Originally posted by Malyse in BCC. This shit is crazy.
Also, if you're American, make sure you get your ass out and vote today.
Every time I look in the mirror I have an existential crisis about the slantedness of my eyes /s
Huge tangent:
You know, I read an academic article a few years ago about how a certain kind of "ethnic lit". You probably know the type: a young Asian-American doesn't get along with their parents, then they find out that their parents have gone through some horrible tragedy back in Asia, and then they use that tragedy to grow closer. I don't remember the thrust of the article, but it's pretty obvious that there are some questionable politics going on. Otherness (the main character never feels American; the parents are always portrayed as weird and distinctly non-American), authorial ownership (using tragedies to make a convenient plot point; the tragedies are never actually fully explored, they're there to shock and act as a plot point), orientalism (always showing the Asian countries as being backwards and strange).
There are definitely some Asian-American authors that handle the subject very well, but there are some who double down on all the stereotypes. Joy Luck Club comes to mind as an example of the latter.
As a counterexample to the commercialized ethnic lit, the article mentions
Nam Le's short story,
The Boat. It's really interesting, because it starts with the same trappings as the ethnic lit that the article bashes, but then turns in a different direction. The main character is a Vietnamese-Australian who has to write a short story for the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He previously swore to never write ethnic literature, but with a deadline coming up, he decides to write a story about his estranged father, a survivor of the My Lai Massacre. The father visits, and upon learning that his son is writing about his experiences, rips up the story and burns it. There's no heart-to-heart or anything like that - just a son who used his father's traumatic experiences on a whim.
Looking at Nam Le's Wikipedia page, there's a quote about this subject:
My relationship with Vietnam is complex. For a long time I vowed I wouldn't fall into writing ethnic stories, immigrant stories, etc. Then I realized that not only was I working against these expectations (market, self, literary, cultural), I was working against my kneejerk resistance to such expectations. How I see it now is no matter what or where I write about, I feel a responsibility to the subject matter. Not so much to get it right as to do it justice. Having personal history with a subject only complicates this — but not always, nor necessarily, in bad ways. I don't completely understand my relationship to Vietnam as a writer. This book is a testament to the fact that I'm becoming more and more okay with that.
I tend to agree with him here. It's good to write about your background and ethnicity, but it has to be handled carefully. Amy Tan, I don't think, was very respectful or thoughtful when she wrote Joy Luck Club. I much prefer the works of people like Change-Rae Lee.
Ugh, writing this out reminds me of how little I've read these past few years.
