Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

The other day, Anthony strolled into the kitchen holding two bright blue gift bags. “Sally dropped these off. They’re Meyer lemons from her backyard.” And sure enough, “Meyer Lemons. Enjoy!” was scrawled on one of the bags. Sally is our next door neighbor (using an alias to protect privacy :).

I’ll be honest–my neighbors probably don’t think I’m the friendliest person. I’m shy, extremely introverted, and have trouble making eye contact with strangers. I consider myself to be an exemplary conversationalist in a one-on-one setting with people I know, but with strangers, I can be socially awkward, at times, and thus assume that everyone will be uncomfortable talking to me.

Which is why, sometimes, I’d rather avoid encounters altogether.

Luckily, Anthony is literally the opposite of me and we are thus not relegated to pariah status in our quiet cul-de-sac. He loves talking to strangers. He is the guy who will strike up a conversation with the dude holding a 6-pack waiting behind him in line at the grocery store, the teenagers tittering away at something on their phones in the elevator, the elderly woman we pass while walking our dog at the park.

Anthony doesn’t just know every single one of our neighbors, by name, he has their phone numbers.

Like, he texts with them.

One of his favorite topics of conversation is, of course, his brilliant wife. ☺️ Anthony is one of my biggest hype-persons. He loves talking about what I do for a living and therefore, every one of our neighbors knows that the quiet, Asian lady who seems to go out of her way to avoid eye contact or conversation is a cookbook author who makes YouTube videos (though, to be fair, the day I filmed myself ​making kimchi in my front yard​ might have also been a dead give away…!).

Hence the gift from Sally.

I was quite touched. I’ve only spoken to Sally a couple times, but she’s been (according to Anthony) an avid fan of my cookbooks and my videos. It was very kind of her to think of the quiet and taciturn neighbor who likes to bake. Moreover, given the hostility and even outright violence we’ve been witnessing in so many neighborhoods across the country, this gesture from a neighbor who has probably seen my content (where I make no bones about my politics) was quite meaningful.

Several months ago, I saw on my NextDoor app that ICE was prowling the street just down the block from our house. There were photos of ICE agents and their vehicles parked in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, as they made arrests at the car wash Anthony takes our Hyundai to every few months. Knowing that the agency responsible for so much violence in our country was a stone’s throw away from our front door was unnerving. Just the other day, during my weekly long run, up the same road I’ve been running for four years, a patrol car drove past me and I wondered, for the first time in my life, Will I have to start running with my passport? How the heck am I going to fit that thing in my sports bra? What kind of person will I become if a masked man threatens me because I exercise my 5th Amendment right to remain silent? Or my 1st Amendment right to tell him he’s an asshole?

Because let’s be so for real right now: to ICE agents, I don’t look American “enough.”

If anyone’s going to get asked to “show her papers” in my neighborhood, I’m the odds on favorite.

Back when I still lived in Wheeling, Illinois–a small, up-and-coming Northwestern suburb of Chicago–I had a very memorable encounter with my next-door neighbor. At that time, I lived in a townhouse complex with my ex-husband. My parents also lived in that townhouse complex, several houses down from ours. I was walking my dog one night and making my way down the narrow sidewalk to our front door, when I saw the short, blond hair of my next-door neighbor emerge from her home. She was carrying a large box. As she marched down the sidewalk towards me, I stepped out of her way and nudged my dog, Billy, onto the green grass of the common area in our little section of the complex. And, as is my habit, I said “sorry” (my way of saying “excuse me”) as I bowed my head and waited for her to pass.

“Yeah, I’ll bet your sorry,” she muttered as she swept by us.

I thought maybe I’d heard wrong, but the venom in her voice was unmistakable.

Here’s the thing–I’m a fairly forgiving person. I let things slide, I give people the benefit of the doubt, and one might mistake my introversion as meekness. But overt rudeness? To my face??

Oh hells no.

“Excuse me, do you have a problem?” I yelled at her receding back, while gripping Billy’s leash.

She swiveled around, jostling the box she was still carrying. She then marched right back to me, spitting out the words, “Yeah, I’ve gotta problem with you. I’ll tell you what my problem is.”

“You people are ruining the neighborhood.”

And I knew, instantly, exactly what she meant by “you people.” Because it was a phrase I’d heard pretty much my entire life. When I was in 6th grade, my science teacher asked me, in front of my entire class, why “you people” (referring to Asian Americans) created tight-knit social circles during recess. When I was a first year associate at the Firm, a partner asked me why “you people” (referring to Asian American women) behaved a certain way around white men.

My then-husband and I were both Korean. There was a Korean family that lived across the common area from us. My parents lived close enough that I could see the pavement leading to their front door from where I stood with my dog.

I peered into her face, blotchy with rage, her short, blond locks flopping over her forehead, as she caught her breath.

I said the first thing that came to mind:

“What a racist thing to say.”

And, as if she was already prepared for the accusation, she retorted, “Oh, I knew you’d say that. I’m not racist. I’m a doctor.”

[I’m not joking. She really said that.]

At no point did Dr. Neighbor Lady ever deny that she was referring to her Korean neighbors when she said “you people.”

We had it out, right there, on the soft green lawn of the common area, until her husband (also a doctor) came out, apologized to me and Billy, and carted his wife off until their bodies tapered into the night air.

Come to think of it, maybe this is why I’m not always keen to start convos with my neighbors, the majority of whom don’t look like me. I know what you’re thinking–why does what I look like matter? The thing is, we can all say that we should be color blind, but if a large contingent of the world refuses to adopt that notion, then none of us can be color blind. My color matters–in all the wrong ways–to the government and to people like Dr. Lady, so, my color, unfortunately, matters. I cannot simply say, “well that’s their problem,” when that problem requires me to think about how to fit a bulky passport book inside my sports bra or whether I might get arrested because someone overhears me speaking Korean or how to protect my elderly parents (including my father who has a very thick Korean accent) from getting assaulted by ICE agents.

Unbridled state-sanctioned aggression is now testing the bounds of the word “neighborly.” No longer does it appear to be limited to lending a bag of flour or checking in when you’re sick or waving “hi” at the Neighborhood Watch meeting. People are literally putting their lives at risk for their neighborhoods. This is not normal. This should not be. And yet it forces me to appreciate the power of neighborhoods, the importance of being neighborly, the intention behind a couple bags of Meyer lemons.

And thus, I’ve been cooking with lemons non-stop (I’ll be adding 3 new lemon recipes to the blog in the weeks to come, including an absolutely DIVINE lemon loaf!!).

Mile 18 is when the proverbial shit hits the fan. It’s when the gloves come off and every part of your body starts rejecting your intention. Your chest aches from having to negotiate the conversion of deficient quantities of oxygen. Your shoulders, too, lodge their grievances, claiming they’ve had enough of the pumping and churning and advise against pressing forward. Your stomach, once a happily cooperative partner in this venture, has decided to sour (literally), and is now making its displeasure known with every belch that threatens to derail you. Your knees, once supple and lithe, have grown geriatric in the past two hours, and are demanding, quite pointedly, that you stop this madness, stop it now, before the ligaments and tendons that hold them together come apart. And your feet. Your blessedly loyal, stolid, steadfast feet. They, too, are counseling you to retreat, begging you with glass-like shards of reproach that you feel with every step.

But you have 8 more miles to go. The finish line is somewhere out there, even if you can’t see it. So every agonizing step becomes a choice. You can capitulate to your body’s demands, to instinct, or you can choose to forge ahead, despite the pain.

I’ve loved animals my entire freaking life. Shortly after college, on my way to work (my first “adult job” after graduation), I saw a service animal calmly guiding her human through a maelstrom of commuters at Ogilvie station. I loved her instantly, wanted to protect her, wanted to clear a path for her and her human, throw my arms around her soft fur and tell her I was sorry, so sorry that humans could be so loud and scary and mean and thoughtless. And at the same time, I was afraid of that love, because I knew it chained me, that it would whip me and lash at me every single time I detected even a hint of possible mistreatment against animals. So, in that moment, I chose to forget I saw this dog, forget that I loved her, forget that I could probably do a little more with what I had to help the plight of animals, and instead, peered down at my watch, even though I knew full well how many minutes I had left before my train left, and marched towards my platform.

Caring for things–animals, humans, causes, ideas, countries, cultures, peoples:

It hurts.

But we have a choice. We can capitulate to the body’s demands–grow numb to what we are seeing, write it off as just another instance of state-sanctioned murder, normalize the hideously abnormal in order to move about our day unhampered by the tax of empathy, and trade in our humanity for a pair of slippers, sweat pants, and an ice cream cone. After all, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions even, who are running this marathon. No one would notice if you DNF’d now.

Or, you could lean into the pain. Choose to learn something from it. Choose to be inspired by it. Choose to remain unbroken by it. Choose to peer at the runner on your left, the runner on your right, the runner in front of you, read their bibs, their names, the person they’re running for, the cause they are finishing for, gulp down their stories with each dig at your heels, each scorching stretch of your lungs, and choose to continue running this race, this human race, straight through to the finish line.

Despite the pain, despite the hurt.

Because of the pain. Because of the hurt.

Wishing you all the best,
-Joanne

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