Ethnicity & Writing

One of my friends, fiction writer Stephany Qiouyi Lu, wrote this as a note on Facebook (you can see the original here). It's generated such a great discussion over there that I wanted to repost it here for all of you. This issue has particular meaning for me: I'm white Irish-Italian who writes a lot of Asian characters, and I plan on taking (and writing under) my first generation Chinese boyfriend's name after we're married. So I'm going to be dealing with the flip side of a lot of this stuff.

On ethnicity, writing, and racialized creations as a whole.

What does it mean to be a minority in the United States trying to forge a path in creative writing?

If you are an author from an ethnic minority in the United States, there is an implicit expectation that you will be writing about your ethnic background. It will be embedded in your words: you are expected to write about the [fill in the blank]-American experience, or, if not that, it will be expected that your characters—one of them, at least—will be of your ethnic background. The content of your novel will be predicted on the basis of your last name, or, if your name blends in with the ethnic majority, by the picture of yourself that is included on the back of the novel with a little blurb about yourself—probably also with subtle emphasis on your ethnic background.

A brief glance at Wikipedia's list of Asian-American authors (found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian-American_authors

) shows that almost all of them write about something related to the Asian-American experience, or to Asian experiences as a whole; the number that write outside those topics can be counted on one hand. That's the expectation, and that's the reality.

Many of these authors are immigrants themselves, having been born in another country. With this context, it's understandable that they write about the immigrant experience, or the Asian-American experience—that's made up a fundamental portion of their life. It's an important topic to them. They are the older generation, in their forties or so; they are at the age where they have developed the talent and maturity to get published, so they have shaped the face of Asian-American literature thus far.

But what does this mean for people like me, a first-generation Asian-American?

I fit in in Southern California—I am surrounded by first-generation [fill in the blank]-Americans. Our experiences are not unique. We, the hyphenated Americans, are the majority, not the minority. We are the ones who find ourselves creeping into the "heritage" language courses in college. The ones who feel a sense of embarrassment when we speak in broken Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Hindi, Gujarati, whatever language with our grandparents. The ones who are distanced from the immigrants because we're not "fobby" enough. We are comfortable in a state of limbo.

But what about when I'm taken out of that context? In North Carolina, I have become the minority, not the majority. The people I'm surrounded by have been in the States for generations upon generations. I am inundated by American culture and find that I have to ask for explanations regarding the definition and relevance of many cultural terms; meanwhile, I am expected to know details of the Chinese culture that I was never really taught. When I am in China, meanwhile, I am familiar enough with the culture to recognize the larger cultural symbols. I feel a sense of comfort when I'm surrounded by delicious Chinese food and by the sights and smells of those places. Yet, at the same time, I'm still a minority among the people of my blood. The way I dress, the way I talk, even the way I walk, places a giant label on me that says that I'm not really Chinese—I can be spotted from far away as being an outsider. I do not yet belong in Chinese culture.

But is this what I'm supposed to write about? As a first-generation Chinese-American, born in the United States, raised in a bastardization of Chinese and American culture, am I limited in my topics to just the first-generation Asian-American experience? Is that what I can write with "authenticity"?

When I look through my pieces of creative writing through the years, I've come to realize that I have created perhaps three or five characters—out of the dozens, hundreds of characters that I've dreamt up since when I started scribbling stories at the age of five or so—that can even claim something of a semblance to an Asian background. Their ethnicity is never emphasized. Perhaps the only thing that gives them away is their name, "exotic" compared to the names of other characters.

All my other characters are white. Why is this? Is it that I have been inundated by images from American television, where white actors and actresses are the absolute majority, and where characters of ethnic minorities are added as novelty items to increase an image of "diversity"? Is it because all the novels I read, and enjoy reading, are written by white, British or American authors, who also make the ethnicity of their characters implicit? Is it because all of this culture that I've been immersed in has taught me that white characters are the default and that characters of ethnic minorities are the exception, the novelty? Is it because any character who is not white is immediately labeled with their ethnicity and seen through that lens, with their physical appearance preceding any internal qualities—and who are often expected to fit into ethnic stereotypes?

Is the fact that the majority of my characters end up being white necessarily bad? Is it just as much of a stereotype, an ethnic obligation, an imposition by the majority—my future readers—to say that I must make my characters of my ethnic background, or that I must write about my experiences as a first-generation Chinese-American, so that I can "challenge the hegemony of the white majority"? Are my stories—and the stories of my first-generation Asian-American friends, whose characters also appear to be implicitly white—just meant to be case studies on minority assimilation into a larger, predominantly white American culture?

This is not to say that I want to be white. Although I dissociate myself from campus organizations such as ASA (Asian Students Association) and CASA (Chinese-American Students Association), that is not because of a shame towards my background, but rather because I simply don't hang out with the people who frequent those groups. I have pride in my background, and, the more time passes, the more my ethnicity becomes an integral part of who I am and how I shape myself.

What my fundamental question is is: Must fiction be racialized? Does my last name have to shape the context and content of my novel? Does the way my face looks—eyes where my crease folds back into my lid, a tiny nose, the yellowish tint to my skin that defies the black–white dichotomy—need to shape the way my characters look? Is ethnicity even all that relevant to the topics that I like exploring, such as the relationships (romantic, platonic, antagonistic, everything) between people and the human emotions and thoughts that back those; do human feelings need to be seen through a lens of race? Am I obligated to include a character of an Asian background in my novels—and, if not, why do I still feel obligated to do so? Why is the visible presence of ethnicity that important, anyway?

On one hand, the United States, mirroring other liberal Western societies, strives to be more inclusive of people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, there are more and more explorations, academic and nonacademic alike, of the topics of race and ethnicity, particularly in the context of the question if identity—works of fiction, works of art, works of music, anything that a person can possibly do is analyzed through a lens of race. On one hand, it is important to understand people of other cultures—yet, on the other hand, how much of this race-oriented analysis serves to simply heighten the visibility of race and drive more divisions, more classifications, more preemptive judgement and labeling based on one's physical appearance?