Priding itself as ‘a Nation of Immigrants,’ America speaks of immigrants as though they had been spoken for, the intended (ghost brides?) from Asia for the Patriarch of Nation. Once feared for yellowing, periling the white bloodline, Asian immigrant voices are few and far between. They come dubbed either by whites or by Asian Americans of the host community bent upon converting, naturalizing these foreign bodies, symbols of alterity, even latent virality. On the one hand, mainstream writers authorize themselves in the name of poetic license to perpetuate yellowface characters, next of kin to Blackface. Poetic license signals white privilege in passing as ethnic imaginatively, with utter impunity, contrary to the social consequences and personal guilt of Nella Larsen’s light-skinned African Americans passing for white. This figment of ‘white’ imagination realizes the majority desire to sympathetically playact or to discursively control peoples of color.
Taken to the extreme, liberal ‘wokes’ construct an alternate universe, whereby white alienation alchemizes itself into the likes of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater and David Hare’s communist utopia of Fanshen (1976), touches that turn China into ideological gold, dead weight as art. The Brechtian penchant eastward gives us Edgar Snow, William Hinton, Andy Warhol’s Mao series, 1972-1974, Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), and more. To illustrate representations of Asian immigrants right here in America with Brecht’s good Setzuan woman and DeLillo’s Mao-worship over there in China seems absurd. But that theater of the absurd has long been the repertoire of centuries-long populist Sinophobia – doppelganger to progressive Sinophilia – mass paranoia that excluded all Chinese from the American soil, 1882-1943; that interned Americans of Japanese descent in the wake of Pearl Harbor; that scapegoated Americans of Chinese descent for the Trump virus sharpie-d as the ‘CHINESE’ virus. Both white hate and white love belong to one bipolar America, spoken by one forked tongue. Asians in Asia, Asian immigrants in America, and Asian Americans are, as Americans of all stripes like to think, if not to say, alike.
On the other hand, that is, in America’s left hand of Asian America, poetic license hits home, domiciled as the ethnic birthright of ‘immigrant license.’ Rather than figment of imagination, Asian America exercises figment of familial – and fairly familiar by now – fallacy over one’s own immigrant parents, grandparents, and relatives. To racialize Marianne Hirsch’s contention in The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989) by splicing that book title with her book two decades later, ‘the [immigrant] mother’s voice is rarely heard, but that the [American-born] daughter tends to speak for her’ (The Generation of Postmemory [2012] 10). These Asian family members or blood relations, real or imagined, come to embody aliens to Asian American protagonists whitewashing themselves subconsciously, thus projecting out their internalized alienness. Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese (2006), for instance, cross-dissolves the ABC protagonist Jin into the whiteface Danny. Yet Danny remains haunted by Jin’s FOB (fresh-off-the-boat) alter ego Chin-Kee, pidginized slur of ‘Chink.’ An eerie echo of the racist stereotype transposing ‘r’ and ‘l,’ Jin’s self-bleaching on the exterior exposes interior self-breaching: whiteness only after shedding yellowness.
Symptomatic of the minority complex, immigrant license fashions ethnic identity through self-splitting, by means of distancing from that which is closest to Asian America, by ventriloquizing immigrant ‘dummies’ animated in its hands, sitting on its laps, throwing its voice from the belly of America’s bestial history of race. The ultimate irony of giving voice to Asian immigrants, many of whom, if not all, feel ill-used by the stepmother tongue of English decades into diaspora, lies in the fact that minority wordsmiths are obliged to undo English, to unlearn their mother tongue in simulation of broken English, halting speech act, and psychological unease. These consummate stylists in the English language are called upon to defamiliarize English and to re-requisition their first – in the order of acquisition pre-schooling – language, which has remained their immigrant home patois ever since. These stylists need to make room in their mother tongue of English for their mothers’ tongues, their heritage languages. This dialectic approach enables an off-kilter Dutch angle to faithfully capture the richness of ‘round’ immigrant characters. Despite their flawed speech and a disorienting tilt to their image, the subjects would emerge empathetically, countenanced by a full acknowledgement of immigrant in-betweenness. By owning up to his ‘mother[’s] tongue . . . stunted . . . at the second-grade level,’ Ocean Vuong mirrors obliquely family members’ illiteracy through authorial limitations (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous [2019] 31). Lest I be accused of legislating on minority creativity, few other ethnic groups have founded their canons so exclusively on the ‘backs’ of immigrant characters, made to slouch toward stereotypes. Few African American writers poke fun at Swahili-speaking African characters to validate their Americanness; few Jews do so at the expense of Yiddish speakers. Indeed, where do we even find Yiddish-speaking figures in contemporary American novels after Isaac Bashevis Singer? Because of the relative youth of Asian America, the ‘runt’ in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, first-generation Asian immigrants are rife in the Promised Land and in their descendants’ compromised ‘talk-stories,’ epitomized by Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976).
If Cathy Park Hong’s Asian American Reckoning is entitled Minor Feelings (2020) à la Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Minor Literature,’ then her ‘Korean immigrant[s]’ parents from the blurb would have to pen Minor’s Doll’s, or simply Infants’, Feelings. One’s immigrant parents become one’s paper sons and daughters, a reversal of fake relations that used to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act. What was once nineteenth-century Chinese laborers’ forged documents as Chinatown expatriates’ ‘papers sons’ to enter the US is now twenty-first century Asian American writers’ ticket to the writerly pantheon of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Put bluntly, immigrant parents are ‘imported’ by Asian American dream factories as raw materials to be processed – crushed and remolded – into prefab tomes for millennial, multicultural getaway reading, tombs of the unknown immigrants’ ‘good death.’
Secreted within white and non-first-generation ethnic writings, immigrant narratives are nearly invisible, inaudible. For Asian immigrants to speak on their own behalf, to get a word in edgewise, they must break the wild horse of a foreign tongue, after having broken many legs or lucked out over food, shelter, job, and family in a foreign land. Such insurmountable challenge leaves a gaping void in American culture, one instantly filled by immigrant representations in native-born white and ethnic writings. In the most blatant, exploitative cases, Asian America resorts to immigrant license in packaging. Printed and online promotional materials routinely begin the blurb, interview, and whatnot with the author’s birth beyond these shores. One who arrived as a preschooler, even an infant, magically acquires the authenticity and authority of an adult émigré. This rubs off on the majority of ethnic writers born in the US, whose Asian-looking face and Asian-sounding surname somehow legitimize insider knowledge of Asia, further insinuated by the blurb’s formulaic ‘a child of immigrant parents.’ The lived experiences of migration emanate the genre of autobiographical fiction from Kingston to Amy Tan to Patricia Park, courtesy of intergenerational memory of Kingstonian talk-stories. In Re Jane (2015), Park even justifies the telepathic sympathy with Korean relatives by means of ‘a flood of infantile memories,’ ‘sensory memory, far buried in the recesses of my mind, could still recall the feel of her touch’ (247, 149-150). A make-believe, sentimental bond, this speaking for immigrant characters by white and ethnic writers alike may well be speaking over them, spanning the spectrum of conservative typecasting and liberal empathetic visualizing.
To rephrase Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak’s postcolonial classic ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, can Asian immigrants speak for themselves? Will we listen through the thick accent and the thicket of alien cultural references? The estranging sight and sound from an immigrant’s eye defamiliarize the Promised Land as well as the ancestral land. The wonderment and woe from Asian immigrant narratives commence with Island (1980), collection of early twentieth century Chinese poems carved or written on the ‘prison walls’ of San Francisco Angel Island Immigration detention center. Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan chronicle their struggles in ensuing decades within a racist America. The civil rights era witnesses the burgeoning ethnic consciousness of bicultural Louis Chu and Wayne Wang. Chu’s classic Eat a Bowl of Tea (1967) on New York Chinatown’s bachelor enclave has gone out of print for decades, until the University of Washington Press reissued it in 2020. From its film title alone, Wang’s indie film Chan Is Missing (1982) diagnoses the vanishing of immigrants, including Chu’s New York bachelors, although these ghosts had sired and continue to sire Asian America. One’s raison d’être is increasingly clouded by exigencies of existence; where one comes from pales in comparison to where one wishes to be.
That the immigrant voice of Island is preserved only through the effort of the Bay Area Asian American scholars testifies to the inextricability of the two. Nonetheless, the asymmetry of fiction writers and their émigré figures of speech render the latter a backstory at best, susceptible to mainstream appropriation. Such foil for ethnicity comes into its own, front and center as in Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred (1964) and Lost Names (1970). The latter’s titular absence set against its subtitle Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, Kim’s autobiographical, historical fiction of Japanese colonization teeters precariously on fiction and memoir, scenes pieced together and sins of the Japanese once experienced in the Korean and Japanese language, now reconstructed in English. Not dwelling exclusively on the Asian backstory as does Kim, nearly all immigrant narratives unfold, nonetheless, initially or in part in the ancestral land proper or transplanted into insular Chinatowns, evidenced by Louis Chu and Wayne Wang. Such tensions of an immigrant life largely evaporate in Asian American hands, where the alien loved ones and their shunned ways cameo, if at all, like the a priori womb – worse yet, the surrogate womb – no one recalls after the birth of a novel, the coming into being of an ethnic identity.
In the new millennium, Patricia Park in Re Jane balances Asia America’s habitual satire of immigrant clowns with self-caricature. As a result of their bicultural background, Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019) traverse China(town) and America with relative ease by way of bilingual actors and subtitles. Rare (fool’s) gold of expatriate writing in Western languages shimmer in Ha Jin and Yiyun Li of the US, Xiaolu Guo of the UK, and Dai Sijie of France. They all engage, unwittingly, in Orientalist pandering to various degrees. Ha Jin breaks out with his award-winning Waiting (1989) on the shock of a pair of bound feet, long a repugnant yet titillating trope to the Anglophone eye, not to mention a eunuch’s self-castration and one notorious ‘Human Pig,’ an imperial concubine blinded, limbs cut off, sunken into the cesspool, a fitting candidate for his poetry collection Wreckage (2001). This race to the bottom is matched by Yiyun Li’s stories featuring Orientalist freaks of self-mutilation. Guo’s self-exhibitionist A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) relishes in atrocious English that is worthy of Charlie Chan Chinglish. Dai’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000) weds West idolizing with the Eastern stereotype of Brechtian woman, one good with her hands. Name-dropping of Chineseness in Ha Jin et al. culminates in Guo’s I Am China (2014), the Chinese title of which is The Bluest Sea. Chinese expats’ titular strategic essentializing recalls Asian American blurbs’ immigrant-dropping.
Coming of age in the ‘Chinese Century,’ transnational cosmopolitans of K-Ming Chang (‘K-明Chang’ in www.kmingchang.com/poetry, ‘born in the year of the tiger’ of 1998) and An Yu (‘born [in 1994] and raised in Beijing’ in the book blurb) internationalize immigrant license in the 2020 Bestiary and Braised Pork. The title Bestiary portends the impish bastardizing of her animal fables and nom de plume K-明, a reincarnation of the poet Kristin Chang of Past Lives, Future Bodies (2018). An Yu’s titular ‘Braised’ acts like an anagram B-raised that slow cooks ‘born and raised’ from raw pork belly to universal reveries of deracinated metropolitans. Although a Chinese delicacy, the dish ‘braised pork’ arrives in English, Anglicizing Beijing and the Shangri-la Tibet, with a dash of Oriental exotica. Filling the same old Orientalism in the new bottle of Chang’s bestial ‘Hu Gu Po’ (Tiger Woman) and An Yu’s surreal ‘fish-man,’ both hip twenty-something writers master the master tongue of English for the Anglophone global market.
Published in the same year, nothing much happens in Simon Han’s Nights When Nothing Happened, except eye-catching romanization of Chinese characters complete with tonal diacritics. Whereas ethnic writers of the Chinese Century increasingly resort to oftentimes unpronounceable pinyin with only sporadic translation, as if encrypted, to authenticate stories out of this (American) world, Han’s ethnic baiting comes out of left field, putting diacritical marks atop, literally, pinyin romanization. Such unglossed pinyin with accent marks sinologizes, exoticizes Han’s American bildungsroman. This eye-opening approach is mind-numbing to all but bilingual readers. Given the disorienting style designed as reprise of the blurb’s ‘born in Tianjin, China,’ part of the immigrant padding, Han and his publisher wager that the target market would fall under the spell of otherworldliness, the aura of Orientalness, in the heart of the fiction’s setting of Plano, Texas. The strange look of four tones (¯, ´, ˘, and `) over strange words is skin-deep, a thin veneer over plain old Texas that otherwise lacks Asian immigrant tales. The immigrant parents of Han’s protagonist speak perfect English at work and at home. The husband’s language proficiency fails but once, in an email to his wife in bad English (49-50), when most immigrant couples would have typed in Chinese. The rare sighting of an immigrant’s speech defect is as incredulous as his enviable speech act throughout. Despite the varying settings, the places from which immigrants hail are equally phantasmagoric, be it K-Ming Chang’s animal fable, Yu An’s China-Tibet, or Simon Han’s Texas.
But are these writers immigrants? Chang, Yu, Han, and, of course, Crazy Rich Kevin Kwan are privileged in America’s cultural capital, just as Kwan’s Chinese and Singaporean fuerdai (the nouveau riche’s spoiled children) are in monetary capital. Jet-setting citizens of the world, superrich with life stories of others to burn, they are surely bemused as to why boomer and pre-boomer immigrants had never helped themselves to the darling plaything of language and culture. This sense of entitlement to bend English so as to latch onto the chic Chinese Century is entirely foreign to those who continue to wrestle with the stepmother tongue that is cruel and unforgiving.
Bracing himself to talk back, this Asian immigrant’s ‘contrarian’ argument on discursive and epistemic justice, if not social justice, is bound to be met, as it has been for decades, with indifferent dismissal as well as swift, passionate backlash in the form of academic one-upmanship. This sophisticated sophistry would once again assert that, akin to Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial ‘mimic man,’ minority writers subscribe to stereotypical immigrants with the best of intentions to parody and subvert them. According to this logic, half a century of representations of immigrant clowns speaking baby English and acting like alien creatures manifest Asian America’s rebuttal of mainstream racism, as though ethnic voice and empowerment lift all boats, the emigrant (prison) ship beyond American literary shores included. One is hard pressed to locate such universal ‘subverting’ that purportedly redeems immigrant characters. A salient exception is Patricia Park, whose self-caricature of her alter ego Jane Re does debunk immigrant clowns when Jane, a sojourner in Seoul, resorts to a creole Korean, a linguistic and cultural baptism of comic shame no different from immigrants swimming and sinking in America’s alphabet soup.
The difference resides in the fact that Park does it to her doppelganger, the mixed-race Jane, whereas the majority of her fellow Asian Americans do it to the immigrant other, doing it for themselves. What Park manages to accomplish resonates with the short order cook (Peter Wang) in Chan Is Missing, who confesses in Mandarin: ‘They [mainstream Americans] haven’t accepted us [Chinese who had been in the U.S. for decades, if not generations] because they don’t want to accept us.’ Just as America relishes exotic food while rejecting foreign bodies, so too Asian America acknowledges and disavows immigrant subjectivity. In reaction to both, Peter Wang’s character serves the Anglophone clientele their favorite ‘sweet and sour pork’ and ‘wonton soup,’ which, nonetheless, secrete his ‘spit,’ a taste of rejection via unintelligible Mandarin dialogue. By contrast, forging ahead with its monolingual literary heritage with scant traces of Wayne Wang’s Chinglish and Park’s Konglish, let alone ancestral tongues, Asian America fetishizes, polarizes immigrant characters into scatterbrained suckers and spiritual succor because that two-faced (un)poetic conceit comes with a long shelf life, with so much preservative of Amy Tan-style ‘good intentions’ that it is practically ageless (The Joy Luck Club 17). This insistence on heteroglossia beyond English-only assimilationism redresses the flattening of bicultural, invariably code-switching, first-generation new arrivals, a corrective to the representational dumbing down rudely forced upon immigrants.
Lest one critique my critique of Asian America as over-simplification, I submit that, long before this immigrant arrived on these shores, Asian America had thrown the first punch(es) in over-simplifying Asian immigrants as schizophrenically split, a winning stereotype that has recurred with amazing frequency and with utter impunity. Although one rung up from the ‘bottom feeders’ of refugees forced to flee their homeland, immigrants in exodus on their own volition remain overwhelmingly preoccupied with physical survival and family well-being rather than artistic self-representation in the adopted tongue and culture. However, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Alice Wu, and many others see fit to hologram their ‘Ba’ (Father) and ‘Ma’ (Mother) characters as immigrant clowns who, with a slight narrative tilt, morph in the same breath into crowning racial pride. Serendipitously, my family name happens to be Mă or ‘horse’ (馬) in the third tone, homophone of their ‘Mā’ (媽Mother) in the first tone, so let me talk back to (Asian) America on her behalf, let me carry her on my back. ‘She ain’t heavy,’ to bend the gender of The Hollies’ 1969 song, ‘she’s my sister.’ Separated by the second tone Má (麻flax), Ma in the first and the third tones fork into beasts versus mothers, a world of difference that falls on deaf ears of English speakers, as unregistered as when Asian Americans (mis)speak in the name of immigrants, dissembling a semblance of immigrants. This Ma or Horse has spoken straight from the horse’s mouth of an immigrant! Too subjective in using ‘I’ and even ‘you’? Getting too personal? Then I shall say it again, to Mà (罵 in the fourth tone, to castigate and criticize) again.
Thus, amidst this counterpointing white and ethnic duet, let us listen for anything amiss, any atonal – or simply tonal, as in Mā, Má, Mă, Mà – dissonance that belies the harmonizing. Therein lies the crypto-immigrant ‘spirit ditties of no tone,’ elusive half-notes barely registered in Anglo-America’s and perhaps Asian-America’s ear. After an overture on the white love song for immigrant tropes, this triple – white, Asian American, and immigrant – concerto unfolds ideally in three movements to winnow immigrant voices: the first from the turn to the mid-point of the twentieth century; the second on post-civil rights ethnic (un)consciousness; the third on the new millennium’s transnational cosmopolitans. No coda would conclude the immigrant hum-along sotto voce, which outlasts any grandiose orchestral composition by the Nation, if only we could hear it through the crescendo of white noise and off-white, yellowish sound-alike. Take a deep breath before the first note, dear readers, who constitute, after all, a full house of team players, or designated closers of team performances, rising and clapping in unison, bravoing for more of the same, more of the empty fetish of Asian immigrants in a century-long concert spanning the overture, the first, the second, and the third movement. Here goes; listen into the silence.
Works Cited
An Yu. Braised Pork. Grove Press, 2020.
Bhabha, Homi K. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.’ The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994, pp. 85-92.
Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Woman of Setzuan. 1947. University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. 1946. Penguin, 2019.
Chang, K-Ming. Bestiary. One World, 2020.
Chang, Kristin. Past Lives, Future Bodies. Black Lawrence Press, 2018.
Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. 1961. University of Washington Press, 2020.
Dai Sijie. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. 2000. Translated by Ian Rilke, Anchor, 2001.
Dai Sijie, director. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Performances by Zhou Xun and Chen Kun, Les Productions Internationales Le Film 2002.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translation by Dana Polan,
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
DeLillo, Don. Mao II. Viking, 1991.
Farewell. Directed by Lulu Wang. Performances by Shuzhen Zhao, Awkwafina, X Mayo, Big Beach Films, 2019.
Guo, Xiaolu. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Doubleday, 2007.
Guo, Xiaolu. I Am China. Doubleday, 2014.
Ha Jin. Waiting. Vintage, 1999.
Ha Jin. Wreckage. Hanging Loose Press, 2001.
Han, Simon. Nights When Nothing Happened. Riverhead, 2020.
Hare, David. Fanshen: A Play. Faber & Faber, 1976.
Hinton, William. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Monthly Review Press, 1966.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmomery: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana University Press, 1989.
Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World, 2020.
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. Edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, University of Washington Press, 1980.
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Li, Yiyun. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Random House, 2005.
Li, Yiyun. The Vagrant. Random House, 2009.
Kang, Younghill. East Goes West. 1937. Penguin, 2019.
Kim, Richard. Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Childhood. 1970. University of California Press, 1998.
Kim, Richard. The Martyred. 1964. Penguin, 2011.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. 1976. Vintage, 1986.
Kwan, Kevin. Crazy Rich Asians. Penguin, 2013.
Park, Patricia. Re Jane. Viking, 2015.
Saving Face. Directed by Alice Wu, performances by Joan Chen, Michelle Krusiec, Lynn Chen, Destination Films, 2004.
Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China. Random House, 1937.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ http://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf. Accessed December 30, 2020.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989.
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin, 2019.
Wang, Wayne, director. Chan Is Missing. Performances by Wood Moy, Marc Hayashi, Laureen Chew New Yorker Films, 1982.
Wang, Wayne, director. Eat a Bowl of Tea. Performances by Cora Miao, Victor Wong, Russell Wong, Columbia Pictures, 1989.
Warhol, Andy. Mao Series, 1972-1974, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. First Second, 2006.
On the other hand, that is, in America’s left hand of Asian America, poetic license hits home, domiciled as the ethnic birthright of ‘immigrant license.’ Rather than figment of imagination, Asian America exercises figment of familial – and fairly familiar by now – fallacy over one’s own immigrant parents, grandparents, and relatives. To racialize Marianne Hirsch’s contention in The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989) by splicing that book title with her book two decades later, ‘the [immigrant] mother’s voice is rarely heard, but that the [American-born] daughter tends to speak for her’ (The Generation of Postmemory [2012] 10). These Asian family members or blood relations, real or imagined, come to embody aliens to Asian American protagonists whitewashing themselves subconsciously, thus projecting out their internalized alienness. Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese (2006), for instance, cross-dissolves the ABC protagonist Jin into the whiteface Danny. Yet Danny remains haunted by Jin’s FOB (fresh-off-the-boat) alter ego Chin-Kee, pidginized slur of ‘Chink.’ An eerie echo of the racist stereotype transposing ‘r’ and ‘l,’ Jin’s self-bleaching on the exterior exposes interior self-breaching: whiteness only after shedding yellowness.
Symptomatic of the minority complex, immigrant license fashions ethnic identity through self-splitting, by means of distancing from that which is closest to Asian America, by ventriloquizing immigrant ‘dummies’ animated in its hands, sitting on its laps, throwing its voice from the belly of America’s bestial history of race. The ultimate irony of giving voice to Asian immigrants, many of whom, if not all, feel ill-used by the stepmother tongue of English decades into diaspora, lies in the fact that minority wordsmiths are obliged to undo English, to unlearn their mother tongue in simulation of broken English, halting speech act, and psychological unease. These consummate stylists in the English language are called upon to defamiliarize English and to re-requisition their first – in the order of acquisition pre-schooling – language, which has remained their immigrant home patois ever since. These stylists need to make room in their mother tongue of English for their mothers’ tongues, their heritage languages. This dialectic approach enables an off-kilter Dutch angle to faithfully capture the richness of ‘round’ immigrant characters. Despite their flawed speech and a disorienting tilt to their image, the subjects would emerge empathetically, countenanced by a full acknowledgement of immigrant in-betweenness. By owning up to his ‘mother[’s] tongue . . . stunted . . . at the second-grade level,’ Ocean Vuong mirrors obliquely family members’ illiteracy through authorial limitations (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous [2019] 31). Lest I be accused of legislating on minority creativity, few other ethnic groups have founded their canons so exclusively on the ‘backs’ of immigrant characters, made to slouch toward stereotypes. Few African American writers poke fun at Swahili-speaking African characters to validate their Americanness; few Jews do so at the expense of Yiddish speakers. Indeed, where do we even find Yiddish-speaking figures in contemporary American novels after Isaac Bashevis Singer? Because of the relative youth of Asian America, the ‘runt’ in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, first-generation Asian immigrants are rife in the Promised Land and in their descendants’ compromised ‘talk-stories,’ epitomized by Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976).
If Cathy Park Hong’s Asian American Reckoning is entitled Minor Feelings (2020) à la Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Minor Literature,’ then her ‘Korean immigrant[s]’ parents from the blurb would have to pen Minor’s Doll’s, or simply Infants’, Feelings. One’s immigrant parents become one’s paper sons and daughters, a reversal of fake relations that used to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act. What was once nineteenth-century Chinese laborers’ forged documents as Chinatown expatriates’ ‘papers sons’ to enter the US is now twenty-first century Asian American writers’ ticket to the writerly pantheon of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Put bluntly, immigrant parents are ‘imported’ by Asian American dream factories as raw materials to be processed – crushed and remolded – into prefab tomes for millennial, multicultural getaway reading, tombs of the unknown immigrants’ ‘good death.’
Secreted within white and non-first-generation ethnic writings, immigrant narratives are nearly invisible, inaudible. For Asian immigrants to speak on their own behalf, to get a word in edgewise, they must break the wild horse of a foreign tongue, after having broken many legs or lucked out over food, shelter, job, and family in a foreign land. Such insurmountable challenge leaves a gaping void in American culture, one instantly filled by immigrant representations in native-born white and ethnic writings. In the most blatant, exploitative cases, Asian America resorts to immigrant license in packaging. Printed and online promotional materials routinely begin the blurb, interview, and whatnot with the author’s birth beyond these shores. One who arrived as a preschooler, even an infant, magically acquires the authenticity and authority of an adult émigré. This rubs off on the majority of ethnic writers born in the US, whose Asian-looking face and Asian-sounding surname somehow legitimize insider knowledge of Asia, further insinuated by the blurb’s formulaic ‘a child of immigrant parents.’ The lived experiences of migration emanate the genre of autobiographical fiction from Kingston to Amy Tan to Patricia Park, courtesy of intergenerational memory of Kingstonian talk-stories. In Re Jane (2015), Park even justifies the telepathic sympathy with Korean relatives by means of ‘a flood of infantile memories,’ ‘sensory memory, far buried in the recesses of my mind, could still recall the feel of her touch’ (247, 149-150). A make-believe, sentimental bond, this speaking for immigrant characters by white and ethnic writers alike may well be speaking over them, spanning the spectrum of conservative typecasting and liberal empathetic visualizing.
To rephrase Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak’s postcolonial classic ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, can Asian immigrants speak for themselves? Will we listen through the thick accent and the thicket of alien cultural references? The estranging sight and sound from an immigrant’s eye defamiliarize the Promised Land as well as the ancestral land. The wonderment and woe from Asian immigrant narratives commence with Island (1980), collection of early twentieth century Chinese poems carved or written on the ‘prison walls’ of San Francisco Angel Island Immigration detention center. Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan chronicle their struggles in ensuing decades within a racist America. The civil rights era witnesses the burgeoning ethnic consciousness of bicultural Louis Chu and Wayne Wang. Chu’s classic Eat a Bowl of Tea (1967) on New York Chinatown’s bachelor enclave has gone out of print for decades, until the University of Washington Press reissued it in 2020. From its film title alone, Wang’s indie film Chan Is Missing (1982) diagnoses the vanishing of immigrants, including Chu’s New York bachelors, although these ghosts had sired and continue to sire Asian America. One’s raison d’être is increasingly clouded by exigencies of existence; where one comes from pales in comparison to where one wishes to be.
That the immigrant voice of Island is preserved only through the effort of the Bay Area Asian American scholars testifies to the inextricability of the two. Nonetheless, the asymmetry of fiction writers and their émigré figures of speech render the latter a backstory at best, susceptible to mainstream appropriation. Such foil for ethnicity comes into its own, front and center as in Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred (1964) and Lost Names (1970). The latter’s titular absence set against its subtitle Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, Kim’s autobiographical, historical fiction of Japanese colonization teeters precariously on fiction and memoir, scenes pieced together and sins of the Japanese once experienced in the Korean and Japanese language, now reconstructed in English. Not dwelling exclusively on the Asian backstory as does Kim, nearly all immigrant narratives unfold, nonetheless, initially or in part in the ancestral land proper or transplanted into insular Chinatowns, evidenced by Louis Chu and Wayne Wang. Such tensions of an immigrant life largely evaporate in Asian American hands, where the alien loved ones and their shunned ways cameo, if at all, like the a priori womb – worse yet, the surrogate womb – no one recalls after the birth of a novel, the coming into being of an ethnic identity.
In the new millennium, Patricia Park in Re Jane balances Asia America’s habitual satire of immigrant clowns with self-caricature. As a result of their bicultural background, Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019) traverse China(town) and America with relative ease by way of bilingual actors and subtitles. Rare (fool’s) gold of expatriate writing in Western languages shimmer in Ha Jin and Yiyun Li of the US, Xiaolu Guo of the UK, and Dai Sijie of France. They all engage, unwittingly, in Orientalist pandering to various degrees. Ha Jin breaks out with his award-winning Waiting (1989) on the shock of a pair of bound feet, long a repugnant yet titillating trope to the Anglophone eye, not to mention a eunuch’s self-castration and one notorious ‘Human Pig,’ an imperial concubine blinded, limbs cut off, sunken into the cesspool, a fitting candidate for his poetry collection Wreckage (2001). This race to the bottom is matched by Yiyun Li’s stories featuring Orientalist freaks of self-mutilation. Guo’s self-exhibitionist A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) relishes in atrocious English that is worthy of Charlie Chan Chinglish. Dai’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000) weds West idolizing with the Eastern stereotype of Brechtian woman, one good with her hands. Name-dropping of Chineseness in Ha Jin et al. culminates in Guo’s I Am China (2014), the Chinese title of which is The Bluest Sea. Chinese expats’ titular strategic essentializing recalls Asian American blurbs’ immigrant-dropping.
Coming of age in the ‘Chinese Century,’ transnational cosmopolitans of K-Ming Chang (‘K-明Chang’ in www.kmingchang.com/poetry, ‘born in the year of the tiger’ of 1998) and An Yu (‘born [in 1994] and raised in Beijing’ in the book blurb) internationalize immigrant license in the 2020 Bestiary and Braised Pork. The title Bestiary portends the impish bastardizing of her animal fables and nom de plume K-明, a reincarnation of the poet Kristin Chang of Past Lives, Future Bodies (2018). An Yu’s titular ‘Braised’ acts like an anagram B-raised that slow cooks ‘born and raised’ from raw pork belly to universal reveries of deracinated metropolitans. Although a Chinese delicacy, the dish ‘braised pork’ arrives in English, Anglicizing Beijing and the Shangri-la Tibet, with a dash of Oriental exotica. Filling the same old Orientalism in the new bottle of Chang’s bestial ‘Hu Gu Po’ (Tiger Woman) and An Yu’s surreal ‘fish-man,’ both hip twenty-something writers master the master tongue of English for the Anglophone global market.
Published in the same year, nothing much happens in Simon Han’s Nights When Nothing Happened, except eye-catching romanization of Chinese characters complete with tonal diacritics. Whereas ethnic writers of the Chinese Century increasingly resort to oftentimes unpronounceable pinyin with only sporadic translation, as if encrypted, to authenticate stories out of this (American) world, Han’s ethnic baiting comes out of left field, putting diacritical marks atop, literally, pinyin romanization. Such unglossed pinyin with accent marks sinologizes, exoticizes Han’s American bildungsroman. This eye-opening approach is mind-numbing to all but bilingual readers. Given the disorienting style designed as reprise of the blurb’s ‘born in Tianjin, China,’ part of the immigrant padding, Han and his publisher wager that the target market would fall under the spell of otherworldliness, the aura of Orientalness, in the heart of the fiction’s setting of Plano, Texas. The strange look of four tones (¯, ´, ˘, and `) over strange words is skin-deep, a thin veneer over plain old Texas that otherwise lacks Asian immigrant tales. The immigrant parents of Han’s protagonist speak perfect English at work and at home. The husband’s language proficiency fails but once, in an email to his wife in bad English (49-50), when most immigrant couples would have typed in Chinese. The rare sighting of an immigrant’s speech defect is as incredulous as his enviable speech act throughout. Despite the varying settings, the places from which immigrants hail are equally phantasmagoric, be it K-Ming Chang’s animal fable, Yu An’s China-Tibet, or Simon Han’s Texas.
But are these writers immigrants? Chang, Yu, Han, and, of course, Crazy Rich Kevin Kwan are privileged in America’s cultural capital, just as Kwan’s Chinese and Singaporean fuerdai (the nouveau riche’s spoiled children) are in monetary capital. Jet-setting citizens of the world, superrich with life stories of others to burn, they are surely bemused as to why boomer and pre-boomer immigrants had never helped themselves to the darling plaything of language and culture. This sense of entitlement to bend English so as to latch onto the chic Chinese Century is entirely foreign to those who continue to wrestle with the stepmother tongue that is cruel and unforgiving.
Bracing himself to talk back, this Asian immigrant’s ‘contrarian’ argument on discursive and epistemic justice, if not social justice, is bound to be met, as it has been for decades, with indifferent dismissal as well as swift, passionate backlash in the form of academic one-upmanship. This sophisticated sophistry would once again assert that, akin to Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial ‘mimic man,’ minority writers subscribe to stereotypical immigrants with the best of intentions to parody and subvert them. According to this logic, half a century of representations of immigrant clowns speaking baby English and acting like alien creatures manifest Asian America’s rebuttal of mainstream racism, as though ethnic voice and empowerment lift all boats, the emigrant (prison) ship beyond American literary shores included. One is hard pressed to locate such universal ‘subverting’ that purportedly redeems immigrant characters. A salient exception is Patricia Park, whose self-caricature of her alter ego Jane Re does debunk immigrant clowns when Jane, a sojourner in Seoul, resorts to a creole Korean, a linguistic and cultural baptism of comic shame no different from immigrants swimming and sinking in America’s alphabet soup.
The difference resides in the fact that Park does it to her doppelganger, the mixed-race Jane, whereas the majority of her fellow Asian Americans do it to the immigrant other, doing it for themselves. What Park manages to accomplish resonates with the short order cook (Peter Wang) in Chan Is Missing, who confesses in Mandarin: ‘They [mainstream Americans] haven’t accepted us [Chinese who had been in the U.S. for decades, if not generations] because they don’t want to accept us.’ Just as America relishes exotic food while rejecting foreign bodies, so too Asian America acknowledges and disavows immigrant subjectivity. In reaction to both, Peter Wang’s character serves the Anglophone clientele their favorite ‘sweet and sour pork’ and ‘wonton soup,’ which, nonetheless, secrete his ‘spit,’ a taste of rejection via unintelligible Mandarin dialogue. By contrast, forging ahead with its monolingual literary heritage with scant traces of Wayne Wang’s Chinglish and Park’s Konglish, let alone ancestral tongues, Asian America fetishizes, polarizes immigrant characters into scatterbrained suckers and spiritual succor because that two-faced (un)poetic conceit comes with a long shelf life, with so much preservative of Amy Tan-style ‘good intentions’ that it is practically ageless (The Joy Luck Club 17). This insistence on heteroglossia beyond English-only assimilationism redresses the flattening of bicultural, invariably code-switching, first-generation new arrivals, a corrective to the representational dumbing down rudely forced upon immigrants.
Lest one critique my critique of Asian America as over-simplification, I submit that, long before this immigrant arrived on these shores, Asian America had thrown the first punch(es) in over-simplifying Asian immigrants as schizophrenically split, a winning stereotype that has recurred with amazing frequency and with utter impunity. Although one rung up from the ‘bottom feeders’ of refugees forced to flee their homeland, immigrants in exodus on their own volition remain overwhelmingly preoccupied with physical survival and family well-being rather than artistic self-representation in the adopted tongue and culture. However, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Alice Wu, and many others see fit to hologram their ‘Ba’ (Father) and ‘Ma’ (Mother) characters as immigrant clowns who, with a slight narrative tilt, morph in the same breath into crowning racial pride. Serendipitously, my family name happens to be Mă or ‘horse’ (馬) in the third tone, homophone of their ‘Mā’ (媽Mother) in the first tone, so let me talk back to (Asian) America on her behalf, let me carry her on my back. ‘She ain’t heavy,’ to bend the gender of The Hollies’ 1969 song, ‘she’s my sister.’ Separated by the second tone Má (麻flax), Ma in the first and the third tones fork into beasts versus mothers, a world of difference that falls on deaf ears of English speakers, as unregistered as when Asian Americans (mis)speak in the name of immigrants, dissembling a semblance of immigrants. This Ma or Horse has spoken straight from the horse’s mouth of an immigrant! Too subjective in using ‘I’ and even ‘you’? Getting too personal? Then I shall say it again, to Mà (罵 in the fourth tone, to castigate and criticize) again.
Thus, amidst this counterpointing white and ethnic duet, let us listen for anything amiss, any atonal – or simply tonal, as in Mā, Má, Mă, Mà – dissonance that belies the harmonizing. Therein lies the crypto-immigrant ‘spirit ditties of no tone,’ elusive half-notes barely registered in Anglo-America’s and perhaps Asian-America’s ear. After an overture on the white love song for immigrant tropes, this triple – white, Asian American, and immigrant – concerto unfolds ideally in three movements to winnow immigrant voices: the first from the turn to the mid-point of the twentieth century; the second on post-civil rights ethnic (un)consciousness; the third on the new millennium’s transnational cosmopolitans. No coda would conclude the immigrant hum-along sotto voce, which outlasts any grandiose orchestral composition by the Nation, if only we could hear it through the crescendo of white noise and off-white, yellowish sound-alike. Take a deep breath before the first note, dear readers, who constitute, after all, a full house of team players, or designated closers of team performances, rising and clapping in unison, bravoing for more of the same, more of the empty fetish of Asian immigrants in a century-long concert spanning the overture, the first, the second, and the third movement. Here goes; listen into the silence.
Works Cited
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Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美mash@msu.edu) is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998); and the memoir Immigrant Horse’s Mouth (2023). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile (2018) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).
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