UNDER THE RED FLAG
By Ha Jin
University of Georgia Press, $22.95
In a bleak Chinese outpost called Dismount Fort, peasants and petty officials entertain themselves by persecuting neighbors. In these stories set during the Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin–winner of this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction–paints a dark landscape of mud-floor houses and sparse fields that reek of night soil, a place where the masses welcome the fresh scents of power, blood and vengeance that Mao’s policies bring. The local council punishes an adulterer because his confession letter doesn’t have enough lurid detail. An unsuccessful man decides his confident son is the cause of his bad luck and must be destroyed.
Like Greek tragedies worked over by Kafka, Jin’s stories are parables of human cruelty at its most absurd, in a town where the red tape is like a moat that keeps everyone locked in. In “Resurrection,” a man is ready to become a beggar to escape, but even that occupation requires government permission. The winds of change, or friends in the right places, can turn a coward into a hero, but happiness is a scarce commodity that others will covet and eventually steal. “Men are always after a good woman, just like flies after blood,” a mother tells a daughter who has stumbled upon good fortune.
Jin, who was born in China but came to the U.S. after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, is a master satirist, not so much of Chinese politics as of the human psyche when it’s being twisted and pummeled by some higher authority. Each story explores how far a person will go to hang onto a thin shred of dignity.
THE ACCIDENTAL ASIAN: Notes of a Native Speaker
By Eric Liu
Random House, $23
Eric Liu is many things: an astute observer of identity politics, a 29-year-old overachiever who just wanted to be “cool” as an adolescent. He is not an Asian-American activist, he says, though he has spoken as one on TV talk shows. Liu, a former speechwriter for President Clinton and now a law student at Harvard, wrote this collection of essays, the best of which are provocative and poignant, because he wants to address the dubious meaning of the label “Asian-American.”
Asians, as he points out, do not share a common language or heritage; at home each nationality thinks of the others as different races. “After discrimination subsides . . . (s)hould walls that once existed to keep a minority group out be maintained to keep them in?” he asks, referring to a tendency he sees toward self-imposed ghettoization. In his opinion, the answer is clearly, “No.”
Liu, who grew up in American suburbia with a father who studied Western philosophy and loved American slang, can’t quite shake the very stereotypes he would like to dispel. He claims he has Chinese qualities such as, “I don’t like to have house guests,” and, “I am loyal to family.” In “The New Jews,” the most contrived essay of the lot, he identifies one culture by “chutzpah” and the other by “saving face,” as if Chinese people are never aggressive and Jews never reserved.
Well worth reading, however, are the very personal musings on his father and on New York’s Chinatown (“a map of our own partitioned soul”), as well as “Fear of a Yellow Planet,” in which he talks sensibly about China’s presence on the world stage and the pride he’d feel if his motherland became a liberal democracy. He says he would like to be the U.S. ambassador to China someday, though he doubts Americans would trust a person of Chinese extraction to represent our side. As he proves here, that would be a shortsighted generalization on our part.
HALF AND HALF: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural
Edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn
Pantheon, $25
In these 19 life stories we see the future of America, and it is Tiger Woods, i.e., Cablinasian, short for Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian. In the future, the ethnic mix will serve as shorthand for describing a person. Perhaps “we’ll all be made to display our ethnic ingredients on our foreheads . . . like FDA Nutrition Facts labels, so that everyone can know just what they’re getting,” writes Francisco Goldman, who is Guatemalan-Jewish-American.
Goldman encounters the most blatant discrimination of any of the young, culturally kaleidoscopic writers on these pages when he is mistaken for a Moor in Madrid. At last, he punches an obnoxious Spaniard in a bar, and it’s about time. Still, when editor Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn (Irish-Chinese-American) asked a group of writers who grew up in a relatively enlightened time and place to write about their ethnicity, she ran a risk that Goldman sums up nicely: “The language of ethnic self-consciousness is one of . . . relentless banality.”
The lesser writers in this mixed bag of essays do resort to banal generalizations. You wish someone would say to them what O’Hearn’s mother said when O’Hearn asked her what she saw when she looked at her daughter: “I see my daughter, finish your dinner.” But like a walk through a bustling, multicultural neighborhood, “Half and Half” also contains many flavorful delights–some angry, some poetic, some tragicomic–in these meditations on mistaken identities, discrimination, love, food and–very important–grandmothers. For the hybrid generation, grandmothers provide a solid ethnic foundation, and that includes Lisa See’s Anglo grandmother who became virtually Chinese by marriage.
Ironically it’s the ethnically rooted parents and grandparents who give this collection a universal quality, because nothing builds bridges between cultures better than a tale of family dynamics and dysfunctions.
ASIAN-AMERICAN EDUCATION: Historical Background and Current Realities
By Meyer Weinberg
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, $69.95, $29.95 paper
Never has a history of American education focused so tightly on Asian students, whether they are in America as residents or just on student visas. Meyer Weinberg, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Massachusetts and former editor of Integrated Education magazine, has set out to study Asians not collectively, as most histories of minorities in American education have, but as individual nationalities.
Each chapter painstakingly traces a different Asian country’s history, especially as it relates to the educational system. Then Weinberg explains, in statistics made more reader-friendly with anecdotes, what happened to the people from that country when they came to the U.S. These are ambitious stories to tell in one chapter, and the capsuled histories generally lack interpretation. What, after all, did education really mean in earlier times? In China during the Cultural Revolution, Weinberg explains that, “College entrance no longer depended on the passing of examinations but on recommendations . . . as well as on the political fealty of applicants.” Peasants got into college, but what isn’t mentioned is that they studied almost nothing except the teachings of Mao Tse-tung.
More relevant to the moment is Weinberg’s assessment of what is happening today. He gives numbers to dispel the belief that Asian college students mostly study engineering, math and medicine. For the most part, the anecdotes become repetitive. Middle-class Asians are assimilating, while the children of poor Asian immigrants often make bad grades and have trouble getting into college. The numbers and the stories behind them reveal America’s social agenda in the 1990s: Discrimination has become more class-based than race-based. No surprises there, but these facts and figures will be useful if you’re trying to research a market or reform the educational system.
