Thoughts on Buffalo Boy and Geronimo

Back in late April I began a series of posts mulling over the definition of Asian American literature--specifically thinking about the boundaries of Asian American literature and the expansion of that term. My musings were prompted by the announcement that James Janko's novel Buffalo Boy and Geronimo had won an Asian American book award. If you want to read my initial post on this issue, click here.

I had promised to give a review of Janko's book once I finished it, and I had actually finished it a while ago but got side tracked by other issues and projects. However, a recent comment by a friend of Janko (click here) made me realize I should revisit this subject and weigh in on Janko's novel.


The first thing I'll say is that Janko is a gifted writer. His descriptions of the natural landscape of Viet Nam--the animals and plants and insects of the region of Viet Nam along the Cambodian border--truly made the novel come alive and gave a perspective to the war in Viet Nam (the American war as those in SouthEast Asia refer to this conflict) sorely lacking from other narratives (I hope someone will work on the novel in terms of eco-criticism and/or environmental justice). The novel follows two narratives, Nguyen Lu, the titular "Buffalo Boy" and Antonio Conchola, "Geronimo," whose lives eventually intersect. I'm not going to provide a summary here, if you want to know what follows you should read the book, it's a worthwhile read. What I will say is that I enjoyed the story and will be interested in Janko's other writings, if he continues his literary career, because I think he has a good eye for detail.

However, I never doubted the literary merit of this work--it's not why I was disturbed by the book winning this award (although I have to be honest and say that a book that was eligible for the award, Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Behold the Many is a stronger story; her voice is lyrical and haunting and polished (this is her sixth novel I believe), whereas Janko, as a first time writer, has a few places where I think he could use some more editing and revision). Let me repeat something I wrote in my April 28 blog post: I believe that writers should be free to write whatever subjects they choose. My criticism of this novel winning an Asian American literary award isn't about Janko's right to author a novel where he does not "match" the identity of his protagonist or any other "authenticity" arguments. Nor am I trying to impugn Mr. Janko's character--as his friend noted in the comments section of the April 28 post, Janko seems to be a man respectful of Vietnamese culture and Asian American politics.

What I am concerned about--what I already voiced in the April 28 post, is what the conferring of an Asian American literary award to a novel set in Viet Nam with a main character of Chicano background written by a white American man signals for the expansion of the category "Asian American literature."

Because after reading this novel, it is not clear to me what exactly qualified it for the status of "Asian American" other than the fact that one of its main characters is "Asian" (ie: Vietnamese) and the other is "American" (ie: Mexican American specifically) and that it is set in Viet Nam (an Asian country).

So this begs the question: what does it mean for a work of literature to possess an "Asian American aesthetics" because that's essentially what troubles me about this novel winning this award. It's not that I think the novel was poorly written or uninteresting or without literary merit. But in thinking specifically about issues of race, there are many questions I am left with that remain unanswered either by the novel itself or by the novel winning this particular award:

*Why was the American medic made to be a Chicano man? His ethnicity seemed to be important--the fact that he was not a white American. In fact, I interpreted both the reference to Germonimo as well as the continued references to Spanish and other aspects of California Chicano culture to be significant to understanding the character's personality and motivation, and a partial reason he is targeted by a white American troop member. So race seems to be playing a role in this novel--a recognition of racism if you will. But how this gets translated into an "Asian American" issue seems to puzzle me--not to say that Asian Americans shouldn't be interested in other forms of racism and race outside of their community, but in terms of marking or signaling a concern that is "Asian American" there seems to be no hint of that in the novel itself.

*Why the reference to Germonimo? Cross-racial and cross-cultural identifications abound in the novel--but I am not sure I understand the purpose of these markings and what the author is trying to demonstrate with them, other than an attention to marginalization and perhaps stereotyping/myth making.

*If there is no "Asian American" content per se in this novel, why was it up for consideration? Is Asian American literature now to be understood as any type of literature set in Asia that features an American character or penned by an American author? In which case, are novels written by Pearl Buck now to be understood as Asian American? Or Mark Salzman's The Laughing Sutra?
[By the way, Mark Salzman is a great writer and I love The Laughing Sutra as well as another one of his novel's Lying Awake--although I wouldn't consider either of them Asian American].

Ultimately what I think is bothering me is the power of representation. It's not that I believe my "voice" is any more "authentic" than a non-Asian American person's--especially given the fact that I often feel that some of my experiences are not necessarily typically understood as "Asian American" (ie: large extended maternal family from Jamaica that identifies as mixed heritage or in some instances mixed-race), even while others seem to be typically Asian American (childhood in the SF Bay Area). It's that finally we're at a moment when we, the Asian American community, as imperfect a group as that is, is trying to make itself understood, legible if you will, within the larger American (read mainstream white) culture and society--and understood in a way in which we are not simply the standard stereotypes of foreign immigrants or insulated and insular ethnic communities.

So having a book that seems not to have any discernible or explicable or legible Asian American content written by someone who does not "identify" as Asian American win an Asian American book award given by an Asian American association begs the question:

What does it mean to be Asian American?

And if the category has become so broad that affiliation with something Asian and something American qualifies, than what does this do for the state of Asian American political enfranchisement and social/cultural awareness in the U.S.?

What does it mean to win an Asian American book award?

So this is the post I really wanted to write about 5 days ago but didn't know how to start to explain all the things I'm wrestling with--my sense of hypocrisy in wanting to de-essentialize race and yet having knee-jerk reactions to expectations of "authenticity" when certain people write/speak, my working through of my own subject position as an Asian American female professor working on mixed-race issues when I am, myself, not mixed-race, and just a host of other philosophical, largely academic (in both senses of the word--related to academia and also not of much practical/applied value) musings. If you really want to re-cap all the long and rambling and semi-coherent thoughts I laid down to get to this long and rambling post, you can click here for the most recent post, and it will lead you down the path of my thoughts to the original post that started this trek.

What is all this fussing about?

The Association for Asian American Studies-THE professional organization of academics, activists, students, and anyone else who wants to be involved with Asian American scholarship, recently awarded it's literature prize for best Asian American work of prose to James Janko's Buffalo Boy and Geronimo (the prizes are for works published in 2006--I think there's a 2 year lag that we're working with because all the book prizes in all categories were for works that came out in 2006).

Here is a link to the publisher's page for James Janko--it also gives a brief bio and a link to an interview with him:

Now, before I go any further, I want to clarify one VERY IMPORTANT thing. It is my belief that when it comes to fiction, a writer has every right to create whatever work and to take on whatever voice he or she chooses. We see instances of men taking on women's voices/stories and women taking on men's voices/stories, and plenty of authors imagine time periods that happened centuries ago and places they've never been and historic events they've never witnessed. In the land of fiction, everything is fair game. And if someone wants to write transracially/transethnically/transculturaly, they have every right to do so.

So my problem isn't that a man who, for all intents and purposes, appears to be a white man has written a novel with a Vietnamese main character's voice and a Chicano main character's voice. Janko gets to write whatever he wants to write.

Publishers, readers, teachers who assign these works in their classrooms, and awards committees--these are the people consuming the works of fiction, and there are different issues raised by these consumers--different amounts of power and politics come into play.

My problem is that when I heard that the award had gone to Janko and his novel (and I hadn't heard of either until learning about the award), my gut level reaction was "HUH??? How could the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) give an award for best Asian American prose to a white guy???"

Am I being small minded/essentialist? I haven't even read the novel--it may be a fantastic novel (I just checked it out from the library, so I'll be reporting back on that issue in a few days). But beyond its literary merits, here are a few thoughts that I had:

*How is the AAAS applying the term "Asian American literature" to the book in question? Is it based on the identity of the author (doesn't seem to be, but again, I'm not certain as to how Janko "identifies" or what his background is--I'm only going off of his appearance, although I have to say I was at the Awards banquet and the reaction of the people at my table mirrored my own, ie: we all thought he was white and were shocked at the prize) or is Asian American to be determined by the content, in which case, if the novel is about the war in Viet Nam, set in Viet Nam (ie: not in the U.S.) and features no Asian American characters, but does feature a Chicano U.S. soldier and a Vietnamese man, what exactly is the "Asian American" piece of the book?

*Is AAAS trying to push our boundaries about what we consider to be Asian American literature? What other books were up for possible nomination (I wracked my brain but the only other novel I could think of published in 2006 was Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Behold the Many, which I have to say I thought was a fantastic novel, but she was given the book award a few years ago and more significantly, it's EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL to give the award to Yamanaka--details would be too long to repeat here, but suffice it to say, I wasn't surprised she didn't make the short list given the past controversies with AAAS, book awards, and this author).

*Why does this raise so many questions/make me feel uneasy? That probably has to do with all of the previous posts and my trying to work through issues of power and representation and race and racism and the effect of having certain people teach certain material. But it does strike me that this award to Janko raises all sorts of questions about how a definition for Asian American literature is really up for grabs and not well defined.

But maybe that's the point? Maybe we can't really define Asian American literature--and I suppose another question is, should we? Do we need to define it? What is at stake in trying to put boundaries around a term like "Asian American"? What am I afraid of? Appropriation? False or inaccurate representation?

[Aside: I know the members of the award committee. They are my friends-colleagues, and I trust them. I also know many members within the ranks of AAAS and like/trust them. And yet, when I polled my Asian American scholarly colleagues, those at the banquet and not, almost all of them reacted in the exact way I did. So obviously there's a disconnect between thinking about something "in theory" and then the reality of what an award like this conveys about legitimizing what counts as Asian American literature.]

This is the last post on this topic. I welcome comments--and for those of you tired of this thread, rest assured--I've got other things to write about--the ongoing Democratic slug-out between Obama and Clinton, the latest Harold and Kumar film (just saw it this weekend), and one golf friend in particular has asked me to weigh in about Lorena Ochoa versus Michelle Wie.

[Update--June 27, 2008: For my further musings on the novel, see my post "Thoughts on Buffalo Boy and Geronimo"]