steno baby gestation

My post titles are getting intentionally stranger and stranger as I think about what would most poetically capture what I want to say. I disclaimed a long time ago that this blog would be an “experimental prose testing ground,” though so far I’ve kept that largely at bay (both for coherency and intellectual property!)

But there is one thing that I think deserves noting publicly in my thoughts about my nascent novel. Ever since falling in love with many of the superb English works by South Asian authors like Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, and even Arundhati Roy, I wondered to myself if America owed its growing receptiveness to subcontinental culture in large part to their efforts. I took a look at the Chinese-American literary pantheon and only found a large stack of woeful accounts of the Cultural Revolution and some whining about cultural oppression by Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Not that I discount the validity, power and truth of their works; I’m just disappointed by how negative the overall picture is because that is how then we have appeared to the literary canon, whereas the South Asian stories of the difficulties of cultural interchange are much less overtly judgmental and more poetically flavored on both sides of the fence. Of Chinese writers, only Ha Jin’s beautiful denouements and elegant prose has impressed me, and he belongs to a generation whose story rests largely on the Asian side of our pan-Pacific saga. So far, there hasn’t been a single Chinese-American writer who has achieved enough prominence to represent us, the new American youth with Chinese faces.

I mean, think of it: “Kumar” repped hundreds of thousands of young South Asians when he got top billing in “The Namesake.” We can’t even keep the lead role in “21.”

So I was thinking of writing a Chinese-American bildungsroman. I figured, hey, I should be in an ideal position to write a coming-of-age story between two cultures: I was pretty confused growing up as the only yellow face at school, to the point where I renounced my heritage in favor of an individuality that I could account for. And then finding the folly of that in Los Angeles, and coming here to Shenzhen to hash things out – my own year long spirit walk, as it were. Of course I can write a story about a clash of cultures. I lived it and I’m living it now.

Except…there has been no clash of cultures while I’ve been here. Not like what I expected.

The Chinese treat me very well, not like the outcast “half-blood” I was expecting to be vilified as.
I’m more accustomed to the manners, mores, and cuisines here than I thought I was.

There has been no struggle. There will be no “hostility” phase in the “honeymoon, hostility, acceptance, loss” 4-step program of expat psychology for me. There are no four steps of expat psychology for me. They are all ongoing at once; they are all nonexistent at the same time. Other expats complain of certain Chinese behaviors; I shrug as if it is already natural to me. Other expats gush about how exotic China is. It is not that different for me either. Still others speculate why on earth any human being would ever eat moon cake. I happen to like it…a lot. (A lot of my cultural challenges have actually come from the other expats rather than from the Chinese…which was perhaps to have been expected.) As far as the Chinese go, I have come face to face with exactly how little there was to come face to face with in the first place. And then something will set me off and I will get shocked by everything all at once again, and will duly write about it in this blog, haha.

This much ambiguity would amount to some difficulty in writing a book about cross-cultural struggle. But, as I’ve realized, there is a culture war going on in Shenzhen that is metonymic for all of China, and all of the West gets pulled into it by default:

“Yes, come to Hong Kong, we can buy shirts. That’s all there really is to do here anyway.” Herbal remedies. Taking care of your parents. Living with them. Spiky-haired young (Chinese) Turks and sashaying, glamorous ladies lounging in malls for lack of anything else to do. Old men begging on the streets by playing the erhu. My bus friend, who works his ass off every day for the dream of a prosperous future. Who probably hasn’t thought what that prosperous future means beyond $$$. Mid-Autumn Festivals being celebrated by deeply slashed discounts. Girls dressed up in glam and blue eyeliner standing by a stack of moon cakes for your gaze and purchase. Ringtones buzzing in loud, brittle polyphonic melodies, unashamed of their brash kitsch. Filial piety and money: a chicken and the egg story.

In other words, I realized, the real culture war in China and America is not about whose parent complex is stronger or how hard it is to eat with chopsticks or even comparing nose and dick sizes. It’s a contest for the value of your secular soul, in a pan-Pacific marketplace where everything can be sold for a fee, including your traditions, and nobody knows what to do next when all the transactions are done. Where people will always reach for the stars because SELF-CONFIDENCE REJECTS HESITATION and everyone is READY FOR THE WONDER, except the wonder turns out to be a shopping mall, and nobody knows what to make of that, exactly. And Shenzhen, well-meaning, open, friendly place that it is, is ground zero for this feeling.

This should be plenty to work with.