Even more...

[oyceter]

I also saw a book of essays by Amy Tan in the bookstore... digression: I find it funny that I'm buying books at Barnes and Noble, despite the fact that I work in a used bookstore, which is right next to an independent bookstore, and in general I like to support my independent bookstore. But what can I do when the independent bookstore or my bookstore don't carry the books I want to buy?

Anyway, back to Amy Tan. Apparently she's giving a speech in San Francisco sometime, and the boy had a chance at getting free tickets but didn't. He asked me if I liked her and this all sparked thoughts.

I liked Joy Luck Club and the Kitchen God's Wife, which are the only books by her I've read. And yet, I feel a bit leery of liking them, because I don't really agree with her. It's strange, because I cannot manage to divorce my feelings about her books with the race issue and the issue of mixed identity Asian-Americanness (if that makes sense). I can do it for other books that comment on race and etc. like Toni Morrison, but not with the Asian-American writers, probably because I am too close to the source and I can't make the mental separation that it's fiction, because it's supposed to be my literature, written for me. Except it's not. From what I've gathered, Amy Tan's mother, who has great influence on the books I've read by her, is from the same generation as my grandparents, come out of China during the war years in the mid-thirties. But her mother fled to America and started a life there, while my grandparents fled to Taiwan and raised my parents, essentially Chinese, a little expat, but not as much as Tan. And my parents moved to America for a grad school education, and that was where I was born and lived for eight years, until we moved back to Taiwan. I still consider Taiwan home. I think that's the key difference.

Amy Tan is American. To me, from her books, she seems very conflicted about being Chinese, about having Chinese parents, and in general, I have a problem with this. I think I would have been the conflicted Asian-American had I grown up here, because I was a very Americanized kid who wanted to eat hot dogs and chicken pot pies. But I think after a year or two in Taiwan, I didn't want to move back. I disliked it when kids in my school, who were mostly like me, raised in America, mocked Taiwan and kept saying America was better, because we lived in Taiwan, and it just seemed self-defeating. I've never wanted to be white, and I've never been embarrassed about being Chinese when I've been in America. I'm also from a different generation than Amy Tan, and I've noticed that Asia and Asian (or Azn or who knows what else) things are getting very "cool" here. I've seen a lot of kids who I know who stayed in America get in touch with their roots. And the whole Asian Pride thing, Chinese-American Associations everywhere in college, Asians hanging out with only Asians, etc... (which I also think is kind of funny because most of them have only been to Taiwan or China a few times, but then, ethnicity is a pretty fuzzy issue. I mean, I'm not sure if I'm Chinese, or Taiwanese, or Asian-American, or Asian, or who knows what, and I'm putting no such claim on ethnic authenticity). So I feel weird reading these books in which China is portrayed as mythical and mystical and superstitious and "weird." I also feel kind of strange reading about "embarrassing" banquets in which characters' American husbands are served things like fish cooked whole (with head) and eating fish heads, or taking the heads off of shrimps, or eating jellyfish or shark fin soup or even dumplings, because to me, this is good food. I don't have that shock of disassociation or of strangeness because this is what I eat (well, in restaurants at least). And I don't like seeing the moms in Joy Luck Club looking so tradition bound or silly to their daughters.

Things that do work for me are the feelings of pressure, of wanting to be the right daughter for my mother and fearing that I've failed her. And yet, I don't think that's an Asian thing at all. I mean, it may be concentrated in the form of academics for many Asians, but that wasn't what I quibbled about. I've never not wanted to succeed academically or felt I was being pressured to do better than I did. I've felt pressured because my mom and dad probably wanted me to do something more profitable like business or engineering or who knows what else and I've felt weird because they really aren't as screamingly liberal as me, but there isn't this giant spectre of my parents/mother in front of me screaming. Usually I like my mom. Sometimes she really pisses me off and I feel she doesn't understand me. I guess I'm just trying to say that I don't have these giant mother issues to work through. Ok, maybe I do, but it's in a complete other direction (read: career and potential waste of talent).

I guess in general I don't really get the conflicts that seem to drive Tan to write, and I don't enjoy seeing what I often think of as my culture (even though technically mine is of 1990's Taiwan and not 1930's China) made out to look so weird and so full of things like feng shui and the whole stereotype of the exotic, superstitious Oriental.

Comments

[thewildmole.livejournal.com]

I think what also informs a lot of Tan's writings is her own admitted battles with depression and that her mother had difficulties as well.

What I get from her when I read books like Joy Luck Club is that, through her sock puppet character, she's still trying to deal with a lot of issues regarding her mother, et cetera. I think the...I don't know...extreme Asian-ness (for lack of a better word) that the sock puppet's mother displays is rather exaggerated in her attempts to try and deal with a mother who, from her own accounts, she had been at odds with for years. I think it's a way of taking a huge, unwieldy topic and making it easier to deal with - reducing everything into one identifiable issue, so to speak. So, some of it is Tan still working out her own issues and, unfortunately, I think that comes out in her fic at least more than I would like to see because some of her characters turn into caricatures.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I guess in general I don't really get the conflicts that seem to drive Tan to write, and I don't enjoy seeing what I often think of as my culture (even though technically mine is of 1990's Taiwan and not 1930's China) made out to look so weird and so full of things like feng shui and the whole stereotype of the exotic, superstitious Oriental.

I'm having the same problem with the gender discussions that are going around off of my friends/friends list now. And that discussion too gives me the sense that as wildmole mentioned part of what's happened is taking a huge complex issues and examining very subjective pieces of it. In the way that you seem to feel about Tan's books, I feel about some of the issues, and I think this is true of other topics also. That when there is a certain commonality in experience or a subject that is very close to us, there's almost more of a disjoint.

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

I think there's also a generation gap that keeps Chinese kids like us from really identifying with Tan's characters. The tradition-bound mothers of Tan's books actually remind me of my grandmothers, and the main characters (the sock puppets) remind me of my parents and their siblings. So we're one generation removed from the history and wars and poverty, I guess, which makes it harder for to understand the tensions at work. Especially the tensions of mother(-in-law) vs daughter (ie my dad's mom vs my mom).

OTOH, both my parents were born overseas, not in North America, so they don't have that conflict of being pulled in two directions the way my Chinese friends and I do. We're the first generation born in Canada, and depending on how "Chinese" our parents have raised us, we feel more or less the pull of being traditional versus fitting in with a predominantly white culture.

Most of us don't feel extreme pressure to fit in, or huge identity issues, I think. I myself have never felt the need to hide or justify my Chinese heritage or my western mentality from either friends or family. (Though there've been times with relatives that I could've been more politic in speech and "modest" in behaviour!) My parents have been pretty supportive of me studying English versus science/math/medicine/etc. While I get annoyed by some of the superstitions, and I particularly loathe the pressure on my cousin to produce a male child, I don't actively hate tradition. I just don't know much about my heritage -- which is mostly my fault for not taking interest.

But I think another factor is that world itself is becoming more of a global community. Being different isn't something to be ashamed of, and diversity is appreciated. So there's much less pressure to conform or hide, and Asian-Americans/Canadians can feel free to embrace both cultures. And like you say, Asia is becoming quite trendy. *g* It's actually kinda scary!

[oyceter]

I think so as well, esp. from standing about and reading some of the essays in the book. I guess I wouldn't so much take issue with it if it weren't so often seen as "Asian-American literature," whatever that means, skewing someone's personal experience and broadening it to an entire genre/people. Maybe the big thing for me in Joy Luck Club especially was that there was no contrast... all four daughters had rather tumultuous relationships with their mothers, and all the mothers suffered tragedies in China, which made the parameters of the relationships seem perhaps more universal than they are?

[oyceter]

I think you've pinned it... I really don't like the shame and the embarrasment that drives it. I mean, I understand the differentness, but a lot of it for me personally comes from being raised in a different culture all together. Just goes to show how much personal experience contributes to my reading experience. For me, being from Taiwan and being able to eat weird stuff, etc, and to know the Chinese holidays and traditions and American ones is fun and kind of neat.

And not TMI, very interesting in fact. I think multitudes of experience, be it cultural or financial or age-wise, makes for much more interesting interactions than living in one's own little bubble.

[oyceter]

*nods* (hrm, have I missed all this discussion?) And yet, it's hard to argue with bringing in personal experience, because what else is there to bring? Except I guess we have to remember that it's just facets of an issue and that each facet complicates the issue exponentially... it's the stereotyping and the simplifying that annoy me. Not that Tan is doing it herself, but just due to market conditions and the general lack of Asian writers in English, it's kind of hard to be a writer of race and not have your works thought of as "feminist" or "Asian-American" or "Afro-American" and etc.

[oyceter]

I think so too... it's like we had this buffering between, with my parents having been in America for a while and with a good number of friends here.

Man, the trendy Asia thing is so weird! I always giggle when I see the kanji/Chinese character tattoos (I saw some guy with one on, except the image was flipped! Oops). And it's funny because it's like that in Taiwan too. I remember living back there ten years ago and everything from America would be so in, except now everyone's looking to Japan and Korea now.

Global communities are a bit strange to me... I mean, I adore the internet, and I love having met all sorts of interesting people with life experiences very different from mine, who still share many interests with me. But then, there's the broader bit in which I wonder if there's going to be a homogenous global culture or what? Is it going to be American (ok, that's what I mostly worry about)? I think my problem isn't having a global culture, it's having one specific culture as a norm and all the others as sort of sideshows. And yet, there's the whole problem of stagnation and that no culture is really truly any culture because of all the intermingling that's been going on for ages. Hee. This is why I become an East Asian Studies major ^_^.

[thewildmole.livejournal.com]

I think so as well, esp. from standing about and reading some of the essays in the book. I guess I wouldn't so much take issue with it if it weren't so often seen as "Asian-American literature," whatever that means, skewing someone's personal experience and broadening it to an entire genre/people.

I tend to really hate the tagging of someone's work under some kind of umbrella like "Asian-American literature" because (many times) it seems that it's placed there simply because the author is Asian and writing about Asian characters (or insert the ethnicity of your choice). Probably the closest parallel I could personally draw would be books or movies about adoptees. So many of them tend towards the "misfit" angle or play up the "real" versus "adopted" families and it drives me insane because it takes a huge, multi-faceted issue and, well, dumbs it down. I sometimes wonder if Tan had been Caucasian, if her work might have been filed more under the "chicklit" label in some instances or something like Alice McDermott (who, unfortunately, has a few of her own caricatures in works like "Charming Billy").

Maybe the big thing for me in Joy Luck Club especially was that there was no contrast... all four daughters had rather tumultuous relationships with their mothers, and all the mothers suffered tragedies in China, which made the parameters of the relationships seem perhaps more universal than they are?

Quite possibly. For a lot of people, reading someone like Amy Tan is their first introduction to another culture. The only background they receive is what the author tells them in the book and the majority of people don't use something like "The Joy Luck Club" as a jumping-off point to do any investigation or deeper reading on their own. If it's in a book, it must be so, right? What starts out as a personal issue somehow becomes expanded and is touted as The Experience of a particular group, and books like Tan's or Gus Lee's "China Boy" and its sequel "Honor and Duty" go through an odd metamorphisis. Readers forget that they are reading autobiographical fiction that is in part animated by and seen through the author's personal experiences/feelings about what happened as opposed to a straight historical or sociological text.

(And I'll stop prattling on now :).

[oyceter]

Speaking of umbrellas, Salon had an interesting article on a YA book about a gay teen that didn't make him have issues while coming out and just didn't make it a big deal at all. Heh, and I can see Tan being under the chicklit label, with all the emphasis on mother-daughter bonding and whatnot.

There's an interesting essay here on race in SF that thinks about some of these issues... Mostly the author of the paper is writing about the appropriateness of having non-ethnic authors tackling ethnic characters and the double-edged sword of angering people of the culture/ethnicity/race or if they don't, of being accused of not tackling the issue of race at all. So I can kind of see that issue for authors who are Asian and etc... I guess it's unfair to put the burden of representing an entire race/culture on to them, but what can one do?

And the prattling is highly welcome ^_^.