“Do you believe it now?” Sadie asked, looking quickly at her father and then back down at her plate.
“Believe…?”
“Believe Grandpa burned down those buildings.”
They ate, no one speaking. When she looked up again, she saw he wasn’t chewing but had his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands.
“You think he did?” he finally asked.
“Probably. I don’t know. The buildings burned down two weeks after he sold them. At least according to the deed. I don’t know what that means.”
She waited for him to say something, but he did not; he resumed eating. Before, she would have been angry with him, but humbled by her own bout of dishonesty, she felt she had no right.
Sunset Park was easier for her. Within the first week, she wrote three pieces—one about Eighth Avenue’s Lunar New Year festivities, another about the city’s first commercial-scale wind turbine, and the third on a developer’s proposal for Industry City.
She wondered whether anyone of her background could be a good reporter in a neighborhood like Brownsville. It wasn’t like the African American Studies classes she’d taken at Yale were enough to give her the perspective of a Black person. What was the morality of writing “objective news” about people of color when you’re not, really, a person of color, at least not by everyone’s definition?
Or maybe, she didn’t need to get so theoretical. Maybe she’d just done a terrible job.
In Sunset Park, Chinese people didn’t always recognize her as Chinese, but when she explained that she was half Chinese, they grew intrigued:Your mother or your father is Chinese? What about your mother? You don’t speak Chinese? You visit China before? The more she talked about herself, the more they’d talk about their own lives, and so it was easier, at the end of the day, to establish some level of connection.
She went to a Department of Education town hall at M.S. 136 where several Chinese parents expressed unease about the mayor’s intention to change the high school admissions process for the city’s specialized high schools. The mayor had sided with the educational equity advocates, who believed the specialized high schools’ reliance on a single test—known as the SHSAT—was unfair and placed Black and Latinx students at a disadvantage.
After the town hall, Sadie approached one of the more passionate young Chinese mothers in the hallway.
“What would you say to the concerns of Black parents that the test is biased?”
“I heard the concern, but I think this is the mistake. The test is not biased. A test cannot be biased. You have to learn how to take it.” The lady wore her bangs cut straight across and an apron with the logo for Angel Nails Salon. “The problem is the Black and Spanishstudents don’t know how to test. Maybe they don’t have good middle school, their parent don’t look for the after-school class.”
“But what do you think of the argument that we need more diversity in each of our schools?”
“Where you go to high school?”
“Stuyvesant,” Sadie readily admitted. “And it was like seventy percent Asian students when I was there.”
“Because Chinese student work hard. This is all Chinese parents want. Ask your parents. They want you to succeed in the world. Where did you go to college?”
“Yale.”
“Yale! You see. You go to a good college because you go to Stuyvesant.”
She saw the mother only wanted the best for her son, but such simple arguments erased centuries of history. Black Americans had been denied access to education for hundreds of years, until one day it was assumed to be “the way things were”—or worse, the fault of Black parents. That she couldn’t convey all this in a five-hundred-word article forNew Gothamfrustrated her.
Sadie covered a protest held by Chinese groups in Cadman Plaza to denounce the indictment of a Chinese rookie cop who’d killed a young Black man in East New York. The Chinese protestors told Sadie that they had common cause with the Black community; the NYPD was scapegoating the Chinese rookie for all the vicious, unpunished crimes of white police officers across the nation. The Chinese rookie wasn’t racist—he’d only shot his gun by accident—and while the young man’s death was a terrible tragedy, the rookie deserved forgiveness; it was only fair.
And yet, it was disingenuous to say they had common cause with the Black community, Sadie thought. Their goal was simple: that the Chinese rookie enjoy the same impunity as the white ones before him.
Not everyone in Sunset Park liked her article about the protest. Some readers called her “self-hating” in the comments. It had taken her a while, but now she understood: you don’t become a journalistbecause you want people to love you. You become a journalist despite your need for love.
Still, in the months that followed, she couldn’t stop thinking about Ms. Lina and Tyrell. Brian, the new Brownsville reporter, was doing a great job covering the neighborhood, but he’d set aside the story about the fire. Ms. Lina had refused to answer his calls, and Brian said it was difficult to pursue a story with so little material.
Sadie understood, but she couldn’t let it go.
LINA
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong had decided to turn Canton Kitchen into a Freedom School.
Every leader and lover of Brownsville who the newspapers had labeled a radical extremist or an anti-Semite, or who’d been fired or quit at the end of the Brownsville decentralization experiment, ended up teaching in the Freedom School. There was the Decolonize Your Mind evening history class and Music of the People on Saturdays, the arts enrichment after-school program and the Altogether Now Day Care. Her school gave out Little Red Books and copies ofThe People’s Voice, along with hot meals, fresh lemonade, toilet paper, and sanitary supplies. Presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm dropped by one night to offer her blessings. And so, community control was back in the house—unfunded, unrestricted, off-the-grid: a sweat-equity project.
