Unfound: The Princeton Journal of Asian American Studies - Volume 1, 2014

EXECUTIVE BOARD MANAGING DESIGN EDITOR Emily Tu ’16

CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Andrew Hahm ’17 Evan Kratzer ’16

MANAGING LAYOUT EDITORS Cailin Hong ’17 Michelle Mui ’16

STAFF Belinda Chen ’17 Isabella Grabski ’18 Edric Huang ’18 Alvina Jiao ’15 Duc Nguyen ’17

Nicholas Pang ’15 Nathan Park ’17 Sarah Qari ’16 Tammy Tseng ’18

FACULTY ADVISOR Anne Cheng

Professor of English, American Studies and African American Studies

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Rebecca Weng ’18 Nicholas Wu ’18 Amy Xie ’17 Katherine Zhao ’17

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear reader, Forty-five years ago, the first Asian American studies programs were founded at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Berkeley. Scholars began to turn their focus to a community whose experience, though often ignored in discourse about race and ethnicity, can profoundly impact our understanding of American diversity. Gradually, Asian American studies departments emerged throughout the country, and programs are now thriving at universities as varied as the University of Hawaii, Pomona College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Columbia University.

An Asian American studies program is also under development at Princeton University. In the past year, our university has made a commitment to expand its support of researchers specializing in Asian America and of classes in Asian American studies. It is this growth of an intellectual community of Asian American studies scholars at Princeton that has allowed us, as students, to begin thinking about Princeton’s place in this field’s larger context.

As we were reflecting, we came to realize there is no forum where undergraduates can come together to share their research and interests in Asian American studies. We want to fill this void. Through Unfound, we hope that academics and students from a variety of institutions will be able to see this field’s exciting expansion as it pushes undergraduates to engage in deeper levels of academic inquiry.

Even though this is only our first volume, we believe that the articles below are representative of the tremendous expansion of Asian American studies both around the world and across disciplines. Students whose work is featured in this journal attend universities from as far away (from Princeton) as California and England. Their work is interdisciplinary, spanning fields such as history, psychology, English, and sociology. We are indebted to them for their commitment to Asian American studies, and we hope that this journal will be of service to undergraduates researching Asian American studies for many years to come.

Andrew Hahm and Evan Kratzer Unfound, Co-Editors-in-Chief

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ABOUT UNFOUND NAME The title Unfound refers to the ambiguities of the Asian American experience. “Unfound”, in its most basic sense, simply refers to something that remains elusive. But the word connotes deeper, emotional meaning upon reexamination. Unfound implies that there is something to be discovered. Unfound implies that someone has tried and tried again to find what she has been looking for, only to come up short. Caught between two identities, the Asian American seeks to carve out her own place in the greater American narrative.

Asian American studies and Unfound seek to create a space where what has remained unfound can be discovered.

SELECTION PROCESS All articles submitted to Unfound go through a double-blinded selection process. Following blinding by our managing layout editors, articles are distributed to our selection editing team, of which our managing layout editors are not a part. Each article is read by at least two editors and graded according to a standardized rubric that takes into account factors such as quality of argumentation, quality of writing style, and quality of research. Following discussions between all editors comparing the relative merits of all submitted articles, articles are selected based on group consensus.

SPONSORS Unfound is a publication of the Princeton Asian American Students Association. This journal is possible due to the generous support of the University’s Program in American Studies and Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding.

SUBSCRIPTION PROCESS If you would like to subscribe to receive physical copies of Unfound, please email us at unfoundjournal@gmail.com and include your name, address, and institution (if applicable). A subscription fee will apply. Virtual copies of Unfound will be uploaded to unfoundjournal.com via ISSUU.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 08

Model Minority? Ethnic Identity and Perception of Asian American Stereotypes in Chinese American Children Elizabeth Cai, Princeton University ’13

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Prufrockian Melancholia and the Orchestration of Desire in A Gesture Life Ami Yoon, Vanderbilt University ’16

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“Asia for the Asiatics”: An (Unfinished) Biography of Lawrence Klindt Kentwell Mark Tseng Putterman, New York University ’14

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The Globalization of K-Pop in the West through American Orientalism Tramanh Hoang, California State University, Fullerton, GS

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Rice Krispies, No Mustard Oil: Food and Diasporic Identity in the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri Sarah Sarkar-El Baz, University of Exeter (UK) ’14

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Model Minority? Ethnic Identity and Perception of Asian American Stereotypes in Chinese American Children Elizabeth Cai

Princeton University ‘13 Abstract: Over the past five decades, the Asian American population has grown significantly, and strong stereotypes about Asian Americans have emerged. They are seen as the “model minority”—highly competent, yet threatening because they are still a minority outgroup. Do Chinese American children, with their dual identities of Chinese and American, perceive Asian Americans in the same way? Chinese American children face unique challenges growing up in the United States. They experience conflict between identifying with the majority national group (White Americans) and identifying with an ethnic minority group (Asian Americans). This study compared two groups of Chinese American children aged 8-10 years old: second-generation Chinese Americans (parents are Chinese immigrants) and Chinese adoptees (parents are White American). It examined how four qualities related to each other: Chinese ethnic identity, American identity, attitudes toward Asian Americans, and attitudes toward White Americans. The two groups exhibited similar attitudes toward Asian Americans and White Americans; neither was significantly correlated with Chinese or American identity. Both groups exhibited high levels of American identity. The adoptees showed significantly higher levels of Chinese identity and significantly higher American identity. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Since 1965, the United States has seen a tremendous influx of non-White immigrants (Osajima, 2005). A problem faced by these new immigrant populations, including Asian Americans, is the difficulty of assimilation into the White mainstream (Pyke & Dang, 2003). Asian Americans have been portrayed as hard-working and competent, the “model minority” (Osajima, 2005). However, because they are not fully assimilated, they are still perceived as “others,” and thus their excessive competence can be seen as a threat; Asian American stereotypes are not fully positive (Lin, Kwan, 8 | UNFOUND

Cheung, & Fiske, 2005; Pyke & Dang, 2003).

The introduction will examine Asian American stereotypes, how and when children develop racial stereotypes, and the particular challenges encountered by Asian American children in forming these attitudes and establishing their ethnic identity.

Then, this paper will focus on Chinese American children and how their family environment influences their ethnic attitudes and ethnic identity.

ASIAN AMERICAN STEREOTYPES The stereotype content model (SCM) ana-

Not only do young children have a theory of race, they can also display ethnic stereotypes. In a study that examined use of stereotypes (for European, Asian, and African Americans) in children from 3-10 years old, both positive and negative stereotypes appear by age 6 (Pauker, Ambady, & Apfelbaum, 2010). Stereotypes were stronger for outgroups than for ingroups, and outgroup stereotyping increased with age. Important factors in development of racial stereotypes in children included race salience (whether the children would see and organize people by race) and essentialist thinking (the idea that race is immutable) (Pauker et al., 2010). Thus, it seems that children as young as 6 years old exhibit an understanding of race, accompanied by ethnic stereotypes.

CHILDREN’S ETHNIC ATTITUDES

Social identity development theory (SIDT) attempts to explain how children develop ethnic prejudice and social identity (Nesdale, 1999).

Social identity is defined as the part of an individual’s self-concept based on perceived membership in a particular social group (e.g., a particular ethnic group) (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

SIDT builds on social identity theory (SIT), a leading theory to explain intergroup conflict. SIT DO CHILDREN DISPLAY STEREOTYPES? integrates social categorization, self-evaluation For many years, researchers believed that chil- through social identity, and intergroup social comdren possessed only a very superficial understanding parison (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). It predicts certain of race (Hirschfeld, 1995). However, young children intergroup behaviors based on perceived traits of the may actually perceive deeper commonalities within intergroup environment—namely, status, legitimaethnic groups that extend beyond appearance; chil- cy, and permeability. According to SIT, individuals dren as young as 3-4 years old already show signs of act to enhance their own self-esteem by identifying a biologically grounded belief in the concept of race their ingroups as relatively superior to other groups, (Hirschfeld, 1995). In the progression from pre- which can lead to prejudice and discrimination school to adolescence, children exhibit a sequence of against ethnic outgroups (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). ethnic cognition spanning four levels: integration of SIDT integrates elements of SIT with self-cataffective and perceptual understandings of ethnicity; egorization theory, detailing a transition from “unliteral understanding of ethnicity; social and nonlit- differentiated” (birth to about 3 years old) to “etheral perspective on ethnicity; and lastly, ethnic-group nic awareness” at around age 3 (consistent with consciousness and ethnic identity (Quintana, 1998). Hirschfeld’s results), which develops into ethnic prefVolume I, Fall 2014 | 9

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lyzes stereotypes of various groups in the US along the two primary dimensions of competence and warmth (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002). According to this model, many groups display a mixture of positive and negative traits; those who are perceived to display low competence and high warmth (such as elderly people) are liked or even pitied, but disrespected, while those who are perceived to display high competence and low warmth (such as Asian Americans) are envied yet respected.

More specifically, the Scale of Anti–Asian American Stereotypes (SAAAS) shows that the general stereotype of Asian Americans is for them to have high competence but low sociability (Lin et al., 2005). The idea that Asians’ excessive competence makes them threatening is consistent with realistic group conflict theory, which posits that the presence of conflicting goals (such as competition) can give rise to intergroup hostility; people tend to dislike outgroups who are seen as competing with the ingroup for resources ( Jackson, 1993; Tajfel & Turner, 1986).

Thus, outgroup members are always derogated in some way; in the SCM they will always be perceived to display either low competence or low warmth (or both), because only ingroup members can be truly admired and be ranked positively on both dimensions.

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erence and then ethnic stereotypes (Nesdale, 1999).

For this full transition to occur, children must acquire certain concepts (ethnic constancy), social cognitive skills, and social identity processes (Nesdale, 1999).

SIDT was developed mainly using sources studying White and African American children.

The theory should be transferrable to Asian American children and stereotypes of Asian Americans, though the applicability may be complicated by social status because Asian Americans are a higher-status outgroup than African Americans (R.M. Lee, 2003).

Effects of Status Minimal group experiments support SIDT and show that children as young as 5-6 years old can develop strong ingroup biases based on arbitrary group designations and are sensitive to status. Children’s awareness of status will influence how Chinese American children feel about belonging to the relatively high-status Asian American minority—or, for those who identify more strongly as American, this will influence how they perceive the Asian American “outgroup.”

Five-year-olds can develop implicit and explicit ingroup biases without any information on status or competition, even when the groups are not explicitly stated (e.g., just wearing different colored shirts) (Dunham, Baron, & Carey, 2011). In another study, 7-12 year-old children were separated into groups (blue or yellow) with or without social status stratification; members of the high-status group in the stratified condition developed more positive ingroup biases than those in the non-stratified condition (Bigler, Brown, & Markell, 2001). In fact, children as young as 5 can be sensitive to group status; in another minimal groups study in which 5 yearolds and 8 year-olds were grouped based on drawing abilities, all children had higher liking for ingroup members than outgroup members. However, those in the lower-ability drawing group displayed lower liking overall for both ingroup and outgroup members, unless there were high opportunities for so10 | UNFOUND

cial mobility (Nesdale & Flesser, 2001). Therefore, Chinese American children who perceive the relatively high status of the Asian American minority may have more positive feelings or identify more strongly with their Chinese American identity than those who are not sensitive to status. Or, if they identify strongly with the White American majority, they may reject their Chinese American identity.

Another experiment assigned 6, 7, and 9 yearold White children to a high-status group and then varied two factors in the outgroup—the outgroup ethnicity (either White or different, Pacific Islander) and perceived threat from the outgroup.

In this experiment children who identified highly with their ingroup, beyond simply preference for ingroup, actually showed dislike for outgroup members when the outgroup was a threat (Nesdale, Durkin, & Maass, 2005). Ethnicity by itself did not significantly impact liking of the outgroup— the important factors were strong identification with the ingroup and high threat from the outgroup. Therefore, Chinese American children who identify strongly as American are more likely to hold negative views of Asian Americans, whose stereotype of competence often makes them appear threatening to the White American majority.

In another study, White 5-7 year-olds and 9 year-olds were grouped on drawing ability, with team members and opponents either same-ethnicity (White) or different-ethnicity (Pacific Islander).

The children reported liking ingroup members regardless of ethnicity, and liked outgroup members less when the outgroup was of different ethnic composition than the ingroup, even if the ingroup was different-ethnicity (Nesdale, Maass, Griffiths, & Durkin, 2003). So if the ingroup was Pacific Islander (different-ethnicity), they liked the outgroup less if it was White (same-ethnicity) than if the outgroup was Pacific Islander (different-ethnicity). These results support SIDT because the children showed that they were aware of ethnicity but that was not the most salient social group-

Ingroup Ethnic Biases However, other studies show that young children are inherently inclined to exhibit preferences for their own ethnicity. In a similar experiment, White children who were 5, 7, or 9 years-old were again grouped based on drawing ability, where the competing team was same- or different-ethnicity (Pacific Islander). Their liking for the ingroup was unaffected by age and outgroup ethnicity, but liking for the outgroup increased with age and was greater for same-ethnicity children than for different-ethnicity children (Nesdale, Durkin, Maass, & Griffiths, 2004). These results supported SIDT less than the previously cited 2003 experiment with similar setup but different results (Nesdale et al., 2003).

Similarly, Dunham and other researchers have found that 6 year-olds already display implicit preferences for their own race (Dunham et al., 2011). These implicit preferences stay fairly constant through life, but explicit preferences diminish with age, often disappearing by adulthood. Also, biases are stronger if the ingroup is higher status than the outgroup. These bias patterns were replicated in a study on Japanese children (in Japan), so it seems that these results may hold across cultures (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2006; Dunham et al., 2011). One caveat is that the Japanese children are the ethnic majority in Japan, so it is unclear how this result would generalize to Asian American children who are an ethnic minority in the US.

ETHNIC IDENTITY IN YOUNG ASIAN AMERICANS What happens to American children who are also ethnic minorities? One study found that children from ethnic outgroups, even those who did not identify as part of the national group, still displayed preference for the majority ingroup (Bennett, Lyons, Sani, & Barrett, 1998).

Another study of implicit and explicit associations of “American” with “White,” “African,” and “Asian” found that across participants of all ethnicities, “White” and “American” had strong implicit associations, but not explicit associations (in some cases “African” and “Asian” had stronger explicit associations); even Asian participants showed the implicit White/American bias (Devos & Banaji, 2005).

So do Asian American children identify with the Asian minority outgroup or the American ingroup?

If they identify as Asian, do they feel un-American?

Do they have positive feelings toward both groups?

This research may help answer these questions; there is insufficient existing research to do so at this time.

Additionally, the answer to each of these questions will vary based on different individuals and different populations—Asian Americans vary widely in their social circumstances, therefore they will exhibit different levels of acculturation and ethnic identity (Rumbaut, 1994). Ethnic identity refers to the ethnic component of an individual’s social identity and self-identification ( J.S. Phinney, 1990). Acculturation refers to the process of modifying attitudes and behaviors to accommodate the norms of the dominant group. Those who attempt to “integrate” (i.e. maintain their cultural identity as well as high national identity) experience less stress and better adaptations than those who resist (i.e. possess high cultural identity and low national identity) and those who attempt to fully assimilate (i.e. reject cultural identity, fully absorb national identity) (Berry, 2005). Thus, an individual can have strong ties to the dominant culture while maintaining a strong ethnic identity.

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ing. Their biases were based on similarity to their ingroup, which may or may not have shared their own ethnicity. This suggests that children will develop strong ethnic stereotypes and biases only if they find race to be a prominent, salient social grouping. Perhaps children who do not view race as a major social category (low race salience) will show smaller differences in their attitudes toward White and Asian Americans, due to reduced biases.

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Phinney has described the stages that second-generation American adolescents tend to go through in establishing ethnic identity (where “second-generation”means children of immigrants): first, diffusion—individuals exhibit minimal exploration or understanding of their ethnicity and related issues; then, foreclosure—individuals have minimally explored yet have come to a rather firm conclusion about their ethnicity, either positive or negative; next, moratorium—a stage of exploration accompanied by confusion; and finally, achievement—individuals exhibit exploration, understanding, and acceptance of their ethnicity (1989). In an interview-based study with 91 Asian-American, Black, Hispanic, and White sophomores in high school, approximately one-half of the minority students were in the non-exploration states (diffusion or foreclosure) while one quarter were still exploring (moratorium) and one quarter were committed to their ethnic identity (achievement) ( J.S. Phinney, 1989). Thus, it is possible to conclude that in children 10 and under, a majority of them will still be in the unexplored states. In addition, although Phinney’s stage theory does not mention adoptees, the process should apply to their ethnic identity development as well.

Overall, it seems entirely possible for Chinese American children to have a strong Chinese ethnic identity and positive feelings toward their Asian ethnicity while also feeling American and having positive feelings toward the White American majority. However, existing research suggests that this balance, though ideal, is not often attained

by Chinese American children, including second generation Chinese Americans (the children of Chinese immigrants) and Chinese adoptees.

face pressures both to cultivate and to downplay their Asian heritage (Kibria, 2000). They struggle to strike a balance between being too ethnic (“fobby”) and too assimilated (“whitewashed”) (Pyke & Dang, 2003). While those who are too “whitewashed” are criticized for rejecting their Asian identity or “selling out” to the White American majority, the majority of adolescents’ feelings do lean more towards that side, finding an excessive display of traditional Asian culture to be shameful (Pyke & Dang, 2003). It’s possible that many of these adolescents are still in the early, unexplored stages of ethnic identity and will become more comfortable with displays of traditionalism later on in life.

The benefits of having a strong ethnic identity are clear, particularly when it comes to psychological health. Many Asian Americans face discrimination due to their race. Discrimination is correlated positively with distress, and correlated negatively with psychological well-being, particularly when directed personally at one individual (R.M. Lee, 2003). Pride in ethnic identity can help buffer these effects, improving self-esteem and psychological well-being (R.M. Lee, 2003, 2005). Ethnic identity and acculturation also lead to a bicultural worldview, which is positively associated with psychological well-being as well (Chae & Foley, 2010; Ng, 2012; Tessler, Gamache, & Adams, 2009).

Overall, balancing ethnic identity with American identity may be ideal for second-generation Americans. For the children of immigrants, immigrant status and ethnic identity predict both positivity bias (toward their ingroup) and negativity bias (toward outgroups), while a superordinate “American” identity reduces intergroup bias (Pfeifer et al., 2007).

Second-Generation Asian Americans Second-generation Asian Americans, caught between the traditional Asian culture of their parents and the dominant American culture of the majority, face a unique identity challenge. This “ethnic bind” leads to uncertainty and conflict as they

Adopted Asian Americans Asian American adoptees face perhaps an even greater challenge, growing up in an American family and being treated by their families as American, yet viewed by outsiders as Asian, leading to identity foreclosure and a conflict between belonging and

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a significant predictor of Korean adoptees’ Korean perspective-taking ability, especially in younger children (D.C. Lee & Quintana, 2005). A longitudinal study of young girls adopted from China found that in pre-teen and teen adoptees, Chinese ethnicity is an important part of their overall identity, and that Chinese ethnic identity has no negative effects on their American identity or closeness with non-Chinese family members (Tessler et al., 2009).

Thus, although a strong Chinese ethnic identity leads to the healthiest consequences, most Chinese American adoptees will identify more strongly as American than as Chinese. This could lead to negative feelings toward Asian Americans—such as the threateningly competent stereotype exhibited

by White Americans—while exhibiting a preferential bias for the White American majority.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS Much of the current research on children and stereotypes focuses on how the majority ingroup (e.g., White Anglo) feels about minority outgroup ethnicities. There is a lack of literature describing how children from minority groups perceive ingroup and outgroup stereotypes—do they still view the majority reference group as positive (e.g., high competence and warmth based on SCM)? Do they still hold mixed views about their own minority group?

When it comes to Asian American stereotypes, do Chinese American children also perceive low warmth or sociability? Threatening competence? Is this related to how Chinese or how American they feel?

This thesis studies four traits in Chinese American children, and how they relate to each other: Chinese identity (do they embrace or reject their Chinese heritage), American identity (how strongly do they identify themselves as American), their attitudes toward White Americans (using the competence/warmth dimensions of the SCM), and their attitudes toward Chinese Americans (looking at perceived competence, warmth, and sociability). The thesis compares two groups of Chinese Volume I, Fall 2014 | 13

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rejection (R.M. Lee, Yun, Yoo, & Nelson, 2010).

Do they consider themselves American or Asian?

Or both? Do they reject or embrace their heritage?

A major argument against the growing trend of transracial adoption (TRA) concerns proper development of cultural identity; some critics even refer to TRA as “cultural genocide” (Huh & Reid, 2000; D.C. Lee & Quintana, 2005). For example, Korean adoptees in college have lower ethnic identity than second-generation Korean Americans (R.M. Lee et al., 2010).

Asian TRA adoptees typically fall under one of three categories: those who identify as White/ American because they do not strongly identify with their Asian heritage; those who wish they were White/American and feel discomfort with their ethnicity; and those who are comfortable with, proud of, or interested in their heritage (R.M. Lee et al., 2010). Huh and Reid suggest four stages in development: recognition and rejection of differences (4-6 years old); beginning of ethnic identification, which is arrested or absent in some (7-8 years old); acceptance of differences versus ethnic dissonance (9-11 years old); and finally, integration of Asian heritage and American culture (12-13 years old) (2000). This timeline is consistent with the earlier prediction that most children under 10 are likely in the unexplored stages of ethnic identity according to Phinney’s model ( J.S. Phinney, 1989).

Adoptees’ ethnic identity and their cultural well-being highly depend on their parents’ involvement. Many Asian American adoptees display little ethnic identity or interest in exploring their cultural roots, but those whose parents recognize the need to identify as Asian American will generally have more pride and better adjustment with regard to their heritage. Ethnic identity is also associated with ease of communication between parents and children about the adoption (Huh & Reid, 2000). Positive parent/ child relationships and parental support of ethnic socialization help predict better well-being in adopted children (Yoon, 2004). Cultural exposure is

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American children: second-generation Chinese Americans (children whose parents are immigrants from China) and Chinese adoptees (children whose adoptive parents are White American).

Hypotheses High Chinese identity will be positively correlated with positive attitudes toward Chinese Americans. Chinese American children with high Chinese ethnic identity will perceive Chinese Americans in a more positive way than Chinese children with low Chinese ethnic identity.

Low Chinese identity will be positively correlated with more mixed attitudes toward Chinese Americans. Chinese American children with low Chinese ethnic identity will display mixed attitudes as White American adults do. Further, Chinese American children who reject or are ashamed of their Chinese heritage will have the most negative attitudes toward Asian Americans.

High American identity will be positively correlated with positive attitudes toward White Americans. Chinese American children who strongly identify themselves as American will perceive White Americans in a more positive way than those with low American identity.

Low American identity will be positively correlated with mixed or negative attitudes toward White Americans. Chinese American children who do not strongly identify themselves as American will display more negative attitudes toward White Americans than Chinese American children with higher American identity. Their attitudes will be either mixed (high on one dimension and low on the other) or simply moderate (medium, but not low or high, on both dimensions). However, the difference in attitudes toward White Americans between Chinese American children with high versus low American identity will be smaller than the difference in attitudes toward Chinese Americans between Chinese American children with high versus low Chinese identity, due to general preference 14 | UNFOUND

for the national group (Bennett et al., 1998). Chinese American children who refuse assimilation and reject their American identity will have the most negative attitudes toward White Americans.

Children with high Chinese identity and high American identity should have the best outcome, avoiding intergroup biases and internal conflicts, while displaying positive attitudes toward both the White American majority and the Asian American minority of which they are a part. Chinese American children with Chinese American parents (i.e., third-generation or later) are most likely to exhibit this balance. Between the two groups that this study focused on, Chinese American children with Chinese immigrant parents are likely to identify more as Chinese and less as American, while Chinese American adoptees are likely to identify more as American and less as Chinese.

Few if any children in the sample should refuse assimilation and reject their American identity, but a few children, particularly adoptees, may display shame or rejection of their Chinese identity.

Also, children’s explicit attitudes toward the outgroup should grow more positive with age (Dunham et al., 2006, 2011; Nesdale et al., 2004). Thus, among the children with low Chinese identity, the older children should exhibit more positive attitudes toward Asian Americans than the younger children; among the children with low American identity, the older children should exhibit more positive attitudes toward White Americans than the younger children.

METHODS Participants Participants were eighty-three 8-10 year-old Chinese American children who had lived in the US for at least 5 years. This age range was selected to be as young as possible, while still being old enough to be able to read and comprehend the questions. If the children were not yet proficient readers, the survey would need to be administered verbally, which would have introduced

find 30 participants). All ten were born in the US. Sixteen responses were excluded because the children were not in the correct age range (younger than 8, older than 10).

Materials and Procedure Participants filled out an anonymous, online survey (see Appendix A for full survey) that was previously piloted on ten Chinese American children aged 8-10. This test run was done to ensure that the reading level was appropriate and the entire survey would take no longer than ten minutes for the children to complete. The only issue reported was not knowing what “compatible” meant, so a child-friendly definition was added to the final survey (Appendix A).

In the final version of the survey, parents were first asked to answer some demographic questions about their children—age of child, years lived in US, and background of parents (to determine which of the three categories the children should fit into).

Then, they were instructed to let the children fill out this 5-part survey by themselves, without parental input, reading, or other guidance (there was no way to verify this; see Limitations under Discussion).

The first part surveyed the children’s Chinese ethnic identity. The first six questions came from an ethnic identity questionnaire for children (Pfeifer et al., 2007), and the results of these questions formed the composite variable “Chinese identity.” Four questions were added about ethnic involvement (e.g., social participation and cultural practices, language, friendship, social groups), which constitutes an important component of ethnic identity ( J.S. Phinney, 1990), to see if they would be moderators of Chinese identity. The first 9 questions were answered on a scale from 1-5; question #10 was converted to a scale from 1-5 based on number of initials listed.

1. Are you happy to be Chinese? (1: very unhappy, 5: very happy) 2. Is being Chinese an important part of your

self ? (1: not important at all, 5: very im

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too many difficulties and potential confounds.

Most of the adoptees were recruited from an email to members of Families with Children from China (FCC) New York. That email reached 2123 email addresses (multiple email addresses correspond to one family, and many families did not have children who were 8-10 years old). All other children were recruited from four Chinese schools in Westchester County, New York: Huaxia New York Central Chinese School (HXNYC), Huaxia Chinese School Greater New York (HXGNY), Chinese School of Southern Westchester (CSSWNY), and Northern Westchester Chinese School (NWCSNY). Parents of all 172 students in Grades 3-5 were contacted since most students should have been in the 8-10 age range. Three participants in the adoptee group attended these Chinese schools—two were from CSSWNY and one from HXGNY. It’s unknown whether they also are on the FCC listserv.

The first category of children, Chinese children whose parents emigrated from China, contained 41 participants: 35 had been born in the US, 5 had lived in the US since infancy, and one 10-year-old since the age of 4. This group will be termed the ABCs: “ABC” stands for “American-born Chinese” and generally refers to these second-generation Chinese Americans.

The second category of children, Chinese children who had been adopted in China by White American parents, contained 31 participants.

These children have all lived in the US since infancy. This group will be termed the adoptees.

Another ten participants were classified in an intermediate group for the purposes of conducting additional exploratory analyses (rather than excluding their responses). This group consisted of 6 biracial Chinese children with one Chinese parent and one White American parent, 1 adopted Chinese child with one adoptive Asian parent and one White American parent, and three third-generation Chinese American children (originally intended to be a third category by itself, but it was too difficult to

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3. Are you proud to be Chinese? (1: very em barrassed, 5: very proud) 4. Do you like being Chinese? (1: really dis like, 5: really like) 5. Are you more Chinese or more American?

(1: much more American, 5: much more Chinese) 6. Is being Chinese a big part of who you are?

(1: very small part, 5: very big part) 7. How often do your parents talk about Chi

nese history or Chinese culture? (1: never, 5: all the time) 8. Do you speak any Chinese? (1: speak no Chinese, 5: daily and fluently) 9. Do your parents speak any Chinese? (1:

speak no Chinese, 5: daily and fluently) 10. Of your closest five friends, are any Chi

nese? List their initials.

The second part examined the children’s American ethnic identity using the same initial questions from the ethnic identity questionnaire in Pfeifer et al. (2007). The results formed the composite variable of “American identity.”

1. Are you happy to be American?

2. Is being American an important part of yourself ?

3. Are you proud to be American?

4. Do you like being American?

5. Is being American a big part of who you are?

The third part asked two questions about whether the children found their Chinese and American identity compatible (Dunham, personal communication, 28 November 2012), forming the composite variable of “dual identity.”

1. Do you feel that being Chinese and being American are compatible or incompat ible? (1: very incompatible, 5: very compatible) 2. Do you worry that if people think of you as Chinese, they might not think of you as American? (1: very worried, 5: not worried at all) The fourth part measured the children’s atti16 | UNFOUND

tudes toward Chinese Americans by listing 10 adjectives (rich, bad, friendly, ugly, smart, selfish, good at sports, lazy, honest, and shy) and asking how many Chinese people they felt exemplified those qualities (also a 5-point scale, anchored at none and almost all). These also were taken from Pfeifer et al. (2007). After reverse-scoring the five negative variables, the results formed the composite variable of “Attitudes toward Chinese Americans.”

Ideally, to correspond more closely to the dimensions of the Stereotype Content Model, the questions measuring attitudes would have been child-friendly, modified versions of the questionnaires used by Fiske et al. (2002) and SAAAS used

by Lin et al. (2005). Unfortunately, those questions were too numerous and complex to modify for 8-10 year old children to complete in under 5 minutes. So for the purposes of this study, the adjectives rich, smart, and lazy (reverse scored) corresponded with measures of competence, while the adjectives friendly, good at sports, and shy (reverse scored) corresponded with measures of sociability.

The fifth part of the survey measured the children’s attitudes toward Americans, listing the same adjectives as part four, and forming the composite variable of “Attitudes toward Americans.”

Finally, because the principal investigator could not personally administer the survey, the survey included a section for the children to indicate if they had any problems completing the survey as well a section for parents to indicate whether there were any problems or if it took significantly longer than 10 minutes to complete. Most participants reported that the survey took about 5-10 minutes to complete; only one indicated it took significantly longer than 10 minutes. No major difficulties were reported. Several parents, however, did use this section to indicate that they thought the questions were inappropriate for their children to be considering (see Discussion for more information).

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there had been a sufficient number of participants Unless otherwise stated, all analyses used all 83 in the intermediate group, perhaps this question responses, including responses from the intermedi- would have yielded interesting results as moderaate group, to give a more reliable, robust sample size. tor. Taking, for example, a third-generation Chinese American whose parents are second-generation, it would be interesting to see whether the Chinese Identity The six items composing “Chinese identi- parents’ use of Chinese affects their child’s Chity” were reliable, Cronbach’s alpha = .80. The nese identity. The overall effect was not significant adoptees had a higher average score (see Table (p = .67). In the small sample of the intermediate 1 for means), and the difference was significant group, the effect was insignificant as well (p = .68).

“Of your closest five friends, are any Chinese? (t (71)= -2.06, p = .04). Nine of the 83 participants, including 2 adoptees and 4 ABCs, had a List their initials.” This question ended up being score below 3.0, indicating low Chinese identity. problematic for two reasons. First, the number of friends was selected in order to convert the responsTable 1: Chinese Identity as a Function of Being an es to a 1-5 scale as with the other questions, but four, not five, friends should have been asked for.

ABC or Adoptee With four friends, 0 Chinese friends would convert Mean SD to 1, and 4 friends would convert to 5. Secondly, there was extensive confusion over this question.

ABCs 3.69 .647 Many participants listed five initials even if they Adoptees 3.99 .617 indicated that they had no Chinese friends, so it is Moderating Variables. Four additional ques- unclear if they just listed initials of all their close tions in this first section were included to see if they friends, Chinese or not. Thus, this question was would moderate the results of “Chinese identity.” excluded from analysis as a moderating variable.

Only the first three were used in analysis.

“How often do your parents talk about Chi- American Identity The five items composing “American idennese history or Chinese culture?” Overall, the intity” were reliable (Cronbach’s alpha = .87). The teraction was only marginally significant (p = .08). Split by group, it was significant for the adoptees had a higher average score (see TaABCs (p = .02) but not for the adoptees (p = .72). ble 2 for means), and the difference was sig“Do you speak any Chinese?” The correla- nificant (t(71) = -2.76, p = .007). Only 2 partion between Chinese identity and the ability to ticipants, both ABCs, had scores below 3.0. speak Chinese was stronger for the adoptees because all of the ABCs attend Chinese school and Table 2: American Identity as a Function of Being an thus would speak Chinese. The overall effect was ABC or Adoptee not significant (p = .72). The effect for the adopMean SD tee group was not significant either (p = .29).

ABCs 4.014 .472 “Do your parents speak any Chinese?” This 4.444 .535 question was less applicable to the main two groups Adoptees tested because all parents of ABCs speak Chinese American Identity and Chinese Identity. (they are all Chinese immigrants), whereas none of Overall, American identity (M = 4.25) was signifithe adoptees’ parents speak Chinese. If, however, cantly higher than Chinese identity (M = 3.81) in RESULTS

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the 83 participants (t(82) = -4.54, p < .001). Split by group, the difference was still significant for the ABCs alone (t(40) = -2.50, p = .02) and for the adoptees alone (t(31) = -3.14, p = .004). There was no significant correlation between American identity and Chinese identity (r = .17, p = .12).

Dual Identity Only two items composed “dual identity,” resulting in a Cronbach’s alpha of .48, which is too low to be considered reliable. This time, the two groups had similar means; the adoptees scored slightly higher, but the difference was not significant (t(71) = -.18, p = .86). Neither question yielded a significant difference individually.

.46), for the ABCs alone (r = -.01, p = .97), or for the adoptees alone (r = .14, p = .46).

Competence and Sociability Dimensions.

The adjectives rich, smart, and lazy (reverse scored) were combined to make a composite variable corresponding to measures of competence, while the adjectives friendly, good at sports, and shy (reverse scored) were combined to make a composite variable corresponding to measures of sociability. The competence variable had a very low Cronbach’s alpha of .31, and the difference between the two groups was not significant (t(71) = 1.39, p = .17).

The sociability variable yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of .23, and the difference between the two groups was not significant (t(71) = -1.45, p = .15).

Table 3: Dual Identity as a Function of Being an ABC Attitudes Toward Americans or Adoptee After the five negative items were reverse-scored, the ten items composing “attitudes toward AmeriMean SD cans” were fairly reliable (Cronbach’s alpha = .71).

ABCs 4.33 .738 Factor analyses found one component comprising Adoptees 4.36 .698 five variables: selfish (reverse-scored), bad (reverse scored), friendly, honest, and smart, but the reliabilAttitudes Toward Chinese Americans ity of these five grouped together only increased to After the five negative items were re- Cronbach’s alpha = .75. The difference between the verse-scored, the ten items composing “attitudes two groups was not significant (t(71) = 0.09, p = .93). toward Chinese Americans” yielded a relatively low Cronbach’s alpha of .59. Factor analyses Table 5: Attitudes Toward Americans as a Function of failed to yield any component that included more Being an ABC or Adoptee than two variables. The difference between the two Mean SD groups was not significant (t(71) = -.37, p = .71).

ABCs 3.57 .411 3.56 .356 Table 4: Attitudes Toward Chinese Americans as a Adoptees Function of Being an ABC or Adoptee American Identity and Attitudes Toward Mean SD White Americans. Attitudes toward Americans ABCs 3.70 .384 did not demonstrate significant correlation with Adoptees 3.73 .303 American identity scores overall (r = .16, p = .14), for the ABCs alone (r = .27, p = .09), or for the Chinese Identity and Attitudes Toward Chi- adoptees (r = .01, p = .96). nese Americans. Attitudes toward Chinese AmerCompetence and Sociability Dimensions. The icans did not demonstrate significant correlation competence variable had a low Cronbach’s alpha with Chinese identity scores overall (r = .08, p = = .40, and the difference between the two groups 18 | UNFOUND

DISCUSSION

Summary Adopted Chinese children had significantly higher Chinese ethnic identity and significantly higher American ethnic identity compared to the children of Chinese immigrants. The two groups did not differ significantly in dual identity issues or in their attitudes toward Chinese Americans or Americans.

The results for ethnic identity are the most surExploratory Analyses prising, or at least the most counter-intuitive. The There were ten participants in the intermediate ABCs, raised by Chinese immigrants, were expectgroup. When comparing the means of the three ed to have higher Chinese identity than the adopgroups (see Table 6), the results did not take on any tees raised by White Americans—this was consisclear patterns, and the only significant difference tent with past research (R.M. Lee et al., 2010; D.C. was in American identity between the ABCs and Lee & Quintana, 2005) and would make intuitive the intermediate group (F(2, 80) = 4.83, p = 0.008). sense. But the adoptees actually had significantly higher results in Chinese identity than the ABCs. Table 6: Ethnic Identity and Attitudes in Chinese The adoptees also displayed significantly higher American Children (Means) scores for American identity. These results, however, were expected. Because both groups face sigABCs Intermediate Adoptees nificant acculturation struggles, it was difficult to Chinese 3.69 3.75 3.99 predict which would score better on dual identity, Identity so it was not surprising when they ended up scoring American 4.01 4.62 4.44 similarly. Why did the adoptees score so high on Identity Chinese ethnic identity, despite research suggesting Dual 4.33 4.10 4.36 the opposite would occur? Perhaps current adopIdentity tive families have been better educated about the Attitudes 3.70 3.58 3.73 risks of potential identity crises and, as a result, are Toward more sensitive to cultivating their children’s respect Chinese and interest for their culture. Although many of Americans the previously cited studies about Asian adoptees Attitudes 3.57 3.56 3.56 and ethnic identity were published quite recently, Toward they all studied children adopted 10-20 years earAmericans lier than the current sample. Much can change in that time span, especially considering that the pop This lack of clear results is probably due to ularity of adopting Korean and Chinese children the small sample size of the group (N = 10) as is itself a very recent phenomenon (Yoon, 2004).

As for attitudes toward Chinese and Ameriwell as its heterogeneity—it includes participants who are bi-racial, adoptees with Asian adoptive cans, none of the initial hypotheses were supportparents, and third- or fourth-generation Chi- ed. The results between the two groups are similar, nese children. These are fairly different conditions and did not correlate with their respective ethnic and thus should ideally be separate categories. identities. This seems to suggest that, unlike their Volume I, Fall 2014 | 19

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was not significant (t(71) = -1.11, p = .27). The sociability variable yielded a very low Cronbach’s alpha of .12, and the difference between the two groups was not significant (t(71) = .95, p = .35).

Attitudes Toward Americans and Attitudes Toward Chinese Americans. “Attitudes toward Americans” showed significant correlation with “Attitudes toward Chinese Americans” (r = .45, p < .001).

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ethnic identities, the children’s racial attitudes and stereotypes are more influenced by larger social units than their direct family, and that they receive most of this information from school (classmates, teachers), media, and society as a whole. This interpretation is consistent with the fact that all participants from the two groups were recruited from the New York metropolitan area, so they are in similar environments. Another interpretation of these results is that the children are too young to have developed such fully-fledged, complex stereotypes. Existing research has shown that children understand race, possess explicit attitudes, and have knowledge of stereotypes, but SCM dimensions are perhaps too specific and too complicated to attempt to measure in children 10 and under. Additionally, these results can be interpreted as a possible effect of status—Asian Americans are a relatively high-status outgroup, and ingroup biases tend to be stronger if the ingroup is significantly higher status than the outgroup (Dunham et al., 2011). Since there is a lack of existing research examining how children belonging to high-status outgroups view that outgroup, it is difficult to say whether or not that can help to explain the results.

Confounding Variables The adopted children were all recruited from the organization Families with Children from China (FCC) because of time and resource pressures, but these children are not a representative sample of all Chinese adoptees. If the family joined FCC, it is evidence that the parents cared about their children staying in touch with their Chinese culture. Similarly, the children of Chinese immigrants all came from Chinese schools, also not a wholly representative sample. If the children are enrolled in Chinese school, then their parents also make an effort for their children at least to learn the language, which is generally associated with higher ethnic identity. Therefore, although both groups are somewhat non-representative of their populations, 20 | UNFOUND

they are similarly skewed, so perhaps it is still fair to compare them in the results of the current study.

Future studies should strive for more representative samples (further discussion in Future Directions).

To keep the survey simple, a few other factors that could possibly have impacted the results were not taken into consideration. First of all, siblings are known to influence each other’s development, so does it matter whether the children have siblings? For example, ABC children with siblings will generally speak English with each other, a tendency that could extend when speaking with their parents as well. Since language use influences ethnic identity, having English as the primary language of the household could ultimately lead to lower Chinese identity for the children. For the adopted children as well, different kinds of siblings could make a big impact. What if they had other, adopted Chinese siblings? What if they had White siblings, biological children of their adoptive parents? Maybe those with Chinese siblings would have more Chinese identity than those with White siblings?

In individualist cultures such as that of the United States, ingroup members and societal prototype groups are the only groups that will be designated high competence and high warmth; however, in collectivist East Asian cultures, even these reference groups are not rated so highly, demonstrating a derogation of outgroups without a preference for the ingroup (Cuddy et al., 2009). Thus, it is possible that some children—most likely the ABCs— hold a more collectivist viewpoint and thus do not view either group as positive on both dimensions.

As the studies on effects of status have shown, children’s perceptions of the ingroup and outgroup are affected by whether they are sensitive to status and whether they perceive these groups as relatively high or low status (Bigler et al., 2001; Nesdale & Flesser, 2001). Based on those studies, discussed previously, Chinese American children with high Chinese identity and those sensitive to status will have a greater liking for Asian Americans than chil-

Limitations For logistical reasons, the surveys were distributed online. This was not an ideal situation, as it is difficult to know how focused the children were during the surveys, or whether they had any trouble understanding the questions (though it was piloted on about ten children first to make sure the reading level was appropriate and could be completed under ten minutes). Also, because their parents were required to help them fill out some parts, children

may have felt pressured by parental presence, particularly in the Chinese identity section. Parents might have also actively tried to influence their responses. They were instructed not to interfere or comment in any way, but that did not always happen; one child noted at the end of the survey that his/her mother disagreed with his/her answers.

One flaw with the survey was the wording of questions evaluating racial attitudes, particularly the nebulous definition of “American.” When used in the ethnic identity questions, word choice was not an issue, as the question simply asked the children whether they felt American. But for the attitude questions, “American” really meant “White American.” Similarly, for the attitude questions, the word “Chinese” was used when in fact “Chinese American” was intended. It is not clear whether children really make a distinction between the two, or whether changing the word choice would have changed the children’s responses. “Chinese” and “American” were chosen because these are what Pfeifer et al.

(2007) originally used, but for future research, clearer wording can be considered. Also, much of the reviewed research focused on stereotypes about Asian Americans as a whole, and not Chinese Americans in particular, but the stereotypes should generally be transferrable, since Chinese Americans are the most numerous type of Asian American. Furthermore, it is possible that some children did not realize that the two pages of the survey evaluating attitudes (the first asking about “Chinese” and the second asking about “Americans”) were different, since the lists of adjectives were the same—one parent noted that her child thought the second page was a repeat of the first. If this happened to many children, this could help explain the highly significant (p < .001) correlation between the two attitude measures. This issue could probably be overcome by administering the surveys in person (e.g., by reminding the children to read the directions carefully on each page and that each page was different).

Several of the parents noted that they found Volume I, Fall 2014 | 21

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dren with similarly high Chinese identity who do not perceive Asian Americans’ relative status. On the other hand, Chinese American children who strongly identify as American, and not as Chinese, and are sensitive to status may view Asian Americans as threatening (as White Americans do), exhibiting more dislike for Asian Americans than do children who have high American identity, low Chinese identity, and are not yet sensitive of status.

Another factor to consider is race salience.

Some children might not see race as a particularly salient social grouping, so their Chinese and American identities may be poorer predictors of their racial attitudes than children who view race as a primary social grouping (Nesdale et al., 2003).

Questions were not added to the survey to evaluate these potential factors (siblings; collectivism v. individualism; status sensitivity; race salience) because their marginal benefit in added understanding to the results did not seem worth tiring the children with too many questions and receiving lower quality responses.

Additionally, some of the differences between ABCs’ and adoptees’ survey results could be due to the children’s statuses as adopted versus biological children. This concern, however, would be more significant for general measures of psychological well-being. It is unlikely to be a major confound in the variables of ethnic identity and attitudes measured here. A category with Chinese adoptive parents could address this concern if absolutely necessary.

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the questions upsetting and that they felt their children should not be thinking about some issues that the questions raised (e.g., “Are you happy to be Chinese?”). However, it is not certain that asking the same questions with more agreeable wording would have been more appropriate; stereotypes and ethnic identity are difficult subjects to address and can evoke sensitivity, conflict or discomfort.

Lastly, children are not always cooperative or fully honest. One male Chinese adoptee I babysit likes to say, “I am not Chinese!” and “I hate Chinese things!” yet will later show interest in watching a Chinese cartoon and learning about Chinese holidays. Such risks come with any study that asks for children’s self-report.

Future Directions Overall, limitation of time and resources restricted the number of groups that could be compared, due to difficulty in finding adequate numbers of participants. The study would ideally be repeated with two additional groups: biracial Chinese American children and Chinese American children raised

by Chinese American parents (i.e., Chinese American children who are third-generation immigrants or even further removed generationally). These groups offer important intermediate steps between Chinese American children raised by Chinese immigrants (ABCs) and adoptees raised by White Americans.

The biracial group is particularly intriguing because it adds a biological component—they are not fully Chinese, and their appearance marks them as such.

Their identities and attitudes would be shaped by more than just their micro- and macro-environment.

If possible, it would be best if all the survey respondents could be recruited from more representative populations, not just Chinese schools or FCC. This would provide more accurate results.

Particularly, there might be more significant effects from the moderating variables. For example, the effect of parents speaking about Chinese culture was not at all significant for the adoptees—this is 22 | UNFOUND

possibly because, as FCC families, their parents all speak frequently about Chinese culture, so it was not a significant moderator for that group although it was for the ABCs. Similarly, speaking Chinese might become a significant moderator in the ABC group if the sample did not consist only of children who attend Chinese school. In addition, it might be more informative to ask how much the parents actually speak Chinese to the children than to ask whether the parents can speak Chinese. This could show a moderating effect even in the ABC group, where all the parents are able to speak Chinese, but some choose to speak to their children in English— these children may have lower Chinese identity.

Also, the study was initially intended to have a control group of White American children for comparison. The ideal control group, the obtaining of which was outside the scope of this study, would comprise White American children whose parents are not immigrants, but have a homogeneous background, one with which the children culturally identify—Italian Americans, for example. Most White American children have a heterogeneous background and would not strongly identify with one particular country for their ethnic identity, and thus they may not provide a suitable control for the Chinese identity questions.

It would be interesting to consider not only a White American control group but also a Chinese control group of children who live in China, where they are the ethnic majority. How do they perceive White Americans? Asian Americans? If recruited from Chinese international schools, the sample would be Chinese students American in nationality, but Chinese in ethnicity. Living as the ethnic majority, the students of this sample would make for a fascinating comparison in terms of ingroup/outgroup dynamics.

Additionally, it might be informative to look at a wider age range to see change over time—in other words, not just children but also adolescents, teenagers, and/or adults. Differences in age were

Chinese immigrant parents may not realize that Chinese identity is something they need to cultivate deliberately, believing that by virtue of being Chinese and raised by Chinese parents, Chinese identity and even ethnic pride should come naturally. If their parents do not deliberately address the issue, perhaps more of the ABC children remain in a more unexplored stage of Chinese identity than the adoptees. It is also possible that, as mentioned earlier in the introduction, children and adolescents who have not fully explored their ethnic identity may find excessive displays of traditional Chinese culture to be shameful. This is not something adoptees ever have to experience, as their parents are not Chinese immigrants. Thus, perhaps this effect combined with a lack of identity exploration has led many of the ABCs to reach prematurely a negative identity foreclosure, resulting in the lower Chinese identity scores. Fortunately, as the Asian American population grows, there are increasing ways to encourage children to confront and explore their Asian American identity, not just via their parents. For example, there is a growing presence of young Asian Americans in the media. Exposure to popular Asian American Youtube stars can make children realize that it is “cool” to embrace their Asian heritage (Guo & Lee, 2013).

The takeaway message is that parents of all ChiImplications nese American children—whether second-generaThe current study, though not comprehensive, tion, third-generation, adopted, or biracial—should had optimistic results overall, particularly regarding be actively and deliberately nurturing their chilethnic identity. Both groups scored very high on dren’s Chinese identities. By encouraging exploradual identity, indicating that these children, at least tion of their ethnic identities from a young age, they at this age, do not see any conflicts or incompatibili- can hopefully avoid negative consequences such as ties between their Chinese and American identities. feelings of shame or identity foreclosure. The earliAdditionally, both groups scored high on American er that the children can reach the final stage, idenidentity, indicating that acculturation is not an issue. tity achievement, the better for the child’s self-conAs for Chinese identity, the fact that the adop- cept, self-esteem, and overall psychological health. tees scored significantly higher than ABCs’ did indicates that their parents are successfully fostering Conclusions a positive Chinese identity in their children. Why Very little research has examined how minority did the ABCs score lower? It is possible that the ingroup members perceive themselves and the maVolume I, Fall 2014 | 23

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not analyzed for the results of the current study because 8-10 is a fairly narrow window. With a wider age range, it might be particularly informative to measure implicit attitudes as well (this study focused on explicit attitudes), and observe effects of age on both; explicit and implicit attitudes are shown to diverge with age, with implicit attitudes remaining constant, and explicit negative attitudes decreasing (Dunham et al, 2011).

Lastly, the existing literature makes no note of gender differences in children’s identity and stereotypes. Future studies could consider looking into this. This survey did not ask about gender because Chinese adoptees are almost all female, and given the relatively small sample size, it was not feasible to try to compare girls and boys.

Perhaps the most important change is for the surveys to be administered in person, to avoid the serious limitations caused by administering the surveys online. The surveys should be on paper and given to the children, who would then be given 10 minutes to fill it out in the absence of their parents. Of course, this introduces another confound of administrator ethnicity. One way to counteract this potential influence is to have a Chinese American administer the surveys half of the time, and have a White American administer the surveys half of the time.

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jority outgroups, especially with Asian Americans, psychology, 88(3), 447–66. who have a relatively short history in the United 7. Dunham, Y., Baron, A. S., & Banaji, M. R. States as a major ethnic minority. Moreover, un(2006). From American city to Japanese like other ethnic minorities in the United States, village: a cross-cultural investigation of immany Asian Americans are adoptees, which introplicit race attitudes. Child development, 77(5), duces unique issues. Chinese Americans’ ethnic 1268–81. identity and ethnic attitudes matter because these 8. Dunham, Y., Baron, A. S., & Carey, S. (2011). qualities are related to psychological well-being, Consequences of “minimal” group affiliations stereotypes, and biases. Thus, this study has imin children. Child development, 82(3), 793–811. plications both on the individual level and the 9. Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. national level, for a balanced ethnic identity leads (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype both to better psychological well-being for the incontent: Competence and warmth respectively dividual child and to an overall reduction in stefollow from perceived status and competition. reotypes and intergroup biases within a country.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902.

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APPENDIX A Questionnaire (adapted from online format) Page 1 For parents This first page should be filled out by parents, but not the following pages • • •

•

Age of child How many years has your child lived in the US? What describes your child?

Please fill in “other” if your child does not fit into one of the four descriptions ◦ Born and/or raised in US, both parents

immigrated from China ◦ Chinese, born/raised in US, one or both parents are Chinese American (raised in US) ◦ Half-Chinese, born/raised in US, one parent Caucasian-American ◦ Adopted from China, raised in US, both

parents Caucasian-American ◦ Other: What is your Chinese School affiliation? ◦ HX Greater New York ◦ HX Central New York ◦ CSSW ◦ Other:

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Page 2 Instructions for parents: please read For the following questions, please let your child read and fill out by themselves.

Please do not read it out loud to them or guide them in any way!

Thanks so much!!

The full survey should take approximately 5-10 minutes. On the very last page, there will be a box to allow for feedback, and parents can fill that out.

Page 3 Part 1 • Are you happy to be Chinese? ◦ 1 = I am very unhappy to be Chinese ◦ 5 = I am very happy to be Chinese • Is being Chinese an important part of your self ? ◦ 1 = Not important at all ◦ 5 = Very important • Are you proud to be Chinese? ◦ 1 = I am very embarrassed to be Chi nese ◦ 5 = I am very proud to be Chinese • Do you like being Chinese? ◦ 1 = I really dislike being Chinese ◦ 5 = I really like being Chinese • Are you more Chinese or more American? ◦ 1 = I am much more American than I

am Chinese ◦ 5 = I am much more Chinese than I am American • Is being Chinese a big part of who you are? ◦ 1 = being Chinese is a very small part of

who I am ◦ 5 = being Chinese is a very big part of

who I am • How often do your parents talk about Chinese history or Chinese culture? ◦ 1 = my parents never talk about it ◦ 5 = my parents talk about it all the time • Do you speak any Chinese? ◦ 1 = I speak no Chinese ◦ 5 = I speak Chinese daily and fluently

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Do your parents speak any Chinese? ◦ 1 = my parents speak no Chinese ◦ 5 = my parents speak Chinese daily and fluently Of your closest five friends, are any Chinese? List their initials.

Page 4 Part 2 • Are you happy to be American? ◦ 1 = I am very unhappy to be American ◦ 5 = I am very happy to be American • Is being American an important part of your self ? ◦ 1 = Not important at all ◦ 5 = Very important • Are you proud to be American? ◦ 1 = I am very embarrassed to be American ◦ 5 = I am very proud to be American • Do you like being American? ◦ 1 = I dislike being American very much ◦ 5 = I like being American very much • Is being American a big part of who you are? ◦ 1 = being American is a very small part of

who I am ◦ 5 = being American is a very big part of

who I am Page 5 Part 3 • Do you feel that being Chinese and being American are compatible or incompatible?

Incompatible means two things can’t fit together, like fire and water are incompatible. Compatible means that two things fit well together. Do you feel that being Chinese and being American are compatible or incompatible? ◦ 1 = very incompatible ◦ 5 = very compatible • Do you worry that if people think of you as Chinese, they might not think of you as American? ◦ 1 = very worried ◦ 5 = not worried at all

Page 6 Part 4 How many Chinese people are: • Rich (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Bad (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Friendly (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Ugly (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Smart (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Selfish (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Good at sports (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Lazy (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Honest (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Shy (none/few/some/most/almost all) Page 7 Part 5 How many American people are: • Rich (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Bad (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Friendly (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Ugly (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Smart (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Selfish (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Good at sports (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Lazy (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Honest (none/few/some/most/almost all) • Shy (none/few/some/most/almost all) Page 8 • •

Did you have any problems with finishing this survey?

For parents: Did your child have any questions or problems with this survey? Did it take significantly longer than 10 minutes?

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Prufrockian Melancholia and the Orchestration of Desire in A Gesture Life Ami Yoon

Vanderbilt University ’16 Abstract: In examining the concept of racial melancholia as it applies to Asian-American subjects in recent fiction, stories of first-generation immigrant subjects stand out with their susceptibility to struggles with loss and desire as they attempt to navigate new sociocultural and linguistic contexts. The protagonist of Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Franklin Hata, posits a vivid illustration of such a struggling subject, caught as he is within the fluidly shifting tapestry of a postwar modernity. In his condition of unstable identity and alienation, I present Hata as a racialized reconfiguration of T. S. Eliot’s socially paralyzed Prufrock, suffering from a particular melancholia and seeking restlessly to constitute himself by cleaving to different objects of desire.

Problems of coherence and continuity in the individual’s conception of self that arise as a corollary of displacement from native environs produce a sense of psychic crisis as the displaced subject attempts to negotiate his identity. The subject, when removed from old roots but not fully subsumed into the new culture, struggles to escape existing in cultural interstices; such is the situation of the immigrant, who searches for teleology in an affirmation of ipseity. This issue is complicated by novel racial contextualization when the immigrant is transplanted into social circumstances radically different from his indigenous ones, as evidenced by the stories of immigrants to the United States. Within the structure of plurality in America, immigrants find themselves slotted into distinct racialized bodies, which generates a trauma of assimilation that ever unfolds for those seeking seamless integration.

The trauma reifies itself in the life of the immigrant subject, then, via fantasies of confirmation.

To escape invisibility within the American social system, the immigrant strives to move away from 28 | UNFOUND

self-erasure to self-assertion, but the uncertainty of the length of the margin between the subject and the end he strains to reach establishes grounds for Freudian melancholia. In Freud’s framework of melancholia, a lost object lingers indistinctly in the subject’s consciousness, preventing libidinal severance and resulting in a conflicted state of ambivalence. Subliminally implicated into the process of refining identity, melancholia becomes a mode of social discourse, and frustrated achievement of desires shapes the person’s being to form an irreducible aspect of the immigrant experience. In fiction, ghosts of the yearning to belong implacably haunt characters and others around them, attesting to the centrality of this tangled ball of melancholy and desire in the lives of those that undergo identity displacement. Chang-rae Lee’s 1999 novel A Gesture Life offers as such a subject its World War II veteran protagonist, Jiro “Franklin” Hata, whose embodied conceptualization of racial melancholia in conversation with resistance against fragmentation adds a racial dimension to the social immobility and

nature of “the whole unwritten covenant of conduct [that] governs us” (44). As he hinges the meaning of his being on relative social significance, Hata most fears “how swiftly … the appellation of ‘Doc Hata’ will dwindle and pass from the talk of the town” (192) once he ceases to be physically present in Bedley Run. His determination of his personhood through his social projections—the wise old man, the naturalized Asian immigrant, the medical expert, the pillar of respectability in the small town of Bedley Run—reveals Hata to be constantly embroiled in an aggressive pursuit of a particular image of himself, an image which is always in construction.

A penetrative evaluation of Hata thus transcribes Lacan’s mirror stage in action. Lacan formulates the mirror stage as the formation of the Ego via a process of objectification, “a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subHata vis-à-vis the Lacanian Mirror Stage and Ra- ject … a form of its totality,” which precisely decial Melancholia: the New Prufrock lineates Hata’s methodology of carving out identity Lee conceives an intricate character in Doc (Lacan 1288). In the mirroring gazes of the townsHata in A Gesture Life, “hungry and hopeful” by Ha- people of Bedley Run, who regard him by specifta’s own admission, leading a life of hollow gestures ic, often stereotypical, images of his person, Hata to which the novel’s title refers (Lee 220). In this glimpses his ideal standards. He tailors his life to discrepancy between his imperturbable façade of a meeting them: baroque and fluent speech, an aloof man at peace with himself, his position in the Bed- but unfailingly courteous manner with a hint of ley Run community and his soundless scream for self-deprecation, the possession of an “immensely acceptance and absolution for his past, Hata epit- beautiful house” to bespeak comfortable affluence omizes the split subject in the discourse of Jacques and integration into the community (Lee 16). As Lacan. He commences his narrative tellingly: “Peo- the child is jubilant because in the mirror he anticple know me here” (1), he narrates, betraying from ipates his standing independence, so Hata derives the outset a central component of his mode of iden- satisfaction in the positive models of himself that he tity construction, “I am respected and valued in this discovers in others’ perspectives. He acknowledges, town … People heed my words” (95). Hata pred- at the time of his narration, that he has spent much icates his self on the cat’s cradle of social relations, of his life fretting over definitions of his place in his existing primarily not in independent self-suffi- social milieu. “What used to concern me greatly ciency, but in the spaces between the criss-crossing about leaving,” he confesses, in explanation of his threads of a social matrix. Even in the milieu of years of self-imposed arrest at Bedley Run, “was … his immediate neighborhood, Hata takes scrupu- how people will stop and think (most times, unnolous care to safeguard inferred borders of sociality, ticeably) about who you may be, how you fit into calling himself “very fortunate to understand” the the picture, what this may say, and so on and so Volume I, Fall 2014 | 29

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distress of his American correlate, J. Alfred Prufrock. As a Korean adopted into a Japanese family during the period of Japanese colonialism following the First World War, a former army medic in the Japanese military, and an eventual immigrant to the United States, Hata skates from place to place, name to name, rootless. In this endless war to create selfhood, psychoanalytic thought by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, with their respective theories of the mirror stage and abjection, informs the plight of individuality. The Lacanian mirror stage, in conjunction with racial melancholia, illuminates identity construction in Hata as an Asian American subject who re-contextualizes the fear of alienation and inadequacy in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock with a racialized dimension, and the course of Hata’s ongoing configuration of identity in face of abjections demonstrates desire’s ability to orchestrate illusions.

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forth” (21). As a Lacanian subject seeking self-affirmation as an entity in mirrors—that is, the gazes of those around him—Hata worries about being reduced to insignificance, and his fear of identity erosion highlights the tenuousness between the “I” and the objectified “Ideal-I,” a traumatic split within the individual. Embodying an essential disconnect, he grounds himself in perceptions outside of himself and lives in anxiety lest he lose his sense of wholeness.

Framing Hata’s demonstration of the mirror stage in context of his racialization within an American environment of white dominance affords a dissection of Hata that is richer still. As a Japanese immigrant to the post-World War II United States, Hata brings an element of anxiety concerning his alien status that factors into his split subjecthood.

His Asian American experience mounts a mirror stage of its own. Lacanian theory also encompasses a realization of desire that is continually deferred, which features significantly in the Asian American condition, far from being necessarily confined to Hata’s specific case. The term “model minority” is often employed when addressing Asian American immigrants or their children, pointing to how Asian Americans succeed in securing a higher average income and level of education in comparison to other racial minorities in America; this phrase is also used to cite the appearance of successful assimilation as Hata has achieved at Bedley Run (Chou 220-222).

With his stable financial situation, enviable real estate and demeanor of educated sophistication, Hata exemplifies the stereotype of an adjusted Asian immigrant. The very concept of a “model minority,” however, alienates Asian Americans from ever being recognized as wholly and naturally American, and this stereotype demands a passive self-sufficiency that limits Asian Americans’ ability to assert legitimate political, economic or social power (223225). Through mimicry of white Americans, Asian Americans endeavor to bridge the gap between their immigrant legacy, and assimilation and acceptance (Eng 349). Such mimicry, unfortunately, 30 | UNFOUND

only generates a traumatic sundering in the psyche.

The failed mimicry resonates with the Lacanian reading of Hata’s condition. The image of a perfectly integrated American cannot be realized: the perception of it exists, but the disparity between this ideal and the reality of the situation that immigrants face exists more truly. In this way, racial melancholia is a consequence of the apprehension of the severance between the “I” and the “Ideal-I.” The Asian American struggling to be treated as a White American through emulation is doomed to failure—this is a built-in certainty of the mimicking process, given that the inherent nature of mimicry bars it from achieving originality (Eng 349).

Here lies the asymptotical aspect of desire as Lacan articulates it. The stage of naturalization into American citizenship serves as the mirror stage, with the individual glimpsing the American reflection; the moment of jubilation, however, lasts but fleetingly as continued—if subtle—racialization excludes the individual from becoming absolutely American. Superficially, Hata is recognized as an integral person in Bedley Run; Liv Crawford proclaims, in fact, that “from anybody’s view,” “Doc Hata is Bedley Run,” that he “is what this place is about” (Lee 136). Yet despite his anabolism into the town and his indispensable dignity of position within it, Hata remains to the American denizens as ultimately a foreigner, an attitude that Hata feels in brief but trenchant moments. A local, Mr. Harris, asks Hata why he does not retire to Japan, to his “old country” (18); Mary Burns, though innocuously, expresses her surprise that she could be “deeply attracted to an Oriental man” even as she laughs at herself for it (52); the young drunks outside Jimmy Gizzi’s house insistently ask him to say, “Well done, Grasshopper,” commenting that “it’s like, ‘The Master’” in a rude relegation of Hata to a stereotypical character in pop culture (100). Hata describes his location in the American social fabric as merely an “almost home,” never simply home (356). And there is anxiety, too, concerning a frag-

frock” was published in 1920. Thus situated within the twentieth century, both float in a mosaic of “a hundred visions and revisions” (Eliot 32), preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet” (27).

The eponymous gentleman of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” suffers in an inner hell of self-estrangement as he plashes in his inability to achieve a sense of belonging and adequacy. Hata cannot be transposed exactly onto Prufrock—the racial dimension of Hata’s non-white ethnicity complicates the comparison, and Prufrock was born into his upper middle class social sphere, never undergoing the mirror stage of naturalization with citizenship as experienced by Hata in his own private battles to fit seamlessly into the lattice of society. However, the model of Prufrock serves to inform Hata’s problem and adumbrates the anguish of a subject suspended in alienation, in desire, in frustration.

As an outstanding representative of the financially stable and linguistically acclimatized “model minority” Asian American, Hata occupies a station not unlike Prufrock’s privileged one, and certainly suffers from a similar psychic split. The comparison between Hata the Asian American subject and Prufrock the white American gentleman, though not unambiguously equivalent, poses a useful and provocative line of critical appraisal for Hata’s melancholia and quest for a crystallized identity.

Like Prufrock, Hata presents the character of a man of well-received society, adhering to a model of social performance. If J. Alfred Prufrock has his affected initial and antique-sounding name, Hata has his empty title of “Doc” and self-christened English name of “Franklin”; they both struggle with the preservation of their public image, taking meticulous care in extending courtesies and grooming.

While engaging in all the acts that will asseverate them as members of their respective societies, both Prufrock and Hata are internally plagued by their incapacity to aver an inherent sufficiency of identity.

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mentation in the American identity that the Asian American has carefully constructed, an expression of the Lacanian terror of the fragmented body.

Hata’s deep attachment to his Mountview house can be read as an allegory of the symbolization of “a fortress of a stadium” for the id (Lacan 1258). He requires a fortified monolith to protect his unconscious from diminishment, manifesting in Hata’s life as his house, which represents for him and the people of Bedley Run his privileged status in the community as an outsider who has managed to carve out a space for himself on the inside. Nonetheless, the house, vulnerable to fire and damage, is not as impregnable as it might be imagined, just as Hata’s identity is forever susceptible to mutability and undermining. In a moment of carelessness as Hata seeks comfort by lighting a fire in his living room’s hearth, the carpet catches on fire and the house suffers extensive damages, calling for major renovations. When Hata returns from a hospitalization following the fire to his renovated house, he finds it jarringly altered: “all disarmingly, exactingly right … appearing just as though I have not lived there every day for the last thirty years of my life” (Lee 119). The burning of Hata’s Mountview home and the ease with which it is remodeled to become superficially perfect yet emotionally alien metaphorizes the condition of Hata’s identity: ostensibly without flaw, yet vulnerable to flux. The process of assimilation, therefore, produces frustrated longing in its imperfect completion, and causes the Asian American subject to more than ever seek validation in external sources, endlessly and futilely.

Such a disconnect between the interior and exterior echoes with a Prufrockian ring: Hata’s contrived person offers a portrait of a new Prufrock, a re-contextualization of T. S. Eliot’s famous dramatic persona in an Asian American frame. Within the chronology of Lee’s novel, Hata enters America scarcely a few decades removed from the time Eliot wrote Prufrock into being: Hata immigrates in the aftermath of the Second World War, while “Pru-

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their sense of self, and like Prufrock, Hata chooses to base his identity largely on inscribed roles rather than a core of individuality. In fact, it is difficult to define Hata when he stands extricated from his social roles as not only the respected elder and “Doc” of Bedley Run but also as a father to Sunny and a former soldier in the Japanese military. He fears being “marked by a failure … not one of ego or of self but of an obligation public and total—and one resulting in the burdening of the entire society of his peers” (Lee 229). Since the architecture of his identity is predicated on the mirroring gaze of others, Hata’s security with his self remains fragile. Indeed, once he resumes his daily routines after being discharged from the hospital following the fire at his house, Hata feels as if his presence has shrunken in the space of time in which he had not been in active engagement with the Bedley Run townspeople, “precipitously insubstantial,” “like an apparition who has visited too long” (192). Trapped in a world of performativity devoid of significance, Hata—the effigy of the modern Asian American subject under the heading of the “model minority”—exists in interior torment, a personal inferno that he cannot escape.

In his parallels to Prufrock, Hata demonstrates how the Asian American can dangerously fall susceptible to Prufrock’s brand of a fragmented sense of identity, replete with fears of dismissal and rejection, driven by the desire for societal acceptance.

Prufrock’s white, upper-class melancholia becomes recomposed into a racial melancholia in the Asian American. The Asian American lives in perpetual suspension, generating a racial melancholia marked by stymied identification with American whiteness and native culture. Although Hata mimics the American ideal through his conscientiously masterful language and genteel mannerisms, he simultaneously slots himself into the Asian stereotype of the wise old man. In doing so, he indicates the paradox of how racial ideals most impel those oppressed by them and elucidates how the activity of racialization links to a Freudian theory of melancholia, 32 | UNFOUND

which undergirds Hata’s split subjecthood (Cheng 6). By definition unnamable, Freud’s melancholia comprises a pathological state in which the subject fails to determine his exact loss (Freud 245). For Hata, his melancholia stems from confused racialization as he hovers between Korea and Japan, then Japan and America, and from the frustration of his desires by which he attempts to resolve his lack of solidity in identity within the context of a fast-changing modern society. Yet he fails to name his own melancholia, and Hata’s complex, alienated psychic state well represents Freud’s expression of melancholia as a conflicted condition of ambivalence, as does his continual repression of trauma in order to zero his will instead on his craving for approval by the social system in which he lives.

Also in the manner of Prufrock, Hata domesticates himself eagerly under his contemporary American values, deriving “small but unequaled pleasure” in “being a familiar sight to the eyes” (Lee 1). In his identity formation, he straddles sociality and individuality, and builds a racial fantasy. He fixates upon and attains the materialism of the American Dream, but nonetheless is cast into a racialized box by others; regardless of his numerous years as an upstanding citizen, townspeople continue to identify him primarily by his Japanese name. Hata professes as much, noting that his Japanese name “seems both odd and delightful to people, as well as somehow town-affirming” (2). The inclusion of “somehow” betrays a kind of bemusement—Hata misses how his ethnicity inevitably jettisons him as an “Other” in a culture with a white primacy, since the othering works passively. His adopted daughter, Sunny, observes cannily that he makes “a whole life out of gestures and politeness” (Lee 95). He hears whispers at the diner referring to him as “whoever that ancient Oriental is,” but his apperception of the racialization is vague, only just “beginning to suspect” (200201). Freud notes that the melancholic subject does not precisely perceive his diminished ego (Freud 246). Indeed, Hata stays perplexed throughout the

ences of alienation and cultural dissonance, his tacit solution is to place upon the two women central to his life, K and Sunny, the weight of his desires.

In doing so, he subsumes them into the machinery of a symbolic universe, incorporating them into his melancholia, and enmeshes them into his various brushes with abjection by turning them into vehicles via which he arrives at jouissance. Desire in Hata operates as a conductor of an orchestra might, assembling Hata’s innermost wishes for an anchored core of self with the important women in his life to direct his sense of identity into coherence.

To extend a Lacanian reading of Hata’s character, Hata obliquely confronts the issue of an identity under threat by resorting to fantasy. Shuttling between Korean and Japanese and American in his national identification, Hata lives always as an immigrant, always deprived of native permanence. In the absence of this kind of solidity and foundation in his life, Hata resorts to placing his objet a—an intrinsically nameless and faceless thing that galvanizes desire and shifts shape as the subject strives for constitution—in the bodies of the two persons that he singularly and actively chooses to bring into his life: K, and Sunny (Žižek 12). Hata crucially acts to shape his identity by engaging first with K, to enable his blending into “the massing” with “something more than a life of gestures,” and then with Sunny, to normalize himself with a family unit in a small-town American culture that values family highly and to atone for his failure to protect K (Lee 299). As he does so, he projects onto the bodies of K The Orchestration of Desire and Abjection and Sunny his unspoken desires for acceptance and In Eliot’s poem, Prufrock tends to define his attachment, turning them into repositories of his worth in relation to the judgments of the women longings. As K and Sunny are reduced to receptacles, around him; in Lee’s novel, Hata conceives mean- their characters metamorphose to assume a measure ing for himself in the present and direction for the of Hata’s desire for belonging, revealing how desires future in relation to his own surrounding women, need not be restricted within single individuals but most notably K and Sunny. Within A Gesture Life, can be shared outward. But unfortunately for Hata, Hata exemplifies the figure propelled and sustained with this movement of desire beyond himself, the by the changing face of his desires as he strives to distance between its attainability and the subject cope in a society not his own. Amidst his experi- is increased, and he in actuality grows no closer to Volume I, Fall 2014 | 33

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novel in regards to his receipt of othering treatment, unable to pinpoint it as a crushing of the American identity he has worked to erect. Prufrock’s characterization as “[d]eferential, glad to be of use” (Eliot 115) and “[f ]ull of high sentence, but a bit obtuse” (117) can apply equally well to Hata. In spite of his front of successful assimilation, Hata falls short of a complete achievement of his desire, except he does not entirely comprehend his failure, which produces lingering effects of haunting in his psychology.

Hata makes visible how, in the multiculturalism of modern American society, the figure of the “model minority” Asian American therefore comes to encompass a predicament of social paralysis akin to J. Alfred Prufrock. A split subject unwitting of his fractured identity, holding onto his polished veneer of comfortable assimilation to blanket his core out of joint, Hata offers an embodiment of the problems of the “model minority” convention for the Asian American subject, which give rise to the instability of racial melancholia. Still, he hazily registers his state of disjunction. In his vague grasp of it, Hata undergoes ceaselessly a process of abjection to persist in constructing an identity that will prove stable in the foreign social environment. Extending beyond the shoes of Prufrock, the intricacies of Hata’s racial melancholia and the complications the melancholia engenders in the nature of desire can be explored through greater consideration of the function of Lacanian desire and the significance of identity reification via Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection.

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grasping his objet a in grounding it in K and Sunny.

In the case of K, Hata brings her into his symbolic order by enacting a projection, which creates a perceptually real world for the subject. The extent to which he apprehends her awry betrays itself in his naming of her, choosing to call her by the cryptic letter K rather than her actual name, Kkutaeh—K for Kkutaeh, K for Korean, K which matches with Hata’s full Japanese surname of Kurohata. Hata mounts a fantasy onto K, a young and beautiful high-born Korean girl brought to the Japanese military camp as one among several comfort women, staging a tragic love story on his interactions with her over the course of his position as the camp medic.

When narrating the passion he felt for K as a youth, his sentences take on a mawkishly poetic quality: I would have done anything then … I would have executed whatever she asked of me … I would have willingly injured another human being had she asked … And it unnerves me even now how particular and exacting that sensation was, how terribly pure. That a man pleasured could so easily resolve himself to the whole spectrum of acts, indifferent and murderous and humane, and choose with such arbitrary will what he shall have to remember forever and forever. (Lee 260) This emotive prose departs sharply from Hata’s typically aloof tone, and in the flushes of his love, Hata ignores the idea that K might not reciprocate his ardor. After consummating his love, he belatedly becomes aware of the ambiguity of her consent to their physical intimacy when he overhears her “fitfully crying” in its aftermath (261). Žižek saliently points out that “fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness” (8). Hata imagines himself and K as “figures in a Western novel,” dreaming of “how [they] 34 | UNFOUND

could somehow exist outside of … place and time and circumstance, share instead the minute and sordid problems of [other] folks, the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love” (Lee 263). Through this act of imagination, Hata can draw away from his sense of existential insufficiency due to rootlessness and propel himself into basking in an anticipated image. The objet a is perceived through the filter of desire, and Hata’s treatment of K lays bare his objectification of her, entering her into the grid of his identity as a form around which he can interpellate himself specifically as K’s lover.

The nature of the objet a, however, lies in how it exists as nothing but the materialization of the distortion of the object that desire ratifies, easily prey to shattering, and the breakage of this illusion fosters a traumatic experience: abjection. The mere notion of losing K to something or someone else tortures Hata, who cannot “bear anyone else having her”—“I must have wanted her,” he says, “unto death” (296). In the aftermath of K’s desperate act of murdering the malevolent Captain Ono who tries to rape her, K disabuses him of his fantasy, and when confronted with the truth of the falseness of the distortion he has elaborately created, Hata reels and spirals into abjection. In no uncertain terms, K begs him to kill her and end her misery before other Japanese soldiers slaughter her for her stabbing of Captain Ono, and tells him, with cruelty and frankness, “I don’t want your help … really you are not any different from the rest. I’m sorry I gave myself to you, not for me but for you … For that I’ll be sorry to my death” (300). She jettisons him from his fiction of possible identity, expelling from him his idea of himself as her tender lover. Faced with K’s categorical rejection and awful request, Hata freezes, suddenly thrown into ambiguity about his character. He murmurs “in hardly a voice” that he loves her, and refuses to shoot her though she presses a pistol to his hands, and even in his recollection of the event he repeats to himself, mantra-like as his typical eloquence flees him: “I could not shoot

Yet since the objet a possesses no inherent identity, desire moves freely; once Hata loses K to death and abjection, he directs his desires instead to Sunny, the half-Korean daughter that he adopts after his immigration to America. In his adoption of Sunny, enfolding her into a new nationality and a new culture, Hata reproduces the process of the mirror stage and the subsequent melancholia of an incomplete subject in Sunny, as if replaying his experiences to confirm his identity beyond them.

Her adoption parallels his own in circumstances, and in restaging the motions of his life, Hata tacitly essays to break the cycle of traumatic identity miscarriages, not only in himself but in an external person. Adopting Sunny signifies his bid for a normative family, a child to complete his benevolent personality in Bedley Run and a testament to his cultural competence in assimilating to American ideals. He dresses her in neat frocks, takes her to Sunday school, and enrolls her in piano lessons to learn Chopin. Sunny thus replaces K in Hata’s formulations as the embodiment of all of his wants, and his act of rooting his desires in an extrinsic object confers a distance that imparting definition to the complexity of his longings to create something he can conceptualize to fantasize about a moment of fulfillment. Unconsciously, Hata estranges Sunny from him and extends the distance, since the intensity of feeling toward the objet a derives not from actual gratification but from the imminence of deprivation, and necessitates an unbridgeable chasm (Žižek 8). Raveled in the threads of his desire, too, is Hata’s memory of abjection with K. Sunny—with her Korean heritage, youth, physical loveliness and induction into a foreign system through a masculine facilitation—parallels K eerily, and the reverberation of his abject in Sunny adds complexity to Hata’s connection with her.

Haunted by the metamorphosis of K from an idealization to the abject, Hata removes himself from Sunny just far enough that he never achieves true familial intimacy but not so far that their ties Volume I, Fall 2014 | 35

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… I could not” (300-301). Instead, Hata does everything except shoot K—he leaves her to a fellow soldier, does nothing as he watches them struggle through a window, administers medicine to his infirm commander, and stands by as he witnesses a crowd of soldiers ravage and kill K. Watching the soldiers converge in on her for brutal rape and savaging, Hata tumbles into jouissance and encounters the Real as he looks upon her broken form.

Kristeva writes that “it is out of [straying] on excluded ground that [the subject] draws his jouissance,” that “The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth” (Kristeva 8-9). Hata, evacuated from his imagined self

by K’s harsh enforcement of epiphany, suffers the abjection of exclusion from himself and falls into such a state of jouissance when he crosses the scene of K’s death and her corpse—the ultimate abject, according to Kristeva, “without God and outside of science … death infecting life” (4). Cast out of the system of language and into the inarticulate as he scrabbles to resist death in the horror of abjection, Hata dodges around both a straightforward description of the event as well as a detailing of the sight of K’s corpse. He claims, “I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part” (Lee 305).

Overwhelmed, he flees from her dead body without regard for her as a beloved, away from what threatens to collapse his sense of wholeness irredeemably. Hata battles to cling to his living subjecthood and to cope with the effacement of his desires’ storehouse by spurning death’s violation of K’s body. In fact, in this episode of Hata’s jouissance, Lee makes explicit Kristeva’s premise that abjection is mourning for an object that has already been lost, and verily a lack more than a loss, since the subject never possessed anything in actuality.

Hata could from the first instance claim neither K nor a certain identity, but the dim realization arrives too late as he teeters at the border of meaning, and he draws away from the potential insight in horror.

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can be undone, mimicking the paradoxically simultaneous repulsion and attraction in a subject’s relationship with his abject. K’s ghost convolutes Hata’s building of a new fantasy in Sunny by infringing a shadow upon Hata and Sunny both, turning Sunny into a source of abjection for Hata almost from the outset. He describes her not with the words of a loving father, but in the tone of a man speaking of something at once terrible and beguiling; he calls her “dark” (Lee 62), of “a ferocity” and “a flint, coallike hardness” (58). He never reaches a comfortable and affectionate father-daughter dynamic with her, for all their years together, though he never disavows their bond. As he wraps his identity around Sunny as a paternal figure and a normative American citizen, he keeps himself appositely detached in order not to directly face the abjection Sunny poses for him, a danger heightened by her objective desirability. Lee stresses Sunny’s beauty repeatedly throughout the novel and knits her closely to K as a kind of successor, as Hata mentions even in his private narrations how Sunny is “exceptionally” beautiful (62), “in all the complicated ways” (70). The specter of K looms portentously over and through her, and Sunny’s beauty triggers nothing but abjection for Hata.

Mary Burns, Hata’s neighbor and brief love interest, points out how he treats Sunny “like a grown woman … as if she’s a woman to whom [Hata is] beholden … as if she’s someone [he] hurt once, or betrayed” (60). Sunny’s unwitting association with K in the end surpasses Hata’s orchestrations of desire and alternatively overwrites his efforts of attaining an ideal identity in society with further trauma.

Hata’s treatment of Sunny as the abject always threatening to be triggered quickly drives her to resent him. She understands in a hazy fashion that to Hata, her importance lies centrally in how her presence grants him a definite identity to cling to, akin to an image on display, insidiously relating to every detail in her life. Of the piano in their Mountview house, on which she once practiced Hata’s favorite Chopin nocturnes, she asks why he refuses to sell 36 | UNFOUND

it when no one plays it any longer. “I think you like what it says,” she tells him, “[a]bout me,” in a shrewd penetration of his deep-seated impulse to build a meaningful self from appearances (31). As she finally renounces her home with Hata, Sunny notes: “I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way” (96). Like his house, the piano and Sunny all compute within Hata’s system as objects that first and foremost help him to sculpt identity, above any genuine sentimental attachment.

Her rebuff and departure, so reminiscent of K’s final actions, inspires desperation in Hata as he scrambles to reclaim her, naturally loath to lose the principal index of his desires. He chases after her to a derelict house belonging to the local hoodlum, Jimmy Gizzi, moving past “piles of trash and bottles and things like old shoes and undershirts scattered across the filthy yard” (99) and a “rancid” kitchen full of a “mess of bottles and ashtrays and spaghetti sauce” (102). For a man such as Hata who has obsessively tucked and trimmed his life to conform to a pristine image acceptable to polite society, Jimmy Gizzi’s house, with its “rank swamp of bodies,” pushes a sense of abjection upon him from the minute his eyes alight on it, foreshadowing the greater one that awaits him (105). After wading through the tumult, Hata at last catches sight of Sunny through a half-window in a door from the top of a staircase, near-naked and dancing in front of two men “calling and toasting her with bottles of beer” (114). Watching Sunny from such a vantage point, seeing her in the company of men eager to sexually devour her, Sunny’s situation echoes the scene of K’s death—a horrific phantasm of the abjection Hata has buried in the past vivifies itself, and Hata averts his gaze in visceral antipathy, his “blood already trying to forget, growing cold” as he descends the staircase (116). Plunged into the “mute protest” and the “shattering violence of a convulsion” that Kristeva elaborates (Kristeva 3), Hata sees nothing familiar in this Sunny who laughs “maniacally, in a dusky tone that seemed … illiberal and vile,” and

tion and destruction disintegrate, grasps at no transcendence but circles around in the wind, his sole heroism the heroism of finally living as himself, vulnerable and cut to the quick by memories and mismatches but alive nonetheless to clutch at dust.

References 1. Chou, Chih-Chieh. “Critique on the Notion of Model Minority: An Alternative Racism to Asian American?” In Asian Ethnicity, Vol. 9.3 (2008): 219-229. Print.

Conclusion: “Let me simply bear my flesh, and 2. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: blood, and bones…”

Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief.

In retrospect, years after K has exited his life, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001.

Hata muses to himself: “And the idea entreats me Print. once more, to wonder if something like love is for- 3. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Love Song of J. ever victorious, truly conquering all” (216). Unsure Alfred Prufrock.” Collected Poems: 1909-1962. of everything, even love, Hata abides in a purgatory New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1963. state, housing his fantasies in others’ bodies, genPrint. erating facsimiles of his yearnings. Contextualiz- 4. Eng, David L. and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue ing anew Eliot’s Prufrock, who can hardly invent on Racial Melancholia.” In Psychoanalytic Dia fantasy better than a pitiably simple wish to walk alogues: The International Journal of Relational upon a beach in white flannel trousers and who Perspectives, Vol. 10 .4 (2000): 667-700. Print. ultimately drowns, Hata similarly fails to be true 5. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” to himself. He closes his narrative circling round In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoand round in a wistful imaginative flight, “outside logical Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James looking in,” to the end measuring his place in the Strachey. Vol. 14: 243-258. London: Hogarth world by where he stands in it, instead of by where Press, 1914-1916. Print. the world stands in relation to him (356). The mu- 6. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on tability of Hata’s identity and desires highlights Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: the flimsy foundations on which Asian American Columbia University Press, 1982. Print. immigrants stand, and the operation of abjection 7. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative on an individual throughout the development of of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoa self that fears fragmentation. And as with Pruanalytic Experience.” In The Norton Anthology frock, Hata’s narrativization provides illumination of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. into a traumatized heartland—the nature of the 1285-1290. New York: Norton, 2001. Print. narrative functions to create coherence for men 8. Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life. New York: Rivlike Prufrock and Hata, as they are able to orient erhead Books, 1999. Print. themselves through the vehicle of literature in some 9. Žižek, Slovaj. Looking Awry: An Introduction personal way, and readers engage with the web of to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Camhunger and melancholia that preoccupy displaced bridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology persons. Doc Hata, whose gestures of objectificaPress, 1991. Print.

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his walking away from her forms an unspoken and despairing disownment (Lee 116). With both K and Sunny, Hata’s desires are not powerful enough to save him from being ejected out of his fantasies of identity. Denied of this filter of protection from the Real that jeopardizes his being, Hata spirals into abjection, a state in which persists his psychic anguish born from the lack of a lucid ontic foundation, casting him still as the split subject weighed down by inner disjunction and melancholia.

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“Asia for the Asiatics”: An (Unfinished) Biography of Lawrence Klindt Kentwell Mark Tseng Putterman New York University ’14

Abstract: The unique and underexplored biography of Lawrence Klindt Kentwell (b. 1876)— a “Eurasian” man whose life trajectory took him from US-occupied Hawaii to Exclusion-era America to WWII Shanghai—necessitates a hybrid analysis grounded both in Asian and Asian American studies. Here, I seek to contextualize Kentwell’s political work as a critic of US Chinese Exclusion and Britain’s intervention in China, and later as a collaborator with the Japanese occupation of China, within the greater Chinese/Chinese American political movements that categorized the early 20th century. In doing so, I apply a critical mixed race lens to understand how Kentwell’s racial ambiguity contributed to the formation of a radical, if flawed, anti-imperial and anti-racist political worldview. Central to this reading is the argument that Kentwell’s own life experience and political evolution mirrored what Jane Leung Larson has called the “emotional transformation from disgrace to resistance” that categorized the political awakening of early 20th century Chinese/Chinese American reformists and revolutionaries.

Introduction

“Isn’t it strange? In Europe, which controls Asia at will and has completely subdued it, these days we hear voices that warn of a yellow peril. However, among the colored races, which are subjugated and threatened by the white race, hardly a peep against the white peril can be heard. Yet while there can be no doubt that the yellow peril is nothing more than a bad dream, the white peril is a reality.”1 —Kodera Kenkichi, “Treatise on Greater Asianism” (1918)

From the passing of the Chinese Exclusion

1. Kenkichi Kodera, Dai-Ajiashugi-ronk: anjyaku [Treatise on Greater Asianism: Chinese Translation] (Shanghai: Hyakujo Shôsha and Shomuin Shôkan, 1918), 1.

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Act in the United States in 1882 to the onset of the Second World War, the West increasingly conceived of Asia as a threat to White Anglo/ American economic and political domination, social norms, and racial “purity.” Whether such fear was hurled at Chinese immigrants in America who threatened American racial and cultural purity and economic opportunities for working-class whites, or at the perceived military and economic threat of an increasingly modern Japan, this was an era in which so-called “Asiatics” were seen not only as racial others, but as racial others potentially capable of challenging Western global hegemony.

Contradictory to the threat of this “yellow peril,” of course, was a very real “white peril” manifest in European colonialism in Asia and the Pa-

“A Chinaman named L.K. Kentwell”2: A Brief Biography Lawrence Klindt Kentwell was born in 1876, aboard the Prince Albert, a British sailing vessel. His father, Robert H. Kentwell, was the captain of the ship and a recognized British subject; his mother, before marriage, was a subject of the Emperor of China.3 The details of Kentwell’s childhood are unclear, as is the role of his parents in his upbringing. However, by 1895, Kentwell and his brother, George H. Kentwell (born in 1881 in Hong Kong), had settled in Honolulu, Hawaii, then a territory of the United States.4 The Kentwell brothers both attended Oahu College, an elite college preparatory school in Honolulu, from which Lawrence graduated in 1897. After his graduation, he worked as a real estate dealer and financial agent, becoming the manager of the Hawaiian Realty & Maturity Company and building a respectable reputation as a businessman and investor.5 On July 4th, 1901, Kentwell was married to Miss Annie Kailakanos Holt at the Roman Catholic Church in Honolulu. Her father, John D. Holt, was a politician for the Home Rule Party, a territorial platform formed by Native Hawaiians as an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties, rightfully perceived by Hawai-

2. As referenced in correspondence within the US Bureau of Immigration File 466-C, Chinese Arrival Files, Honolulu, Records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, National Archives, Pacific Region, San Bruno, Calif. US

3. Certificate for Traveller, 15 August 1905, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Honolulu District, 466C.

4. Certificate for Traveller, 17 May 1906, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Honolulu District, 715C.

5. Certificate for Traveller, 15 August 1905, 466C. Volume I, Fall 2014 | 39

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cific—in China, where Great Britain and other Western interests forced economic and territorial concessions, in India, where Great Britain established formal colonial rule, in Hawaii, where the United States flexed its own imperial muscle—and in the West itself, where Asians were overwhelmingly barred from entry, or faced brutal racism, exploitation, and violence upon entry.

It was into this context—between the contradictions of Western racial fear and international Western aggression and intervention—that Lawrence Klindt Kentwell was born. The son of a British sea captain and a Chinese woman, Kentwell’s life was shaped both by Western fear of the Asiatic other—through his encounters with Chinese Exclusion Act policies in the United States—and by the role of Western intervention in China, of which he would become an outspoken and vitriolic critic. Throughout these encounters, Kentwell’s own racial identity as a Eurasian would be a defining factor, and his alternating experiences with both racial passing and racial discrimination would shape the evolution of his uniquely transnational anti-colonial political project.

In this article, I present the findings of my preliminary research on Lawrence Klindt Kentwell, which I seek to place in conversation with the existing literature on early 20th century transnational Chinese political movements, Chinese wartime collaboration with Japan, and the experiences of mixed-race Asians, or “Eurasians”, in both Western and Eastern contexts.

Analysis of Kentwell’s biography, which stretches geographically from Honolulu to New York to Shanghai and Nanjing, serves as an embodied manifestation of the need for greater conversation and contextualization of East Asian Studies in Asian American Studies, and vice versa. With this article, I hope to synthesize both disciplines in service of a comprehensive examination of Kentwell’s unique trajectory and its significance to Chinese and Chinese American histories of resistance.

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ians to be dominated by white settler interests. 6, 7 There is no indication that Kentwell’s Chinese heritage played any role in his social, political, or business dealings in his early life, or even if this heritage was known to his peers. Indeed, later in life, Kentwell would remark that the “Chinese strain in my make up does not dominate the Anglo-Saxon.”8 Of his brother George, a Hawaiian immigration official observed: “…his appearance would never betray his Chinese extraction.”9 In 1897, upon his graduation from Oahu College, Kentwell, as one of the few students of his class “born under the British flag,” spoke of Queen Victoria’s reign, and “made an eloquent speech for the noblest of England’s sovereigns.”10 No mention is made of his Chinese heritage. Thus, it seems likely that Kentwell effectively “passed” as a haole (white settler) in the Hawaiian context.

However, in October 1902, when Kentwell began a political campaign to serve as a representative of Hawaii’s Fourth District under the Home Rule platform (the same party and district as his fatherin-law), questions regarding Kentwell’s eligibility were raised that would ultimately call his ethnic background into question. Faced with allegations that he was not an American citizen and was there 6. “Marriage Announcement,” The Independent, 3 July 1901.

7. “The Democrats Endorse Wilcox,” The Hawaiian Star, 20 September 1902.

8. Kentwell to V.H. Metcalf, 27 February 1906, File 466-C, Chinese Arrival Files, Honolulu, Records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, National Archives, Pacific Region, San Bruno, Calif. Note: as all correspondence hereafter is from the same location in the records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Services, letters will be cited using date followed by file, e.g., Kentwell to V.H. Metcalf, 27 February 1906, INS 466C.

9. Chinese Inspector in Charge to Commissioner-General of Immigration, 22 March 1906, INS 715C.

10. “At Oahu College,” The Hawaiian Gazette, 25 June 1897.

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fore ineligible to claim office, Kentwell asserted that he had in fact been naturalized in September 1900.

He stated passionately: “I am a citizen all right and have ample proofs to substantiate my heritage as an American.”11 Indeed, in a political speech delivered prior to his citizenship controversy, Kentwell remarked on the “great privilege” he had to address the audience as a “citizen of the foremost Republic on the face of the globe—the United States of America.” 12 Ultimately, the controversy raised by his political opponents led to formal review of Kentwell’s citizenship. A year after withdrawing from the race, his American citizenship was revoked on the grounds that the papers were “fraudulently secured.” The formal statement of revocation attested that Kentwell had become a citizen on September 6, 1900, after a sworn statement that he was a British subject, a white man, and had resided in Hawaii for the time legally necessary. The statement continued, “…[A]ll three allegations are now said to have been untrue.”13 Throughout this entire ordeal, this oblique reference to the fact that Kentwell was not, in fact, a white man, stands as the lone mention of Kentwell’s ethnic background.

Subsequently, Kentwell temporarily withdrew from the public eye, growing his real estate business and family (three daughters, Elizabeth, Alice, and Winnifred Kentwell would be born between 1900 and 1903).

But two years later, in February 1904, Kentwell’s background would again challenge his ability to move freely within elite Anglo/American contexts. This time, race, and the stipulations of the Chinese Exclusion Act, would take center stage, catalyzing an awakening of perceived racial difference that would shape the rest of Kentwell’s life.

11. “Kentwell Says He Is a Citizen,” The Hawaiian Star, 1 October 1902.

12. “Kentwell on Home Rule Program,” Evening Bulletin, 15 September 1902.

13. “His Citizenship Attacked,” The Hawaiian Star, 5 March 1903.

by the immigration officials.” Kentwell proceeded to argue that “according to law…a person takes his “…I can safely state that the Exclusion Act is the worst father’s nationality, if so then I am English and not piece of discrimination in the whole creation, and I Chinese, although the immigration officials at Hohave been subjected to it because I am the son of a nolulu have attempted to make a Chinaman out Chinese mother, and who I wish to say is a noblewom- of me…” The incident would spark nearly a yearan and I am proud of her and her people, notwithlong correspondence between Kentwell and varstanding the prejudice shown to them by the American ious US government officials, during which this nation.”14 —Lawrence Klindt Kentwell, in a argument of exemption from Chinese Exclusion 1906 correspondence with V.H. Metcalf, Secretary of as a British subject would be repeatedly invoked.

Despite the outrage expressed in the corresponthe US Department of Commerce and Labor dences referenced above, Kentwell’s first corresponIn November 1905, L. K. Kentwell wrote a let- dence with US immigration officials was not in reter of complaint to President Theodore Roosevelt, gards to the aforementioned 1904 detainment, but detailing his grievances regarding a distasteful ex- instead contained a benign inquiry regarding the perience with United States immigration officials in details of the “laws, treaties, and regulations” relat17 February 1904.15 According to Kentwell’s account ing to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Upon receipt therein, after a trip to Manila, Philippines, Kent- of these materials, Kentwell argued (as he would in well was detained aboard his ship upon re-entry to his letter to the President) that because he was not the harbor of Honolulu by an immigration official a subject of China but Great Britain, the Exclusion 18 who “demanded to see [his] papers and hinted sar- Act should not impact his status. The response castically that he knew [he] had Chinese blood in from the Chinese Inspector in Charge stated that [his] veins, and therefore [came] under the Chinese “the law embraces all Chinese persons or persons Exclusion Act.” Being “forced” to return on board, of Chinese descent,” and Kentwell was advised to Kentwell waited for several hours before being sub- obtain a Section 6 certificate, a mode of exemption jected to “all kinds of humiliating questions” by the for Chinese travelers who were students, teachers, 19 Chief Inspector, Mr. J. K. Brown. As Kentwell re- or merchants. A compliant Kentwell obtained the layed in a later correspondence with another gov- necessary documentation, which he would use to ernment official, the inspector acted “in a very in- travel to New York and enroll as a student at the 20 sulting manner in the presence of a large number Columbia University Law School, class of 1909.

It is only after obtaining his Section 6 certifof fellow passengers, and I felt quite mortified over 16 it.” Kentwell explained to the President, that he icate in August 1905 that Kentwell began to vowas not a subject of China but of Great Britain calize his critiques both of his categorization as a (unsurprisingly, he made no mention of the revo- “Chinaman” and of the Exclusion Act as a whole cation of his “fraudulent” American citizenship), “I 17. Kentwell to F.M. Bechtel, 18 July 1905, can not see why I was subjected to such treatment INS 466C.

14. Kentwell to V.H. Metcalf, 27 February 1906, INS 466C.

15. Kentwell to President Theodore Roosevelt, 20 November 1905, INS 466C.

16. Kentwell to V.H. Metcalf, 27 February 1906, INS 466C.

18. Kentwell to F.M. Bechtel, 7 August 1905, INS 466C.

19. F.M. Bechtel to Kentwell, 10 August 1905, INS 466C.

20. Kentwell, Lawrence K, Columbia University Alumni Association Records, Columbia University Archives.

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Confronting an Ambiguous Color Line: L. K. Kentwell and the Chinese Exclusion Act

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(though his writings alternated between arguments for his personal exemption and arguments against Exclusion as a general policy). Only a week after obtaining the certificate, a San Francisco Chronicle article reported the landing of Kentwell’s ship in San Francisco Bay. The article relays that Kentwell claimed he would “confer with the Chinese Minister at Washington” regarding the exemption of Chinese in the Territory of Hawaii from the laws of Exclusion (whether or not Kentwell did indeed have such a meeting is unclear).21 A month later, Kentwell appeared by chance in an installment of the Washington Post series “People Met in Hotel Lobbies.” Kentwell took the opportunity to make an eloquent plea against Chinese exclusion: I would like to feel that devotion and loyalty to the United States that every man ought to render to his country. In my case, however, the laws of this government make it uncommonly difficult for me to cherish any patriotic sentiment. My sin lies solely in the fact that I have Chinese blood in my veins, and for this I am treated as an alien and an outcast, unfit to step upon the soil of the nation to which I owe allegiance.22 By 1906, Kentwell had taken his “campaign” to the New York Times, who published an extensive letter from Kentwell to the editor in February of that year.

In it, Kentwell sought to correct the “many unfounded reports” regarding the motivations behind the Chinese boycott on American goods, which had begun in 1905 and would last through the end of 1906:

the Chinese Exclusion act and the outrageous treatment accorded by your immigration officials to Chinese students, travelers, and merchants who happen to come to your most inhospitable shores.23 Kentwell went on to reference his personal experience of this outrageous treatment, and contrasts British treatment of the Chinese as “fellow-creatures,” to that of America, where they were treated “…like dogs.”

Interestingly, despite Kentwell’s strong words, his messaging was less than consistent. While he clearly located himself within the Chinese community in the New York Times editorial—in which he acts as a sort of spokesperson—at other times he distanced himself from being read as a “Chinaman.”

In one correspondence, Kentwell interrogates the motives of the immigration official who detained him in 1904, asking, “did he intend to have me deported as a common Chinese collie [sic]?”24 And yet, in the very same letter, Kentwell would close by defending both his mother and “her people.”

In April 1906, despite Kentwell’s public critiques against Chinese Exclusion (the Honolulu Chinese Inspector in Charge would complain that “he apparently courts newspaper notoriety…”) and his longstanding correspondence with US officials to resolve his own case, the Commissioner-General of Immigration would mark Kentwell’s case “resolved.”25 As immigration official V. H. Metcalf would explain to an irate Kentwell: “…you are advised that the Chinese exclusion laws do not refer to Chinese in the political sense but as a race—to the exclusion

23. “Exclusion—Boycott. A Chinese-Amer-

…I desire to voice the unanimous sentiican Student Cries ‘Check’ In the Game,” New York ment of the people of my mother coun- Times, 26 February 1906. try against the unfair discrimination of 24. Kentwell to V.H. Metcalf, 27 February

21. “Comes To Assist the Chinese of Honolulu,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 August 1905.

22. “People Met in Hotel Lobbies,” Washington Post, 14 September 1905.

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1906, INS 466C.

25. April 14, 1906, File 466-C, Chinese Arrival Files, Honolulu, Records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, National Archives, Pacific Region, San Bruno, Calif.

Shanghai, Nanjing, and The Voice of New China Despite Kentwell’s apparent political stance against American imperialism (via the Home Rule party) and experiences with domestic US systems of racism, Kentwell apparently sought comfort within British systems of informal empire in the Shanghai International Settlement. According to a brief biography published in The Voice of New China, the newspaper that Kentwell founded and edited later in life, after arriving in Shanghai in 1916, Kentwell joined the British Army in 1917. He then returned to Shanghai in 1919 and resumed his legal practice. The same biography later refers to Kentwell’s experiences with racism and “British snobbiness” at the Shanghai Club, an elite European men’s club of the time. Kentwell dubbed the club the “home of racial prejudice and imperialistic arrogance.”29 It is this second experience with Western racism, this time in a new context, which seems to

26. V.H. Metcalf to Kentwell, 9 March 1906, INS 466C.

27. “Kentwell To Be Great Educator,” The Hawaiian Star, 11 October 1909.

28. North China Herald, 2 December 1916.

29. “A Poisonous Reptile Must Be Crushed,” The Voice of New China, 15 April 1939.

have influenced the anti-British propaganda that Kentwell would publish in the coming decades.

There is no indication of where Kentwell’s political leanings lay in the years between 1919 and 1925. He apparently operated as a fairly typical lawyer in the Mixed Court of Shanghai, and his name appears on reports of a wide range of trials. The most high profile case that Kentwell handled during this time was his defense of the accused in the murder of Lien Ying, a young Chinese girl whose case captured national attention.30 Then in 1925, Kentwell was charged with forging bank notes “with purpose to defraud.” Pleading innocent, Kentwell’s charges were dismissed.31 In 1926, Kentwell encountered legal troubles again, this time for allegedly registering a client—a Chinese subject—as a Spanish subject at the Shanghai Spanish Consulate, in order to enable the client to register his business as a Spanish company. Kentwell was ultimately found guilty, and struck off the roll of legal practitioners of the Mixed Court. Kentwell offered a simple response: I feel that it is because of my political views that your lordship has chosen to put me out of action.32 Kentwell’s claim that political censorship played into his ousting from the Mixed Court refers to the fact that in early 1926, inspired by “British arrogance toward the Chinese,” Kentwell co-founded The China Courier with Chinese journalist Francis Zia as its editor. The journal supported the Chinese Nationalist Revolution and “demanded the retrocession of all British conces 30. “The Murder of Lien Ying: An Arrest and Charge at the Mixed Court,” The North China Herald, 14 August 1920.

31. “The Forged Note Case,” North China Herald, 4 April 1925.

32. “Mr. L.K. Kentwell’s Penalty,” The North China Herald, 27 November 1926.

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of ‘Chinese and persons of Chinese descent’…” 26 Following the review of his complaint against US immigration policy, in 1909 Kentwell graduated from Columbia Law School. He then relocated to Oxford, where he would study for a degree of Doctor of Civil Laws.27 In Oxford, Kentwell and Anne D. Holt had two more children, Aileen (1911) and Larry (1915). Although a 1909 Hawaiian Star article stated that Kentwell would take the chair of Civil Laws in the university of Peking and act as a special legal adviser to the board of advisers on Chinese foreign affairs, it appears that in 1916, Kentwell and his family relocated again to Shanghai, China, where Kentwell was admitted to practice within the British Supreme Court for China, a court of the International Settlement of Shanghai.28

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sions.”33 According to Kentwell, the foundation of the journal angered British authorities and Shanghai, prompting the “conspiracy” to strike his name from the roll of Shanghai British legal practitioners.

His license to practice law revoked, Kentwell collaborated with Zia as editors of both The China Courier and The Canton Daily Sun from 1926 through 1935 (the time of Zia’s death). Published out of Shanghai, both appear to have been fairly well regarded bilingual newspapers that, while critical of British engagement in the East, fell in line with popular support for the Kuomintang nationalist regime. Indeed, upon Zia’s death in 1935, he was remembered as being held “in the highest esteem in both foreign and Chinese journalistic circles.”34 After the death of his longtime collaborator, Kentwell began moving towards the political fringe.

In the same year as Zia’s death, Kentwell began publishing the newspaper The China Outlook out of Nanjing, which in 1938 was reconstituted as The Voice of New China. Under these platforms, Kentwell expanded on The China Courier’s anti-British stance, pairing it with strong support of Sino-Japanese collaboration. In its inaugural edition, The Voice of New China publishers stressed: “Although the format has been altered somewhat, the policy remains but slightly changed…Our aim from the very commencement of publication has been to promote Sino-Japanese amity, and that aim to-day is not only our TASK but our IDEAL.”35 Fiercely anti-British, religiously supportive of Sino-Japanese collaboration, and strongly anti-Nationalist (as compared to Kentwell’s publications with Zia), The Voice of New China served as a platform for such editorial commentary as “Asia for the Asiatics,” which argued that only “in cooperation” with Japan could China

33. “A Poisonous Reptile Must Be Crushed,” The Voice of New China, 15 April 1939.

34. “Francis Zia, Well-Known Chinese Journalist, Dies at Age of 47,” The China Weekly Review, 12 October 1935.

35. “Foreword,” Voice of New China, 15 August 1938.

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“throw off [the shackles] of Western aggression.”36 Besides touting the benefits of Japanese collaboration and celebrating the puppet regime of Wang Jingwei, The Voice of New China also praised the accomplishments of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

One 1939 editorial extended “congratulations to the German and Italian nations on their recent achievements – achievements which have placed them in the front rank of nations.”37 The newspaper, which would come to be banned in British Malaya and other British occupied territories, also featured regular advertisements sponsored by Kentwell which called on “the Great Indian people” to “[shake] off the yoke of British Imperialism” by joining the “Asiatic League to Overthrow British Imperialism!”

The paper’s support of the Axis powers in World War II went so far as to argue that the war was one of “liberation, which, when successfully concluded, will return to the nations their birthright.”38 The end goal, in Kentwell’s understanding, was the establishment of a “New Order” in East Asia and the establishment of a strong China free of British intervention and racism.

After the ending of the war Kentwell, alongside his fellow collaborators, was tried for treason. He testified in Shanghai High Court that “he became a member of a puppet legislature because it paid him well,” but that he was “morally against” collaboration and contended that “he actually engaged in anti-Japanese propaganda while accepting favors from Nippon.”39 At this point, Kentwell would have been at the age of 72. The amount of time served in prison, and his date and cause of death, are as of yet unknown.

36. “Asia for the Asiatics,” Voice of New China, 1 March 1939.

37. “German and Italian Achievements,” Voice of New China, 15 April 1939.

38. “Axis Wages War to Liberate Nations Under the British Yoke,” Voice of New China, 1 May 1941.

39. “Became Puppet Solon for Pay,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, 16 January 1946.

“passing” was the default, seem to have catalyzed a sort of racial awakening that would influence “…the desire of the mixed-blood man is always and Kentwell’s political leanings. Moreover, Kentwell’s everywhere to be a white man; to be classed with and frustration of being forced to obtain a Section 6 become a part of the superior race.” 40 certificate so as to legally enter the United States, —Edward B. Reuter, The Mulatto only to pass by San Francisco immigration officials in the United States (1918) unbothered, is telling evidence in support of Teng’s understanding of the gap between the racial rigidity L. K. Kentwell’s unique biography begs fur- of Exclusion policy and the fluidity of enforcement. ther analysis. Kentwell’s political evolution—from Also of great significance is Shirley Geok-In a Home Rule party ally to Native Hawaiians, to Lim’s theory of the “hybridity matrix” of race, genan outspoken critic of Chinese exclusion, to an der, and class. Lim argues that the opportunities anti-British and later pro-Axis propagandist— for Eurasians in the early 20th century differed funbrings into conversation diverse historical moments damentally depending on their gender, class, and that traverse boundaries of Asian American stud- even the racial pairings of their parents (Chinese ies and East Asian studies. However, any serious mother/white father versus white mother/Chianalysis of Kentwell’s politics must take place in nese father).42 Clearly, Kentwell’s gender and class conjunction with a discussion of his unique iden- privileges were crucial ingredients in his ability to tity and experiences as a Eurasian, which un- “pass” and travel extensively through territories undoubtedly played a role in his political evolution. der Chinese Exclusion. Indeed, the comment in Emma Jinhua Teng’s work on the experienc- Kentwell’s brother’s immigration file that he was es of Eurasians in Western and Eastern contexts “clearly not a laborer” but instead a “person of edprovides a useful lens from which we can seek to ucation” whose appearance “would never betray understand Kentwell’s own story. Crucially, Teng his Chinese extraction” support Lim’s thesis that articulates that while in theory, racially motivated the intersectionality of class and race was crucial legislation like Chinese Exclusion understood race in dictating the experiences of Eurasians. Kentalong rigid, binary lines, enforcement and daily well’s own class privilege is a clear influence on his lived experiences were in reality much more fluid for own identity, and seems to manifest in his occaEurasians.41 This concept of fluidity is apt for Ken- sional expressions of derision at the idea of being twell, who in early life seems to have passed quite grouped with a common “coolie” or “Chinaman.” readily as an educated, elite Anglo/American male.

Teng’s analysis of the biography of Edith EaIndeed, it seems that only in a few isolated incidents ton, a Eurasian Canadian journalist and author who (e.g. the revocation of his American citizenship, his could superficially pass as white but decided instead 1904 Honolulu detainment, and his 1916 experi- to assert her Eurasian identity, explores what Teng ences with Shanghai Club racist “snobbiness”) was terms the “temptation to pass,” a temptation of Kentwell marked clearly as a racial “other.” Yet these which Eaton was highly critical. While many of experiences, as a contrast to an early life in which Eaton’s siblings would choose to live on “the white

40. Edward B. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United side of the color line,” even hiding their Chinese States (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1918), 315.

41. Emma Jinhua Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 18421943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 171.

42. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Sibling Hybridities: The Case of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna,” Life Writing 4, no. 1 (2007): 81-99.

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Contextualizing Kentwell: “Eurasians” in Asia and America

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heritage, Eaton herself would remark: “I will not be that sort of half breed, and prefer to reflect honor upon those who are of mixed Asiatic and European nationality.”43 Eaton, who adopted the pen name Sui Sin Far in her writings, is one rare example of a Eurasian in the West who chose to forsake their “ability to pass,” apparently taking a sort of pleasure at the shock of European Americans who discovered she was not “pure” white, and who were even more shocked to find that she did not want to pass.

44 Along these same lines, Teng cites Herbert Day Lamson, a Harvard graduate student who in 1927 traveled to Shanghai to begin a dissertation on racial mixing in Asia. In his work, Lamson referred derisively to Eurasians as “European aping hybrids,” and blamed Eurasians who attempted to pass as European for “hitch[ing] their wagons to the wrong star, the alien instead of the native.” Meanwhile, Lamson “approved heartily” of those Eurasians who chose to “blend back” into Chinese society.45 The commonalities and contradictions of Edith Eaton’s perspective are interesting to relate to Kentwell’s own. Like Eaton, Kentwell ultimately did away with the temptation to pass (a decision perhaps influenced by his occasional inability to pass). Like Eaton, Kentwell took on a Chinese pseudonym: as early as 1906, the Acting Chinese Inspector Brown of Honolulu (the offending officer in Kentwell’s 1904 detainment) remarked that Kentwell was known among the Chinese community in Hawaii as “Kam Duck Won.”46 Some twenty-five years later, Kentwell would renounce his British nationali-

43. Sui Sin Far, “The Persecution and Oppression of Me.”

44. Teng, Eurasian, 184.

45. Herbert Day Lamson, “The Eurasian in Shanghai,” American Journal of Sociology 41, no. 5 (1936): 642-8.

46. Acting Chinese Inspector to Commissioner-General of Immigration, 26 March 1906, INS 466C. 46 | UNFOUND

ty and change his name to Kan Teh-Quan.47, 48 In this sense, Kentwell’s late-life choices seem in line with Lamson’s understanding of “blending back.”

However, Kentwell’s case challenges both Eaton’s and Lamson’s conceptions of the “color line”.

While recognizing the ambiguity of the color line as it impacted Eurasians in the day-to-day, both Eaton and Lamson conceive of an individual’s choice to live on one side of the line or the other—that is, the decision to “pass” or to “blend back”—as singular and permanent. Yet, Kentwell’s life demonstrates the fact that certain Eurasians could in fact straddle the color line, choosing to “pass” in some contexts while opting to “blend back” in others. Instead of viewing Kentwell’s life as separated into early-life “passing” and late-life “blending back,” we see Kentwell moving within a spectrum between the two, never fully falling to one side or the other.

Kentwell’s movement within this spectrum reveals his own complex, contradictory racial identity. While his early life in Hawaii, particularly his time at Oahu College, may have been categorized as a period of “passing”, Inspector Brown’s assertion indicates that Kentwell was in fact comfortable moving within both Anglo/American and Chinese contexts. Similarly, while Kentwell’s late-life decisions might fall broadly within the category of “blending back”, the reality is that having married a non-Chinese woman, continuing in practice to use his English name, and publishing an English language periodical, Kentwell never did fully assimilate into Chinese culture. Indeed, it seems that the majority of his children ultimately settled either in Great Britain or in Hawaii, not China.49

47. “Became Puppet Solon For Pay,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, 16 January 1946.

48. “Kan Teh-Quan” is likely no more than a different transliteration of “Kam Duck Won”. It is unclear to what extent Kentwell would use this name after 1931, as his writing throughout his life was always attributed to his English name.

49. “Larry Holt-Kentwell. He lived all over the world,” Oxford Mail, 6 September 2012.

Locating Kentwell Within a Transnational Chinese Political Awakening The turn of the 20th century was a time of Chinese political upheaval, filled with the possibilities of reform, revolution, and rebuilding after a half-century marked by foreign aggression and domination. After the nation’s bitter first tastes of both Western and Japanese aggression through the First and Second Opium Wars, the Sino-French War, and the first Sino-Japanese War, China found itself forced into a semi-colonial status, ceding large

parts of territory to both the West and Japan.50 Within this context, Chinese reformists and revolutionaries such as Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen envisioned alternative futures in which a modernized and empowered Chinese nation-state could repel foreign aggressors and protect its people from humiliation, both domestically and abroad. It is within this political climate that we can locate Kentwell as a political actor, and his place within this burgeoning transnational Chinese political project.

Kang Youwei’s leadership over the 1898 Hundred Day’s Reform and the 1899 formation of the Baohuanghui (Protect the Emperor), both of which sought Chinese reform and modernization via the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, established Kang as one of the foremost Chinese political thinkers, not just in China but also throughout Chinese diasporic communities. Kang’s Baohuanghui, as well as Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui, relied extensively on political and financial contributions from Chinese living abroad, and the political rivals Kang and Sun each traveled extensively through Chinese diasporic communities in Japan, Singapore, Hawaii, the Philippines, Vancouver, and the United States, rallying communities and commissioning financial contributions to support reformist/revolutionary visions for change in China. This critical role of Chinese living abroad in the political movements that shaped modern Chinese history has been termed aptly by Tu Wei-ming as the “transformative potential of the periphery.”51 Moving within these peripheral political spheres, it is certain that L. K. Kentwell was caught up in the political rhetoric of the time. Indeed, I argue that Kentwell’s politics were profoundly shaped by popular ideology and trends of the time, most

50. Alison Adcock Kaufman, “The ‘Century of Humiliation,’ Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order,” Pacific Focus 25, no. 1 (2010): 1-33.

51. Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” Daedalus 120, no. 2 (1991): 1-32.

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The contradictions of the workings of Kentwell’s racial identity are also apparent in his critiques of Exclusion. A foundation of Kentwell’s dissent against Exclusion is less concerned with the workings of the policy as a whole and more with the unjust application of Exclusion policies to Kentwell personally. In claiming Britishness as a shield against Exclusion, Kentwell identified himself as separate from the Chinese people. Yet, at the same time he also positioned himself as a spokesperson of the Chinese, as a proud member of the Chinese community, and as a critic of Exclusion not due to personal victimization alone, but out of broad moral outrage at its foundation in racism.

In straddling the color line and navigating the spectrum in all of its complexities and contradictions, Kentwell’s story provides a window into the variable and shifting opportunities and limitations that appeared in the lives of Eurasians, in both Western and Eastern contexts. It is precisely because of the contradictions of his experience that Kentwell’s case is a useful addition to the body of literature on Eurasians. Indeed, it is a story that demands an understanding of “passing” and “blending back” that is contextual, anecdotal, and reoccurring, rather than hinging on a single life decision to lay claim to one side or another of the color line.

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importantly what US Consul Samuel L. Gracey reported in March 1906 as a “virulent…spirit of antagonism to foreigners…”52 Indeed, it is this sentiment of “China for the Chinese,” emerging from turn-of-the-century reformist/revolutionary aspirations and in particular the 1905 boycott, that would undergird Kentwell’s political critiques of American Exclusion and British intervention in China.

Jane Leung Larson expands upon Tu’s theorization of the “transformative periphery” in regards to the 1905 boycott of American goods, a boycott in which Chinese around the world united in critique and outrage of American treatment of Chinese immigrants. In theorizing the boycott as a uniquely transnational Chinese movement, Larson identifies several themes of critical importance to boycott ideology, including: (1) a sense that China and Chinese had been made victims at the hands of foreign aggressors, (2) a sense of “shame and humiliation from being victimized by foreign powers”, (3) a sense that responsibility for this humiliation was borne in part by the Chinese government, who proved unable to properly protect its citizens at home and abroad, (4) a newfound “racial self-awareness” resulting from the discriminatory US immigration law that targeted Chinese alone, and (5) an “emotional transformation from disgrace to resistance” catalyzed by a unique sense of power and empowerment deriving from the united boycott.53 Clearly, Kentwell’s 1906 New York Times editorial, which sought to clarify to an American readership the “real cause of the Chinese boycott”, locates Kentwell as well within the movement itself. Apart from this isolated editorial, it is quite possible that

52. Samuel L. Gracey to Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon, letter, March 28, 1906, from Dispatches from US Consuls in Foochow, China, 18491906, Record Group 59, Roll 1007, National Archives.

US

53. Jane Leung Larson, “The 1905 Anti-American Boycott as a Transnational Chinese Movement,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives, (2007): 191198.

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Kentwell would have been involved in further boycott or Baohuanghui organizing, especially given Kang Youwei’s significant followings in both Honolulu and New York. Yet beyond these demonstrated and potential affiliations, I argue that Larson’s identified thematics of the boycott would influence Kentwell’s political writings for the rest of his life.

A shared sense of Chinese victimization and humiliation at the hands of foreign aggressors would be a defining concern of the boycott and larger structural political movements at the turn of the century. This sense is certainly articulated in Kentwell’s strong critique of the “unfair discrimination” and “outrageous treatment” accorded to Chinese travelers under American Chinese Exclusion.54 This same sentiment intensifies in Kentwell’s later writings in The Voice of New China, in which he articulates the unanimous resentment that “Asiatics” feel for the “feeling of superiority which the English-speaking white race”, and describes foreign concessions in China as a “virulent cancer.”55, 56 Moreover, Kentwell’s personal dealings with racism and discrimination reveal a similar theme of humiliation. His correspondence with the US government following his 1904 detainment harp on this theme, as Kentwell sought reparations for the “humiliation accorded me” in his treatment by immigration officials, and the fact that the exchange was conducted in “the presence of a large number of fellow passengers”, a fact of which Kentwell felt “quite mortified.”57 Clearly, this public humiliation is of central importance to Kentwell and is a primary source of his own outrage.

The notion that Chinese victimization and humiliation both domestically and abroad was tied to

54. “Exclusion—Boycott,” New York Times.

55. “Racial War Inevitable,” The Voice of New China, 1 November 1940.

56. “Retrocession of the International Settlement,” The Voice of New China, 1 March 1939.

57. Kentwell to V.H. Metcalf, 27 February 1906 and Kentwell to President Roosevelt, 20 November 1905, INS 466C.

58. “Exclusion—Boycott,” New York Times.

59. Liang Qichao, “Liang Qichao zhi gebu liewei tongzhi yixiong shu” [Printed letter from Liang Qichao to all comrades in all cities] in Kang Youwei yu Baohuang Hui—Tan Liang zai Meiguo suocang ziliao huihian [Kang Youwei and the Baohuang Hui: A compilation of materials collected by Tom Leung in America], ed. Fang Zhiqin (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 1997), 113.

60. “The New Order in Great East Asia,” The Voice of New China, 1 May 1941.

61. “Exclusion—Boycott,” New York Times.

62. “People Met in Hotel Lobbies,” Washington Post, 14 September 1905.

By the time of his Voice of New China writings, Kentwell had expanded this racial rhetoric to the “yellow race” as a whole, but nonetheless the concern for anti-Asian racism remained. Part and parcel of Kentwell’s pan-Asian political project was the elevation of “the status of the yellow race to a footing of equality with the white race,” and Kentwell repeatedly denounced the now-expanded exclusion laws “prescribing the entry of Asiatics into” the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and beyond.63, 64 Most crucially, within the boycott movement, the larger turn-of-the-century Chinese political project, and Kentwell’s own political evolution, all of these factors coalesced in what Larson describes as an “emotional transformation from disgrace to resistance.” As early as 1906, in his New York Times editorial, Kentwell’s lament that a weak China could not protect her people abroad from American discrimination was tied to a warning: “…if China to-day had at her command an up-to-date navy, an entirely different aspect of affairs would exist, and the exclusion law would be a thing of the past. That Chinese Navy is coming.” A similar sort of political/ national empowerment is evident when Kentwell states: “I am not far from the truth when I say that the boycott will never end or be relaxed until the absolute repeal of the Exclusion act is in sight.” Thus, the humiliation of Exclusion is undone in part by defiant resistance and a promise of its overturning.

The same transformation from humiliation to resistance is evident in Kentwell’s ownership of his Chinese identity, and his statements of pride for his mother’s people. Kentwell’s later renunciation of his British citizenship also falls within this same lineage of resistance. His outspoken call for the retrocession of British territories in China, and vision of a New Order of Asiatic Equality is equally informed by such a transformation, and the

63. Wen Tsung-Yao, “The Founding of a New Order in Asia,” The Voice of New China, 28 March 1939.

64. “Racial War Inevitable,” The Voice of New China.

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a weak and incapable Chinese state is also central to Kentwell’s politics. In 1906 Kentwell bemoaned the fact that China could not “make an effective demand on Washington” on behalf of the Chinese who were discriminated against, detained, and deported under Chinese Exclusion policies. This sentiment mirrored Baohuanghui Vice President Liang Qichao’s concerns that China might “timidly bungle” the 1905 negotiations over the renewal of an Exclusion treaty “if the power of the citizens does not provide a back-up force.”58, 59 Moreover, Kentwell’s later vision of a New Order and New China emerging from Sino-Japanese collaboration and establishing independence, territorial integrity, and the “complete elimination of British and American domination in China and other weak Asiatic countries” was similarly informed by a sense of victimization as a consequence of Chinese weakness.60 Racial self-awareness stemming from unique discrimination against Chinese is also recurrent in Kentwell’s body of work. Between 1905-1906, Kentwell’s language evokes a clear understanding of the unique racism facing Chinese in America, likening their treatment to “dogs” rather than “fellow-creatures,” and noting that no other human being, whether a “New Zealander, a Fiji Islander, a naked savage from the Australian bush, not to mention a Korean or Japanese,” would be subjected to the same treatment as the Chinese in America.61, 62

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channeling of a half-century of frustration with foreign aggression, military defeat, and territorial concessions—not to mention personal humiliation via Western racism and discrimination—towards a political project of redemption and resistance.

Thus, beyond personal ties or involvement within the Chinese transnational political movement of the early 20th century, I argue that Kentwell’s own political evolution was inherently tied to the rhetoric of humiliation, racial self-awareness, and transformation from victimization to resistance that categorized the broader political movement of Kentwell’s time. Moreover, Kentwell’s political evolution was shaped by his own personal experiences with racism and imperialism in Honolulu, New York, and Shanghai. Thus, Larson’s “transformation from humiliation to resistance” takes place not only within the Chinese body politic, but within Kentwell’s own political and personal life.

Understanding Collaboration: Racial Disgrace and the Appeal of “Asia for the Asiatics” “China’s national dignity and identity will inevitably be restored by drawing upon yellow culture instead of white.”

—Wen Zongyao, “The Construction of the New Order in East Asia,” 193965

The question that remains is how Kentwell, an apparent Chinese patriot whose early-life politics fell well within the political mainstream of Kang Youwei’s reformism (and later, alongside Francis Zia, support of Sun Yat-sen’s popular nationalist revolution) would come to commit what in the canon of Chinese history is the greatest of all betrayals: collaboration with the Japanese occupation of China. Rather than condemn or de 65. Wen Zongyao, “The Construction of the New Order in East Asia” (Shanghai: 1939), quoted in Timothy Brook, “Collaborationist Nationalism in Occupied Wartime China,” in Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, ed. Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid (Michigan: University of Michigan Press 2000).

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fend Kentwell’s actions, I seek to link Kentwell’s collaboration to his unique transnational experiences with both American and British racism, and examine the potential personal appeal of the rhetoric of racial equality and liberation invoked by wartime Japan and their Chinese collaborators.

Sven Saaler identifies Kodera Kenkichi’s 1916 “Treatise on Greater Asianism” (excerpted at the introduction of this article) as a cornerstone of early pan-Asianist literature, which would come to define the rhetoric invoked by Japanese wartime officials as well as Kentwell’s own writings in The Voice of New China. Kodera, a mid-level Japanese official and member of the Kenseikai party, articulated pan-Asianism as a call for a “glorious new Asian civilization under Japanese leadership and guidance.”66 As Saaler argues, by the First World War, fears in Japan were emerging over an “imminent clash with the European powers along racial lines,” fueled by Western “yellow peril rhetoric.”67 In this context, Kodera and other pan-Asianists urged “close cooperation” with China, calling on Japan to “become the leader of the yellow race and guide [the other nations], preserve the territorial integrity of China, and strengthen its population and culture.” Kodera continued: “This Asianism I am preaching can be summarized in the slogan: ‘Asia is the Asia of the Asians’”.68 Kodera’s rhetoric would define the arguments of Chinese collaborators, who claimed that only under Japanese leadership could China finally realize its goals of modernization, self-determination, and the expulsion of European aggressors—goals that had defined Chinese political movements since the time of Kang Youwei. While many collaborators no doubt invoked such arguments to obscure their own

66. Kodera Kenkichi, “Treatise on Greater Asianism,” 1916.

67. Sven Saaler, “The Construction of Regionalism in Modern Japan: Kodera Kenkichi and his ‘Treatise on Greater Asianism’ (1916),” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 6 (2007): 1261-1294.

68. Kodera, “Treatise on Greater Asianism.”

69. Timothy Brook, “Collaborationist Nationalism in Occupied Wartime China,” in Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, ed. Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, 159-90, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

70. Wen Zongyao, “The Construction of the New Order in East Asia,” 1939.

the United States. Wen feared that under Kuomintang rule, China would seek modernization along Western lines, rather than rightfully “drawing upon yellow culture” to create a modern China in an Asian context.71 For collaborationist nationalists like Wen, only intra-racial collaboration (i.e., between Japan and China) could begin to undo the ills of fifty-odd years of national racial humiliation.

While it is impossible to ascertain the motivations behind Kentwell’s active role in collaboration, I argue that his experiences with Western racism in a multitude of geographic contexts would have made him particularly susceptible to collaborators’ invoking of racial equality. Clearly, Kodera’s slogan of “Asia is the Asia of the Asians” resonated with Kentwell, who would paraphrase the slogan in The Voice of New China with the editorial “Asia for the Asiatics.” In the editorial, Kentwell invoked Kodera’s understanding of the creation of an Eastern bloc in service of the ending of Western oppression in Asia, stating: “In cooperation with Japan, New China will take measures to throw off these shackles and cooperate in the founding of a powerful Asiatic bloc to overcome the unjust aggression of certain Western powers, especially Britain…”72 Like Wen, Kentwell was highly critical of Kuomintang reliance on British loans and assistance, and, after the creation of a united Kuomintang/Communist front against Japan, of Soviet influence via the Communist party.73 For Kentwell and other collaborationist nationalists, Larson’s formulation of the “emotional transformation from disgrace to resistance” that defined Chinese political leanings at the turn of the century must be extended—to a transformation from disgrace to resistance and, ultimately, retribution. Like Wen Zongyao, Kentwell’s project was not limited to the political liberation of China. Instead, it argued

71. Ibid.

72. “Asia for the Asiatics,” The Voice of New China, 1 March 1939.

73. “The Second Kuomintang-Communist Partnership,” The Voice of New China, 15 August 1938.

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corrupt or self-serving motivations behind collaboration, it is arguable that for some Chinese at the time, collaboration with Japanese truly appeared a viable course towards a better future for the nation.

Along these lines, Timothy Brook argues that traditional historiographic portrayals of collaborators as one-dimensional traitors do not do justice to the complex political climate of the time. Brook invokes the term “collaborationist nationalism” to describe Chinese who, after decades of humiliation at the hands of European aggressors, saw intra-racial collaboration with Japan as a viable pathway from racial humiliation to racial equality.69 Brook points to the writings of Wen Zongyao, a longtime Chinese politician and diplomat who took on a high-ranking position under Wang Jingwei’s collaborative regime, as rhetoric that falls within this realm of collaborationist nationalism. In Wen’s 1939 “The Construction of the New Order in East Asia,” Wen articulates the objectives of the East Asian “New Order” as: (1) termination of China’s colonial status and restoration of Chinese sovereignty, (2) restoration of East Asian values and culture, and (3) achievement of full racial equality between the “yellow and white races.”70 As Wen argued, “if colonialism is a racist relationship…then Japan’s assistance to China cannot be construed as colonialist because Japanese and Chinese are of the same race.” Wen saw collaboration with Japan as not only a political project, but a racial project concerned as much with the establishment of a sovereign China as with a restructuring of racial hierarchies that would place the “yellow race” alongside or above the white race.

Given such a project, Wen and other collaborationist nationalists were highly critical of Kuomintang financial and ideological ties to Great Britain and

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that liberation depended not only on the achievement of political sovereignty, but on the enaction of political and even racial retribution. Likely tied to early-life experiences with racism in both the United States, Great Britain, and the British settlement in Shanghai, this concern with retribution may have deluded Kentwell to overlook Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of China, eyes focused instead on the tantalizing potential for racial retribution. In 1940, Kentwell would clearly articulate such a desire, harping on the “obnoxious exclusion laws” that prescribed entry of Asiatics into the United States, Great Britain, and the British Commonwealth.

As a consequence of this exclusion, he wrote, “… it will not be the least surprising, now that the peoples of Asia, under the efficient and eloquent leadership of Japan, are fully roused, that retaliatory action will be taken against those who have discriminated against the Asiatics.” He continued:

the former Kaiser Wilhelm II and others of his unbalance[d] mentality, but we do state that Asiatics will rise up as one man against their enemies unless those obnoxious restrictions are removed once and for all.74 Given Kentwell’s loathing of Great Britain, the United States, and their “obnoxious” policies, it is no wonder that Kentwell would have been mistrustful of Kuomintang ties to the West. Clearly, in Kentwell’s vision of a New China and a New Order in East Asia, there was no room for Western affiliations.

I have argued that the thematics of the early 19th century Chinese political awakening (as articulated by Larson)—particularly the development of racial self-awareness and an emotional transformation from disgrace to resistance—are recapitulated in Kentwell’s political and personal evolution. As such, it is worth noting that in the above passage, Kentwell appears preoccupied not with Western intervention in the East (though that was a recurring theme of his writings), but with their domestic policies of exclusion, policies with which Kentwell had personal experience. Thus, Kentwell’s political project of collaboration was tied to an equally vital personal project of retribution—the consequence of personal dealings with imperial racism across time and place—that would manifest in an obsession with racial equality for the “yellow race” and a full transformation from disgrace to outright retribution and threats of racial war. It is only within the context of this personal project, I argue, that his collaboration with the Japanese and support for the Axis powers can be explained. In the end, we must understand that Kentwell’s vision of a New China was informed by a transnational perspective of Anglo/American imperialism and racism, crystallized by personal experiences with racism across the globe, which would take the Chinese zeitgeist of national resistance to its extreme.

The present epoch-making changes in Asia marking the period of transition from semi-enslavement to sovereign independence also heralds the revision of the attitude of Asiatics towards the English-speaking white race. It will not be long now when all Asiatic countries will adopt their codes of law to restrict the entry of nationals of those countries which have discriminated against Asiatics. In this way, all undesirable foreigners will be kept out of this part of the world and the peace and prosperity of Asia will have less chance of being disturbed.

On the other hand, it is well within the realm of possibility that if the English-speaking white race continues or increases its policy of racial discrimination against Asiatics, the latter will not only take legal steps to ban the entry of nationals of that race but will also commence an active war against them [emphasis added]. By this, we do not imply the threat of a ‘yellow peril’ as envisaged by

China.

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74. “Racial War Inevitable,” The Voice of New

are significant gaps within Kentwell’s biography that must be addressed in order to fully understand his political and personal trajectory and significance.

Of critical interest are details of his childhood— the context in which he was raised, and the role of each of his parents in his upbringing. Such facts will be especially useful in tracing the evolution of Kentwell’s racial identity. Beyond this, information highlighting Kentwell’s potential involvement with Baohuanghui organizing and the 1905 boycott will provide further insight to his political leanings and work in his early life. Finally, Kentwell’s writing from between 1926 and 1935 (during which time Kentwell wrote alongside Francis Zia) will again be useful in tracing Kentwell’s political evolution.

The cause and context of Kentwell’s passing are also of great biographic interest, as are any existing explanations that Kentwell may have invoked in his post-war trial for wartime collaboration.

References 1. “A Poisonous Reptile Must Be Crushed.” The Voice of New China. 15 April 1939.

2. “Asia for the Asiatics.” Voice of New China. 1 March 1939.

3. “At Oahu College.” The Hawaiian Gazette. 25 June 1897.

4. “Axis Wages War to Liberate Nations Under the British Yoke.” Voice of New China. 1 May 1941.

5. “Became Puppet Solon for Pay.” Spokane Daily Chronicle. 16 January 1946.

6. Brook, Timothy. “Collaborationist Nationalism in Occupied Wartime China.” In Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, edited by Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, 159-90.

Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

7. “Comes To Assist the Chinese of Honolulu.”

San Francisco Chronicle. 24 August 1905.

8. “Exclusion—Boycott. A Chinese-American Student Cries ‘Check’ In the Game.” New York Times. 26 February 1906.

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Kentwell’s Transnational Political Project: Concluding Thoughts and Points of Further Interest Chinese Exclusion, turn-of-the-century Chinese political movements, British neo-colonialism in the East, and wartime politics of collaboration cannot be understood apart from one another. Indeed, their significance can only be understood within the context of their connections. Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen’s respective reformist and revolutionary visions of a modern China were directly informed by the humiliating experiences of Exclusion and British intervention; in the decades that followed, wartime collaborators took the rhetoric of resistance towards one of retribution, becoming ideologues of a project of not only national sovereignty and reconstitution, but of racial liberation and vengeance.

While scholars have sought to contextualize these historical moments through interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship, Lawrence Klindt Kentwell brings these points into conversation by the mere facts of his life. Thus, Kentwell serves as a crucial link between histories of Asian Exclusion in the West, European intervention in the East, and domestic and diasporic Chinese political projects of the early and mid-20th century. In understanding the unique political and personal motivations that drove Kentwell’s personal trajectory, we can come to understand the truly global nature of both modern Chinese political history and European systems of racism, exclusion, and domination. Indeed, Kentwell’s story synthesizes histories of “yellow peril” hysteria and Western policies of exclusion with those of Western intervention in China and the Far East. This imagined “yellow peril” and the very real “white peril” would operate as twin guiding principles of Western policy, dictating the lives of Asians throughout the world, including Kentwell. Kentwell’s experience thus provides a compelling example of the extremes to which these twin pillars of Western anti-Asian racism could push one’s politics.

In the end, this article serves as a small milestone within a much larger work-in-progress; there

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9. File 466-C, Chinese Arrival Files, Honolulu, Records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, National Archives, Pacific Region, San Bruno, Calif.

10. “Foreword.” Voice of New China. 15 August 1938.

11. “German and Italian Achievements.” Voice of New China. 15 April 1939.

12. Gracey, Samuel L. to Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon. Letter. March 28, 1906.

From Dispatches from US Consuls in Foochow, China, 1849-1906. Record Group 59.

Roll 1007. National Archives.

13. Herbert Day Lamson. “The Eurasian in Shanghai.” American Journal of Sociology 41, no. 5 (1936): 642-48.

14. “His Citizenship Attacked.” The Hawaiian Star.

5 March 1903.

15. Kaufman, Alison Adcock. “The ‘Century of Humiliation.’ Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order,” Pacific Focus 25, no. 1 (2010): 1-33.

16. “Kentwell on Home Rule Program.” Evening Bulletin. 15 September 1902.

17. Kentwell Says He Is a Citizen.” The Hawaiian Star. 1 October 1902.

18. Kentwell To Be Great Educator.” The Hawaiian Star. 11 October 1909.

19. Kentwell, Lawrence K. Columbia University Alumni Association Records. Columbia University Archives.

20. Kodera, Kenkichi. Dai-Ajiashugi-ronk: anjyaku [Treatise on Greater Asianism: Chinese Translation]. Shanghai: Hyakujô Shosha and Shômuin Shokan, 1918.

21. “Larry Holt-Kentwell. He lived all over the world.” Oxford Mail. 6 September 2012.

22. Larson, Jane Leung. “The 1905 Anti-American Boycott as a Transnational Chinese Movement.” Chinese America: History & Perspectives.

(2007): 191-198.

23. Liang Qichao. “Liang Qichao zhi gebu liewei 54 | UNFOUND

tongzhi yixiong shu” [Printed letter from Liang Qichao to all comrades in all cities] in Kang Youwei yu Baohuang Hui—Tan Liang zai Meiguo suocang ziliao huihian [Kang Youwei and the Baohuang Hui: A compilation of materials collected by Tom Leung in America]. Edited by Fang Zhiqin. Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe. 1997.

113.

24. “Marriage Announcement.” The Independent. 3 July 1901.

25. “Mr. L.K. Kentwell’s Penalty.” The North China Herald. 27 November 1926.

26. North China Herald. 2 December 1916.

27. “People Met in Hotel Lobbies.” Washington Post. 14 September 1905.

28. “Racial War Inevitable.” The Voice of New China.

1 November 1940.

29. “Retrocession of the International Settlement.”

The Voice of New China. 1 March 1939.

30. Reuter, Edward B. The Mulatto in the United States. Boston: R.G. Badger, 1918.

31. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Sibling Hybridities: The Case of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna.” Life Writing 4, no. 1 (2007): 81-99.

32. Sui, Sin Far. “The Persecution and Oppression of Me.” The Independent. 24 August 1911: 421426.

33. Saaler, Sven. “The Construction of Regionalism in Modern Japan: Jodera Kenkichi and his ‘Treatise on Greater Asianism’ (1916).” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 6 (2007) 1261-1294.

34. Teng, Emma Jinhua. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

35. “The Democrats Endorse Wilcox.” The Hawaiian Star. 20 September 1902.

36. “The Forged Note Case.” North China Herald. 4 April 1925.

37. “The Murder of Lien Ying: An Arrest and Charge at the Mixed Court.” The North China

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Herald. 14 August 1920.

38. “The New Order in Greater East Asia.” The Voice of New China. 1 May 1941.

39. “The Second Kuomintang-Communist Partnership.” The Voice of New China. 15 August 1938.

40. Tu Wei-ming. “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center.” Daedalus 120, no. 2 (1991): 1-32.

41. US Bureau of Immigration File 466-C. Chinese Arrival Files. Honolulu. Records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. RG 85. National Archives. Pacific Region. San Bruno. Calif.

42. US Bureau of Immigration File 715-C. Chinese Arrival Files. Honolulu. Records of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. RG 85. National Archives. Pacific Region. San Bruno. Calif.

43. Wen Tsung-Yao. “The Founding of a New Order in Asia.” The Voice of New China. 28 March 1939.

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The Globalization of K-Pop in the West through American Orientalism Tramanh Hoang

California State University, Fullerton, GS Abstract: In this article, I historicize the Korean Wave and trace the resurgence of K-pop after PSY’s hit music video, “Gangnam Style,” on YouTube in 2012. I explore Orientalism in the US through the 2012 debuts of two female K-pop groups, the Wonder Girls and Girls’ Generation. I examine how PSY’s success and performance as a Korean male artist transforms the gendered Orientalist construction of Asian men in the US. The rising popularity of K-pop in America exposes the Orientalist constructions of both Asian men and women. K-pop does not simply replicate Orientalism, but transforms it for profit.

Introduction K-pop is a genre in Korean popular music that started at the end of the twentieth century as an alternative to the globalization of American popular music in Asia. Korea’s export of K-pop as a cultural product is a collaborative global project between the Korean and American music industries to dominate mainstream America with a new Asian-themed import.1 American Orientalism shapes the introduction of K-pop artists into mainstream American culture. In Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, scholar Mari Yoshihara expands Edward Said’s influential concept of Orientalism, originally concerned with European discourse on the Middle East, by constructing the term around American discourse about China and Japan during the period of US expansion in Asia

1. Ingyu Oh and Gil-Sung Park, “From B2C to B2B: Selling Korean Pop Music in the Age of New Social Media,” Korea Observer 43, no. 3 (2012): 368.

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beginning in the late nineteenth century.2 Yoshihara traces the roots of American Orientalism to the United States’ “informal empire” in China and Japan.3 American Orientalism gained significance as a cultural discourse in intellectual and political debates in elite circles surrounding Asian immigrants in the West Coast and led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.4 At the same time, increasing numbers of immigrant Asian laborers in the West coast “further aggravated the racial construction of Asians as unassimilable aliens,”5 leading to the prevalent stereotype that Asians and Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners in America.

Yoshihara examines the unique roles that White American women played in the field of Orientalism

2. Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

The Second Korean Wave Yoshihara argues that “the nature of American Orientalism changed with the evolving relationship the United States had with the ‘Orient,’” but that “common expressions of Orientalism include objectifying, exoticizing, homogenizing, and feminizing of the ‘Orient’” remain unchanged.9 Both the American and Korean music industries adopt these various expressions of Orientalism in the repackaging of female K-pop groups for American consumption. They exploit the Orientalist fantasies and stereotypes perceived in the East’s imagined relationship with the West as both submissive and

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid, 8.

8. Ibid, 9.

9. Ibid, 6.

feminine. In contrast, PSY’s unprecedented success has captivated the West through the globalization of popular music outside the exploitation of Orientalist stereotypes and at times in direct confrontation with Orientalism in mainstream American culture.

Within the context of the “Korean Wave” beginning in the 1990s as the alternative to “American cultural imperialism,” the globalization of Korean popular music contributes to the tension between the cultural agendas of both Korean and American music producers and consumers of K-pop in Korea and America. Scholars of East Asian studies determined that the Korean Wave needed “to be recast in a more historical light” after such failures of K-pop solo artists like Rain and BoA in the West.10 PSY played a major role in reviving the “Korean Wave” of the early 1990s through his unprecedented online success around the world. PSY’s viral success on YouTube and social media for his “Gangnam Style” music video in 2012 solidified the beginning of the second Korean Wave. Since then there has been a resurgence of scholarship on the popularity of Korean pop music in Europe, the Middle East, and North America due the second Korean Wave. Wonder Girls and Girls’ Generation are two notable female K-pop groups who also entered into mainstream American cultural consciousness in 2012 just before PSY’s viral music video.

As with earlier formulaic and highly manufactured K-pop artists such as BoA and Rain, the entertainment industry and the media reporting on the Korean Wave predicted that K-pop would finally penetrate the West with the US debuts of Wonder Girls and Girls’ Generation in 2012.11 The media’s predictions for the girl groups’ success in the West became exaggerated following the as 10. Oh and Park, “From B2C to B2B,” 368.

11. Patrick St. Michel, “Does Korean Pop Actually Have a Shot at Success in the U.S.?” The Atlantic, January, 30, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/does-korean-pop-actuallyhave-a-shot-at-success-in-the-us/252057/.

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in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as “consumers, producers, practitioners, critics, and experts.”6 She argues that “the growing availability of ‘Asian’ things and ideas from the turn of the century onward facilitated women’s entry in the production of Orientalism.”7 The West’s commodification of Asian objects and ideas about the East led to the spread of “commercial Orientalism” into American popular culture and extended White American women’s role as producers of Orientalism at the turn of the century.8 Yoshihara thus demonstrates that Orientalism has gendered dimensions that affect its construction as much as the historical and ideological context. In this paper, I examine two popular female K-pop groups, the Wonder Girls and Girl’s Generation; a male Korean hip-hop artist, PSY; and their commercial entry into American popular culture through the internet and performances on mainstream American television. I argue that American Orientalism shapes K-pop’s strategy for dominance in the West, while simultaneously reinforcing and challenging the notion that Asians and Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners in America.

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cension of PSY as a representative of K-pop and, by extension, a cultural ambassador of Korea.12 On October 12, 2012, Billboard reported that “PSY’s K-Pop breakthrough on US top 40 radio with ‘Gangnam Style’ is perhaps helping open doors for fellow Korean act Wonder Girls,”13 despite Wonder Girls’ earlier performances and singles in the US market. In addition, PSY is not a singer like the K-pop solo artists and groups who had previously attempted success in the West. PSY was a wellknown Korean hip-hop artist and rapper mainly in his own country before he became known as one of the biggest celebrities in the Korean entertainment industry to be recognized internationally.

Despite his recent popularity, PSY was not always the recognized face of K-pop in South Korea. As part of a larger overseas project to globalize K-pop using South Korean hip-hop, PSY’s South Korean entertainment agency, YG Entertainment, along with several others, joined forces to create a single agency named “United Asia Management” in the same year that PSY signed with YG Entertainment in 2011.14 PSY may not have been the most popular artist in South Korea, but he was valuable on a global scale for “United Asia Management.”

According to ethnomusicology scholar Hae-Kyung Um, these major Korean entertainment agencies united with the goal to “further strengthen the control and influence of the Korean mainstream music industry, which aims to achieve the ambition of

12. Cory Midgarden, “Psy’s Success is ‘No Surprise’ to Wonder Girls,” MTV News, November 30, 2012, http://www.mtv.com/news/1698201/wondergirls-psy-k-pop-success/.

13. Billboard Staff, “Bubbling Under: Wonder Girls Ride K-Pop Wave to U.S. Radio,” Billboard, October 12, 2012, http://www.billboard.com/articles/ chartbeat/474689/bubbling-under-wonder-girls-ridek-pop-wave-to-us-radio.

14. Hae-Kyung Um, “The Poetics of Resistance and the Politics of Crossing Borders: Korean Hip-hop and ‘Cultural Reterritorialisation,’” Popular Music. 32, no. 1 (2013): 61.

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the Korean state marketing Korean popular music globally” through the inclusion of Korean hip-hop in K-pop.15 The viral success of PSY’s video exposes the global forces at work between the West’s and the East’s consumption of popular music and the power struggle between international producers and consumers with America and South Korea as competing global leaders in popular culture.

Made in South Korea or the USA? According to scholars Ingyu Oh and Gil-Sung Park, “cultural hybridization between Western universalism and Asian exoticism (or particularism)... is pivotal in attracting transnational audiences.”16 This results in a collaboration between producers in the American and Korean music industries to market and repackage K-pop as cultural products through “consumer Orientalism” in the US market. Wonder Girls is one of the few K-pop groups to make the Billboard’s “Hot 100” list, making it in 2009 with their Korean hit song, “Nobody.” In 2012, they were number one on Billboard’s “K-pop Hot 100” list twice for their Korean songs “Like This” and “Be My Baby” before releasing their English single “Like Money” featuring American singer Akon in the US after years of practicing their English speaking skills. They were not able to achieve a successful breakthrough into American popular music with “Like Money,” however; it received less praise from fans than their previous Korean hit songs did.17 “Like Money” was first featured on the Teen Nick movie, The Wonder Girls, which was produced

by Nick Cannon in 2012. The music video for

15. Ibid.

16. Oh and Park, “From B2C to B2B,” 375.

17. See, e.g., “How Popular is Wonder GirlsLike Money Getting as of Now?” July 14, 2012, Discussion Forums, Allkpop, http://www.allkpop.com/ forums/discussion/28459/how-popular-is-wondergirls-like-money-getting-as-of-now.

18. Wonder Girls, “Like Money, featuring Akon,” July 9, 2012, Video Clip, YouTube, http://youtu. be/quE6Cq4Q2bs.

video,19 as the words “transmission begin” appear, as if the music video is being watched through someone else’s computer screen at a science lab. The computer narrator says, “Project W.G. deemed a success as human genetics are combined with biogenetics enhancements,” as each member rotates 360 degrees with their Korean names announced by the computer narrator. As the human repackaging operation is complete, the narrator introduces the finalized product as “bionic women given the title of Wonder Girls” and are described as “perfectly designed for complete domination” before they begin their performance. As the words “complete domination” appear on the screen, it is ambiguous whether the Wonder Girls have been racialized for the West to dominate or racialized to dominate the desires of the West. In both these meanings the Wonder Girls are eroticized for the West’s consumption. As they begin their performance they are dressed in matching silver and black metallic body suits that appear to be Tron-inspired costumes. The homogenization and objectification of their Korean bodies is naturally fitting with the human robot theme as they are all dressed to look alike after the completion of the operation to turn them into exotic entertainers in the West’s new frontier in space.

Within the first minute of the Wonder Girl’s music video, expressions of Orientalism appear before the song actually begins. The song lyrics were written by American celebrity song writer Cri$style with the repeating chorus: Love me like money Love me like cars Love me babe love me babe wherever you are Love me up close Love me from afar Love me babe love me babe wherever you are20

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

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“Like Money”18 premiered on YouTube after the movie and, as of October 2014, has over 10 million views. It takes on a futuristic space theme where the five female group members are scientifically engineered robot humans designed to achieve world domination. The music video begins with some incoherent Korean dialogue before the voice of an English speaking female narrator who takes the form of a computer voice translates the incoherent dialogue and describes the process of producing the Wonder Girls for the future of space.

The video literally portrays the process of American Orientalism at work as Jin-Young Park ( JYP), the CEO of the Wonder Girls’ Korean entertainment agency, works madly to reassemble the Wonder Girls’ old human bodies with new, technologically advanced body parts in order to repackage their image for space, a symbol for the Western frontier. Through their costumes, the Wonder Girls are hyper-sexualized for the transportation of their foreign bodies into the US entertainment market.

This evokes the history of US immigration legislation, particularly as codified by the 1875 Page Law, which prohibited the transportation of women from any Asian country for the purpose of prostitution by imposing penalties on any US citizen who participated in such transportations, and denying entry into the US to any immigrant woman suspected of prostitution. The new frontier theme in the Wonder Girls’ music video, then, fits into this historical context and serves to couch the symbolic transportation of women from Asian countries in the context of the sexual pleasures of men in the United States.

The rest of the music video confirms this as well, as JYP symbolically repackages the Wonder Girls for the West and transports them from South Korea to the US in order to profit from their exotic sex appeal in their music videos. An English-speaking computer narrator opens the music

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The chorus asks Akon, who represents Western men, to treat them as sexual objects by expressing their desires to be loved like “money” and “cars.” The girls take turns singing or rapping about manual instructions for how to use and treat them as sexualized human-robots. The first instructions in the beginning of the song are sung by the member Sohee: Listen to me now My heart is screaming out I’m trying to show you how to touch me I’m not just a girl, I’m more precious than pearls And I deserve all you got babe21

race. An English-speaking computer narrator replaces the Korean language narrator as the Wonder Girls translate their exotic foreignness into a comprehensible cultural product to American viewers.22 The dominant Orientalist discourse about the West as modern and East as backwards is so prevalent in American culture that the Wonder Girls’ English single, meant to be their breakthrough into American popular music, was given an Orientalist fantasy theme in hopes of great commercial success in the United States by both American and Korean music producers of this transnational K-pop project.

The nine-girl group Girls’ Generation (also known as SNSD in Korea) made their first US debut in 2012 under the Korean management of S.M. Entertainment with their English song and album titled “The Boys” shortly after the Wonder Girls’ English single. Their music video performance and theme is not as explicitly sexualized as the Wonder Girls’ “Like Money” video on YouTube. However, the February 1, 2012 debut performance on mainstream American TV, of their song “The Boys” to an audience of ecstatic K-pop fans inside the studio and lined up outside with welcome signs in New York City, deserves an in-depth analysis. The Girls’ Generation’ US debut on Live!

With Kelly can be viewed on YouTube.23 Kelly and Howie Mandel began their introduction of Girl’s Generation to American viewers at home by showcasing their fans in the studio and downstairs. As the cameras spotted some fans holding the Canadian flag with their Girls’ Generation signs, Howie made a joke about the fans by calling them “CanAsians.” In doing so, Howie set a racial tone for the introduction of K-pop and Girls’ Generation’s performance for American viewers at home who were about to watch a Korean pop performance.

The YouTube music video lyrics to Girls’ Gen-

These suggestive song lyrics degrade the members of Wonder Girls as Asian imports in the transaction of “commercial Orientalism.” Akon’s lyrics respond to the girls’ instructions, agreeing to love them like “money” and “cars.” This dialogue portrays the stereotype of Asian women as submissive to the sexual desires of men, particularly Western men’s Orientalist fantasies about them. The song ends with a depiction of the Wonder Girls in an outer-space prison built on another planet. Due to their containment in the space prison where they perform, it is more likely that they were built perfectly to be sexually dominated by the West in outer-space.

The complicit nature of the Wonder Girls portrayed in the music video reinforces the belief that Asian women naturally have a sexual desire to be dominated by Western men. This stereotype about Asian women replicates the dominant Orientalist discourse that the West is masculine and dominant and the East is feminine and submissive by nature.

The music video also reinforces the stereotype that Asians are perpetual foreigners who need translation. Ultimately, the only solution to this problem is to eradicate the Asian race as the girls’ bodies were dismembered at the beginning in order to be repackaged as part of a superior human-robot

21. Ibid.

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22. Ibid.

23. “[120201] ABC Live with Kelly – SNSD Full Cut,” February 2, 2012, Video Clip, YouTube, http://youtu.be/_XklTj4_OW0.

for “The Boys” deliver an Orientalist fantasy to the American market. In their song, the Wonder Girls are desperately inviting boys to come out and idolize them as female K-pop stars in the US to ensure their domination in American popular culture and music. This message is made clear as they sing, “this is not a fantasy, this is right for me,” addressing any hesitation about the Orientalist fantasy in the West.

I can tell you’re looking at me, I know what Again, female K-pop groups are marketed through you see the dominant Orientalism discourse that Asian Any closer and you’ll feel the heat. women desire to be sexually dominated by the West.

You don’t have to pretend that you didn’t During their interview at the end of their notice me performance on Live! With Kelly,26 Tiffany, one of Every look will make it harder to breathe. the two Korean American members, spoke on beB-bring the boys out! half of the group in English, which surprised HowWe bring the boys out, we bring the boys ie. He said, “Your English is very good.” With a out. Yeah! smile, Tiffany responded that she was actually born Soon as I step on the scene, I know that in America, further complicating the nature of the they’ll be watchin’ me. Watchin’ me. group as a foreign K-pop group in America. These Get up! two new revelations about Girls’ Generation were I’mma be the hottest in the spot, there ain’t just too much for Howie to take into consideration; no stoppin’ me, therefore, he responded to Tiffany again saying, … It’s not a fantasy, “And…your English is VERY good!” while leaning This is right for me in further towards Tiffany as a way of making it a Living it like a star funny joke. Howie avoided seriously addressing his … Girls Generation make you feel the assumption that Tiffany’s place in a K-pop group heat, and we’re doing it we can’t be beat. automatically makes her a foreigner in America, B-bring the boys out!25 even when she demonstrated her fluent English with a California accent. The conversation about “The Boys” is the first English song by Girls’ Gener- English fluency was taken lightly by both sides ation in their first US album because only two mem- when Tiffany said, “I know! Thank you so much, bers of the nine-girl group speak English fluently. I studied SO hard!” while smiling and laughing.

Unlike the members of the Wonder Girls, who, after The issue of not being able to speak English fluyears of studying, speak enough English to be inter- ently without an Asian accent in America prevents viewed, the majority of the members of Girls’ Gen- K-pop artists from being incorporated into maineration do not speak English and thus probably do stream American culture and presents an even bignot fully comprehend the lyrics that they are sing- ger obstacle to their “domination” in American pop ing to an American audience. Their English lyrics music. Even with two Korean American members in Girls’ Generation, it is difficult to overcome the image of Asians and Asian Americans as perpetual

24. Bubblegum pop is a form of music that is foreigners in America who are unassimilable aliens, generally light, upbeat, and intended to appeal to preteens.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

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eration’s song “The Boys” do not cross over into explicitly eroticized material because the group is best known as a bubble-gum pop group in Korea and Asia.24 But the song is provocative in its similar invitation and instruction on how to fulfill their sexual desires for the boys in the West. They express their confident sexual desires with these lyrics:

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especially when K-pop advertises itself with an Orientalist fantasy theme. The fact that Korean Americans are a part of a K-pop group from Korea also reinforces the stereotype of Asian Americans having more allegiance and loyalty to their home or ancestral country in Asia despite being born in America.

PSY’s Gangnam Style Goes Viral around the World K-pop was brought from the periphery in global popular music to the center of attention in American popular culture and US mainstream media in both a positive and negative light when views of PSY’S “Gangnam Style” music video on YouTube surpassed those of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” music video, which had 800 million views in 2012. “Gangnam Style” has three Guinness World Records for the most viewed and “liked” video, along with the first video to receive one billion views.27 PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music video is currently approaching 2 billion views. His 2013 follow-up single, “Gentleman,” has 700 million views and holds the Guinness World Records title for “the most viewed video online in 24 hours.”28 The Guinness World Records go on to say that PSY is not a one-hit-wonder because “the success of ‘Gentleman’ is more immediate than that of its predecessor…reaching 100 million views in barely four days, compared to the almost two months it took ‘Gangnam Style’ to cross the same threshold.”29 K-pop’s popularity in Asian countries began in the mid-2000s, but the attention K-pop received in US mainstream media and popular culture since PSY’s YouTube success in the West is recent.

Just as Justin Bieber’s music video was surpassed by PSY, what is central in American popular culture is always in flux as cultural industries thrive on producing and defining what is pop 27. Dan Barrett, “Psy Secures New YouTube World Record with ‘Gentleman,’” Guinness World Records, April 25, 2013, http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2013/4/psy-secures-new-youtubeworld-record-with-gentleman-48291/.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

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ular and what is not at any given moment. Stuart Hall argues that “cultural domination has real effects—even if these are neither all-powerful nor all-inclusive” and explains how this works: The cultural industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions of ourselves as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant of preferred culture.

That is what the concentration of cultural power—the means of culture-making in the heads of the few—actually means.30 The idea that PSY might just be a “one-hitwonder” stems from this idea of cultural domination and culture-making. This was one of most common comments made about PSY’s overnight success in American popular culture; PSY’s future career in the US would become dependent on proving that he was not a “one-hit-wonder” or “one-trick-pony.” If PSY was an unpredictable and unproduced phenomenon, then his success either challenges or lacks the traditional kind of cultural power that defines “what belongs to the central domain of elite or dominant culture, and the culture of the ‘periphery.’”31 PSY’s success is due to both of these explanations. Although “Gangnam Style” was originally released by his Korean entertainment agency, YG Entertainment, for PSY’s comeback in Korean popular music without the US directly in mind, “Gentleman” was released after he was signed by Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, to Schoolboy Records in 2012. “Gentleman” was PSY’s comeback and debut in America and the world as a legitimate global Korean pop star under the management of

30. Ibid.

31. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory ed.

Raphael Samual (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 68.

trict in his “Gangnam Style” music video and performance. According to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “symbolic inversion” may be broadly defined as any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms…”34 “Gangnam Style” is inspired by this “symbolic inversion” to, in PSY’s words, “dress classy and dance cheesy,”35 and the basis of the video’s concept is PSY’s grotesque body representing what is aesthetically appealing about the lifestyle of the rich and famous in Gangnam’s high-class, South Korean society. In other words, PSY’s body stands in opposition to the dominant culture’s hierarchy.

PSY’s position in the social periphery places him in the “low-Other,” a concept advanced by Stallybrass and White. Stallybrass and White argue that the construction of the “low-Other” has its roots in Orientalism, where Edward Said first noticed that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of… underground self.”36 Stallybrass and White extends this “phenomenon of colonial and neo-colonial representation” to a pattern in popular culture that expresses hierarchy inversion:

32. Billboard, “Psy, Maximum Exposure,” November 3, 2012, http://www.billboard.com/articles/ columns/k-town/474456/psys-gangnam-style-the-billboard-cover-story.

33. Mallika Rao, “Gangnam Style Trivia: 6 Odd Facts about Psy, Our New Cultural Overload,” Huffington Post, September 28, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/psy_n_1922025.html.

34. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 17.

35. “Surprise! Britney Learns ‘Gangnam Style’ from Psy!” September 10, 2012, Video Clip, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZmkU5Pg1sw.

36. Ibid, 5.

A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other…, but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, con-

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both a major American record label and one of the most powerful entertainment agencies in Korea.

PSY’s penetration into the American popular consciousness extends the second Korean Wave into mainstream American culture. PSY’s music career underwent various controversies in Korea in the decade before he released his sixth studio album and the “Gangnam Style” single as a comeback into Korean popular music.32 As Mallika Rao noted in a Huffington Post article on September 28, 2012, “PSY went on to produce four full-length albums, two of which have been banned in South Korea for sale to minors under the age of 18” and his “legal history includes one arrest for smoking marijuana and one court case for not serving South Korea’s mandatory 21 month military term in full (as punishment, he served two).”33 As a husband and father of twin girls, Jae-sang Park is obviously not the typical “K-pop idol” or family man in Korea; after all, PSY is short for “psycho.”

Already seen in Korea as a controversial Korean rapper with previous run-ins with the law, PSY produces lyrics and music that comes from the social periphery and makes transgressions via symbolic inversions in both Korean and American popular culture. Even the pseudonym “PSY” is symbolic of his location at the social periphery in Korean popular culture and music. PSY has extensively discussed his non-traditional looks compared to other well-groomed and physically trained “K-pop idols” in Korea who even undergo plastic surgery as part of their training process to become “K-pop idols.” PSY’s contrasting physical looks in the K-pop industry played out in his parody and social critique of Korea’s high-class Gangnam dis-

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flictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level.

It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s).37 The dominant society or the power-bloc is often ambivalent towards the social periphery or “low-Others” with mixed feelings of desire and disdain. PSY transgresses from the social periphery via symbolic inversions through his music in both Korean and American society. As noted by Max Fisher in The Atlantic on August 23, 2012, “there’s a long history of fools and court jesters as society’s most cutting social critics, and [PSY] might be one of them” with his YouTube hit song carrying “a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society.”38 Fisher explains the different symbolic inversions in PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music video with the help of a US-based Korean blogger, Jea Kim, and a Korean-American observer, Adrian Hong, on Korean issues and South Korea’s pop culture: Psy hits all the symbols of Gangnam opulence, but each turns out to be something much more modest, as if suggesting that Gangnam-style wealth is not as fabulous as it might seem. We think he’s at a beach in the opening shot, but it turns out to be a sandy playground. He visits a sauna not with big-shot businessmen but with mobsters, Kim points out, and dances not in a nightclub but on a bus of middle-aged tourists. He meets his love interest in the sub 37. Ibid.

38. Max Fisher, “Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2012.

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way. Kim thinks that Psy’s strut through a parking garage, two models at his side as trash and snow fly at them, is meant as a nod to the common rap-video trope of the star walking down a red carpet covered in confetti. “I think he’s pointing out the ridiculousness of the materialism,” Hong said.39 PSY parodies his different roles as the “low-Other” in South Korean pop culture and in American popular culture through his “Gangnam Style” and “Gentleman” music videos on YouTube respectively. In his later “Gentleman” music video, PSY transgresses via symbolic inversion through the English lyrics of the song as he continues to play his role as the foreign, Asian male jokester. From the social periphery, PSY becomes symbolically central in both Korean and American popular culture as a grotesque representation of a “K-pop idol” in the South Korean pop culture, and as the comical Asian male who is a “perpetual foreigner” in American pop culture.

Bill O’Reilly’s commentary on PSY encapsulates the American representation of PSY as a “low-Other” from the social periphery. Despite his long career in the entertainment world in Korea, PSY’s recent arrival in America as a foreigner from Korea is met with extreme hostility when he is discussed on Bill O’Reilly’s show. PSY’s role as the “low-Other” from the social periphery disrupts cultural domination through the global phenomenon of his “viral” video on YouTube, bringing him into the center of mainstream American culture and creating a hierarchy inversion between the West and the East. O’Reilly found this problematic and invited Fox News psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” on November 27, 2012,40 for medical expertise on the internet

39. Ibid.

40. “Bill O’Reilly on ‘Gangnam Style’: ‘What’s Going On???’” Huffington Post, November 28, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/bill-oreilly-gangnam-style_n_2203882.html.

There will be those who dismiss this as having no meaning, just a good beat and a lot of fun. I will not be one of those dismissing it because when you approach a billion views on YouTube and surpass Justin Bieber, perhaps you’re tapping into something and I think what this fella is tapping into is the fact that people don’t want any meaning right now. The most popular music right now is apparently without intelligible words to some extent that simply conveys you to a distant place beat wise, that doesn’t try to convince you of anything, and that doesn’t try to raise your emotions. It’s just sort of like a drug that most people seem to want right now. I think the meaning is that it has no meaning and the lack of insight is reflected in this person’s popularity.

because his music does not have real words or dancing. O’Reilly’s comments reveal the real threat that PSY poses as a foreigner from the socially peripheral in mainstream American culture and society.

PSY does not look, act, or speak the same way as other celebrities in American pop music. To the uninformed, his Korean lyrics are read as unintelligible words and his Korean body represents the threat that North Korea poses to America. In this reading, the reality of PSY’s Asian language and body threatens America. If O’Reilly and Dr. Albow admit that there is real meaning in PSY’s music then the problem is not that there is no meaning, but that there is satisfaction and pleasure in something inherently foreign and socially peripheral in American society. PSY and K-pop disrupt the globalization of American popular culture through the local cultures of other countries. If America and the world are watching and dancing to PSY’s “Gangnam Style” more than Justin Bieber’s “Baby” at the moment, then American popular culture is declining in popularity on the world stage. PSY is tapping into the globalization of popular culture through YouTube and social media. That is the real meaning and threat to American popular culture that O’Reilly and Dr. Albow quickly dismiss as ultimately meaningless.

Conclusion As if Dr. Ablow’s professional opinion were unWhen K-pop is not repackaged with an Oriclear, O’Reilly asked him again if there was any- entalist theme for the West, it stands to oppose the thing wrong with watching PSY’s music video on West’s dominance in the globalization of popular YouTube. Dr. Ablow’s response to O’Reilly was culture when it can succeed without being produced that “it’s the same as getting high in miniature, specifically for “commercial Orientalism”in the West. it’s a drug.” O’Reilly disagreed with Dr. Ablow at There is a lack of Asian and Asian American reprethis point in the interview and said, “Once you al- sentation in the American music industry. K-pop is ter your consciousness with substances it’s a whole attempting to fill that void with their niche success different ball game. I think this is relatively harm- in Asia as a platform, but both American and Koreless.”41 Despite dismissing PSY as harmless and not an producers in K-pop need to adopt a more innovaa drug, O’Reilly racially characterized PSY as a lit- tive style and image outside of Orientalist tropes in tle fat guy from North Korea whose musical talent order to translate their success in Asia to the mainis not comparable to Justin Bieber or Elvis Presley stream US market. PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and “Gentleman” succeeded on YouTube and launched

41. Ibid.

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meaning behind the 800 million YouTube views of “Gangnam Style.” Bill O’Reilly’s overall analysis was racist when he said, “[PSY] is a little fat guy from Pyongyang (North Korea) or someplace” who is relatively harmless other than that his songs do not have real words. Dr. Ablow disagreed that PSY’s comical foreignness is harmless to American society with his medical diagnosis and analysis:

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him into American pop culture. PSY might be the 7. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the new model for K-pop’s success in the West withPopular.’” In People’s History and Socialist Theout relying on complicit expressions of Orientalism, ory, edited Raphael Samual, 227-40. London: but it is too early to predict his staying power and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. influence in the West. Korean and Asian Ameri- 8. “How Popular is Wonder Girls-Like Money can singers in the K-pop genre might also challenge Getting as of Now?” July 14, 2012. Discussion the lack of representation in US mainstream media Forums, Allkpop. http://www.allkpop.com/fowith their transnational ties or, alternatively, conrums/discussion/28459/how-popular-is-wontinue to reinforce Orientalist stereotypes about the der-girls-like-money-getting-as-of-now.

East if they play complicit roles in producing Ori- 9. Midgarden, Cory. “Psy’s Success is ‘No Surprise’ entalism as objectified Asian imports in America. to Wonder Girls.” MTV News, November 30, 2012. http://www.mtv.com/news/1698201/ References wonder-girls-psy-k-pop-success/.

1. “[120201] ABC Live with Kelly – SNSD Full 10. Oh, Ingyu and Gil-Sung Park. “From B2C to Cut.” February 2, 2012. Video Clip. YouTube.

B2B: Selling Korean Pop Music in the Age of http://youtu.be/_XklTj4_OW0.

New Social Media.” Korea Observer 43, no. 3, 2. Barrett, Dan. Guinness World Records. “Psy Se(2012): 365-393. cures New YouTube World Record with ‘Gen- 11. Rao, Mallika. “Gangnam Style Trivia: 6 Odd tleman,’” Last modified April 25, 2013. http:// Facts about Psy, Our New Cultural Overwww.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2013/4/ load.” Huffington Post, September 28, 2012. psy-secures-new-youtube-world-record-withhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/ gentleman-48291/. psy_n_1922025.html.

3. “Bill O’Reilly on ‘Gangnam Style’: ‘What’s Go- 12. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics ing On???’” Huffington Post, November 28, 2012. and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/ University Press, 1986. bill-oreilly-gangnam-style_n_2203882.html.

13. St. Michel, Patrick. “Does Korean Pop Actually 4. Billboard, “Psy, Maximum Exposure.” Last Have a Shot at Success in the U.S.?” The Atmodified November 3, 2012. http://www.billlantic, January 30, 2012. http://www.theatlantic. board.com/articles/columns/k-town/474456/ com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/does-kopsys-gangnam-style-the-billboard-cover-story. rean-pop-actually-have-a-shot-at-success-in5. “Bubbling Under: Wonder Girls Ride K-Pop the-us/252057/ Wave to U.S. Radio.” Billboard, October 12, 14. “Surprise! Britney Learns ‘Gangnam Style’ from 2012. http://www.billboard.com/articles/chartPsy!” September 10, 2012. Video Clip. YouTube. beat/474689/bubbling-under-wonder-girlshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZmkride-k-pop-wave-to-us-radio.

U5Pg1sw.

6. Fisher, Max. “Gangnam Style, Dissected: The 15. Um, Hae-Kyung. “The Poetics of Resistance Subversive Message within South Korea’s Muand the Politics of Crossing Borders: Korean sic Video Sensation.” The Atlantic, August 23, Hip-hop and ‘Cultural Reterritorialisation’.”

2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/internationPopular Music 32, no. 1 (2013): 51-64. al/archive/2012/08/gangnam-style-dissect- 16. Wonder Girls. “Like Money, featuring Akon.” ed-the-subversive-message-within-south-koJuly 9, 2012. Video Clip. YouTube. http://youtu. reas-music-video-sensation/261462/ be/quE6Cq4Q2bs.

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17. Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Rice Krispies, No Mustard Oil: Food and Diasporic Identity in the Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri Sarah Sarkar-El Baz

University of Exeter (UK) ’14 Abstract: Like her origins, the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, an American writer born in England to Bengali parents, span three continents. The short stories in her two collections, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), as well as her novel The Namesake (2003), feature characters whose identities are, though different, all shifting as we follow them through episodes from their daily lives, be it in London, Boston, or Calcutta. But no matter the continent, an overarching feature of her published fiction is the way in which Lahiri lovingly describes the food her characters prepare, serve, and eat, meals ranging from the most mundane to the exceptional. In this article, I will endeavor to explore the ways in which food contributes to the building and expression of Lahiri’s characters’ diasporic identities, by outlining the patterns through which she creates them. Much like the identities of her characters, food as a motif can undergo severe shifts, as it is capable of successively taking on the roles of a symbol of nostalgia for the old country or a way to reconstruct its comforts as best one can; a bone of contention or a bridge between generations; a marker of foreignness or a way to inclusion.

Introduction: Being South Asian in America In the press coverage surrounding the release of her latest book to date, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Lowland,1 words spoken by South Asian American author Jhumpa Lahiri in an interview with The New York Times surfaced again and again: “I don’t know what to make of the term ‘immigrant fiction.’ […] It just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the

1. I have chosen to exclude The Lowland from this study, as it takes place, for the most part, in India and is therefore not relevant to the “diasporic identity” angle.

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world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences.” (“By the Book,” BR8). Hearing Lahiri rebut the very existence of the genre her own writing is most often classified as is jarring. But beyond the explanation she provides in the article – that “[g]iven the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction” – lies another issue, one that is only hinted at: such a categorization subtly but surely delegitimizes the American-ness of the characters that populate her stories, stories told for the most part not from the

gave regarding The Namesake, Lahiri has stated that she is not “representing a group” and “would never claim to be doing that,” specifying that “[t]hese characters are a very few examples of the range of experience out there” (Mudge). But Bhalla’s interviewees, all of whom “expressed a powerful attachment to The Namesake’s poignant representations of the second-generation experience,” and “emphasized that they felt a strong sense of recognition with the novel’s protagonist,” speak to the fact that regardless of what Lahiri “claims” to be doing, her work is unarguably striking a chord of recognition in its second-generation readers (Bhalla 111). The popularity of her work with South Asian Americans has even led to references to her seeping outside of the literary sphere and into American popular culture. For instance, Indian American MC Himanshu “Heems” Suri, formerly of popular alternative hiphop group Das Racist, “shouts out” to the author, comparing himself to a “Queens, street Jhumpa Lahiri” in the group’s performance of the song “Michael Jackson” on popular late-night talk show Conan, while television writer and actress Mindy Kaling named the autobiographical protagonist of her FOX situational comedy, Mindy Lahiri, after her.

Though Lahiri’s popularity among South Asian Americans owes a lot to her nuanced and authentic portrayals of the second-generation experience, another reason for it may be the mere dearth of South Asian representation in American culture.

Comedian Hari Kondabolu speaks of what Jennifer Ann Ho calls “the overwhelming invisibility of Asian Americans in mainstream popular culture” on an episode of the comedy series Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell on U.S. cable network FX, explaining that growing up in America, there were so few figures for him to identify with that he had “no choice but to like […] Apu, a cartoon character voiced by Hank Azaria, a white guy. A white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father” (4). Indeed, media representations of South Asian Americans have dealt, and, to a large Volume I, Fall 2014 | 69

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perspectives of South Asian immigrants, but from those of their South Asian American children.

Rather than classifying them as immigrants, then, we can call them diasporic subjects who, to cite Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur in their introduction to Theorizing Diaspora, are “marked by hybridity and heterogeneity – cultural, linguistic, national – […] and defined by a traversal of the boundaries demarcating nation” (5). Such a definition of the diasporic subject, in its inherent complexity, better fits Lahiri’s characters than the overly reductive label of “immigrant.” Furthermore, the term is particularly appropriate here, as it carries within itself a reference to the historical and geographical phenomenon of the South Asian diaspora; as Rajini Srikanth argues in her book The World Next Door, “the South Asian American experience is one of diaspora. One cannot discuss South Asian American literature without considering the numerous geographical locations this diaspora comprises” (qtd. in Mannur 8). This is also the term employed by Françoise Král in Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature when she speaks of “the global novel” and its “deterritorialized characters who not only roam the world at their ease but who sometimes seem to have jettisoned all cultural moorings.” Král’s words aptly describe Lahiri’s Americans, who we see settle in London, Rome, Paris, or Hong Kong, all the while “negotiating their double belonging and coping with the de facto in-betweenness of their condition” (2).

These complex identity politics are ones real South Asian Americans have to negotiate every day, which explains why Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing, beyond the widely positive response it has garnered in the American literary world, also specifically resonates with second-generation South Asian Americans.

Tamara Bhalla documents as much in her essay “Being (and Feeling) Gogol: Reading and Recognition in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake,” in which she analyzes the responses of nineteen South Asian American readers to the novel. In an interview she

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extent, still do deal mostly in stereotypes; the Simpsons character mentioned above by Kondabolu, for instance, is the owner of a convenience store.2 Such characters evoke the tendency to associate South Asian individuals with food in mainstream American culture through “prevailing one-dimensional portraits of Asians as cooks, waiters, and other fetishized objects of mainstream consumption,” effectively reducing an entire segment of America’s population to the jobs some of them hold since “it is through their labor that Asian Americans have become and continue to be racialized in the political imaginary” (Ho 3; Mannur 15). This contributes in part to the conflation of South Asian American individuals with South Asian food, which Mannur states is “connected to the racism and tension that South Asian bodies experience on a daily basis,” citing several examples of racist discourse in the public sphere that employed this mechanism (15-16).

Food and South Asian identity are therefore conceived as being inherently linked in ways that are sometimes deeply problematic.3 But this association can be reclaimed and it is possible, as Jennifer Ann Ho argues in Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels, to “work against prevailing stereotypes that have associated Asian Americans with food, its preparation, consumption, and service” by complicating this connection (3).

There is, however, the risk of going to the opposite extreme, as exemplified by the ideas of Asian American cultural critic and author Frank Chin and his concept of “food pornography,” which Mannur defines as Chin’s “desire to banish from Asian American rhetoric any evocation of the culinary. […] His targets, most typically women authors, are those who deliberately use a culinary idiom to an 2. The British equivalent to the “convenience store owner” stereotype being that of the corner shop.

3. It is worth noting that, due to the countries’ different immigration patterns and ethnic breakdowns, South Asian food is nowhere near as ubiquitous in the United States as it is in the UK, and is therefore viewed as much more of a novelty.

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chor depictions of racialized life for Asian Americans” (15). I do find Chin’s argument valid to an extent. The motif of food can indeed be used and over-used; the universality of the experience of eating can serve to pander to non-Asian American readers by bringing in a relatable experience, all the while playing on the aforementioned connection that exists in the American collective unconscious and turning “unfamiliar” foods into a cheap tool for exoticization. But I would also argue that Chin’s condemnation is far too general, as it is based on the assumption that all writers use mentions of food in the same way. It is aimed only at women authors, while also specifically vilifying domestic (i.e. non-professional) cooking, an element that is, in Asia as well as in America, still considered as being very much “women’s work,” thus giving his criticism what I consider to be a fairly sexist edge.

Lahiri’s work references food enough to give Chin heartburn, to the point that one of her non-fiction pieces received a James Beard Foundation Award, the highest distinction in the field of culinary journalism. It seems fair to assume, therefore, that she has manipulated the food motif and its loaded implications with nuance and subtlety. In the essay “Edible Écriture,” in which he likens the act of reading literature to eating, Terry Eagleton states that “[i]f there is one sure thing about food, it is that it is never just food. Like the post-structuralist text, food is endlessly interpretable, as gift, threat, poison, recompense, solidarity, suffocation” (Griffiths 204). In this article, I will be analyzing the ways in which Jhumpa Lahiri uses food in her fiction to navigate, describe, and, most importantly, build her characters’ South Asian American identity while still managing to accurately render its complexity. In the following chapters, I will attempt one interpretation of how food is “never just food” in Lahiri’s writing, analyzing how she uses it to create the South Asian American identities of her characters and exploring how food plays different roles in the shaping of each generation’s identity.

ing the readers of the inherent absence at the centre of Ashima’s life, “even now that there is barely space inside her” (1). The story’s protagonist, not yet born, is about to be brought into (and brought up in) a world that his parents view as lacking something.

Kessler argues that “like an hors d’oeuvre,” opening on food scenes “stimulates the reader’s appetite for the larger meal ahead.” In this first paragraph we are practically offered a menu, one that promises us not only a story of nostalgia, but also the combining of typically American ingredients into something that is not quite traditionally American (151).

It also, by virtue of its setting, announces Lahiri’s preoccupation with the liminal space of the immigrant home – the kitchen – which acts as a site of creation of the diasporic self. The first American kitchens Lahiri’s South Asian immigrants encounter are less than welcoming to them. For instance, Ashima, disappointed by the barely salubrious apartment she first occupies in Cambridge because it does not conform to the vision of America she had been taught to expect by “movies she’d seen with her brother and cousins at the Lighthouse and the Metro,” chooses to focus in her letters to her parents back in Calcutta4 on “the powerful cooking gas that flares up at any time of day or night from four burners on the stove, and the hot tap water fierce enough to scald her skin, and the cold water safe enough to drink” (30). Ruma’s widowed father in “Unaccustomed Earth” recalls his own early days in the country, describing a kitchen that we can imagine is similar to the one Ashima skirts around in her letters, a “tiny kitchen” in which his wife used to cook using “an electric stove” (Unaccustomed Earth 28; Interpreter 174). These kitchens, though austere, are more welcoming still than those

4. Although today the de-anglicised spelling of the city’s name, Kolkata, less loaded with colonial implications, is preferred, I will match Lahiri’s spelling – most likely chosen because most of her fiction takes place prior to the city’s renaming - from now on.

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From Hungry for Home to Seasoned Immigrants: The Culinary Nostalgia of the First Generation While the second generation, having grown up in America, is usually at the center of Lahiri’s stories, these characters often contemplate their own parents’ lives in attempts to comprehend the displacement they have experienced and the ways in which this affected their own upbringings. Lahiri herself has said, “[l]ike most children of immigrants, I am aware of how important food becomes for foreigners who are trying to deal with life in a new world. […] My parents have given up so many basic things coming here from the life they once knew – family, love, connections – and food is one thing that they’ve really held onto” (qtd. in Mudge) In this chapter, I will explore how Lahiri’s fiction depicts the first generation’s relationship to food in America and how it evolves through their lives in the country.

Brad Kessler starts the formulation of his “Gastronomic Theory of Literature” by considering a friend’s remark that “every good novel she’d ever read opened with a food scene in the very first or second chapter,” before claiming that food in fiction is an effective way of engaging “all the reader’s senses” while lending one’s writing “a concreteness, a specificity, a round tactile feel, like an apple in hand” (149; 151). While both Lahiri’s collections open on stories that feature food as their central motifs, neither quite possesses the gripping quality of The Namesake’s opening paragraph, where a pregnant Ashima Ganguli “stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl,” managing to create only a “humble approximation” of what she craves. Three lines in, we know that “as usual, there is something missing,” that no matter how much salt and lemon juice she adds into the bowl, she misses not the traditional snack itself but its context, the “Calcutta sidewalks and railway platforms” where it is sold (1). As Kessler surmises, the scene, with its descriptions of textures, smells, and tastes, engages the readers’ senses while also inform-

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of the drab rooms rented by Bengali5 bachelors, like Pranab Kaku’s in “Hell-Heaven” where Pranab is “permitted to use the kitchen only at specified times of the day” and “instructed always to wipe down the stove with Windex and a sponge.” These are conditions that the young narrator’s parents agree are “terrible” but they cannot compare with, worse still, those of the narrator’s room in “The Third and Final Continent,” which simply features “a sign on the door” announcing that “cooking was strictly forbidden” (Unaccustomed Earth 62; Interpreter 174).

Thankfully this disappointing experience is only transitory, and the characters, after they have founded families, move to suburban homes. However, while this move is “a marker of success, of an admittance into ‘real’ America,” it is also, to Ashima, “more drastic, more distressing than the move from Calcutta to Cambridge had been” (Varvogli 132; The Namesake 49). The analysis of the kitchens – or lack thereof – brings to light an important motif: the women cook, but the men cannot or do not. Tamara Bhalla debates that though “the food metaphor contributes to a limited characterization of South Asian female subjectivity,” South Asian readers’ mothers’ “recognition of Ashima’s experiences recalibrates the stereotypes” by couching them in authenticity, while Koshy argues that writing these “slight, inconspicuous, and fleeting events of daily life” into importance is Lahiri’s way of expressing her “feminist concerns” (120-1; 595).

The fact remains that until they find wives, Lahiri’s first-generation bachelors subsist on diets of American convenience foods like that of the narrator of “The Third and Final Continent.” The narrator of that story asserts that “in a week [he] had adjusted, more or less: [he] ate cornflakes and milk, morning and night,” a routine that cannot be mistaken for the adoption of American culture through its food,

5. It is important to note that while the terms “South Asian,” “Indian” and “Bengali” are far from interchangeable, all of Lahiri’s South Asian characters, whether they are from India or Bangladesh, are Bengali.

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since he goes back to eating full Bengali meals as soon his wife joins him from India (Interpreter 175).

Unlike others, however, this character does not benefit from Lahiri’s repeated use of what Koshy calls “the trope of the host-guest.” While the first-generation diasporic subjects are still all “guests in the host country,” they, in turn, let guests into their homes (599). This allows the hosts, slightly more established in the country, to further this feeling in themselves by opposition and through a process of initiation as exemplified in “Once in a Lifetime”: “your parents were slightly older — seasoned immigrants, as mine were not” (Unaccustomed Earth 244). Beyond helping the hosts to further their own place in America and the new arrivals to familiarize themselves with the new country, this trope also acts as a fascinating unifier, as is the case in “Hell-Heaven,” where Aparna and Shyamal welcome Pranab, a young man “from a wealthy family in Calcutta,” who “had never had to do so much as pour himself a glass of water before moving to America” (Unaccustomed Earth 62). The “cruel shock” of being away from one’s motherland first hits all the immigrants in the same way, uniting them even after it fades in the hosts, who, though they do not still feel this shock, can still very much identify with it (Unaccustomed Earth 61). The shock’s effects manifest themselves through food, as evidenced by the fact that “in his first month” Pranab “lost nearly twenty pounds,” and their class difference means nothing to the couple who welcome him into their home and offer him a permanent seat at their table. As we see in “Once in a Lifetime,” “those differences were irrelevant in Cambridge” (Unaccustomed Earth 62; 225).

But the uniting of immigrants through food goes even further than class, as illustrated in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”: “the hospitable bond that develops between Lilia’s Indian parents and their East Pakistani guest refutes the bloody logic of Partition” to the point where the young, American-born Lilia is entirely unaware of their differences, since their eating habits are identical: “they

“The store is far?”

“Just a few minutes.”

“But you must take the car?”

I nodded, and she looked disappointed.

“Without a car there is nowhere to go?”

“Not really. Can you drive?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not hard. I’m sure you could get a license.”

“Oh, no,” she said, not as if she were incapable, but as if driving were beneath her.

“I would not like to learn.” (Unaccustomed Earth 269) This exchange expresses Chitra’s isolation from her surroundings, specifically places where she could choose the ingredients she wants, while also expressing a memory of home; like “Mrs. Sen’s” eponymous character, she is unwilling to learn how to drive because it would fully detach her from India, which she still considers “home”: “I am learning […] but I am a slow student. At home, you know, we have a driver” (Interpreter 113).

Laura Ahn Williams offers a detailed analysis of the foodways of this particular short story in a section she titles “Missing Ingredients,” a phrase that perfectly suits an omnipresent motif in Lahiri’s stories, in which the characters are often concerned with finding traditional Bengali ingredients in attempts to recreate home in America. Mrs. Sen’s yearning for freshwater fish, for instance, is echoed in The Namesake’s first sentence, when we find Ashima “wishing there were mustard oil” (73; 1). These rarities are carefully searched for and treasured when found: Ashima is thrilled to have “recently found a kind butcher on Prospect Street willing to pull [chicken skin] off for her,” Pranab’s ability to drive Aparna and her daughter to “India Tea and Spices in Watertown” is highly valued, and Lilia’s parents “purchased [green chilies] on monthly trips to Chinatown and stored [them] by the pound in the freezer” (The Namesake 5; Unaccustomed Earth 66; Interpreter 30). In “Indian Takeout,” Lahiri recalls this very situation in her own childhood, returning from trips to Calcutta with a Volume I, Fall 2014 | 73

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ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands […] chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for dessert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea” (Koshy 596; Interpreter 25). Lilia’s parents’ social isolation and desire for South Asian company, as well as their physical distance from the political issue, renders insignificant to them the fact that Mr. Pirzada is Muslim; though “for many [Hindus and Muslims], the idea of eating in the other’s company was still unthinkable,” they do so every night, before turning to the television set in hopes of seeing “footage from Dacca on the news” (Interpreter 26; 34).

The story of Mr. Pirzada also features another pattern in the freshly arrived immigrant. The story’s titular character does a “curious thing” before each meal: he lays out next to his plate a pocket watch set to Dacca time, symbolizing to Lilia the family he left behind (Interpreter 30). This ritual makes perfect sense when examined in parallel with The Namesake: for her first few months in America, as if suffering from an extended form of jet-lag, Ashima imagines, at each of her own mealtimes, her family’s own food-related activities in Calcutta. She visualizes how, “in the kitchen of her parents’ flat on Amherst Street, at this very moment, a servant is pouring after-dinner tea into steaming glasses, arranging Marie biscuits on a tray,” or she thinks of “her mother at the market, a burlap bag in hand, buying vegetables and fish.” (5; 44). In their early days in America, these characters are, through food, still living in their native countries, inhabiting another time zone.

In spite of its unifying power, however, the repeated ritual of hosting other immigrants speaks to the isolation felt by Lahiri’s diasporic subjects in the New England suburbs of the 1970s, especially by the women, who are effectively confined to their homes by their inability to drive, as we see in “Year’s End”:

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whole suitcase dedicated specifically to food, since “in Rhode Island […] back in the Seventies, Indian groceries were next to impossible to come by.”

Those carefully collected ingredients were “enough […] to make Calcutta seem not so very far away.”

Food preparation and consumption is therefore framed as the way through which Lahiri’s first-generation characters assert their identities as South Asians while still occupying what Judith Caesar calls “American spaces”: “places to re-imagine” as Indian, but also places which the next generation can re-build as Indian-American (50; 67). As Varvogli points out in her analysis of The Namesake, “it is no coincidence that she has made her protagonist an architect” (131).

“Fluent Navigators,” Picky Eaters: The Second Generation, Food, and Their Parents The first generation’s diasporic offspring are, for the most part, very different from their parents, to the point that “when Ashima and Ashoke close their eyes it never fails to unsettle them, that their children sound just like Americans” (The Namesake 65). Their children are indeed, born legally American and, since India does not recognise dual nationality, only American. As Michiko Kakutani puts it in her review of Unaccustomed Earth, they are “fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture,” “having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives.” We can see as much in “Only Goodness,” in which Lahiri writes that the parents “relied on their children, on Sudha especially. It was she who had to explain to her father that he had to gather up the leaves in bags, not just drag them with his rake to the woods opposite the house. She, with her perfect English, who called the repair department at Lechmere to have their appliances serviced” (Unaccustomed Earth 138).

This role as “translators” makes the children the force that drives first-generation immigrants’ assimilation into America, and I will, in this chapter, explore the second generation’s relationship to food, the ways 74 | UNFOUND

in which it differs from their parents’, and how this difference shapes both generations’ identities.

These children’s arrival into their parents’ world is, fittingly, heralded by a dietary disruption: “she had spit out her tea, accusing him of mistaking the salt for sugar. To prove himself right he had taken a sip of the sweet liquid from her cup, but she had insisted on its bitterness, and poured it down the sink. That was the first thing that had caused her to suspect, and then the doctor had confirmed it, and then he would wake to the sounds, every morning when she went to brush her teeth, of her retching” (The Namesake 11). References to morning sickness are present in many of Lahiri’s stories, and are permeated with meaning, as she uses pregnancy as an extended metaphor for immigration, one that “suggests that the transition from immigration to assimilation at once partakes of public recognition and is also an insular, private, and internal process that carries with it the promise of resolution” (Bhalla 120). Integrating elements of food into this metaphor, therefore, serves to place food at the center of the first generation’s diasporic identity, while the expectant mother’s changing tastes foreshadow the unborn child’s diverging preferences.

These babies are then welcomed into the world through the food-centric Bengali tradition of the annaprasan, or rice ceremony, as pictured in The Namesake: “There is no baptism for Bengali babies […] Instead, the first formal ceremony of their lives centers around the consumption of solid food” (38). This “first formal ceremony” is an elaborate affair, with “food arranged in ten separate bowls,” and though it is typically Bengali, it features at its heart elements that are, incidentally or deliberately, already hybridized. While “Ashima regrets that the plate on which the rice is heaped is melamine, not silver or brass or at the very least stainless-steel,” “[t]he final bowl contains payesh, a warm rice pudding, […] alongside a slice of bakery cake” (39).

Gogol is therefore simultaneously introduced not only to “rice, the Bengali staff of life,” but also to

or box mixes that can be found in any supermarket, a stark contrast to the painstakingly prepared multi-course Bengali meals Ashima serves, their ingredients precious and carefully collected. This could, as Timothy K. August puts it in his analysis of Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir of growing up in America, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, merely be a way to “create a sense of intimacy with the reader” (106). However, August also frames this use of brands as a possible form of commodity fetishism, one that promises “neutral, interchangeable commodities that are a part of a time with no future and no discernible past” (107). The promise these idealized commodities hold, namely those of neutrality and timelessness, are diametrically opposed to the very nature of growing up in a diasporic household, since being the child of immigrants in America brings with it “the structural necessity of having a story,” one that will be questioned and probed for “authenticity” and met with skepticism, as Ho points out in an account of her own experience of growing up in America ( Jain 4; Ho 2).

It is very important to note that, as Anupama Jain puts it, “anxieties are produced because, for the children of South Asian immigrants who are part of the diaspora, there is always another site of identification than the United States, which plays a part in their negotiations of national belonging,” and a degree of awareness of this notion is necessary to the understanding of the forces at play in the interaction of this commodified food with second-generation children’s identities (11). Indeed, August proposes a yet more pervasive explanation for Nguyen’s, and by extension Gogol’s, insistent desire for American food. He suggests the second generation’s insistence for American food might be “the aspiration to whiteness,” a desire to not stand out in the “overwhelmingly white” communities they live in by emulating the perfect lives promised by “the women on commercials and in the Sunday coupons,” wishing they too could eat food prepared by “white mothers in aprons” (107; Nguyen 125).

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an American dessert, both “for the very first time” (38-9). This evokes Stuart Hall’s definition of the diasporic conception of identity as shaped by diasporic experience, an identity “which lives in and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (235).

This hybridity is omnipresent in Gogol’s upbringing through what he eats as he grows up.

While the boy has been taught how to “eat on his own with his fingers, not to let the food stain the skin of his palm” and has “learned to suck the marrow from lamb, to extract the bones from fish” the Bengali way, he is also fed “peanut butter and jelly sandwiches” (54-5). After the birth of Gogol’s sister, his parents allow the children to “fill the cart with items that he and Sonia, but not they, consume: individually wrapped slices of cheese, mayonnaise, tuna fish, hot dogs” (65).

Gogol recalls the Saturdays of his childhood, accompanying his parents to parties at their Bengali friends’ homes, through the meals they featured, “eating curry off paper plates, sometimes pizza or Chinese ordered for the kids” (63). While early on, those foods are viewed as equals and remembered on the same level, this soon changes: “at his insistence, his mother concedes and makes an American dinner once a week as a treat, Shake ‘n Bake chicken or Hamburger Helper prepared with ground lamb” (63). Some degree of hybridity is maintained here by his mother’s refusal to use beef, but the child’s “insistence” indicates preference for more traditionally “American” foods (63; 80). This could stem from a desire for a change from Indian food, as we have previously seen Gogol grow bored with his father’s limited repertoire while his mother was unable to cook, “bored of eating the same thing day after day” (63). Gogol’s documented tendency to tire of foods explains this craving for the new and unfamiliar American meals, in an interesting reversal of the established American fetishized view of Indian food as “exotic” (Mannur 11).

It is worth noting that the American foods listed here are all either processed convenience foods

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This is pursued further in “Only Goodness,” in which Sudha reminisces over how, growing up, she tried to protect her younger brother from suffering like her because of his difference, promising herself that her brother would not “slip through the cracks” as she had (136). This involved, like Nguyen’s story, a certain degree of concealment of the way her family lived and ate, as well as attempts to emulate the lives of her White American friends by procuring for her brother the same objects they owned: “She sought out all the right toys for him, scavenging from yard sales […] for things that she’d discovered in the playrooms of her friends” (137). She did not, however, manage to spare herself or her brother the same shame and humiliation Nguyen endured, when at lunchtime, her carefully contained “domestic world would spill out”; Sudha and Rahul would be “teased at school for the color of their skin or for the funny things their mother occasionally put into their lunch boxes, potato curry sandwiches that tinted Wonderbread green” (109; Unaccustomed Earth 143). Anita Mannur points out that this image is the one Michiko Kakutani “zeroes in on” in her review of Lahiri’s collection, titled “Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures, Conflicted Hearts,” and that this attention, by marking the sandwiches as a sign of “disruptive otherness,” speaks to the way America “invests heavily in the ability of food to produce and contain difference,” especially in the case of Indian food, which, “within the framework of mainstream America, […] marks a kind of visceral difference analogous to the indelible traces race leaves on the immigrant body” (151). In light of Mannur’s analysis, it becomes evident that the remark on the children’s lunch, where even the use of the indisputably American Wonderbread does not suffice to temper the foreignness of the sandwich’s filling, cannot be read as separate from the first taunt on Sudha and her brother’s skincolor, but must be seen as an extension of it; their bodies are racialized by the food they consume in the same way the bread’s literal whiteness is, in 76 | UNFOUND

the eyes of their classmates, tainted by the curry.

Arriving in America, Lahiri’s first-generation immigrants do not need to feel like they are marked by “difference,” since America is, to them, the foreign land. Their children, however, born in America but raised in what Varvogli terms culturally South Asian “ethnic homes,” have to come to terms with their own “difference,” which, as we have seen through “Only Goodness,” often happens in school. Such is the case in The Namesake too; as soon as Gogol and his father enter the building, they are singled out as Indian by the principal, who “shakes Ashoke’s hand and tells him that there are two other Indian children at the school, Jayadev Modi in the third grade and Rekha Saxena in fifth.

Perhaps the Gangulis know them?” (57). But as they grow up, these children learn how to navigate the American world they live in as diasporic subjects, and can help others do the same, as we see in the Unaccustomed Earth story “Year’s End.” In this story, the American-born narrator, Kaushik, at first reluctant to interact with Piu and Rupa, his young stepsisters newly arrived in America, ends up initiating them into a new American experience the first time they leave the house without their mother by taking them to “Dunkin’ Donuts,” which he explains to them is “a place that sells donuts. Donuts are a kind of cake, with a hole in the center” (270).

He introduces them to the unfamiliar concept of the drive-through, gives them their first dollar to spend, and watches them delight in contemplating the display case at the shop, carefully selecting which donut to take back to their mother, eventually settling on “[t]he one with the colors on top,” since according to Piu, “that is prettiest” (273). This scene, through the girls’ eyes, transforms the familiar cultural image of the frosted donut and its multicolored sprinkles into something new, and their desire to share this experience with their mother displays the mechanisms of acculturation to the new country in action. Kaushik shows the girls something new, and they, in turn, initiate their mother.

between “an artificial or a live Christmas tree” to the community with which they have surrounded themselves (65). For the sake of their children, then, they celebrate these holidays that, at first, have no meaning for them; but through their repetition and the addition of Indian details, these events become family traditions specific to the Gangulis, and the family makes American holidays their own.

This is not the case in “Hell-Heaven,” in which Usha’s parents “did not normally celebrate Thanksgiving,” as “the ritual of a large sit-down dinner and the foods that one was supposed to eat was lost on them” (Unaccustomed Earth 77). But when invited

by Pranab and his new American wife, Deborah, to celebrate the holiday with Deborah’s extended family, they make a concession and join in, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Due to the distaste of Usha’s mother for the union of Pranab and Deborah, the whole day is viewed through an overly critical lens: “food was being prepared when we arrived, something my mother always frowned upon, the kitchen a chaos of people and smells and enormous dirtied bowls,” the guests are forced to sit “in an alternating boy-girl formation that made the Bengalis uncomfortable,” and Usha knows “that afterward, on the way home, my mother would complain that the food was all tasteless and bland” (77-9). But this does nothing to temper Usha’s enjoyment: she admires their way of life, how Deborah and her family “[joked] with one another as they chopped and stirred things in the kitchen,” and is glad to be included with them in the preparation of the meal, when, “out of [her] parents’ sight,” she is given beer to drink. The whole experience is transgressive, giving her a taste of the life she envies: her mouth “watered at the food” arranged on their table. However, this difference between Usha’s family and the one formed by Deborah and Pranab is somewhat reconciled by Pranab’s toast, in which he thanks Usha’s mother: “this woman hosted my first real Thanksgiving in America. It might have been an afternoon in May, but that first meal at Volume I, Fall 2014 | 77

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The girls are also about to celebrate their very first Christmas, and “they’re terribly excited about it,” and though we are not privy to Piu and Rupa’s first celebration of the holiday due to Kaushik’s inability to stay in the house he associates with so many painful memories, we do see characters celebrate American holidays in other stories (264).

This is the case, for instance, in The Namesake and “Hell-Heaven,” which both depict American holidays very differently, with radically diverging effects on the child/parent relationship. While Ashoke and Ashima continue to celebrate Indian religious festivals, these are slowly pushed aside. Pujas are “scheduled for convenience on two Saturdays a year,” and there is no doubt that young Gogol and Sonia are reluctant attendees: they are “dragged off to a high school or a Knights of Columbus hall overtaken by Bengalis, where they are required to […] eat bland vegetarian food” (63). The disappointment in these events is made obvious by the lack of interest in the food that comes with their celebration. They “can’t compare to Christmas,” which is celebrated “with progressively increasing fanfare,” in part because Christmas, an American national holiday, brings with it “days home from school” and also harbors the promise of “cookies and milk” to “set out for Santa Claus.” Though it does not happen overnight, and is for Ashoke and Ashima a deliberated process, American holidays and their accompanying food rituals are slowly but surely incorporated into their lives. They “color boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter,” and “learn to roast turkeys at Thanksgiving,” but concessions to their Indian palates are made, as the birds are still “rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne.”

Fourth of July celebrations involve a “barbecue on the porch,” but they eat tandoori on those occasions rather than hamburgers and hot dogs (64). However, it is important to note that ”each step, each acquisition, no matter how small, involves deliberation, consultation with Bengali friends,” Ashoke and Ashima choosing to defer decisions like the choice

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Boudi’s table was Thanksgiving to me. If it weren’t for that meal, I would have gone back to Calcutta” (80). Pranab’s playing on the symbolic significance of the holiday actualizes and universalizes its meaning, making it relevant to the Bengali guests, the opposite of Deborah’s father’s coolly-received joke “Here’s to Thanksgiving with the Indians,” which serves only to unnecessarily single out half the guests by pointing out their already visible difference (79). Pranab’s reconciliation of Bengali and American culture, through showing that they are not mutually exclusive, serves to foreshadow Usha’s mother’s slow acceptance that Usha “was not only her daughter but a child of America as well” (82).

Stuart Hall explains that diasporic identities “are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (236). The ways in which Lahiri’s second-generation Americans’ childhood experiences serve to shape and guide the first generation’s shift from South Asians to South Asian Americans through changing attitudes to food, with the constant transformations it brings, cement her characters as inherently diasporic.

The Culinary Anxieties of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjects After they have grown into South Asian American adults, the second-generation children no longer need to help their parents navigate America; they are, however, still engaged in the on-going process of coming to terms with their own ever-shifting identities. In some cases, as their parents did before them, they need to negotiate how to raise their own children whether in familiar or foreign lands.

Even as adults, however, some of Lahiri’s characters still endure the racial microaggressions of their childhood. Solórzano et al. define microaggressions as “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (62). In Lahiri, these are often food-related, reflecting Mannur’s conception that in 78 | UNFOUND

the American collective consciousness, food is often conceived of as being “indelibly grafted onto bodies of racialized subjects,” “serving to negatively racialize South Asian bodies” (5). This is the case, for instance, for Gogol at a party thrown in honor of his birthday by his girlfriend’s parents. He speaks to “a middle-aged woman named Pamela,” who, going by his skin color, immediately asks him “at what age he moved to America from India,” only to dismiss him when he explains he is, like her, from Boston. She consequently turns the conversation back to India: “I once had a girlfriend who went to India.”

“Oh? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. All I remember is that she came back thin as a rail, and that I was horribly envious of her.” Pamela laughs.

“But you must be lucky that way, [….] you must never get sick.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” he says, slightly annoyed. […]

“But you’re Indian,” Pamela says, frowning. “I’d think the climate wouldn’t affect you.”(157) Pamela then projects her very limited conception of India onto Gogol through food, all the while denying him his identity as an American in spite of the fact that he has clearly stated it as such to her. Along with this type of microaggression, Lahiri’s characters are also often associated with food in ways that, while more innocuous, still serve to exoticize them, to mark them as different, and as non-American.

This is the case in “Sexy,” where Miranda, the story’s White American protagonist attempts to feel closer to the married man of South Asian origin she is having an affair with, by going to “an Indian restaurant, and [ordering] a plate of tandoori chicken. As she ate she tried to memorize phrases printed at the bottom of the menu, for things like

frigerator” (175). His watching Sang so closely and his contrasting of her unfamiliar food with his in the refrigerator serve to exoticize and fetishize her, turning her, through his intense gaze, into a beautiful commodity, on display, to be consumed by him.

But these projections of exoticism onto diasporic subjects are sometimes reversed, in an updated echo of these characters’ idealization of American food when they were children. When the characters are older, however, their desire for those foods takes on a new aspect, in the case, for instance, of The Namesake’s Gogol, who aspires to the lifestyle of his girlfriend Maxine and her parents. Lahiri here reverses the vilified practice of “food pornography” in South Asian American literature by describing the Ratliffs’ meals at length, zeroing in onto the smallest details and counterintuitively investing great detail into the description of what is noted as being a minimalistic meal: Lydia serves the food on broad white plates: a thin piece of steak rolled into a bundle and tied with string, sitting in a pool of dark sauce, the green beans boiled so that they are still crisp. A bowl of small, round, roasted red potatoes is passed around, and afterward a salad. They eat appreciatively, commenting on the tenderness of the meat, the freshness of the beans. His own mother would never have served so few dishes to a guest. (133) He falls in love not only with Maxine but “quickly, simultaneously, with the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner of living, for to know her and love her is to know and love all of these things” (137).

But his love for the way they live is expressed chiefly through food and the rituals that come with it: [H]e learns to love the food she and her parents eat, the polenta and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco, the meat baked in parchment paper. He comes to expect the Volume I, Fall 2014 | 79

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‘delicious’ and ‘water’ and ‘check, please’” (Interpreter 96). Unaware of any other ways to interact with Indian culture, the first place Miranda chooses is a restaurant, echoing August’s statement that “[t]hese restaurants can come to function as important contact zones where, in order to eat, non-Asian bodies travel to spaces filled with textures, smells, languages, and etiquette, and make decisions about how to negotiate this physical and material encounter” (99).

While these contact zones can transmit valuable knowledge, they also act as a way of commodifying Indian culture into a marketable mass, one that is palatable to White Americans, rather than giving a more nuanced and accurate vision of India’s manifold cultural facets and its extremely diverse cuisine.

Miranda thinks she is physically consuming Indian culture as well as learning Dev’s language, but she does not realize that she is attempting to memorize phrases in the wrong language, Hindi instead of Bengali. The naive ignorance that underscores Miranda’s attempts to better comprehend her lover’s “foreignness,” the way she stays on the very surface of his identity acts as a metaphor for her superficiality.

We are presented with a similar but gender-reversed scenario in “Nobody’s Business,” a story that takes place almost exclusively in the central hub of the house its characters share, the kitchen. Paul, one of the housemates, through whose perspective the story is told, first wonders after Sang calls regarding the spare room, ”what sort of name Sang was, half expecting a Japanese woman” (Unaccustomed Earth 173). To Paul, Sang’s name is “ethnic” but not “ethnic” enough to satisfy his need to classify her in some way. Shortly after she moves in, he becomes infatuated with her and starts spending more time in the kitchen in the hope of seeing her, closely observing the way she eats and her food preparation rituals in a way that feels almost voyeuristic: “she was standing at the microwave, heating some rice. Paul watched as she removed the plate and mixed the steaming rice with a spoonful of the dark red-hot lime pickle that lived next to his peanut butter in the door of the re-

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weight of their flatware in his hands, and to keep the cloth napkin, still partially folded, on his lap. He learns that one does not grate Parmesan cheese over pasta dishes containing seafood. […] He learns to anticipate, every evening, the sound of a cork emerging from a fresh bottle of wine. (138)

jects’ homes: Gogol and Moushumi dining on spaghetti alle vongole or pasta with vodka sauce, Hema and Kaushik in “Going Ashore” feasting at local restaurants in Rome, or Twinkle cooking in “This Blessed House” (241; 264, Unaccustomed Earth 312; 319; Interpreter 143). While a biographical reading brings up the fact that Jhumpa Lahiri, as of August 2013, resided in Rome, it is more interesting to consider this through what Gardaphé and Xu point out in their introduction to MELUS’ issue on “Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures.” They note that Italian cuisine was reviled in 1930s America as inelegant and unsophisticated, to the point that the rusticity and marked foreignness of their eating habits was once used as an argument to support the proposed relocation of Italian immigrants “from the city to rural areas into agricultural colonies composed of Italian peasants” (5-6). This example is fascinating, as it is evidence that a type of food once deemed strange and repulsive by American culture can become fully assimilated into it. What was once disdainfully described as “that form of flour preparation known as spaghetti, […] boiled whole and served as a first course” has become “staples of the American diet” (Bushee 52 qtd. in Gardaphé and Xu 7). By having her second-generation characters consume Indian dishes alongside Italian ones, Lahiri dredges up this parallel that bears within itself the hope that Indian food might someday be less culturally loaded, become as accepted into American culture as its Mediterranean homologue, which stands as a marker of the cultural heritage of some Americans while still being considered American.6 Indeed, while Italian Americans still proudly bear their ethnic origin, unlike South Asian Americans, they are not considered any less “American” for it. While there is an obvious obstacle to this supposition, that of the visible, physical markers of South Asian ethnicity, the incredible change in perception of the Italian Amer-

This description is heavy with class signifiers. Gogol feels, at first, like a foreigner in what Varvogli calls Maxine’s parents’ “privileged white home” not because his parents are Indian, but because his own suburban, middle-class upbringing has not provided him with the Ratliffs’ innate comfort with the quiet luxury of their lives (130). He also admires the “understated, unflustered way” Maxine’s family entertains; if the dinner party is, indeed, “a rite of passage for the immigrant, and a test of citizenship,” then Gerald and Lydia’s dinners are, to Gogol, the model to emulate (140; Varvogli 131).

But that is not to say second-generation adults don’t cook or eat Indian food. Shoba and Shukumar, the protagonists of “A Temporary Matter,” for instance, used to have a “pantry always stocked with extra bottles of olive and corn oil, depending on whether they were cooking Italian or Indian. There were countless boxes of pasta in all shapes and colors, zippered sacks of basmati rice” (Interpreter 6).

Both cuisines are here, as in Gogol’s early childhood, represented equally, our protagonists as ready to prepare and consume Italian food as Indian food.

Gogol, once married to Moushumi, sets up a similar kind of home, one where “[t]hey make Indian food infrequently—usually it’s pasta or broiled fish or take-out […]. But sometimes, on a Sunday, both craving the food they’d grown up eating, they ride the train out to Queens and have brunch at Jackson Diner, piling their plates with tandoori chicken and pakoras and kabobs, and shop afterward for basmati rice and the spices that need replenishing” (229).

Interestingly, Italian food surfaces again and 6. The particularly striking example of pizza, a again in Lahiri’s second-generation diasporic sub- food that is now viewed as being as American as it is Italian, comes to mind here.

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more complex in the case of multi-ethnic marriages.

Conclusion: American Eaters One of the second-generation readers interviewed by Tamara Bhalla on The Namesake said of Lahiri that “[h]er voice is America. Her stories are very true” […] emphasizing that “Lahiri writes South Asians into US cultural citizenship” (111). While her characters are diasporic, they are undoubtedly American, and their eating habits only serve to further this American-ness. Indeed, as Donna R. Gabaccia puts it in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, “what unites Americans culturally is how we eat, not what we eat. […] We are multi-ethnic eaters” (225-6).

Gabaccia therefore reinforces the idea that eating South Asian food, and therefore manifesting one’s diasporic identity, does not in any way take away from one’s American-ness, but is in fact an inherent part of it. Furthermore, Lahiri’s popularity and wide-ranging American readership legitimizes the act of “probing the layers of meaning produced through intersecting stories about contemporary affiliation,” which, in this case, “results in an expanded vision of what it means to be American today” ( Jain 4). And indeed, through the multiplicity of food practices and tastes, some individual, some shared, that they manifest, Lahiri’s myriad characters do complicate and expand concepts of American-ness.

While the process of hybridizing food has, for both the first and second generations, yielded largely disappointing results, producing foods that were either lacking a certain impalpable Indian-ness or that were too Indian to be publicly palatable, the yet-undetermined tastes of the young third generation bear hope for the discovery of a satisfying hybrid: maybe the third bowl will be just right.

References 1. Ahn Williams, Laura. “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.” Food and Multi-Ethnic Literatures Spec.

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ican community in 70 years remains encouraging.

While the second generation, as adults, grow more comfortable with the consumption of Indian food, no longer concerned with how it will affect others’ perception of them as they had been as children, a new question is raised once they have children of their own: what will they feed them? “Unaccustomed Earth” addresses this. While Ruma is still dealing with the fact that she has unwittingly followed her mother’s path, which “growing up […] had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was [her] life now,” her father’s visit reminds her of advice given by her mother which she has not followed, on feeding her son, getting him “used to the taste of Indian food” by “[making] the effort to poach chicken and vegetables with cinnamon and cardamom and clove” (Unaccustomed Earth 10; 23).

In spite of this her son refuses to eat ”anything other than macaroni and cheese for dinner,” proclaiming, when presented with an Indian meal, that he hates “that food,” bringing up in Ruma memories of her childhood: “In spite of her efforts he was turning into the sort of American child she was always careful not to be, the sort that horrified and intimidated her mother: imperious, afraid of eating things” (23-4).

This displays a kind of anxiety surrounding the feeding of their children that is characteristic of the second generation: the parents in “A Choice of Accommodations” and “Only Goodness,” for instance, harbour deep-set fears of seeing their children choke on food, and repeatedly voice those concerns (Unaccustomed Earth 90; 160). These are, of course, normal anxieties in new parents; but, like Ruma’s memories in “Unaccustomed Earth,” they also speak to the second generation’s concerns about the ways their children might grow up to navigate food and its implications for identity. Will they like Indian food or will they shun it? The children of a generation who fought to be perceived as American while still retaining a degree of Indian-ness wonder what will happen to their own offspring, a question that becomes even

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