A Mirror of Memories | Phyllis Myung on Julia Lee’s memoir, ‘Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in a Black and White America’

“Most of the time, I found myself reading this book with a fist in air and furiously highlighting passages while crying bittersweet tears of healing.”

Julia Lee’s Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in a Black and White America is my story, too.

For the past several years, what has fueled me (or has been slowly burning me up, I can’t tell anymore) is the growing rage and fury that’s been inside me like a fireball. I often have visualized myself as Ryu from the 1980s video game, Street Fighter, who is ready to unleash his fireball attack. My problem is that I don’t know where, at what, or at whom I should unleash it. When I picked up Julia Lee’s memoir, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, I immediately recognized that rage she kicks off with. For me, it’s rage about the patriarchy, anti-Asian hate, racism (both internalized and external), genocide, past self-hatred, and microaggressions that happen multiple times every day, the “model minority” myth, Japanese incarceration in World War II, the inordinate number of incarcerated Black and Brown men and women in the U.S., the school to prison pipeline – the list g…