"in turn" meant

"Never marry a Japanese or a black," my mother told me once.

I think I've always been aware of the divide between my own Chinese heritage and all non-Chinese; "it's all in the way you're brought up," as the blonde girl in Hisaye Yamamoto's memoir would say (151). The way you're brought up, with an unconscious understanding of race (though I only realized it consciously much later in life), with a distrust of Japanese and blacks—or, no, but knowing you're supposed to distrust them, because of what the Japanese "did to us during the war" (also only later would I understand the complexities of that statement, the duality of the Japanese-Chinese war and the Japanese-American war, the conflation of Chinese patriotism with American patriotism in the form of hating the Japanese) or because blacks are just "untrustworthy."

How easy—too easy—to concede that "I was brought up this way, so that's the way I feel" (151), to inherit racism. Nature or nurture?

As easy as writing a "calm, impartial story, using 'alleged' and 'claimed' and other cautious journalese" when reporting the case of a black man being threatened by his white neighbors (154)? As Grace Kyungwon Hong writes, in response to Yamamoto's "Fire in Fontana," "Journalistic objectivity thus supports the processes through which the state maintains its pretense of offering equality to all citizens while hypocritically denying property rights to all but the most privileged few" (305).

But Yamamoto recognizes her failure, her resort to "easy": "I should have been an evangelist at Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their predicament in Fontana. But I had been as handicapped as the boy in the wheelchair, as helpless" (155).

easy to give in to hatred; easy to accept racism like an infant accepts breastmilk, from the heart of its mother; easy like my initials, like i am supposed to accept easy, accept the easy answer, the easy explanation, the easy way out, accept my mother's hatred like i accept her love; when easy is who i am what else am i supposed to do

but fight against easy