Quincy’s Asian Gate

The Lunar New Year Of It All

Gatekeeping seems to be the word lately. The dog whistle. The birthright. The fight for lord knows what. But a gate is also something you pass through on the way to somewhere else. And sometimes, (if I want to go all Hero’s Journey on you) it symbolically represents a threshold for personal changeyou need to make or be.

I think of those large red arches we see at entrances to Asian temples, Chinatowns, historic sites.

Boston’s Chinatown has one, and Quincy does not. But if we did have one, I’m not sure exactly where you’d put it. The Asian population isn’t confined to any specific neighborhoods. There aren’t any designated special areas. They are people, living their lives, spread throughout the city, though certainly clustered in some places (like my neighborhood) more than others.

I could and have wrote and said and shared pages on why this city belongs to all of us. And I could probably write pages on how an archway gate welcomes you into a new space, but a kept gate goes both ways, keeping people in, and keeping people out.

If your elected officials function more like a bouncer working an exclusive club, keeping that gate, it stands to reason that most outside people stay out unless called in. But people who have been allowed in will also typically stay in rather than converging in the public areas with the rest of us. It really dampens public involvement entirely to have a gate be kept. Unfortunately block parties and parades don’t often form right outside of an exclusive club, as being excluded in and of itself is sort of a vibe-killing experience.

It is easy to describe the pain of this sort of exclusion, of the humiliation inherent in being subject to a moving of the goalposts (or in this case the locked gateposts), and what it does to signal to everyone (not just Asian people) that the person or group on the receiving end will never really belong, or if they nominally want to do so, they must be “good” within the confines of the space allotted, keep themselves and any differences they have secondary and out of the way of the rest of the community.

Taking off the day as an excused absence seems like a solution if you want to keep that pattern going. And clearly some truly did.

When one school committee member said she felt her responsibility to advocate for the 65-70% of people who don’t celebrate Lunar New Year, believing that to be a way to maintain equality, I could hear the honesty in her voice. She meant what she said. She was keeping that gate for them, whether she was asked to or not. She believed that asking for a minority holiday, no matter the size of that minority, was unfair to the majority.

What happens when all students are off for Good Friday? They learn about Catholicism, whether they are Catholic or not. What happens when to they’re off for Juneteenth? They learn about black history and a celebration of freedom from slavery. As would they learn about the Asian community and history, if they all had Lunar New Year off.

There’s been this whole awkward conversation since Juneteenth became a holiday on how white people can celebrate it. None of us know. Maybe we buy something from black-owned businesses? Maybe we take it as a day to rest and reflect and catch up on chores around the house? But the learning experience is that not every holiday has to be about us. And if we feel awkward at people celebrating a personal sense of liberation from people with heritage like ours, it is a reminder that our experience is not a universal experience. A lesson more powerful than whatever you’d get in one day in school.

But there’s a reason certain spaces with a political and cultural machine built on filching from and lording over (certainly this mayoral administration’s inclination) will structurally punish something that’s a strength - like a holiday - in a population they want to keep apologetic, happy for scraps, accepting that if they put themselves out there, the goalposts will be moved on them.

Suppressing a holiday, not letting anyone else outside the group feel a right or interest to participate in it, is also one way to keep acolytes from becoming interlopers, pulled to the other side.

But that had already happened here. It was too late.

I noticed that a few of the people most outraged at the rejection of the Lunar New Year advocacy crowd were not Asian but white people who have become deeply attached to people and elements of the Asian community. People who teach and tutor within it. People who have joined cultural programs and community groups. People like myself who have married into it.

Why can’t they belong? Who says you get to decide? we ask, angrily, sadly, and sometimes resignedly. But mostly we state our intention to displace the gatekeepers and assist the people on both sides to open the gates and connect.

I hope I can be a gate-opener, if I am anything in life. But I do understand that I will not be able to open all the gates for my children. The people who someday quietly set aside their resumes because of an ethnic last name. The people who will ask them where they’re from and then where they’re really from. The people who will see their features and immediately speak to them differently.

But my whole momentum around Asian culture gatekeeping changed because of what we accomplished on Wednesday night, an experience I was proud to support and participate in, a public meeting equivalent of storming the gates.

It was a moment, as school committee member Tom Leung said after the vote, that will be written in this city’s history, a case study for people in the future to look to.

After five years of no, the community forced the school committee vote to flip to a unanimous yes.

However, it was clearly still a forced vote, as a couple comments and the general demeanor of two of the holdouts plainly showed.

I watched as those two people on the dias, their faces almost gray and bloodless, tried to explain and defend themselves. A third holdout played hookey, his empty chair making his statement for him.

But it was more what they didn’t say. There was no hello, no congratulations, no thank you for sharing. There never has been. They hated us being there and taking up their time, their bandwidth, their space, and this particular night, their overflow conference room. For sending in 15 letters and giving so many three-minute speeches that I lost count.

They kicked us all out into the hallway and met with a lawyer in executive conference, but no matter what was said behind those closed doors (and I suspect it was that their interpretation of Roberts Rules was silly and didn’t have a leg to stand on), they eventually read the writing on the wall, came out, and unanimously passed it.

We all clapped when one of these women who has been staunchly against it took her moment to vote yes, but also say that her interpretation of representing everyone includes the QPS students who are not Asian and therefore should not be made to take the day off for a holiday they don’t celebrate. As if, in her convoluted way of thinking - a true gatekeeper mentality - she was protecting Quincy’s white student population from the frivolity or uselessness of Lunar New Year.

But I did notice she first talked about it in religious terms, of how accommodating she is to different religions. And I suspect that on some level she does think she’s protecting kids from any idols and graven images and non-Christian religious elements lurking within Lunar New Year by keeping them in school. The ghosts of the ancestors, perhaps.

Which is a shame, but nothing new.

However, I think that perhaps Tom Leung was generous when (after he had to push to speak on the matter and not have the chair just quickly gavel the vote through, saying “oh, I thought you went already”) he said people who stood in the way will be footnotes in history. We remember the people who tear down the walls and open the gates separating us, not the ones who scramble to keep them up.

But even after the score was known - and let’s face it - the score had to have been known after three meetings in a row, the crowd speaking and returning with friends. They saw the overflow room likely would have been unable to hold the mob that would form if they waited another week. They could tell the (additional) negative newspaper headlines that would be theirs. Nonetheless there was a pathetic level of sore losership on display.

Those of us there all saw it after the vote when a certain school committee member wordlessly walked through the crowd celebrating in the hall with what I can only describe as Trunchbull energy, and other than when interrupting the public comment period with a frankly ridiculous defense of her prior behavior, when only an apology would have sufficed, she addressed the recurring crowd with the personality of a cold angry fish. Clearly she felt that all the Asian joy at the Asian cultural win she really really didn’t want to give them, after all the Asian sadness she had needlessly helped prolong by holding this up, had stolen something from her. And maybe it did. Who knows. Gatekeepers always think the gate, and what’s on either side, belongs to them.

But whatever it was, it was clearly never something that was rightfully hers in the first place.

We bypassed her. We invited the people inside the gate and outside the gate to join up for a holiday. To be one city. Have a party together.

The invite was accepted and passed along. I personally invited my city councilor and Bucket the Clown to the school committee meeting. And if that seems like a joke, it’s not. Both wanted to be there. Both deserved to be there.

My ward’s city councilor doesn’t like controversy. He doesn’t like fights. He also deeply values community. He knows Asian grandmothers from Ward 2 care deeply about this. He knows being inclusive to the minority experience does not somehow disadvantage the majority experience.

While I don’t have any illusions that I will achieve inclusive community with everyone or on every issue, or that my family and descendants will always have it, at least my mixed kids will grow up knowing their parents (and their city councilor) believed they deserve it.

It was within that context that had a conversation with Bucket the Clown, a local city council open mic participant who has been making everyone laugh during otherwise often-tense local meetings.

Bucket showed we really have needed some levity and haven’t been doing a great job of that.

But whether it’s old men talking about being Clint Eastwood or being related to Clint Eastwood (I really am sorry for spurring all the Clint Eastwood content, y’all), or cutesy one-liners that only our friends laugh at, we’ve been trying. So there’s always a role for clowns. Not in the pejorative usage lately of the term, but in the original, perhaps more Shakespearean societal function of the Fool.

As a few late night comedians have pointed out, the health of a democracy is judged by how readily someone can expect to mock those in power and come out unscathed.

But all that literary and political mumbo jumbo aside, I found Bucket the Clown to be a decent human. A young person living their values. A former military kid who has chosen this city to settle down in, find a decent job in, and a weekend prosocial hobby of tabling on the Common as a founder of a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, offering clothing and vegetarian food to anyone in need.

I realized what we had in common was exposure to Christian nationalism through homeschool curriculum materials (lots of military kids are homeschooled intermittently), and it gave us both an allergy to it. An understanding of the need to fight it, hound out the adherents who have found political power, the gatekeepers, and break down the whole gate.

I asked Bucket their pronouns (this is something I’ve learned is respectful to do when someone presents as gender-nonconforming) and was told she/her, in a nonbinary genderpunk sense.

Which means that she is also poking fun at the construct of gender in society. Clearly I had found someone working to break down other silly gates keeping people apart too.

I saw Bucket again at the school committee open mic, researched and ready to speak on inclusion of the Asian population. She pointed out that if nearly half a high school’s body take off for a day, it’s already a holiday. And she found, independently, that the local hate crime perpetrated against an Asian man and his family a couple years ago, is connected to this story of school committee disregard and disrespect, and that there are layers to such terrorism, stochastic and otherwise, that we need to evaluate this community’s leaders’ role in.

Aside from what I said (at minute 7:09, right after Richard Ash) I was proud to have contributed to the greater coalition and conversation, different facets of our little gathering.

When you invite people in you never know who will show up and make the experience richer for it.

All of us belong here. None of us deserve to be distilled down to a one sentence dismissive description. All of us are a panoply of our life experiences and decisions. Even current (or newly former) haters.

I bet there are more and more instances in the future where we all say yes in such a manner. Where Quincy Irish and Quincy Asian (who both are inclined to pronounce this city’s name with a “Z,” I might add) team up for fun and community and doing stuff together. Including, in a few cases (ahem, my own) that may result in getting married and making babies.

And when I think of the babies I feel hopeful.

I bet future Lunar New Year in this city is gonna be lit. As time goes on, I can almost guarantee it won’t just be a quiet family celebration that Asian people take the day off from school for, but a public celebration of the day respect was won and all of us - clowns and respectable leaders alike - can put on new clothes, get and give red envelopes, and watch the lion dances over dim sum, if we so feel inclined.

A public party in the streets, no gatekeepers in sight.