{"id":99280,"date":"2016-06-15T10:45:36","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T14:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99280"},"modified":"2016-06-15T14:23:18","modified_gmt":"2016-06-15T18:23:18","slug":"my-twinkie-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/15\/my-twinkie-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"My Twinkie Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"

On \u201cGoldacre<\/a>,\u201d a poem in our new Summer issue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>

Photo by Rainier Arenas<\/p><\/div>\n

I wrote \u201cGoldacre<\/a>\u201d\u2014my \u201cTwinkie\u201d poem\u2014in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding last year\u2019s Best American Poetry<\/em> anthology, when the white writer Michael Derrick Hudson published a poem<\/a> under the name Yi-Fen Chou, sparking a media frenzy. As one of the few #ActualAsianPoets to have had a poem (\u201cMarch of the Hanged Men<\/a>,\u201d first published in The<\/em> Paris Review<\/em>) included in the anthology, I was unwillingly sucked into the whole mess. But after my initial queasiness subsided, the controversy stirred up a familiar set of questions for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been twitchy about my own racial identity. I grew up in Houston, Texas, with parents who had emigrated as teenagers, prior to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, when only a trickle of Asian immigrants were allowed into the United States\u2014my father\u2019s family were Korean War refugees. My parents speak neither English nor Korean perfectly; they are perpetually between languages and don\u2019t read for pleasure. When I was a kid, the only books our family owned were the Better Homes and\u00a0Gardens Cookbook<\/em>, the Kama Sutra<\/em> (oddly), and (still more oddly) The Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham<\/em>, all of which I reread countless times.<\/p>\n

The Texas public schools ranked forty-eighth in the nation in education at the time, and I was always one of the only Asian kids in my class. I remember my elementary and middle schools as Darwinian battlegrounds, in which violence by students and by teachers was commonplace (corporal punishment was widely meted out). Racism was as pervasive, and as exhausting, as the humidity. My seventh-grade English teacher, who had me paddled for \u201cinsubordination\u201d for correcting his grammar, was a particularly loathsome specimen. He drove a Nissan muscle car and was weirdly invested in ingratiating himself with the popular kids. Per their requests, he would set aside class time for \u201cskits,\u201d which involved two of the class clowns impersonating me and the other Asian kid\u2014a girl who had immigrated from Vietnam\u2014calling us Miss Ching and Miss Chong, complete with squinty eyes, feigned buckteeth, and an inflected singsong pidgin that was supposed to mimic Chinese, I guess.<\/p>\n

My classmates\u2014learning racism like any other life lesson\u2014thought they needed to force me into a preexisting mold, to pretend that a native English speaker who had recently won the school spelling bee couldn\u2019t actually speak English correctly, to pretend that a Korean American kid was actually Chinese, et cetera. Preserving racial hierarchy required real imaginative work on their part, a vigilant stamping out of any potentially threatening deviations from the stereotype. At the time, I didn\u2019t understand why these skits felt more hurtful, more personally corrosive, than the usual middle school put-downs (ugly, nerdy, and so on). Now I know the difference: when someone called me ugly, he was commenting on my personal characteristics, but when my classmates called me Miss Ching, I as an individual ceased to exist.<\/p>\n

It was around the same time that I first heard the insult \u201cTwinkie\u201d\u2014yellow on the outside, white on the inside\u2014a label I brooded over. New acquaintances seemed surprised, judgmental, to learn that I couldn\u2019t speak Korean, had never been to Korea, knew little about Korean history, couldn\u2019t recognize many of the dishes on Korean restaurant menus. I wasn\u2019t \u201cyellow enough.\u201d But how, I wondered, could I manufacture an \u201cauthenticity\u201d I fundamentally lacked? Should I trade in my Greek mythology books and my Agatha Christies for books about Korea? Watch unsubtitled Korean soap operas instead of Dallas<\/em>? See every episode of M*A*S*H<\/em>? Should I research \u201cmy\u201d culture in order to perform it? And for whom would such a performance be intended?<\/p>\n

When I was fifteen, I visited Korea for the first time, and my parents were horrified, watching me act like the worst kind of tourist in their home country. They snapped at me for wearing skirts above the knee, for crossing my legs, for accepting presents with one hand rather than two\u2014practices I had never known were problematic. They were ashamed of me\u2014their ungainly, ignorant daughter\u2014and I was ashamed of myself. I would pretend I was Chinese in stores so shopkeepers wouldn\u2019t yell at me (one had called me a \u201crich American bitch who had rejected her heritage,\u201d according to my parents). At the same time, I was alienated, even repelled, by much of Korean culture: its prestige-obsessed consumerism, its sexism and racism, its overt class hierarchies. Was this my \u201cauthentic\u201d racial identity, my heritage?<\/p>\n

Identity<\/em>, of course, is the quality of sameness, defined as \u201cthe fact of being who or what a person or thing is.\u201d But what does racial identity mean for those of us who perceive ourselves to be deracinated, whose relationship to a particular cultural identity is not one of authenticity? What does it mean to have a sense of racial identity that is externally imposed by other people\u2019s often-negative assumptions about you, identity as spray tan? As I grew up, moved out of the South and into the Internet era, these questions softened, lost their accusatory edge. Many of my friends and I are now engaged in exploring our own racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds in a way that feels straightforwardly celebratory rather than shamefacedly remedial. But the term \u201cTwinkie\u201d lives on as a symptom of a larger cult of racial or ethnic \u201cauthenticity.\u201d<\/p>\n

So \u201cGoldacre\u201d calls back to my seventh-grade self, my seventh-grade shame: that my racial identity was no more than skin-deep, a costume concealing a default whiteness. Urban legends were the quasi-religious currency of our middle school, and some part of me wanted to believe the rumors that Twinkies weren\u2019t baked, that their cakey exterior was only the chemically catalyzed stratum of their creamy interior, tinted golden brown to mislead consumers.<\/p>\n

Syntactically, I wanted \u201cGoldacre\u201d to read two ways\u2014both with the \u201cas if\u201d and without the \u201cas if.\u201d Read with the \u201cas if,\u201d the poem takes the subjunctive verb form and denotes a state of unreality, such as a wish or possibility. When read this way, the poem describes the urban legend that the epigraph has already debunked. But the poem also plays with the fact that, in English, the subjunctive form of a verb is often identical to the past tense form of a verb: \u201cthey are<\/em>,\u201d in the present tense indicative, becomes \u201cas if they were<\/em>\u201d in the subjunctive. When read without the \u201cas if,\u201d the poem suggests something that has already occurred.<\/p>\n

I intended this dual reading, which simultaneously evokes myth and reality, to be more than pure grammar geekery; I wanted to capture something about the link between racism and nostalgia. The backward-pointing gesture, the soft-focus mythologized past, is a common denominator for so many racist imaginings: Aryanism, Gone with the Wind<\/em>, \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d In these revisionist narratives, the past\u2014before racial migration, before emancipation, before the civil rights movement and the Immigration Act, before \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d\u2014appears as a simpler, even a more harmonious time, a time of wholeness for the \u201cdominant\u201d race. A sickly sweet, synthetic, homogeneous white goo figures as the origin myth both for racist fantasies and for America\u2019s iconic snack cake.<\/p>\n

Monica Youn\u2019s most recent collection, <\/em>Blackacre, will be published in September. Her previous books are <\/em>Barter and <\/em>Ignatz. \u201cGoldacre<\/a>\u201d appears in our Summer issue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On \u201cGoldacre,\u201d a poem in our new Summer issue. I wrote \u201cGoldacre\u201d\u2014my \u201cTwinkie\u201d poem\u2014in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding last year\u2019s Best American Poetry anthology, when the white writer Michael Derrick Hudson published a poem under the name Yi-Fen Chou, sparking a media frenzy. As one of the few #ActualAsianPoets to have had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18642],"tags":[22786,1706,22793,22788,22787,22784,2624,22790,19248,7092,22789,22791,19409,12293,3539,165,22792,6661,1166,22785,19410],"class_list":["post-99280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inside-the-issue","tag-actualasianpoets","tag-asian-american","tag-asian-american-identity","tag-barter","tag-blackacre","tag-goldacre","tag-gone-with-the-wind","tag-hostess","tag-houston","tag-identity-politics","tag-ignatz","tag-korea","tag-michael-derrick-hudson","tag-monica-youn","tag-poem","tag-poetry","tag-racial-identity","tag-racism","tag-texas","tag-twinkie","tag-yi-fen-chou"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMy Twinkie Poem: On \u201cGoldacre\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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