Asian American Anger in Literature
One of my biggest concerns about Asian-American culture, especially those of large enclaves, is a lack of racial consciousness. Over the last few years with an increase in media representation, the advent of Subtle Asian Traits, and the spotlight on anti-Asian hate crimes, this has certainly improved. However, much of the narrative portrays Asian Americans as victims or trauma survivors, not agents demanding change. In the African American context for example, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Twenty Years a Slave, and The Colour Purple portray black people as victims of a cruel society, whereas Black Panther, The Fire Next Time and Invisible Man portray them instead as crusaders, imagining what a reformed society could be like.
This is an important distinction to make; one is a cry for help, the other is a call to arms. In an indifferent world, no one will help someone outside of their tribe. It is ultimately up to a disadvantaged group to uplift themselves rather than seek help from power structures that are benefiting from their oppression. Hence, I was happy to have read several Asian-American pieces in 2021 that are angry as opposed to sad, a yell as opposed to a whimper. In the order that I read them, they are Minor Feelings, Interior Chinatown, and Free Food for Millionaires.
Cathy Hong Park’s Minor Feelings is a collection of essays about her Asian American experience. It is subtitled: “An Asian American Reckoning”. Quite inappropriately, my first reaction after reading it was “wow, she sounds pretty mad.” But she is mad, and rightfully so. Within, she recounts stories from her life, all tinted with racism, including her complex friendships, artistic endeavours, and career challenges. Within these essays, she not only bluntly illustrates how her American experience is inextricably tied together with race and the negative emotions it made her feel, but also finishes with criticism of American society and avenues of change.
Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a novel in the postmodernist tradition, making it difficult to provide a succinct plot summary. The protagonist is an actor named Willis Wu, also referred to as Generic Asian Man. He is stuck playing stock Asian American roles on a detective soap, aspiring to become the lead Asian actor in the soap, Kung Fu Guy. It’s clear when the camera is rolling because these scenes are written in screenplay format. What isn’t clear, is his life outside of acting. It seems as though he also lives the character he plays, living in run-down SRO building in Chinatown, associating with stock Chinatown characters: his real life is almost it’s what his character would do during the time offscreen.
The novel presents a great deal of explicit and implicit commentary about various parts of the Asian American experience: Asian-Black conflict, interracial relationships, stereotypes of Asian men and women, and complex family relationships. However, the overall feeling is one of being stuck. Stuck in the byzantine network that is Chinatown values, expectations, and roles, unable to break into mainstream society as a whole. There is also being stuck in the caricatures that media assigns to Asian Americans; these are so interwoven within Asian American identity that it is impossible for the reader to tell when Willis Wu is playing Generic Asian Man, or when he’s simply just another Background Oriental Male.
Min Jin Lee’s Free Food For Millionaires is a beachy read about a poor young woman named Casey with nothing but her wits and her sense of style, striving to remain in the upper-crust society that she had been educated in. The novel dazzles with glimpses of New York luxuries, detailed description, and interesting characters. This story, of course, has been told in many different settings and many different characters, but never with an Asian American woman as a lead. That this novel was able to find success in the aughts, prior to any sort of Asian American consciousness, any demand for Asian American representation, is a testament to Lee’s writing.
Though often eschewed in favour of her inter-generational epic, Pachinko, I am glad I read her debut novel first, because Pachinko would not have driven me to read Free Food for Millionaires. And although it’s easy to dismiss a novel centered a fashionable young woman trying to make her mark on a big city, it is all the much harder when the novel is centered around a cultural minority. However, Casey’s issues aren’t explicitly tied to her Asian identity. Sure, a majority of the characters are Asian American, and there is some internal monologue about her feelings, but the same story could have happened to anyone with a blue collar background; it is not trauma porn.
Yet the story is also an Asian American story. Korean words are thrown in here and there, the reader receives a crash course on Korean culture, and there are racial tensions. One of the most jarring is the disdain one of the characters, Ted, has for both partners in an Asian female, white male relationship. It is simultaneously a protest against Asians who worship whites, and whites who fetishize Asians. It’s an interesting choice to include, as it had the potential to alienate not only readers, but publishers. But this sentiment does exist within the Asian American community. Like Cathy Hong Park, Casey rallies against the system, against the people who stereotype her, against the people born into wealth, against the people who seek to use her. She is proud, never accepting charity or bowing her head; in short, an Asian American heroine fighting against her prescribed role in the world.
To some degree, art imitates life and life imitates art simultaneously. Art can represent the unrealized, unspoken, and unachievable dreams that people have. But a shred of those dreams need to exist for that art to exist. Art also propagates these dreams into the wider consciousness, redefining the limits of possibility, and how people see themselves. That’s why widespread meaningful representation is important, despite it feeding the powers that be.
So, reading books depicting Asian Americans as opinionated and determined, doggedly taking on the system and winning is importantly. It is a wake-up call to Asian Americans everywhere, showing them what others are doing, and that it’s possible for them to do the same. This becomes a feedback loop where these dreams inspire actions and change, which inspires even greater dreams. And just as importantly, it is indicative that a subset are already angry, angry enough to write about it.
