Who Decides What Asian American Literature Is?

In the 1990s, when I was a student at the newly formed Asian Pacific American Studies Department at NYU, the artist in residence at the time, David Henry Hwang, visited my class and spoke about Bruce Lee and the film The Joy Luck Club. He said something that I will never forget: “One generation’s breakthrough is another generation’s stereotype.”

At the time, I was in a cultural identity crisis. I was an immigrant and didn’t know what it meant to be American (because I wasn’t), nor did I know what it meant to be Asian or the right kind of Asian because of my mixed identity as half Chinese and half Filipino. In the Philippines, in the sixth grade, a Filipino classmate told me, “Your people stole the money in our country,” referring to my Chinese half. Meanwhile, when I was fifteen, a Chinese classmate at my American high school found out that I liked another Chinese boy and said, “You should like your own kind.” I felt unaccepted by everyone. In the Philippines, my surname marked me, while in New York, my inability to speak or look Chinese rendered me “other” to my Chinese classmates.

As I looked for categories I could fit into, I realized that I was obsessed with passing. If I could pass as Chinese, I wouldn’t be judged. People wouldn’t look at me like I was the maid. The biggest export from the Philippines has, after all, is human labor. The Overseas Filipino Worker or OFW. Most end up as domestic helpers in Asia and elsewhere.

Frank Chin, one of the editors of Aiiieeeee!, the first Asian American literary anthology, saw American culture as a place that protected the sanctity of its whiteness. Considering himself a fifth generation “Chinaman,” Chin said, “As far as I’m concerned, Americanized Chinese who’ve come over in their teens and later to settle here and American born Chinaman [sic] have nothing in common, culturally, intellectually, emotionally.” Chin despised Oriental stereotypes and those who cultivated the image of the Oriental which he saw Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston do. Whether this is a correct assessment, of course, is another story. But ultimately Frank Chin posed the question: Who is the real Asian American?

The term Asian American was originally coined by two students in 1968, fueled by what was happening during the Civil Rights Movement. The death of the Oriental paved the way for term Asian American. Over the years, I had noticed that each American incursion abroad added more Asian ethnicities into its melting pot. First, it was just the Chinese working the railroads in California as well as the Japanese and the Filipino farm workers that worked the plantations in Hawaii and lands in California and Oregon. The 50s saw an expansion of Koreans after the Korean War, while the sixties and seventies opened up US borders to Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees after the Vietnam War.

I remember being confused when I first attended events at the Asian American Writers Workshop, which included writers from Afghanistan and South Asia. Before I came to the United States, I didn’t realize that someone from India or Iran would be considered an Asian like me. In the Philippines, anyone from the Middle Eastern countries was called “Arabo” just as the Chinese were called “Intsik” and South Asians “Bombay.” In the United States, I had to learn an entire lexicon.

Still, the inclusivity of the umbrella term Asian American has a shadow side; other identities get flattened. Perhaps this is why post-George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the acronym BIPOC—for Black, Indigenous, People of Color—became popular, as it centers the experiences of specific communities who’ve experienced historic oppression in America. How many times have I been confronted with the question Are Asians people of color from fellow minorities?

On another level, the idea that the enemy is only the ‘white man’ can also be disingenuous. Of the West, Cathy Park Hong, in Minor Feelings writes: “The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.”

I believe Hong’s statement is both true and untrue. Yes, the West’s imperialist legacy is haunting. But growing up in the Philippines, the bogeyman was the Japanese of WWII. I saw them as foot soldiers of Hirohito; they were monsters of the imperial machine come to conquer most of Asia.

What I’m getting at here is that there is such a thing as Asian self-hatred evidenced in the permutations of Asian American VS Asian (Asian Americans against the generation of old-school immigrant Asians), Asian VS Asian American (immigrant Asians against Americanized Asians whom they see as a lost people that forgot their language and identity), and, of course, Asian VS Asian (different Asian ethnicities against each other). But all these labels to say that it is ethnic and generational hairsplitting. During WWII, for example, it was the Japanese against every other Asian country they colonized and took over. We, of the Asian diaspora, are just as capable of dominating and conquering as other people. To quote James Baldwin in his 1965 debate against William F. Buckley, “We’re also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human too.”

For the current Asian American writer, it is not necessary to see or even know the entirety of Asian American literary genealogy because it is not vertical—it is horizontal. There is no overarching chronology or guideline of how one behaves as an Asian in this country. One can immigrate and have no knowledge of the history and burden of yellowface, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Although the publishing industry has a long history of expecting that writers of color tell identity-based stories, things are starting to change somewhat. One can be Asian American and tell a story outside of the Asian American lens. The breakthrough now, it seems, is to stay away from certain Asian American narrative tropes and focus on granular storytelling that isn’t bogged down by explaining Asianness as a historical event.

My novel Love Can’t Feed You grapples with questions of mixed identity, but it was  a visceral reaction to and inspired by The Lover, the story of a white French woman’s experience of being born and raised in French Indochina and her illicit affair with a rich older Chinese man. I felt deep kinship with the narrator; what was revealed in the pages told me more of my life than anything I had ever read. The narrator, at fifteen, had an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old man. She was looked down on by her fellow French. It gave me a way to access how my Filipino mother married my Chinese father who was twice her age.

Perhaps every generation needs to redefine what their breakthroughs are. Who belongs and who gets to decide? Beyond categories and schisms, each Asian American needs to define who they are to themselves.

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Love Can’t Feed You by Cherry Lou Sy is available now via Dutton.