Asian America through Three Book Quotes: Pachinko
AAPI Heritage Month is a celebration and recognition of Asian Americans, but what might it leave behind? I turn to to literature in search of answers.
It’s AAPI Heritage Month, which means political and corporate America has deigned to pay us attention for a strict 31-day period that manifests mostly in toothless tweets, lazy listicles, and the neoliberal method of celebrating anything, that is, discounts. There’s also a flurry of op-eds and essays about the Asian American experience, and I always wonder how we’re supposed to receive them, as Asian Americans, women, young people, liberals, or whatever label we may encompass.
As much as I am critical of the performativity of AAPI Month and other similarly designated celebrations, I’m still grateful for the sliver of recognition and acknowledgement it bestows on Asian Americans. Yet, there remains a collective cultural amnesia and refusal to acknowledge the history and realities of Asian America, as well as a complacency among Asian Americans to remain politically and socially silent. In light of the past few years and changes in my life, I’ve never felt the multicultural superficiality of AAPI Month and my own invisibility and more acutely. So, in search of insight, I turn to art, specifically literature, which has the uncanny power to simultaneously reflect and refract our reality, to shape and be shaped by our culture.
“History has failed us, but no matter.” The opening line of Min Jin Lee’s wondrous Pachinko enchanted if bemused me the first time I read it three years ago. Who is “us”? What counts as history/History, and whose is it? The matter-of-fact tone and succinctness of the sentence initially marks a resignation to the failure of history: “history has let us down, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” Yet on further reflection, it enacts a quiet rage and a stubborn resilience.
History—made up of philosophers, scholars, textbooks, lectures, and memories—erase Asian American history. We do not merit even a mention as the object of others’ discrimination, violence, or neglect. Even taking into account the pragmatism of editing and condensing events for the sake of better clarity and palatability, it’s no coincidence that in every version, Asian Americans are invisible. I attended a private high school and a liberal arts university and didn’t formally learn about the internment of Japanese Americans, the L.A. race riots, or Chinese labor in the west until my junior year of undergrad in a class about Asian American history. What little prior knowledge I had was gathered piecemeal from reading and from an independent study I arranged with a professor. If it’s difficult for someone like me with access to many resources to learn about my history, how can others?
It’s as if what Hegel wrote about Africa applies to Asian Americans and Asians in America as well: “at this point we leave [Asian America,] not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit…[it] had to be presented here only as on the threshold of [America’s] History.” History, like everything else, is not neutral and does not arise from nothing. Like any story, it has a point of view, and that point of view has its own opinions, biases, and passions. These must be acknowledged and taken into account despite any efforts to make a particular narrative appear natural, impartial, and inevitable. Better yet, let us make our own history and tell it to the world.
Fail: as in not succeed, to neglect, to break down, to let down. In the tale of America, failure is anathema to and impossible for the model minority; the 1888 Chinese Exclusion and 1904 Immigration Acts legitimized racial exclusion and vandalized the American Dream; violence broke solidarity across communities of color and killed Vincent Chin; birth on American soil couldn’t save Japanese Americans; and lies from the leader of our country end with the beatings of grandmothers and the shootings of mothers and daughters. Reading and learning about these atrocities is exhausting and saddening, and it is perfectly understandable to feel defeated on an individual and collective level.
Asian Americans have borne the weight of all these kinds of failures to be sure, but we also fail ourselves. We atomize and individualize, abandoning the power and the solidarity of the community, preferring to keep our heads down and strive for the future. It’s certainly easier this way, but by not forming bonds with each other and with other people of color, we fail ourselves.
Us, or is it US? “Us” speaks of solidarity and may hint at sameness, but elides our diversity: Asian Americans account for the largest intergroup income gap in the nation, and being “Asian” is more slippery and fluid than all the maps say. The United States has failed and has been failed by its people and its leaders. Again, the collective is in question: Asians are not all from “East Asia,” and we do not all look the same, but others perceive us as such. Asian Americans are not the same as Asians in America, and recent immigrants have a completely different relationship to the United States and to their motherlands than second and third generations do.
There’s a fine line between collectivity and universality, but there’s a way to form communal bonds while also acknowledging difference. I’m definitely reading “US” into this passage, but it fits well nonetheless. History has failed our country as much as it has failed minorities because of the conventional narrative we tell ourselves about the United States. The idea of freedom and equality and we the people is broken in the wake of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor’s murders, our invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, the political anger and ignorance, and the economy of inequity. Our economic, political, and cultural institutions and norms do not, and often actively oppose the realization of the dream of America. We cannot be complacent even as it is tempting to fall in love with the romance of America, or else we allow history to fail us all.
But no matter: this clause simultaneously conveys resignation and anger, defeat and defiance. “Matter” stands in for “importance.” None of the errors of history are unimportant, but this suggests the opposite. Yet, what follows is an attempt to rectify the failures of history in the telling of a people’s story that is overlooked, that is, the Korean zainichi in Japan during the first half of the 20th-century. This is an assertion that yes, history has failed us in the past, but from here we can work to remedy those failures to make—and to tell—our own history.
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