The U.S. national narrative disavows that fact of American military, economic, and cultural colonization in Asia, from which Asian immigration directly emerges as the displaced and dislocated migrate to the very imperial center that disrupted their lives. The immigrant who wishes to close the chasm between herself and U.S. culture is obliged to leave by the door memories that contradict the story that America tells about itself. Finding a place in mainstream American life can mean denying her own history, for she must not recall what the United States as a nation seeks to forget, including the very existence of a U.S. imperialist project in her homeland as well as her own lived experiences of abjection and discrimination in the United States.
A history like the history of my family had no relevance at all when I was growing up in the United States. It was as if I had been dropped here from another planet. Schoolchildren in the United States still learn world history, as I did, with everything beginning in Greece and Rome. Sometimes, when thinking about today’s Korean American communities, I also feel like an outsider. I have no extended family here and I don’t go to church. My parents were unable to ever find work commensurate or even related to their education. Even I, who finished my Ivy League education one year before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, could only find work as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant, though I graduated with straight A’s and was president of my class.
What ties Asian Americans of today to those of my day? Is it really true that race discrimination is a thing of the past, that now everyone can make it to the American dream, if they just agree to be good and work hard enough? I think that two threads connect us. One is exploitation of immigrant labor for maximization of profit for the captains of U.S. industry. The other is racialization of Korean and other Asian immigrants as outsiders to U.S. culture.
Linguistically and racially at odds with the United States’ image of itself, Asians in the United States have traditionally been seen as eternal aliens. Today, Asians continue to be the object of law; there is an obsession to identify us by classification along a continuum from alien to citizen: as legal or illegal, U.S.-born or permanent resident, to manage the corrupting “foreignness” in the middle of America. In my grandmother’s day, the labor was on sugar plantations and in fruit orchards. The racialization as outsiders meant being barred by law from immigration, citizenship, and intermarriage as well as from owning land or living in most neighborhoods or frequenting most restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and barbershops. Now, it’s highly trained professionals and technicians underemployed in service sector, small business, and technology industry work. And being thought of as an eternal foreigner today means being told you can’t use your native language, being rendered invisible or represented as the evil enemy in the mass media, being suspected of spying, or being killed for the way you look. Really, Asians in the United States are distanced from U.S. culture either as the “yellow peril” taking over everything or as “model minorities” whose “successes” assure us that racism has been replaced by meritocracy and only laziness and inability hold back the black and brown.
The “model minority” stereotype conveniently ignores the fact that Asians usually have to have much more education and work much longer and harder than white Americans for the same outcomes. Or that Asian Americans pay a heavy price in terms of what they are obliged to give up or trade in for a place in U.S. society. Or that out of plain view is a multitude of immigrants from all over Asia in low-wage, low-mobility jobs in cleaning and food service; part-time and split-shift factory work in sewing, meatpacking, and electronics assembly; and prostitution.
How much have things changed since the old days? The students in my literature class this semester were born in the early 1980s. Still, I am amazed at how familiar their stories are. Min Chu, nineteen, who grew up in San Francisco, wrote:Third grade traumatized me. My white teacher was a racist. She never called on me and always put me in groups with people who couldn’t speak English, though I spoke as well as anyone in the class. She treated my Mom like she was an alien from Mars. I would never go back to the third grade.
Another student, Susan K. Lee, nineteen, remembered excelling in English in Asia and then entering sixth grade in New Jersey: As one of a handful of Asian girls in the school, I was tortured. I was called names like “chink” and “smarty-pants.” Classmates asked “why do your eyes look like that?” and “how come your face is shaped that way?”
Daniel Hur, twenty-one, a student from Southern California, wondered if signs of Asian immigrant “success” might obscure something ominous beneath:It’s hard for me to believe that my dad . . . used to ride his bike randomly up and down Jefferson Boulevard in search of work. I cannot really picture my mother working in a huge sewing factory either. I was seven when we moved to a nicer neighborhood, and I figured that my family and most of my relatives were doing quite well. But when my uncle was 60 [and] was shot to death in the east L.A. deli where he worked, I realized that our being here in America is still highly problematic and that the struggle never really ends.
My students have dreams for the future that are not all about money and nice neighborhoods. As Julie Carl, nineteen, put it:I live in a country that never considers me American, even though I was born here. My identity is being able to play a role in creating a safe, multi-racial, multi-cultural America. Not in that phony-politicians-looking-for-minority-votes way, but so that the concerns of every minority (racialized, gendered, poor, or of a different sexual orientation than most) get a legitimate forum. After all, my parents taught me that making waves is a good thing.
These students want to see themselves and other “minorities” in history and in literature.
As a rule, I think that when we read literature, we can enjoy and appreciate it all the more by learning as much as possible about social and historical context, without charging the cultural with the burden of representing, reflecting, or expressing the social and historical, which after all include aesthetic practices. Of course, we would be making a mistake to focus on what is being said so much that we neglect how it is being said, since in the best work the what and the how are entwined. Indeed, looking at formal issues in Asian American literature and art very often reveals an aesthetic of disidentification that critiques representational modes like realism and naturalism as well as the concept of autonomous art separated from material conditions.
In my view, it is important to remember that Asian American artists write into a politics of representation that includes a long history of Orientalism in Western high and popular cultures. Assumptions about immigrant subjectivities and experiences are often rooted in notions of Western superiority. The underlying “truth” in Asian immigrant narratives in American literature has been the teleology of “progress” from Asia to America. Amy Tan’s immigrant Chinese women escape the hell of Chinese misogyny into the paradise of American gender equality. Whether or not Maxine Hong Kingston meant The Woman Warrior to be the story of the coming of age of a Chinese American who emerges from the superstition-ridden ghost world of Chinese immigrants into the American world where floodlights are shone into dark corners, readers are conditioned to see “progress” from savagery to civilization. This helps explain the eagerness with which American publishers welcome novels about women escaping the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian “killing fields,” the war-torn and chaotic Philippines or Vietnam, where women are supposedly killed for bearing mixed-race children or children out of wedlock, into the freedom and happiness of American life.
Asian American writers from the 1920s to the present have been encouraged by mainstream publishers and readers to function as a “cultural bridge” or a “bridge between two worlds,” between “here” and “there,” between the United States and Asia, between the West and the East, between American child and immigrant parent. This expectation presupposes a duality between two poles, eliding the inequality between them—for the fundamental and self-congratulatory supposition is
that the “here” is always far better than the “there.” No matter that the Asian American struggles not between two worlds but among at least three: mainstream America, imagined/remembered/revisited Asia, and the Asian American community that the other two sides do not acknowledge. No one expects Italian Americans, Greek Americans, or even Mexican Americans to serve as “bridges” or “cultural go betweens,” because Italian, Greek, and Mexican Americans are not viewed as eternally alien.
The work in this volume refuses the go-between, interpreter, bridge role. Instead, it mounts a critique of the kinds of totalizing representations that ultimately only describe the dominant. The writers here unearth buried stories that upend common assumptions about color, culture, and sexuality with unexpected voicings from unexpected locations. Together they show how very diverse Asian Americans are, in terms of ethnic and social class backgrounds and perspectives.
For many Americans, the most visible symbol of today’s “new (and newly successful) Asian American” is the deracinated female news anchor. In general female news anchors are a homogeneous-looking-and -sounding lot, and Asian American female television news reporters are actively encouraged to look as much like the ever-familiar Connie Chung as possible. According to her interview in the documentary Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film, San Francisco news anchor Emerald Yeh’s station fiddled with her hair and makeup until satisfied that she better approximated Chung, with what my students call “the plastic Asian Barbie doll look.”
Even if an occasional character in At Home in the World bears some superficial resemblance to the Asian news anchor, concert pianist/violinist, or figure skater in the American popular imagination, readers might be surprised by what goes on inside that Barbie doll-like head. There are no “model minorities” here, but rather people of all kinds whose idiosyncratically raced and gendered views of the world are not often found in the American cultural arena. These are people with a past, people from both here and now and there and then who remember and dream about other worlds that have been subject to national forgetting. Their version of history requires them to be disobedient, rebellious, and unfaithful to the national narrative of American identity and viewpoint.
In these stories, we visit other terrains and other times: Sabina Murray’s Indonesia, Ginu Kamani’s India, and Linh Dinh’s Vietnam. In Monique Truong’s 1930s French village, everyone gapes at Binh, the “asiatique” live-in cook who accompanies Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on their sojourns in the Rhône Valley, where he knows he is regarded as “the sideshow freak.” In “Mango,” Christian Langworthy shows us American soldiers through the eyes of a prostitute’s children during the Vietnam War.
We consider news headlines from new vantage points. In Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief,” we see the well-meaning but culturally ignorant angrezi social worker through the eyes of an Indian Canadian woman widowed when an Air India flight is bombed. In “Cunanan’s Wake,” Gina Apostol imagines a close relative of Andrew Cunanan’s in the Philippines who wants to arrange a memorial service for him.
In “Red Wall,” Sara Chin’s Chinese American sound technician realizes that Jill, the British-born filmmaker she has accompanied to China, has already determined what the “story” will be. Jill is unable to see or hear the life all around her, and we are tantalized by what might have been revealed had the narrator been allowed to “open up [the] film.”
Jill . . . wanted a face that told it all. I thought she had it, many faces. Big, fat, thin, and small . . . But what she wanted was something we couldn’t give her. The way she saw it, the face that told it all had to be a particular face . . . All I had to do was hold out my microphone and listen. Listen for the past to percolate up out of people . . . I used a . . . microphone that easily picked up half-digested meals, ill-cooked thoughts. Can you say that again? I would have to interrupt to get it right, a clean recording. It was my job to stand watch over memory, roll my tape out before it like a red carpet. I didn’t have to worry about facts or truth. I could ponder other things. Things closer to my heart . . . Jill had to get the big picture, but I could indulge in the small moments . . . Jill needed to march straight through to her conclusion. . . . I loved the low ground, the things that people pushed offstage, the gossip, the dirt. I was looking for the heart, the trashy heart of history. After all, wasn’t that where the unknown leaped out at you?
The artists in this collection give us another way of looking, a different take, as they remember and create history from occluded viewpoints that challenge both the textbook and the Hollywood versions. In Han Ong’s “Fiesta of the Damned,” a middle-aged Filipino American “failure” named Roger Caracera is on his way back to the Philippines to bury his father. On the same flight are American actors on their way to make a war film. Caracera knows that for them, Third World locales are conflated as jungle backdrops for the enactment of American manhood. Ultimately, we realize that Caracera’s “failure” is actually his success in becoming a “ ‘No, boss’ contrarian . . . unobliging, unrepentant.”
These writers are “at home in the world” in the sense that they are not involved in an “identity” movement in search of cultural roots. At the same time, they are never quite “at home in the world”—thus their artistic attempts to disobediently claim and articulate the “trashy heart of history.”
Elaine H. Kim
Oakland, California
March 2003
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Christine Bacareza Balancé for her excellent editorial assistance and critical insights. A big thanks, once again, to Elaine H. Kim for another kick-ass essay. My gratitude also extends to Quang Bao of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Cynthia Gehrig of the Jerome Foundation, R.Z. Linmark, and Jan Schaefer for turning me on to several exciting new writers and stories I might have overlooked. Thanks of course to my editor, Jane Von Mehren, to Brett Kelly, Barbara Campo, and the team at Penguin Books. Last but not least, maraming salamat to my agent, Harold Schmidt.
INTRODUCTION
TEN YEARS AFTER: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD
The original title for this anthology was inspired by the yellow-face movie detective Charlie Chan, a character created in 1925 by a white man named Earl Derr Biggers. In those creaky black-and-white film series of the thirties and forties, Charlie Chan was always played by white actors made up to look “chinky”—hair slicked back, taped eyelids, long, wispy, sinister mustaches. For some weird reason, the secondary character of Charlie’s “Number One Son” was always cast with an actual Asian American actor. Nowadays, while Asians may be cast as Asians on the big screen, the only characters they are relegated to portraying are of the kung-fu fighting, tiger-crouching, hip-hop variety.
Ingrained in American popular culture, Charlie Chan is as much a part of the legacy of cultural stereotypes that continues to haunt, frustrate, and—dare I say it?—sometimes inspire us. Fu Manchu. The bucktoothed, apelike Jap wielding his bayonet. The cunning Dragon Lady. Tokyo Rose. The Placid Geisha. The indolent Filipino House-boy. The Model Minority. Miss Saigon, tragic victim/whore of war-torn Vietnam. Weeping. Giggling, bowing, and scraping. Sexually available, eager to deceive or to please. As of 2003, you can add these stereotypes to the list: the belligerent Korean Grocer, the goofy Japanime Geek, and the campy, innocuous “Charlie’s Angel.” I must confess to a soft spot for kick-ass, kung-fu fightin’ mamas, no matter how preposterous and absurd. Is Charlie Chan really dead? Probably not. According to the critic and scholar David Eng, Charlie’s merely in a coma.
The 1993 Charlie Chan Is Dead anthology was created out of a need. As I said in my introduction to that first edition, “This is an anthology I created for selfish reasons; a book I wanted to read that had never been available to me.” In the postwar Philippines of my childhood, I was educated in the literature and the ways of the Western world. Though we were also taught a few classics of Tagalog literature, the colonization of our imagination wa
s, as I wrote in 1993, relentless and hard to shake off. I arrived in the United States in 1963—a displaced teenager, largely ignorant of the turbulent history and contributions of Asian Americans and other people of color in this country. I was Filipino American, yes. But what did that mean? I had no idea that Filipinos were exploited as cheap farm labor in places like Watsonville, Salinas, and Stockton; that they were firebombed and run out of town throughout the Western states by angry mobs that were threatened by loss of jobs; that Filipinos were once forbidden to marry white women, harassed openly, and even lynched for being involved with them. I was unaware of the signs that were prominently hung in California public establishments as recently as the 1930s: NO FILIPINOS AND NO DOGS ALLOWED. Unfortunately, these painful but illuminating bits of history were not part of either my early Philippine or later U.S. schooling.
There was one thing I always knew: I wanted to be a writer. I came from a family of voracious readers, art lovers, and storytellers. My dream of one day becoming a writer was encouraged. But what kind of stories and whose would I end up telling? How would I find my voice? In his eloquent and insightful Letters to a Young Novelist, the Latin American writer Mario Vargas Llosa asks, “What is the origin of this early inclination, the source of the literary vocation, for inventing beings and stories? The answer, I think, is rebellion. I’m convinced that those who immerse themselves in the lucubration of lives different from their own demonstrate indirectly their rejection and criticism of life as it is, of the real world, and manifest their desire to substitute for it the creations of their imaginations and their dreams.”
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