, not-too-concerned, slightly
 

mystified “Huh, I’d never noticed that before,” as if
I’d been talking about the thin layer of dust lining

 

the inner bottom lip of a framed wall hanging
in an American home. But this is my life, or non-life,

 

I’m telling you about, how exhaustingly I’ve had
to work to render my puny sexuality at all

 

non-puny to this nation, “puny” because still
the first thing that comes to mind when anyone

 

(even other Asian men, even, sometimes, myself)
imagines an Asian man having sex is a little

 

dick, as if that were the sole preserve of Long
Duk Dong and Co., what’s absurd is that nowhere

 

are we actually seeing the body of Mr. Dong
on screen, so how does anybody even fucking know?

 

From personal experience? Kindly raise your hand
if you’ve seen the penis of an Asian man in your lifetime.

 

Case in point: during one summer in New York City
after my last relationship was over, I tried Tinder,

 

curious to see who was out there beyond my usual
circles and thinking the app would accelerate

 

my dating, at this point in my life I was 37 years old,
I’d finally achieved some semblance of confidence

 

in myself as a sexual entity, which took, oh, two decades,
I was dating all kinds of women, Black, White,

 

Latina, Asian, you name it, younger, older,
doing all kinds of things professionally,

 

I no longer had a type (White), as I thought I did
before I’d really dated anybody, no longer lived

 

in a small town in Missouri or North Carolina
where I had no options but had to accept whoever

 

would have me, this was New York City, where a face,
a body such as mine, were actually on the radar.

 

In two months of using Tinder I got
ten matches. All of them Asian women.

 

I went out with two, both terrific people
(the only reason I don’t completely regret using

 

the app), but if ever there was a definitive picture
of how racism works in my life, this was it.

 

I vanished. Women I possibly could’ve met
and attracted in real life did not see me at all

 

when reduced to an image, a preconception.
Rather than accelerating my dating life

 

and expanding my options, as the app seemed
to do for everyone I talked to, even people I knew

 

who were horrible at meeting people in real life,
it slowed it down, I was now spending all my time

 

and energy trying to figure this fucking thing out,
expanding my searches even outside the city,

 

until finally I just swiped right on everybody,
as a friend of mine suggested, just to see if I was

 

being too picky, and still no more matches.
Even Match.com, the only other dating app I’d used

 

before that, in 2007, in North Carolina, yielded
more matches, and with White women, despite

 

—or perhaps because of—most of their profiles
saying they were looking for a White Christian guy

 

who made six figures. At least the racism there
was out in the open, but here, in New York City,

 

where one expects better, it played out silently
in swipes. I know what you’re thinking: poor me,

 

right? This is all the racism I’ve had to encounter?
Um, no, but hold that thought, because it’s part

 

of the problem I’m so exhaustively trying to describe.
Both of the Asian women I went out with had

 

hundreds of matches, seemingly per day.
I know this because I asked them to show me

 

and couldn’t scroll through the end of their lists.
I showed them mine. They laughed. I asked them

 

why they’d swiped right on me, if they were so coveted
and I, so clearly, was not. They said, I only date

 

Asian guys. In other words, the pool had to be limited
to Asian guys for me to reappear, for these features

 

to surface as “attractive,” I could separate myself
only when there were eyes that separated that type

 

of self at all. Whereas their type was already a separator,
they were fetishized, they only dated Asian guys

 

to try to avoid this problem, one of them had a face
that White dudes see in their most lavish imperial dreams

 

of the Orient. What’s better, to be invisible
or fetishized? Like a rock and a hard place, neither

 

is great, but at least when you’re fetishized you’re invited
to the table, you’ve got a puncher’s chance at revealing

 

your identity, whereas when you’re invisible, you do
not. It’s the difference between not really being seen

 

and not being seen. In Missouri, I took an Asian American
lit class (in which I was the only Asian guy present)

 

and would read about all the problems Asian American

women were having being exoticized and think,
 

Please, exoticize me! It’s a problem I want to have!

I left class and walked between the blonde, baked faces
 

blinking past me as if I were about as interesting
as the back of an envelope, it didn’t occur to them that I

 

could be considered sexually. And here I was, a man
in my late 20s, entering my prime years of sexual eligibility,

 

so to speak, tall, smart, creative, clean, funny, passionate,
ambitious, with a job, a car, my own place, experience

 

in love, in sex, from a good family, without major baggage,
and none of that added up to sexy, despite what any

 

women’s magazine let alone actual woman in my life
had to say to the contrary, I was churning with qualities

 

American culture had led me to believe were desirable,
many of which had been hard earned through years

 

of clumsy learning, but I’d become the man without qualities,
I wasn’t even a man, I was just without qualities,

 

my Asian American lit teacher tried to sum up this problem
for the class when we discussed M. Butterfly by citing

 

the joke about what you call a gay Asian couple
(“lesbians”) and only I understood the punchline.

 

My friends in the writing program, all of whom were White
and in significant relationships, living with someone

 

they were about to marry or already married
and having kids—I went to no less than four weddings

 

and three baby showers during my four years there—
were mostly amused by my problems, didn’t think

 

of them as “problems,” I’d go out with my best friend
to one White spot after another and tell him my only chance

 

of being noticed at all was if I was mistaken
for Jackie Chan, I was told this twice while I lived there,

 

otherwise I was just some random math teacher
or foreign exchange student or tech guy, and he’d look

 

at me, slightly incredulous, and say, Do you really
think that’s how people see you? and just by using

 

that word “see” proved he didn’t see the problem,
thus making me unseen twice over, first for not

 

being seen, then for not being seen as not seen,
even by one of the few people, I thought, who could

 

see me. He didn’t see my problems as having
to do with race, he wasn’t alone in this, my whole life

 

my very own mom has been telling me the same thing,
that I shouldn’t complain about racism, that’s just

 

an easy out, I should put my head down, work hard-
er and good things will eventually happen to me,

 

this is how she and my father achieved success
as immigrants from South Korea, it’s the model

 

minority way, I know this way well, I’ve been wearing
it away my whole life, and my mom’s not wrong,

 

taking more SAT prep courses and practice tests
than any non-Asian kid I knew in high school

 

helped me, I suppose, get over the racism latent
in the test to do well enough on it that I got over

 

the racism of comparing Asians against other Asians
to get into Yale, getting into Yale and working hard-

 

er than everybody else to catch up on all the books
they’d read in their non-immigrant households

 

then lap their reading many times over helped me
get noticed enough by my famous White professors

 

that they’d write me recs, those recs and the Yale
imprimatur probably helped more than any poems

 

I’d written to get me into the MFA and PhD programs
of my choice, the director of my PhD program

 

said in a student newspaper article how proof
of the high national regard of the program was that

 

now Ivy League grads were applying to it, which
was interesting, Yale apparently mattered more

 

than any talent that was revealed in my poems,
as my mom always said it would, she wasn’t wrong,

 

this was true probably for every teaching job
I’ve landed, we all know almost nobody in the academy

 

besides poets reads poems, and if they do, not
contemporary poems, and if they do that, not

 

by poets of color, and if they do that, not by
straight Asian American men, this was certainly

 

true for my current job, at a university just
twenty minutes from Yale and always conscious

 

of its rather large shadow, when someone picked
me up from Union Station in New Haven

 

for my campus visit, the first thing they said was,
Well, you’re no stranger to this place, are you?

 

even though I hadn’t set foot there in fourteen years,
spending that time trying to make myself stranger

 

and stranger to everything it represented, to be seen
as a poet, not a Yale grad, I learned in grad school

 

that virtually everyone besides other Ivy League grads
looks at you with suspicion if you say you’ve gone

 

to Yale, it immediately makes them think they know

something about you, that you’re a snob, or rich,
 

or wannabe White, or all of the above, but what
you certainly are not is a real writer, you can only hope

 

to be an academic, so I started leaving Yale
out of my author bio for cover letters or publications,

 

went out of my way not to mention it if someone
asked me where I went to school, which drove my mom

 

crazy, she said, You’ve chosen the one profession
where having a Yale degree doesn’t help you???

 

She wasn’t wrong, or right, it’s helped me, and it hasn’t,
I got my current job because of it but it’s not tenure-track,

 

nor was any other job I’ve gotten, I can’t compete
for the most coveted jobs because I don’t have purchase

 

in the marketplace, not even as a token, when other
POC complain about the problem of being tokenized

 

I can’t help but think of the sad irony of their privilege
compared to mine, my problem is that there is no

 

problem, nobody talks about or even seems to think
about the problem of the lack of Asian American men

 

in writing teaching positions or publishing, every year
VIDA counts the percentage of women being published

 

in journals compared to men and the numbers are appalling,
but how about we compare the number of women

 

to Asian American men? I can always count on one half
of one hand the number of Asian American men

 

I see in a journal, or in a press’s roster of authors,
or as part of a reading series or writing faculty, this number

 

shrinks if I look for straight Asian American men,
even more if I look for such men who are poets,

 

even more if I look for such poets under the age of 45,
even more if I look for Koreans, there’s just me,

 

or not me, I remember Lorde saying in an interview
with Adrienne Rich how when she was diagnosed

 

with cancer she wanted to find solace in another
Black lesbian feminist with cancer and realized,

 

Hey, honey, you are it, for now, words which just jumped
out at me, I don’t have cancer and my problems

 

are nowhere near as painful as all the shit Lorde
had to deal with, but I heard her speaking directly

 

to me, Hey, honey, you are it, for now, you’ve got
to make it on your own, and I have been trying

 

and trying and trying and trying and trying
to make myself manifest to the American public,

 

long poems are not the best way to go about it
but I seem to keep writing these to be exhaustive

 

in my efforts, to make it impossible, I suppose,
to miss me, just as I exhaustively try to go over

 

everything with my students so they don’t miss
what I’m saying, to preempt the emptying of me,

 

and I’ll think I’m starting to get somewhere
then see a list that comes out about the best

 

Asian American poetry books of 2018 and I
am not on it, even though I had a book come out

 

and had a big launch party for it in Brooklyn
and run Brooklyn Poets, which you’d think

 

would make me more visible to the author
of the article, a young Asian American woman

 

who used to intern at Kundiman, which hosts
its annual retreat in the city, whose founders

 

and executive director know me, but nope,
and sure, yeah, maybe the author read the book

 

and didn’t like it, she has every right, but there
were only two men on that list, one gay and the other

 

I don’t know, the rest of the poets were women
and no one on the list was Korean, she admitted

 

at the beginning of the article to not having read any
Asian American poets just a couple years before,

 

so, I don’t know, come to your own conclusions
about what happened here, swipe, then I see another list

 

of “funny” Asian American poets and I am not
on that either, say what you want about my poetry,

 

maybe it’s not the “best,” maybe it’s not your cup
of choice Asian tea, but one thing it is is goddam funny,

 

I’ve been making audiences laugh at readings
for twenty years, and it’s not as if they expect to laugh

 

at a poetry reading, they don’t just give you laughs
out of courtesy or pity, the worst part about this

 

was that the author of the list, a rising young gay
Chinese American poet, knew me, in fact he’d just done

 

two readings I’d set up for him in Brooklyn
and at my school, when I invited him and said I admired

 

his work (which is true), he said he admired mine too,
which touched me, I believed him, I’ve seen him

 

critique fake fans on Twitter who say they admire
your work then reveal pretty quickly in conversation

 

they haven’t read it, I thought, Well maybe my work
is getting out there, when he visited my school

 

we talked about the lack of representation of Asian

American men in the literary world, something,
 

you know, I was doing my part to try to correct
by inviting him to do these two readings and teaching

 

his book in two classes, then he goes and leaves
me off this list, “leaves me off” is too strong, I don’t think

 

I even occurred to him, almost all the poets on the list
were women, save for one gay male and one nonbinary,

 

the list was actually a “playlist” for a new poetry app
that a former Brooklyn Poets student of mine developed

 

so you can read sample poems by poets according
to some organizing theme, I read all the poems

 

and found one funny, I found zero things funny
about the whole situation, my founding Brooklyn Poets

 

had inspired my student to do something entrepreneurial
and create the app, I’d helped this poet by setting up

 

two readings for him to reach more readers, one
of whom was this student, who invited him to make

 

the playlist after the Brooklyn reading, I’d basically
created the conditions to watch my own erasure,

 

swipe, then I see another playlist for the same app
featuring Korean American poets and I am not on that,

 

swipe, any day now I am going to see a list of Funny
Korean American Straight Male Poets from Cleveland

 

and I won’t be on that, it’ll just be blank, swipe,
these lists hurt more than Tinder because I am not

 

even matching with other Asians, they presumably
have nothing to do with my face or assumed dick size,

 

the pool of possible poets for each of them is so limited,
creating the ideal conditions to notice honey here,

 

who is it, for now, and honey is not, honey is not
asking to be included on a list of best poetry books

 

of 2018 or funny American poets or American poets
overall, honey is not asking for the National Book Award

 

or Pulitzer, honey is not asking for White recognition,
honey is asking to occur to somebody, even as just

 

not occurring, especially other Asian American poets
and most especially Asian American men, this is exhausting,

 

being nowhere a notion in the American imagination,
all this energy expended to preempt what turns out to be

 

a prepreemptying of me, a swipe before I’ve even begun,
“swipe” is too strong, that implies I was there at all,

 

when I’m just trying to begin, being, begin, instead
of redefining how you see me I’m just trying to get you

 

to see me unseen, writing a poem I never wanted
to write, and that you, knowing you, will never read.

-from No Rest, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick

Jason Koo is a second-generation Korean American poet, educator and editor. He is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: most recently, No Rest, a winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, and More Than Mere Light, America's Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. His work has been published in Best American Poetry, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Village Voice and Yale Review, among other places, and won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute. He is an associate teaching professor of English and the director of creative writing at Quinnipiac University and the founder of Brooklyn Poets.

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