Your therapist knew this day would come. She knows you had to get over your once-blatant-then-unconscious belief that therapy is for privileged white people. To her credit she never told you get over yourself or die. She sometimes looks at you like a sweater sprouting a bunch of frayed threads that she wants to pull on. How do I help raise an Asian child in a country with a political right that will hate her unless she assimilates and they can use her, and a radical left that will hate her unless she assimilates and they can use her? Yes, I survived, and you’d think I feel good about that but I don’t. You know my parents don’t have internet? They don’t even have computers. Don’t feel sorry for them—they probably hate you and are talking shit about you in Viet, hoping you don’t understand. I’m talking to you, reader, and not my therapist. They don’t need Twitter or Facebook for that. When and if the wicked come for my family and my loved ones, I will not have the power to do anything. All this shouting will not have helped anyone. And yet my first reaction not being simply to punch people I dislike in the face is a type of progress? Zombie apocalypse scenarios make you ponder the practical application of who you are and what you believe. Okay, your therapist says, so you may not have the skill set that would allow you to do backflips and chop off three zombie heads at once—my challenge to you is to think about and value how you, the real you, could contribute, and think about if you already are contributing to the world and your loved ones. Well that’s no fun, you think, but your therapist is always right about you. So last night, instead of dreaming that you were a hero with violent alpha-male abilities but with a nerd sensibility, like some type of gook Captain America, you imagined—in the middle of jump scares and zombie beheadings and hot desperate people fucking each other—a building with a Linotype machine and abandoned reams of paper and gallons of ink. You could create small messages to let people know they weren’t alone, or crush notes for the crush-ons, or shit-talking missives to people you dislike. And it would mean something, because you might have used the very last ink and paper in the world to love, lift, or hate. If there were a zombie apocalypse and you sat in a place where all the potential stories and poems and love letters and arguments were just waiting for a brain and a heart and a hand, it wouldn’t matter if it was fate or luck or destiny. You wouldn’t sit there wondering what you’re good for.

Mouse