Asian American identity

I'm continuing the theme from the last post about Asian American identity because it's something I've been mulling over lately. In many ways, I feel like I'm back at Asian American Studies 101: What does it mean to be an Asian American? Who IS an Asian American? What is Asian American identity?

I'm actually looking for something beyond the basic answers of ethnic ancestry, phenotype, oppositional identity, social constructedness, political solidarity.

Or perhaps I'm looking for more nuanced discussions of these topics.

I remember having a very lively discussion with a friend in grad school--a woman who came to the U.S. from Hong Kong at the age of 7, who spoke fluent Cantonese and English and had lived a majority of her life in the U.S. and who felt the category of Asian American was odd and counterintuitive. Why should she share an identity with a Japanese American? These two countries, Japan and China, have been at war and in conflict over the course of several centuries. And what affiliation would a person with Pakistani ancestors have in common with a Filipino person? Interestingly enough, my friend actually developed an Asian American identity (or perhaps more specifically Chinese American identity) when she moved back to the West Coast from the East Coast.

I rebutted every one of her challenges, talking about Vincent Chin and civil rights and the Asian American studies movement and how Asian Americans get lumped as perpetual foreigners, regardless of their length of stay or perfect English--that there was a way we get perceived by others--that in fact, this threat to our individuality (ironically enough) is what pushed Asian Americans to band together into a political group, in solidarity with one another and with other minoritized groups of the 1960s (American Indians, Chicano, Gay and Lesbians, and of course African Americans) to fight for civil liberties and social justice.

So I guess my question is: Can you be an Asian American person without having an oppositional identity--without your identity being political--without any notion of essentialism? Can you be Asian American in any positive (as in affirming) way without devolving into cultural nationalism?

To put it another way, is the day when Asian American literature dissolves a good day because it will mean that Asian American literature is now American literature--is seen as being on par and indistinguishable from American literature and the expanded American canon, which includes John Steinbeck, Nella Larsen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya and Sui Sin Far? (by the way, I don't think I'll see this day in my lifetime, but you can always project).

I guess what I'm wondering is what is the efficacy of an Asian American identity beyond political solidarity? And rather than saying just beyond political solidarity, perhaps this is more than enough...perhaps the fact that it is first and foremost a political identity because it is a racial identity is the key point and that I should stop being so concerned about the scope of Asian American collectivities beyond political concerns. That inherently Asian American as a category is political and its power lies in precisely this fact--that there are challenges and limitations, no doubt, but that a political identity that is centrally an oppositional identity--one that focuses on social justice, is perhaps the way to best understand what it means to be Asian American.

I'm Proud to be a Chinese American!

Back in the 1970s there were a series of public service announcements focused on educating people about bigotry and race/ethnicity. If you're a certain age, you know exactly what I'm talking about (or did these only come out in CA???)--the white grandpa and his grandson in a rowboat, the kid talking about his Jewish friend (I think it was a Jewish friend) and how he's not prejudiced against Jewish people and his grandpa calling him out and telling him that if he calls "Billy" his Jewish friend then he IS prejudiced because that's bigotry and that's wrong!

There was also one that featured a young Chinese American girl leading viewers around Chinatown (I think in SF) and talking about the wonderful contributions Chinese have made to American life (Damn it! We built the railroad!) and at the very end she smiles and says "I'm PROUD to be a Chinese American!"

So I've been thinking lately about ethnic nationalism and ethnic pride--and I guess the question is: if I can be proud of being Chinese American because of my fantastic ancient culture and the many contributions Chinese Americans have made to the U.S. (lets consider the bing cherry--named after Ah Bing, the Chinese immigrant who brought this fruit to fruition), should I also feel shame at the negative things Chinese Americans have done (Norman Hsu does not seem a source of pride right now) and should I feel ashamed at the past and current human rights atrocities of the Chinese nation? I mean, their treatment of the Dalai Lama, for one, doesn't seem like something to be proud of. What does ethnic pride look like exactly, in this day and age when ethnic essentialism seems to be something of the past.

And pushing this further, can I be proud to be Asian American? What does it mean to be Asian American? I've always maintained that this is a political category--a racial category that is socially constructed, as all racial categories are. It clearly has meaning and functions as a reality marker for many of us since we have been living with the reality of "race" throughout the last 3 centuries of the founding and solidification of the U.S. as a world empire. And yet, all leading researchers point to the fact that race is an invention--a social fabrication without a basis in genetics--without a basis in blood. And while we can't shrug off the social construction (I can't just tell people race is imaginary and therefore I'm not Asian American) the thing I'm struggling with currently is: beyond politics, beyond being a means for political and social enfranchisement and a place for righting wrongs and fighting against injustice, what does it mean to be Asian American?

Any thoughts?

Poor Man, Rich Man

I spent this past weekend in the mountains, and there are some brief observations I wanted to make:

*Because it has been so dry and so warm, the leaves hadn't really turned color yet.

*I saw very few people of color the entire 3 days I was in the mountains, but unlike my trip to West Virginia, I did not feel racially paranoid, at least it wasn't acute. I'm not exactly sure why, perhaps I am more comfortable in my own home state or perhaps people weren't staring at me the way they were in West Virginia (and I was once again with my white Southern boyfriend, so we again comprised an inter-racial couple but really, we noticed nary an askance glance)

*The class/economic polarization and disparity is very marked. We drove through the countryside and saw small farmsteads and trailer homes--indications of rural life and poverty. And about a half hour later we came upon a boutique town that sported views of one of the ugliest condominium sites on the top of a mountaintop (part of a ski resort), golf condos, and a private air strip complete with a few jets parked amidst the lush greenery of the mountainsides, with million+ dollar homes in the background. All of this struck me, somehow, as obscene.

*Aside from the natural landscape and beauty of the mountains, the towns, for the most part, resembled one another in terms of the similarity of shops and restaurants and things to do in the town, itself. Some towns catered more to tourists. Some catered more to wealthy out-of-towners, some to college students, some to hippies. But we basically went from one downtown to another, shopping at similar stores, until it struck me that aside from the detours to the natural surroundings, we were basically taking a shopping tour of the mountains--and that also felt obscene, so we stopped.

That's all my observations for now. The poverty and the wealth is what is going to stick with me the most--the class disparity. Because it just seemed wrong. I know that I should not begrudge people their private wealth, but the conspicuous consumption of it, against the backdrop of people really struggling to make a living, just seemed disturbing.

Womb for Hire

A friend of mine told me about an Oprah Winfrey show (air date: 10/9/07) about surrogacy, specifically a white American couple who hired an Indian woman to be the surrogate for their egg&sperm (unclear why woman can't carry the baby to term--and I didn't watch the show).

For a description of the Oprah show, click here:

My friend was very upset about the repercussions of all of this--the exploitation of women's bodies in developing nations (yet another instance of outsourcing to India?), the racial aspects of a relatively wealthy white American couple hiring an Indian woman living in poverty, the premium on biology and birth over adoption (and transracial adoption especially), and just the overall problematics of commercial surrogacy--especially when these Indian women, who all have children of their own (a condition of their being surrogates is they have to have a proven track record of successful fertility and birth) must leave behind their children and live in a "surrogacy center" in another part of India until they have the babies for their hired Moms. Apparently there were a few Indian women they brought to Oprah's show and they actually cried when they talked about being away from their children.

I did a little digging and commercial surrogacy is apparently against public policy in India but not technically illegal (here's the abstract written by an Indian law professor). And I also found a chatboard (for families adopting babies from Guatemala) and according to one poster, commercial surrogacy is illegal in many countries.

I hope someone is doing research on this. What is particularly disturbing to me are the comments on the Oprah discussion board about this topic. It just seems that NO ONE is really disturbed at the implications of hiring out another woman's womb--and doing it for commercial profit. And more specifically than just the issue of surrogacy (which, I have to say I have less of a problem with, within an American context--perhaps because of the choices we, as Americans, have) is that it seems like it's predominantly white European and American couples hiring Indian women--the first world imposing on the third, a colonizing of the womb. The lack of examination of privilege--white privilege, American privilege, and the privileging of biological children--whether birthed by you or not--the privilege of one's genes,the possessiveness this implies...Isn't anyone else disturbed??? Why do we, as Americans, feel so entitled???

And is it just me, or is anyone else reminded of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

The Black Atlantic

Last night as part of a reading group I discussed Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic with a group of grad students and faculty, from various disciplines. And it was a really rich conversation--I mean it was academic (read egghead and chock full of jargon) but it was also provocative and interesting and we challenged each other on our interpretations of the book and about black culture and life in the U.S. and outside of it and the notion of blackness and race and identity and diaspora and comparative work. And about the tension in the particular versus the universal--in wanting to dispel any notions of an essential identity and yet still finding value in collectivities around racial categories. About talking about these issues in the abstract world of letters and the ivory tower and yet also understanding the historical and contextual reality of the dearth of actual black bodies in the academy (and for that matter, Latino, American Indian, and Asian American bodies--and I do mean Asian American and not Asian, and especially in the humanities and social sciences).

And I mention all of this because this morning I woke up and read a news piece about a noose that was found outside the office of an African American faculty member at Columbia University's teacher's college. For more on this piece, see the following links:

WNBC news article

Racialicious's blog post on the incident

What do an elite academic black cultural studies professor's book and a noose at Columbia University have in common? Well, I suppose in the most simplistic way, it means that despite neo-conservatives assertions, we have still not come to grips with the legacy of the middle passage and the transatlantic slave trade. That race does still matter--and that especially the darker your skin, oftentimes the worse you are treated. I'm not trying to rank oppression by that statement, but I will be the first to acknowledge that my experiences as an Asian American woman in the South are significantly different from an African American woman's experiences in the South (or in the nation at large for that matter). Just saying we are over race or beyond race or that we can transcend race does not account for a reality that race, FOR ALL OF US, is a reality we still haven't fully woken up to.

I don't have the space to really do justice to Gilroy's book--it's not perfect, but it is an important work and although it's pitched towards a college crowd, it has important things to say--and important things because they are pitched towards his peers--towards people in the academy who have not thought about the central importance of black studies to modernity and Enlightenment thought. But it doesn't matter if you read Gilroy or you listen to more organic intellectuals--people who don't necessarily have ivy league degrees but whose lived experiences make them more than qualified to talk about the experiences of race and history in the world. Gilroy is actually great about saying this--that jazz and hip hop musicians are also intellectuals and activists and have a message that may reach much farther and be more powerful than any academic work.

Little Buddha or Why Keanu Reeves should not be in this film

I finally got around to seeing the Bernardo Bertolucci film Little Buddha. Bertolucci's big American claim to fame was The Last Emperor, which won an academy award for best film in the late 1980s. Continuing his fascination with all things Asian, Bertolucci made an early 1990s film about an American couple in Seattle who are visited by a group of exiled Tibetan monks who believe that their son, Jesse, is the reincarnation of Lama Dogen, who is also the reincarnation of Sidhartha aka: Buddha.

The film features Bridget Fonda as the troubled white Mom. Rocker-singer Chris Isak as the troubled white Dad. Some Asian (perhaps American) actors as the beatific and wise Buddhist monks. And most inexplicably, Keanu Reeves, who plays Sidhartha through his pre-enlightenment days through his moment when he understands that he is "one" with the universe (ahhh...and how was Keanu to know that he really would be chosen to play "The One" one day).

I watched the film almost solely for the scenes with Keanu, which were all flashback scenes to Sidhartha's life in ancient Nepal. All other actors in these flashback scenes appear to be either South Asian or at the very least Southeast or even East Asian. Except for Keanu, whose skin is darkened and who speaks in this strange Indian accented English--sort've like a softened version of "Apu" on The Simpsons--but I mention Apu because it's almost that stereotypically bad an accent--as in, it's painfully bad.

So I suppose the question is this: Is Keanu in yellowface? Or maybe more accurately, brownface? When he was cast as the Buddha, and was interviewed about the appropriateness of a white man playing the enlightened one, Keanu busted out his Asian credentials and claimed a hapa identity for himself as half Hawaiian-Chinese and therefore uniquely qualified to play an Asian. And yet...watching him, there's something really wrong with his portrayal, and I'm not just talking about the bad acting.

Self Silencing

I've been thinking alot about silence and in particular self silencing and all the various ways that we self-silence: holding your tongue, being afraid to speak truth to power, feeling intimidated into silence, choosing silence in order to let other voices be heard, silence as a goal in itself, and other variants of this nature.

I've been thinking of self-silence because there are sometimes things I choose not to write about in this blog because I know it's public, and especially now that I don't require people to be invited to view this blog, I have no idea who is reading my words and the conclusions they are drawing about me and my work/research and how what I write in this space may or may not have ramifications for the people who comment on this blog, my academic reputation, or the professional and personal affiliations I have.

I have been thinking of self-silence because I have had thoughts about the Duke lacrosse case in Durham and the fall-out of that case and the reaction of the communities in the South and around the nation to this case, and the way it links up to other contemporary racial issues like Jena 6, Clarence Thomas's new book, and even Jimmy Carter's trip (along with other humanitarian representatives) to Sudan. And I know that I am not writing about the Duke Lacrosse case because of the negative experience I had 2 months ago, and it makes me feel like a coward--that I am not speaking truth to power, that I am censoring myself, that I am letting the mass group of (I believe largely) men who sent me hate mail or wrote scathing comments win.

And yet, I also feel like what would be accomplished by inviting another feeding frenzy into this blog space? It's not dialogue that many of what I'll call "the rabble" want--it's blood. Or at least it feels that way to me. And it also takes up so much energy to respond or to even choose not to respond. And it does raise the question of whether the blogosphere is the appropriate medium/venue/forum to have difficult, challenging, and respectful discussions about race from people who don't agree with one another.

Yet, how are we to reach any sort of understanding if we don't try? And why does civil discourse seem so hard to come by, especially surrounding issues of race?

Any thoughts?

Hung on Top

Last night in its third season, Top Chef named Hung (don't know last name--they usually only refer to one another by their first names) the winner of the cooking reality tv show. Hung is a Vietnamese immigrant--his story came out in the penultimate show, when he finally got personal and discussed his motivations for being in the show--as a tribute to his parents: his father escaped from Viet Nam in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, came to the U.S., and eventually brought the rest of the family over, while his mother is credited for teaching Hung how to cook, infusing him with the skills and passion for a life of the kitchen.

Although one would guess that I would be rooting for Hung, I actually was turned off by his personality during the show--he was highly competitive, independent minded, confident to the point of being cocky and arrogant, disdainful of his competitors, often scoffing at how easy a challenge was, and admitted that his strategy was to look out for himself only--that in a regular kitchen he was a team player but that during Top Chef he was in it to win and wasn't interested in helping other contestants.

Yet I wonder how much of my own distaste for him was based on the internalized stereotypes I've imbibed about the way Asian Americans should behave: deferential, communally oriented, humble, self-effacing, and quiet. Hung is none of these things, and I am glad that he IS so confident and sure of himself, as well as being skilled. Although, interestingly enough, one stereotype that was perpetuated on the show was that Hung had technical mastery but no soul or heart (a charge often leveled against Asian and Asian American artists/musicians). I think Hung does have heart and soul and I'm glad that he, along with Yul Kwon, are changing the face of media television, even if briefly, to demonstrate that Asian American men can be strong and confident winners.