Asianish

Identity Isn't Everything

"What are you?"

It's a question people of mixed-race hear throughout their lives. People want to know what race you are (or how you identify) when they can't quite place you.

Variations of this question in my formative years went something like this:

"Are you Chinese?"

"No."

"Are you Japanese?"

"I don't think so."

"What are you then, Siamese?"

This was the beginning of my racial education, and it’s how I learned I about wasn't White. All I knew back then was that I felt normal until suddenly I was no longer like everybody else. This loss of racial legibility was a profound formative moment for me.

Racial in-definition is like an itch people need to scratch. Think of it as a less invasive version of White people asking to touch Black people's hair. "What are you?" is usually a benign question, but some days it just feels like none of your business.

Honestly, I don't expect anyone to find it interesting that I'm half-Asian. It's not my identity, and for whatever reason, I'm mostly white-appearing now, anyway. But I think it's worth mentioning that I was technically the product of miscegenation in at least 20 states in the Union until I was five years old, when Loving vs. Virginia legalized interracial marriage. My early experience of racial displacement didn’t come out of nowhere, and it shaped my worldview. It's the basis for this column, where I think through non-binary concepts across a range of cultural sectors including race, disability, the environment, and design. It's also central, although less immediately evident, to my work as a writer of fiction.

Last month, my story collection Waiting For Mr. Kim (recipient of the Flannery O'Conner Award for Short Fiction in 2022) was published. The marketing and indexing terms for the book include Korean American, which is not inaccurate: my stories are about Korean Americans, after all. I just don't happen to be one -- not a good look in our essentialized racial economy.

I wrote the stories to find a way into an ethnic heritage I knew little about and for many years wanted nothing to do with. The stories didn't happen until I came to Iowa for graduate school, where a friend suggested that some of the rich tidbits my mother mentioned now and again when I was growing up might make for interesting stories. Like the fact that an infant sister who preceded her died from eating rat poison. Or the fact that my mother was betrothed at the age of 14 to an elderly Korean bachelor who was eagerly waiting for her to come of age. (You'll have to read the book to find out how "Grace" -- the character based on my mother -- got out of that one.)

But as pleased as I am that the collection has done well, I've spent the year leading to its publication fretting about how to promote it. At one point, my editor thought we might try to get the book adopted by professors of Asian American literature. She contacted a colleague in the field — my field long ago when I was an active literary scholar — who suggested in the kindest way possible that if I mattered someone would have heard of me. Wrong tack. Fortunately, my Asian American creative writing colleagues have been warmly supportive.

Still, where do I stand in relation to this book? It is inaccurate to say that these stories come from my Asian American identity, because I don’t claim that identity. Besides, they are fiction. So, while I did my due diligence with historical research, they are not the stories of my family. Maybe as someone who is only half-Korean, I have no business representing Korean Americans whether I’m related to them or not. On the other hand, this post-COVID literary moment is important: readers are more alert to the experience of Asian Americans due to their renewed visibility as a target of racial resentment? If I can contribute to understanding, shouldn’t it? Or should I nobly refuse to cash in my ethnic chips, insisting that I cannot claim to be a person of color?

No big mystery, here. In the end, if you want your book to sell and your editor and publicist to be happy you go with what readers can recognize.

But what about my next book? My author name includes my Korean family name, Roh, but readers won't find Korean American themes in Helen Button (Sowilo Press, 2024) a novel about the friendship between a French girl and the American expatriate writer, Gertrude Stein during World War II. What they will find is a familiar theme of cultural displacement. Stein was a Jewish American lesbian living out the war years among the Collaborationists. After reading Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, I became fascinated with Stein as a kind of trickster figure (not the Jewish sell-out Malcolm strongly suggests she was) who wrote for Resistance rags and lesbian journals while simultaneously penning speeches for the hero of Verdun, Marechal Phillipe Petain. And she knew that her good friend, the notorious gay Fascist, Bernard Fay, burned all the books by Jewish authors in the Bibliotheque National de France save for her own.

Stein was a fascinating contradiction, a trickster figure, a bricoleur of identity (and self-interest) who survived by hiding in plain site. But it is doubtful I would have recognized her as such were it not for what happened during my graduate school years during the first big wave of multicultural American literature in the 1990s.¹ It was a heady time. The literary canon was busting wide open. Taking part recovering the work of 20th century writers of color whose novels had been buried or ignored by the literary establishment felt vital, momentous, even.

Then one day I attended a multicultural literature conference in San Diego and sat in on a session featuring Asian American poets recently published in an important new edited collection. The book’s editor moderated the session, and after the presentations he prefaced the Q & A portion with a statement: in an effort to create equity in the academy he would be taking questions only from people of color. Nowadays we would say from "those who identify as being of color." But this was back then in the 90s. I raised my hand because I wanted to ask what qualified as Asian and how far the boundaries extended outward until they were so diffuse as to become meaningless.

I never got to ask my question. It felt like a different version of “what are you?” — Who do you think you are? — but it may have been fate. Soon, I was finding mixed race American authors everywhere in history, many of them women of Asian descent: Sui Sin Far, Edith Made Eaton, Han Suyin, Diana Chang. I was astounded at how an author like the Chinese-Canadian Sui Sin Far spoke to me across the decades in her “Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”:

"After all I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more than nationality. 'You are you and I am I,' says Confucius. I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant “connecting link.”

Chinese-Canadian author, SUI SIN FAR, 1965-1914

I also discovered in Far’s many stories — and in fiction by African American and American Indians — that tricksters, passers, and racial shapeshifters abounded.

Perhaps most formatively I was introduced in a French literature course to the work of beur novelists, which I mention in my recent "Between" column on Franco-Algerian novelist, Leila Sebbar, called “The Green Chinese From Africa.” Her term for racial/culture mixture, "permanent disequilibrium" captures that sense of being “ni Francais, ni arabe,” both refusing and being refused a racial classification. To pass or play the racial trickster, like so many characters in the fiction of multicultural writers, is not an expression of one's racial essence; it is a demonstration of race’s categorical insufficiency. This is not about being "intersectional" or "multiply identified." No race is pure, no identity safe. All of it is a kind of cultural performance — useful, but one whose ends reveal that how we define difference matters first and foremost as a form of social control. Pick a racial lane and keep driving.

Reading Asian American literature with a looser grip on what we mean by Asian and what we mean by identity taught me that a binary understanding of race not only limits human lives, it limits our ability to recognize racialized experience outside of defined racial categories. A looser grip can open up perspective elsewhere in literature, as well.

For example, most people are familiar with the work of James Baldwin, another expatriate American who enjoyed living in 20th century Paris, where being Black didn't mean the same to Parisians as it did to New Yorkers. Imagine being able to live free of segregation and discrimination as a Black American in the 40s and 50s. But Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son reads differently alongside the work of his contemporary, the lesser-known African American author of black social protest novels, William Gardner Smith. In Smith's The Stone Face, Simeon Brown, like Baldwin and many Black American writers of his time migrates to Paris after a racist attack left him partially blind and thoroughly convinced that he could not abide in the nation of his birth. But this is also the Paris of post-war Franco-Algerian conflict, Baldwin's Paris, mind you, where Simeon discovers there are, indeed, black people -- that is, a ruthlessly oppressed class of second class citizens -- in France after all. They're called Arabs. And to this day, France has hardly begun to reckon with that past, which is not truly past to the near 10% of the population of Maghrebin origin.

We need cultural identity in order to seek justice, but it is a fragile, often inadequate, and easily contested instrument, never fully up to the task of serving our human wholeness. Our endless culture wars, in which reputations are vanquished over weak, essentialized beliefs about race, and books are banned by barkers from both the left and right, calcify once liberatory identity categories into positions that are first and foremost marketing concepts. Branding is not voice. It may give voice, but the social price it exacts may no longer be worth it.

Besides, aren't we far enough along in our appreciation of racial and cultural difference that we can surface the many and sometimes conflicting perspectives in any given ethnic category of literature to complicate and even trouble our tidy understanding? I mean both Baldwin and Gardner Smith. Fred Moten as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coleman Hughes as well as Ibram X. Kendi. I ask because at the university where I teach, some of these authors are on our DEI reading list and some are not, and I'll bet you can guess which ones are not.

So, here's to the "-ish" in Asianish, which is not against anything and certainly not against identity. It's not a status or condition or essence, like race. It's a practice. I recognize that as an able, educated, white-appearing woman, it’s easy for me to make this call. I don’t live out my days as a racial minority; it’s not dangerous for me to go outside. But even as we work to achieve justice, we can recognize the limitation of identity and the potential in seeing how neither/nor creates important perspective, too. Here's to the potential for discovery when the lines blur on your racial lane. To the thousands of suspended moments of in-between that you do not name but which comprise your day. Like pulling a sweater over your head, or like that millisecond in the morning when you open your eyes before life rushes in. In moments like these, you, too, may be "ish" — not who you say you are, but not not you, either. A world of potential lies in that in-between, and you can take it with you.

1. See also Barbara Will’s fascinating book Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma (Colombia UP, 2011).