Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CUNANAN’S WAKE
FASCINATION, GRAVITY, AND DEEPLY DONE KISS
RICO
HOMECOMING
MELPOMENE TRAGEDY
TWO PARABLES: PARABLE OF THE CAKE
TWO PARABLES: MOON
RED WALL
DOCTOR
THE HULL CASE
DEAD ON ARRIVAL
FORMERLY KNOWN AS BIONIC BOY
SUBMISSION
BABY
WHO’S IRISH?
WAXING THE THING
BECCAH - from COMFORT WOMAN
SEXY
MANGO
AHJUHMA - from NATIVESPEAKER
VOIR DIRE
NO BRUCE LEE
LATE BLOOMER - from WAYLAID
MISTER PORMA
COLD-HEARTED
FOURSCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO
THE MANAGEMENT OF GRIEF
FOLLY
VIDEO
FIESTA OF THE DAMNED
SHIPS IN THE NIGHT
SEPARATION ANXIETY - from AMERICAN SON
IMMIGRATION BLUES - from THE MAN WHO (THOUGHT HE) LOOKED LIKE ROBERT TAYLOR
SURROUNDED BY SLEEP
PAPIER - from GRASS ROOF, TIN ROOF
LIVE-IN COOK - from THE BOOK OF SALT
MS. PAC-MAN RUINED MY GANG LIFE
UNTITLED STORY
EYE CONTACT - an outtake from AMERICAN KNEES
THE BROWN HOUSE
THE KEEPER - from FATHER OF THE FOUR PASSAGES
WHAT IF MISS NIKKEI WERE GOD(DESS)?
THAT WAS ALL
A PERSONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
A PERSONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
PENGUIN BOOKS
CHARLIE CHAN IS DEAD 2
At Home in the World
Jessica Hagedorn is an acclaimed novelist and National Book Award nominee, as well as a poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She was born and raised in the Philippines, and moved to the United States in her teens. She is the author of three novels, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, and of Danger and Beauty, a collection of selected poetry and short fiction. Hagedorn is also the editor of the first Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 1993
This revised and updated edition published 2004
Copyright © Jessica Hagedorn, 2004
Preface copyright © Elaine Kim, 2004
All rights reserved
Pages 574-576 constitute an extension to this copyright page.
Publisher’s Note
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Charlie Chan is dead 2 : at home in the world : a new anthology of contemporary Asian
American fiction edited with an introduction by Jessica Hagedorn ; with a preface by
Elaine Kim.
p. cm.
“New, revised edition of Charlie Chan is dead”—Introd.
eISBN : 978-1-101-16151-7
1. American fiction—Asian American authors. 2. American fiction—20th century.
3. American fiction—21st century. 4. Asian Americans—Fiction.
I. Hagedorn, Jessica Tarahata, 1949- II. Charlie Chan is dead.
PS647.A75C484 2004
813’.54080895—dc22 2003058225
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PREFACE
When I was a kid back in the 1940s, I was always asked, “Are you Chinese or Japanese?” as if there could be no other options. There are over sixty different Asian groups in the United States today, from origins as diverse as Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as the islands of Polynesia—each with its own history, language, and culture. Some segments have been in the United States since the 1850s; others arrived only last week.
Asians are now the fastest-growing group in America, with a population projected to increase from eleven million last year to twenty million by 2020. But until quite recently, many Americans considered the United States either a white country or a black-and-white country.ELAINE H. KIM is associate dean of the Graduate Division and professor of Asian American and comparative ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She has written, edited, and coedited such books as Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Issues in Asian American Visual Art, Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writing, Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, East to America: Korean American Life Stories, Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Making Waves: Writings by and About Asian American Women, and Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. She is a founder of Asian Women United of California, the Oakland Korean Community Center, and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. She was born in New York City in 1942, but grew up in the Washington, D.C., area.
Since they really only recognized two possible races and were unaccustomed to thinking of Asians as part of the national human landscape, they could not imagine that an Asian could be American. They saw instead stereotypes and caricatures of sinister villains out to conquer the world, the brute hordes that blindly obey them, and exotic aliens of every description.
Asian Americans have a rich and sometimes troubled history in this country. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed only with the blood and sweat of ten thousand Chinese immigrants. They also built roads, levees, irrigation systems, wine caverns—contributing to the phenomenal increase in the value of Pacific Coast land and, with the development of the railroad and refrigerator cars, American agriculture. By the early 1900s, Japanese Americans, who constituted a minuscule portion of the population, were crucial to the development of the nation’s agriculture, producing up to 90 percent of truck crops on only 450,000 acres of land. The wealth of the country was also increased by Filipino migrant farmworkers, who
moved with the crops from Alaska to Baja California. A segregated Japanese military unit that fought in Europe was the most highly decorated American unit during World War II, even though the young soldiers’ families were being held in prison camps under suspicion of disloyalty to the United States. Individuals also made their mark: not many people know that a century ago, the nectarine was invented by a Korean American farmer or that the Bing cherry was invented by a Chinese American named Bing.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of America as a nation of immigrants did not include Asians or Latinos but had to do with Europe and the other side of the Atlantic. Historically, Asian immigrants were viewed as apart from white America. They were denied by law the right to become naturalized citizens, to own land, to intermarry; they were confined to segregated jobs and residential areas, and sometimes murdered, lynched, run out of town, or set adrift on the ocean.
Early Asian Americans worked together to challenge racism and social injustice. Chinese Americans fought every piece of racist legislation against them, sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court. And there were many: ordinances against laundries, laws against long hair, laws requiring a certain amount of cubic feet of air per Chinese person, a tax on being Chinese, laws against getting business licenses, laws against attending schools with whites or testifying against whites in court, laws against intermarriages, laws prohibiting Chinese from owning land, and, of course, laws against Chinese immigration or naturalization. Likewise, Japanese Americans participated in a long and ultimately successful legal battle for redress, reparations, and publicity about their unlawful internment during World War II. Filipino Americans built a spectacular labor movement that organized the poorest and most disenfranchised migrant agricultural workers in coalition with Mexican Americans from the 1930s through the 1960s. Among the many positive results of this is safer produce for everyone because of United Farm Workers’ efforts to protect farmworkers from harmful pesticides.
Since the Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated national-origin quotas, there has been a new wave of Asian immigration that has increased the importance of learning about this diversity as a basic component of what it means to be American.
Unlike the earlier Asian immigrants, the newcomers are coming as families with the intention of settling down in America. About one-third are professionals, and the rest belong to the working class. Some have come looking for economic betterment. Others have fled unstable political and economic conditions in their homelands. Today, Asian workers continue to play a crucial and ever-increasing role in the food service industry as well as the garment industry. More than one-third of Silicon Valley’s engineers are Asian American. Many small businesses across the country are operated by Asian immigrants, such as Korean dry cleaners, South Asian hotels and motels, Vietnamese nail salons, and Cambodian doughnut shops.
The enormous differences between Hmong refugees and fourth-generation Japanese Americans whose families have been in this country longer than many white Americans show us the diversity of Asian America. There is dramatic contrast between the more established Japanese and Chinese Americans and the Southeast Asian refugee communities. For every Asian American with an annual income of $75,000 or more, there is another making less than $10,000 a year. And while more than a third of all Asian Americans have at least a college degree, another 23 percent of those over twenty-five have less than a high school diploma. For every scientist or engineer, there is another making less than minimum wage.
In 2003, there were lots of activities going on to celebrate the Korean American centennial. I think it’s fitting for us to settle on 1903, the year the first shipload of Korean immigrant sugar plantation workers landed in Hawaii, for several reasons. First, it places working class people at the center of the picture. Though the Korean immigrants to Hawaii were from a variety of backgrounds, almost all of them ended up in hard labor as sugar plantation workers. Because of racial barriers, many Korean Americans were unable to move into a wider range of work until the 1970s. Second, it reminds us of the importance of ethnic coalition. Koreans were deliberately recruited as strikebreakers by the planters, who wanted to halt Japanese plantation workers’ demand for equal wages with whites. They kept workers in ethnically segregated work camps, but they could not prevent collaboration. The Japanese and Filipinos worked together to press for equal pay in spectacular strikes in 1909 and 1920, and by World War II the International Long-shore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Hawaii was the model of multiracial labor organizing in the whole country. Finally, when we talk about assimilation, we usually think in terms of nonwhite people disappearing like raindrops into what we see as the ocean of mainstream white European American society. But this has not been the case in Hawaii. And, to my mind, Hawaii still remains a refreshingly working class kind of culture.
My grandmother somehow arrived in Hawaii around 1903 to work on the sugar plantations. She was apparently accompanied by my mother, who was an infant. My grandmother told my mother that she had left Korea because her husband, supposedly my grandfather, was a gambling man who had become angry at my mother’s crying and had thrown a blanket over her. This, according to my grandmother’s story, almost smothered her last living baby, since her supposed other children had all died already. In desperation, she told my mother, she grabbed her baby and stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii.
I think that my mother believed this story all her life. But after I grew up and started reading about Korean history, I could see how impossible it was for an illiterate rural woman to leave Korea alone or with an infant in 1903 to travel thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to a place she knew nothing about and where she could not speak a word of the language.
After reading Korean history and studying gender relations in Korea, I know that at least in the past most women couldn’t leave husbands even if they were drunks, gamblers, and wife-beaters who brought home second wives and children from other women. And if wives ran away, they certainly didn’t take their children with them. As for the story of the husband who threw a blanket on the last remaining baby—well, she probably said that so my mother would believe that she emigrated for her sake. That’s a trick today’s immigrant parents still use on their children to make us feel guilty and study harder: “I came here to suffer because of you.”
What could the real story be? My mother looked like a mixed-race person, though she always thought of herself as Korean. I wondered: perhaps my grandmother was seduced or raped by a Russian soldier during the Russo-Japanese War. What would have happened to such a woman in Korea in 1903? If her situation were desperate enough, maybe she would take a chance when she heard about the ship bound for Hawaii. After all, aren’t most immigrants to America unusual people, not just people with courage and a pioneering spirit but also people with a past from which they are escaping?
Unlike my mother, my father came from a landowning family. I have often marveled at how social classes that would never mix in the old country could mingle and marry in the New World. My father came to the United States as a foreign student in 1926, two years after complete exclusion of immigrants from Asia. He remained a student until World War II, when he was finally able to get a green card for working for the U.S. State Department against Japan. Not permitted to be naturalized for so many decades, he refused to become a U.S. citizen even after the law allowed it. When we traveled to Korea together, I would breeze through with my U.S. passport and then wait and wait for him to get through the line with his Korean passport. He lived sixty-three years in the United States and my mother lived here all her life, but they are buried in Korea because my father wanted to be there. After they died, I had the heartbreaking task of going through their belongings. Though their lives spanned continents and centuries, all that was left were some photographs of people I didn’t know, some papers I couldn’t read, and many harassing letters from the INS, which they kept for many years. That was almost the sum total, the proof of their American life.
Like som
e other Korean families of his time, my father’s family is scattered across the globe. I have six cousins in South Korea, five cousins in North Korea, and five cousins in mainland China, most of whom have never met each other because the U.S. and the USSR had divided Korea in half and prevented movement between capitalist and Communist countries. My father went to Japan and on to the United States to study. His older brother went to China to fight in the resistance around the time of Japanese annexation. His younger sister became a Communist and went to North Korea to live in 1945. His younger brother was the only one who stayed in South Korea. This summer, I expect some cousins from Seoul, South Korea, and one cousin from Tientsin, China, to visit me in California. The cousins from Seoul speak only Korean. The cousin from China speaks only Mandarin. And I of course speak mostly English.
America is filled with people whose histories have deep and complicated roots. Their stories give us alternative views to the grand narrative of Western European progress, modernization, and enlightenment. Often, they directly contradict the fictions the United States tells about itself as a nation as benevolent abroad and inclusive at home. Especially for the racialized immigrant, moving to America brings opportunity for material comfort and liberating anonymity. But it also involves great pain and loss that must be recognized and acknowledged. Asian immigrant subjects are formed through racialization in the United States and colonialism, neocolonial capitalism, and imperialist wars in Asia. Their memories, histories, and experiences tell us a story quite different from the Hollywood versions of U.S. heroism that saved their homelands and adopted their orphans.
How many people in the United States are aware that one-sixth of the population of Luzon, the Philippines, was exterminated in the American attempt to put down the popular resistance during the Spanish-American War? How many people know that during the Korean War, U.S. bombs killed two to four million Korean people and burned to the ground every city, every village, every hut in northern and central Korea in an aerial war that presaged this year’s attack on Iraq? Or that General Douglas MacArthur wanted to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea, creating a “belt of radioactive cobalt” across the Korean Peninsula that would destroy anything that crossed it for ten generations? How many people have been told that the United States dumped two million tons of bombs on Laos—more than got dropped on Japan and Germany combined during all of World War II, making Laos the most bombed country per capita in the history of warfare? Or that twelve thousand villagers in Laos have been killed since 1973 because the estimated “dud rate” of 30 percent has left ten million unexploded bombs in Laotian soil?
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