My favorite line: “We Asian men are de-facto exiles within our own culture.”

The piece begins:

A few years ago, I attended the inaugural Banana Conference for Asian American bloggers in Los Angeles, where I met a gentleman who was a fan of the Asian American blogosphere. He said of my blog writing (www.fighting44s.com), “You guys were great.  You spoke to my demographic, which is highly underserved, heterosexual Asian men.” We shared a laugh at the mutually-recognized irony. In most communities, it’s women and gay people who struggle for recognition. In the Asian American community, it’s the reverse: heterosexual Asian men are the ones who struggle most for recognition in our community, particularly in the media. Even though homophobia and sexism exist among Asians, heterosexual Asian men are the underserved demographic that gets the least attention.

Read the full article here.

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TZ informed me about the 500 Project, where the Kartika Review is trying to get 10 Asian American readers of Asian American literature from each state in the U.S. to contact them.  Check it out here.  She wants you to send an e-mail to 500project@kartikareview.com and to list the following:

1. Full Name
2. Date of Birth
3. Ethnicity
4. Residence (City, State)
5. Occupation
6. Professional Affiliations (optional)

Then answer the following questions:

1. Does Asian American literature matter to you?
2. Why does Asian American literature matter to you?
3. Cite the last 3 works of Asian American literature you read.
4. Who are your favorite Asian American writers or poets and why?
5. In your own words, you are:
6. In your own words, Asian American literature is:

I think there are a few institutions out there that support Asian American writers, but VERY few (other than bigWOWO!) that support Asian American readers.  If you are an Asian American living in America and you enjoy Asian American literature, this is an opportunity to get your voice heard and to inspire other Asian Americans to read.  Sound off!

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In the YA Literature thread, King, Kobukson and I had an interesting discussion with Oriental Right, formerly known as Asian of Reason.  Some of you remember AOR–he is a “human biodiversity” proponent from Johns Hopkins who believes that black people on average are not as intelligent as White people, and Asian men aren’t as masculine as White men.  With all due credit to him, he defended these views in a podcast with me, Alpha, and King (who is black), which we recorded here: Podcast.  Although everyone disagreed with his views and the logical leaps he took to stand behind his beliefs, people respected him for having the courage to step up.

In the YA lit discussion, he wrote about reading Kazuo Ishiguro, and how he felt that Ishiguro’s books in which the characters are White are better than those in which they are Asian.  He mentioned Never Let Me Go, and said:

His best books, Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, are not about Asians, they are about white people–more concisely, they are about people and the universal human doubts and concerns.

Here’s the kicker: the characters in NLMG were never described as White. Never.  They didn’t even have last names that were “White.”  The fact that AOR assumed they were White indicates that in his mind, the default human being is White.  This, of course, makes it easier for White characters to grab hold of readers–ethnic characters are tied to ethnicity, while White characters get to be all about “universal human doubts and concerns.”  Being a Universal Human is a right that only White characters seem to have.

When I asked Oriental Right why he assumed they were White, he stepped back by saying that they could be Asian, that he wasn’t even thinking race, and that the point was that the characters didn’t focus on ethnicity.  I asked him why he specifically said that they were White and NOT Asian if he wasn’t thinking race, and well, that question didn’t get answered except to say that we had ideas about a “white power structure,” which he put in quotes.

Human Biodiversity (HBD)–a.k.a. racism–is a religion–that is, it defies all logical and rational explanation, and proponents have to suspend disbelief in order to believe it.  Whereas Christianity offers everlasting life, HBD offers a feeling of superiority for White people and Asian people who think they are better than the rest of us.

There are two points I want to make in this thread, one about the nature of dialogue, and the other about literature:

1. Dialogue should be about learning.  As Jigoro Kano said, “Mutual benefit and welfare.”  I can respect religions–most of them anyway–but religious adherents need to turn on the logic when talking to those of us who don’t worship the same god.  When logic and religion collide, I believe that logic should get priority.  If it’s shown that there’s a contradiction in your thinking, acknowledging it helps the thinker.  Unlike religious proselytizing, it’s not about winning or losing.

2. Ethnic characters have a higher burden of proof BECAUSE the default human being in America is White. Ethnic characters need to prove that they are above ethnicity and are universal.  It places an extra burden on racial minorities to have their voices heard, even among readers who happen to be of the same race.  I’m not saying that this is based on intentional racism; I’m just saying that this is the way it is, which Oriental Right’s assumption indicates.

(Oriental Right, to be fair, I mentioned HBD in this post, so the blog policy with respect to obtrusive and unsubstantiated comments is turned off on this blog post.  If you want to share your HBD religion here or seek converts, please feel free below.  I don’t suggest it though–you can cling harder to this religion, or you can let it drop.  I think you’re beginning to realize the flaws in this thinking.  I suggest you let the breakdown take place–if you allow the structure of racism to self-implode, you may be surprised to find the greatness of the person that lives inside of you.  Trust me on this one.  Pic from here.  Peace.)

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I just saw this: Diversity in YA Fiction (thanks, NW.)  It looks like it’s a book tour to gather readers and writers of YA fiction.  It’s run by Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo, two Asian American Young Adult fiction writers.  They’re trying to promote diversity in YA fiction (in case the name didn’t give it away.).

I think what they are doing is good.  Writing and publishing are in trouble right now, and anything that we can do to revive it would be welcome, not just for the economy but for our own cultivation as well.  I like the fact that they are meeting writers and readers in person.  In this new age of digital isolation, that is definitely the way to go.

At the same time, I hope that their promotion takes on the form of a conversation, rather than simple promotion.  It doesn’t have to be a conversation with the authors, per se, but there should be a conversation about reading.  A couple weeks or so ago, I blogged about gatekeepers.  I strongly feel that what’s lacking in Asian American literature is dialogue.  In our PC Asian American culture, you can’t say that you like or dislike something or some aspect of a work–any criticism is seen as betrayal.  Criticism seems to be fine for White people and works written by White people, but somehow if any Asian person even remotely critiques an Asian American work, people see it as a crabs in the bucket thing.  The end result is tepid acceptance–Asian American readers don’t bother reading because they fear picking up yet another mediocre book, and Asian American writers never know what people really think about their work.

Creating a dialogue, I think, is what will eventually save literature.

For example…Cindy Pon, one of the leaders of this movement, wrote a fantasy book about a Chinese girl in ancient China and somehow managed to squeeze in a love interest who’s a half-White dude with a father who comes from “the lands to the north where they have hair that’s so pale it’s almost white and eyes the colour of the sky.”   Now I don’t know about you, but when I first heard of a half-White half-Asian dude getting romantic with the ladies and being separated from his White dad and Asian mom, the first thing I thought of was…

Kwai Chang Caine

In other words, something we’ve seen before many many many times.  I’m cool with hapa characters–I think we need more hapa characters–but I object how publishers and writers use Whiteness or half-Whiteness as a metaphor for masculinity or awakening, especially seeing how it doesn’t fit the context of the story’s historical period.  At the very least, Asian American critics ought to be able to comment on the racialized aspects of Asian American literary works, along with racialized themes.  Asian American critics should be able to point out what they liked and disliked, and then let the readers decide what they like and dislike.

Engagement is good.  I had never heard of Malinda Lo, but I checked out some of her writings, especially with respect to the relationship between her Chineseness and other Asian Americans/Asian American literature.

http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2010/02/26/guest-post-malinda-lo-on-the-woman-warrior/

A lot of writers don’t think about the impact of ethnicity and writing, and it’s always refreshing to find authors who think about this sort of thing.  And the fact that she doesn’t feel represented is even more reason for her to make herself represented.

In any case, I think we should support anything that brings Asian American literature to the masses, provided that the media–both mainstream and ethnic–create a dialogue rather than a lecture.  We live in the age of mass media and social networking, and literature in our day should engage people and meet people at (or near) their level.

Edit: Someone in the know, who has read an advanced copy of the second novel by Cindy Pon, has informed me that things about the “hapa” dude are not what they seem, and that certain things come out in the second novel.  I don’t know if it changes the marketing message…in either case, I have to stand by my words.   This is exactly what we gain from dialogue about books.  Thanks, everyone!  Keep reading!

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Alice Munro

I’ve been reading Alice Munro.  She is an amazing writer.  I’ve not seen many writers who can skillfully create entire lives for characters within so few pages.  I think she’s tied Yiyun Li as my favorite short story writer.

Which leads me to the story behind this post–I was interested in finding whether anyone had made the comparison in styles between Munro and Li, so I googled it.  Quite a few reviewers did make the comparison, but more interesting was this site of literary reviews, where there is one reviewer who hates Yiyun Li’s writing and has friend who hates Alice Munro’s writing.  When I read this, I wondered: how is it possible to hate Yiyun Li’s writing?  How is it possible to hate Alice Munro’s writing? Do these people have no souls?  I decided to keep an open mind, and so I clicked through to Yennie Cheung’s review of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.  You can see her review here; my own review of the same book was here.

Yiyun Li

I was surprised to find that I liked Ms. Cheung’s review.  It was very well written, and she brings up a number of good points that I had never considered.  She writes how Yiyun Li misstated the Buddhist pairing in the title story, saying that it should be “Gold Boy, Jade Maiden” rather than “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.”  (I can’t verify this, but if anyone wants to jump in, please do.)  She then talks about the Chinese proverbs that I and others have admired in Yiyun Li’s stories, describing them as cliches.  She writes:

Beyond the titular misnaming, there’s the use of proverbs and allusions that seem fresh and insightful only in English. What is a proverb, after all, but a Chinese cliché?

According to Ms. Cheung, Americans are “blissfully ignorant” of Chinese stuff, so they eat up Yiyun Li.  She writes:

While Gold Boy, Emerald Girl may be a good peek at modern China for the uninitiated, its storytelling fundamentals feel semi-solid at best. The cultural differences between Li’s characters and her audience may work in her favor, but don’t mistake missing details for minimalism, poor plot structure for character introspection, or audience confusion for authorial mystery.

There isn’t much else to say about this.  I’m amazed by my own ignorance of Chinese culture if this is true, but at the same time, I still think that Yiyun Li is a spellbinding storyteller from the perspective of readers who may not be as familiar with Chinese culture.  It shouldn’t take away anything from her, since she does write for an American audience in English.  But it does once again point to how gatekeepers, reviewers, readers, and consumers have points of view that are strongly influenced by their cultures and points of view.

(Chinese people and others feel free to comment.)

Related posts:

1. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li (Review)
2. Call for Asian American Writers
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I can’t even begin to imagine writing a novel on a cell phone.  My typing speed is anywhere between 70-85 words a minute on a full computer keyboard, and even then, I think I write slowly (definitely less than 10,000 words a day, although English might be more succinct in some cases.).  However, it’s pretty cool how the process takes place with the keitai shousetsu.  Most of the authors remain anonymous.  They write their novels on the phones, kind of like a text, and they post them online, sometimes in segments, where people download them for free.  When certain titles become popular, publishers approach them and try to get them to sign.  Sometimes they make them into movies or TV dramas.  Everyone makes money.  It’s not just small beans either.  According to the story,

In 2007, cell-phone novels held four of the top five spots on the literary best-seller list.

What makes the story even more interesting is the kind of literature that comes from this.   Most critics seem to say that the literature coming from this genre is not high literature, that much of it reinforces traditional gender roles and doesn’t push any deeper meaning.  For example:

I haven’t read a keitai shousetsu and therefore can’t comment on the literature itself, but a few thoughts occurred to me when reading this.  First, in terms of the gender roles, these stories are probably not all that different from some American romance novels–especially the ones with Fabio on the cover.  Second, if they had stories like this about Asian people in the U.S., it would be a clear break from the common clueless protagonist learning to assimilate theme, and for that reason alone, people might find it compelling.  Third, Asian men as love interests?

In any case, it’s cool that people in Japan are using their cell phones to become creative and to share with others.  It’s a good indicator that although formats may change, literature will live on in some form.

No related posts.

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bigWOWO rating: Asian American Gold

I got one of those 40% off Borders coupons in my inbox, and like all dutiful cheapskates, I took that mo’fo’ to the nearest Borders to see what I could get for less.  I knew that Yiyun Li was a first generation Asian American writer who writes mostly about life in China, and because the subject matter was a bit outside of the normal Asian American themes, I held the book in my hand for a good ten minutes before approaching the register. Past experience with Chinese Chinese writers had been good but not great: Mo Yan’s writing is good but too gross for me, Ha Jin’s book didn’t have enough action, and I was too leery of White worshipping themes to even pick up anything by Wei Hui or Annie Wang. I also remembered sending out a mass e-mail telling people about a Wayne Wang film based on a Yiyun Li short story–the Princess of Nebraska.  Several people saw that film online (me not included), and they told me they hated it.  (You can see the story of what went down here.)

Plus, I wasn’t sure I would have much to say if I reviewed Yiyun Li’s book on bigWOWO; after all, if those Chinese characters are all in China, what could they say about the Asian American experience?

Good thing I finally submitted to my spend-lust and got the book.  Holy J.C., Yiyun Li is a talented short story writer.  I don’t know what to say about the short story she wrote for the Wayne Wang movie, but this collection was awesome.  She’s getting lots of attention these days too.  She just became a MacArthur Fellow:

Most of the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl were amazing.  They all had action, discovery, character development, and suspense.  What I loved most was how Li used the stories to tell us about both China and Chinese people at the same time, without becoming overly political.  The stories were not laced with the sense of doom that we see in Mo Yan or other Chinese writers I’ve read.  Government policy played a big part in the characters’ lives, but government wasn’t the only issue in their lives.  The stories were great, and Yiyun Li’s style and rhythm worked in near-perfect synchronicity.

In terms of the storylines, what makes this collection stand out most is the inventiveness of the characters.  “A Man Like Him” is about a retired teacher who develops a bond with a man whose daughter accuses him of cheating on her blog.  “Prison” is about an older Chinese couple that returns home to China in order to find a surrogate mother after their daughter dies in a car accident.  “The Proprietress” is about a woman who makes a life caring for women whose men have been imprisoned.  “House Fire” is about a group of old ladies who become private investigators, “Number Three, Garden Road” is about a woman who pursues an old crush, and “Sweeping Past” is about a grandmother who made a pact with two other young girls when she was small.  The stories stand out not just in terms of delivery but also because of the stories themselves.

What I found unique about this collection was also the focus on individual relationships.  It’s rare these days to find a work that creates something new outside of stereotypes.  I haven’t read “The Princess of Nebraska,” but this book had none of the crazy Kingstonian themes that normally inundate us.  All of the stories take place in China, and it was refreshing to step away from the race issues for a while to read Asian characters as they are.  The characters were, in the words of my last post dealing with an indirectly Yiyun Li product, “just being normal.”

Keep in mind that this is just one focus of one author, and the stories seem to reflect Yiyun Li’s own personal background as a Chinese woman who immigrated to the U.S. when she was 25.  (And for those who want to know, NO…she is NOT a member of the AFCC.  WOOHOO!)  I think that Asian American literature needs to cover multiracial relations–as demonstrated in stories by authors like Ed Lin, Jamie Ford, Nami Mun, and Min Jin Lee (Min Jin, you broke my heart!).  But there is a lot to be learned about life from people in the motherland, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl sheds much needed light on these stories.  Check it out.

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Tao and Franzen

Thanks, S, for sending this interesting blog post from the Economist.  In the blog, the author compares two cover stories from Time Magazine and a magazine called the Stranger.  Time featured a posed Jonathan Franzen with the title Great American Novelist, while the Stranger had the same exact title with Asian American author Tao Lin in the exact same pose. In the article, the blogger talks about how the literary fiction establishment restricts its definition of mainstream normalcy to authors who are White men.  The author writes, “Will an Asian-American author, or an African-American or a woman, ever be credited with writing the Great American Novel?”

This anecdote from the same blog post sums it up well:

Last month Chris Jackson, an editor at Spiegel & Rau, wrote an impressively candid piece about his own reading. Over lunch another editor had asked, “When was the last time you read fiction by a woman?” He couldn’t remember. “It was a pretty shameful moment,” he admitted. Judging from the (great) bookstore owned by his wife, he writes, “it’s clear that women are willing to buy books by male writers, but men seem much more reluctant to buy books by women.” He then observes that “there’s definitely a feeling out there that men—even when writing about frivolous subjects—are taken more seriously as literary writers and are more likely to be presented to serious readers by the various literary gatekeepers.”
 
All readers are gently trained to empathise with white male narrators—the bulk of important books are dominated by them. The gender specificity of a narrator’s voice hardly matters. Whether reading “Moby Dick” or “Rabbit, Run”, the hero’s “I” becomes the reader’s “I”. My own copy of “Zuckerman Bound” is littered with the pen-marks of a younger self, not just for the book’s insight into the life of a vital and sexually voracious male writer, but for the clarifying light it cast on my own.

I don’t know anything about Tao Lin (I read of him from another blog post by those AFCC women who were railing against colonialism, but I was too busy cherishing the AFCC irony to really look into it).  I do think the author raises some good points.  There happens to be a stigma that follows all non-White-men around the literary fiction world, where people who aren’t White men are either not taken seriously or are treated as niche writers.  I don’t know when or how that will change.  I can’t see e-books really making much of a difference either way (I don’t know why the guy in the anecdote didn’t realize that Jennifer Egan was female; I think most people are interested in who the author is.)

Interestingly enough, this rule doesn’t apply to non-literary fiction.  Jodi Picoult, for example, is a leader in her part of the fiction world (which many say is halfway between genre fiction and literary fiction).  J.K. Rowling is the undisputed queen of children’s fiction, and the Twilight author owns vampire stories, for the moment. 

But I do think that literary fiction has cachet that the rest of the fiction world doesn’t.  All eyes are always on the literary fiction world, even when that world pulls in far less money.  There are of course women and minorities in literary fiction–Ishiguro, Atwood, Toni Morrison, etc.–but the stigma still exists, and the establishment still seems to treat them as niche writers.

How do people get their voices heard?  How do people make their case to be treated seriously?  It’s a good question, both for intellectual and activist reasons.

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This was my first foray into YA literature, and I must say that I was impressed.  M.E. Kerr weaves a good story.  She truly captures the first love of the rich teenager Annabel dealing with social, racial, and economic class differences.  Her portrayal of Annabel’s father and the older generation’s struggle with both inherited racism and economic convergence was spot on.  I thought her portrayal of Esteban, the Hispanic dude, maybe could have gone deeper, but I appreciated how she described his love for family and friends.  I LOVED how Kerr also included little backhanded slaps as well, giving the finger to George W. Bush for the war in Iraq and taking on institutional racism of certain organizations.

Here’s one last thing I thought was cool–I couldn’t tell anything about the author from reading this book.  She seemed to have a great understanding about society, but at the same time, she seemed so in touch with young folk today–talking about Google, cell phones, etc.  I figured she was in her mid-forties.  I was impressed that an author in her mid-forties was able to so deftly summon her inner teenager.

I was wrong.  M.E. Kerr is not in her forties–she was born in 1927, which means that she is 83!   Let me put this in perspective–M.E. Kerr was born BEFORE the Great Depression and lived through it.  When she was my age (34), the Beatles released their very first smash hit “Love Me Do.”  She was two months shy of her 41st birthday when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.  And STILL…she can summon her inner teenager even in her 80′s.

That’s skill, something we can all aspire to.  Check out this book.

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