Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(13)
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Literature supposedly bridges cultural divides, an axiom that rang false once I understood the inequities of the publishing industry. Publishers treated the ethnic story as the “single story,” which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie defines as follows: “Create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” As the writer Matthew Salesses elaborated in a 2015 essay in Lit Hub, the industry instituted the single story in two ways: (1) the publisher had a quota that allowed them to publish only one Chinese American writer, and (2) even if there were multiple writers of Chinese descent, they had to replicate the same market-tested story about the Chinese American experience.
This is changing as I write this book. Poetry is having a renaissance in which many of the most exciting—and rightly celebrated—poets are people of color. It’s happening for fiction too, but I’m more doubtful about that genre, since the industry is still 86 percent white and fiction is more susceptible to the fickle tastes of the market. As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief. At some point, they expect you to get over it. But as suspicious as I am, I also hope that we can seize this opportunity and change American literature completely. Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities—and stop spelling ourselves out in the alphabet given to us.
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For the last twenty years, until recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories were the template of ethnic fiction that supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers. The fault lies not in Lahiri herself, who I think is an absorbing storyteller, but in the publishing industry that used to position her books as the “single story” on immigrant life. Using just enough comforting ethnic props to satisfy the white reader’s taste for cultural difference, Lahiri writes in a flat, restrained prose, where her characters never think or feel but just do: “I…opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s.” Her characters are always understated and avoid any interiority, which, as Jane Hu writes in The New Yorker, has become a fairly typical literary affect that signals Asianness (in fact, more East Asianness than South Asianness) to readers.
In Lahiri’s story “The Third and Final Continent,” the protagonist migrates from Calcutta to Boston and lives with an elderly white landlady who condescends to him as if he were a little boy. Unruffled by her quaint racism, he grows fond of her and they reach an implicit cultural understanding. Later, his wife joins him in Boston, and they assimilate with remarkable ease—“We are American citizens now”—and his son grows up to attend Harvard.
Much of Lahiri’s fiction complies with the MFA orthodoxy of show, don’t tell, which allows the reader to step into the character’s pain without having to, as Susan Sontag writes, locate their own privilege “on the same map” as the character’s suffering. Because the character’s inner thoughts are evacuated, the reader can get behind the cockpit of the character’s consciousness and cinematically see what the character sees without being disturbed by incessant editorializing.
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The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.
Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination. Publishers expect authors to privatize their trauma: an exceptional family or historic tragedy tests the character before they arrive at a revelation of self-affirmation. In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.
At the start of his career, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was the living embodiment of human resilience. Reviewers never missed an opportunity to recite his biography: Vuong was born to a family of rice farmers in Vietnam who immigrated to Connecticut as refugees after the Vietnam War; his mother renamed Vuong “Ocean” to give him a new start in the United States; Vuong couldn’t read until age eleven, which makes it all the more miraculous that he became a prodigy and award-winning poet.
I love his debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and teach it in my poetry workshops. Much of his collection is about how his queer desire is rooted in the paternal violence he endured as a child. In a poem about the speaker’s father, Vuong writes:
…No use. I turn him
over. To face it. The cathedral