Bad Daughter
Mia You
frayed; faked own death; kept showing
up in new clothes, new names; then leaving.
– Franny Choi, ‘Bad Daughter’
When you see her, you know her. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to recognise her, really, but the longer you’re around her, the higher she ascends, the clearer the scale and extent of her commitment. When she greets you she is friendly, she often appears to be the friendliest person in the room, but you hesitate to call her warm. She is always standing in a circle. She makes small talk that isn’t really small talk at all. She makes jokes that aren’t just jokes but performances of sociability. She doesn’t waste time. Still, she often volunteers her time. She joins the associations, the committees, and the councils. She offers to talk through her own ‘best practices’ during meetings. She does all the jobs no one else wants to do (although frankly no one else can be trusted to do them). She helps invigilate exams, create and organise ‘online environments’ for the team, put out and clean up the catering. She attends and reports back on leadership workshops, sensitivity training, and blended learning information sessions. She doesn’t tell you about them in advance, however. She’s a team player but doesn’t like to do things in groups. A circle is different from a group, because her circle usually includes at least one person of higher rank; he finds her charming. Usually, I said, but not always, as she understands that institutions are both vertical and horizontal. Obviously, she’s eager to support women. She is a woman. She’s enthusiastic about gender, diversity, inclusivity, migration, open societies, sustainability, creativity, critical theory, democracy, oceans. Her current research project, for which she won an external grant, addresses at least five of these, distributed across three ‘work packages.’ She is always eager and enthusiastic. But she is never confrontational. She winces as she tells you, as a colleague who cares, you came across as ‘slightly aggressive’ about your politics. It made people feel unsafe. Still, she certainly has ways of having her opinion be heard, especially when she begins her sentences: With an eye toward what the Exam Committee might say… or In light of our students’ increasing mental health concerns… or Given the university’s recent prioritisation of public engagement and societal impact… The second half of these sentences never have much to do with the first. That doesn’t matter. Her opinion, really, is that no one is as conscientious as she is.
Now you see how her commitment has warped and thickened into identification. She is the Good Daughter. She loves the institution, or she has convinced herself she has no choice but to love it. And she is convinced that if she’s good enough, the institution might love her back. It already encourages her and sometimes rewards her, doesn’t it? Eventually she’ll be so good, praised so much, raised so high, she’ll become the institution itself, won’t she? Then, she tells you, then she’ll make the changes to the institution that she’s privately agreed with you need to be made (whatever they were), don’t you see? From within. From the top. That’s really the only way, right?
~
A lot of my time and energy, as an employee of the neoliberal Dutch university, is spent wondering if I can be the Good Daughter. It’s not that I believe she’s actually good. But she is proffered repeatedly as the logical end of my current position. With every evaluation form I fill out, every training session I’m asked to attend, every learning objective I delineate, every second I spend wondering how I’m supposed to be labeling my output in PURE, I feel my edges blur and morph to try to fit into a mould that’s designed never to fit. At least, that’s designed never to fit someone like me, but perhaps those Good Daughters that were birthed and grew within the institution’s clear borders, or those willing to hack off their unruly excess, their extraneous and impractical criticality, their strangeness, in order to accommodate the shape and space they’ve been allocated. With every factor of the multi-factor authentication system I confirm, I ask myself: am I willing to become one of the latter?
Sometimes I can almost convince myself I am. If I could actually make myself be the Good Daughter, to identify and finally be identified as her, wouldn’t this particular path I’ve set out for myself – researcher, teacher, writer – be more immediately worthwhile? Wouldn’t all my various forms of labour and effort, the overwhelming multitasking currently demanded of anyone working in academia, at least be recognised and commended by the institution employing me?
That’s what I tell myself each time I begin my Sisyphean ascent again: keep your eyes in front of you, keep your mouth closed during meetings, keep your cards close to your chest, keep perspective, keep reminding yourself you have a permanent job, a monthly paycheck, time to write and talk about poetry (even if you don’t really, at least not in the way you’d like, but that’s your own fault for not managing your time better, and honestly, you wanted a job in poetry, what more can you ask for?), keep being grateful, keep hoping the mountain-institution will start to feel like your home… And then I get distracted by looking out at the view. I start reciting Lauren Berlant to myself: ‘How long have people thought about the present as having weight, as being a thing disconnected from other things, as an obstacle to living?’ I wonder what the ‘top’ of the mountain actually is – does it even exist? What am I even climbing toward?
I lose my grip on the boulder (be it poetry, scholarship, or my own sense of self-worth) again and tumble down trying to catch it.
Was it an accident, or was it intentional? Was there anything that could have been done differently? Does matter if, whatever the case, I find myself back to being a Bad Daughter?
~
A lot of my life, as both the child of Confucian Korean parents and Capitalist American ambition, has been spent training to become the Good Daughter, twice over. My parents claim to this day that even though I grew up in the U.S., and I have now lived in the Netherlands three times longer than I lived in South Korea, I am a Korean daughter first and foremost and should carry the duties of filial piety that come with that. Still, a Good Daughter to modern, migratory Korean parents is also a good student, a successful daughter – so they turned a blind eye whenever I had to perform as a Good Daughter to my adopted country, the U.S., in order to do well at school. But, of course, performing and identifying get blurry if the performance is repeated long enough. I led a bifurcated life of being a Good Daughter to one set of parents at home and to another set of parents (the American school, the English language, the U.S.) at large. I knew these parents could become jealous and possessive, so I also learned to become the situational Good Daughter, the circumstantial Good Daughter, the conditional Good Daughter that could betray one set of parents for another at one moment, and the other way around at another.
For many years, I was a Good Daughter, a good immigrant, and a good student, but I was also, always, a bad one. I was a Scheming Daughter. I was a Resentful Daughter. I was a Cowardly Daughter. I couldn’t commit to being good or bad, so I realise that I’ve spent an exorbitant amount of time and labor digging a path between both. The only end to such a path, however, is to become a spectacularly Bad Daughter.
I became pregnant with a man that my parents told me I shouldn’t be with, with the consequence that they refused to see or speak to me for years. This man was Dutch, so I moved with him to the Netherlands – forsaking my adopted parent, the U.S., as well – in the middle of my Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley. For years I thought I’d never complete my dissertation nor find a job in academia. I was a motherless mother living in a non-Anglophone place, while I was supposed to be building a career as a scholar of English-language poetry. I could now only speak and write in what the poet Kim Hyesoon has called 'the motherless mother tongue.' I had become a bad student, a bad American, an unequivocally Bad Daughter.
Was it an accident, or was it intentional? Was there anything that could have been done differently?
~
Yet here I am again, ascending the mountain with my boulder, a Bad Daughter who has found another path to become a good one, but this time as the daughter of the neoliberal Dutch university. My Koreanness adds to its diversity, my American degrees add to its prestige. My difference is the acceptable, even attractive kind, just as long as it can be assimilated and made to fit inside the mould. The Good Other. I know this is what’s wanted from me, and I want to be accommodating. But being accommodating isn’t the path of least resistance. It is an enormous amount of work.
A daughter is only really bad if she has tried and failed to be good. Otherwise, she’s just a girl who doesn’t give a fuck. I’d like to be her too, but I care too much. I just want to belong. I want parents who want to be Good Parents to me, who believe I’m worth having in their home, who have a reason to care about me. So I can’t stop trying and failing.
I’m a Bad Daughter to the Dutch university for the same reason I am a Bad Daughter to the U.S. and for the same reason I am a Bad Daughter to my Korean parents. As I grow older, the number of parents that demand filial piety proliferate. But rather than loosening earlier bonds, they reinforce each other. What Edouard Glissant writes about the nomad could apply to the prodigal daughter: ‘But is the nomad not overdetermined by the conditions of his existence? Rather than the enjoyment of freedom, is nomadism not a form of obedience to contingencies that are restrictive?’ A Good Daughter here will always be a Bad Daughter somewhere else, and she will never be able to stop caring, trying, and failing, so she will be a Bad Daughter everywhere.
~
When I saw her, I knew her. I was the Bad Daughter only because I had wanted so much to be a good one. Anyone with a tenured position has played the Good Daughter at some point; whatever we might say now, whatever the degree of commitment and identification, we wanted to be her. But then I saw it, and I knew it. We weren’t the ones who were failing. It was the university that was failing, had failed, us.
On May 7, on the day I was supposed to send in this essay, I stood arm-and-arm in a human chain with a dozen colleagues in solidarity with Palestinians and our students, who were asking the university to divest from Israeli institutions complicit in genocide and apartheid. We stood facing the President of Utrecht University, who yelled through a megaphone and was flanked by his own chain of policemen. One colleague had suggested we position ourselves between this dystopian tableau and the student protestors behind us, with the hope that the university management would de-escalate or at least deter the police from being violent. As the President instructed the protestors to dismantle their encampment set up in the library courtyard and leave immediately, we began to shout back, ‘We are staff! No cops on campus!’
Nonetheless, half an hour later, the riot police came in. Colleagues and students were beaten with batons, thrown onto the ground, dragged by their necks, and pepper sprayed. Then they were put into buses and driven outside the city of Utrecht for hours, until they were dropped off in the middle of a non-residential area in the middle of the night, left to find their own way home. Some students had to walk for two-and-a-half hours to get back home. This is a legally controversial enforcement tactic I later learned was called ‘administrative displacement’.
I will say upfront that for many years, I had been a Good Daughter and a Cowardly Daughter, so I was also a coward that night and made the last-minute decision to leave. Before I had come to the Gaza solidarity encampment, my daughter had made me promise her I wouldn’t get arrested or get hurt. I wasn’t scared of either, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how scared she would be if I didn’t come home that night. As I told colleagues and students I needed to go home, they hugged me and told me they understood. What’s truly impossible to understand: over a million Gazans need to go home too, but they can’t, because their homes are gone. One of the protestors on a megaphone periodically announced: ‘If you feel scared, if you don’t want to stay, don’t worry, you can still leave. No one will judge you.’ But later, as I read the messages stream in from the colleagues and students who stayed, I couldn’t help but feel I had chosen to let them down, let them be scared instead. I felt with certainty – whether as a Good or Bad Daughter – I had failed.
There is no way to not fail. My family, my colleagues, my students – I have a duty of care to all of them. The university has put me in a position of always-failing, of choosing between failing ‘less’ versus failing ‘more’, as it always did. But doesn’t it have a duty of care to me? The problem with being a Daughter, of any kind, is that she wants affect in excess of the contractual equivalence between labor and compensation, task and responsibility. As I said, she wants to belong. The reciprocation of attachment, commitment, and eventually identification is precisely the point; it’s what she desires, what motivates her, what keeps her dragging her boulder up the mountain. Yet this reciprocation so rarely feels realised in the family structure, why would it happen within an institution? The Good Daughter wants the institution to love her, and it seems to promise her it will, but it is an institution. It is incapable of love. It is more likely to call the riot police on her.
No one can sustain being a Good Daughter to a Bad Parent. It is a Bad Parent that believes physical harm is a proportionate punishment for peaceful protest. It is a Bad Parent that makes a daughter feel their relationship is situational, circumstantial, and conditional. It is a Bad Parent that coerces their daughters constantly to test and prove their goodness, in order to affirm their worth. It is a Bad Parent that employs exhaustion and precarity as a form of discipline, to ensure submission. It is a very bad sign if you’ve been hired as an educator and expert in your field, and yet you experience your role within the university as that of a child seeking approval from withholding parents.
This is strategic social reproduction. This infantilising disciplinary model of parent-and-child that the university places upon its faculty is what its faculty is expected, in turn, to place upon its students. Recently a friend likened working at the neoliberal Dutch university to the game Asteroids. At some point we’ve been hit so many times, she observed, it’s hard to tell if our spaceships are still spaceships, or if we’ve also turned into asteroids.
~
Earlier in the library courtyard, I stood near the back and surveyed how the students had transformed it into a liberated zone. In one corner was a well-being area, stocked with medical supplies and staffed by students with first aid training and those willing to offer an ear to any emotions or concerns anyone wanted to talk through. Along one wall was the food and drinks tent, where there were tables covered with prepared sandwiches. In the middle of the encampment was a large circle that alternated between reading poetry aloud, singing, and discussing possible future actions. More tents, mostly silver or blue (clearly bought together at the local sporting goods store), dotted the grounds, like clusters of satellites, at last broadcasting something different. Two women walked around offering everyone watermelon-shaped popsicles. Every fifteen minutes someone would appear in front of me and ask if I’d like some water.
Next to me were some of the colleagues I had got to know across the last half year, colleagues I would never have met or have spent much time with otherwise: from Governance, Geosciences, History, Philosophy, Gender Studies, and so forth. We made jokes about how organising teach-ins, demonstrations, and open letters have been the most actually ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘collaborative’ and ‘impact-oriented’ work we’ve been able to do since being employed by the university. Although we weren’t really joking, because what we said was true.
In ‘The University and the Undercommons’ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write: ‘After all, the subversive intellectual came under fake pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears.’*
They were all Good Daughters too. But then they became comrades forming a shield against the incoming shower of asteroids. When I saw them, I knew them. They are the university I want to belong to.
*Thanks to Layal Ftouni for drawing my attention to this quote. This essay is dedicated to her and Eva Hayward. It is also written in memory of Lyn Hejinian.
Mia You is author of the poetry collections I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Festival (forthcoming from Belladonna, 2024), and the chapbooks Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007) and Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, the Boston Review, nY, De Gids, Nioques and the PEN Poetry Series. Other writing has appeared in Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the European Review of Books, as well as ELH and Textual Practice. Currently she teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. She is also working on a three-year Dutch Research Council-funded project titled, ‘Poetry in the Age of Global English’.