“Sometimes, though no one ever asks, I say that it was moving to the East Coast that led me to understand that I was raced—to understand that the gaze upon my body bore the effects of a system far larger than me. I could no longer think of myself as a neutral subject; no one was, and in that realization there was a kind of relief. Emboldened by my reading, I began to consider my own Asian-Americanness, and within it to draw a distinction between East and Southeast Asian, finally acknowledging the effects of being a repeatedly colonized subject—the ways women who looked like me had been degraded and degraded. Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking, I related to the term ABJECT so much that I made endless puns about it: ABJECT PERMENANCE, ABJECT STORY, ABJECT OF YOUR AFFECTION. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified. Kristeva was the spotlight that illuminated my condition.”