Yet there are those who argue that American literature must toe some sort of political line, and if you disagree with them, it’s not easy to parry with your own arguments. For one thing, anytime you talk about ethnicity, you are in danger of tripping over terminology and landing in the battleground called racism. In the unstable arena of ethnicity and race, there is no common language everyone agrees on. It’s hard enough for me to determine what ethnic descriptors I use for myself. Do I refer to myself as a Chinese-American writer, an ethnic writer, a minority writer, a Third World writer, a writer of color? From person to person, and particularly writer to writer, these terms carry different emotional and political weight.
If I had to give myself any sort of label, I would have to say I am an American writer. I am Chinese by racial heritage. I am Chinese-American by family and social upbringing. But I believe that what I write is American fiction by virtue of the fact that I live in this country and my emotional sensibilities, assumptions, and obsessions are largely American. My characters may be largely Chinese-American, but I think Chinese-Americans are part of America.
As an aside, I must admit that “writer of color” is an expression I personally dislike, since, in terms of color, Chinese people have always been referred to as yellow, the color associated with cowardice, jaundice, bananas, Ping the Duck, and the middle-class Marvin Gardens in Monopoly. I’d much prefer a term such as “colorful writer,” which seems to refer more to the writing itself. Or how about “writer of a different flavor”? Cuisine is probably a much closer indicator of differences in literary tastes than skin color. “Writer of color” is also an exclusionary term—you’re not a member if your skin is too pale, and yet you face perhaps the same problems as a writer if you’re Armenian-American or gay or lesbian or a woman. Whatever we minorities are called, as the result of common experiences, both bad and humorous, we often have an affinity with one another. We are segregated in the same ways.
Consider book reviews. More often than not, if a book is by an Asian-American writer, an Asian-American is assigned by the newspaper or magazine editor to review it. On the surface, this appears to make sense: an Asian-American reviewer may be more sensitive to the themes and meanings of the book—never mind that the reviewer is an academic in history, not a fiction writer, and possibly not even a fiction reader. But a reviewer who is thus qualified may dwell more on the historical relevance and accuracy of the book than on its literary merits—the language, the characters, the imagery, and the storytelling qualities that seduce the reader into believing the tale is true. The review may be favorable, but it casts the book outside the realm of literature.
And woe to you if the Asian-American reviewer champions both ethnic correctness and marginalism, and believes your fiction should not depict violence, sexual abuse, mixed marriages, superstitions, Chinese as Christians, or mothers who speak in broken English. “Using the mother to tell of her life in China,” said one reviewer, “has deprived Tan of the full resources and muscularity of the native English-language speaker.” I might have replied to that reviewer, “Exactly, and I did so because my own mother has long been deprived of telling her story, this story, because she lacked those native English-language skills.”
Reviews have also done much to reinforce the idea that any book by an Asian-American writer is part of the same genre. If two or more books by Asian-American writers are published around the same time, more likely than not the book review editor will assign those books to be reviewed simultaneously by one reviewer. More likely than not the reviewer will compare the books, even if they have nothing in common except for the fact that they are written by Asian-Americans. Gus Lee’s China Boy is compared with Gish Jen’s Typical American, David Wong Louie’s Pangs of Love with Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, and so forth. The underlying message to the reader: These books are similar, but one book is better than the other, pick only one. Some reviewers tend to reduce the books to the most obvious and general abstractions: the themes of immigration and assimilation. They overlook the specifics of narrative detail, language, and imagery that make the story and the characters unlike any that have been written before.
I was talking about this trend to a friend of mine, a reporter who writes on literary matters and wears the badge of realist. He said that we writers shouldn’t complain. “Any attention is valuable. You can’t demand attention. If you receive any, you should be grateful for what you get, good or bad, lumped together or not.
“The new writers,” he went on, “would never get that kind of attention, unless they were grouped together for an angle. The media need an angle. Culture is the angle. A new wave in Asian-American literature is the angle. They are not going to feature the writers separately as the next Joyce Carol Oates or the next Raymond Carver. They’re not going to devote column inches to talking about the beauty of their prose, the cleverness of their characterization. That’s not topical. That’s not interesting.
“And as to books’ being compared one to another, there’s a rational argument for that. Readers do the same thing. They categorize and compare. They ask themselves, ‘Do I want to read a mystery or a book about China? Old China or modern China? Mothers and daughters or warlords and evil empresses?’
“Consider yourself lucky,” my friend advised.
I have been lucky in this regard. Nowadays, I’m told, my books are usually reviewed alone, and not alongside other books by Asian-American writers. More often than not, my books are reviewed by fiction writers who may or may not be Asian-Americans. They are writers or reviewers of fiction, first and foremost. And thus they discuss the relative literary merits and faults of my books and don’t focus exclusively on Chinese customs, superstitions, and positive role models. For that I am enormously grateful.
Nonetheless, I still get the occasional review that categorically lumps me with other writers purely on the basis of race or culture. Here is what a daily New York Times reviewer had to say about The Kitchen God’s Wife:
It competes unsuccessfully with novels like Malcolm Bosse’s [The] Warlord, Gary Jenning’s Journeyer, and the works of James Clavell, Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior and China Men, Bette Bao Lord in Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic, and Nien Cheng in Life and Death in Shanghai, [which] have covered similar territory in greater depth.
I mentioned this to Bette Bao Lord, and we both found ourselves asking out loud: “What’s been covered before? China? Suffering? Mothers? Death? Hope? Love? Pain?” I wasn’t disagreeing with the reviewer’s conclusion—those other books he cited might have been better—but what, exactly, was the basis of the comparison? And why was The Warlord on the list? After this review, I made it a policy not to read reviews of my books.
I’d had unfavorable reviews before, but this one struck me as—dare I say the word?—racist. The point is, minority writers tend to be perceived as different from their white colleagues. Our responsibilities are supposedly more specific.
No wonder, then, that I am frequently asked questions about “the responsibility of the writer.” The assumption is that the writer—any writer—by virtue of being published, has a responsibility to the reader. According to this ethic, the writer’s musing, his or her imagination and delight in the world of make-believe, must be tamed and shaped by a higher consciousness of how the work will be interpreted—or rather, misinterpreted—by its readers. God forbid that a reader in some remote Texas hamlet believe that all Chinese men today have concubines, or that all Chinese mothers speak in broken English, or that all Chinese kids are chess grand masters.
A professor of literature who teaches in southern California told me he uses my books in his class, but he makes it a point to lambaste those passages that depict China as backward or unattractive. He objected to any descriptions that had to do with spitting, filth, poverty, or superstitions. Was China free of these elements, I asked him. And he said no, the descriptions were true, but still he believed it was “the obligation of the writer of ethnic literature to create positive, progr
essive images.”
I secretly shuddered and thought, Oh well, that’s southern California for you. A short time later, I met a student from UC Berkeley, a school I attended. The student was standing in line during a book signing. When his turn came, he swaggered up to me, took two steps back, and said in a loud voice: “Don’t you think you have the responsibility to write about Chinese men as positive role models?”
I told him, “I think you have the responsibility as a reader to think for yourself.”
Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, commented on this matter of writers and their responsibilities. This is from her contributor’s notes to a story, “The Girl on the Plane,” which appeared in the 1993 edition of The Best American Short Stories:
In my opinion, most of us have not been taught how to be responsible for our thoughts and feelings. I see this strongly in the widespread tendency to read books and stories as if they exist to confirm how we are supposed to be, think, and feel. I’m not talking about wacky political correctness, I’m talking mainstream. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, please. Stop asking, “What am I supposed to feel?” Why would an adult look to me or any other writer to tell him or her what to feel? You’re not supposed to feel anything. You feel what you feel. Where you go with it is your responsibility. If a writer chooses to aggressively let you know what he or she feels, where you go with it is still your responsibility.
I can only suppose that if writers were responsible for people’s thoughts and for creating positive role models, we would then be in the business of writing propaganda, not art as fiction. Fiction makes you think; propaganda tells you how to think.
Yet some minority writers believe that’s what fiction by minority writers should do: tell people what to think. These writers believe, for example, that if you’re Asian-American, you should write about contemporary Asian-Americans—none of that old-China stuff—and that your work should be exclusively for Asian-Americans and not a mainstream audience. If your work is inaccessible to white readers, that is proof it is authentic. If it is read by white people, that is proof the work is a fake, a sellout, and hence the writer is to be treated as a traitor, publicly branded and condemned. While the numbers within this faction are small, their influence in academia and the media is substantial. They shout for attention and they receive it.
A couple of years ago, at a conference on Asian-Americans and the arts that I attended, a literature professor spoke passionately into the microphone about the importance, the necessity, of “Asian-Americans’ maintaining our marginalism.” She rallied the crowd to believe it was the responsibility of Asian-American writers and artists to remain apart from the mainstream. She believed in a Marxist model of thinking for minorities, that the dominant class was the enemy and minorities should work separately from them as part of the struggle. “There is strength in marginalism,” she shouted, and most of the audience applauded wildly.
To me, that kind of thinking is frightening, a form of literary fascism. It is antithetical to why I write, which is to express myself freely in whatever direction or form I wish. I can’t imagine being a writer and having others dictate to me what I should write, why I should write, and whom I should write for. And this is the real reason I consider myself an American writer: I have the freedom to write whatever I want. I claim that freedom.
I’ve been trying to understand why these factions exist in the first place. I suspect that they have their origins in bitterness, anger, and frustration in being excluded. I’ve experienced those same feelings in my life, growing up Chinese-American in a white community. As a teenager, I suspected the real reason I was never asked to dance had to do with my being Chinese rather than, say, my nerdiness. As a cynical college student, I realized my forefathers never ate turkey, never dropped down chimneys dressed in red costumes. In my twenties, I joined various Pacific Asian groups and became an activist for multicultural training programs for special educators.
If not for a few circumstances that led me to where I am today, would I have become one of those activists for ethnically correct literature? If I hadn’t found my voice in a published book, would I too have shouted from a lectern that there is strength in marginalism? If I had written book after book, starting in the 1970s, and none of them had been published or reviewed, would I also have been tempted to feel there was a conspiracy in the publishing industry? Would I have believed that those Asian-Americans who did get published and reviewed had sold their souls and were serving up a literary version of chop suey for American palates?
As I think about those questions, I remember being an English major in 1970 (at a time, by the way, when there were fewer than 450,000 Chinese-Americans in all the United States, including Hawaii). In the American literature classes I took, I read Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and so forth—no American writers who were women or minorities. It didn’t bother me—or rather, I didn’t question that it could be any other way. During those years that I was an English major, the only female novelist I read was Virginia Woolf; I had originally thought there was another, Evelyn Waugh, who, I later discovered, was very British and a man. The only minority writers I read were in a summer school class I took called “Black Literature,” where I read Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—but again no books by women. I didn’t even imagine there was such a thing as a book by an Asian-American woman; Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior didn’t come out until 1976.
Back in my college days, the early seventies, the teachers and students were also politicizing fiction. When I read An American Tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath, Babbitt, Tender Is the Night, I was required to look at character flaws as symbols of social ills. I became adept at writing weekly papers, alluding to the trickier symbols and more subtle themes that I knew would please my professors. I could tell by the tone of their lectures which books they admired, and which ones we had to read so that, should we one day become literary critics, we would know how to heap scorn properly. I would wade through each semester’s stack of required reading, pen and paper at hand, ready to catch symbols and social themes with much the same focus as that of a gardener searching for weeds, snails, and leaf rot. When I completed my literature requirements, I stopped reading fiction, because what I had once loved I no longer enjoyed.
I didn’t start reading fiction again regularly until 1985. I don’t think it was coincidence that most of what I read was by women writers, among them: Flannery O’Connor, Isabel Allende, Louise Erdrich, Eudora Welty, Laurie Colwin, Alice Adams, Amy Hempel, Alice Walker, Lorrie Moore, Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, Harriet Doerr, and Molly Giles. I was not gender-exclusive: I also read works by Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond Carver, David Leavitt, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. But mostly I read fiction by women, because I had so rarely read novels by women in my adult years, and I found I enjoyed their sensibilities, their voices, and what they had to say about the world. I was feeling again the thrill I had felt as a child choosing my own books, falling in love with characters, reading stories because I couldn’t stop myself. Now I kept reading, day and night, until I couldn’t stop myself from writing.
When my first book was published, in 1989, I was at the advanced age of thirty-seven. Interviewers asked me why I had waited so long to write fiction. I could answer only, “It never occurred to me that I could.” By that, I didn’t mean I lacked the desire. In part I didn’t think I could because I didn’t have the talent or necessary disposition to think of tricky symbols and plant them in carefully tilled rows of sentences. I didn’t think I could because I wasn’t an expert on white whales or white males. The idea of my becoming a published fiction writer was as ludicrous as, say, my wearing a dominatrix costume while singing rock ’n’ roll onstage at the Hollywood Palladium with Bruce Springsteen, which, by the way, I recently did. Suffice it to say, the way that I used to read literature did not encourage me to become a writer. If anything, it discouraged me.
This short history of m
y educational background is to show by example that minorities and women were largely ignored in the literature curriculum until a couple of decades ago. I understand the reasons professors and students campaigned for the inclusion of ethnic studies programs. With the creation of these separate programs, at last we had stories of Asian-Americans written by Asian-Americans, taught by Asian-Americans, and read by Asian-American students. At last we had a history that went beyond the railroads and laundries of the Gold Rush days. And because so little was available, we found our sources for material overlapping. We looked to story to provide history. In any case, to have our story included in the curriculum, we had to create a separate department, separate and equal as we could make it.
Unfortunately, in some educational arenas this notion of separatism remains the primary focus. As writers, we’re asked, “Are you one of them or one of us?”—meaning we can’t be both. We’re asked, “Are you writing American literature or Asian-American literature?”—meaning one is not the other. We’re asked, “Are you writing for Asian-Americans or for the mainstream?”—meaning one necessarily excludes the other. And those of us, including Bharati Mukherjee, Maxine Hong Kingston, and me, who say we are American writers have been censured by the separatists, reviled on podiums, and denounced with expletives in the student press.
In the past, I’ve tried to ignore the potshots. A Washington Post reporter once asked me what I thought of so-and-so calling me “a running-dog whore sucking on the tit of the imperialist white pigs.”
“Well,” I said as dispassionately as possible. “You can’t please everyone, can you?” Readers are free to interpret what they will or won’t out of a book, and they are free to appreciate or not appreciate what they’ve interpreted. In any case, reacting to critics makes a writer look defensive, petulant, and like an all-around bad sport.