5. Literature as Exploration of Local Identity
5.2.4 Ethnic Asian Identities
In 1989 Bamboo Ridge editors Chock and Lum published a collection of texts by Hawai’i writers of Chinese ancestry. While commemorating the 200th anniversary of Chinese in America, Lum says Paké was primarily intended to showcase that,
[i]ndeed, we do have a literary history: in English, with Hawaii settings, themes and concerns, in the Western literary tradition; literature that is lively and vibrant and concerns itself with making contemporary Asian American life in Hawaii.
[…] These are tales of settlers, making a life in the Islands struggling with the mix of cultures and generations and languages.414
Trying to express the significance of ethnicity in the lives of Hawai’i-born Asian Americans, Lum is well aware that
we’re consciously trying to preserve a Chinese tradition that is not truly Chinese to begin with, rather one that has evolved over the years and very likely bears little resemblance to anything done in China. […] What we have is a local Chinese
412 Quoted in Hawai’i Review 22 No. 2 (Summer 1999): 54.
413 Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, Boston 1999: 110. As Fujikane notes, this ‘claiming of America’ is associated with the Aiiieeeee! group, while Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men can be read as a counternarrative to such strategic claims (see Fujikane 1996: 11).
414 Eric Chock/Darrell H.Y. Lum (eds.), Paké, Honolulu 1989: 10. The word pake, Hawaiian for Chinese, though, has negative connotations. For an example refer to Cathy Song’s poem “Pa-ke” in Song 2001: 14-5.
Leprosy was commonly called ma’i pa’ke’, the Chinese sickness.
tradition that is our own. […] we acknowledge that being Chinese is part of the equation that cannot be cancelled out.415
Wing Tek Lum’s poetry collection Expounding the Doubtful Points, which is dedicated to Frank Chin, contains several poems that explore Chinese American, and, by extension, Asian American identity in a Localized fashion, exposing the stereotypes that have the power to confine and exoticize realities: In “The Return of Charlie Chan,” a movie ad shatters the daily American-Chinese-Hawaiian routine of work, lunch at “Kowloon Restaurant,” drinking Coke and preparing the Chinese New Year gift-giving, reading the morning paper, in which a movie ad of “the most famous Chinaman in all America”
unsettles the poet: “I remember more out of sadness than rage / the mincing way you walk and your fortune cookie talk […] and you will never let us forget it.”416 Which non-Chinese American knows that “There is no / word for / fortune cookie in Cantonese” (72,
“Translations”)? When Lum describes an old Chinese woman on the ferry between Kowloon and Shanghai, the image is created as a counterweight to American images distributed by museums, restaurants and “our bookstores / extolling Shangri-las in paperback – all to deny / our scrutable / lives. We believe / that somewhere in the world our / exotica is real.” When the poem’s speaker sees the old woman while he is
“searching for a vision / for my own, […] she is / for me reason enough to / have come home”(76-7, “Riding the North Point Ferry”).
Lum’s most often quoted and anthologized poems are “Grateful Here” and
“Chinese Hotpot.” They are both comments on the experience of being Asian in America:
The first records instances of racism experienced that are not assuaged by the knowledge of worse injustices being committed in China:
Actually, though, I know I should feel grateful here.
In fact, just last week on the radio, I heard that the Red Guards had broken the wrists
415 Chock/Lum 1989: 12-3. Chinese New Year as celebrated in Hawai’i is a good example: A newspaper article quotes Cindy Ning, associate director for the Center for Chinese Studies at UH saying: “People from China and Taiwan often comment that traditional cultures get sort of fixed overseas, frozen in time.” The article argues that Chinese communities like Honolulu’s have acted as “cultural time capsules” for festivities, while in China, “Big cities such as Beijing have outlawed fireworks because of fire and health problems, […] many cultural icons have been discouraged by Communist leaders ‘who don’t like tradition,’
Ning said” (“Hawai’i keeps Chinese ways at new year’s,” in Honolulu Advertiser 01/31/2002).
416 Lum 1987: 65-6.
of a most promising young pianist.417
This acknowledgement is ironic, for any degree of prejudice and othering has the power of weakening the subject’s identity, and of stifling the creative expression of ethnic minorities. Sumida elaborates:
The tone of ‘Grateful Here’ tells us that the poem is informed not by Lum’s own discovery that he is mistaken for an alien on the mainland, but by a knowledge that this awareness is undercurrent and commonplace throughout his community:
the poem is based on Lum’s knowing the development, dominance, and meaning of a ‘dual identity’ theory about Asian Americans and the theory’s historical consequences, for instance, in the Japanese American internment.418
These thoughts are closely related to another mainland commonplace, namely that “all Asians look alike – indeed, are interchangeable.”
In the multiracial and multiethnic community of Hawaii, on the other hand, misidentification of ethnic groups/mixtures is something close to a cardinal sin.
[…]The issue of misidentification brings up the paradox of Local loyalty to ideas of ethnic integrity and pan-ethnic cultural identification: how is it possible to assume the communal perspective of a Local without losing some of the distinctive ethnic markers?419
“Chinese Hot Pot,” a poem which proposes a more flexible alternative to the American melting pot, a fondue, might suffice as Lum’s answer:
My dream of America is like dá bìn lòuh [...]
as each one chooses what he wishes to eat only that the pot and the fire are shared along with the good company
and the sweet soup
spooned out at the end of the meal.420
Food as motif or metaphor is often used by Lum, though with much more positive connotations than the ones elaborated by Wong. She mentions his comfort food poem
417 Quoted in Sumida 1991: 261.
418 Sumida 1991: 262.
419 Gima 1997: 74.
420 Chock/Lum 1986: 63.
“Juk,” criticizing its lost nostalgia and arguing that the idea of ‘comfort food’ serves to show Asian American inequality, having to resort to the reassurance of ethnic comfort.421
Local literature, however, has a host of positive examples of how food connects people across ethnic lines. In Joseph Stanton’s poem “The Kim Chee Test” the haole narrator remembers how being accepted by his Korean father-in-law “wasn’t because / I made your daughter happy,” but was aided by his ability to appreciate the spicy pickled cabbage:
the best of it sears the tongue like a battle cry a warm scream of pride
at being alive and Korean.
It’s hotter stuff
than I was born to handle, but the taste is there.422
In the end, though, both men are equal, and even: When he orders the right beer, the older one has “just passed the Michelob test.” In the afterword to the 1998 Bamboo Ridge collection Growing Up Local, co-editor Bill Teter identifies food as one of the central aspects of being Local: “Local people love to eat, love variety in what they eat, and love to talk about what they love to eat. […] While we drank coffee and tried to digest, we talked about our favorite plate lunch places back home. Local people talking serious grinding.”423 Hence, the impressive list of foods for the protagonist’s birthday party in Kathleen Tyau’s novel Makai is only one of numerous examples of the richness and variety of Local ethnic foods serving as a stand-in for the larger cultural richness:
My mother has been cooking for weeks. She tells everybody no potluck, and then she panics, so now we have everything she made – pork with oong choy, sweet and sour spareribs, shrimp with black beans, squid with sin choy – plus what she orders from Kapahulu Chop Suey, chef special noodles, ginger chicken, char siu
421 Wong 1993: 71.
422 In Chock/Lum 1986: 88. For Nora Okja Keller, on the other hand, the craving for and refusal of Kim Chee at certain times of her life is linked to her identification as Korean: “I smelled like garlic, like kimchee, like home. […] I didn’t want to smell like a Korean. I wanted to smell like an American, which meant being odorless” (See Nora Okja Keller, “A Bite of Kimchee,” in Chock et al. 1998: 295-299, here 296-7.)
423 Bill Teter, “Listening with an Outsider’s Ear,” in Chock et al. 1998: 348-9.
pork, San Francisco and Peking roast duck, black mushrooms with bamboo shoots and water chestnuts – plus roast turkey, baked ham, and sweet potatoes, because she’s afraid Annabel won’t eat Chinese food that doesn’t come from Fat Lee Woo. And people still bring food. Sushi, teriyaki, lavosh, taco salad, namasu.
Feeding time is six o’clock. In the meantime, everybody’s eating pupu. Lumpia, ahi poke, cuttlefish, sour-cream-and-chive potato chips.424
Tyau’s first novel, A Little Too Much Is Enough, goes even further in endowing multi-ethnic food with meaning. It is made up of recipe stories and household advice, (such as
“How to Cook Rice,” or “Mixing Poi”), sprinkled with family memories, resulting in a genealogy of food, the bounty that signifies ‘home.’ Similarly, in Laura Iwasaki’s short story “Salesman’s Daughter,” the mangoes she describes are metonymic for the home she misses:
Because my craving for the silky, opaquely orange, piercingly sweet flesh of mangoes is a genuine neurotic fixation, and, despite all the glum wishful thinking I apply to those sickly excuses for mangoes available on the mainland, nothing comes close to the fruit of that mammoth tree sprouting from the reddish-Black lava rock in my parents’ backyard.425
Special foods, religious rituals, or cultural celebrations serve as reminders of ethnicity and belonging.
On the other hand, many contemporary Asian Locals have only a faint idea of their ethnic heritage. This is reflected in literary texts such as Juliet Kono’s poem
“Yonsei:”
You live so far away From what connects you.
You have no recollection Of old plantation towns, […]
The indignities cast by hard labors.
Your blood runs free
From the redness of soil. […]
And yet once a year
424 Kathleen Tyau, Makai, Boston 1999: 233-4.
425 Laura Iwasaki, “Salesman’s Daughter,” in Bamboo Ridge No. 73 (Spring 1998): 182-90, here 182.
You come with me In your dark brooding – Like a craving –
To visit the ancestors’
Gravesites to pray.426
The generational link is often missing, which might partly be due to the proverbial Asian silence. In Chris McKinney’s The Queen of Tears, the younger daughter wants to drop out of college because she dislikes studying Asian American literature:
Kids like me, Mom. Second generation. Some can speak their ethnic language but not read or write it, like me. […] But we all pretend like we know what’s going on. But in truth, we’re just twenty-something-year-olds swapping sob stories and using ridiculously big words to rationalize our experiences. Ivory tower, Mom, looking down on the masses, isolated, out of it. […] Dad was second-generation Korean. His parents came and worked the sugar plantations of Hawaii. He grew up dirt poor, he was in World War II and the Korean War because he thought that was his only way out of plantation life. […] It’s like what right do I have to dwell on my heritage and call it my own when I never experienced any of the stuff you guys experienced? (61-2).
She questions the authenticity of those who grew up the American way, but her demands are too essentialist:
You know, back at school, there’s this girl from Hawaii. She writes papers on being Hawaiian, being local. But she’s never done drugs, never stolen a car, never been in a fight. She’s never been abused by a parent, never had to buy food with food stamps. How can she write about being Hawaiian or local without these experiences? She has no right to represent people whose lives are much different than hers (62-3).
McKinney is very good at depicting clichés, bringing them to life. His characters are derived from ethnic and other stereotypes yet they breathe and fight as individuals. In
426 In Chock/Lum 1986: 51-2. Yonsei means fourth-generation Japanese. Kono’s poem corresponds to Wing Tek Lum musing about how funerals and other Chinese-related traditions are triggers of memory but also mere habits emptied of meaning, their significance lost. He wistfully acknowledges: “Maybe it’s for this loss that I still come here” (Lum 1987: 36, “What? Another Chinese Holiday?”).
similar fashion, he describes Ken, the protagonist of The Tattoo, by ruling out what he is not like:
He did not wear the skin of the cliché Japanese national, slicing-and-dicing American business. TeppanyakiGeneral Motors. He wasn’t the president of Honda, Sony, not the one who bought up land from New York to Honolulu. He wasn’t the bobora foreigner walking on Kalakaua Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Donna Karan, pale face, crooked teeth. He was also not the katonk of Berkeley, the A.J.A. majoring in business or engineering, devouring white jobs, trampolining off the affirmative action springboard, soaring in the white clouds. He was not even the Hawai’i townie Japanee, the upper middle-class Pearl City-living, private school-attending, baseball-playing, gel-haired, car stereo-pounding, my-dad’s-name-is-Glenn (he wears an aloha shirt to work) fucking dime-a-dozen Japanee.
He wasn’t townie, he was country (3).
The world is run by stereotyping whole peoples, doing much harm. Thus, the victims of such stereotyping have every right to challenge those who dare represent them.
Even though now I know where that word came from – the original name of Puerto Rico was Borinquen – in Honolulu in the ‘60s it sounded pretty nasty:
Hey Borinkee!
What you like, paké who look like one Jap.
Shit, you look like one kanaka-popolo.
Eh, fuck you.
Fuck YOOOOOU!
That’s the thing with cultural politics in Hawai’i, hard to sort out what’s derogatory and what’s not. Rodney Morales – When the Shark Bites427
5.2.5 The Politics of Ethnic Literature: Lois-Ann Yamanaka and the Question of