NEW MANNAHATTA

Parasite 

First recorded in 1530–40; from Latin parasītus, from Greek parásītos one who eats at another's table, originally an adjective: “feeding beside,” equivalent to para- + sît(os) “grain, food” + -os adjective suffix;

par·a·site

• an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.
• a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others:
  They are greedy politicians, parasites with their snouts in the public trough.
• (in ancient Greece) a person who received free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.
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Parasite
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Re-appropriated definitions:

par·a·site

• Has potential to incite productive disruptions and mutations.
• Parasites wield a great deal of power in transforming a larger system.

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“Who is us?”

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The category of Asian American sprawls: sixth generation toddlers and undocumented teens; crazy-rich coeds chilling on Rodeo Drive or in Singapore Air…; architects and oncologists, nannies and bus drivers, innumerable histories colliding, even in a single family. Yet here you are, the survival, making yourself through panethnic coupling and an emergent culture of image, story, song, food. A tiger clan, a model fucking minority, a blueprint for multicultural democracy. You too are the exception and the exceptional. When you are summoned, you too may teach the reset of the world exactly how to get along.

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In-betweeness can create the stuff of epics. It is the mental geography through which we make the crossings that define us. A place of refuge.

What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege -while the battle rages all around-to disengage.

You have never been one to sit on the fence. But you have constantly worry about what it means to engage. You have learned that between intention and liberation, a lot, maybe everything, can go wrong.

Indeed, its reliance upon the Fourteenth Amendment provided a perfect example of how the very idea of an immigrant or an Asian American is predicated upon the freedom struggle of African Americans.

The word “citizen” confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied. You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers.

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