Seeing Jay-Z in

Hua Hsu

My father left 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

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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 - 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-

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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

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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. Which is not to say Jay-Z in plainably hopeful that some essential that the legacies of familiar racial hierar- Taipei quality had passed through generations chies were invisible. When my parents and geography to me. I wanted to feel were growing up, a famous toothpaste some primordial connection, if only to brand throughout Asia was called Dark- shade in some long-imagined vector of ie; its yellow box was illustrated with a my identity. It was an intoxicating, mys- garish black man in a top hat, his black terious, secondhand nostalgia. If any- skin the void out of which shone a set thing, with ease of travel and globe- of impossibly white, sparkling teeth.5 In spanning technology, this desire only Taiwan, Darkie toothpaste was probably grew. The advances of “world culture” the closest many came to encountering did not efface the need for identity pol- an actual black person, just as seeing itics or resolve the past’s yearnings; it Rock Hudson and Elvis Presley (whose merely gave that need a wider platform, hairstyle my uncle would dutifully mim- new articulations, unheralded claims. ic) in magazines or on television consti- Years later, when my father returned tuted their exposure to white Americans, to Taiwan to pursue a job, this problem intrepid Christian missionaries notwith- of distance returned–only we now had standing. Converging in these ½gures– the technology to bridge it nightly. We the grinning cartoon minstrel, the deb- bought a fax machine. Each night my onair leads–were speci½c origins, histo- mom and I would detail, in the smallest ries, and contexts. But projected across type possible, our daily activities. Each the Paci½c, they could seem like degrees morning, before I left for school, his re- of the same American effect. turn message would be waiting for me. Faxes gave way to email, which was ren- “We are all bewildered by the movie,” dered quaint by Skype, and so on. young Rio Gonzaga remarks, “which is Taiwan was no longer a mere abstrac- probably too American for us.”6 The tion for them, but it remained a mystery movie in question is A Place in the Sun, to me. That distant place provided an George Stevens’s 1951 adaptation of approach to questions of identity that Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, were frequently posed in terms of black and Rio’s environs–the 1950s Manila and white. I spent most of my vacations of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters–are there in middle school and high school, not ideally suited for this tale of for- and upon each visit, I felt ever more dis- bidden love and murder, which stars located. Was I just another American, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, my faint grasp of the spoken language and Shelley Winters, among other an unbridgeable gulf? Or was I, warmly models of alien, American beauty. Rio’s welcomed by my parents’ Taiwanese envies are familiar: the “casual arro- born-and-raised friends, just another gance” of a “modern” American hero- version of them? ine, the “blond, fair-skinned” looks of To import American racial categories her own cousin Pucha.7 And while Rio achieved little. The notion of “Asia” is and Pucha hail from the local elite, in not immediately intuitive to many with- relation to the American splendor they in this continental grouping, and the lasso- see on-screen during their retreats to ing of different Asians into the category the air-conditioned movie theater, Asian American once they enter the Unit- they are only marginally more privi- ed States seemed, to those over there, leged than their lowly chaperones.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 But there is something about Rio’s rela- There is something familiar, possibly Hua Hsu tionship to this American otherness that even heartening about this anecdote. It resists it. Though not yet critical of her flatters our sense of how connected the adoration for exclusively white stars, she world is or can be. Even in a remote strip is beginning to understand that this is of Central Asia, Michael Jordan is recog- someone else’s version of the good life. nized. But what lay beyond this mere For Rio, the margin of her privilege fact of recognition? Did these itinerant manifests itself in an awareness that Tibetans perceive Jordan as an African this American ½lm was not meant for American–a pioneer of black style and her, even if she ½nds something seduc- status and (prior to the election of Pres- tive in its images, themes, possibilities. ident Barack Obama) possibly the most “I decide that even if I don’t understand famous black man ever–or just as an it, I like this movie,” Rio explains, and American? Were they familiar with his her desire to translate this feeling of skills as a basketball player or his inter- bewildered enchantment into some- changeability with Nike? Which ver- thing more concrete distinguishes her sion of Jordan did we hope to project? as one of the novel’s most astute voices. Which qualities stayed af½xed to Jordan She doesn’t understand America, yet as his image traveled the globe? she draws closer, and with caution. I was visiting Taiwan with my parents This is how much of the world ½rst ex- in Fall 2006 when I learned that the rap- periences America: as an image. Once per Jay-Z was bringing his elaborate as a racist tube of toothpaste, now as a world tour to the Taipei Dome. Jay-Z’s YouTube clip of kids in Oakland invent- status as hip-hop’s iconic 2000s hero ing a new dance. Today, this range of was already, at the time, assured. This images is far greater and less singular tour, with United Nations-cosponsored in quality; American culture no longer dates throughout Africa, was ambitious privileges the fair-skinned cowboys and, in some way, heartening. It was sup- or superheroes exclusively. Accessing posed to make him a global presence, America from abroad is no longer the and not just in London and . Each fancy of the affluent or the intrepid. time he left an African city–traveling The infrastructure for the “post-city beyond Cape Town and Johannesburg age” exists: the logic of social network- to Dar es Salaam, Accra, Lagos, and ing websites or crowd-sourcing and the Luanda, too–startling photographs of proliferation of cheap, ef½cient cellular Jay-Z aiding humanitarian water secu- phone technology mean that we are rity missions, touring rural lands in mod- connected in previously unimaginable est, utilitarian dress, or meeting heads ways. There is the famous, oft-repeated of state would circulate the Internet. story of Max Perelman, an American These photographs suggested new col- college student lost in western in lective possibilities. the late 1990s. He encountered a group This had long been hip-hop’s promise. of Tibetans traveling to their capital, When the former gang leader-turned-dj Lhasa. They had never wandered far Afrika Bambaataa became hip-hop’s ½rst from their village; they did not know philosopher in the early 1980s, he imag- what a camera was. At one point, while ined a form that would be voracious, in- partaking in a feast of raw meat, one of clusive, and global. Anything with a beat the wandering Tibetans asked Perel- could be assimilated into his genre-resis- man, how was Michael Jordan doing?8 tant dj sets: why couldn’t he and the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 Seeing young men and women of the South ½nds any meaning whatsoever in those Jay-Z in Bronx found a culture on roughly the vague, fraught words. To those who rec- Taipei same principle? The cosmopolitan pos- ognize that minorities are no longer to- sibility of hip-hop was captivating, and ken contributors to our cultural self-im- as it traveled the nation and then the age, this news only con½rms what has world–thanks to epochal singles and been felt for some time. The audience one-hit wonders, bootlegged documen- for such news will have experienced a tary videos and self-published maga- culture that moves free of city or space, zines–its potential for change grew as where mixture and multiculturalism well. For the most optimistic, hip-hop’s are valued. The primacy of the idea of global reach was predicated on its capac- “whiteness” only makes sense in isola- ity to coalesce different groups around tion, abstracted from history or culture, notions of justice or foster a new creativ- protected from the larger, global flows ity perched on the possibilities of “sam- of majorities and minorities within pling.” This cultural form was a piece which Americans, white or otherwise, of my identity, and it was founded on a will always fall into the minority cate- sense of community or “nationhood” gory. Whiteness will only matter inso- as abstract as my parents’. far as people continue to choose the cate- Hip-hop’s entry into the cultural main- gory, to validate it with their hopes and stream introduced a new kind of proud fears; along these lines, perhaps hip-hop antihero to the American imagination. has charmed the world’s stage more suc- Even as the music produced a multibil- cessfully than “white America” (if such lion-dollar industry, allying itself with a concept still holds) ever did. the forces that had once tried to stymie But did hip-hop’s importance as an in- its growth, there was a sly and almost tervention in America’s racial hierarchy, residually subversive quality to it. The if only cosmetically, travel? Was its glob- music became a business, and the artists al rise predicated on a vague black cool- blossomed into savvy, swaggering busi- ness or its symbolic overturning of a nessmen. Men like Russell Simmons, heretofore lily-white American order? Sean Combs, or Jay-Z were unimagin- How far could style translate, and was ably famous for reasons beyond music. it a suf½ciently durable, transferrable, Often, they were the least powerful men translatable quality? in the boardroom–but the only ones From the American perspective, these who, with a squint or a frown, could issues formed the subtext of the photo- make everyone else feel uncomfortable, graphs of Jay-Z, the living embodiment beholden to their charisma. How far of hip-hop’s victory. The photographs could this swagger take us? were his appeal to all who had ever con- sidered themselves members of the The rise of hip-hop and the general underclass. They portrayed a globally “colorization” of American culture pre- famous black pop star returning to his pared us to see ourselves anew. Demog- ancestral lands, rewarding their patron- raphers predict with some degree of cer- age with an image of success. One could tainty that, in the next three decades, have anticipated different versions of the population of the United States will these photographs dispatched from all ½nally become “majority minority”; it the obscure parts of the globe where he will be the “end of white America,” at would perform. This tour was not for least to the slab of the population that America; it was for the rest of the world.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 We grafted our struggles onto his, and “We relate to struggle,” Jay-Z shouted Hua Hsu now the rest of the world could do the to the audience midway through his pro- same. gressively lackluster set. “We relate to As I approached the Taipei Dome and y’all.” It was a somewhat generic thing spied the throngs of locals, all of them for him to say, more a performance of recognizable as versions of the “global empathy than a gesture of sincerity. citizens” I grew up with in California, I Struggle: such a common, universal, oft- thought about that symbolic victory for uttered condition. Could solidarity really the underclass. As an American versed be forged through so vague a notion? in the codes and meanings of hip-hop, I What were the consequences of taking was a somewhat protective spectator. one’s struggle abroad? Was Jay-Z actual- Did the triumphs that Jay-Z represented ly introducing the youth of Taiwan to a translate? Were people here to revel in new vocabulary for understanding their the spectacle, or to share in acts of sub- lives? Where “struggle” in the Ameri- version? When the local fans thrilled can context might describe the minori- to every move of the opening act, a Tai- ty’s struggle against a power structure wanese rapper named mc Hot Dog who or cultural mainstream, here it meant had carefully studied the playbooks of something else. What hip-hop helped his American peers, I scoffed. His very achieve in the United States was the vic- name made me cringe, yet the fans tory of the image: kids of color, kids adored him. After a brief intermission, with attitude who could not be under- Jay-Z took the stage. The audience sat estimated–who took that underestima- politely through most of the set, rising tion and made billions of dollars off it. only in the presence of the easy hits. I But projected abroad–and complicated felt an irrational sense of alienation. by language–hip-hop’s valences were Perhaps this, in a way, was hip-hop’s different. In the context of American victory. A local version had mastered race politics, it represented the ascen- the moves, and at least the fans could sion of an underclass, and its effects understand what mc Hot Dog was say- could be felt economically, politically, ing: he both rapped in their language and even spiritually; in Taiwan and else- and ½lled his rhymes with de½antly lo- where, hip-hop could just as easily rep- cal references. He was oppositional in resent the ascension of American cul- a way they could relate to. ture in general. The divide between Jay-Z and the Efforts at solidarity approached farce audience only widened as the evening later during the concert, when the enor- dragged on. Often, it seemed they had mous screen behind him flashed the logo only the faintest clue what he was talk- for Jay-Z’s record label, roc (short for ing about between songs, and his raps Roc-A-Fella, a riff on Rockefeller). The lost them altogether. The African Amer- crowd awakened with ferocious, unex- ican star’s swaggering charisma didn’t pected energy. In Taiwan, “roc” reads translate either. Still, the spectators as the abbreviation for “Republic of craned their necks and climbed atop China.” The name is a reminder of Tai- seats merely to see an American in our wan’s strained relations with the Chi- presence, validating this market by show- nese mainland. Some argue that Taiwan ing up. They may not have understood and China must reunite, while others him, but they knew they were supposed rally for formal independence: this to like him. schism, in some way, de½nes Taiwanese

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 Seeing identity. The crowd assumed that their now have their own strip malls, shop- Jay-Z in American hero was referring to their ping centers, and newspapers. Indeed, Taipei struggle. the predictions went slightly awry. In- stead of creating a “world culture” of From a distance, the bare facts of this uniform desires and tropes, the new scene might describe the “world culture” flows of information merely gave co- of Webber and others. But within this herence and credence to more micro- set-piece of globalization, the transla- regionalisms. Categories of identi½ca- tions–of culture, symbol, language– tion became segments of a market remain vexed. The coming together of share, and the logic of this “world cul- different localities does not always result ture” became that of the neoliberal in the kind of solidarity we would have market or a social network online. hoped for. In this case, was it empathy, This outcome is a version of what an- or something else? What happens when thropologists John and Jean Comaroff these immense distances collapse and describe in their book Ethnicity, Inc. There we surrender our long-held, reliable no- was a certain kind of claim, the Coma- tions of authenticity or essence, memory roffs explain, to essence or invisible af½n- and imagination? As the opportunities ity, which was supposed to wither away for new moments of contact proliferate in the modern age. We were supposed –and as the ½gures and images circulat- to stray from binding myths–of origin, ing along those pathways change as well tradition, belief, and culture. The seem- –what will be the basis of our “world ingly archaic, vernacular meaning of culture”? Do these notions of struggle, community was supposed to flounder in community, or identity politics translate the “post-city age,” in which geography across such vast spaces, or does the aston- was suddenly incidental, or at least sur- ishing rate of circulation loosen them mountable. These new associations, it from intent and meaning? was predicted, would cause the abstract, The circulation of images happens at not-quite-rational core of identity poli- a rate that is either terrifying or exciting, tics to shrink, causing us to act more given your age. Suddenly it is impossi- rationally or sensibly toward the world ble to ignore the interconnectedness of around us. We would access far corners American fates with those worldwide. of the world as an endless stream of im- Many Americans were introduced to ages and data, customizing our prefer- this idea only recently, in the wake of ences and tracking usage statistics along 9/11; others may have read it in our shoes the way. and socks, shirts and appliances, most Instead of advancing past our provin- of which are crafted overseas and will cial af½liations, however, we have found travel farther distances than many of us reasons to return to and properly mark ever will. The circuits that implicate us these delineations. The feeling of au- are in½nite. Against such a backdrop of thenticity, that alluringly vague line di- extreme possibilities and energies, what viding two tribes, the abstract outline of of our older allegiances to seemingly a community, could now be monetized. outdated notions like race or ethnicity? New forms of consumption activated Those who venture to America, as my identities in novel, almost chillingly prag- parents did forty-odd years ago, no matic ways, creating a need to crystallize longer face the same light homesick- or codify boundaries that previous gen- ness. Wherever immigrants live, they erations had never thought to demarcate.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 There is belonging in the nebulous, home- they rely on a shared, universal logic. Hua Hsu sick sense, and there is a legal type of “be- We possess unprecedented forums for longing,” which entitles you to claim a instant, global contact, but too often this piece of a Native American gaming casi- connectedness merely means that we are no or an obscure, mountainous Japanese implicated as slivers of a market whole. tea ceremony. “Neither for consumers Rarely does the potential to connect on nor for producers,” the Comaroffs write, a global scale embolden us to seek mutu- “does the aura of ethno-commodities ality or discover radical new possibili- simply disappear with their entry into ties for feeling and transferring empathy. the market; sometimes, as we have seen, Perhaps this is asking too much. it may be rediscovered, reanimated, re- Furthermore, amidst all this possibili- gained.”9 We know that identity can ty, it becomes dif½cult at the individual enter into commodity relations–the level to feel all that unique or original. idea that blackness can signify “cool” to How does one orient oneself in a sea of American consumers or that an ethnic such endless connective possibilities? rite can be trademarked. But to presume that this marketability automatically As I began recollecting the scraps of compromises the integrity of that iden- conversation that constitute the opening tity is to presume a kind of original au- pages of this essay, I had to take care to thenticity, which simply locks us in a remember what was mine and what I circle. Instead, the Comaroffs’ idea of had read in someone else’s memoir, or the “ethnicity industry” is useful for overheard in a class. Was the shape of considering what entry therein does this narrative cliché or easily predict- not guarantee. The rise of entertainment able? Did I just rearrange the details of marketed speci½cally to white Ameri- my parents’ lives according to a recog- cans–the Blue Collar Comedy Tour or nizable script? It was like that line in auto racing are two sturdy examples– Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman might help us reorient our understand- Warrior about the impossibility of dis- ing of racial hierarchy and the emer- tinguishing Chinese Americanness gence of a white claim to identity poli- from the unique weirdness of your tics that follows the example of actual own family.10 minority groups. But accepting the fact It was a somewhat generic strategy on of the “ethnicity industry” discourages my part, though, as Kwame Anthony us from scrutinizing related broader Appiah has observed in his discuss- notions: the very idea of blackness or ions of culture, “[O]ne is bound to be whiteness, for example. formed–morally, aesthetically, politi- The conditions of identity haven’t cally, religiously–by the range of lives changed so much as our ability to artic- one has known.”11 Just as markets exist ulate, choose, express, and complicate for a certain kind of by-the-bootstraps them has. The end of white America– ethnic art, its opposite now courts au- a numerical majority–is assured; the diences as well. This is exactly the form end of whiteness–an idea, a hegemon- of ethnic knowledge Nam Le assails in ic center–will not die so easily. The par- his recent short story, “Love and Hon- adox of all these new ways of articulat- or and Pity and Pride and Compassion ing and embracing difference–of cus- and Sacri½ce.” Le describes a wry, frus- tomization and connectivity, lifestyle trated young Vietnamese-Australian choices and segmented markets–is that writer at the University of Iowa’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 Seeing M.F.A. program. He struggles to com- lates every rule he and his friends have Jay-Z in plete a ½nal assignment. “How can you agreed upon. Ultimately, his father can- Taipei have writer’s block?” a friend (presum- not accept his son’s desire to ½ctionalize ably white) wonders. “Just write a story the past. But he chooses to write it. about Vietnam.”12 But he resists, even There are speci½cities we lose when as instructors assure him that ethnic lit- we surrender to the universal, a fear that erature is “hot” and lusty literary agents Le’s short story seeks to express. It does encourage him to mine his “background not overcome the stinging criticisms and life experience.” Ethnic literature is Le’s characters set out for their creator, “a license to bore,” its stories stocked nor does Le seek to reclaim or own such with “flat, generic” characters and “de- stereotypes by turning them on their scriptions of exotic food,” his classmates head. Instead, Le embraces identity’s decry, and Le’s young proxy in the story current contradiction: he wants to have agrees.13 Instead, he chooses the right- it both ways, to possess and control his eous path: he writes fantastical stories identity, but without being completely about vampires, assassins, and painters beholden to it, without letting it overde- with hemorrhoids. termine his actions. The story is skepti- There is something disarming about cal and ironic about identity politics Le’s seemingly ironic take on identity, while passionately defensive about our the way the short story anticipates read- right to claim our sense of self. erly expectations. It’s a knowing, brac- The ½nal paragraph in Le’s story be- ingly logical put-down of ethnic litera- gins, “If I had known then what I knew ture–and from an insider, no less. When later, I wouldn’t have said the things I the story turns, slightly, upon the arrival did.” The writer’s father has just de- of the young writer’s father, a witness stroyed the only existing copy of his to unimaginable wartime atrocities, it son’s story, and a strained relationship is unclear whether the reader is merely is about to disintegrate altogether. This being set up for a savage fall. After a writer–so unimpressed and otherwise series of wrenching, relationship-ad- ironic–never reveals this secret. He vancing conversations with his father keeps it for himself, to defend his father. about his experiences during the war– Certain details in this life simply can- the type of wondrously food-½lled con- not be assimilated into a larger whole, versations the characters within the whether that whole is a story or a mar- story mock–the young writer begins ket economy. They should be allowed writing his “ethnic story.” It abides by to serve no end. certain generic conventions, and it vio-

endnotes 1 Melvin Webber, “The Urban Place and the Non-Place Urban Realm,” in Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Melvin Webber, John Dyckman, Donald Foley, Albert Guttenberg, William Wheaton, and Catherine Wurster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 79–153. 2 Melvin Webber, “The Post-City Age,” Dædalus 97 (4) (Fall 1968): 1099. 3 I am reminded here of Arjun Appadurai’s stirring discussions of how globalization– another way of approaching Webber’s “world culture”–expands the imaginative scope

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00068 by guest on 27 September 2021 of its subjects. See Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagina- Hua Hsu tion,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001) and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 4 While these forms of sentimental yearning were important to people like my parents, I do not want to overstate or generalize their effects. Aihwa Ong, for example, has written about how flows of migration and capital across the Paci½c have inaugurated “flexible,” pragmatic, new approaches to citizenship. See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultur- al Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). 5 Over time, and in what ranks as possibly the most tepid exercise of political correctness ever, the manufacturers of Darkie toothpaste decreased the resolution of the image so it was merely the shadow of a black face and renamed the toothpaste Darlie. 6 Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 15. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Walter Lafeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: Norton Books, 1999), 14. 9 John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 20. 10 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 5–6. 11 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), ix. 12 Nam Le, The Boat (New York: Knopf, 2008), 8. 13 Ibid., 9.

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