![]() “Why the fuck does the test ask these questions?” I thought, reading questions about justice and the Supreme Court. My laptop was in the middle, opened to Google Translate, zoomed in on the browser for oversized web fonts and legibility. There we took up space on a U-shaped arrangement of oak brown tables: a stack of the N-400 Application for Naturalization printout in one pile, a booklet of citizenship questions in another, her composition notebook cracked to reveal previous penciled notes in Thai. We agreed on the time a week later and found ourselves in a loud cafe, then a quiet library. On a separate occasion, when asked why the zip code can five number and also nine, she was told, “Why don’t you google it?” The trauma of being made dumb, made to look stupid, in an education setting, felt familiar to me. A large part of it was that when she asked the tutor, “What does that mean?”, they’d just repeat the same answers, but louder. Part of it was because she could only ask five questions in an hour that she doesn’t understand, then she’d have to go again the next week. I had to show up when the Thai Town Santa Fe kingpin subpoenaed.ĭriving in her car with beanie babies and teddy bears at the both sides of the windshield, she told me she actually has a tutor as part of a program. After all this laughter, after all these karaoke ballads, these perfectly crooned sad Thai love songs, I felt it was my duty to become her tutor. ![]() The auntie initiated by opening up an app on her iPhone and attaching a portable USB mic. I was a young guest they coddled, babied with alcohol, curries, and impromptu karaoke sessions. While others reassured the auntie that she will ace the test, I sensed a familiar dread that had nothing to do with her intelligence. He welcomed me to his community of Thai people, maybe over a dozen in all, which I dubbed “Thai Town Santa Fe” after Thai Town in Los Angeles. I knew nobody, but met a Thai artist, Nuttaphol Ma, who was an alumnus for the Art Institute’s immigration justice residency and is now a staff member. ![]() I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a Labor Fellow for a two-month art residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute with other artists and writers working on the theme of labor. One auntie-the most respectable, oldest, and shortest kingpin of them all-was determined to make me her tutor, booking me the next day, because fuck the hangovers. ![]() I felt responsible, as a first generation of a diaspora, seeing the process of assimilation and naturalization to become “Americanized” that many without the cultural or language barrier took for granted. It sobered up the conversation a little, the hint of voting and racial discrimination being part of the many dark fabrics of this country, until the tipsy answers mixed with Issan dialect were blurted out again when we started the next question. The test said only that they both “fought for civil rights.” In my broken Thai mixed with first-generation English, I explained that she was a white woman, and he was a Black man. To add my own flair, I lingered on Susan B. Two of the Aunties were about to take a citizenship test in the upcoming month, which was why one of them handed me her iPhone and had me read questions from a YouTube video of a US citizenship flashcard test. After the World Wars, and Cold War, the Korean War, and Vietnam were named, they were surprised to find the (Persian) Gulf War as the sixth, forgotten one. “Name one war the United States has fought in the 1900s,” I asked. In a friend’s living-room-turned-artist-studio, six Thai people of various generations loudly, drunkenly, and crassly covered the civics questions of the American citizenship test. “WAR!” the other yelled, tipsy from the wine, the tequila, or both.Īs the February New Mexico sun died down, the drinking game continued on. What is one power of the federal government?” At the communal dinner where we all sat on the floor next to the blue plaid tablecloth highlighting the green curries and the fermented fish sauce, I projected my voice: “Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government.
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