America is an Inhospitable Land: Awakenings from Mitski’s Spotify Page
(Published on December 11, 2023 on The Daily Californian Weekender)
By the time the world had realized the American Dream was long shattered, those of us in America had already had our hearts broken by this land a million times over. Decaying remains of a hope that were never meant to be alive in the first place was all we had. Growing up as a Vietnamese-American had built a cycle of grieving into me long before my body was made. I mourn for a land that had never existed: a land that allows me to hold all my identities, and all its contradictions and intersections. I’ve been predetermined as a visitor of my own identities long before I could make the choice myself.
Of course, laced in all of this exists a level of privilege that I will not separate from my experiences. The fact that I have the time to contemplate and articulate my existence in America is a privilege in itself. Still, there is something to be said about the collective struggle in a white, capitalist America that forces racialized people to exert their bodies, somehow and in some way, to keep the American Dream alive. We are forced into systems built to exclude us from social mobility, education, and possibility - yet this system hides behind the American Dream, placing the responsibility on our bodies and minds to achieve it all. The American Dream acts as a body that was never put to rest, giving the illusion of life when there never was any to give. Thus we keep exerting, grinding ourselves on the teeth of a gluttonous land that spits us out and demands to chew us in again and again.
Mitski’s album, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, has been self-described as her “most American album.” Prior to its release, Mitski teased “Bug Like An Angel,” “Star” and “Heaven” some singles from the album. In this trifecta of releases, Mitski transcends through a journey of acceptance, keeping themes of love within its orbit. She plays a wise man, stuck between teaching and learning a lesson, finding the most blessed life in the most unknowing on — a bug. She croons to a faraway star, the kind that one admires in the sky, feeling both the beauty it holds and its permanent distance. She cries of a warm note so painful, yet so affective, so palpable, it must be from heaven.
Individually, it isn’t glaringly apparent how these songs encapsulate “American.” Mitski has long (to her expressed dismay) been subject to the categorization of “sad girl music.” It isn’t surprising to hear interpretations of these songs as simple expressions of love and regret.
American playwright, Will Arbery, who wrote the About the Artist Spotify page for Mitski, finds love in Mitski’s songs existing beyond the sake of love. In this album, Arbery finds love operating in tandem with the American experience.
“Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. ‘This is my most American album,’ Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions.”
This equation between love and the American experience that Arbery describes in Mitski’s album bears a truth that I, as a second generation Vietnamese-American, hold. To be born here means my very birth is marred with histories of colonization and destruction, including the fall of Saigon — the event that changed the trajectory of my parents’ lives for better or for worse. With its violent hands, the war brought me to America. Yet to have been born here means that I constantly live with the reality that I was never brought here because I was wanted. I am displaced, with nowhere to alleviate this feeling. I felt akin to a casualty to the war, without having lived through it.
There’s a love that still presides in the face of America in spite of its violence, its veiled glory and its imminent demise. However, in the state of this love, I find uncertainty. Perhaps I attempt to believe in the existence of love in America as a means to grasp something, anything, to understand my existence in America. When I constantly negotiate my identities in this country, I never find a proper familiarity with myself in its entirety. There is never space to hold all of what I am. In the eyes of the Americans, I am Vietnamese, and in the eyes of the Vietnamese, I am American. Although I am not wanted in this land, I have nowhere else to go.
Mitski, due to her father’s work in the U.S. government growing up, is no stranger to moving from country to country, attempting to root herself again and again - only to be uprooted once more. When familiarity has never been guaranteed, where can you find love? What is love supposed to be? Love in this way, seems to exist in its most difficult form: a love that operates from loss and its contradictions. In spite of myself, I remain in America, my family remains in America, my community attempts to find its roots in America - even when it openly rejects us. I can’t help but wonder if the collective labor of staying, and the pain of such work for my community, makes me find this love.
It’s a love that hurts you again and again, but won’t leave because it has nowhere else to be. I love because we all are hurting, and must love one another, because with no way out, we together must only go through. The love that exists in America is akin to the remains of a body that had passed long before I was alive. It remains there, haunting, reminding me that this might just be all that I have left to keep me here.
“Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. The album is full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic… it feels like everything and everyone is crying out in pain, arching towards love.”
The love that Arbery is describing is not a love that is passionate, idealistic, or fantastical. Where The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We takes form to become what Mitski calls her “most American” album resides in its articulation of love as the last choice. Arguably this is when love has the most life. Love is something worn out, tired, and full of feeling - to the point where it’s hard to even discern that it’s love. In past albums of Mitski’s, love is explosive, contemplative, lost and unknowing. Yet, it still felt like something fantastic and wondrous, in spite of its disappointments, anger, and sadness.
Perhaps this is her “most American” album because love is there, with all of its disappointments. Love becomes a decision, where all of its shortcomings will still remain. As the Little Saigon neighborhood I grew up in finds its footing, all of us that reside there hurt. We hurt because Saigon is gone, and we live in Little Saigon in constant memory and pain. My community replants its roots clumsily, because this land never allowed us the grace to do so. We run for office, we build libraries, we make restaurants and bars, and we gossip and we have our own trivial qualms with each other. We do all of this because we are all we have, and we still stand on the land that rejects us so viciously, trying to build love with all of this rejection. This is a love that you endeavor towards, because it is the only path. But it’s the path we were all placed on, and we must walk together, even at its most difficult.
“To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.”
This America takes us in and pushes us out, all at the same time. This constant absorption and rejection refuses to allow for us to find our footing. It proves a challenge to find familiarity in such uncertainty. This America leaves myself and my communities with love as the last option. But this love is exhausted, chewed up, and worn. It is easier to refuse to find love in this America, so easy that it feels as though that is how this land wants me to operate - refusing to find connection in my community. The work it takes to love through this America, side by side with my family and my community, is not work that anyone asks for, but it’s the work that allows us to face this inhospitable land. With Mitski’s album, she might ask us to continue holding love, even if this land is uncertain, and even if we are uncertain.
In the Name of Preservation
(Published on Caravan - The Northern California Issue)
You never run into temples. Temples hide themselves in peculiar ways, secluded completely in the hilltops or blended into a blur of bushes and suburbia. The discovery of a temple isn’t a mere occurrence, but a consecutive onslaught of searches and redirections climaxing into its final, transfigured form.
Visiting Joss House in Weaverville was no accident. Before the Caravan NorCal trip, I was adamant in finding a temple to visit; searching up “temples in NorCal” eventually led to me marking Joss House as a road stop. I double checked the visiting hours — 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM on Saturdays — to schedule this location into our trip. Even as a Buddhist, I can’t precisely articulate why I wanted to explore the temples in Northern California.
This is the first trip I’ve embarked on without my Vietnamese-Buddhist family. There was no mother reminding me to pray before the car starts moving. There was no space for the tonal cacophonies of the Vietnamese language to fill. It was just me and the Caravan group, where we, no matter our histories, are bound together by a vaguely shared experience of Americana. Together, we live through a land that has built itself through “othering” and “foreigning,” defamiliarizing our selfhoods from the roots we call home. I can’t help but wonder if I was searching for something new, or was searching for something familiar.
When we arrive at the temple, I begin to feel unsure if Joss House is a place that even wants to be found. The visitor center, plotted with tall brown fences, is a gray house, with a large tree covering its presence. The plot of land containing the center and the temple is a small, obscured part of a line of various historical sites and cute shop-fronts, giving way for the classic American small town aesthetic that one would expect from rural Northern California.
Weaverville’s Joss House is a temple built in the 19th century during the Gold Rush by Chinese immigrants. In order to access the actual temple, one must go through the visitor center first. The center is a museum exhibit-like space that held artifacts from the Chinese community during the Gold Rush — from spoons, to jewelry boxes, to a lion dance costume that filled half of the room. Underneath each artifact were detailed stories and tidbits of the Chinese-American experience during its beginnings in Northern California.
With a glass pane in between me and these artifacts, this history of rebuilding, assimilation, and community seems to be protected from me. I feel a sense of offense, as if I hadn’t come to many historical museums in this fashion. In the name of preservation, I have become a voyeur to the story of the Asian diaspora. Just an onlooker, only being afforded to merely peek at a glass window. Part of me wants to break my hands through the glass and own this history, even though I am Vietnamese-American.
The only way to look around Joss House is to go through a tour, led by Greg, a white man who is close with the Chinese community in Weaverville. He retired in Weaverville after working for 20 years in Davis, finding a sense of peace within the rural quiet of Weaverville and within his connections to the Chinese community a passion to host the temple.
What is it like to be welcomed in a community with such a history of being othered? Has he ever felt othered in this aspect?
Growing up, I had never felt fully assimilated into my land, and the communities that this land had assigned me to. Perhaps I always felt too Vietnamese, or too American, or even too Asian-American (which is different from being Vietnamese-American). Negotiating my existence with the wide spectrum of these identities meant that assimilation is never an end goal, but instead, a perpetual series of compromises and acceptances I make for myself – going forwards and backwards, diagonal and sideways. Belonging, in this way, had always been a chore in my birthright. Somehow, Greg is doing a better job at this chore that he was never assigned to: to be entrusted with representing this temple and this history, and to be the one to share this all to me, who carries such adjacent history, yet constantly wanders.
Joss House is the oldest running Chinese temple in all of America. It was built in 1874 to replace an earlier structure that had been burned. According to Greg, this process was slow: the Chinese community at the time had to import items from China in order to build the temple similarly to how they’ve known at home. This didn’t just include all the statues and pillars and other artworks: this included the blue tile that surrounds the outside of the temple and the golden signage outside that translates to “Temple of the Forest Beneath the Clouds.”
The Chinese immigrants of Weaverville came to America in order to take part in the Gold Rush. But it is not just their bodies that they string along. They bring a knowledge of their histories, their routines, and all that is familiar to them. Such knowledge becomes relocated and recontextualized, built in the form of a temple, which now becomes a stark site in the face of rural, predominantly white Northern California.
The Joss House, as I quickly find out, is not a Buddhist temple, but a Taoist temple. Inside, I recognize the structures of worship that I have always seen in my childhood, but the deities are not the same. Despite these physically foreign figures staring back, a sense of familiarity comes over me. It’s not these figures of worship that give me comfort: it is the plates of fruit and candy offerings that do. It is the incense standing on a cup of rice, with some of its ashes laying at the bottom. It is the use of red on the walls to welcome in luck. It is how there’s always a table or counter that comes between me and the deities, giving a place for me to lay all that I am before I pray. I feel unsure about what I can grasp at this temple, as the realization that I had no one to pray for, yet the urge to pray nonetheless, dawned on me.
However, the Joss House does not have the sole function of being a temple; it is an exhibit, an artifact of the 19th century. The middle of the temple is an empty space, so visitors can take a full, distanced view of the temple in its entirety. Fairly short, wooden fences surround us, separating us from the altars of the temple. Although these fences have doors, the additional labor of opening the door and taking a step up to the altar serves as a jarring reminder that this temple bears a history that is to be protected. It is in this protection that the temple’s use becomes comprised of more careful, methodical steps. Part of me mourns the loss of an unapologetic movement, perhaps one that doesn’t have to carry the weight of the American experience. The other part of me feels that this is right: the careful opening of the fence door and the double-take to make sure I didn’t move a table by an inch. This must be done in the name of preservation. But mostly, this has always been done in the name of Americana. In the land of beckoned, yet unwelcomed, bodies, there is constantly the risk of being “Americanized,” a fear that being American means the loss of any other culture, any other selfhood. Thus, embracing one’s culture can become an act of preservation, protecting oneself from the all-consuming experience of being American. As a Vietnamese-American exploring their culture, have I always practiced my culture in the name of preservation? Is the loss of unapologetic movement conceived the moment I was born?
The sense of familiarity I have for the Joss House, despite the fact that the temple belongs to a Chinese Taoist community, forces me to question what “familiarity” even means. Sharing merely abridged histories, part of me feels wrong to have attempted to seek recognition in this temple, and even more wrong to have found recognition in this temple. Asian aesthetics, customs, and culture, have fallen prey to being a mere mirage of the East in the eyes of America. Asian-Americana becomes a pile of images, blurs, and markers, not beckoning for recognition nor specificity. Throughout my life, the specifics of my background have become a guessing game, because recognition was never something simply afforded to the Asian-American.
Thus, I guiltily play along with this rhetoric, seeking recognition for myself, even if I don’t hold the same history as whatever I find. Perhaps the assimilation that I can reach for in this land is not one that entails true ownership and belonging. This assimilation is constantly shifting, finding familiarity in different histories, picking and choosing, taking and giving, even if these histories aren’t mine. But although several histories are not mine, these several — my history, the Caravan’s histories, and Joss House’s history — meet each other in America, the land where all these histories are forced into a sort of collective shape-shifting, displacing our bodies and identities, where we must find solace and recognition in each other.
To call the creation of Joss House a singular event is a disservice to what it is. The creation of Joss House consists of searches for the familiar, a reach for something “known” amongst a land of unknowns. The people that built Joss House sought for their histories and recreated all that they’ve known. Similarly, my visit to Joss House is not a mere occurrence, nor a singular event, nor an accident. My visit to Joss House is a step in my assimilation, my recreation of what I’ve known, an attempt to reconcile the murky history I hold, and find recognition within it.