If you’re Asian-American, have you suffered stupid questions like: What’s a good
If you’re Asian-American, have you suffered stupid questions like: What’s a good place to eat in Chinatown? Do you know Kung Fu? Do you eat dog meat? The perceptions, stereotypes and realities of three Asian-Americans play out in Don Lee‘s new novel, “The Collective.” Here & Now’s Robin Young sat down with Lee, part of the conversation is transcribed below, followed by an excerpt from the book.
In your book, Eric, Joshua and Jessica all meet at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. Eric, an aspiring author, Jessica, an artist, Joshua, a writer. All three of your characters are considered Asian American by others looking at them, but in fact they are very different.
Yeah, it’s a strange and really broad rubric, especially these days when you include South Asians, Indians, and Pakistanis as well. It’s an odd category, and I think that it is one that’s probably too broad.
Eric is third generation Korean American. He grew up in Mission Viejo and thinks of himself as American. Joshua was abandoned at a Korean orphanage and adopted by Massachusetts intellectuals. Jessica is a second generation Taiwanese who wants to be an artist. There are similarities in the way the world sees them but many differences in who they are.
I think that its something that most people who aren’t Asian American don’t really recognize in terms of generational differences. I’m third generation Korean American and mostly from California, although my father was in the state department, so I bounced around a lot oversees as a kid. But really didn’t think about my ethnicity until I moved to Boston back in 1984 to attend graduate school at Emerson College. It was only here that my questions about identity really arose, because here it seemed there was a kind of segregation in terms of race. People did actually say things to me. I had these encounters that were shocking to me.
Like what?
Just walking through a crowd of people, there were a bunch of guys and one of them said to me, directly to my face he said, “Did you know it’s National Hate Chinese Week?” Things like that happen, and coming from California, where you have so many Asian Americans, you know, I never expected that.
So that goes to some of the racism that the characters see and feel. But what about who gets to write about race? When they’re in this school in Minnesota, Joshua excoriates a young white woman because she wrote a story based in China. “You can’t write about the Asian experience unless you are Asian,” he says. What are you saying about who gets to write the story?
I think issue of cultural appropriation, in terms of writing, is very interesting. It’s one that’s heatedly debated. Here, I’m more interested in what’s happening within Asian American writers and artists. And I think when we’re going through this transitional period, and we’re all asking ourselves several questions. You know, if you’re an Asian American writer, do you always have to have race as your subject? Do you have to have all your characters Asian American? If you don’t, is that race betrayal? I mean, if you keep on doing that, are you limiting yourself, are you ghettoizing yourself and your audience, or even perpetuating stereotypes? And so these are, you know, the arguments that they have within the collective here.
You’re right in the middle of that debate because you’re writing a book that’s filled with Asian American characters. Is that what you think you should do?
From a personal point of view, I think that we should be able to do anything that we want to. And, actually, I think that that carries through as well to white writers. If they want to write from a different race’s point of view, that’s fine with me too.
And I’ve written stories about a chair maker, a sculptor. I’m not a chair maker or sculptor, but I believe if I do enough research and am true to those characters, then I have a right to do that. But there are many people who would adamantly disagree with that.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/07/24/don-lee-asian