The Accidental Asian

The Accidental Asian | Eric Liu

Eric Liu epitomizes the typical second generation American: the son of two Taiwanese immigrants (who met in America) he went on to graduate from Yale and serve in the Clinton White House. This is a deeply personal collection of essays, which is equal parts memoir, and equal parts reflection on race, culture, and identity. Liu examines issues ranging from his own 'Asian-ness', the typical ideas associated with Chinatown, the Asian as the 'other', and the viability of the Asian American identity, in the prism of his own experiences and those of his immediate family.

One powerful aspect that ties his essays together is a ceaseless questioning, and a refusal to accept the widely held notion or the commonplace assumption. This is immediately evident in his first piece, a deeply moving reflection on his father rooted in questions about Chineseness and assimilation - both his own and his father's. His father was in many ways typically Chinese, proud of Chinese culture, deeply familiar with the Chinese classics with a grasp of the language equal to that of any Confusian scholar-official. Liu, despite attending Chinese classes, soon lost all facility for the language and with it his cultural roots as he grew increasingly American.

This could be seen as the typical immigrant story as Liu so eloquently writes:

In our archetype of the immigrant experience, it is the first generation that remains wedded to the ways of the Old Country and the second generation that forsakes them. This we learn is the tragedy of assimilation: the inevitable estrangement between the immigrant father who imagines himself in exile and the American son who strains to prove his belonging.

Except that Liu questions this assumption of the first generation immigrant, and the inevitable estrangement with their new adopted culture because:

we let ourselves think of the first generation's life as a mere chrysalis, an interlude between the larval existence of the homeland and the fully formed Americaness of the second generation. But the truth is that the father can become his own form of butterfly.

In fact, his father did transform. A deep love and facility for languages was soon applied to English, and an understanding of culture enabled him to rise to respectable middle management in IBM. It was this very ability to adapt, and this openness to a new culture that gave his son the opportunity to transform himself fully into a typical American.

More than that, assimilation is never the easy transformation for the second generation child as it is made out to be. As the author himself freely admits he often attributed his father's actions to his "Chineseness" but as he admits, with considerable insight this was often in response to his own cultural insecurities : "it was I who boxed against the shame and shadow of racial stigma" as a Chinese boy in an American world; to "cloak any handicap, real or imagined" that might accrue, to his race. Often, it is the second generation that is the one truly caught in between.

This overturning of easy assumptions is again at play in his essay "The Chinatown Idea". The very idea of a 'Chinatown' is often cited as evidence for a Chinese tendency to cling together, to refuse to assimilate. He again examines this through the lens of personal experience, in this case a powerful and touching portrait of a grandmother who lived for more than two decades in the same cinder-block apartment in New York's Chinatown. She seemed a powerful symbol of the typical immigrant Chinese, separated by a linguistic and cultural chasm, comfortable only in a familiar environment. Except Liu always felt that she had a desire to be somewhere else.

As Liu notes, we all have a certain idea of Chinatown, specifically that:

Chinatown chooses to exempt itself from America: that it is purely the product of Chinese clannishness and insularity.

Indeed, this is a particular cliche that I am ashamed to say I have repeated on countless occasions. After all it is only us Chinese who have Chinatowns all over the world (San Francisco, New York, Sydney). It must be a sign of our unique unwillingness to adapt to cultural morays, to assimilate. After all, Americans go abroad all the time and do not create "little Americas" all over the world now do they?

Liu calls this the "cruellest myth" because many of those who are in Chinatown do not wish to stay there, like his grandmother. Far from cloistering themselves they too wish for the American Dream but for them, whether due to their illegal immigrant status, or some vast linguistic chasm, assimilation is distant and unattainable.

It is thus not the insularity of the Chinese that sustains Chinatown, but the determined blindness of the rest of America in creating this myth of a separate entity, where the Chinese often exploit the Chinese, subject to different rules and standards, a "potemkin village" that hides a "nasty brutish shadow world".

After reading the essay, I felt a distinct sense of unease. But as Liu notes there are many Chinatowns: the insular enclave of foreignness, the shadowy world of exploitation, the thriving self sufficient community and the worst mistake one could make is the one that I made: to try simplify and generalize such a diverse portrait.

Ultimately, though, it is Liu's second essay that I could relate the most deeply to. The larger question of the essay (the "accidental Asian") is presented immediately and forcefully in a list of what makes him "white". Among the items he lists are: listening to NPR; marrying a white; speaking flawless, accentless English; subscribing to Foreign Affairs; not being too ethnic; and being mindful of minority militants, among others. As he notes: he never asked to be white, never sought out such a status but he found himself being "white by acclamation". Thus he has become an honorary white to some, a banana to others.

That certainly brought back memories. Of being called Sergaent Kantang (potato) in the army for my english speaking proclivities, as opposed to the Chinese speaking Hokkien swearing rice eaters that were typical of my race. I was a banana (yellow on the outside, white inside), a man with 'atas' (high) tastes - i.e. European cultural tastes. White by proclaimation, then?

I've made my own list: I am functionally monolingual, I speak in grammatically correct, complete sentences, I love the theater and musicals, I enjoy trivia nights, I drink my beer in British pubs or trendy bars (not coffee shops), I listen to jazz, I listen to classical music, I read literary novels, I have many foreign friends.

Of course this status came as much from the things I didn't do, a negation of the typical Chinese Singaporean: I don't speak mandarin (well), I don't speak a dialect, I do not listen to Chinese pop music, I don't watch Korean or Taiwanese TV serials, I hardly karaoke (and only English songs if I do), I don't use singlish. The only mainstream local custom I seem to enjoy doing is eating. That if anything is something that is truly universally Singaporean.

The bizarre fact is that our experiences are parallel, very similar, but like two lines running opposite to one another. As much as we have both become white, or been labeled white, for him it is as a minority Chinese attempting to assimilate into the larger culture. For me it is being born into the racial and cultural majority but have been emplaced into my own cultural (even linguistic) niche, as a result of background and education. As he has become part of the status quo, I have lost my place in it.

Yet in a sense he has become part of the majority, but a minority within the majority. He is not just white, but a certain type and class of white. Upper middle class, confident, socially mobile a far cry from the white trailer trash that used to hurl abuse at him on the bus. I too am a minority within a majority, culturally and linguistically. In that regard, though for different reasons, we are the same. We are both "accidental Asians".

Even though Liu's essays are deeply personal, it is has voice and his aptitude for the stirring image that captures the imagination. This is something unsurprising given that he was a Presidential speechwriter. I wish to end off with a sample from his final essay, Blood Vows about his marraige to his wife:

Let me explain why I married a white woman. It wasn't as if I had a plan. I wasn't trying to prove a point or defy convention. It was simply a matter of who was there and what was possible. Why did Carroll marry a Chinese man? Why do people of different races marry at all? For the same reason today that they go to school together, live together, travel together, work together: because they can

what should immediately strike you is the fact that any explanation is even necessary. As he soon makes clear:

I chose. I chose to enter into a relationship with Carroll. Not with a "white woman", not with some nameless paragon of "white beauty" but with Carroll Haymon, who has always had an uncanny knack for finishing my sentences; who knows when to humour me and when not to; who, as a Southerner schooled in the North, is no stranger to acculturation; whose neck bends just so when she reads; who sings a soulful alto and scorns the designated-hitter rule; who has a way of putting complete strangers at ease. Nobody - and nobody's subconscious tricked me into falling in love with her.

In this powerful memoir, and in his hands, one is impelled to believe that race doesn't really matter that much, and if it does, there are other greater things that can surpass it.