Mississippi Transplant: Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn
"Some people look at me and can’t quite see how I fit in a place like Mississippi, but I feel like I fit, and I’ve come to appreciate that that’s all that really matters."
What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Educator, speaker, and author Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn grew up all over the world—from Tokyo, to Malaysia, to Beijing, to northern Virginia. She never expected to spend more than a couple years in Mississippi, and yet she has now lived here longer than any other place she’s called home. Her book Exclusion and the Chinese American Story comes out March 26.
Where are you from?
This is a tough question for me. My dad was an American diplomat, so my childhood was spent moving between various countries in East and Southeast Asia and the DC area. I was born in Bangkok, spent most of elementary school in Tokyo, and most of middle school in Beijing. My mom is Malaysian Chinese, so in many ways home was my grandparent’s house outside of Kuala Lumpur. That’s where I would go every year when school was out, but the longest I ever spent there continuously was a few months. So when I’m asked “Where are you from?” I rarely answer the question directly, because there is no direct answer! Depending on the context, I might say “I went to high school in Northern Virginia” or I might say “I’m Malaysian Chinese.”
These days, I’m most likely to answer like this:
“Where are you from?”
“I live in Mississippi. I didn’t grow up here, but I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else, and it feels like home to me.”
But sometimes it takes leaving a place to really understand and appreciate it. I was in London—this amazing, vibrant city—but all I could think about was the rural South.
When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?
I came to Mississippi for the first time in 2009, though I didn’t move here until 2012. My first couple of years I lived and taught in Lake Village, Arkansas, just across the bridge from Greenville. I would go to Greenville multiple times a week to run errands or to go to this lovely yoga class I would take in the back of a warehouse, for which I will always be grateful. In 2011 I moved to London to go to graduate school. That might sound like a drastic shift, but given where and how I grew up it made a lot of sense. I figured I would spend my whole life moving from place to place, and I figured the Delta was just one of those places I’d lived in and left. But sometimes it takes leaving a place to really understand and appreciate it. I was in London—this amazing, vibrant city—but all I could think about was the rural South. My master’s was in social justice and education, and all I could think and write about was social justice and education in the Delta. I missed my colleagues, my students, their families, the landscape—all of it. Long before graduation, I knew I had to come back. When the program was over I left the UK and moved to Clarksdale. I took a job teaching at Quitman County Elementary School. I’ve lived in a few different towns now, but I’ve been in Mississippi ever since.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
Because I’m not “from” any one place, home to me is more about choice than about the happenstance of birth. Home is any place where you are able to be or become yourself. Mississippi is that for me. I always thought I’d live a peripatetic life. I never understood people who stayed in one place for more than a few years, but I think it’s because I envied them.
I had a student from Marks, MS, a third grader, who loved to teach me the names of all the different trees and birds. I couldn’t do that when I was eight, because I’d never lived anywhere long enough to learn those things. If you go back into that student’s family history, a descendent of enslaved Africans, the land holds a lot of pain. But when he talked about the land, all you could hear was his pride. His dad was a farmer, as was his dad before him, and that’s what he wanted to be. I would regularly catch him reading the John Deere catalog instead of whatever he was supposed to be reading. His mom was thinking about moving the family to a bigger city to give her kids more opportunities, but she told me that she worried about taking them away from their roots.
I realized that I was longing for something that my eight-year-old student already knew to appreciate—living in a place where you have roots. Now, I can’t imagine living anywhere besides Mississippi. I might not have been born here, but I have chosen to grow my roots here. Like the trees that my student would name for me, the deeper my roots grow, the stronger I feel and the taller I stand. The more shade I provide for others. The better I can weather the various storms that life brings. That’s what home is.
Because I’m not “from” any one place, home to me is more about choice than about the happenstance of birth. Home is any place where you are able to be or become yourself. Mississippi is that for me.
What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?
This question makes me think of Malaysia. I miss the sensory things most of all. It’s a multiethnic, multilingual, multi-religious country and I miss hearing the jumble of languages. I miss hearing the muezzin’s call to prayers. The clatter of mahjong tiles and loud Chinese dialects. The old men that drive trucks through the neighborhoods, honking their horns and calling over the loudspeaker in three languages that they are collecting old newspapers. I miss the press of people at the hawker center and the smells of satay barbecuing and noodles frying. I would say that I miss the heat and the lazy whir of the ceiling fan, but I get plenty of that in our Mississippi summers. I’m lucky, though. I don’t think we have to have only one home. I can say that Mississippi is home, and I can still say that Malaysia is home.
How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?
My first few years here, most of my community was through work. I think this is pretty normal for anyone who moves somewhere else. The first people who helped me understand and appreciate Mississippi were the teachers on my hall, my students, and their families. But to be honest, at that point I still wasn’t sure how long I would stay here. I overly categorized myself as an outsider. The more I saw myself as belonging and the more I claimed Mississippi as “home,” the more I was able to build real relationships and grow roots. My husband is a Mississippian (check out his Rooted interview!), and that’s been the most significant relationship for me. Knowing his family, the people he grew up with, and being a stepmom to his kids roots me here in a way that no coworker relationship ever could.
What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?
I travel a lot for work, and I go all over the country. I’m always surprised by the things some people say—people I’ve never met before—when they hear that I am from Mississippi. It tends to fall into two categories: Those who think Mississippi is a horrible, regressive place, and those who think Mississippi doesn’t include people like me. I’ll say I’m from Mississippi, and people will say “How can you stand living there?” or even “I’m sorry.” That last one really gets under my skin.
Or people will see my Asian face and hear my mid-Atlantic accent and say “You don’t look/sound/seem like someone from Mississippi.” What shocks me most is how comfortable people feel saying these things to my face when I don’t think they would feel comfortable talking that way about other places or identities. And, given the work I do, these tend to be highly educated “social justice focused” people. I once had a superintendent who’d brought me in to talk about cultural competence break into the worst Southern accent I’d ever heard while introducing me to his staff, all with a grin on his face. It’s even happened in other parts of the South, especially in cities like Atlanta or New Orleans. As a country, we may have (generally) agreed that we should avoid stereotyping and looking down on certain groups of people, but Southerners (and rural Southerners in particular) seem to still be acceptable butts of the joke.
As a country, we may have (generally) agreed that we should avoid stereotyping and looking down on certain groups of people, but Southerners (and rural Southerners in particular) seem to still be acceptable butts of the joke.
How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
I’ve always had a complicated sense of identity. Nothing sums that up more than my name. Sarah-SoonLing is my legal first name. I weirdly strongly relate to that hyphen. I have my Western name and my Chinese—specifically Teochew—name. I am Asian American and I am multiracial. Mississippi is home, and so is Malaysia. There’s a lot of “both and” going on there. Living in Mississippi has made me more comfortable with the nuance, because Mississippi is a place of nuance. Some people look at me and can’t quite see how I fit in a place like Mississippi, but I feel like I fit, and I’ve come to appreciate that that’s all that really matters. I used to think that having a complicated sense of identity was somehow a bad thing or a burden, but living in Mississippi has made me realize that it’s actually a beautiful thing. It’s given me the confidence to recognize that I—like my state—have many parts of who I am, but I am always all me.
What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?
I’ve been reflecting a lot on isolation. A few years back I did a study about teacher attrition and retention in the Delta. About 80% of the teachers in the study named geographic or social isolation as a central factor in their experience. That’s a very high percentage. But isolation is not the same as loneliness. 79% of the teachers who were choosing to stay in their schools described some form of isolation, but it didn’t take away from their love of their students, their appreciation for communities, and their overall sense of wellbeing. Driving a long distance for a movie was seen as an annoyance, for example, but not one that outweighed the joy of knowing the names of your mail carrier and gas station attendants and them knowing yours in return. Sure, I have felt isolated in Mississippi, but I’ve never felt more alone than when I lived in big cities, surrounded by many people. I thought it would be harder to be far away from most other people who look like me or have similar backgrounds to mine, but I’ve found belonging in Mississippi, a place I might not have expected to find it.
Sure, I have felt isolated in Mississippi, but I’ve never felt more alone than when I lived in big cities, surrounded by many people.
Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?
Although I’ve lived in many places, Mississippi is the first place I feel like I truly chose to move to. It’s hard to imagine moving away, which means a lot coming from someone who never thought she’d ever stay in one place for more than four or five years at a time. Perhaps I do feel a sense of duty to stay. There’s a lot of privilege in my being able to say “Yeah, I could leave if I wanted,” and knowing that I’d probably be just fine no matter where I went. That’s not the reality for most people. But what if more people had the opportunities, resources, and education that meant they could really live just about anywhere and they chose Mississippi? What would it mean about our state for that to be true? I want kids who grow up in Mississippi to have the opportunities that would allow them to go be whatever they want to be, wherever they want to go and for Mississippi to be a place that they might choose even within those limitless possibilities.
What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?
My knowledge of Mississippi came from school, the media, and the casual jokes that classmates would make about places that were seen as “less than.” It was all pretty negative. I’d heard about high infant mortality rates and underfunded public schools. I’d learned about the long histories of racism. For better or for worse, many of those negative things are true or are rooted in truths. But living here, I’ve had to learn to unlearn that the negative is the only truth.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned is this: Wherever you find stories of struggle and oppression, you will find stories of resistance and resilience. In school, we learned about the horrors of racial terror and the injustices of Jim Crow. But my teachers never once breathed the names of Fannie Lou Hamer or Medgar Evers. This isn’t to say that I believe in hiding or shying away from the negative. What I believe is that the negative shouldn’t be the only story, because telling it as the only story makes it seem as if Mississippi is predestined to be a place of tragedy, and that everyone here is just passively accepting it. If we want the world to see Mississippi as a place of strength and a place of hope—and if we want to feel that way ourselves—we have to do a better job telling that story, too.
More people should know about the Mississippi communities fighting to keep their hospitals open, or about the teachers who love their students and do their best each day, or about the community markets that are springing up all over the state, or about the young people who took up the mantle and finally got our flag changed. This Mississippi is just as real as the negative one that’s painted in so many people’s minds, as it was in mine. We have to do a better job of sharing the stories of resistance and resilience that are always found alongside the stories of struggle and oppression.
We have to do a better job of sharing the stories of resistance and resilience that are always found alongside the stories of struggle and oppression.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?
I think Andrew Bryant is wonderful. On paper our backgrounds are wildly different, and yet I relate so much to the emotionality of his music. It wrestles with many of the same things I do: What does it mean to belong? How do we hold space for nuance and grace in our understanding of our past, our present, and our future? But of course I’m biased—I’m married to him!
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
I would start by ensuring that everyone has their basic human needs cared for—housing, healthcare, clean water, nutritious food, and so on. It’s a deep injustice that this even needs to be said. It should already be a given but unfortunately, for too many Mississippians, it isn’t. I would invest the rest in education.
Our current education system is based on a premise that we go to school so that we can be productive participants in our economy, and I think that’s totally backwards. Think of it this way. As an elementary teacher, my students had to take high stakes tests involving reading passages and answering questions. If I spent most of my days having students practice reading passages and answering questions (which is what many teachers are encouraged to do), then they probably would do better on the reading test. But, and this is a crucial but, they would not have learned how to enjoy reading or how to read in most real-world situations.
But if I taught my students to love reading and to make meaning and draw connections from their reading, then that would open far more opportunities for them and they would still do better on that reading test. This is the same premise I want to see applied to our education system writ large: If we focus on preparing students to love learning, to be curious about the world, to care about their communities, and to believe in themselves, then they will be better off in a more holistic way and they will be better prepared for a wider range of job opportunities. But if we only focus on preparing students for job opportunities, then we are missing out on all the other factors that make for thriving individuals and communities.
What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)
My book Exclusion and the Chinese American Story is out on March 26th! It is about the challenges that Chinese Americans have faced in the United States, and at the same time it foregrounds stories of solidarity and resistance. Check it out in print, e-book, and audiobook. There will also be a book launch event at Square Books Jr. in Oxford, and I'd love to have you there.
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Really enjoyed this!