At what point does the Asian immigrant become an Asian American?

I recently finished Ha Jin's latest novel A Free Life (2007). This novel is Jin's first set completely in the U.S. discussing life as a Chinese immigrant. I was going to include a link to the NY Times Book review, but I found this one by a blog called "Hallucina" that I think gives a very good summary of what the book does in terms of its adherence to the themes of immigration and living as an immigrant in the U.S. (click here).


I liked the novel--I actually liked it better than any of the other things I've read by Jin (his award winning novel Waiting, his collection of short stories Ocean of Words and The Bridegroom). There was a bleak repetition, for me, of these works in their themes dealing with Communist China of the 1970s and 1980s and with the bleakness of much of the characters' lives.

I suppose, in some ways, these themes continue in his latest novel. But for some reason, I found them more compelling--and I agreed with Hallucina--that one of the most powerful things about this novel is recognizing that regardless of whether people are living in China or America, their humanity is always with them--which is to say, the difficulties of being human follow you in the U.S. just as they do in China. This novel isn't going to be for everyone--its over 600 pages, although each chapter is only 3-6 pages long, which makes it feel as if it's easier to read or that it reads faster than it probably does. Perhaps I appreciated the descriptions of writing--the challenges of trying to be an artist and the compromises you have to make between the prosasic needs of putting food on the table versus the poetry you want your life to be immersed in.

But really, what I wanted to write about today was the question in this post's title: When does an Asian immigrant become an Asian American? In Ha Jin's case, to be more exact, when did he start to become a Chinese American writer instead of a Chinese writer? These questions are hard to tease out, in some way, for Jin because one could say that it was either his taking on, finally, Chinese American issues in his writing. Or it could be the fact that he became a naturalized American not long ago, officially becoming a Chinese American citizen.

But lets say, for argument's sake, that Jin had not become naturalized--that he continued to write about China in his fiction. Does this make him a Chinese writer versus a Chinese American writer? Must Chinese American writers write about Chinese American or Asian American subjects? How long does a Chinese immigrant have to live in the U.S. to become acculturated to American customs--and does that acculturation make one an American?

If we believe that the quality of being "American" isn't simply found within a legal document, then is it a length of time that makes one an American--to have lived here for five or ten years? Is it the fluency of one's English or the embrace of certain cultural and societal values that makes one an American?

One can make the argument that for Asian Americans, immigrant generation or otherwise, the stereotype of being "forever foreign" plagues them. But if we assume that this is not the case--if we look at other immigrant groups, Jamaicans, Germans, Ghanaian, Peruvians--at what point do they become Americans? Does it differ ethnic group to ethnic group or person to person? Does it depend on whether they are living in ethnic enclaves of their natal lands or where they are the "only ones"--or does it matter that they are in urban vs. suburban vs. rural areas?

Or, does it matter, at all--the question, that is--since it seems that regardless of what legal papers you hold, claiming America, changing from immigrant to settler, is always a state of mind and always depends on how others perceive you as much as how you perceive yourself in your newly adopted homeland.

Still, it would seem to be easier to be a settler rather than an immigrant if you are a white immigrant or if you are already fluid in English and familiar with Western customs. Or if you have money. Money does seem to be the key factor in all forms of assimilation and belonging.

Asian American Chick Lit

I'm in the middle of reading the second of Kim Wong Keltner's Asian American chick lit books, this one called Buddha Baby. The first, Dim Sum of All Things, followed the adventures of 20-something Chinese American, San Francisco born and bred Lindsey Owyang. Neither is very good. As in, bad writing. As in, bad chick lit writing. The writer uses extended metaphors and similes in every paragraph and a lot of them are cheesy. The characters are relatively two-dimensional, and basically, it's just not good writing--the prose is not singing off the page, but rather, clunking off the page.

So why am I reading it? Well, there's this odd tension in the book--it seems to want to be chick lit and yet it also wants to be this self-consciously reflective piece of social justice and Asian American activism. It contains a little Chinese American history lesson in its pages, and a larger Asian American consciousness that does feel reminiscent of some of the better Asian American literature out there. It's this weird hybrid form, and actually, for that reason, I feel it's not successful--because it just doesn't know what it wants to be.

Or maybe, it's just bad writing, I mean what do you do with a passage like this:

"She was like an early Californian panning for gold, believing in her right to discover buried secrets. However, the strong current of verbal reticence that invisibly gripped the nearly dried-up Owyang riverbed hardly ever yielded a shiny pebble of insight" (Keltner 76).

Suffering from Racial Paranoia

Somewhere in this blog I've discussed racial hypochondria, the term I came up with for the feeling when you are being "oversensitive" about race, it's a bit different from paranoia, because with hypochondria, oftentimes these are people who have suffered from illnesses in the past and are therefore over-sensitive to issues related to their health. Similarly, with racial hyponchondria, these are people who have experienced racism or race related incidents that means that they are looking for similar experiences to happen to them.

However, what I experienced yesterday was a clear case of racial paranoia and not hypochondria, because there was really no basis in reality for my feelings, other than my own hyper-awareness to issues of race.

Yesterday my boyfriend and I went to a new French restaurant. We had about a 10-15 minute wait and so we went to the bar to get a drink. The bartender (who turns out to also be the co-owner of the restaurant) was busy engaged in talking to another couple at the bar and seemed to not recognize that we were interested in ordering drinks. Admittedly bad service, but for some reason, as we kept getting ignored (and after about 10 minutes had passed) I looked around the restaurant (it's a small place, about 50 diners) and realized I was the only visible non-white person in the whole place. And so then, I started to think, "is this because I'm Asian?"

Anyway, we eventually got our drinks, eventually (30 minutes later) got seated, and eventually received poor service from our waiter (who had to be asked to bring bread to the table and reminded to refill our water glasses). Overall I wasn't impressed with our meal or the service, but the truth is, although I continued to be the only non-white visible person in the restaurant, I believe the problems were inherent with the restaurant and not with the reaction to me because I was Asian and not white. And yet, that feeling persisted. I knew it was irrational, but I couldn't help *feeling* that my discomfort was linked to this racial difference.

And then today, as I was relating this to a friend, I realized that my feelings probably had a lot to do with the comparison between being, recently, in Toronto and California--places in which racial diversity is rampant and, in particular, Asian Americans (Canadians) are a visible and sizable presence. It just so happened that I was with my friend at an Urgent Care clinic (no worries--it was just a sprained ankle for her) and the doctor that she saw was South Asian (Indian to be precise) and so there we were, three Asian American women in a Southern state. And I felt right at home at that moment.

Is Tiger black?

I was in the gym the other day reading a special issue of Sports Illustrated--one primed for the US Open (it was an old copy). And there was an editorial from an African American sports journalist about Tiger Woods--specifically, lamenting Tiger's lack of political activism around issues of race (and I would add gender). The gist of the editorial was that this black journalist was, like many African Americans, initially enthused and supportive of Tiger's golf career--seeing him as someone who had made it into the most hallowed and whitest of institutions--the PGA--and that he could lead a race revolution in the world of golf. And yet, it hasn't happened. Tiger remains the only black PGA golfer in the tour, there are no up and coming new African American golfers set to rival Tiger's record--there are not scores of African American golf athletes infiltrating lily white university golf programs, and Tiger has not taken a stand on key race issues in the public domain. In other words, he's no Jackie Robinson.

And I know I've had similar critiques about Tiger's lack of politicization--and also speculating about how fair that is--for me to want and to demand that Tiger become a political spokesperson for racial justice and gender equity. After all, we are not making these demands on Ernie Els or Jim Furyk or Phil Mickelson. Or even Vijay Singh. They get to be "just golfers" and they have their respective charities and corporate sponsors, and yes they are under scrutiny, but none of them have the pressures to be a symbol in the way that Tiger so clearly is under a media and world microscope.

Yet there was something else about the editorial that troubled me. The dismissiveness of Tiger's claim to be "Cablinasian." There was much "to-do" made when he first coined the word and when he tried to show that he was not simply an African American golfer but a person who had many different racial and ethnic strains in his ancestry. And there have been many people who have called him on his apparent lack of black pride for not claiming a mono-racial African American identity. But Tiger himself said it best when he explained that to claim a black identity would be to disavow his mother and her life, her influence, on him. His Thai mother. Which makes Tiger as much Asian American as African American.

So is Tiger black? I'm not saying he's not because the truth is, he's identified by others and perceived to be "black" because he *looks* black. In other words, if he had more Asian features, if he favored his mother's side of the family more than his father's, phenotypically, perhaps we would be calling him an Asian American or at least a mixed race, hapa, golfer and not simply a black golfer.

I actually do think that Tiger is a black golfer. It's just that he's not only black. He's also Asian American and mixed race and hapa and Cablinasian. He is a multitude and he's got a killer golf swing and so we want him to infiltrate the bastion, the fortress of white privilege--the country club--to lay waste to their belief systems and herald in a new age of racial tolerance and acceptance--to get them where they sleep, so to speak--on the fairway.

Maybe he'll do it one day. Maybe he'll stick it to "the man" and take a political stand and support a cause that is contrary to his Nike endorsement and the galleries that watch him. Maybe not. At any rate, maybe we can start by recognizing that Tiger is both black and not black and that there's nothing wrong in acknowledging the complexity of who he is, just as one day perhaps he will also recognize and embrace and act on that complexity.

The Hollywood Mirror

Last week as I was de-toxing from my South Carolina sojourn, I took a break from the work schedule I put myself on and immersed myself in narrative. I read two novels in 4 days (The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman--I recommend both, highly, for different reasons. Erdrich continues to weave the genealogy that she began in Love Medicine about American Indians in the Midwest--with haunting and beautiful effect--and Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy is a page turner and much more than a children's fantasy world: it is dark and rather treacherous and raises some philosophical/theological questions that are really more for adults) and more to the point of this entry, I saw 3 films: the latest and final installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, the indie film Waitress, and the latest caper flick in the Oceans' series, Oceans 13.

What do these films all have in common?

Nothing, other than the fact that I was entertained by all 3 and that all 3 lacked any real Asian American characters. In Waitress I don't think I recall seeing a single non-white person. It is set in some small, rural town in the midwest or the South (unclear the exact setting). Pirates did feature Chow Yun-Fat as the pirate king Sao Feng. The Angry Asian Man blog already discussed the stereotypes associated with his character--and the People's Republic of China is so incensed with the continuation of "yellow peril" stereotypes that his character perpetuates that they have apparently edited out certain scenes for release in mainland China.

Did the depiction bother me? Yes and no. Yes, because it's racist fantasy and no one likes racist fantasy. No, because I wasn't expecting more from this film series. I mean, if I don't want to be incensed by Hollywood depictions of Asians and Asian Americans, I shouldn't go to movie theaters and watch Hollywood films. It's almost a given, nowadays, that what you see projected on screen is going to be a stereotype or gross caricature. Nothing new has really changed in nearly a century of cinematic portrayals. So yes, it's important to point out all the ways that Sao Feng and the other Asian faces are in line with Hollywood stereotypes--and so are the other "ethnicized" characters--the Turk, the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the African--so I'm just not surprised and unlike with books, in film I can turn down the volume of the critical voice--or at least I was able to this week.

But the surprise film I want to talk about is Oceans 13. Because they have done something in all 3 films with the Chinese character that I think is intriguing and I can't figure out if it is done for pure laughs or could be a potentially subversive thing to do. They never have the Chinese character, Yen (played by real life acrobat, Shaobo Qin) speak English--he speaks Mandarin and the other characters respond in English. But what is important is that they all understand one another--the only need for an "interpreter" is when they are conning other people. It's a small thing--and I think it was originally done for laughs in the first film when Qin speaks Mandarin and Brad Pitt responds in English, signaling that Pitt can understand Mandarin, but continuing this conceit in the third film is interesting and potentially subversive because it creates a world in which a facility for language is assumed--where accents are not used for comic effect and where there is something natural about everyone understanding Mandarin and simply responding back in English. And there are never subtitles or explanations--if you don't speak Mandarin then you have to figure out through the context of the speech act what is being conveyed. So what is mirrored back is a reality in which you can speak Mandarin and look like a Chinese guy (and be a Chinese guy) and you don't get mocked or ridiculed--you are understood and accepted.