Four Heated Discussions I’ve Had with My White Husband Since November 8, 2016

(We're actually doing really great right now.)

A few months back I said yes to participating in an election night group reading here in Seattle. It was a gift to my future self, my current self — the gift of being in community, listening to, and supporting the writing of Native, Palestinian, Black, and Ecuadorean colleagues, which will always be essential and increasingly important in the years to come. I went to bed and woke up thinking about some words from journalist Jordynn Paz, who spoke of the comfort and pride she takes in hearing and speaking Apsaalooké, “a language older than this country could ever dream of being.”

I read this new piece last night, made in part with scenes and fragments lifted from my memoir-in-progress.

Four Heated Discussions I’ve Had with My White Husband Since November 8, 2016

I. November 10, 2016

Two days after the election of Donald Trump, I woke up in the middle of the night to one hard, crystalline thought: If it ever came to it, I would send Noli away with my husband Will so they could live as white people. That would be my job as her mother.

As melodramatic as this may sound, the thought didn't carry much emotion. It was just something that I understood and told myself, and then I went back to sleep.

That morning I told Will, “We should think about getting a gun.” He looked at me and said, “You’re insane.”

Was I, though?

For a long time I thought we were exceptional — that the power dynamics between white men and brown women in this country didn’t apply to us. That our love transcended them.

It does not.

We have been speaking different languages this whole time.

II. March 2022

I am sitting at the dining room table and my husband is walking by me, a bowl of microwaved leftovers in his hands. He is on his way upstairs to eat lunch in his office which, since the pandemic started, is a desk in our daughters’ bedroom.

“Are you going to ask me how I am?”

It’s a loaded question.

He puts the bowl on the table, knowing it’s going to go cold. Then, slowly: “How are you?”

“Well I’m definitely not okay!!!!!,” I say.

I’ve escalated this quickly, which means only one thing: I must double down, with vitriol.

“Did you know,” I ask, weaponizing the hours of internet research I can call work because I am a writer, “that anti-Asian hate crimes have gone up by over 300 percent in the last year? That an older Filipino man was slashed across the face with a boxcutter on the subway? That a Korean woman was stabbed to death inside her apartment in Chinatown?”

I know, because I have been keeping a mental list, one that has gotten too large and unwieldy for me to keep an accurate count of, one that has grown with my depression and substance use. My list fails to capture how long I have been feeling unsafe, how long I’ve been wondering if I am insane for feeling unsafe, I in my comfortable home, where we don’t speak of this type of violence so maybe it isn’t as near as it feels, though the feeling is coming from inside my body.

January 2021 – Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai man, is shoved to the ground in San Francisco and dies from head injuries two days later

February 2021 – Noel Quintana, a 61-year-old Filipino man is slashed across the face (through his mask!) on the New York subway

March 2021 – Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old Filipina woman, suffered injuries including a fractured pelvis after being stomped on outside of her apartment building while being told “you don’t belong here”

March 2021 – a shooter opens fire at two spas and one massage parlor in Atlanta and murders eight people, 6 of them Asian women: DaoyouFeng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Yong Yue

February 2022 – Christina Yuna Lee, followed home from the subway and killed in her apartment

I have been waiting for months for him to ask me how I am and in moments I am convinced that I hate him because I fear that if I don’t say something he will never ask me about any of this.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been paying attention to the news, for my mental health. You know that.”

“Yes, I know!,” I scream. “I’m your wife! But I still expect you to know about these things.” This feels dramatic, extreme. This feels true.

“How?”

“I don’t know, you figure it out.”

III. June 2023

Most of the fights we’ve had in the sixteen years we’ve been together always involve him asking, at some point, “You know I’m not against you, right?”

Which is how I expected this conversation to go. This conversation that started in our kitchen with him saying, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“I understand that you are very angry,” he begins. “And why. But I am not all of white male patriarchy.”

I think: “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I say: “You are not all of white male patriarchy, but you are part of it, you will never be exempt, whether or not you’re willing to see or admit it.” I fix my gaze and all my anger on him and hope, as has often worked in the past, that he will feel guilty enough, uncomfortable enough to drop it.

But he doesn’t.

“You chose to marry me, Angela. So you have to decide if you are only going to stay angry.”

In the last six months – since I got sober and went into recovery – I have begun to understand and admit how much pain I have been in for most of my life, how resentful I am, how ambivalent I am about being alive, how little I trust anyone. Now there is nothing numbing me from reality, no hitting the eject button out of difficult feelings via a quick shot and a beer.

I want very badly to live honestly. I am angry with my husband for not understanding how hard it is to live in this body in this country.

And I like being angry. I’m very good at it. Like the time I found an envelope with nearly $200 cash in an old purse – leftover from my days working as a server – and secretly spent it on cocaine because, after all, I’d earned it.

I was aware that I had changed, for better and maybe for worse, the fundamental terms of our marriage. That he would be asked to do more, do better. That he might not want to, or be able to. I had not yet asked the same of myself.

I realized the stakes. How we might not get out of this still married, with our family intact. Could our marriage survive? Did we want it to? Would I change, would he change so that it would no longer make sense to be together?

But I would keep going. I need to know who I am, fully. For him to know that too. What terrifying relief to know I would keep going.

IV. October 30, 2024 (aka Last Wednesday)

Six days before the election, I usher the kids out the door to walk to school. I am in my bathrobe so, since I haven’t gotten dressed yet, I decide to get back in bed.

Will is dawdling, not exactly rushing out the door to the office and, even though he is fully dressed, he crawls back in with me. We lie there on our backs, holding hands.

“Do you think…,” I start to ask, knowing fully that I am about to ruin the moment – as I often do, “that we should make a Go Bag?”

“For…if he wins?”

“Yes.”

A long pause. Long enough for me to think of that Homer Simpson meme, Homer calmly receding into a bush. If I push my body weight into our mattress, I think, maybe it will swallow me whole.

“Well, I’m open to that………Tell me: What do you need us to do to feel prepared?”

“Maybe not pack a full Go Bag, exactly,” I say. “But all our papers – the girls’ birth certificates, our marriage certificate, you know, have all of that in order instead of in that one drawer. Cash. A few hundred at least. Probably we need a three month supply of drinking water.” I am aware this list is scattered, perhaps unhinged, but I no longer care or apologize for it.

“Okay, we can definitely do that.”

We are still holding hands but we are not looking at each other. I watch an old cobweb hanging from the ceiling beam, dancing in the air.

“Maybe we don’t get an actual gun but maybe we learn to shoot guns, like a handgun, not a rifle.” I stop myself from telling him how my friend S and her husband N bought a gun after Trump was elected and both of them learned to shoot it. That it was N’s idea – N who is Mexican, is an immigration lawyer. I stop myself from saying that I have informally surveyed several friends – all people of color – and that I am not, in fact, the only person who had this idea, that I am not insane.

“Sure, I like that idea — I like that better than having a gun in the house,” he says. He turns to me. “You know we’re going to be fine here in Washington state?”

“You know,” I say, facing him now, lying on my right side, tears pooling in the tiny space between my left tear duct and the mostly non-existent bridge of my nose, tears saturating the pillow, “that’s something that brings you more comfort than it brings me.”

“You could go anywhere in the country and you’d be fine. I’m fine here, but could easily not be somewhere else. Fine is only ever conditional for some of us.”

“Right,” he says. “I hear you. I’m listening.”

sending you love from my kitchen