To kick things off

I just finished My Year of Meats, and had a reaction I wanted to share/get feedback on. Last week's discussion was based almost entirely on material in the text itself--relationships and ideas the author included in her writing. But I wanted to say something about the book as a text, particularly the relationship between fiction and autobiography. While we mentioned in class that Ozeki was unlikely to have actually done most of the things (documentary filmmaking, exploring meatpacking plant, DES-related health conditions) in her novel, there are elements of her experience present in the narrative she created.

The one that particularly caught my eye was the identity of her narrator. Jane's multiracial background is alluded to from the first pages of the book, and her relationships with her extended family are further developed in the novel's second half. At first, I was excited that we were reading about a hapa main character (an uncommon event), and that Ozeki had chosen to explore some dimensions of identity related to the multiracial experience. A few chapters further in, I had become convinced that Jane's mixed parentage was a literary device intended to situate her outside of the symbolic discourses of both Japan and America in a way more profound than if she had been Japanese American (which carries its own resonances and meanings as a result of that community's history in the US). By the end of the book, I was less convinced of the "useful literary device" explanation--and then I read the Readers' Guide in the back of my copy, which alludes to her own identity as hapa.

While I think this should have made me a little bit happy (a published hapa author!), I felt a little bit hurt, somehow. Jane's identity was not a deliberate decision of a non-multiracial author to write about a sometimes-marginalized group within Asian America. It was a semi-autobiographical flourish. This doesn't (and shouldn't) take away from the depth or meaning of her ideas about the multiracial experience. It's just that, to be honest, I feel like a group paying attention to itself isn't nearly as momentous as when it is validated at large.

In this respect, I think multiracial Americans have long been silent--legal, political, and social discourses have denied the existence of a multiracial identity, forcing a choice of (sometimes assigning) one identity over another. And while I see the problems inherent in an outsider trying to write first-person narrative from a particular group's perspective (thinking about men writing in the person of women and vice versa, white people writing in the person of a minority, etc) and how hollow it can feel, I can't shake the mild disappointment that Jane was just way for Ruth Ozeki to be a little closer to her story.

After all, it seems a little depressing to conclude that, because they do a better job of it, authors should only write about characters like themselves.

I'm just still not sure why my excitement at the inclusion of a hapa author in the scope of Asian American lit isn't more triumphal. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the expectation that a non-hapa author was writing those identity issues into the text.