Sunday, June 30, 1991
THE MERCURY NEWS

Finding a Voice (continued)

There is no disputing that in some ways The Woman Warrior accomplished exactly what Chin had feared. Many non-Asian readers took Kingston’s literary metaphors as Chinese facts. Kingston was frequently asked to explain how her mother had cut her frenum (a piece of tissue on the underside of the tongue)—a scene in the book that was intended purely as a graphic metaphor for the silence in which the narrator had found herself imprisoned as a child.

“Early reviews confirmed to Kingston that she was horribly misread,” recalls Stephen H. Sumida, associate professor of English literature at the University of Michigan and a friend of both Chin and Kingston. “A year later, she told me that a lot of the praise she was getting was racist praise.”

“What I did not foresee was the critics measuring the book and me against the stereotype of the exotic, inscrutable, mysterious Oriental,” Kingston herself wrote six years later. “About two-thirds of the reviews did this. In some cases, I must admit, it was only a line or a marring word that made my stomach turn.”

The current flowering of Asian-American literature has its roots in the ’60s at Berkeley. Shawn Wong was an undergraduate at Berkeley when he met Jeffrey Paul Chan, who, like him, was Chinese and an aspiring poet. “He said, ‘You live near Frank Chin; he just got a story published.’ And he gave me Frank’s phone number. I called Frank and he said, ‘Meet me … in 15 minutes.’

“The three of us decided we couldn’t be the only ones. In a bookstore, I saw an anthology of Fresno poets with a picture of them on the cover. And in the picture I could see a Japanese guy. I called him up, and it was Lawson Inada. I said, ‘You’re a Japanese poet? We want to meet you.’ We all met at a party with Alex Haley, Richard Brautigan, Ishmael Reed, and we talked about how, before we knew we were going to be writers, we were first going to be doctors and engineers like our parents wanted us to be.”

Wong, Chan, Chin and Inada went on to compile and edit Aiiieeeee!, the first anthology of Asian-American writings. When it came out in 1983, “I can’t tell you how many publishers asked us if the stuff was in translation,” recalls Wong.

The friends, whose present-day clout has earned them the occasional epithet of “The Gang of Four,” spent days haunting used bookstores. They found such classic and forgotten works as No-No Boy and Yokohama, California by the late Japanese-American writer Toshio Mori.

In the wake of Aiiieeeee!’s unexpected rise through the best-seller lists, these and other novels were republished after years of gathering dust. The publishing industry began to discover writers who had been all but missing from the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly.

Frank Chin’s archenemy, Maxine Hong Kingston, also attended Berkeley in the ’60s. After years of silence on the subject of Chin, Kingston let loose with her revenge two years ago with her novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. In it, she introduced Wittman Ah Sing, an obnoxious 6-foot-tall Chinese- American playwright who attended Berkeley in the ’60s. Though Kingston has tried to deny it, no reader familiar with Frank Chin has any doubt that he was her inspiration.

“I said, ‘Oh, Frank, she’s got you perfectly,’ “ Shawn Wong says with a laugh. “I told him, ‘She must have been a fly on the wall. I thought only you and I were there.’ ”

In fact, Chin and Kingston have never met, though they both attended Berkeley in the same years and even sat in many of the same classes. According to Kingston, the same teachers admired their work. Both were born in Northern California in 1940, the Year of the Dragon. Kingston says that if she had been a man she would have been like Frank Chin.

“I can probably do anger and offensiveness better than Frank,” says Kingston. “The main energy that goes through his work is anger. I think I also write angrily, but I think I’ve also gone beyond anger. I wrote out all my anger and then discovered another world of emotions, including resolution and joy and other strong emotions.”

To many young writers, Chin and Kingston stand as the parental figures of contemporary Asian-American literature.

“If it weren’t for Maxine Hong Kingston, I wouldn’t have my imaginative life,” Garrett Hongo states flatly. “It was a great moment in my life reading China Men. That book released human feeling for me. It humanized me, it released my own stories for me.”

The poet David Mura similarly acknowledges that Chin’s anger has freed him to explore a host of other emotions in his own poetry.

As “parents,” Kingston and Chin preside over a family divided by issues of artistic freedom, cultural appropriation, and sexual politics. Their feud has raised new questions about racism in a society that seemingly tolerates the presence of Asian women while condemning the men to invisibility.

“When it comes to jobs where people have visibility in white society, Asian-American women are getting preferential treatment,” says Laureen Mar. “We females can use our sex to get ahead. It makes us more acceptable. The women have always played into white men’s sexual fantasies. It’s the stereotype of the exotic Asian-American female who, God knows, might be as submissive as she seems.”

Enraged that “four out of five” of the Chinese-American books published by major companies are by women, Chin has called for a “singing, stomping, and muscular” voice to recuperate Asian cultural integrity through a “recognized style of Asian-American manhood.”

Race is a central concern of David Mura, who grew up speaking no Japanese and learning nothing about Japanese culture. His poetry expresses an alienation that he attributes to years of subtle exclusion in the Chicago suburb where he was born and raised.

“I think I grew up in some way shameful about my Japanese background,” Mura says. “In the camps, my father’s high school teacher told him, ‘When you get out, you have to be not 100 percent American, but 200 percent American.’ And one of the things American culture is designed to do is give us the picture that white middle-class reality is the only reality. I grew up, in a way, thinking that, desiring that. My whole life as a writer has been in stripping away that desire in myself.”

Mura spent a year on a fellowship studying in Japan. “Part of me would have preferred a grant to France,” he admits, somewhat ruefully. “I don’t feel that way now, but at the time I did. Going to Japan allowed me to reclaim and know that side of my family which my parents hadn’t talked about. I could see how long a distance my parents had had to travel from their culture to American streets.

“And I saw ways in which, if I’d grown up there, I’d have had a greater sense of belonging than I do in America. Then, as the year went on, it became clearer and clearer how American I was. By the end, my sense of self was more integrated. I’d reclaimed more of my Japanese heritage and affirmed a greater sense of myself as an American.”

Bharati Mukherjee, who won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Middleman and Other Stories, flatly refuses to be categorized as “Asian-American.” Instead, she wishes to be known, simply, as an “American” writer.

Mukherjee believes that the hyphenization of terms like “Asian-American” is just another attempt to marginalize a people who, ever since their arrival in this country in the mid-19th century, were regarded as mere sojourners and transients. By contrast, she notes, European immigrants were always looked upon as settlers—even when they arrived years after their Asian counterparts.

“My point is, the moment we say ‘Asian-American,’ we are implying that there is something that is the norm and that those we are hyphenating are different,” Mukherjee says. “We don’t talk of Amy Hempel, Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie as Jewish-American writers. Why should some of us, simply because of our race, color, etc., be specified as Asian-American? I don’t want to emphasize racial purity or origin— however many generations away. I want to emphasize the cultural present.”

Mukherjee was raised in a traditional Brahmin family. From early childhood it was understood that her marriage would be arranged, and in 1963, two years after arriving in Iowa as a student, Mukherjee received a letter from home that “the perfect Bengali groom” had been found. By then, however, she was in the midst of a romance with Canadian writer Clark Blaise, and her “wake-up call from the unconscious,” as she calls it, had begun ringing. They were married during a lunch break; 25 years later, she obtained American citizenship.

“Don’t paint me into a kind of elegant woman, a mysterious woman, because of your baggage about the mysterious,” warns Mukherjee, who is, by any standard, very elegant and very beautiful. “I’m giving you a version of America, your America, that you may not have chosen to see or may have missed. I used to travel on the train going out to my job in Queens from the Upper West Side. After a certain subway stop, the entire train is filled with non-whites. And those people are the people I am writing about, saying they have huge interesting lives. Let me tell you their stories. And how your lives have changed because of their being here.”

Like Mukherjee, Holly Uyemoto also wants to be on record opposing her inclusion in the category of “Asian-American” literature. Uyemoto, a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese-American, writes about people who are as white as one can still find in America.

Rebel Without a Clue, published in 1989, when Uyemoto was 19, describes Thomas Bainbridge, a wildly successful young model who has come home to Marin County to tell his parents and friends that he has contracted AIDS. There are no Japanese people in the book; there are no Asians.

“I didn’t want to be anybody’s racial experience,” says Uyemoto, who recently dropped out of UC-Santa Cruz and is traveling in Europe. She has a flair for the dramatic and an idiosyncratic way of expressing herself—characteristic of somebody whose father named her after Holly Golightly, the heroine of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Are her parents proud of her success? “I’m an Asian parent’s worst nightmare,” she boasts. “A dropout and a writer!”

“That whole Asian-American writers’ thing is so bogus and lame,” Uyemoto says. “We’re all in this little Asian-American box, sitting on this glistening media shelf, all stepping on one another to try to get out. When you say ‘Asian-American woman writer,’ that is pretty specific.… Especially if it’s something you don’t particularly aspire to, one you don’t even want to be in in the first place.

“It gives me a funny twinge to be called a Japanese-American writer,” she adds. “I don’t have any problems with being called Japanese-American; I like that. But being called a Japanese-American writer just doesn’t fit right—using the term of my race to define the job. I don’t want my Japanese-American experience to be a sideshow in a book about something else. One day I’ll write about it. But hey, I’m only 20.”

When Jeanne Wakat-suki Houston was 20, she was dissuaded from studying journalism at San Jose State by a professor who told her: “There’s no way you’re going to get a job as a journalist being an Asian woman.” Even after she changed her major to social work and got her first job as a probation officer in San Mateo County in 1956, she was gently informed that the community was not ready for an Asian officer on the streets. She took an invisible desk job.

“So, me be a writer? Are you crazy? I would never have thought of it. At that point I couldn’t even get a job as a probation officer.”

Seventeen years later, Houston’s nephew, who was born in Manzanar, came to visit her in Santa Cruz. He was 25 years old, and for the first time, in a Berkeley sociology class, he had heard of the camps. When he questioned her about “this place Manzanar,” she tried to respond with the usual superficial memories. “Oh yeah, we ate in the mess halls, we slept together, we played baseball…

“He looked at me very intently and he said, ‘Auntie, but how do you feel about that?’ And that was the first time anybody asked me how I felt. And immediately, I allowed myself to feel and I started crying. I just broke out and just wept and I got hysterical.

“Then I understood why his parents couldn’t talk about this—for fear of breaking down. I started writing, trying to put down my thoughts and I was having trouble. So I said to Jim, ‘Look, I’m trying to write down this memoir for my family but I’m having trouble, I just cry.’ And he said, ‘Well, tell me about it.’ ‘Cause I’d never told him. We’d been married 17 years. He knew I’d been in the camps—but nothing about the deep stuff. So when I began to tell him the truth, from an emotionally honest place, he said, ‘This isn’t a book for your family, this is a book that all Americans should read.’ ”

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Copyright 1991 San Jose Mercury News
Knight Ridder