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Sep. 2nd, 2006 08:28 am
asian am reading
Yes, I'm up too early.
The other day I was thinking about my like/dislike relationship with Asian American literature - in college, when I became an English major so that I could buy more books, I didn't realize that it meant I had to concentrate on dead writers from England. I didn't realize it would be more like a literary history of England, rather than a focus on writers who write in English. Once I realized this, I filled as many of my electives as I could with classes on American literature, Chinese literature in translation, and other stuff like that, where I could get away from dead white guys. Unfortunately I never got to take the Children's Lit class or the Science Fiction class, because they were only offered once a year and totally conflicted with my schedules.
The first non-dead-white-people's class I took was an upper-division Asian American Women Writers class, freshman year. Obviously, I was in over my head. Thank God for my wonderful ghetto education, where I had teachers who still cared - I think I may have even pulled off a B+ or A- in the class.
I'd actually read a lot of the works before, I think - I don't remember the exact syllabus, but we had to read Sui Sin Far, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan (not sure about her, but she pops up everywhere anyway). I read Maxine Hong Kingston in sixth grade, when I found my oldest sister's books from college - I guess she had taken a class in Asian American literature. She told me she didn't like the books because the writers kept trying to use Chinese words - for example, writing "kwei" instead of just saying "ghost" or "demon".
I had a lot of trouble with them using the Chinese words, too - but mostly because I couldn't figure out what the Chinese words actually were. Tan used Mandarin, and Kingston used a dialect I'd never heard of, so I could usually approximate but not quite figure out what the words were.
Among my sister's books, beside Kingston and Tan, was Frank Chin - that figure of controversy who attacked Kingston for "not being authentic" and condemned her for attacking Asian men or something. I thought both of those were stupid arguments, but other than that, his writing was decent. The more I read in the genre (I don't know if it's okay to call it that), though, the more I got frustrated with it. Every time a protagonist expressed a desire to "be white" or tried to tape her eyelids so they would have a fold, I'd want to throw it across the room.
I don't have to relate to Asian-American literature - that's not what it's for, and god knows Asian Americans who are successful creatively get enough shit from their own communities for not being authentic enough, for airing dirty laundry, for not focusing on a specific experience enough, for not speaking their own language enough, etc. But it got really tiring reading about people who were supposed to be like me be so totally consumed by whiteness - something that's just totally alien to me - the only times I didn't want to be Asian, I wanted to be a mixed kid, because I wanted the self-confidence of all the mixed kids I saw around me. And also because I thought it would be more interesting than just being Chinese.
Most of the time, though - I'm comfortable in my own skin - I like being Asian. I don't stand out, and in the Bay Area, it's not like I'm a novelty or something. That's not to say that Asians don't face discrimination, but it's not the same - there weren't enough white people in Oakland for us to idolize or glom onto or whatever. Sure, there was TV, but the majority of the stuff we watched were black sitcoms. (And by the way, Friends totally ripped off Living Single. Just saying.) The racial tensions we felt were mostly between Asians and blacks - junior high was the most hellish expression of that.
And the other thing that got me about all this Asian American literature? None of the protagonists had friends who weren't white. What the hell is up with that? You're telling me that your main character who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, doesn't have one single black, Latino, or Asian friend? I just found that hard to swallow.
Anyway, the books I didn't want to throw across the room include:
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston - I love this book to death. I re-read it every couple of years. It's an autobiography, but at the same time so much fiction is woven in (Kingston had said before that the purpose was to confuse immigration authorities so they wouldn't come after her parents - even though I'm pretty sure she wrote this in middle age, it says a lot that we're all so paranoid about immigration) that it's actually a different kind of work altogether. I don't know how she does it, but the way she weaves in old Chinese myths with speculations about her female relatives and her own understanding of what it means to be Chinese is so seamless that I'm always in awe of how she does it. Her next novel, China Men, about the Chinese men in her life, is less successful. I'll have to re-read it, because I don't remember it that much, but it took me a long time the first time around to get into it.
Bone, Fae Myenne Ng - I can't be objective at all about this book, because this book perfectly captured so many aspects of my life - from the protagonist's mom working in the sewing shops of San Francisco Chinatown, for the consequences of having too many daughters, for the way the male figures are simultaneously well-meaning and constantly misunderstood, for having to work and not relating to richer relatives who lived outside the insular world of Chinatown. It got everything right, and I was saddened, but not surprised to read that Ng, who took ten years to write this book, was criticized because she didn't represent some people's experiences.
China Boy, Gus Lee - This is an autobiographical first novel about Kai Ting growing up in the San Francisco ghetto and learning the hard way to take care of himself. I liked it a lot because he actually interacts with people who aren't white, and even makes friends with some of them.
Donald Duk, Frank Chin - A story of growing up Chinese in San Francisco, like so many others. This is the book where I learned about how the Chinese built the railroads and how they got shafted for it. Eventually I grew to dislike a lot of Chin's opinions about what he thought Asian American "authenticity" encompassed, but I really liked this book.
Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn - The majority of my Asian American literature is dominated by Chinese-American literature, which is probably my own fault. I keep wanting to read stuff about people who are like me. Anyway, I don't know where my copy went, but this is a really well-written, complex, layered novel about the Philippines and growing up in the middle of all that craziness. I don't know enough about its history to comment on it or anything.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie - Ok, I don't know if this counts as Asian American literature, considering it's mostly set in India, but I'm putting it here because I loved it so much. More books should be like this.
The other day I was thinking about my like/dislike relationship with Asian American literature - in college, when I became an English major so that I could buy more books, I didn't realize that it meant I had to concentrate on dead writers from England. I didn't realize it would be more like a literary history of England, rather than a focus on writers who write in English. Once I realized this, I filled as many of my electives as I could with classes on American literature, Chinese literature in translation, and other stuff like that, where I could get away from dead white guys. Unfortunately I never got to take the Children's Lit class or the Science Fiction class, because they were only offered once a year and totally conflicted with my schedules.
The first non-dead-white-people's class I took was an upper-division Asian American Women Writers class, freshman year. Obviously, I was in over my head. Thank God for my wonderful ghetto education, where I had teachers who still cared - I think I may have even pulled off a B+ or A- in the class.
I'd actually read a lot of the works before, I think - I don't remember the exact syllabus, but we had to read Sui Sin Far, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan (not sure about her, but she pops up everywhere anyway). I read Maxine Hong Kingston in sixth grade, when I found my oldest sister's books from college - I guess she had taken a class in Asian American literature. She told me she didn't like the books because the writers kept trying to use Chinese words - for example, writing "kwei" instead of just saying "ghost" or "demon".
I had a lot of trouble with them using the Chinese words, too - but mostly because I couldn't figure out what the Chinese words actually were. Tan used Mandarin, and Kingston used a dialect I'd never heard of, so I could usually approximate but not quite figure out what the words were.
Among my sister's books, beside Kingston and Tan, was Frank Chin - that figure of controversy who attacked Kingston for "not being authentic" and condemned her for attacking Asian men or something. I thought both of those were stupid arguments, but other than that, his writing was decent. The more I read in the genre (I don't know if it's okay to call it that), though, the more I got frustrated with it. Every time a protagonist expressed a desire to "be white" or tried to tape her eyelids so they would have a fold, I'd want to throw it across the room.
I don't have to relate to Asian-American literature - that's not what it's for, and god knows Asian Americans who are successful creatively get enough shit from their own communities for not being authentic enough, for airing dirty laundry, for not focusing on a specific experience enough, for not speaking their own language enough, etc. But it got really tiring reading about people who were supposed to be like me be so totally consumed by whiteness - something that's just totally alien to me - the only times I didn't want to be Asian, I wanted to be a mixed kid, because I wanted the self-confidence of all the mixed kids I saw around me. And also because I thought it would be more interesting than just being Chinese.
Most of the time, though - I'm comfortable in my own skin - I like being Asian. I don't stand out, and in the Bay Area, it's not like I'm a novelty or something. That's not to say that Asians don't face discrimination, but it's not the same - there weren't enough white people in Oakland for us to idolize or glom onto or whatever. Sure, there was TV, but the majority of the stuff we watched were black sitcoms. (And by the way, Friends totally ripped off Living Single. Just saying.) The racial tensions we felt were mostly between Asians and blacks - junior high was the most hellish expression of that.
And the other thing that got me about all this Asian American literature? None of the protagonists had friends who weren't white. What the hell is up with that? You're telling me that your main character who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, doesn't have one single black, Latino, or Asian friend? I just found that hard to swallow.
Anyway, the books I didn't want to throw across the room include:
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston - I love this book to death. I re-read it every couple of years. It's an autobiography, but at the same time so much fiction is woven in (Kingston had said before that the purpose was to confuse immigration authorities so they wouldn't come after her parents - even though I'm pretty sure she wrote this in middle age, it says a lot that we're all so paranoid about immigration) that it's actually a different kind of work altogether. I don't know how she does it, but the way she weaves in old Chinese myths with speculations about her female relatives and her own understanding of what it means to be Chinese is so seamless that I'm always in awe of how she does it. Her next novel, China Men, about the Chinese men in her life, is less successful. I'll have to re-read it, because I don't remember it that much, but it took me a long time the first time around to get into it.
Bone, Fae Myenne Ng - I can't be objective at all about this book, because this book perfectly captured so many aspects of my life - from the protagonist's mom working in the sewing shops of San Francisco Chinatown, for the consequences of having too many daughters, for the way the male figures are simultaneously well-meaning and constantly misunderstood, for having to work and not relating to richer relatives who lived outside the insular world of Chinatown. It got everything right, and I was saddened, but not surprised to read that Ng, who took ten years to write this book, was criticized because she didn't represent some people's experiences.
China Boy, Gus Lee - This is an autobiographical first novel about Kai Ting growing up in the San Francisco ghetto and learning the hard way to take care of himself. I liked it a lot because he actually interacts with people who aren't white, and even makes friends with some of them.
Donald Duk, Frank Chin - A story of growing up Chinese in San Francisco, like so many others. This is the book where I learned about how the Chinese built the railroads and how they got shafted for it. Eventually I grew to dislike a lot of Chin's opinions about what he thought Asian American "authenticity" encompassed, but I really liked this book.
Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn - The majority of my Asian American literature is dominated by Chinese-American literature, which is probably my own fault. I keep wanting to read stuff about people who are like me. Anyway, I don't know where my copy went, but this is a really well-written, complex, layered novel about the Philippines and growing up in the middle of all that craziness. I don't know enough about its history to comment on it or anything.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie - Ok, I don't know if this counts as Asian American literature, considering it's mostly set in India, but I'm putting it here because I loved it so much. More books should be like this.