2018 #MinneAsianStories: Hello, Neighbor

Prophecy is After Me

By Jay Colond, Falcon Heights

I’m sharing a photo of me in my Sears Toughskins (husky) jeans on my very first bike, a banana-seat, coaster-brake, ape-hanger, 70s-brown (like me) Huffy. Swa-ag.

By 1979, my family and I had been in the United States for five years and we were looking for the best secondary migration destination. Like a lot of other recently arrived families before us, my parents were looking for stable income, and having blended a family from two Asian cultures, they didn’t feel particularly at home in any mono-ethnic community. Having first landed in San Francisco, we briefly tried Arizona, Chicago, and Minneapolis before settling in the East-central Minnesota town of Cambridge, along the banks of the Rum River, where my parents found stable jobs working at the now long-closed State Hospital.

I am an only child and was one of a bare handful of colorful faces in our tiny town. As a very young immigrant, I wasn’t aware of rootlessness or alienation; and as an only child I took a solitary existence for granted. My parents were fitting into Minnesota their own way and made the warmest home they could, innocently keeping and discarding their habits, languages, and memories of bigger cities, warmer places, and “exotic” tastes and smells.

I remember clearly being so excited to fit with my bicycle-riding second grade peers. One of a thousand acts of artless assimilation, having and riding my own bike was a way to fit into one of the slots I saw laid out for me. I practiced for hours in the parking lot behind our building, riding in endless self-soothing circles.

An early eco-horror movie, the mildly expropriative flop, Prophecy, had just come out. My nerdy young mind must have gulped in one of the gory ads showing a monster attacking campers. While pedaling around and around, I rhythmically chanted a nonsense rhyme, “Prophecy is after me,” imagining the huge mutant bear looming out of the thin birch trees that ringed the parking lot.

That solitary, almost meditative, sense of conjured dread can still drive me into a fugue. Sometimes when I’m piecing together the jigsaw of brown memories, dominant Minnesotan expectations, and trying to connect the gaps between what people say and what they want, I’ll catch myself drifting off into space. I’m still soothed by holding that half-understood, unfinished dread, something at least can concoct or control, soothed, by spinning my wheels, while I try to understand why I don’t understand what Minnesota wants or sees although everyone seems to think I should understand. Even though I’m old enough to know better.

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