This weekend we went on a trip to Ha Long and to Yen Tu. While on the way back to Hanoi we started telling ghost stories. Sometimes I wonder whether or not I'm telling a story in the best way and often I wish I could start over to withhold certain details till later to build tension. My mom is such a great storyteller, I don't know how she learned that. Latinos have such a knack for storytelling, brownskinnded people have such a knack for storytelling. I 'on't know a white person who can tell a good story but I got a list of brown skinnded ones who could tell you stories for days. I was telling the story and as I'm listening to myself I'm like damn, this some crazy shit. I was sharing and my friends were sharing back and I'm listening to us communing and making connections across oceans and time and while I [[Longed to understand Vietnamese]] to understand them more, I was happy also to just laugh along when they laughed. Listening also filled me with further appreciation for our brownness and non-whiteness as living acting and contributing realities existing in antithesis to capitalism and in spite of capitalists, racists, imperialists, and oppressors. Yes, we're a group of Vietnamese, Latino, and Korean 20 to 30 years olds simply existing and laughing and that in itself is significant given all the chaotic factors of the universe--but you will find another layer of complication when you combine that universal chaos with the attempted murder and subjugation that the white empires of the world have attempted on each of our individual cultures and people. I was born with an attitude, I'm sure of that. The whites love to say that our blood is fire because of our passion in sex and life. They find us sexually exciting and find our outrages to be entertaining. We that Latin Lover, that Spicy Latina, we the countless shows and movies of us being the wild intense one and it's true, motherfucker. I am wild, intense, and I fuck well. I say that because sometimes the fantasies and perversions of the whites and their white consciousness are based in fact. It is not that the [[Whites and their Consciousness]] are able to understand the truths, it's simply that there are certain parts of their mind that are still human and still able to recognize truths. They then misexpound to fill their perversions and fantasies. Since whites are removed from the consciousness of the oppressed, removed from the place where art, theory, freedom, philosophy, and writing come from, they are also prevented (through their own socio-cultural past) from participating as legitimate creators of art, theory, freedom, philosophy, and writing. In college I'd write stories about my family, true stories, stories as true as water and hoes hydrate. As a Creative Non-Fiction focus, I was tasked to write real stories about my life. Most of the time Creative Non-Fiction revealed itself as a memoir, and all the whites and white-minded people in class would take Creative Non-Fiction to mean this - Memoir. I ain't know what the fuck Creative Non-Fiction was when I chose it as my focus. My poetry professor wanted me to choose poetry as my focus but my roots felt closer to storytelling around the dining room table. Tales and myths of family and family's family. I wanted to learn how to write the stories my parents, grandparents, tias, tios, and family friends told. I am great at poetry, I am great at learning. I am the sort of student you can easily teach, or have read directions once or twice, show by modeling, then have them work independently to completion. I knew that I'd succeed at any genre but after choosing Creative Non-Fiction and having my first writing workshop I realized I needed a base for my writing. Submitting personal journal entries to be workshopped by a room of whites emboldened by their white professor wouldn't work if I wanted to stand out or prove I was better than them ([[Self Assertion as Violence]]). You may think, in reading what I am saying, that I am the aggressor to say that I wanted to prove I was better than these whites. Yes, I knew I was better than each of the white students, I knew I was better than the professor. I knew this by knowing my grandpa and my mother were better storytellers than they were/are. You must understand that an English program in any one random university in the USA is made up of a majority of white students and professors who speak to each other in an echo chamber. If the students or the professors are not white, they usually are infected with a white consciousness. If they're not infected with a white consciousness, then they are often a token. If they're not token or infected with the white consciousness, then they're the exception to the rule. I say this with the intention to explain the disconnect between a Latin brownskinded minded young mf like me and the white institution that prefers and intends to employ and admit whites and white minded people. We were asked to read memoirs and short stories by whites and a few token non-whites to study. Upon reading, I knew this shit wasn't anything I wanted to say, feel, write, or emulate. I'm talking Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, David Foster Wallace, and Susan Sontag type shit. I couldn't relate to what they were writing and how they were writing. Their writing sounded fake and disingenuous. I didn't know at the time, but what I was reading in their words was a lack of humanity and humility--a symptom of white consciousness. Their writing emulated humanity but lacked authenticity. Their writing didn't reflect the realities that I knew, and though the professors proclaimed that we didn't need to relate to the stories in the material and only needed to pull out the grammar, devices, and literary techniques used, I knew they just didn't know any better or any more than they knew. My mom taught me to question everything. She never liked when I questioned her authority, but she showed me how to question authority and fairness anywhere we went. I read these writings, looked around the room, and understood I was being fucked out of learning what I could if I just continued to force myself to read *Infinite Jest* or *The Argonauts*. Luckily our library was full of some good shit. I started with the Autobiography of Malcolm X (the only words I knew that related to *Creative Non-Fiction* at the time were 'Autobiography' and 'Memoir'), then the Motorcycle Diaries, then The Revolt of the Cockroaches. Afterward I went into theory reading Sister Outsider, Viva la Raza: A History of Chicano Identity and Resistance, and Borderlands: La Frontera. By the end of freshman year I had radicalized myself and distanced myself from whites and white consciousness. I say this and I mention these works because these words and these works dip into the Black Radical Tradition and the Brown Radical Tradition. I was reading by myself without anyone to talk to other than the authors who one way spoke to me. I tried to talk to friends or family but they thought I was on some shit and it often seemed I annoyed or distracted them from things they'd rather be doing. My parents and sisters listened and related and pushed where they could, which further helped to shape my understandings. Within these traditions is magic, spiritual workings, brujeria, fantasmas, curses, and other things commonly called 'otherworldly.' My writing was questioned often and later called *Magical Realism* as a way to categorize and understand it in context. I never understood the need to call my work such a name, I never understood a need to call any work by that name. The realities I say include brujeria as a reality because brujeria is included in my reality. I can visit a brujo or a botanica any one day of the week. I can wake up on a Monday and be cleaned by an egg if I wanted, or I can burn things and write things and create realities if I want to create them. To whites and to the white consciousness, this is not real, it is impossible. Maybe they'll love witches and the idea of being one with nature or doing yoga, but they cannot fathom the stories I share as reality because they do not live a magical life. Their lives, defined by their [[White Oppressive Traditions]], do not include those traditions that are included in the Black Radical Tradition and in the Brown Radical Tradition and at the intersection of those two traditions. They are, through their past actions and through the mindset they carry (regardless of personal politics, likings, voting lines, or facebook friends), limited in their imagination and therefore in their reality. They are incapable of creating the reality we create (the art, theory, freedom, philosophy, and writing) as much as they are incapable of understanding, relating, and participating in any way other than [[Observers]]. The power of a car full of nine Vietnamese, Latino, and Korean 20-30 something year-olds communing and storytelling as they return from a multi-lingual trip to Ha Long and Yen Tu is great within its existence among the chaotic factors of the universe. The universal chaos combined with the attempted murder and subjugation that the white empires of the world have attempted on each of our individual cultures and people provides an even more fantastic and unbelievable layer to the story and to our stories shared. In the car we spoke things no white person will ever hear or observe. My lack of communicating those stories now is a preservation of those stories and that memory in a site, a car in Vietnam, outside of and out of reach of the white gaze ([[White Gays]]). Do you hear that? That lack of audience is power. How do we make a purposeful audience that lacks members on purpose?