Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
foundational motivations for social-context methodologies within Asian Americanist critique have been to elucidate the experiences of those who are facing oppression and historical erasure, Whiteman certainly fits this purpose, even with its use of a fictionalized narrative perspective. But my larger point is that D’Souza’s novel is not anomalous. It belongs to a vast archive of Asian American fictions that emerged in what has been called the postrace era, yet it must still be read with an attentive eye to issues of social inequality.
The “Model Minority” in the Postrace Era
Like Hagedorn, D’Souza, and Le, the writers included in this study might be read as pushing for a postracial aesthetic as they take on narrative perspectives of non–Asian American or racially unmarked characters. However, on deeper inquiry, these cross-ethnoracial storytelling viewpoints direct us to consider social inequality in relational, refractive, and comparative formations. That is, Asian American characters or experiences may seem marginal to the plotting, but this marginality is advanced in the service of exploring the multifocal configurations of power. This move away from the autobiographical and autoethnographic storyteller is explained in part by timing: these writers have emerged during a period in which their racial status can be hailed as a marker of privilege. As I mentioned earlier, Americans of Asian descent have been labeled as the “model minority.” This designation distinguishes this racial group from others (such as African Americans, Native Americans, and Chicanos/as) and grants us a way to understand why authorial ancestry still remains a vital component to cultural criticism. The connection between racial formation and literary expression cannot always be directly ascertained, yet contemporary Asian American writers must attend to their creative work in an era in which their status as a minority can be levied as a kind of cultural capital. While many scholars cast light on the problems with the logic of the model minority myth, it still remains a pervasive way to conceptualize Asian Americans.16
The model minority narrative emphasizes closure, uplift, and, most of all, the Asian American subject who achieves and succeeds. In this construct, the Asian American becomes, most importantly, a docile minority, one who does not protest and instead obeys the formulation that he or she models for others to follow. The term “model” itself suggests a prototype that can be seamlessly replicated among all the different Asian American ethnic groups, flattening out an incredibly heterogeneous population in terms of class, religion, language, and other such differences. Further still, the model minority mythos is funneled through a particular form of achievement. As the legal scholars Miranda Oshige McGowan and James Lindgren note, Asian Americans are “said to be intelligent and highly educated, though a large number of them are dismissed as math and science geeks” (335). A number of other scholars such as Frank Wu (40), Jean Yonemura Wing (462), Guofang Li (70), and Debora A. Trytten, Anna Wong Lowe, and Susan E. Walden (440) echo the stereotype that Asian Americans only excel in certain academic areas and occupational fields. As the model minority paradigm functions within a reductive homogeneity, Asian American writers at the center of this study directly undermine this racial formation through the construction of such diverse storytelling perspectives. The practice of decentering the ethnoracial autobiographical voice actively challenges the homogeneity and the inherent prototyping that the model minority myth foregrounds. And of course, as Asian American writers create narrators whose ethnoracial ancestries do not match their own, they make an imaginative artistic leap in the creation of these fictional personages. In this sense, we must attend to the Asian American writer not only as a figure whose works may be read for their multifaceted political valences but also as an artist who can be studied for the mastery and deployment of literary craft.
Emergence of Mixed-Race Studies
It is important to note that the postrace era also overlaps with the development and rise of mixed-race studies, a field that casts attention on the nature of descent. With changes in the US Census that offer individuals the chance to mark one or more boxes to denote ancestry, theorizing racial formation becomes all the more challenging. A number of scholars show that mixed-race Asian Americans face thorny issues related to community inclusion and ancestral ties.17 Does one identify strictly as Asian American or as a mixed-race American? What does it mean when one attempts to identify only with one ancestral background and not another? These questions generate particular friction with respect to mixed-race Asian American writers, who do not always create narrative perspectives that mirror their manifold ancestries. In the following chapters, I focus on a number of authors—Sesshu Foster, Claire Light, Sigrid Nunez, and Sabina Murray—who hail from mixed-race backgrounds.18 Like D’Souza’s Whiteman, their fictions cannot be easily tethered to their ancestries. Without an obvious autobiographical center to influence analytical inquiries, such works encourage critics to engage a diverse set of character-narrators and corresponding sociohistorical circumstances.
The Fallacy of Postrace Discourse
The fictions briefly touched on—Hagedorn’s Toxicology, Le’s The Boat, and D’Souza’s Whiteman—and the ones analyzed at length later in this study ultimately expose postracial discourse as a fallacy, but not in such a way as to celebrate racial difference in some sort of superficial multiculturalism.19 Indeed, such cultural productions engage cross-ethnoracial perspectives that allow us to consider both the relational and the asymmetrical nature of social difference and associated inequalities. In Whiteman, Jack Diaz’s attempt to identify with the local Ivoirians does not simply come about through his work with PWI, and though we see him struggle to attain a measure of acceptance, his personal problems are effectively contrasted with those of his hard-won friends as they find themselves mired in a bloody civil war. And while Le’s The Boat engages various narrative perspectives and characters located all over the globe, unveiling a veritable multicultural tapestry—with stories set in the United States, Vietnam, Australia, Japan, Iran, and Colombia—these depictions target rather weighty topics that do not exalt the richness of ethnic differences. The various stories probe into issues such as refugee flight in the wake of war, systemic poverty in shantytown communities, and racial ideologies that fuel international and local conflict. Finally, Hagedorn’s Toxicology draws up a fictional world in which art’s value finds dubious social import in a city focused so much on celebrity sightings and superficial capitalist consumption. At the same time, the novel includes an important minor figure named Agnes, the cousin of one of the main characters, who reminds us that the glitzy veneer of New York City also includes an immigrant underclass of domestic workers and laborers.
Despite my focus on such an idiosyncratic archive, one that has not been the center of much critical attention, let me be clear: I do not believe that the ethnoracial bildungsroman and autobiography have become obsolete as forms employed by Asian American writers, nor do I believe that a direct connection between authorial background and narrative perspective somehow results in an impoverished fictional world. For instance, the recent surge of Cambodian American autobiographies relating the experiences of Khmer Rouge survivors clarifies the importance of certain literary forms as a way to give voice to personal histories that have been profoundly altered by trauma and violence. The period following the terrorist attacks on 9/11 saw a substantial rise in cultural productions from South Asian American and Anglophone writers seeking to expose the rise of racial profiling, especially as anti-Muslim sentiment flared. The years following the Tiananmen Square massacre have also seen the emergence of a new generation of Chinese expatriate writers who have detailed the challenges of living under communist rule. Such developments reveal a field that continues to grow in manifold directions.
Touristing in Asian America
Despite the proliferation of postrace rhetoric, one arena—the contemporary literary marketplace—continues to aggressively promote a form of racial authenticity. As I stated earlier, Asian American writers have often been circumscribed by the expectation that their fictions are composed with their personal and communal histories in mind. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) exemplifies how an Asian American fiction can be both commercially viable and reductively marketed as a kind of authentic narrative. The Joy Luck Club remained on the New York Times best-seller list for approximately thirty-three weeks, debuting on April 16, 1989, and finally falling off the list on November 26, 1989. It garnered rave reviews, became a runaway best-seller, and possessed enough popular momentum to be adapted into a mainstream