Apia Quotes

En el Pacífico, había solo cinco estaciones inalámbricas alemanas: Yap, Apia, Nauru, Rabaul y Anguar; estas estaciones fueron destruidas antes de dos meses, a contar desde el principio de la contienda. Después de esto, solo quedaron las estaciones de T. S. H. de a bordo, con las que era muy peligroso lanzar una sola palabra en el espacio.

I didn’t realize that Saturday morning that I was going to embark on a similar voyage of my own. A life-changing journey that began when my mother asked me to drop everything and go to Apia on an errand. An errand that would take me into a strange new world where the rules of civilization as we know it were instinctively abandoned and forgotten until the full weight of its reality glared and glared and glared into my eyes, almost blinding me. I’m talking about the forbidden world of incest. The final frontier. However, my journey was not to benefit mankind or anyone else, only the exploration and ultimate fulfillment of my own seventeen-and-a-half-year-old curiosities and desires, and those of the one I came to call Night, who was my brother and my lover.

I had supposed that I was practicing passive resistance while being stereotyped, but it was so passive no one noticed I was resisting; it was so much my expected role that it ultimately rendered me invisible. When the Asian American woman is lulled into believing that people perceive her as being different from other Asian women (the submissive, subservient, ready-to-please, easy-to-get-along-with-Asian woman), she is kept comfortably content with the state of things. She becomes ineffectual in the milieu in which she moves. The seemingly middle class woman and the apolitical Asian woman constituted a double invisibility.

We must remember that one of the most insidious ways of keeping women and minorities powerless is to let them only talk about harmless and inconsequential subjects, or let them speak freely and not listen to them with serious intent... To finally recognize our own invisibility is to finally be on the path toward visibility. Invisibility is not a natural state for anyone.