{"id":129273,"date":"2018-09-13T13:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T17:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129273"},"modified":"2018-09-17T13:00:33","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T17:00:33","slug":"subverting-the-chinese-immigrant-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/13\/subverting-the-chinese-immigrant-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Subverting the Chinese Immigrant Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first time my parents read my fiction, my mother had just one comment about the short story, which featured a server at a Chinatown restaurant: \u201cChinese can be more than waitresses.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a visit home, in my early thirties, I\u2019d given them a copy of the literary magazine that had published my story. I\u2019d recently quit my newspaper reporting job, taken the leap into an M.F.A. program, and for the first time, I was showing them the result of my labors. Of all the reactions I might have anticipated\u2014pride or excitement or maybe boredom or disappointment\u2014I hadn\u2019t foreseen that one. My mother seemed to feel that I should portray Chinese Americans only as model minorities, highly educated engineers and doctors who live the American Dream.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t know that for a time, I\u2019d stopped writing about Chinese Americans at all. For a year or two in college, I had convinced myself that if I wanted to be considered a real <\/em>author, all my characters had to be white\u2014as if those were the only worthy stories to be told. After all, that\u2019s what I\u2019d grown up with and what I\u2019d studied in school.<\/p>\n

Even though we didn\u2019t share the same race or place, I\u2019d recognized myself in feisty aspiring writers in children\u2019s literature: Jo March in Little Women<\/em>,\u00a0Laura Ingalls of the Little House series, and the titular Anne of Green Gables. As a girl, I also read and reread Laurence Yep\u2019s Dragonwings<\/em>\u2014published the year I was born\u2014about the Chinese immigrant son of a master kite maker in San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown in the early twentieth\u00a0century. But I didn\u2019t identify with the main character, even though we were both of Chinese descent; he was a boy, and he spoke often of demons, which my scientist mother and engineer father never mentioned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was still in middle school when Amy Tan\u2019s The Joy Luck Club<\/em>\u00a0was published. I don\u2019t remember exactly when or how I got a copy, but I cherished the interlocking stories about mothers and their daughters, their secrets and their struggles, in China and the San Francisco Bay Area. I related to the push and pull of homelands adopted and ancestral, and the unspoken expectations that passed between parents and their children. Our parents had given up their language and culture and family to make a life here. We, their children, owed them a debt we felt we could never repay.<\/p>\n

I discovered more family secrets in Maxine Hong Kingston\u2019s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts<\/em>,\u00a0which opens with these lines from her mother: \u201cYou must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you.\u201d But Kingston proceeds to do just that in her pioneering book about her childhood in Stockton, California, and the Chinese myths and secrets that shaped her. She writes about her aunt, the No Name Woman who gave birth alone in a pigsty and then killed herself by jumping into her family\u2019s well. Kingston has said she wanted to bring her aunt back to life. \u201cWe\u2019re going to find a meaning for her life \u2026 giving her immortality by writing it down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, as I gained more exposure to Chinese American authors as well as those from various diasporas\u2014Dominican, Nigerian, Haitian, Peruvian, and more\u2014I realized I wanted to tell stories that emerged from my unique worldview, from my experiences, and from my interests, even if they fell outside the canon or what appeared in the pages of a newspaper or magazine.<\/p>\n

Our community is not a monolith\u2014we never were. We don\u2019t think the same way, act the same way, or look the same. Stereotypes that cast us as hard-working, dull strivers erase our individual histories, flaws, and dreams. In my journalism and in my fiction, I\u2019ve tried to shine a light on untold stories that subvert traditional immigrant narratives. Today, at a time when the country is so divided, such stories are more important than ever. Immigrants and their children are under attack. Denying someone\u2019s story is a way of denying their humanity.<\/p>\n

Recent Chinese American narratives have moved away from the weight of World War II, and contemporary economic and social forces are giving rise to a new generation of literature. Asian Americans are the fastest growing ethnicity in the United States. There are nearly five million Chinese Americans in all walks of life, in all parts of the country. In one story from May-Lee Chai\u2019s forthcoming collection, the\u00a0insightful\u00a0Useful Phrases for<\/em> Immigrants<\/em>,\u00a0a family settles in Southern California during the recession, feeling as if they\u2019ve come too late, after the earlier Chinese \u201cbought real estate when it was cheaper, started mindless businesses, and made a fortune.\u201d Lillian Li\u2019s darkly comic Number One Chinese Restaurant<\/em> is set in Maryland, in the D.C. suburbs. Leland Cheuk\u2019s hilarious The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong<\/em> takes place in a Southwest town founded by the protagonist\u2019s great-great-grand uncle. Jade Chang\u2019s\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Wangs vs. the World <\/em>is a riches-to-rags tale, with a rollicking road trip from Bel Air to upstate New York, with stops in Phoenix, Austin, and more cities along the way.<\/p>\n

In Wendy Lee\u2019s absorbing The Art of Confidence<\/em>,\u00a0an immigrant Chinese painter in New York forges a masterpiece. Esm\u00e9\u00a0Weijun Wang\u2019s The Border of Paradise<\/em>\u2014which moves from Brooklyn to Taiwan to an isolated country house in Northern California\u2014is a gothic, multigenerational saga. Kathy Wang\u2019s forthcoming Family Trust<\/em> is a satirical, sharp-eyed examination of the impact of an immigrant Chinese patriarch\u2019s bequest on his Silicon Valley family. Yang Huang\u2019s poignant My Old Faithful<\/em> follows one family from China to Boston and North Carolina over the course of three decades.<\/p>\n

The traditional extended clan of meddling aunties and uncles has begun to change, and so, too, the narratives. China\u2019s one-child policy, adopted in 1979 to curb population growth, and the culture\u2019s traditional preference for boys rippled across the ocean as thousands of families gave up baby girls for international adoption. Mei Fong\u2019s fascinating One Child: The Story of China\u2019s Most Radical Experiment <\/em>investigates the origins and fallout of this policy (which ended in 2015). Chinese adoptees appear in Lisa Ko\u2019s The Leavers<\/em>,\u00a0Celeste Ng\u2019s Little Fires Everywhere<\/em>,\u00a0and Peter Ho Davies\u2019s\u00a0The Fortunes<\/em>,\u00a0novels that raise difficult questions about family, blood, and belonging.<\/p>\n

Yiyun Li\u2019s lyrical memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life<\/em>,\u00a0is a meditation on depression, national identity, and the power of literature. Li, born in China, has spent much of her adult life in the United States. Yet China\u2019s rapid economic development has also attracted migrants in reverse\u2014those who might have otherwise stayed in the United States after earning their degrees and establishing their careers. In Kirstin Chen\u2019s engrossing Soy Sauce for Beginners<\/em>,\u00a0the protagonist, an ethnic Chinese woman in San Francisco, returns to the family business in Singapore. The Zhen family in Lucy Tan\u2019s compelling What We Were Promised<\/em>\u00a0leaves New York and returns to Shanghai\u00ad.<\/p>\n

Going to the motherland is a chance for self-examination, an opportunity to think deeply about your values and upbringing, as in Lenora Chu\u2019s fascinating Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, <\/em>a nonfiction account of when she moved to Shanghai and enrolled her son in a top elementary school. So, too, in Kevin Kwan\u2019s Crazy Rich Asians\u2014<\/em>which has been adapted for the silver screen and won the box office several weeks in a row\u2014<\/em>with the middle-class striver and economics professor Rachel Chu at its center.<\/p>\n

Though Lenora Chu and Kwan\u2019s Rachel are both of Chinese descent, they\u2019re outsiders among those who they believed might possibly be of like mind. And in a departure from past depictions of China as backward and poverty-stricken, these books reveal the economic and technological advancement in the region. The latest generation of young female narrators subverts persistent stereotypes of dutiful daughters and submissive girlfriends. The protagonists in Ling Ma\u2019s Severance,\u00a0<\/em>Weike Wang\u2019s Chemistry<\/em>,\u00a0Jenny Zhang\u2019s Sour<\/em> Heart<\/em>,\u00a0Rachel Khong\u2019s Goodbye,<\/em> Vitamin<\/em>,\u00a0Yi Shun Lai\u2019s Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty<\/em> Wu<\/em>,\u00a0and Bonnie Chau\u2019s\u00a0All Roads Lead to Blood <\/em>seem like kindred spirits, young women who are figuring out life, muddling their way through their relationships with men and their parents, with observations incisive, funny, and charming. Other young women narrators include the protagonist of Anelise Chen\u2019s So Many Olympic Exertions,<\/em>\u00a0an intriguing autofiction about sport and success. Winnie M. Li\u2019s harrowing Dark Chapter<\/em> explores rape and its aftermath from the perspective of the Taiwanese American victim and the perpetrator, an Irish traveler. Charles Yu\u2019s Sorry Please Thank You: Stories<\/em> and Ted Chiang\u2019s Stories of Your Life and Others<\/em> examine the uncertainty and strangeness of the world through the lens of science fiction.<\/p>\n

Even with the expansion of Chinese American life, here and abroad, and the subsequent expansion of narratives, Chinatown remains a jumping-off point for new immigrants and for new stories. Lauren Hilgers\u2019s\u00a0Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown<\/em> is a riveting nonfiction portrait of a Chinese family navigating this country. The characters in my novel, A River of Stars<\/em>,\u00a0find a haven in San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown, the oldest in the United States and one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city. Though tourists flock there, buying knickknacks and snapping photos of the architecture and the busy markets on the ground level, the inner lives and interpersonal struggles of its residents don\u2019t typically figure in the public imagination.<\/p>\n

In my travels, I\u2019ve sought out Chinatowns\u2014those neighborhoods that serve as cultural and community centers for the sixty million Chinese living in the diaspora\u2014all over the world: in Panama City, Lima, Buenos Aires, Siem Reap, Tel Aviv. The familiar scent of musty dried herbs and desiccated fish, the elbowing grannies, and the clack of mah-jongg tiles tell me that I have arrived home wherever I am.<\/p>\n

Years ago, over drinks in Washington, D.C., I was chatting with another journalist, a white woman who\u2019d reported from Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you grow up in Chinatown?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

I stiffened. As worldly as she was, she couldn\u2019t conceive of someone like me growing up in the suburbs, just like her. Back in middle school, we might have both permed our hair, donned Guess jeans and Benetton Rugby shirts, and carried Esprit tote bags along wide, leafy streets. I\u2019d visited San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown many times to poke at the hairy rambutans and the scaly lychees, to ogle at the fish and turtles flopping in the tanks, and to get dim sum from a bustling palace where the cart ladies hawked egg tarts and shrimp dumplings. But I didn\u2019t claim the neighborhood as a native.<\/p>\n

\u201cChinese are everywhere,\u201d I told her.<\/p>\n

It could have been that the journalist hadn\u2019t known many Chinese Americans wherever she had grown up. Or it could have been that her imagination had been shaped by the same beloved childhood books that had formed mine, the ones that didn\u2019t feature anyone who looked like me. It would be sentimental and naive to consider all Chinese Americans my long-lost cousins, yet I am drawn to their stories, to all those yet unwritten. I hope this explosion of new literature will deepen the collective understanding of our very different lives and will pave the way for even more stories in the future.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vanessa Hua is the author, most recently, of <\/em>A River of Stars<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The first time my parents read my fiction, my mother had just one comment about the short story, which featured a server at a Chinatown restaurant: \u201cChinese can be more than waitresses.\u201d On a visit home, in my early thirties, I\u2019d given them a copy of the literary magazine that had published my story. 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