The Wily Filipino

"Asian American," Part 3.

Tim Yu writes:

Here's my question, though--and I don't have an answer: What is the difference, then, between the category "good poets who happen to be Asian American" and "the fantasy of social colorblindness"? If we reject the idea that the category "Asian American writing" has determinate content, then what does it mean to employ the category at all? In particular, what's "Asian American" about a text whose only racial marker is the ostensibly Asian name of its author?

(I had to snip a delicious tidbit about a couple of poets that he asked me not to post, alas.)

But let me take a hastily written stab at it: I'm not so sure that I'd agree that "Asian American writing" doesn't exist as a category, or that it refers to nothing on the ground. I simply reject what "Asian American writing" as a
discursive category has evolved (or devolved) into, as an Orientalist beast defined from within and without. Eileen's recovery/rescue of Jose Garcia Villa (in her edited volume of Villa's work, The Anchored Angel) into the Asian American canon represents a main phase of this project: interrogating what Asian American literature has narrowly come to be. In turn, Tim's excellent essay argues for Villa as a "proto-transnational" figure, haunting the borders of both "American" literature and "Asian American" literature and whose work, shorn of the usual ethnic signifiers, provides an excellent entry into questioning the notion of Asian American lit per se.

(Villa's position in Filipino literature is a different story all together. My mother went to school in the '50s and majored in English, which was why I was exposed to Villa at a young age. (One of her brothers was a poet, another was a critic, and so there was always poetry around the house.) In any case, she was totally into his coconuts/nipples poem, and was trying to explain it to me -- now that I think about it now, it seems a little disturbing.

But by the time I went to college in the '80s, the '60s had happened, and the world had changed. A lit professor of mine in the Philippines was talking about how literature had to be socially engaged for it to have any relevance, and should not be created as simply art for art's sake -- "like those poems by that American, Jose Garcia Villa," he said with barely disguised contempt. True story. It's either that kind of dismissal, or Villa is way too canonized in the Philippines as a kind of distant literary father -- enough so that people don't have to read him anymore.)

(And I'll digress and muddy the waters even further: if Tchaikovsky was gay, then would "The Nutcracker" be gay music? Or is he simply a good composer who happened to be gay? Does one runs the risk of devaluing sexuality if one says no? Or is there a huge gap in terms of content between music and poetry, i.e., is it less possible to be "ethnic" in music than in poetry?)

There are a couple of positions one can take regarding ethnicity, for instance, but it's clear that there's always a dynamic tension between both poles:

1. Ethnicity is elective. That is, all those ethnic markers -- whether it be food, or language, or clothing, however seemingly arbitrary they may be -- are things to be deployed, to be operationalized, and as such, ethnicity is malleable and flexible and highly contextual.

2. But many people labor under particular ethno-national categories imposed on them by states or other people, and so in that sense they have little choice in the matter. Tagalogs, for instance, like to think of everyone else in the Philippines as Filipino, even though that lived experience of being "Filipino" may be extremely different to, say, a Muslim resident in Mindanao. Ethnicity therefore can be shot through with unequal power relations and as such isn't all that fluid.

3. And we know in any case that those ethnic choices are a fiction as well, since I have to wear my brown skin all day. Such colorblindness (or generic Americanness) does not exist in the same way for the person of color, as s/he is always/already marked as Other. The idea of race as a cultural construction may have been fostered by well-meaning sociologists and anthropologists, but one cannot wish away those pesky phenotypical differences (regardless of whatever cultural significance is accorded to them). In contrast, an Anglo American can wear four-leaf clovers and drink green beer and, in short, be Irish American for just one day, then retreat to Vanilla American the rest of the year. Asian Americans simply don't have the "luxury" of retreat. (But to digress again: can literature give the writer that illusion of momentary retreat? But can the text be so easily demarcated from "real life?")

In any case, there probably shouldn't be any absolute position -- or, ultimately, it may all be a matter of semantics, and the debate becomes pointless after a while. The statements about the Wayne Wang films in my previous entry are, according to Eileen's criteria, both accurate. But if someone were to say that Chan Is Missing is a "more" Asian American film than Smoke, surely one would agree, and one doesn't have to be acceding to Orientalist criteria to say that.

I'll end with something from Dana Takagi, from her essay "Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America" (found in Russell Leong's edited volume, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience):

A politics of identity and whatever kind of politics ensues from that project -- multiculturalism, feminism, and gay movements -- is first of all a politics about identity. That is, about the lack of a wholistic and 'coherent narrative' derived from race, class, gender, and sexuality...

And later on in the essay:

The gist of this essay has been to insist that our valuation of hetereogeneity not be ad hoc and that we seize the opportunity to recognize non-ethnic based differences -- like homosexuality -- as an occasion to critique the tendency toward essentialist currents in ethnic-based narratives and disciplines. In short, the practice of including gayness in Asian America rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept of "Asian American" identity. The interior of the category "Asian American" ought not be viewed as a hierarchy of identities led by ethnic-based narratives, but rather, the complicated interplay and collision of different identities.

All right, back to grading. Posted by the wily filipino at April 30, 2003 02:17 PM