BY SOPHIA TERAZAWA
This is a series of confessionals about the intersection of Asia America and feminism in desperately melancholic times. Asian American women are committing suicide. The number of us with depression is rising at an alarming rate. It is my hope to illuminate the will to live in a radical spirit of exile. Welcome to PHANTASMAGORIA.
Her name is Olive, and she is my ghost. I am not afraid of her. For the entirety of 7th grade, I sign my name, "Olive Terazawa," and quote Anne Rice novels like I am a vampire, too.
My friends are okay with this oddity until I start the process of actively dying.
Let’s fail Honors Biology on purpose.
Let’s mention the Japanese internment camps during History and just keep talking about it.
Let’s burn the American flag at our next pep rally.
Of course none of this actually happens. I take the quieter route and stop showing up to school instead.
By the end of 10th grade, I have to decide between doing my homework and pissing the bed because I am too numb to move.
Olive hovers over me, staring. Her hair is long and black like mine. She waits for me to cry.
You have to understand that my depression is not cultural.
My mother is a refugee from Vietnam, and I inherited her mentality of surviving a war: Keep going at all costs. Keep going, even if the person standing next to you falls dead. Keep going.
By 11th grade, I drop out of school and attack my mother during a psychotic break. I cannot trust her. She must be a demon alien from another planet. What has she done to my mother?! No! No! I want to speak with my mother right now!
I am institutionalized and spend the rest of my life as a Model Minority who wanders in and out of locked cells of psychiatric units.
You have to understand that my depression is not cultural.
My illness is an act of political resistance.
I cannot keep going. History does not allow me to forget the grief of being this far from home.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of I AM NOT A WAR, winner of the 2015 Essay Press Chapbook contest (forthcoming publication). As a Vietnamese-Japanese poet and performer working with ghosts, her work has been featured in places like The James Franco Review, Project As[I]Am, The Fem, and elsewhere. Currently, Terazawa is a columnist for THE DECOLONIZER, where she writes about love and intimacy as radical healing practice. You can visit her site at: www.sophiaterazawa.com