Many observers have predicted that China is slated to become the #1
Many observers have predicted that China is slated to become the #1 economy in the world within the next twenty years. Indeed, the conversation has shifted more to when, not if. India’s rise is not far behind.
At least from the point of view of the (first?) second-generation Asian American literature out there, the interest in Asian Americans’ racial countries of origin mostly relates to family and assimilation — which is fine, though exclusively personal. Is this driven by the general background of the novelists who like to do this kind of writing, who became accustomed to turning inward at an early age, being branded as outsiders at the schools they attended? Did that look inward become a default, instead of looking at external conditions like how non-related people in their parents’ countries of origin lived, economics, international development, rule of law, international relations, and the countries’ troubled histories? Or is it just more natural to attend to the nuclear family and lovers in fiction rather than write about these other themes? I’m no novelist, and so I have no idea. (I realize Ha Jin is an exception, but he is someone who lived in China for much of his formative years and then came to the U.S. I want to know about the natural born Asian American who grows up in America and then looks outward after.)
I think this paradigm misses a lot of what is going on now, and what will continue to happen as globalization continues its inexorable march onward. It is curious to note that it appears that these writers, and perhaps people similar to them, are deeply invested in the content of being a certain kind of American — typically well-educated, life-of-the-mind living, latte-drinking, Blue State Americans — and the Asian part is relegated to untrammeling the troubled relationships they have had with their parents and with feeling like the Other while growing up. I know this is a reductive view (and there is also a lot to admire in this kind of writing! I just think it misses a lot), but I think it’s one that has a bit of heft to it.
Further, these protagonists take a particular kind of curiously incurious worldview — they care about social status and education but only as American signals. They are supposed to obtain PhDs, MBAs, MDs, JDs and attend Ivy League schools. They have a lot of angst, but that angst is meta-angst — dealing with how they dealt with their childhood and teenage angst, of being an outsider, of alienating their parents, of ignoring their racial and ethnic lineages. When they deal with their Asianness, it usually revolves around embracing things that are considered “exotic” to non-Asian American Americans: language, food, clothing, literature, music — the aesthetics. A writer like Nam Le deserves credit for incorporating some painful broader world history into his stories, but they are mostly connected to either his own family or how a distant, third-party family deals with the pain of leaving the country. They do not involve the Asian American wanting to know more about his or her own racial country as a country — it is only through the lens of understanding one’s blood relations. And it has become mostly a racial issue, as the ethnic interest for these writers extend only to making peace with their own parents’ cultures and histories. Ethnically, these individuals have become Asian American, emphasis on American. The Asian part is dealing with physically appearing Asian while being an American living in America, and with the residual Asianness that their parents embody. Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian is based upon this premise. The same intense scrutiny, deconstruction, hyper-analysis of what it is to be Asian beyond that physical apperance is something that is not considered, though American is considered alone (that’s what the assimilation is). Asian only works as a pair, as Asian American taken together, as one deals with assimilating though one’s outward appearance places them in a relative minority and signals their ethnic alienation from their parents, even as they share family and race with them.
I believe the truth of these ideas will become more and more apparent as China and India and the rest of South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia hopefully rise and grow in their economies. For it was the opportunities and safety that wealth and rule of law America presented that likely induced most of their Asian parents to flee their countries of origin, and so it will be wealth (and perhaps rule of law, at least transactionally as Asian countries become more and more economically prominent will want to bargain more and more with the West and adhering to Western transactional legal norms is part of that) that will make these Asian Americans realize their own insularity. Indeed, part of assimilation involves insularity — to narrow one’s worldview to understandably respond to the pressures of feeling different. In the aggregate, the tradeoff of that is that many Asian Americans are not as interested in traveling outside their own assimilated Western boundaries. You don’t have many Asian Americans traveling to Africa or Asia, to really immerse themselves in a foreign culture like you do with White Americans, or minorities of other races and ethnicities — at least that’s my perception of things.
I believe the rise of China, India, et al. will expose the provincialism of the pioneering children of immigrants who spoke and wrote of the Asian American experience pre-2011. This is not something negative; it is simply something that I believe is true. Again, I admire the work that has been done thus far by Asian American commenters and writers; I just feel that there’s a big blind spot. It shows how much economics matter, and that perhaps above all it is economics that is so central to the lives of many Asian Americans. Their parents came over so they could live lives of relative comfort and privilege, and thus they did so, and their parents’ countries of origin may only become strongly significant to them as these countries grow in spending power, grow strong middle classes of their own and the attendant soft power in culture (music, literature, art, food, and language) that is likely to affect the non-Asian American Americans with whom these Asian Americans interact, and then perhaps the latent cognitive dissonance will be revealed. They may ask themselves: what do I do about the Asian in my Asian Americanness that I have only acknowledged as physical otherness and a source of alienation with my parents for my whole life?