Never the Twains Shall Meet
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”
Fires are currently raging in Minneapolis over the deeply unjust murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer. In roughly hewing this post together in my brain, a line from Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West popped up in my thoughts. My mind only held the faint glimmers of discussions it once partook in long ago in a high school AP English class regarding this poem so I decided refresh my memory and look it up. Lo and behold, it’s quite apropos for what I’ve been meaning to write about.
The Kipling Society summarizes this poem as “Kipling's justly famous 'Ballad of East and West', in which an English officer and an Afghan horse-thief Kamal discover friendship by respecting one another's courage and chivalry”. You can read the complete breakdown of the poem here as well as the entire poem itself here.
Some medical schools don’t have their own hospitals per se (e.g. David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA hospitals) so third and fourth year students will rotate at hospitals that the school has an affiliation with. Mitchell’s medical school operated like this so for his third and fourth year, we lived in Metro Detroit even though his medical school was located in Iowa.
Moving to Michigan was a rough start. We only brought two rolling luggages and four Balikbayan boxes and whatever we could fit into them (thank heavens for Southwest’s free luggage policy - a godsend for broke medical students). The plan was to stay at a hotel chain with a kitchen while we scoped out places to live. I opted for the fully prepaid option on our hotel stay because of the slight discount. It seemed like an infallible plan but in hindsight, I have to smile at my naivety.
The hotel was located in a questionable neighborhood and appeared to be more of a permanent living solution rather than the temporary, glossy hotel on the website. The carpet was damp, the advertised full kitchen boasted one pair of utensils - spoon slightly sticky, and there was a literal hole in the wall where the AC unit was connected large enough that you could peer into the weed stricken parking lot. Dirty hotel rooms are one of my top phobias. They make my skin crawl and my anxiety just skyrockets.
I took it all in and sat gingerly on the edge of the hotel bed and cried. Mitchell just chuckled because he knew how I felt, unpacked our sole set of bedsheets, and redid the hotel bed with them in an attempt to improve things. We made a trip to Walmart to get plastic utensils, food, and we even purchased some cookware.
Our view from the living room window of our MI apartment
It goes without saying, our zeal for apartment hunting ramped up quickly. We chose a promising apartment complex near a nice enough outdoor mall. The complex boasted manned gates that cars had to get through before entering and was centered around a picturesque lake with several walking paths. As far as I was concerned, it was tantamount to moving into Buckingham Palace at this point.
Mitchell’s rotations began soon after and Ava and I settled into a routine at our new home. In the first few months, we only had one car, no television, and one laptop. Ava was only about 1.5 years old when we moved to MI. There wasn’t really room in our budget for enrolled extracurricular activities or paid mommy and me classes so we walked around a lot.
Mitchell and Ava walking around the lake in our MI apartment complex
On one of these walks, something peculiar happened that is now forever ingrained in my memories…
Ava and I were making our way slowly to the apartment complex lake and the pathway that circumvents it. At some point, a young Black man was walking along the same path we were but going the opposite direction. His presence didn’t really register in my mind until I noticed that he crossed the small apartment complex street before he passed us and then crossed back over to the same side we were on after he’d passed us. This seemingly mundane action caught my attention because I initially assumed that he was crossing the street to avoid a car that I failed to detect or perhaps a wayward, aggressive dog maybe? I quickly glanced around and noted that the only souls around were Ava, myself, and this Black man.
I’m not sure why, out of all the memories of MI that I could have, this is one of the more vivid ones. Perhaps its the oddness of it? Or at least what I perceive to be odd. Why did this man choose to cross an apartment complex street before he passed us only to cross back to the same side we were afterwards? I remember my thought process shifted quickly from alerted, puzzled, into offended. My gut told me that he crossed the street specifically to avoid being close to us. Did he not like Asians? Or was it something else? Did he think I thought he was scary? It’s a memory I pull out and inspect here and there, turning it over, trying to look at it from another angle to see if I can get an answer.
It was just so odd.
Ava and I standing by our garage at our MI apartment
With national anger amidst the unjust murders of Black men constantly bubbling up, I review this memory through a different lens. What life experiences did this gentleman go through to reflexively cross a street to avoid being near an Asian woman and her young child? To understand my background, the city where I grew up, who my childhood friends were.. one would know how absurd it’d be for a Black man to think he had to avoid being near me. I never equated Black men with being scary or threatening in any shape or form. In my life, Black men were the parents of my friends, friends themselves, cousins-in-law, teachers, professors, and so on. But we weren’t in L.A. county. We were in Metro Detroit in a seemingly nice apartment complex. And he was a Black man
“They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.”
Even though Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West was published in 1889, the aspects of racism are unfortunately timeless. When we think of racial prejudices and injustices, I find the natural inclination is to review huge events such as George Floyd’s murder; however, for myself, this memory of a Black man crossing a street to avoid being near me and my child underscores how deep-seated these prejudices and injustices are. I felt compelled to write about this event thinking maybe at last, it could be sorted neatly and filed away in my mind. Now that I’ve sat down and written it, it feels even more unfinished, unrefined, and straight up sloppy. So many more emotions to process.
My feelings oscillate between rage punctuated by tears and hungry hope. How do mothers even find the strength to carry on knowing what the world will be like to their Black sons? I will.. I must raise my children to see things differently. To know better, to be better, to listen.