Asian American Literature in the Twenty-First Century
- Asian American Literature in the Twenty-First Century
Asian American Literature, Min Hyoung Song, essay
the twenty-first century
I am walking with my daughter to school on a cold late May morning in New England. She is six. We just waved good-bye to her brother, who is eleven. He turned in the opposite direction to catch his school bus. I place my hands on my daughter's head, which comes up to my chest (where my heart beats fast), and then on her slender shoulders, upon which so much will be placed. I don't know if I am trying to assure her of my presence, or if I am trying to reassure myself that she is there with me.
It's been a chilly, overcast spring punctuated by a handful of sudden and very hot days. The temperature can seesaw twenty degrees or more in a matter of hours. According to my sense of the seasons, today should not be this cold. The weather should be mild and warming. The sky should be blue and the sun shining. There should be a gentle cooling breeze. I should not be shivering underneath a sweatshirt and a waterproof shell. Something is wrong. All of us know this, even those who shout that everything is fine. Especially them. The more they rage the more they betray their fear. Every day, we go outside and we know—in our core—that something is not right.
At this moment, it is impossible not to imagine the lives my children will lead. The future that seems to be waiting for them is scary and difficult. The ice is melting faster than predicted; the oceans are acidifying; wildlife is going extinct; supplies of food and fresh water are under threat; the distribution of wealth across the human population is more lopsided than ever; democracies everywhere, including in this country, are in trouble; and all the old prejudices endure and are, if anything, gaining potency. We seem to have entered a period of calamitous change, unheralded and unheeded but present nonetheless. [End Page 770]
asian americans
Almost twenty years ago, I was hired as a full-time professor because of my knowledge of Asian American literature and culture. And during those years I have worked, and continue to work, as hard as I can to promote knowledge about this topic. Asian Americans are an odd, often forgotten racial minority in the United States, always foreign-seeming, easy to discount, useful for winning divisive arguments, and circumscribed in the kind of lives they can choose to lead. Sometimes they seem simply white. At other times, they seem somehow more white than white. And at other times still, they seem vulnerable and mistreated. If they aren't black, they aren't white either. They are all of these things, and none of these things. Maybe there's even something inhuman, something machinelike, about them.
How am I defining Asian Americans? This is a nagging question. The term itself is ugly and bureaucratic. It tries too hard to be as inclusive as possible and ends up, like every such term, excluding others. On occasion, I want to argue that we should stop using it. I worry that it hinders as much as it enables. I am not at all sure that the term can name anything more than a collection of often-repeated fables, either of something atavistic or of something too luminous. I am certain it is a mistake to think of this term as always naming someone who is oppressed. It could, but it can also point to people who yield a lot of power and who oppress others and who are the villains in the stories of other people's lives.
I don't like the way the term "Asian American" flattens out such enormous differences, but I am also suspicious of the contempt for labels in general. This contempt is often unleashed on Asian Americans whenever they insist on their noteworthiness. On their right to define themselves. On the possibility that they might indeed have something in common. Such contempt feels to me a desire to assert one...
