I’ve had depression, anxiety, and body issues for most of my life. I realized I was going to die when I was seven, and that did weird things to my brain. I wav both fascinated by it and repulsed by it–which probably isn’t that weird, come to think about it. When I got my MA in writing, we had to write roughly a hundred pages of fiction around a theme. Mine was death. I was emo goth, which is who I am at heart.
I wrote roughly 150 pages of death-related stories, and the one I remember the most was about a Taiwanese American female serial killer. I remember it because it was basically a revenge fantasy in which I went to very dark places. My advisor said I should make her white because people would get fixated on her race–in a negative way. They would think it was representnative of all Asian women. He was Mexican American, and I understood his thought process.
I rejected it, though. I hated the whole model minority bullshit (especially because it was used for Asian people as a way to poke at black people) because it still didn’t acknowledge the humanity of the person. Real people are flawed and complex–neither wholly bad or wholly good (for the most part).
It’s a weird kind of pressure. Asian kids in college kill themselves at an alarming rate because of it. They get it from their homes (East Asian cultures are very big on education) and from American culture (which promotes the idea that Asian people are preternaturally smart. There was one time when I was in my twenties and doing one-person performances. An Asian group did a book of themed essays every year and one year, it was focused on sexuality. Then, we had a reading, and it was really fascinating. At the end of the reading, a white dude walked on stage and proceeded to trash us all. He started by saying he had an ex-girlfriend who was Korean (not Korean-American), and any time a white dude starts like that, it’s not going to be pretty.
Yes, because he had once fucked a Korean woman, he was an expert of all things Asian. He pompously said that he wanted to talk about Eastern spirituality, which was very common for white dudes, too. They always want to talk about how mystical ‘The Orient’ is. Which, I mean….there are a lot of venal assholes in Asia. I’ve been there. But that’s another kind of racism–thinking all people of any one race or even worse, a continent, were all the same.
Who the hell was this asshole to dictate what we were allowed to talk about? He took what had been a lovely evening and shit all over it. Several people went up after him to rebut him, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.
Back to the story I had written. It was about a Taiwanese American woman who was disatistfied with her life. She was watching the news when there was a report of a sexual predator (white dude) who had had sex with a woman and then killed her. Then did it again and again. The protagonist became obsessed with this guy and other serial killers who disposed of their victims in particularly gruesome ways. For one reason or another, each of them eluded justice, so she deicded to get all of them back with the same method they had used to kill the women they killed.
It was a very gory story and disturbing in nature. It wasn’t my usual style at all because I don’t care for gore. Video games are now very much into body horror, which is not appealing to me at all. My brain has a hard time differentiating real violence from fake violence so as graphics become increasingly realistic, I just can’t deal with it.
My advisor had a point. By making my protag Taiwanese American, I risked people focusing on that rather than on the story itself. I did not care, however, because I was committed to having all my protags be Taiwanese American. Women, too. To be frank, I was just sick and tired of the hemegony of Western writing. This was in 2000, so 23 years ago. Things have gotten better since then–much better. Diversity is accepted, but it’s still not perfect. There is a tendency to make someone’s race the background as if it were the same as saynig they liked pasta. Like, the character can be Asian, but they better not act any differently than white people! Or they better be completely different.
I felt similarly when Amy Tan exploded onto the scene. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about the Asian woman’s immigration experience, but…the way it happened in the Joy Luck Club was not the way it happened for everyone.I had a woman say to me earnestly after reading the book, “Now I know what it’s like to be a Chinese woman in America.” No you don’t! I don’t know what it’s like, and I’m Taiwanese American!
My parents met in Nashville as they both were attending grad school. We never worked in/owned a restauarant or a laundry. My parents scrambled to become middle-class and are now upper middle-class. It’s not Amy Tan’s fault that she became the template for what Asian women could write for the next twenty year, but I remember being in Modern Times Bookstore (in San Francisco), leafing through the new books. One was about three generations of Asian women and the terrible things that happen to them. I couldn’t help it. I exclaimed out loud, “If I never read another book about intergenerational Asian women and the abuse they have suffered at the hands of Asian men, it will be too soon!” The friend I was with shushed me, but I had had enough.
We are multitudes. We are not all inscrutable and/or off-the-charts intelligent. We don’t all play musical instruments and do calculus in our heads. The problem is that there is a streak of education is ultra-important in many East Asian countries, so Tiger Mom is not completely off as a stereotype.
How the hell did I end up here? Man, I really wander down some interesting paths when I don’t sternly rein in my brain. I consider that a feature and not a bug. I started out talking about depression and anxiety and ended up at racism–which is not unrelated, actually. I’m done for the day so I’ll leave it here and tackle the original question in another post.