The Occasion For Screaming

The Occasion for Screaming

This Sunday, my brother and I skyped back home, from Riverside to NYC, to wish our mother a happy holiday.  She had just come back, along with my youngest brother, from a dinner for her own mother and sisters.  Excited to hear her sons’ voices and to see their handsome faces, she chastened my father to join the conversation.  Their familial and familiar faces crammed into the space of the chat window, as we made the anxious small-talk typically expected of an Asian family strewn apart by language and history.  The family conversation ended with laughter, over a joke, a witty turn-of-Chinglish, or what, I don’t remember.  At that moment, all I could think about was how far this Chinese family had come, in terms of distance.  We were far from China much like we were far from each other in body and mind.  My mother would probably fall asleep on the couch, as she is apt to do; my father would skype his old classmates in China, as he is apt to do; my brother would march upstairs in our tiny house where he would dream high of better lives, as he is apt to do.  You could say we were materially separated by walls and floorboards of our house – a metaphor that can be easily extended to various aspects.  But if the rats and roaches that skittered around the house, and the prayers and shouts from our Bangladeshi neighbors are evidence of anything, it is that these walls were porous.  I’d like to think we were mediated, rather than separated, by walls just as we mediated each other through our LCD screens.

What occasions me to speak, and perhaps to scream, to create this portrait, is of course the recent appearance of writers like Amy Chua and Wesley Yang in the public sphere.  I will forgo a summary and close-reading of their writing if only for the sake of brevity (Read: sanity).  That being said, these writers are receiving attention for their wholesale portrayal of authentic Asian Americans, whether it is through explicating the conditions that produced them (i.e. Chua’s “Tiger Mom”), or through a psycho-social profile of the limpid Asian penis (i.e. Yang’s “Paper Tigers”).  I am not here to dispute the truth value of their claims and observations; as the outpouring of responses from the Asian American community over Chua’s book (and responses that Yang’s piece will surely garner) illustrates, these writers are speaking to a truth that will continually be contested and supplemented by the spoken experiences of all Asian Americans, self-defined or otherwise.  

No, my intended audience is not those who want “the truth”, but those who want to discuss what underpins this truth, how it is made, and how this might inform the creation and dissemination of our own truths and knowledge to our communities.   My audience is my fellow Asian Americans who imbibe a healthy dose of skepticism, of hermeneutical suspicion, who cannot help but desire participation in this conversation despite their alienation from the constructed images and histories put forward by these writers.  So forgive me in advance if I do not speak to your experience.  I am but a product and actor of my times.

What enables these writers to speak the “truth” of Asian America, a truth that is authenticated through its print and reception?  Many things which exist beyond the scope of this essay.  But one that I would like to focus on is the concept of the individual so enshrined in American thinking.  The idea of the individual as an autonomous subject, free to ride the whims of the market, to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, to refashion themselves as “unique” is essential to our perception of ourselves as Americans, and by extension Asian Americans.

Yet this concept of the individual is not free from the pull of epistemology, of politics, of history.  Within the Western tradition, the concept of the individual is premised on the sense of a whole self, an actor of history with agency, an enlightened subject.  It is a concept that is manifest in the act of writing, an activity that many have conventionally understood as an interior process – the “self” arranging words, dreams, and reality together to re-present a world in his/her liking.  This relationship between the individual, and the creation of text (particularly the novel, the autobiography, and poetry), continues to this day (although with differences of contingency).  This is especially evidenced by Yang’s connection between his interior self and his work as a writer.  Individuality has become an essential aspect of our humanity.

It would behoove us to recognize that this concept of the individual, at least in Western tradition, has also been defined in its negation of “others” as non-individuals, creating a mass of strangers who certainly could not be individuals, who could not have agency, who could not be human.  Cedric Robeson, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said – intellectuals who, of late, inform my thinking – have made this argument and I will not rehash it.  Suffice to say, we can consider how the individual, while presented as an autonomous subject, can only exist through the excess of what it is not: not a nigger, not a chink, not a wetback, not a towel-head, not an indig, not a terrorist.  An individual is not born, but made through discourse (hegemonic or otherwise).

For Asian Americans, U.S. citizenship – juridical and cultural – holds the promise of becoming an individual who can partake in the nation’s willful ignorance of the historical contradictions which produced the nation-state.  And as the rigors of acquiring citizenship attest, this requires an acquisition of English language and a national history that would fuel the national fantasy of the American individual.  Lisa Lowe has written on this process of citizenship in Immigrant Acts, describing it as an abstraction facilitated by the discarding of racial, sexual, and political differences.  For Asians to be American – and even Asian American – they must rise above their race, their ineffable skin, and transcend their particularity to become the universal citizen, the iPad toting, gun-slinging, military supporting, two-party system devotee American individual.

Might we consider this a manifestation of power?  It is an imperative and desire that no Asian American can escape.    I recently met a young 18 year old Asian American male who had grown up his whole life in San Gabriel valley.  He had grown up in an environment of Asian faces, bubble tea, and dim-sum.  Speaking to me in a Chinese restaurant, he expressed envy at the fact that I had attended a liberal arts college rather than the university-machine.  When I asked what he was planning to major in (an evergreen question of no certain importance or significance), he said he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but certain with what he wouldn’t.  “I don’t want to go into math, science, or engineering” he told me, “I don’t want to fit a stereotype”.  Then over the rest of the conversation, he divulged his desire for white women, his desire to go the UCSB and be in a sea of “white faces”.  What I thought he was trying to impart to me was that he wanted to be white, more specifically, not Asian.  He wanted to be like me.

I cannot castigate the young man for his desires to remake his identity in the skin of another, and for inscribing this narrative onto me.  It reminded me of my own desires to become an individuated American.  While the young man sought to fulfill this desire by filling his world with white faces that he could learn to identify with, I sought to fill it through books and novels.  Long ago, the date lost to processes of memories, I had biked over to the library to check out novels that I thought would make me a better person.  My appetite however, was not for the Chinese American and Asian American writers before my time, was not for Frank Chin, Sui Sin Far, Amy Tan, and Maxine Hong Kingston, and Carlos Bulosan.  Rather I hungered for the works of Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Austen.  You know, the books that are listed and canonized as Western classics, books of extensive interiority historically imposed and disseminated through the Third World.  I packed my schoolbag with twenty of these novels – the library limit- notwithstanding the reality that I could not read, much less understand, the import of these books in three weeks.  I was certainly aware of this, but something outside of my then rationale and reason drove me to the library, drove my obsession to these books.

I tell this story to anyone who will listen not because it explains “me”.  I tell it because of the ending.  Riding my bike home from the library, the books weighing heavy on my back, I was hit by a car at an intersection.  The man who hit me?  My father’s boss, of whose existence, until that day, I had never known or considered.  When I came to, I realized I had flown a great distance from my bike, propelled by the physics and mass of Western classics.  I did not have a helmet to break my fall.  I should’ve died, I’ve reasoned, or at the least, something should have broken.  But I survived relatively unscathed, cushioned from the gravel pavement with borrowed books.  It is the ending, the interpretation of this ending that continually haunts and drives my re-telling of this story; this ending is also a beginning. 

These days, or at least, on this particular occasion, the story whispers and affirms that the abstraction and creation of a positivistic American individual is always a futile and tragic one.  The young man, in his wish to be non-Asian, could only achieve this position of the individual through the homogenization of Asianness, and a denial of individuality and subjectivity to the Asian community and family from where he grew up.  He was not like them, and this is what allowed him to speak to me in that particular way, offering stories that he was sure that I could relate or affirm.  Rather than as ornamentation, he implied that “We” were a cut above the rest, a rupture of the mass material of Asian fabric woven and sutured into our identities.  And being a cut above the rest, in transcending “Asian tradition”, we were objective and reasoned individuals critiquing the conditions (which MUST be an aspect of Asianness) that produced our fragmented selves.  We were insiders who had clawed our way out of the Tiger’s womb to see the antiseptic light; we resolved to speak truth to those who would listen, to bask in the light of the missionaries, Apache helicopters, and lynch mobs.  But the light is fleeting, constantly searching for the next “new” thing.  So we are left in the shadows of our own words, the darkness which represented what we had departed from: our family, our sexual and racial difference, our class, our contradictions, our Asianness.

In this space of shadows and darkness that has defined Asian American invisibility, some clamor for the spotlight, to emerge again and again from the shadows as authenticated and objective individuals – despite the very subjectivity of their knowledge, despite the very construction of this position.  This is informed and framed by my research and observations of Asian American history and literature.   What Chua and Yang say, their rhetoric situated in a continuum of others who write from the position of light and authority, is nothing new in the sense that it has already been recorded and debated in the annals of Asian American literature and culture, now in the shadows and recesses of Asian American quotidian life.  They consciously and subconsciously ignore these epistemologies – alternative veins of critical consciousness – because they understand the fickleness and peculiarity of the light.

This validating light, this is a condition that enables us to speak to others (who are not only whites, but blacks, latinos, native Americans, and Asian Americans, and non-Americans).  But it functions on a denial of the dynamism and constant revision of meaning and meaning-making, produced by changing material conditions, that “Asian” communities and culture operate under.  Discourses of U.S. citizenship and Orientalism are what have historically given light to Asian American “subjectivity” but have sedimented it, rendered it fixed and static along the gradients of authenticity.  And when we speak of our “self” as distinct from filial others, we are, in some respect or other, creating shadows with what we cannot say.

I end this essay with a scream that plays in the shadows.  It is a scream that invites you to join me in the darkness.  These are things that scare away the light: Fuck National Piety.  Fuck the Wars Waged In My Name.  Fuck the Prophets of Profits.  Fuck The Profits of Prophets.  Fuck Patriarchy.  Fuck Heteronormativity.  Fuck The Military and The Countless Lives of Brothers and Sisters (And their Brothers and Sisters) They Have Taken.  Fuck The Spotlight On Your Navel-Gazing Amidst Cluster Bombs and Predator Drones.  

May You Choke On the Belly Lint.  And May We Breathe Life Back Into You.