Download a meditation app on your phone. Your anxiety has gotten so bad that you lurch up in the middle of the night shuffling grant deadlines on the Google calendar in your brain until the colored blocks fizzle. Don’t go to therapy, that’s for white people. But everyone meditates now and that comes from Asia, like you. So.
Sit on the edge of your bed and open the app. Of course, it’s a white lady guiding you, her voice rich from years of milk and sourdough and entitlement. She tells you close your eyes and breathe, to picture your thoughts floating up and above your head like a cloud, and to let that cloud dissolve into the wide, blue sky.
Open your eyes and discover, to your surprise, that the fire running up and down your spine has quieted. Pay three-ninety-nine to unlock more meditations.
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Your boss calls you into his office when you arrive for work. He’s smiley and jittery and you know it’s about to get weird.
Listen, he says. This grant you wrote is super woke, we all get how down with the struggle you are, but it’s too much. You’re going to confuse the white people reading it.
Writing grants isn’t your job, but you work at a non-profit where staying within your job description is as probable as Christmas bonuses. And yet this is—as your boss would remind you—a dream job.
This grant is due Monday, you say. And aren’t we an organization that serves the whole Asian American community? Or should we hide our class disparities and help East Asian tech bros break the bamboo ceiling?
We can have this argument when the revolution comes, he drawls. These foundations pay your salary.
So we should prioritize white peoples’ comfort.
His face stretches into a tight grin that shows the smallest sliver of teeth and you know the conversation is over.
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You tell this to your girlfriend later that night, lying beside her in bed.
What’s the point of even having Asian American organizations if we’re just centering whiteness all the time? you say.
I’m not arguing with you, she says, staring at the ceiling, one arm clutching the other.
You realize your voice was raised, that the blood is beating in your temples. Take a breath. Close your eyes and try to do the cloud thing.
Where are you, even. She speaks in a small, tired voice.
What? I’m right here. Reach out to touch her shoulder, but even as you do, it feels like your hand is lying.
You have no idea how awful I feel, do you? she asks. You don’t talk to me except about work. You don’t want to do fun things because that would be selling out. You don’t even want to fuck. You expect me to lie here and act like your therapist.
She shrugs away your hand and suggests the two of you take a break.
Your breathing becomes fast and shallow as you realize that you are failing. You’re not supposed to fail, you can’t fail. You look for a response, look for a way you could’ve avoided this, but nothing comes.
Instead, you nod, and she turns away from you.
Ride the subway back to your apartment. Open another meditation about conflict. The meditation tells you to picture your anger like a small, warm fire, but the fire in your head grows as you argue with your girlfriend. Open your eyes and realize you never asked about her week. You can’t remember the last time you said something nice to her.
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Google places near you to meditate.
Walk up the stairs of a former industrial space that offers zen meditation. Of course, a white woman opens the door. Her head is shaved and you wonder if you’ve entered a cult. She has you sit in a long rectangular room with big arched windows overlooking polluted, gentrifying Gowanus. A couple other newcomers are there, and you all glance at each other like shy kids.
She explains that they do a kind of meditation called zazen and shows you how to sit on a cushion with your pelvis titled forward and your knees grounded, to hold your torso upright, and to rest your hands in an egg shape on your lap.
All of it looks wrong and the posture is uncomfortable. But then, what do you know about meditation except movies where people sit cross-legged with their indexes and thumbs touching, chanting om? And even though you watched your grandmother squat on her heels all day for meals and chores and gossip, you never sit on the ground like this. You feel like a white person, but not even as good of a white person as the white person teaching you to meditate.
If you need more support, feel free to add another cushion, says the woman, handing you one.
You put it under your knee and it eases the discomfort and you are filled with resentment.
So there’s no, like, guidance? you ask. No picturing a forest, or sky, or anything?
She smiles. In our lineage, she says, we find it’s effective to just sit and watch what comes up. Now that you have the basics, you’re welcome to join our morning sit.
You don’t like the way she said, ‘our lineage.’ And you’re not sure you want to see what ‘comes up.’ But stay anyway.
Sit facing a whitewashed brick wall as more people file in and sit in the cushions on either side of you. A bell rings three times.
Try to zen out. Tense your muscles so you stop thinking. A fantasy pops into your head of your boss contracting a rare pneumonia and resigning. This feels irreverent and, though it brings some comfort, push the fantasy away. An image appears of your girlfriend’s face and the hurt in her eyes when she said you needed a break. Push that away. Your knees ache and you want to shift, but your neighbors are incredibly still. You can almost taste your bitterness at these smug white people who appropriated this practice your ancestors invented. Not your ancestors, actually—the Japanese colonized and slaughtered your ancestors—but in the context of America you stick together to survive the closer threat of white supremacy. So.
The bell rings. Your eyes water with relief. Look to your sides and do as your neighbors do, though you feel ridiculous: bring your hands into prayer and bow from the waist.
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At work on Monday, your boss calls you into the office. He’s smiling again, thin-lipped.
Hey, he says, I read your grant ‘rewrite.’ He slides a paper across the desk. Sign this, will you?
You haven’t slept well again and the words seem to swim across the paper. You catch little phrases like, during probationary period, the parties agree… and the EMPLOYER shall not be held liable…
What the hell? You’re putting me on probation because I didn’t kill myself over the weekend making every little change you wanted? Then you blush for not keeping it cool.
Oh, it’s no big deal. His voice has gone high and tense. It’s just, you know, we’ve talked about your behavior.
Is probation even a thing in non-profits?
Believe me, it is. I went to law school.
Your temples feel like they’re being power-drilled. Blink. Try to picture the cloud floating into the white sky. You hear the white lady’s voice instead and the ease that comes with never having dealt with bullshit like this, her parents probably the kind of people writing the checks that you’re grubbing for. Easy enough for her to dissolve her thoughts.
Fuck it, you say. I quit. Pass the paper back to him, which feels both magnificent and hollow.
Wow, huh, he says. He coughs and his eyes dart around. Then the fake grin appears and an iron grill drops across his face. I’m going to need your email password. And any social media log-ins.
You stare. You could throttle him, but he definitely knows more lawyers than you. What, you say, You think I’m going to tweet that you’re a toxic boss who sells out the community?
He stares at you with his lawyer’s deadpan.
Nothing? you ask, desperate for any indication that he sees you as a person, sees you at all.
The fake grin comes back. Long live the revolution, he says, raising a fist.
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Suddenly your Google calendar is empty. Sit on your secondhand couch and scroll through a bell hooks article on the patriarchy. You realize she’s talking about you, your fixation on work, your fear of intimacy and vulnerability. That sounds right but you don’t know how to fix those issues, so you close it. Check your bank account and calculate how many months you can pay rent without a job. Four, if you eat out less. This is a relief, until you picture four months feeling this shitty.
Your roommate, a holdover from college when you had white friends, finds you crouched over your laptop. Dude, he says. You haven’t looked this rough since, like, finals.
You tell him what happened at work and with your girlfriend—maybe ex-girlfriend.
He puts his hands up. Whoa, I’m not your therapist. But I will let you buy me a beer or three. He swivels his hands into finger guns and grins.
Look at the laptop screen. Look at him. Right, you say.
Walk over to the auto shop turned hipster bar. You hate that it’s your local place, signaling the displacement of Black and Brown folks that, by the sheer fact of living there, you’re exacerbating. You had mentally offset this fact—like a carbon footprint—with the social justice job that’s now gone. Accept the beer your roommate hands you, anyway.
To your sudden freedom, he says, as you tap your glasses.
Both of you are quiet as you down the first beer. You feel your brain settle, slow, and fuzz, muffling your internal chatter about all the things wrong with you and the world. The music thumps louder, the people around the bar laugh harder.
Ah, says the roommate, throwing back the last of his beer. You look better already.
You nod and offer to buy the next one, and another after that.
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Spend the next few days in a fog rewatching The Lord of the Rings—the extended versions. When you remember you have a body, open a can of Annie’s black bean soup. Glance through job listings on idealist.org, click each one that seems promising, then picture all the ways it probably serves whiteness and would mean working for petty bosses who do, too. Pick up an Audre Lorde book then put it down. Think about doing the meditation app, then don’t. Even though you’re not doing anything, you can’t sit and do nothing.
Send your girlfriend—ex?—the occasional text. I’m examining my internalized patriarchy, you write.
She writes back: Good for you but too soon.
Check the zen center’s website. There’s a Saturday retreat coming up led by a Black woman. Fill out a scholarship application that says, in your elite college diction, how they should be happy to have you as a person of color in that mostly white space.
Two days later, they write to say you’ve been accepted.
A whole day of staring at a wall? your roommate asks. When they hand you that blue tracksuit, run away.
Hah, you say.
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Everyone’s already seated and silently facing the walls when you arrive for the retreat. Someone smacks a wooden block with a mallet. Your face flushes as you wonder if you’re late. Prepare an argument about how the weekend subways are unreliable and only gentrifying white people without real jobs would locate a space on the G train.
Sit on a cushion. You wonder what your ancestors would think about you learning zen in America. They didn’t come here so you could learn the Japanese colonizer’s religion, so you could sit and do nothing. But then, why did they come to America—happiness and two cars? So you could get a college degree only to suffer through marginal non-profit work?
The bell rings to end the first period and you wipe your face with your hands. Only six more to go.
The dharma talk finally comes, and you move the cushions into a semi-circle around the teacher. She says she’s been teaching a long time, but all of a sudden she’s popular because everyone wants to get “woke.” This is funny, she says, because waking up is exactly what the Buddha suggested.
But here’s the thing, she says, we need to wake up through our identities. There’s this whole idea that zen is about getting enlightened, transcending. No, zen is about being right here, with both feet on the ground.
She slaps the ground, and you look at it afresh, realizing you never feel your feet on the ground. You’d always thought that was a metaphor.
At the end of the talk, a white man in the audience raises is hand—it’s always a white man first—and asks what he should be doing to support her.
The teacher smiles. I don’t envy being a white man in America right now. You want to support me? Look at your karma, what your ancestors gave up to become white, what you do to maintain it. Then ask if you’re willing to take responsibility for it. All of it. That’s the only way we’re going to get free.
He gasps. Then he sobs and wipes his big pink face into his dress shirt.
You stare in shock. If you can make white men blubber, maybe there’s something to this zen thing.
Stay around for tea and snacks at the end of the retreat. Talk to the South Asian woman you sat next to all day in silence. You saw her at the center last time and wonder what she makes of it.
Can I ask—how do you, uh, deal with the whiteness here?
She nods. You know, she says, the Buddha was a brown man. I guess it helps me to think that a thousand years ago, someone looked around and said, What’s with all the East Asians appropriating this practice? Like, the Japanese Buddha on the altar? That’s not what he looked like.
You stand there as your brain tumbles for the right response.
It’s like yoga, she continues. I was in this Bikram class the other day taught by a white woman, and at a certain point I was like, you know, I feel great. My hips are opening, I’m getting my sweat on—I’m not mad at this.
Huh, you say.
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Meet your girlfriend—ex?—in a café in the East Village where you used to have brunch together. She sits with her knee curled against her, like she’s defending herself. Realize you feel the same way, like you wish you had armor on.
At the same time, you are, oddly, more attracted to her than ever. Maybe it’s the bright winter light, or the long strands of hair falling across her face, or the way sadness softens her. Then you realize that it’s the distance that’s attractive: now you can work towards something, make it a project, only to take her for granted again. You understand how messed up this is and push it away, though you suspect it’s going to come up in zazen next time.
Eat your omelets in silence. Try to talk about little things—the subways, weather, movies—anything that won’t open one of the raw wounds on each of you.
I quit my job, you say. I feel better now.
Yeah, she says, I don’t think the job was the issue.
Wince and look at the floor. Tell her you’re trying meditation and it’s helping your anxiety, helping you to be more present. Tell the story of the teacher and the crying white man.
God, your whole thing with white people, she groans. You say you hate them, but really you just want what they have—control.
Your face glows red. You stammer: Well, anyway, I need to work on my intimacy issues, which are, like, because of colonialism. And the patriarchy. I think the meditation is helping, even though it’s Japanese.
You dummy, she says quietly, staring at the table. I was trying build intimacy with you.
You replay your relationship through this lens and it checks out and you’ve never felt so stupid. The muscles in your throat pound and stop you from saying the right thing, or anything, so you pay the bill and do what you’re best at: you leave.
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Sit on your couch and do another app meditation. Even as the woman tells you to focus on relaxing your shoulders, you feel restless. You’re home alone. You’ve been trying to rise later and later so there aren’t so many daylight hours because those feel sadder than nighttime. You should be trying to get a freelance gig, maybe even a grant-writing job. You should be figuring out your intimacy issues. Should, should.
You need something bigger, like a surgical intervention. Close the app and check the zen center website. They’re offering a five-day retreat. Before you can think too much click “register.”
Your roommate comes home. Beer o’clock, he says.
Shake your head.
What, some lady told you to picture clouds, and now you’re above killing some brain cells?
Imagine the loud bar and handing out nine dollars for a beer that will dull your thoughts for a few hours only for them to come back screaming. Yeah, I’m good.
He shrugs and leaves you on the couch, alone again.
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The schedule for the retreat is posted at the entrance when you arrive: zazen, zazen, zazen, dharma talk, zazen, zazen, lunch, zazen, zazen, zazen, dinner, zazen, zazen, zazen. Five days of this. Panic sends tingles along your neck. You wonder if anyone’s had a mental break from too much zazen.
Enter the hall for the first period. To the right of your assigned cushion sits a white man with a shaved head in gossamer black robes. He does a little stretch, leaning to the right, then the left, then the right, then coming upright. Perhaps he is a monk or something. Perhaps he is fucking ridiculous, this white man in his Japanese garment, this Karate Kid wannabe who gets to cosplay the Asian cultures he drooled over as a teen.
You have the unsettling feeling that this white man can read your thoughts. Sit and stare at the wall and try not to think so loudly.
The bell dings. Get up with relief only to realize that next comes walking meditation. Zazen again. Ding. Zazen. Three periods in and your thoughts are still loud, spinning like a carousel of flames with all the ways you’ve failed your job, your girlfriend, your ideals.
Then your body starts to protest. Your hips tighten and your knees ache. Your shoulder muscles are tangled into a Gordian knot. When break finally comes, you do every yoga pose you can recall while feeling bad for appropriating yoga. Grab extra support cushions from the supply cabinet and put one under each knee to ease the pain. That doesn’t help so you roll a yoga blanket to prop up your legs. Your cushion now looks like the bed of a sick dog yet you still worry your joints are being damaged.
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Go back for a second day well-slept and ready to take on more. The first period starts and halfway through a new pain shoots through your knees. You feel broken, you feel hopeless. Curse the monk-priest-whatever, who continues with his one cushion and that same, simple stretch: leaning right, then left, then right as if this doesn’t hurt, as if he could do this forever.
You feel him and everyone else in the room judging you and your dog bed in their silence, this oppressive silence. You wonder how they’re doing this, why no one gets up, like you want to, and screams that this is torture. No, they’re too busy being smug: they get the satisfaction of being good at a spiritual practice they weren’t raised with, the way white people who speak Chinese are treated like demigods.
At home that night, take a long bath with Epsom salts and stare at the little crack in the ceiling of your bathroom. Think how nice it would be not to go back, not to sit more zazen, not to face your screaming mind in silence—to return instead to your couch and books and scrolling. Then remember that the whole point is not to leave.
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Meet with the teacher for a one-on-one dialogue on the third day. Sit across from her on the floor of a small room with tatami mats. She’s an older white woman, and maybe it’s the low light, or your mind settling down, or some product of her decades of zen mastery, but her eyes seem to burn timeless.
You stare at each other for a while, then she clicks her tongue. So. What’s the issue?
Fear of intimacy? you guess.
And what’s stopping you from that?
Myself. Maybe my mind.
Well. What do you think we’re doing? Sitting together like this?
Pause. Start to chuckle.
Yes, she says, cocking her head as if she is realizing the same thing. It is funny, isn’t it?
Bow to her and go back to your cushion.
That night you all eat dinner together and in the silence every sound is amplified—the smacking of people’s mouths, the scraping of spoons against bowls—and you remember how your family would fall silent, too, when food hit the table. Then you went to white friends’ homes for dinner and forced yourself to learn their nonstop sarcastic chatter while the food, which was mediocre to begin with, got cold.
Now, for once, those people are adapting to you, and though you don’t know their names or whether they’re facing white supremacy, they feel familiar. They feel like family.
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On the fourth day, your hips still ache, your back is sore, your knees feel unsteady, but you are no longer fighting them. You’ve given up tensing your muscles, you don’t have the energy for it. You’re a sack of onions that’s settled into a mound.
Chant along with the entire group that you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. They’re the first words you’ve spoken all day, and the word strikes you: refuge. Glance around the zendo and consider how, of all the things you could be doing in all the places in the world, you are sitting zazen in Brooklyn.
Think about your family and the thin line between immigrants and refugees, how it was this country’s bombing of your mother’s that brought you here, into this room, with people who should be your enemies. Think about the generations of lynching and mob violence and everyday slurs that your father’s family survived in America, and how one of their main takeaways was: don’t trust white people. And yet here you are, taking refuge together, as if you were all part of the same community, moving towards the same place.
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The last day of the retreat begins at five in the morning. Your eyes are bleary and the sky is dark as you walk to the zen center. You’ve never seen the streets so empty and it’s like the city is telling you a secret.
The only light in the zendo comes from the red glow of an exit sign. Look at your pile of pillows and blankets, which, though it’s so much messier than your white-guy neighbor’s, makes you feel warmly, almost happy. The cushion started as a battleground and now it feels like home.
Admit your grudging respect for this white man, in his robes, who does his little stretch then sits as still as ever. He is not messing around. He’s clearly spent hours and hours and hours sitting zazen, reading sutras, eating in silence, asking guidance from teachers, then sitting more zazen.
You realize that you can’t name a single thing he did against you. Perhaps he wasn’t judging you after all. Perhaps that was all in your mind—it really is all in your mind. If that’s the case, maybe you can just sit with him, and the white people in this room, even though they’re not perfect and neither are you. And you see the simple, excruciating truth that no future on the horizon will wash away the fires of this world, that no amount of zazen will give you anything but this body and mind and history, that nowhere you run will make it easier to form the intimacy you supposedly want—that the only place and time you will ever have is here and now.
Something is shifting and you see that what felt like fire in your mind was more like ice, and those icicles are beginning to melt. They are breaking apart and you can’t stop them because the warmth is too great and the ice was only there to protect something that doesn’t need protecting anymore. You haven’t felt this for a long time, this swell enveloping you like a bath: love. You are in love with your cushion and aching knees, with this silly robed priest and these silent strangers, with the ambient glow from the exit sign and the lilac dawn breaking over Brooklyn.
And for just a moment, as this feeling floods over and inside of you, there is not a single word in your mind.
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The moment is over, gone. But it was there, and better than any idea you had of zazen, because you know it is real. It is reality.
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The retreat ends and the next few days pass as if someone put a soft-focus filter on the world. Check your email and realize that what felt urgent five days ago has come and gone and you are still here. Begin a spreadsheet and fill out job applications. Order a few books on intergenerational trauma. Continue to avoid white people but look at them with a little more curiosity.
You go to a community film screening and spot your old boss. He darts his eyes in embarrassment and scurries to the other side of the room. You almost want to laugh: he was a petty tyrant, but you’ve quit his petty kingdom.
Get coffee with your ex. She orders a cappuccino and you order a tea. Catch up, and for once, don’t struggle to make conversation, don’t say things to prove yourself. You can sit silently—you did it for five days.
Instead, say what you need to say: you’re sorry for not being there, because you didn’t even know how to be there. And that must have hurt.
Thank you, she says, and both of you cry a little.
There’s another pause, and in that pause you sense all the tender memories and feelings between you, hovering like some invisible and fragile web—feelings that couldn’t be put into words if you tried.
You hug and say goodbye. Nothing is resolved, and that feels right.
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Go home and sit on your couch. Notice that you are alone but not lonely.
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Return to the zen center. Keep sitting.