Some thoughts on ethnicity & language

(composed for a panel discussion at the 1999 San Francisco Book Fair)

by Pamela Lu

I just got back last night from two weeks in the Midwest, where the only manifestations of Asian-ness or Asian identity were a restaurant chain called Wok and Roll - which served up Japanese fast food cooked in a wok and which my Jewish host and I proclaimed to be the most authentic example of contemporary middle American culture precisely because of its glaring inauthenticity - and the isolated pockets of young, bourgeois 20/30-something East Asian and South Asian Americans, many of them imported from California or beyond, clustered around prestigious universities and large computer engineering plants.

It's this latter population of upwardly mobile Asian Americans that I want to use a springboard for my part in this panel discussion. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, I found myself in the heat of a consuming stew of debates, on multiculturalism, on political correctness, on the revision of the Eurocentric canon, on everything from stereotypes to identity to affirmative action to interracial dating. The Ethnic Studies department had recently been formed, the Gay/Lesbian Studies department was in its birthing stage, and all sort of people were up in arms about the role of politics in art, the personal and political, and so forth. As an Asian American student in a large public school that was maybe 30-40% Asian, my choices seemed to be binary: I could either conform to a relatively conservative, conventionally success-oriented status quo, or I could perform its opposite.

The opposite performance seemed to entail jumping on a performance-based, slam/spoken word person-of-color platform, in the hard-hitting rhetorical style of radical political and cultural activism. Which I respected the powerful voice and direct agenda of this aesthetic when it was done well, I remained skeptical of exactly what motivated many of its 20-year-old practitioners, who assumed arrogant, self-righteous, and intolerant stances toward ideas, styles, and aesthetics at odds with their own. I could not suspend my disbelief that their bandwagon approach wasn't just another form of adolescent conformity, at the same time that I was desperate to find and define an aesthetic space that could protest the interruption of the bandwagon performance by the ringing cell phones of complacency.

I can safely say that it was my quest for a more authentic, more complex representation of marginalized identities that led me to the avant-garde. I never in my life thought of the avant-garde as being an elitist aesthetic (its social/historical exclusivity, of course, is another matter); rather, I saw it as a natural transliteration of an identity and an existence that could not possibly be satisfied with neat, one-to-one correspondences between language and lived experience. So-called experimental writing, therefore, became a sort of ESL, an unpretentious vehicle for representing and inhabiting the still not fully explored reality of living in a cultural, political, and linguistic diaspora.

So that's the general form of it. Here are a few specifics:

Ethnicity and language:

One could argue that standard written English is no one's native language, and that by writing in English we are all writing in a "foreign" tongue. I'm particularly interested in the idea of proper English as a form of drag, and of Western culture itself as a kind of assumed identity. Because I learned English from reading books, especially British novels and world literature in translation, I came to absorb that too careful, often too correct to be realist, "translator's voice" - the kind of English that struggles to convey another language that remains partially hidden or encoded. The irony is that by writing drag and effectively "passing" as a Western subject, I have actually been able to reinvent my own content and context and render a truer sense of postmodern being.

Avant-garde lineage:

Certainly I've been influenced and inspired by other innovative Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, or John Yau. But my models for thinking about aesthetic experiments have not been limited generically to literature, geographically to the States, or politically to race. To this list I might add Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Maya Lin, I.M Pei, Akira Kurosawa, the pop idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong cinema and post-war Japanese animation. Given the polyglot, internally multicultural nature of the Pacific Rim diaspora nowadays, along with the relative newness of the Asian American community as a community, the future of Asian American literature would seem to be a relatively plastic aesthetic - conducive to a sense of conceptual multiplicity and the hopeful adventure of a wide open playing field.

© Pamela Lu. All rights reserved.