To be a first-generation Asian in America can feel like a perpetual state of puberty.
There are growing pains and awkward phases, like obsessing over White romantic partners (see: the collective oeuvre of Mindy Kaling), or appropriating Black culture (hello Awkwafina’s early rap career), or else writing so-called “mango diaspora” poetry romanticizing the homeland.
The latest drama is more existential, over celebrated Vietnamese American poet and now-novelist Ocean Vuong, whose work has divided the Asian American community: Did he build his success on fetishizing his community’s trauma, or falsely claiming to be a spokesperson of it? To me, the Vuong controversy cuts to the heart of a common diasporic problem: Why do so many Asian Americans insist on writing from the margins, when in many ways, we are at the center of the narrative? What would it take, for us as readers and writers, to decenter the West while we dwell within it?
I empathize with Vuong’s diasporic melancholy. There is a real heartbreak among those who feel their lives wrenched out of context by forces that predate their birth. There is a deep confusion as to how life should look after that rupture. In her novel “Gold Diggers,” the writer Sanjena Sathian describes first-generation Americans as “conceptual orphans.” “We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being,” her Indian American narrator explains. “What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America?”
These are deep and worthy questions. In fact, ethnic diasporic American literature is largely preoccupied with finding belonging in America. The entire scholarship of Asian American studies arose to map out a legible Asian American history, from Chinese exclusion to Japanese internment camps, staking a claim to American identity through its national past. These narratives can get sticky, particularly when they seek equivalence with other minority American narratives — think, for example, of the weird competitiveness between #StopAsianHate and the preexisting #BlackLivesMatter movement — but it brings many Asian Americans comfort to insist that we’ve been part of America’s fabric all along.
At the same time, there are prominent Asian American writers who are sharply critical of the circumstances that made them Americans. “I am here,” Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong insists in her memoir “Minor Feelings,” “because you vivisected my ancestral country in two.” Hong goes on to position her country, Korea, as “just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States.”
The danger of an Asian American artistic identity lies in the name: American. I question our tendency to see America as an end in and of itself: “the third and final continent,” as Jhumpa Lahiri once described it. American identity becomes vexed for those of us who see the webs of oppression connecting our belonging and comfort here with the exploitation of others abroad.
As the Arab writer Omar El Akkad put it, “millions of people look[ing] at the West,” and saying, “I want nothing to do with this.”
“I came into political consciousness around Asian American causes, which were framed as an issue of anti-racism, access to the United States, and belonging to this country,” the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen told The Emancipator last month. “Over the last couple of decades, I’ve [begun seeing] all those things as subsidiary to a greater cause of decolonization.”
Like Nguyen, my coming-of-age as an Asian American writer led me to think closely about decolonization. An important shift I made was choosing to read writers from the South Asian subcontinent, not just the diaspora. Not a South Asia “as written for its diaspora — the longing for an imagined homeland — or written for a colonial imaginary,” as the Indian writer Richa Kaul Padte explained, but a world that exists in conversation with ours, but also on its own terms.
Reading South Asian women writers awakened me to the legacies of colonialism; of the interplay of systems of domination in race and caste; of the potency of environmental movements in the Global South. As much value as I find in stories by “conceptual orphans” like Vuong — and certainly I am one of them — I encourage more diasporic readers to expand their horizons. When we do so, we are less likely to seek a “single story” of existence, to quote Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or style ourselves as “voices for the voiceless.”
The truth is that Western readers have enormous power as gatekeepers and champions of literature from our homelands, which are far from voiceless. It’s our job — and our joy — to seek them out.
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