Short Writes: Queen's Dead

obligatory queen's dead post

On September 8, 2022, the Queen of England (and the Queen of the Commonwealth) died. It’s made worldwide news. It’s kind of everywhere. Nobody really cares enough to be sad about it, but it’s the kind of thing where you ought to just say, oh well, that’s so sad, RIP old lady.

But she wasn’t just an old lady; she was one of the last bastions of English colonialism, a behavioral strategy that swept the world and resulted in the deaths of millions. To mourn her as some kind of cute little old lady queen, harmless and petite with the stiffest of upper lips, differentiates people who have experienced colonial violence from those who have not. Those who live in a mediated reality vs. a brutal actuality.

It makes me a little jealous, honestly. It’s gotta be an easier way to live, with everything like a low-grade Lot Less version of Disney. Where you can pretend to play party to rules of decorum that, at their root, exclude you; where you can have a moment of confabulation in which you believe there’s still some innocence in the things that we take for granted.

Though I am an American, with many privileges, I’m also part of the broader Chinese diaspora. My grandmother was from southern China; she grew up in Hong Kong during and after World War 2. She carried in her that pain of colonialism, a direct subject to it. There’s a reason she loved going to the Peninsula whenever she got a chance—it’s classy, and for a long time, Chinese weren’t permitted there. Part of her loved Hong Kong going back to China; part of her loved seeing the British gone, only their trade goods remaining. She loved to posess them, too; she passed on to me Barbour and Burberry coats and a taste for good woolens. Sorry not sorry: I like good stuff that lasts.

When I was younger, we went to see an Alice in Wonderland movie. At the end, Alice boards a ship to go to China, and it’s portrayed as triumphant; that moment betrayed the fantasy to us, and as her upper lip curled, so did mine. Alice is a drug-pusher.

When I visited 圆明园 in the winter before I returned to the United States, all I could see was the violence etched into the architecture there. The spare remainders of the room that held the first telephone in China; the broken marbles; the gouges, cracks, and traces of violence from the original sack of the Summer Palace all remain, so close and easy to touch. The barbarity and death from that moment resonate there, deep in the Earth of a place built to dream of immortality.

So no thanks, I don’t think I’ll be shedding the tears over a figurehead representing a brutal colonial regime.