Originally published in The Margins, 2017
What the parallels between the violent murders of The Walking Dead’s Glenn Rhee and Vincent Chin tell us about being Asian in America.
When I started watching The Walking Dead, I thought the show needed flashbacks. Based on Robert Kirkman’s comic of the same name, The Walking Dead follows a group of survivors banded together in post-apocalyptic Atlanta, where the dead walk around—“walkers” they’re called, never zombies. It is a world with no pre-existing zombie lore. No George A. Romero, no Zora Neale Hurston, and no flashbacks.
“You know, flashbacks like they do in Lost,” I told my husband, Quincy, as he set down our Sunday dinner.
He’s the one who got me into the show. A comic book and sci-fi fan, Quincy is a self-professed “black nerd.” We had begun to watch The Walking Dead together each Sunday evening over plates of his signature salmon and sweet potato fries, the menu unchanging, our own ritual of nerdom and nourishment.
“You know how in Lost they cut back to periods of their lives before the plane crash, those origin stories?”
“Different show, baby,” he said, cutting another piece of salmon.
I quietly fumed at his logic. There are rules that govern any science fiction or fantasy universe, amid any and all kinds of chaos and wildness. Unlike in Lost, in The Walking Dead there is no time for the past. Or, more simply put, there is no time-past. History, like water, medicine, food, and life itself, is a scavenged thing. Take what’s necessary, what’s useful to the present. The rest is a luxury.
Even the word “past” is a luxury; most often on the show it is referred to as “before.” Characters ask one another: “What did you do before all this?” or, “before it all changed?” One survivor, Sasha, is even more efficient. She recounts a portentous dream, simply saying: “We were at the beach, but it was before.” Sometimes the word holds on its own like that, no more time stamp needed.
Can I even like a show like this? I wondered then. What are we but the past we carry? What constitutes our stories? Our survival?
And then came Glenn.