Our “Long-Living Badasses.” Why So Much Asian American Fiction Focuses on Grandparents

When I began drafting my forthcoming novel, Off the Books, I knew I’d write a spunky grandpa. Lǎoyé, the protagonist’s smack-talking, wake-and-bake-weed-smoking, video-game-playing grandfather, was my beta readers’ favorite character. Every novel needs a character who can get away with saying outrageous things—and Hollywood has certainly positioned Asian-American elders to say whatever the F they want!

If you’ve ever watched a movie about Asian Americans, you know we’re bound by duty to defer to our elders as social treasures deserving reverence and care. You also know those elders are a handful: think playful, long-living badasses à la Fresh Off the Boat’s Grandma Huang, Minari’s Grandma Soonja and the real-life sheroes in Sean Wang’s Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó.

Now cue the lights and soundtrack, and you can easily imagine my auntie Xiang Juin in her tidy Las Vegas home, reaching into a full jar of Lindor truffles only to discover her mother—my 109-year-old wàipó, placed on a restrictive diet befitting her age—has snuck each and every chocolate out of its wrapper. What’s left? Only their perfectly round, crinkly wrappers, emptied like cicadas’ exoskeletons.

This is just one of many script-ready Wàipó scenes. When I began dating my now-husband, my family adored him so much they fed him, and he adored them so much he choked down a slice of one of those whipped cream cakes topped with strawberries that you find at Asian bakeries—despite the fact he can’t stand fruit.

So, when I called my mom to tell her we were engaged, I expected excitement. Instead, after a long pause, she said, “Burgious is a Black man,” as though I hadn’t noticed. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn, but I held my tongue. “Think of your future kids,” she said at last. “Life will be harder for them.”

I was stunned into silence. Stalking down the busy sidewalk, phone pressed a little too hard against my ear, I thought, Surely this woman who polluted my father’s pure Aryan lineage with her Asianness is not warning me away from an interracial relationship. “Let me ask what your wàipó thinks,” she pressed. She knew I’d listen to Wàipó.

A few days later, my mother called again. “Well,” she reported, “I asked whether your wàipó minds that your fiancé’s Black.”

I felt myself clutching the phone too hard again, breathing shallowly. “She asked,” my mom continued, “‘Does he mind that we’re yellow?'” Over the staticky line, I heard a long sigh. “I said no. And she said, ‘Then I don’t mind that he’s Black!'”

I could share a hundred other uplifting Wàipó stories, like the time she scared a would-be burglar off while my military-hero-grandfather hid in the bedroom, the time she survived major surgery as a centenarian, then decided the doctor was taking too long to approve removal of her feeding tube and yanked the thing out herself (“Will she be able to eat?” “I guess we’ll see!”) or the time my ex-girlfriend complimented her silk qípáo and Wàipó offered to sew her one of her own. But life is not a Hollywood movie.

Even as I reveled in writing Lǎoyé, I was researching China’s quiet Uyghur genocide, which the book touches on. According to reports by Human Rights Watch, approximately 1.3 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been detained by the Chinese government.

And per the Uyghur Human Rights Project, as of this spring, more than 449,000 Uyghurs remain imprisoned in Xinjiang. That translates to about one in seventeen non-Han Chinese residents—some of whom are elders like Wàipó and Lǎoyé, imprisoned for crimes like wearing conservative Muslim clothing, studying the Qur’an and attending religious gatherings.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Uyghur situation, I’m not surprised. China is the United States’ number one trade partner. And despite the steps we’ve taken to block its regional hegemony, it’s likely to become a superpower. So, we don’t bark at Beijing too loudly.

Sure, the US joined a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in response to the Uyghurs’ maltreatment—but we still sent athletes to compete in the games. And TV crews to record them. And money to sponsor them.

Sure, we’ve condemned the persecution, surveillance, mass detention, forced labor and sterilization that Uyghur people have endured. But we still hustled the homeless unceremoniously out of San Francisco so Biden could welcome Xi Jinping to a prettied-up APEC summit site. After all, Beijing is not obliterating ethnic groups through obvious, outright slaughter.

Yet Uyghur birthrates plummeted by nearly forty-five percent in a single year. Uyghur homes and mosques were razed, families separated and reeducated.

And as horrific reports of rape, torture, organ harvesting and deaths at the reeducation camps began leaking from police officers and former detainees—backed up by satellite images—Uyghurs living “free” on the outside were hurriedly changing their children’s legal names to avoid losing access to school and healthcare. Veils, and even “abnormal beards,” were banned in China for their association with Islam.

The FBI has named the authoritarian Chinese government a grave threat to our democratic values and economic wellbeing. Delve into Beijing’s actions, and you may find yourself haunted by Martin Niemöller’s unforgettable postwar statement, which began, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out….”

Even after they came for our beloved Asian elders, it’s pretty much business as usual with Beijing.

The Chinese word “wàipó,” meaning maternal grandmother, is composed of two characters: 外 (wài, or outside) and 婆 (pó, or matron/mother-in-law). My mother’s mother, then, is the matron who came from outside our patrilineal Li family.

Yet to me, my wàipó is the family. So, what to do?

For this nerdy writer, the answer was to start by leveraging a fictional grandparent to help shine a light on multitudes of real ones, because Lǎoyé’s quirky observations may be jokes—but my motivation for inventing him to keep Off the Books lighthearted enough for mass consumption is no laughing matter.

And you? What might your answer be?

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Off the Books by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is available via Henry Holt.