Know My Name - by Chanel Miller
Published:
Know My Name - by Chanel Miller
Read: 2025-01-10
Recommend: 10/10
I admire both her courage and her writing.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
This is not the ultimate truth, but it is mine, told to the best of my ability. If you want it through my eyes and ears, to know what it felt like inside my chest, what it’s like to hide in the bathroom during trial, this is what I provide. I give what I can, you take what you need.
I am a victim, I have no qualms with this word, only with the idea that it is all that I am. However, I am not Brock Turner’s victim. I am not his anything. I don’t belong to him. I am also half Chinese. My Chinese name is Zhang Xiao Xia, which translates to Little Summer. I was named summer because: I was born in June. Xia is also China’s first dynasty. I am the first child. “Xia” sounds like “sha.” Chanel.
I always wondered why survivors understood other survivors so well. Why, even if the details of our attacks vary, survivors can lock eyes and get it without having to explain. Perhaps it is not the particulars of the assault itself that we have in common, but the moment after; the first time you are left alone. Something slipping out of you. Where did I go. What was taken. It is terror swallowed inside silence. An unclipping from the world where up was up and down was down. This moment is not pain, not hysteria, not crying. It is your insides turning to cold stones. It is utter confusion paired with knowing. Gone is the luxury of growing up slowly. So begins the brutal awakening.
Hours passed. I didn’t like the chilled metal, the stiff heads of cotton, the pills, syringes, my thighs laid open. But their voices soothed me, as if we were here to catch up on life, handing me a cup of neon-pink pills like it was a mimosa. They kept making eye contact, every act preceded by explanation, before insertion. How are you doing, are we doing all right. Here’s a little blue paintbrush, just gonna glaze over the labia. It’ll be a tad bit cold. Did you grow up around here? Any plans for Valentine’s Day? I knew the questions they’d asked me were for distraction. I knew the small talk was a game we were both playing, an act they were cuing me into. Beneath the conversation their hands were moving with urgency, the circular rim of the lens peering into the cave between my legs. Another microscopic camera snaked up inside of me, the internal walls of my vagina displayed on a screen.
After two decades of private practice, my dad said he has heard every scenario you could imagine. Having grown up during the Cultural Revolution in rural China, my mom has seen every atrocity you could see. They both understand that life is large and messy, that nothing is black and white, there is no such thing as a linear trajectory, and at the end of the day it is a miracle just to wake up in the morning.
At the time it was very simple; I put the memory of that morning inside a large jar. I took this jar and carried it down, down, down, flights and flights of stairs, placing it inside a cabinet, locking it away, and walking briskly back up the stairs to continue with the life I had built, the one that had nothing to do with him, or what he could ever do to me. The jar was gone.
Friends who vocalized their depression were immediately medicated, pills doled out, backpacks rattling like maracas. Some were hospitalized, put on suicide watch, gone for a few weeks, the rest of us courteous enough not to ask questions when they returned from “vacation.” You were either treated as an extreme case on the verge of death, or you were expected to carry on; nothing in between. So we settled for perpetual numbness.
My Grandpa Miller explained that during migration, birds flew in V formation. The bird at the front, the tip of the V, had the hardest job facing the greatest amount of wind resistance. The air coming off the leader’s flapping wings lifted the birds flying behind it. Being the leader was grueling, so the birds took turns. When a bird exhausted itself, it trailed to the back, where it wouldn’t have to flap as hard, riding waves of wind that have been broken down by others. It saved its energy so that it could lead again. This was the only way to make the journey, to escape winter and make it to warmer places. I had spent two weeks pumping my wings, keeping a calm face, to protect my flock from brutal conditions. But resilience required rest. For the next eight months I was going to fall back. The most important thing to remember was that to be at the rear, to be slower, did not mean you were not a leader.
his only way out is through you. It was like watching wolves being clipped off their leashes while someone whispered in your ear that meat has been sewn into your pockets. The only chance he had of being acquitted was to prove that to his knowledge, the sexual act had been consensual. He’d force moans in my mouth, assign lecherous behavior, to shift the blame onto me.
They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability. Drinking is not inherently immoral: a night of heavy drinking calls for Advil and water. But being drunk and raped seemed to call for condemnation. People were confounded that I had failed to protect myself.
These words temporarily lifted me, but their warmth faded quickly. I found people unmoved, mildly disgusted by the whole thing, hoping their kids would never suffer similar fates.
I knew he led the Oakwood team to state championship two years in a row. I knew he was a heavily recruited athlete, a dominant swimmer, who finished second in the 200-yard backstroke. I knew there were multiple jokes made about breaststroke. I knew they called me finger lickin’ good. I knew I did not deserve help, because this was not real trauma. He was a kid, not a criminal. Accomplished, not dangerous. He was the one who lost everything. I was just the nobody it happened to.
I knew I shouldn’t have been reading the comments, but I wanted to understand. Some supported me, but others had gifted themselves with the task of constructing every possible explanation and excuse to put me in the wrong. Was I crazy? Was I exaggerating? Was this even sad?
In rape cases it’s strange to me when people say, Well why didn’t you fight him? If you woke up to a robber in your home, saw him taking your stuff, people wouldn’t ask, Well why didn’t you fight him? Why didn’t you tell him no? He’s already violating an unspoken rule, why would he suddenly decide to adhere to reason? What would give you reason to think he’d stop if you told him to? And in this case, with my being unconscious, why were there still so many questions?
At three in the morning, we stared at the news on TV, heard mass murder. The word seven was displayed in tall, white letters at the bottom of the screen. It seemed wrong to group the dead. It was not seven; it was one and one and one and one and one and one and one. Each an entire life, each with a name.
I railed off all the worst things I’d heard about myself, judgments made and memorized from reading comments. They think I’m, they tell me, I shouldn’t have, on and on. She said, Can I ask if you’ve ever heard any of this in person? I thought awhile, pinching my mouth together, then shook my head. No, not once. It had never occurred to me that I’d given the opinions of online strangers equal weight to actual people. This was a powerful revelation. I had never heard those horrible things spoken; when the news was relayed to a person, silence enfolded them, a palpable sadness, a teardrop, a hug. I began to distinguish real experiences from online ones. I repeated mantras in my head, when I washed dishes, before I slept. I did nothing wrong. I am strong. I have a voice. I told the truth.
No. This single syllable on my tongue felt like nourishment, tasted like something new. I wanted the two little letters to slip inside his ears like seeds, to settle inside his gut, to expand, pushing on his lungs, his heart, suffocating him from the inside out, until he was overcome, bursting out of his buttoned shirt.
Trauma was refusing to adhere to any schedule, didn’t seem to align itself with time. Some days it was distant as a star and other days it could wholly engulf me.
It seemed impossible that in this year I had only spent a single day testifying in court, while around that day my life had disintegrated. It had taken me nine months to process, a few weeks to prepare, a day to testify, all this time to restore, and we had yet to get into the meat of it.
A word came to my mind, another. I remember, after learning of the third suicide at school, people shook their heads in resignation, I can’t believe there’s been another. The shock had dimmed. No longer a bang, but an ache. If kids getting killed by trains became normalized, anything could. This was no longer a fight against my rapist, it was a fight to be humanized. I had to hold on to my story, figure out how to make myself heard. If I didn’t break out, I’d become a statistic. Another red figure in a grid.
It was happening to her and it was happening to me, the two of us fed distorted realities, our words twisted until we became uncertain, discredited, writing ourselves off as flawed and broken. We willingly rammed our heads against the walls, confused, apologizing, unsure of what right we had to speak. I had unlocked the secret of the game; this was not a quest for justice but a test of endurance.
Brock had a sister my age. The French teacher had three daughters, the swim coach had a daughter and two sons, all close to my age. But it was no help to me that they had girlfriends and sisters and daughters. Somehow I was different, cast outside their range of empathy. In that courtroom, my identity had been reduced to something in the category of “other.”
As my eyes follow them one by one, I feel anger draining out of me, making space for something else.
I had told my story many times; but with loved ones I told censored versions. In court I could only speak through questions others asked me. I took out my worn copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which had guided me through college. She wrote, “Remember that you own what happened to you. . . . You cannot write out of someone else’s dark place; you can only write out of your own.” For the first time I would be telling my version of the story. A letter, from me, to Brock.
I wondered if I was waking up to a truth that I had been the last one to realize; you are worth three months. A smarter part of me knew this was not right, but I could not pretend to know better. At that moment there was nothing to do but give in. I accepted that this would be one of the most painful nights of my life.
Assault buries the self. We lose sight of how and when we are allowed to occupy space. We are made to doubt our abilities, disparaged when we speak. My statement had blazed, erupted, was indomitable. But I was holding a secret fear, that there must be a cap, an end to this road, where they’d say, you have achieved enough, exit this way. I was waiting to be knocked back down to size, to the small place I imagined I belonged. I had grown up in the margins; in the media Asian Americans were assigned side roles, submissive, soft-spoken secondary characters. I had grown used to being unseen, to never being fully known. It did not feel possible that I could be the protagonist. The more recognition I gained, the more I felt I was not supposed to be on the receiving end of so much generosity. Yet people kept pulling me up and up, until I heard from the highest house in our nation. The vice president was not lowering down to my level, he was lifting me up to bow with gratitude.
After struggling for so long to move away from this case, it felt counterintuitive to immerse myself again. But I also understood that moving through was a way of moving on, that I needed to go backward before I could go forward again. I now had my instructions. The statement was the wave. It was time to submerge even deeper, return to the beginning.
I wanted to say my commute was twelve seconds, from my bed to my desk, occasionally breaking from this trajectory to boil coffee in my pajamas.
What exactly were you afraid of, one might wonder. You weren’t raped in a house, there was no invasion or break-in. But it’s the sleeping itself that got me, the unconscious, vulnerable state in which anything can happen. The night of my assault, I’d missed the chance to fight back. I tried to outsmart the system, sleeping with one eye open, one eye closed, drifting in and out.
When skinny-dipping, there was only the expanse of sky, open sea, and a circle of pure, white moon. The lighting was soft, the landscape limitless. The penises nothing more than noodle shapes, breasts like mounds of silly putty. We all looked funny and natural and free.
There is a certain carefree feeling that was stripped from me the night of the assault. How to distinguish spontaneity from recklessness? How to prove nudity is not synonymous with promiscuity? Where’s the line between caution and paranoia? This is what I’m mourning, this is what I do not know how to get back. Still I keep those memories close and remember it is possible to be naked, amongst men, and not be asking for it. The girl running arms wide into the ocean is gone. In her place is a woman wrapped in two coats, staring at the black water, mistaking lumps of seaweed for dormant bodies, the stones for crouching men. Lucas takes my hand and asks if I’d like to walk and I shake my head, trotting back up the wooden stairs.
When I was afraid of the dark during our first year in the city, I tried to reframe the darkness. I told myself to admire the inky lumps of hills, the snoring neighbors with their lemongrass diffusers, the coyotes trotting through the park. With sex I started small, savored the little things; the simplicity of sleeping next to each other. This closeness, this quiet. Sex is this feeling unpeeled. I thought about the language of sex; I liked the term lovemaking, bodies churning and creating sweat and heat, until love is actually made, bing bing bing, appears like glistening pink lights that float and drift above the bed as you lie back, skin glimmering.
We named our dog Mogu (Chinese for mushroom). Every day she reminds me of the Muttville slogan: It’s never too late for a new beginning. It was a promise to her and a promise to myself. Whatever past you came from, you don’t have to go back. Over the course of that year with a rotation of little dogs sleeping on my lap, leaking gases into my room, I wrote. I sat down to look at transcripts for the first time; hundreds of pages of everything that was said during the days I was absent in the courtroom. My commute, it turned out, was long, required traveling back to my past every day. I was stunned that even with the validation of millions, the enraged feelings returned as if untouched. I annotated the transcripts in red pen; dummy ass nut piece of shit. For all the clarity and catharsis of that statement, I still struggled. We understand a victim’s antagonists to be the perpetrators and lawyers but overlook the enemy who is the victim herself. Old ideas about who I was resurfaced, told me I was damaged, unworthy. Some of the shame had calcified, impervious to praise.
A long time has passed since the last time I was in that courtroom, but I worry I will forever be stuck on the stand. My mind is one step behind where it used to be. I call it the lag. Before I was living in real time. Now I evaluate the moment before I can move into it. I am always asking permission, anticipating having to present myself to an invisible jury, answering questions before a defense. When I reach for a piece of clothing, the first thing I think is, What will they think if I wear this? When I go anywhere I think, Will I be able to explain why I am going? If I post a photo I think, If this were submitted as evidence, would I look too silly, my shoulders too bare? The time I spend questioning what I’m doing, turning things over and talking myself back to normalcy, has become the toll.
In each line, I found common, common, a part of, everybody, everybody. This pattern was not an accident. He was leading Brock back into the herd, where he could blend into the comfort of community. Compare this to when he had questioned me: You did a lot of partying. You’ve had blackouts before. It was you and you, the lens fixed so close I was stripped of surrounding. For Brock, his goal was to integrate, for me it was to isolate.
But I told myself, don’t become them. Focus on who you want to be. I fought hard rewriting drafts of this book to dial down the sarcasm, personal attacks. I vowed not to minimize or dehumanize. The goal should never be to insult, it should only be to teach, to expose larger issues so that we may learn something. I want to remain me. So I use my strength not to shove back, but to exercise my voice with control. Two cyclists. For every person that wants to hurt me, there are more who want to help.
He was talked about in terms of his lost potential, what he would never be, rather than what he is. They spoke as if his future was patiently waiting for him to step into it. Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don’t act accordingly, that dream dissolves. If punishment is based on potential, privileged people will be given lighter sentences. Brock was shielded inside projections of what people like him grow up to become, or are supposed to become. Orthopedic surgeon. Biomedical engineer. All-American Athlete. Olympian. The judge argued he’d already lost so much, given up so many opportunities. What happens to those who start off with little to lose? Instead of a nineteen-year-old Stanford athlete, let’s imagine a Hispanic nineteen-year-old working in the kitchen of the fraternity commits the same crime. Does this story end differently? Does The Washington Post call him a surgeon?
Brock wrote: I just existed in a reality where nothing can go wrong or nobody could think of what I was doing as wrong. Privilege accompanies the light skinned, helped maintain his belief that consequences did not apply to him.
When you say go to the police what do you envision? I was grateful for my team. But the police will move on to other cases while the victim is left in the agonizing, protracted judicial process, where she will be made to question, and then forget, who she is. You were just physically attacked? Here’s some information on how you can enter a multiyear process of verbal abuse. Often it seems easier to suffer rape alone, than face the dismembering that comes with seeking support.
Brock will always be the swimmer turned rapist. He was great and then he fell. Anything I do in the future will be by the victim who wrote a book. His talent precedes the tragedy. She was supposedly born in it. I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it. I just used it like I never had to use it before. I do not owe him my success, my becoming, he did not create me. The only credit Brock can take is for assaulting me, and he could never even admit to that.
Victims are often accused of seeking revenge, but revenge is a tiny engine. I know better than to think my peace arrives when the gavel hits, when the handcuffs click shut. He may sit in a cell, but he will never know what it’s like to be unhomed from his own body. We don’t fight for our own happy endings. We fight to say you can’t. We fight for accountability. We fight to establish precedent. We fight because we pray we’ll be the last ones to feel this kind of pain.
The irony is that institutional betrayal is not only bad for those dependent upon the institution, but comes to haunt the institution itself.
I tried to come back when I could. There was a session called Unmasking Anger. We would be making cardboard masks that personified rage; a mask would be a way to identify the presence of the emotion, but create enough distance not to be fully consumed by it.
No matter how formidable or self-assured I might become, I will always be a tadpole. I believe that’s what being a victim is, living with that little finicky, darting thing inside you. Most people say development is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. People grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen around that place of hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone. More than becoming a frog, I believe surviving means learning to live forever with this trembling tadpole.
You made me a victim. . . . I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. . . . I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.
It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I am really in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I’d seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could come and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather.
From grief, confidence has grown, remembering what I’ve endured. From anger, stemmed purpose. To tuck them away would mean to neglect the most valuable tools this experience has given me. If you’re wondering if I’ve forgiven him, I can only say hate is a heavy thing to carry, takes up too much space inside the self. It’s true that I’ll never stop hoping that he learns. If we don’t learn, what is life for? If I have forgiven him, it’s not because I’m holy. It’s because I need to clear a space inside myself where hard feelings can be put to rest.
I’m sorry to all the math teachers I failed, but I hope my English teachers are happy
After a few hours of this, they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.
If I told them, I would see the fear on their faces, and mine would multiply by tenfold, so instead I pretended the whole thing wasn’t real.
Lastly you said, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin a life. A life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine. Let me rephrase for you, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. You and me. You are the cause, I am the effect. You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again. You knocked down both our towers, I collapsed at the same time you did. If you think I was spared, came out unscathed, that today I ride off into sunset, while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. Nobody wins. We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering. Your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.
See one thing we have in common is that we were both unable to get up in the morning. I am no stranger to suffering. You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was “unconscious intoxicated woman,” ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All-American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.
You have no idea how hard I have worked to rebuild parts of me that are still weak. It took me eight months to even talk about what happened. I could no longer connect with friends, with everyone around me. I would scream at my boyfriend, my own family whenever they brought this up. You never let me forget what happened to me. At the end of the hearing, the trial, I was too tired to speak. I would leave drained, silent. I would go home turn off my phone and for days I would not speak. You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself. Every time a new article come out, I lived with the paranoia that my entire hometown would find out and know me as the girl who got assaulted. I didn’t want anyone’s pity and am still learning to accept victim as part of my identity. You made my own hometown an uncomfortable place to be.
When I see my younger sister hurting, when she is unable to keep up in school, when she is deprived of joy, when she is not sleeping, when she is crying so hard on the phone she is barely breathing, telling me over and over again she is sorry for leaving me alone that night, sorry sorry sorry, when she feels more guilt than you, then I do not forgive you. That night I had called her to try and find her, but you found me first. Your attorney’s closing statement began, “[Her sister] said she was fine and who knows her better than her sister.” You tried to use my own sister against me? Your points of attack were so weak, so low, it was almost embarrassing. You do not touch her.
The damage is done, no one can undo it. And now we both have a choice. We can let this destroy us, I can remain angry and hurt and you can be in denial, or we can face it head on, I accept the pain, you accept the punishment, and we move on.
The fact that Brock was an athlete at a private university should not be seen as an entitlement to leniency, but as an opportunity to send a message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class.
Most importantly, thank you to the two men who saved me, who I have yet to meet. I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed to remind myself there are heroes in this story. That we are looking out for one another. To have known all of these people, to have felt their protection and love, is something I will never forget.