At The Margins, Sarah Wang and Connie Leung Must Go On, Can't, Do

Sarah Wang began exchanging letters with Connie Leung, a poet who is incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, in May of last year. "We debate shifting portrayals of Asians in popular culture. We discuss the books we’re reading, our favorite writers, our jobs, our fields of study, relationships and love, and the prejudice of a carceral system that punishes girls and women differently than boys and men," writes Wang at AAWW's The Margins. "Perhaps most of all, our letters are cast through the die of lived experience: what it is like to be a woman subject to gendered violence in this world." Two of those letters are up; we'll excerpt:

[SW:] ...What [Andrea] Dworkin identifies as a loss of reality locates abuse as not only acts of violence but a totalizing existence. Where can a person live but in chaos, despair, in an impenetrable tomb of isolation when she cannot find reality? I still cry whenever I read this passage. Sometimes being a woman feels like slow genocide. 

You asked me if we are “the carriers of [our family’s] legacies of sorrow… forever searching the sea of tears that carried our parents… their dreams… our reflections.” I don’t know either, Connie. Our families came to the US in search of something that I fear I will never find. I think of Beckett: You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. I occupy all of these positions at once. I must, I can’t, but I will. And so will you.

Yours, 
Sarah

Dear Sarah

May you be safe and well. 

Your letter came today and your words were, as they say, “perfect timing.” I had a legal visit earlier in the day that rattled my nerves a bit. (I’ll discuss it later.) As I was finally unwinding, I was called for your mail and it was just nice to remember that I’m not “alone.”

Thank you for the many “congrats” on my graduation/degree. Honestly… I feel nothing although I really want to. I walked/graduated with two honor cards—representing two different honors societies I was inducted into—while my senior thesis won two awards. Perhaps being in prison so long has taken the context out from me...

Read on at The Margins.