The Cartography of Us

What if our lives are maps — marked by grief, resilience, and the stories we inherit? In this essay, I trace the cartography of self and other across childhood silences, memorial walls, and voices that refuse to be forgotten.

Prologue: Borders and Beginnings

I have come to see identity as cartography: waypoints marked by memory, borders drawn by history, and coordinates shaped by the tension between self and other. Maps are not neutral; they reflect power – what is centered, what is erased. So too with identity. From the beginning, I understood that the maps we inherit are incomplete – drawn as much by silence as by speech. I first felt the weight of “us and them” in childhood, though I didn’t yet have the words for it. The sense came in sideways — in what was celebrated, in what was left unspoken, in the silence around certain histories. I remember sitting in classrooms where some stories of the past were told with pride, while others were skipped over in hurried sentences, as though they carried too much discomfort to linger on. Even then, I sensed that history itself was divided: one part carefully preserved, another exiled into silence. I remember textbooks that gave paragraphs to wars but only footnotes to slavery, as if suffering could be minimized into margins. The omissions themselves became coordinates, mapping what this country wanted me to see and what it wanted me to forget. That silence became a kind of border, a line I would return to again and again as I grew older and sought to understand who I was, and who I was not allowed to be.

Waypoints of Identity

Each of the writers I’ve studied — Jeff Chang, Ross Gay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and James Baldwin — has traced a map of identity, showing where the boundaries of “self” and “other” are drawn, and how those lines cut into lived experience. Their voices, placed together, create coordinates on the map of what it means to inhabit a body, a culture, a history that the world sometimes welcomes, and other times rejects.

In We Gon’ Be Alright, Jeff Chang writes about his Asian American identity, discrimination, and activism. He calls upon his community to advocate not only for themselves but also for justice across all cultures. Ross Gay, an African American poet, has confronted the harsh realities of racism and social injustice, themes that permeate his life and poetry. In Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, he maps gratitude as a form of resistance, charting how friendship and joy can thrive even under shadow.

Viet Thanh Nguyen extends this cartography of self in his reflections on memory and identity. His hybrid identity is inseparable from the refugee experience, ethnic background, and social relationships. In On Powerful Memory, Nguyen wonders whether history feels closer to us when it is proximate in time, culture, or blood. I have often asked myself the same.

Coordinates of Memory

I recall visiting several memorials in Washington, D.C. Although all were solemn, only two left me overwhelmed: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Standing before the wall of names, my daughter and I wept. The wall became more than stone; it was a map of memory, every name a coordinate pointing toward loss and sacrifice. At the Tomb, the sense of proximity was sharper. My own family members have fought, died, or disappeared — missing in action, presumed dead.

Those losses returned to me at the wall. I remember pressing my hand to the polished black surface, the stone so smooth it caught my reflection between the etched names. For a moment, I stood among the dead, my own face mapped over theirs. My daughter leaned close, her fingers tracing the grooves of letters, and in that small gesture, I saw grief passed from one generation to the next.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, silence reigned differently. The guards moved with exact precision, every step measured, every turn deliberate, a ritual too precise to be broken. Around me, the crowd held its breath. That silence was not absence — it was presence, collective, reverent. It folded into my own history, into the stories of family who had not returned. It became another marker on the map of who I am. In that moment, I felt history pass through me – a map handed down from one generation to the next, drawn in names and absence, in the weight of what is remembered and what is lost. Their absence is part of my inheritance. These places charted grief not as history, but as present tense – lived again through the body, through silence.

Borders of Resistance

Reading Baldwin alongside these writers drew another map for me — one etched in grief and in outrage. In A Report from Occupied Territory, Baldwin describes the brutalities inflicted on Black Americans by police. In my notes, I wrote: I feel like this country has not learned from history and the consequences of racial hatred. As individuals, we expect respect. Yet too often, respect is reserved for the few.

As a youth, I was not exposed to violence of this kind and was shocked the first time I became aware that such injustice existed in a nation proclaiming freedom for all. That shock has not waned. Returning to college in 2018, I studied U.S. history and sat with the horrors of slavery — of Africans, Mexicans, and Native Americans. I learned not only how these injustices were inflicted but how often they were erased, hidden, or denied.

Baldwin’s question haunted me: “Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many?” For him, this was rooted in the legacy of slavery. For me, it echoed through the Holocaust. My ancestry includes Jews who carried the weight of hatred and extermination. The atrocities of slavery and the Holocaust are not comparable in scale but are equal in their moral indictment: neither can or should be hidden. Both are coordinates on the same tragic map of humanity.

Another Baldwin line struck deep: “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.” Watching Baldwin debate William F. Buckley at Cambridge, I admired Baldwin’s eloquence and was repulsed by Buckley’s condescension. His tone alone was enough to close my ears to his arguments. What struck me most about Baldwin was not only his intellect but his poise. His words rose like fire, yet they were tempered by a kind of grief that made them undeniable. His voice revealed truth, while Buckley’s condescension attempted to obscure it. I realized then that eloquence can redraw borders, while condescension only reinforces them. Baldwin’s voice stretched the map outward, carving space for dignity, while Buckley’s sought to hem it back in. Placed against each other, I understood that tone itself can carry history — Baldwin’s as an inheritance of survival, Buckley’s as an inheritance of privilege. Baldwin’s refusal to yield became a map of resistance, one I could follow across decades and borders. In his insistence on remembering, I heard Nguyen’s question of proximity answered: memory matters not just when it is close, but when it is demanded, kept alive, carried forward.

The Map Unfinished

I am old enough now to have seen progress, but I am also old enough to know how far we still have to go. Hatred and violence remain woven into the fabric of our nation. If we claim pride in being American, how do we reconcile that pride with the way we fight among ourselves? If we claim to value freedom, why do we allow history to be erased or rewritten to favor the privileged?

Perhaps this is the map of the self: not a straight path but a terrain marked by difference, resilience, and the refusal to forget. It is a map that runs through Chang’s activism, Gay’s joy, Nguyen’s memory, Baldwin’s fire — and through my own history, my ancestry, my grief, my hope.

It is a map I am still tracing, one that insists on remembering, on listening, and on celebrating what makes us different. Because only then can the self and the other stand on the same ground. Like every map, it expands as new crossings are traced, as silence is broken, as memory insists on being remembered. It grows every time I listen, every time I remember, every time I confront silence instead of turning away. Each waypoint — Chang’s call to justice, Gay’s celebration of joy, Nguyen’s reckoning with memory, Baldwin’s unflinching fire — becomes another coordinate. They are not separate from my own story but entwined with it, reminding me that the map of identity is never singular. It is not drawn to keep others out but to remind us where we have crossed, where we must cross again. Perhaps the work of a life is to redraw those crossings until the self and the other can be traced as part of the same terrain. Maps are never finished. They are revised, erased, redrawn – just as identities are. My own remains a work in progress, open to crossings yet to come. The cartography of us is unfinished, but perhaps that is its strength.