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303 16 Acting Asian American, Eating Asian American The Politics of Race and Food in Don Lee’s Wrack and Ruin Jennifer Ho What kind of Vedic rabbit hole of temporally acausal connections have we tumbled through? I mean, holy mother of Carl Gustav Jung, throw down the I Ching, man, this is heavy, the serendipity of this, the Deschampsian plumpudding wheel of karma that’s spun me off in this direction. Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 289 Race and Food Greedy land developers. Estranged Korean–Chinese American brothers. Chocolate ice cream. Buddhist precepts written on paper airplanes. Organic brussels sprouts. These are but a few of the plot elements that propel Don Lee’s second novel Wrack and Ruin (2008). Lyndon Song, former world-renowned sculptor, is besieged by visitors to his organic brussels sprout farm, including his Los Angeles wannabe movie producer brother, who is also a former Wall Street embezzler; an aging and washed-up Hong Kong martial arts film star; a former art curator turned shiatsu masseuse; and two environmental activists trying to save the snowy plover from a golf course developer. Although clearly a satire, at the heart of Lee’s novel is an organic message that emphasizes the interconnected nature of all beings and experiences as well as a respect for the land and for the linkages among people, animals, and the food we produce and consume. In this novel, to act Asian American and to eat Asian American become forms of political engagement rooted in a desire to be understood outside a dominant white hegemonic culture and outside stereotypical and Orientalized portraits of Asian Americans and foodways. Wrack and Ruin continually upends expectations of model minority stereotypes and self-consciously questions what it means to be an Asian American artist and, by extension, what it means to act Asian American: what it means to live as an Asian American in our day and age. Food serves as an organizing device, as well as a plot element, yet not in the ways that one would typically associate Jennifer Ho 304 with the term “Asian.” Food in many ways centers this novel, but not as a simple or simplistic ethnic symbol, signifier of racial difference, material of assimilation, or sign of hybridization. In this chapter, I expand on Anita Mannur’s observation that “the deliberate recasting and reframing of which foods are deemed ‘exotic,’ un-American, and desirable can be read as a strategic attempt to understand and undermine the continuing link between Asian Americans and their foodways.”1 Mannur recognizes that decoupling food from ethnicity and race releases Asian American identities from being exoticized and racialized through stereotypical associations with food and eating, thereby making them objects of consumption rather than subjects who are “consumers and producers of American taste mechanisms.”2 Indeed, Wrack and Ruin does not fetishize authentic Asian-ethnic foodways; instead, Lee’s invocations of food and eating become political acts through their apolitical affiliations, calling on readers to understand action and eating as forms of racialized politics through their de-ethnicized materiality. Race versus Ethnicity: The Meaning of “Asian American” “‘You know the problem with us?” Woody said to Lyndon. “We’re fucking typical Asian men. We don’t talk. We’re emotionally inaccessible.’” Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 145 As the title of my chapter suggests, there is a way in which one can act Asian American as well as eat Asian American, but what does that really mean? What does it mean to act or to eat “Asian American”? Is this about one’s identity , one’s behavior, one’s performance, or the materiality of the food items that one is consuming? Moreover, just what is this adjective, “Asian American”? “Asian American” acts as a racial rather than an ethnic descriptor, meaning that it is not tied to a particular Asian ancestral homeland or ethnic national identity. Rather, “Asian American” exists as a constructed, political marker, one created during the 1960s civil rights movement.3 Scholars and journalists like Daryl Maeda, William Wei, Frank Wu, and Helen Zia traced the development of a racialized Asian American community and the rise of the Asian American movement, specifically its development as a political affiliation encompassing various Asian-ethnic groups.4 To be Asian American in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to affirm one’s difference from the white mainstream majority as an oppressed nonwhite “other” in solidarity with people of color. After the civil rights era, the term...

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