For my final post for this class, I would like to meditate on some things that have sort of been going through my head this semester, not in response to any particular readings but just in general.
What really cemented what I wanted to say in this blog post was actually a reading for another class. You may or may not be familiar with Snow Falling On Cedars, a novel by David Guterson. The plot centers around the inhabitants of an island in Puget Sound, many of whom are Japanese Americans and the older generation that actually migrated from Japan. Guterson is, of course, not Japanese, but if I did not know who the author was I would probably assume that the book was written by an Asian American just because it deals so much with the Asian American experience prior, during, and after WWII. I actually had to keep reminding myself that Guterson is not Asian American, he wrote so poignantly. However, when I did so, the experience seemed somehow cheapened. So I started wondering ... would it be legitimate for people of other racial identities to write about the Asian American experience?
All of the authors we have read in this class have been Asian American, and there have been several themes that appear in most works - the sense of being the other, gender identity, overcoming stereotypes, the difficulty of communication between people from different nationalities. We have read about biracial characters, characters set apart by their sexual orientation, and characters of both genders or whose gender has been unspecified. It seems to me that someone of another race could discuss these issues, but of course they wouldn't have the Asian American perspective. That's why I wonder why Guterson could have written from an Asian American point of view so well.
Coincidentally, I also saw a flier recently that advertised a workshop for learning to write from different racial/gender/sexual perspectives. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it claimed to be able to help you (probably in creative writing) to write about a character from an identity you don't share. At first I was intrigued, but then I was slightly irrititated. Isn't Asian American literature unique because it is written by Asian Americans and communicates something that people of other races would not be able to write about? Guterson's novel, while good and worth reading and incredibly moving, could never be Asian American literature because the author is not Asian American.
I'm not exactly sure where I wanted to go with this post. I think I am just trying to understand Asian American literature from the perspective of someone who is outside that community. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) I will never be able to share in the Asian American experience beyond what I can read or watch. That is why this class has been so inspirational for me ... I am looking at things from a different point of view now, and hopefully a more informed one.
Anyway. I hope everyone has a great summer, and I've really enjoyed this class! See most of you next year!
posted by Anna Gaumond @ 2:21 PM
2 Comments:
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would it be legitimate for people of other racial identities to write about the Asian American experience?
I think that's a really interesting question, which ties in with questions I had about "Asian-American" literature and that are being raised by others. What makes Asian-American literature? Is it enough to be about Asian-Americans? Does it have to be be written by Asian-Americans?
In one of my other classes we read Famous All Over Town, by Danny Santiago. It deals with a Mexican-American/Chicano/Latino family from East L.A. and other issues of race. Like most of the American public at the time of the book's release, my class praised the book highly for various reasons. I laughed at the time, because I knew the "secret"--Danny Santiago is not a real person. Danny Santiago is actually Dan James, a rich, old, white man from Kansas who was blacklisted in the McCarthy era.
The response once people found out was violent. People were outraged that someone should appropriate a story that wasn't theirs and pretend that it was. They were outraged not so much about what was written--the "truth" of which they left unquestioned--but by who had written it.
Which got me to thinking about some of the same issues you've mentioned. Yes, even if Dan James had spent extensive amounts of time with families in a community like the one he wrote about, does that make his novel "legitimate"? Then I wondered cynically, "Well, if it had really been written by a poor Chicano teenager, would anyone have published it?" And then, "Does it matter that James picked this particular story to write, when he could just as easily have written a book about white people? Or is there some exotic value to a book about minorities?"
I remember thinking something along those lines when friends (non-Asian friends) raved about Memoirs of a Geisha. I remember thinking that yes, the author did a lot of research and spent a lot of time talking to the right people, but something still bothered me about the book. With enough time and experience, I figured out what it was: I didn't like the book because I felt like it exoticized the subject material. It felt, to put it in crass terms, that the author was writing what a "white" audience wanted to hear about this exotic "other."
I'm also not sure where I'm going with this. I guess a lot of it was just thoughts I had about "ethnic" literature, and what it means when we classify books or works as "Asian-American." While most of the things we read were distinctly Asian-American in content or subject, there were some that were distinctly not what we might consider "canon" topics of discussion. The poems I did my presentation on, for example, were not explicitly what most people would consider "Asian-American" literature, and I wanted to know what people thought about what that meant.
Your point about Snow Falling on Cedars is interesting, though. I'm not sure who else reading this has read it. I read it a long time ago, along with my grandmother, and after we'd read it we talked about it, and I talked about it with my parents. I can hardly remember the content of the book, but I do remember not liking it very much. I'm not sure why anymore, and I'd probably have to read it again. I think, though, that I was probably, to some extent, prejudiced against how the experience was being presented, because I knew the author was not Japanese-American.
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