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It is Tuesday at 4:00 pm, and it is time for Ben, a white man in his early thirties. He often refers to himself as “strange” for feeling out of step in not holding popular, mainstream views like most of his friends. He feels like that is due to a lack in him, and this lack makes him feel on the outside of things. He does not feel lacking or strange to me but familiar. I find myself holding him in warmth and fondness.
It is our first session of the week. He recounts a conversation he had with friends. It is about the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans and how these hate crimes are not getting enough news coverage. Then he asks me, “Dr. Chong, are you okay? How are you doing with all this?” In that instance, I feel simultaneously seen and wanting to remain unseen. Both positions feel vulnerable to me.
I can feel my emotions well up. I am relieved we are on the phone and Ben cannot see my eyes tearing up. There is so much. How I want to answer is so vastly far from how I need to answer. That is when my mind goes to thoughts that have been banging around my head since my own analytic session on Friday and the weekend plenaries at the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) meeting.
It would be too much to share my painful anguish, now having to process a racial enactment that my analyst and I are coming out of and starting to understand together. How do I convey that it seems without my body and phenotype in plain sight, in only hearing my voice, my Asian-ness seems to disappear? I have become white. But more than that, I am being centered in whiteness, and being constructed against the norms of it—and my lack of it. It is an agonizing and grueling process to become visible because it entails decentering my analyst's whiteness. I start decentering by having the courage, and the nerve, to say in response, “So thinks and says the white man.”