My winter reading – all five-star ratings (★★★★★):
This is a novel written as a screenplay to deconstruct Asian stereotypes by the roles presented in popular media: from 'Generic Asian Man' and 'Background Oriental Male', to 'Kung Fu Guy'.
The story takes place within a TV show called "Black and White", referring to the two main characters in the cop show ('White Cop Lady' and 'Black Dude Cop'), police cars, and the two primary American racial identities. Within this TV cop show is the embedded story of Willis Wu, 'Generic Asian Man' background character at the Golden Palace, a restaurant in Chinatown. Willis is trying to work his way up to 'Kung Fu Guy', but instead finds himself as 'Dead Asian Guy'. Still, he makes it into the show.
There’s just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it’s just easier to keep it how we have it.
There are sprinkles of Romanized Taiwanese and an unexpected reference to West Virginia which seem to individualize the story (for me). The writing is inventive, while the personal story is familiar and poignant.
Heard about this novel some years ago from an interview on The Daily Show, and was reminded that this was on my 'Want to Read' list from this follow-up interview:
This is an up-to-date history of Taiwan written with engaging narrative energy. The early chapters include fascinating historical legends passed down by the island's indigenous peoples describing the early European discoverers: Dutch, British, Spanish, and Portuguese. This includes an incident with the American ship Rover, which illustrates the status of the island as a kind of unsettled wilderness as late as 1867.
The island changes hands several times, and is ruled, often at some distance, by dynasties, strongmen, and empires – seemingly never fully governed or self-governed. This succinct summation can be found in the book's Preface:
In both modern and pre-modern times, Taiwan has enjoyed a unique territorial status. It has been a stronghold of pirates and smugglers, a promised land of coastal emigration from Fujian and Guangdong provinces via the Taiwan Strait, and a secret backdoor to Japan. It was the site of failed settlements for both the Spanish and the Dutch, and a retreat for the last of the Ming resistance, an accidental acquisition by the Qing dynasty, only reluctantly retained amid multiple indigenous uprisings. It was a prime target in the Sino-French War of the late 19th century, and an environment hostile enough to repel several invasions solely on the basis of climate and disease. Handed over as a spoil of war, its 50 years as a Japanese colony continue to have a strong influence on the island’s culture and connections. Most famously, in 1949 it became the site of the rump government of the Republic of China, as the mainland fell to the Communists. After 38 years of martial law, the liberalisation of the refugee regime led to free elections, and a new conflict over the meaning of ‘independence’.
The book also reminds me of my intense research and thesis paper for Donald Cole's Asian History course at Exeter. He chided me for coming to the 'wrong' conclusions; "Rebel Island" provides some vindication. I wish it had been in the Library in 1979.
This novel spans three generations of an Asian-American family: a mother (Lily), a son (Nick), and a grandmother (May). It's a family drama, but there are elements of fantasy and science fiction, as well as the three-part time jump, reminiscent to me of Yann Martel's "The High Mountains of Portugal". Each generation, in trying to assimilate, splits from the previous, in a cascade of 'over-parenting', misplaced responsibility, as well as class and cultural mismatches – like irreparable errors in replication.
The deeper observations lie in the last chapter, May's story. It flashes back to the Cultural Revolution, when teenagers tear apart the institutions of China and academics, like May who is a genetic scientist, are accused and threatened. She escapes through Hong Kong to New York where she raises her daughter.
America was a place that made promises. In America, a farmer’s daughter could become a scientist. In America, parents hid their disappointment in their children. But I was a poor actress. Your father said that to me, once. I hid my disappointment without success. I hadn’t realized that, as an American child and a Chinese mother, our difficulty communicating would always be insurmountable.
Khong sums up May's thoughts in this lovely paragraph near the end of the book:
The clock ticks loudly from the kitchen. Time passes, indifferent to me. So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention. I notice it now, my present: my grandson’s kind face, his warm hand in mine, and the smell and sensation—here the words, in any language, fail—of being alive. Chinese is a language that exists in the present tense. In this way, it is unlike English, a language in which it is easy to say: I had a past, I will have a future. When I adopted English as my own I lived so much in the hope of what was to come. Now my future shrinks with each passing second.
That last paragraph suspends and sends me back to my last visits with my mother in the summer of 2022. She holds my hand and smiles lovingly at a face she does not recognize, my face. For a while, she cannot speak English, only Taiwanese. But we still connect and enjoy our shared company, even as I struggle to apply 'foreign' words and phrases from my childhood, and she struggles to recover a lost language. Is it strange that some of the warmest times I spent with my mother are those when she did not know who I was?
All these things are abstractions – exponential expressions of our basic human connections: identities, families, communities, nations, cultures. Each one of us strives to answer 'who am I'. However, when we try to answer 'who are you', we should appreciate the burden of identity we load on 'others'. We must be cautious of our assumptions and aware our lack of cultural or historical knowledge, lest we succumb to a destructive process. As the US embarks on its own Cultural Revolution, we should keep the focus on ourselves and the kind of people we are or want to be.
While valuable, identity is not an absolute or a requirement in our negotiating relationships; we may simply connect. And, we may connect at scale. In any case, I sure did enjoy these three books.
