another week, another famous author

So I went with a friend to see Amy Tan speak tonight over at Scripps (last week, David Sedaris did a little reading here). I finally read The Joy Luck Club this fall, right around the time of AAMP training, and I think the juxtaposition of the two events was what I needed. The writing felt so personal, and the lives she describes match up in interesting ways with my mom's life. At the time, I was feeling really isolated and alone in a profound way--not as close to a lot of my white friends, out of touch with all these 1.5 / second-generation API mentors (most of whom are sophomores), and so forth. Reading a work, one often used as a synecdoche for Asian American experiences, and knowing that it includes a family kinda like mine made and makes me feel so much better. Especially in light of the disdain at least some people I know have for Amy Tan's work, criticisms rooted in perceptions of her work describing "The Asian American Experience" when it isn't their experience, I felt like it would be good to go.

As with so many personal appearances by famous people I've seen in the last few years, this one raised some serious questions for me. I appreciated the way she described her writing and her ideas as being so deeply personal (many of the elements of Joy Luck Club were drawn from her family history), but that specter of Perceptions by the Dominant reared its ugly head, as well. The very first comment during the Q and A after the talk amounted to (I paraphrase), "I love your work so much. I hadn't read it before I was in China, and it helped me understand the culture so much better. I started getting along better with my Chinese American friends, then with my Chinese friends, and it was so great. Thank you!" This, I thought, is exactly the sort of thing people hate about how Amy Tan is accepted and read by Americans who fervently want one book to make clear everything it means to be Asian American.

Even though her talk had tried to combat this image to some extent--she poked fun at the Cliff's Notes on Joy Luck, and really tried to personalize her ideas and experiences--she didn't bother to try and address the assumptions implicit, the screamingly loud assumptions packed tight into that praise. She just sort of nodded a bit and said a little "Thank you," validating that sort of projecting her work onto every Chinese American the girl who just spoke is clearly guilty of. I tried to mention it as she was signing my mom's copy of her book, and she said something nice about "Not even really feeling ok speaking for my family, let alone all Asian Americans," but it's hard to feel better after the comment that made me actively uncomfortable got swept under the rug.

In the meantime, I feel like generation has become the most salient part of my identity (I'm 3rd); I find myself straddling a gap between my 2nd generation friends and some yonsei (4th gen) Japanese American kids I've met this semester, not quite on either side. It's just so fun how America makes everything about negotiating these little compromises--I'm finally starting to feel ok about multiraciality, and all of a sudden I realize that it's subsumed by this even less physically tangible but culturally significant generation gap. Maybe I have a pathological need to fixate on difference to distinguish myself from my peer groups, but if that's the case, I blame the influence of an American culture which does the same thing to everybody in this country who isn't part of the dominant; after all, I have to say, for good or for ill, I'm pretty consummately American. (I mean, where else would be from?)