Seeing Jay-Z in Taipei

Seeing Jay-Z in Taipei Hua Hsu My father left Taiwan for the United States in the mid-1960s at the age of twenty-one. He would be nearly twice as old before he returned. In the interceding years, a willing maroon far from home, he acquired various characteristics that might have marked him as American. He studied in New York, witnessed and participated in student protests, and, according to photographic evidence, once sported long hair and vaguely fashionable pants. He acci- dentally became a Bob Dylan fan, thanks to second- hand exposure through the floorboards of his apart- ment building. He subscribed, very briefly, to The New Yorker. He acquired a taste for pizza and rum raisin ice cream. He and my mother spent their honeymoon driving across the country, and among the items that have survived my parents’ frugal early years are weathered paperback copies of the bestsellers The Pentagon Papers and Future Shock. For a brief spell he toyed with anglicizing his name and asked to be called Eric, though he soon realized that assimilation of that order did not suit him. I often try to spin these details into a narrative of my parents’ early years in America. How did they imagine themselves? How did they acquire a sense of taste or decide which movies to see? Did any HUA HSU is an Assistant Pro- minutiae betray some aspirational instinct, a desire fessor of English at Vassar Col- to ½t in? Would they have recognized themselves lege. His work has appeared in Artforum, The Atlantic, The New in Future Shock? And who was the influential Eric York Times, and Slate. He served after whom my father had named himself, if only on the editorial board for A New briefly? These were the raw materials for their Literary History of America (2009). new American identities, and they foraged only as © 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Dædalus Winter 2011 163 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 Seeing far as their car or the subway line could Of course, they had chosen all this: Jay-Z in take them. In those days, as my parents the occasional loneliness, the itinerant Taipei never tire of reminding me, their sense of lifestyle, the language barrier. They had identity was bound by geography: prox- arrived to study at American graduate imity to these American effects, on one schools far superior to their Asian coun- hand, and profound distance from home, terparts, though the reward for such a on the other. Back then, they explain, it mad pursuit had not yet come into focus. required a small fortune and months of Despite their acceptance of this fact of careful planning to return home. They displacement, what they had not chosen remember, with the kind of nostalgic was to relinquish the place they held in fondness assigned to experiences that their hearts in order to become Asian need not be repeated, that when they Americans, a category then coming into were young like me it took weeks sim- fashion. They had little in common with ply to schedule a long-distance phone the American-born Chinese and Japan- call and ensure a quorum of the family ese students organizing on the other side would be available on the other side of of their campuses for free speech or civil the line. rights; they knew nothing about the Chi- This speci½c detail has long captivated nese Exclusion Act, Charlie Chan, or why me. What must it have been like to leave one should take deep offense to the slurs home willingly and cross into a different “Oriental” or “chink.” My parents and world, with only the haziest plans for re- their cohort would not have recognized turn? I could not fathom the idea that the that they were representatives of a “mod- rare phone call and the occasional trans- el minority.” In fact, they hadn’t even paci½c letter–which might announce a planned on becoming Americans. It’s not future phone call–constituted the entire- that they were unconcerned: they simply ty of their connection to their gradually did not know such categories of identi- more distant homeland. In the absence ½cation–national, racial, ethnic–were of available connections, they held on to available to them. Their allegiances re- an imaginary Taiwan, more an abstrac- mained with the communities they had tion, a beacon, a phantom limb than an left. They subscribed to a narrative of actual island. The available technology return, and for the most part, they were could deliver them home only occasion- not deeply invested in where they ½t in ally. So they would search for traces of the American racial landscape, even as it in the faces of their classmates; they it reoriented itself to accommodate would hear it wafting above the din when their kind. they visited Chinatown. My parents– Many of them–my parents and their usually rational, reserved, mellow people classmates, clustered at engineering –would drive hours in search of neigh- schools–were the moving pieces in boring immigrant colonies that prom- someone else’s grand abstraction, one ised Chinese restaurants, grocers, news- that promised flexibility and improvi- papers, and marathon lunches with old sation rather than the strict contingen- classmates. It was the same for my fa- cies of identity politics. “For the ½rst ther’s entire collegiate graduating class, time in history,” wrote the urban theo- all of whom pursued their futures rist Melvin Webber in 1964, around the abroad. Any encounter was enough time my parents arrived stateside, “it to nourish them and remind them of might be possible to locate on a moun- who they were. tain top and to maintain intimate, real- 164 Dædalus Winter 2011 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 time and realistic contact with business of my father’s generation. As an engineer, Hua Hsu or other associates. All persons tapped he was essentially building a bridge back into the global communications net across the ocean, one made of silicon would have ties approximating those chips and wafers, circuits and micro- used today in a given metropolitan re- processors, the essence of a computer gion.”1 A visionary of telecommunica- and the raw materials of the digital age. tions, Webber was one of many 1960s He was helping solve the problem of theorists and planners to describe a cheap, ef½cient communication that future in which traditional notions of had been one of the de½ning limitations “identity,” tied to geography or tribe, of his early years in America. The great would no longer matter. Instead, ad- distances that once separated various vances in technology would allow us human outposts–that mystery of what access to the world’s farthest corners, lay beyond–had inspired artists and inaugurating a new era of global simul- inventors and entranced conquerors, taneity. Encounter and contact, the explorers, travelers, stowaways, and Grand Tour, and ethnographic explo- heads of state. Now there were better ration would no longer be the pastimes things to think about. Posed another of the intrepid few. As the distance way: why af½liate with arbitrary cate- between here and there was abridged, gories of race or ethnicity when connec- Webber foresaw global possibilities: tivity empowers us to seek out those “By now there is a large class of per- with whom we share interests, opin- sons around the world who share in ions, or background? the world culture, while simultaneous- ly participating in the idiosyncratic lo- But what if our imaginations do not cal cultures special to their regions of progress accordingly, at the same rate residence,” he observed in a later essay. as theories or technological advances? “Their range of opportunity is far larger What if we are unable (or choose not) and far more diverse than the most pow- to imagine something beyond the sim- erful and wealthy man of past eras could ple yearning for home comforts, or the have imagined.”2 tendency toward tribalism? The prob- What were these men “imagining?”3 lem with such universalist thinking is This vision of “world culture” was meant its tendency to efface difference: to of- to supplement, possibly even supplant fer an inevitable, common future as anti- the more local expressions of identity dote to our disparate, occasionally con- that had arisen in the 1950s and 1960s. tentious pasts. While my parents had We had to rebuild our beleaguered ur- been pragmatic and unsentimental about ban centers, Webber and others agreed the decisions that landed them in the –riot-wounded places like Watts, New- United States, there was something ark, and Detroit. But in this “post-city about their relationship to their identi- age,” we also had to anticipate the new ty that de½ed such reason; it was irra- social con½gurations of the future be- tional, if not steadfastly provincial. It yond the quaint, limiting city and the was something that seemed to emerge provincialism of local spaces. Suddenly, instinctually.4 Over time, as I approached “encounter, contact, communication” the age they were when they left home, I were no longer problems. This revolu- became mysti½ed. I carefully listened to tion in “global communication” would my parents’ stories about coming to the be fomented and ½ne-tuned by people United States, desperate to locate some Dædalus Winter 2011 165 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 Seeing bit of myself in their wanderings, unex- vaguely laughable.

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