Where are you from? August 3, 2007

I was at a bar on 82nd and Amsterdam ordering a drink when a white-haired man asked me, “Where are you from?”  For a few seconds I was confused.  Yeah, where am I from really?  I was going to tell him New York, but I’d lived in New Jersey for a bit before I moved to Atlanta.  I go to school in Michigan, and I went to high school in Rochester, NY.  Before all that moving happened, I lived in Taipei, Taiwan.  Finally, I managed to squeeze out, “Georgia.”  He stared at me for a second, processing my answer.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s rare an Asian girl is from Georgia, or it’s because he was expecting me to say China.  Anyway, after he complimented on my good looks, I politely thanked him and told him bye.  Obviously if I’m that good looking, I have the choice of not talking him.

Personally, I’m fine with moving around and not having a place I can say where I’m from.  For now, home is wherever my dad is, somewhere I can go to on important holidays.  It’s not necessarily my obsession with finding a home, but rather other people’s.  Whatever I say, someone’s bound to say, “No, you’re not from there, you’re really from…”  Hey, who the heck are you to tell me where I’m from?

Which leads me to wonder why people have such a strong obsession with “roots.”  I think I used to be obsessed with it, too.  I never considered myself a real Taiwanese, because my dad’s side’s family is from mainland, and growing up in a patrimonial society, I was from where my dad’s dad was from, Hunan Province, China.  But obviously that was refuted when I moved to the States and met some “real” Chinese people, who told me I was really Taiwanese.  And you know the rest of the story: between graduating from high school and now, my family and myself have lived in five places total, and I’m not from anywhere, according to everyone.  A lot of times I don’t feel I belong anywhere, and if I want to simplify my question, people are obsessed with belonging.  It’s a basic human emotion, and we are out to fulfill it.

Before I left New York, or New Jersey, whatever you want to say, I’d always claimed myself as an East Coaster during school in Michigan.  But during the National Asian American Student Conference board transition retreat, I found myself waving the Midwest flag really hard, along with a little South flag (not confederacy, though), and afterwards I laughed at myself because I’d never admitted I was a Midwest girl until that retreat.  Of course, real Midwesterners won’t think I’m from the Midwest, and real Southerners probably think I’m a Yankee and should go back to Yankeesland up there anyway.  Or they’ll tell me to go back to China, and that’ll just get more complicated.

Let’s talk about ourselves, womyn. June 14, 2007

“From my book bag I pull out Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary where he writes in the voice of a woman who has lost a child.  Writes in a woman’s-hand to permit greater emotional license, the men of the tenth century too restricted by their own conventions…
***
I tell several female friends about this piece and only one does not change the subject.”– “The Orient,” The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn.

A year ago I wrote this:

Responding to Leslie Scalapino (and Tis of Thee)

Because I was taught imperialism was for survival,
I found myself constantly falling in love with imperialistic men
For survival, because by being the colonized I would be protected
Although suffering was inevitable.
I was taught not to love my way of impermanence , to separate entities,
To be logical, when in fact, I could explain the possibility of co-existence,
Or even existence.
One identity has characteristics, the characteristics that aren’t possessed by the other identity.
Because we define others by the absence of those qualities in us, or in them.
At the age of 15, I, the same, had to accept another way of thinking
To survive. Choice was no longer my birthright and I was enslaved by a culture
That blatantly refuses my definition of existence. Or my people’s.
Unconsciously colonized, I attached myself to the praised logic, admiring those who
Have the ability to extract parts of the world, to make sense of them,
When manipulation does not portray truths, at all.
At the age of 15, I was weak, unable to grasp all the entities. I succumbed.
Stumbling at the feet of imperialism for I was told
Existence was only visible through imperialism,
And visibility is the only way to define existence.
All these years I have survived with indignity, except those nights when I dreamed
And again saw the possibility of reviving when that was the only place
That no one could tell me that existence was disputable.

(It was written on April 10, 2006, on my xanga.  I was writing a poetry paper then, and I had chosen to write my paper on Leslie Scalapino’s  The Public World/Syntactically Impermenance and Fanny Howe’s Tis of Thee.  I still constantly re-read those two books as sources of strengths. )

A year ago I responded to Leslie Scalapino publicly on my blog because someone was speaking the words that were only dreaming in me.  And I denied them at times.
A woman’s destiny is so far still colonized.  Biologically.  Emotionally.  Economically.  Physically.
I had to and learned to make myself a parasite of powerful beings.
A man commented on my poem.
“What are you ranting about this time?”
Ranting?  Tell me if you can “rant” like that, dumb fucker.  God may have made us all equal, but we haven’t.

It seems quite obvious women haven’t escaped the fate of being colonized
Eleven centuries ago, men were restricted emotionally because of conventions, by themselves.  Being melodramatic was a woman’s nature, and still is deemed so, not by women, but by men.  But no one says it’s okay.
(CC why are you so melodramatic?  You’re just being melodramatic.  Stop it.)
An abundance of emotion is restricted.  Logically, women are restricted.  Melodrama is permitted when a man speaks through a woman’s voice.  That’s called fiction.
We’re colonized by fiction, a fact.  A woman who’s permitted to express her emotions only exists in fiction, a fact.  Is she judged harshly in our world as a fact?  A fact.  And unfortunately we exist with emotions, a fact.

Contradictory facts.  Or not.

At the National Asian American Student Conference female identity’s forum, we go from talking about ourselves to talking about our allies, who don’t share our identities wholly.  I was infuriated by someone who was extremely worried about alienating allies.  I told her I couldn’t care less about people who pretend to be allies, who have no respect for safe space, who want to claim ownership of our issues– our identities.  And more importantly, why are we worrying about allies when we don’t even feel comfortable with talking about ourselves, full Asian, part Asian, adopted, female, LGBT?

Why do we have to change subject all the time?   Why is talking about being a woman, being colonized, so hard?

(Exotic) Cooking Shows June 12, 2007

Can food represent one’s culture? A better and more straight forward question, are we what we eat? To a certain extent, yes, I’d say. Picking foods that represent my Chinese cuisine, I’d write down tofu, ginger, different kinds of chili peppers, beef, pork, fish, and lamb. For flavoring we use sesame oil, chili powders, soy sauce, vinegar, and rice wine. But many non-Chinese cuisines also consume those ingredients, if I recall correctly. Then what makes Chinese cuisine so Chinese? Is it because the cooks are Chinese? Not necessarily. Nowadays people who cook Chinese food on cooking shows aren’t usually Chinese. They add their own taste into the food, fuse it up, turn it into something else. Everyone has a different approach to making a beef stir-fry so what we eat today is not what Chinese people ate a hundred years ago, I bet.

And what does being Asian really mean these days? Movies like Lost in Translation, Tokyo Drift, Tomorrow Never Dies, Mission Impossible III have taken place in Japan and China, showing the modernist high rises and the electric lights that spark the vibrant night life in Tokyo and Shanghai. But with so much exposure of Asia, people still seem to perceive anything Asian must have Chinese/ Japanese characters, or something from that “culture.” But what’s really that culture? I can’t recall seeing lanterns with Chinese or Japanese scribbles in any of those movies, or anyone wearing qipao and kimono on a daily basis. It makes me wonder why people always come up with those elements when they think of Asian culture. And there isn’t really such a thing as a unified Asian culture, but rather many Asian cultures that possess different values from one another.

I was watching a cooking show on Food Network today with my sister. It was pouring, thus ruined our little plan to go to Starbucks for some coffee. While I was making some chai, Sandra Lee’s “Semi-Homemade Cooking” came on. I’d seen the show a few times, including once when she made Chinese food in her red qipao and set her table with items swarmed in Chinese characters that didn’t make any sense when put together. Today she introduced her show her very own “Indochina Brunch.” Thanks to Comcast, my sister pressed the information button and let me copy the description down.

“Indochina Brunch” An Asian-inspired brunch, includes steamed dumplings, Szechwan beef stir-fry, andspicy mango-chile sorbet. Also: an “Indochini” cocktail. (Food Network 2007)

Not a big fan of fusion food myself, coming from a Chinese immigrant family, but I’m definitely not against fusion. It’s inevitable nowadays, and many times fusion foods taste quite amazing if you refrain from criticizing its authenticity. Fusion doesn’t just happen between East and West. Centuries ago Koreans took the Chinese ja jang myun and made their own version of it, and I absolutely love it. The problem I had with the description and the show is not the food itself, but rather the context. Indochina describes the French colonies of what we know as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia today. Although there’s Chinese influences in those cultures because China was a colonizer once, none of them is Chinese and I can imagine how they offended they’d be if they’re called Chinese. Furthermore, Indochina is a product of imperialism, a way to categorize these countries between China and India. It’s not a term Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians would use, but a term employed by colonizers who’d come to Southeast Asia to exploit the resources and labors.

A self-proclaimed life-stylist, Lee’s show also teaches you how to make a beautiful table set that’d reflect or enhance the food that day. Today, she hung lanterns with large Chinese characters like “Luck” and used fabrics and plates that she thought would reflect Asian culture. Similar to the episode of Chinese cuisine, it makes me wonder if this is the only way she perceives Asian culture– Chinese, and everything Asian needs a Chinese character to be authentic. I can’t say what she did wasn’t Chinese, but the Chinese culture I know, as a Chinese person, is more than just Chinese characters and calligraphy. The danger of representation very often is its aspect of essentialism, condensing a culture to a few elements. And very often Chinese food becomes the representation of Chinese culture. When I was volunteering at the 29th Asian American International Film Festival, a man came to a screening and told me he really appreciated events like this because “This is the only place you can see real Asian people outside of restaurants.” I tried to tell him it’s New York City, and Asian people are walking on the streets everywhere, real Asians like me, my sister, my father, and many of my friends. We do things other people do, too, going to movies at AMC on 42nd Street, visiting the Met, sitting in the Yankee Stadium cheering for Jeter and A-Rod. But he dismissed me completely and proceeded to watch the film. To him, someone who enjoys Asian films or Asian American films, we’re still an exotic, mythical people whose natural habitat is Chinatown, making wontons and chop suey. Right, that’s really authentic.

Can we, real Asians and Asian Americans, ever escape the fate of being “represented”? That our cultures cannot simply be consumed through food and items bearing our languages? These questions bother me, but I’m not going to stop enjoying Chinese food because I don’t want it to be the only thing representative of my culture. Meanwhile, what’s my own culture anyway?