Rebuilding Through Literature
by Samuel B.
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I suppose it’s really no surprise that I became a librarian. Whenever there is something I need to sort out in my life, the first place I have always turned is books. My multi-racial identity is no exception.
I was always told that I was German, Japanese, and Irish. While both 23&Me and Ancestry.com have certainly complicated the European sides of that equation, they have confirmed the Japanese part and allowed me to trace my lineage to areas just outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which makes sense, since most Japanese immigrants of my great-grandparents’ generation were from these regions.
Growing up I barely had an Asian American identity. I didn’t know I needed one. I certainly didn’t know I was entitled to one.
Even after I was old enough to know I had Asian heritage, I couldn’t see myself in the models of Asian American identity presented to me – models that focused on the second-generation Chinese American experience. My Asian American parent had no accent (she was born in Wisconsin, her father in Hawaii). We celebrated no holidays, no customs that I knew about.
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I grew up in Los Alamos, where I was largely considered “white with a bit of a question mark.” It wasn’t until I was in college in Pittsburgh, and a strange convergence of puberty and geography hit that I was suddenly recognized by everyone around me as Asian. I couldn’t deny it, couldn’t hide it, and so I gravitated to the only model of Asian Americanness I had and devoted a substantial portion of my coursework to the literature and anthropology of China. The best course I ever took was on 20th Century Chinese literature, and I was captivated by authors like Lu Xun and Han Shaogong.
I had begun to feel Asian American, but not specifically Japanese American.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I started to specifically explore Japanese American literature. While I had grown up with the idea that assimilation was a keenly held Japanese American value, I had not understood either the brutality by or the ubiquity to which that value was put into action. Books like John Okada’s “No-No Boy ” with its stirring foreword by novelist Ruth Ozeki helped me to make sense of my feelings of disconnection and erasure – to see that one of the things that marked me most as Japanese American was that I felt no connection to Japan at all. After all, my grandfather – who had served in the 100th Infantry Battalion in WWII, a segregated unit in the US Army for Japanese American men from Hawaii – had literally left 90% of his blood on a mountain in Italy to prove he wasn’t Japanese. The symbolism was not lost on me.
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From there, I branched out into Asian American (as opposed to Asian) literature more broadly. I began to understand the Asian American social movement that arose in the 1960s and continues today that seeks to unite Asian Americans regardless of national heritage into a cohesive political and social group. “Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong ignited something in me. It put into words and reflected back at me my anger, my ennui, my dispossession. It called out racism and gaslighting and the processes by which Asian Americans had been stripped of our history – the disruption, the forgetting, the silencing. It reiterated the idea that my feelings of isolation were not accidental, nor was I alone in feeling them.
My Asian American identity continues to evolve. Solidarities formed with other Asian Americans, other mixed-race people, other People of Color, and people I met while living in Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). They have had a profound impact. But books and literature still play an important role, whether recognizing elements of my values and mannerisms as Japanese while reading Naomi Hirahara’s “Clark and Division “or sympathizing with Sabrina Imbler’s eternal obsession with dissecting their own racial identity as discussed in How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, the rich world of Asian American literature continually serves to validate my experience and identity as undeniably Asian American.
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Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun
“I knew that in this laughter were courage and integrity. Both the old man and my brother turned pale, awed by my courage and integrity.”
No-No Boy: a novel by John Okada
“And when one is feeling gay and full of joy, the saké must be brought out to lift the spirits higher. And they drank, your papa and mine and the mayor’s brother, and I only a little because I was even happier than they and needed no false joy.”
Minor Feelings : an Asian American reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”
Clark and Division: a novel by Naomi Hirahara
“kurou, which could be translated to “suffering.” But the English word seemed to skim the surface, whereas kurou went deeper. It referred to a guttural moaning, a piercing pain throughout your bones.”
How Far the Light Reaches: a life in ten sea creatures by Sabrina Imbler
“Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up. Imagine showing up to your high school reunion, seeing everyone who once made you feel small, only now you’re a hundred times bigger than you once were. A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.”
Homecoming? and Other Stories by Han Shaogong (Available via ILL)
“All this looked so familiar and yet so strange. It was like looking at a written character: the harder you look at it, the more it looks like a character you know, and yet it doesn’t look like the character you know. Damn! Had I been here before?”
Booked Solid in Santa Fe 