(originally published at Hyphen Magazine)

Burlee Vang, founder of The Hmong American Writers’ Circle, explains that “Some say we had a written language, believed to have been lost from forced assimilation under Imperial China thousands of years ago.” In light of a scarce written canon, the Hmong American contributors to the anthology  How Do I Begin? seek to recover cultural heritage and challenge their marginalization within more mainstream Asian American literature.

The material contained within demonstrates a wide range of styles and themes, although highly personal and semi-autobiographical narratives of everyday experiences, especially within a familial context, take center stage. A few authors incorporate mythology and history in relation to modern characters, like Ka Vang, whose protagonist Pao adopts a WWF persona based on the ancient shaman Shee Yee. However, most writers choose not to introduce mythical elements to their narratives, in favor of more visceral and emotional relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and strangers.

While each writer brings a unique and culturally significant insight into the lives of often disadvantaged Hmong American youth and families, some fall prey to tired tropes common to other Asian American texts. Those more noteworthy, standing out from the crowd, include Burlee Vang, Mai Der Vang, Pos L. Moua, and Mai Neng Moua, who all write with such raw sincerity that I am left haunted by their words.

Burlee Vang’s “Mrs. Saichue,” which is in my opinion one of the most compelling stories in the collection, follows a married couple who choose an unconventional solution to the eponymous character’s infertility. Focusing on Mrs. Saichue’s apprehension concerning her domestic situation, Vang ponders the words left unspoken in her relationships. “The other housewives have come to address her only by her husband’s name,” he writes, “no doubt a polite and customary formality for persons of no relation — but an indication of impersonal distance nonetheless.” Mrs. Saichue’s inability to voice her concerns to her husband further underscores a central tension that persists throughout the anthology between societal expectations and personal desires. She fears that the concessions she makes to fulfill her duty as a wife by providing a child has created a rift in her marriage.

Likewise, in Mai Neng Moua’s story “Being a Nyab,” a young wife must face the expectation that she, as a nyab or daughter-in-law, will be forced to take care of her husband’s overbearing aunt Phauj Mee. “I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between my feminist self and the submissive Hmong girl Niam [mother] had taught me to be.” When Phauj Mee rejects a bowl of pho for lunch, the protagonist must choose between letting her eat a “poor man’s lunch” or compromising her independence by cooking a new dish, an act she fears will doom her to forever serving Phauj Mee. Moua successfully transforms an otherwise mundane experience into a tense battle between not just two women, but two opposing beliefs about femininity and tradition.

Pos L. Moua and Mai Der Vang both similarly take small moments and infuse them with abounding significance. Moua’s poem “The Ant and the Fire-Woman” is an Aesop’s fable of sorts, featuring a firefighter trainer (the “Fire-Woman”) who orders an ant-sized man to climb up a hill with a heavy fire hose. Its ambiguous, futile ending, however, seems to lack an easily discernible moral: “and i, tiny little ant, / quickly head uphill / only to roll back down / like all sorts of fat animals,” Moua writes. Vang’s poem “Your Janitor: Is My Father” takes on a similarly resigned tone as she writes about a Hmong janitor and his work cleaning up after white-collar office workers. For Vang’s janitor father, the empty hallways represent not just an office building, but moreover the disjuncture between the visibility of the office employees and the invisibility of the janitor. “The clock in the break room / spinning, / ticking, / full stress, / still, rows beyond,” Vang writes, suggesting the endlessness of her father’s unappreciated work.

In prefaces to their poems and stories, the authors are all given an opportunity to introduce themselves and the relationship between their writing and their ethnicity. Some consider themselves a Hmong first and a writer second, others a writer first and a Hmong second. Their own individual experiences and multiple identities, too, add depth to their writing. For example, Mai Neng Moua, mentioned above, writes from a conflicted feminist perspective, while Ying Thao’s queer identity informs his writing. The inclusion of non-Hmong writers like Anthony Cody further complicates the diversity within the volume by adding voices that, though they may not share the same experiences, have in some way been impacted by the Hmong American community. Lastly, the book also features the works of Hmong painters and photographers, which enrich the text by making the faces of these Hmong characters and individuals all the more visible.

Ultimately, How Do I Begin? is an invaluable addition to Asian American literature. The writers and artists highlighted throughout the book attest to the diversity of experiences within the Hmong American community, revisiting themes common to Asian American literature as well as introducing imagery and perspectives that have not previously been addressed in the mainstream.

Eric Zhang has a background in Asian American studies, art, and visual culture. He currently lives in New York, where he works at NYU and MOCA.

(originally published at Hyphen Magazine)
Our Hyphen books section writers read everything. Seriously. And if the book is calling Asian America’s name, we are so on it. So it should come as no surprise that we are the last word on the most notable Asian American books of 2011. Skeptical? Go ahead and get your hands on the books below. Read ‘em, gift ‘em, and prove us right. Or prove us wrong by adding your comments and picking your own faves. Go ahead, we double-dog dare you.

FICTION

Leche by R. Zamora Linmark

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

 An exquisitely lyrical narrative that follows the lives of Japanese picture brides from their San Francisco arrival to their banishment to internment camps in 1942. Full review here.
This Burns My Heart by Samuel Park

A doomed love story set in 1960s Korea that ponders the roads not taken. Full review here.

NONFICTION

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Fukuyama draws from a vast number of fields to produce an expansively-researched yet accessible history of political systems over the past 10,000 years. Gathering examples from ancient China, India, the Muslim world and Christian Europe leading to the American and French Revolutions, the book inquires into why certain governments adopted by certain civilizations failed and why others succeeded. Fukuyama observes that a well-functioning modern political order results from a combination of a strong state, rule of law, and accountable government. He warns that while the US currently balances all three aspects successfully, its demise may still eventually occur as a result of rigidity and failure to adjust to changing circumstances. Interestingly, the book holds bipartisan views, extolling a conservative capitalism alongside the liberal support of strong government.
A Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan 

A poignant and humorous reflection on food, family, and home. Full review here.
Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

In the most comprehensive account of the painter’s life yet, Naifeh and Smith enrich Van Gough’s reputation beyond mere madman genius and explore in great depth the development of his rich artistic and personal life. Mining the 6-volume edition of 900 letters recently released by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the authors proffer several new speculations regarding the artist’s brief 37 years, from why he cut off his ear after a falling out with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, to how he might have died (not by suicide but by a bullying teenager’s gunshot). Also included are analyses of Van Gogh’s works, along with a finely traced history of an artist hungrily determined to expand his knowledge and reach, as the book charts his learning from pointillism, Japanese prints and symbolism, to his reading of writers as varied as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Eliot.

POETRY

Dhaka Dust by Dilruba Ahmed

A cosmopolitan examination of multiple states of belonging. Full review here.

ILLUSTRATED

Zahra’s Paradise by Amir & Khalil

A scathing political commentary on the state of Iran after the 2009 protests, featuring a mother and brother search of a missing university student. Full review here.
Vietnamerica by GB Tran

A moving, full-color memoir about the artist’s recovery of family roots in Vietnam. Full review here.

YOUNG ADULT

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai

Ten-year-old Hà’s life faces upheaval when her family is forced to flee Vietnam at the close of the war as the Communists take over. Inside Out & Back Again, a novel-in-verse which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, charts the year-long course that Hà, her mother, and three older brothers traverse as they live out their last idyllic days in Saigon, travel by sea to a refugee camp in Guam, and adjust to their new home in Alabama. Lai creates a delightful character in intelligent, precocious Hà who keenly senses and describes the turmoil around her in direct, matter-of-fact speech which resists pity or sentimentality. A true poet, Lai’s love and talent for language are matched only by her deft rendering of the complexity within a child’s thoughts and feelings. A great read for everyone, both kids and adults.

(originally published at Hyphen Magazine)

In June 2002, a New York Times full-page spread described the unlikely efforts of Schenectady’s mayor to recruit Indo-Guyanese immigrants from Queens to his rust-belt city three hours North. The story received a great deal of press and piqued the interest of anupama jain, a professor of Asian American literature who was at the time in the process of moving to Schenectady to teach at Union College.

“I was certainly curious,” jain told me over the phone, “At the time, I knew so little about the history of Guyana — the fact that half of the country’s population were of Indian descent — and all this was happening in my backyard.” But beyond her interest in understanding this little-known history of the diaspora, jain was caught off guard by a quote from one of the Schenectady’s most ardent recruiters. In addressing the Indo-Guyanese, the president of the Schenectady Economic Development Corporation had told them, “Quite frankly, you’re an opportunity for us. We are very much looking for a new ethnic group.”

What did it mean for city officials to be actively “looking for a new ethnic group”? What were the implications for the already-settled communities of color? And if Robertson and the mayor were so eager to recruit a new ethnic group, what, then, did all this say about the racial politics of the US at the start of the 21st century?

For the next several years, jain knocked on doors, meeting and listening to the various parties in this unfolding Schenectady story. She spoke with Robertson, the mayor, and with members of the Indo-Guyanese community, who had suddenly found themselves the subject of a state-wide conversation about immigration. Curiously, all of the parties, jain noticed, were writing themselves into familiar scripts of national identity. If the mayor attempted to eschew racial implications and struck a libertarian tone (“American is not about the government taking care of you”), then her interviews with the Guyanese revealed a far more complex script. Many saw their identities tied up in the colonial history of the Caribbean, as well as the capitalist promise of the American Dream.

Meanwhile, city officials were clearly projecting their “new ethnic group” against the well-established coordinates of the model minority, among which South Asian Americans have played a historical role from the mid-60s onwards. jain quickly caught onto these reductive readings (or, one might call them active misreadings) of identity. Even if “you’re [...] migrating via Guyana and actually never have seen India for probably two generations,” jain explains, “you could still be read the same way as a professional who came after 1965. These hierarchies of color and race are so pervasive.”

The story of the Indo-Guyanese immigration to Schenectady makes up one part of anupama jain’s recently published book, How to Be South Asian in America. A sprawling study that combines ethnography, literary theory, and film criticism, jain’s book looks closely at narratives of South Asian American identity that circulate through the media, fiction, and film. Central to jain’s study is the idea that forming ethnic and racial identity is akin to the act of storytelling, a kind of narrative performance where one picks and chooses from already existing scripts. How is it that we put that story together? Which narratives are emphasized? Which ones are erased?

Raised in Iselin, NJ, jain’s own story of South Asian American identity-formation was shaped in part by her experience growing up as one of the few Indian families in an otherwise white neighborhood. “We weren’t there in any kind of critical mass, so mainly we just got ignored,” she explains. The demographics of Iselin, however, would transform enormously over the next decades. By the 1990s, Iselin was known for being a central Indian business enclave, so much so that her former alma mater John P. Stevens high school picked up the nickname “John Patel Stevens” after she left.

And yet, while Iselin reflected the growing South Asian presence in pockets of the US, she explains, none of this is substantially represented in the media. Shows like NBC’s Outsourced reflected a changing global economy, certainly. But set in India and resting on tired jokes of Indian “otherness,” the show did very little to challenge the national character of the US. Reflecting on the South Asian American presence in Jersey, jain tells me, “What’s happening in [Outsourced] is so different than what’s happening in Edison where there is a South Asian critical mass. So you’ve got on the one hand a plethora of doctors, but you also have shop owners, and people who are living five to a room.” And yet, even as South Asian America becomes more diverse (regionally, nationally, and socio-economically), only a sparse selection of narratives dominate the American imagination. Others are simply erased. As jain pithily puts it: “[there’s] doctor, doctor, doctor, and then terrorist.”

How Does One Be South Asian in America (as the book’s title provocatively asks), then? If it’s partly a matter of story-telling, then, well, the choice of scripts is limited.

jain presses on this idea in a series of skillful readings of diasporic fiction and films, considering the multiple “narratives” — both South Asian and American — that characters assimilate into. In a chapter devoted to the fiction of Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, and Bapsi Sidhwa, jain considers how these narratives of South Asian American women’s assimilation are themselves characterized by an uneasy relationship to several “normative scripts” of identity, both South Asian and American. The immigrant women in these stories, she explains, are paradoxically “expected to be, at one and the same time, bearers of an alleged ‘ancestral culture’ in a new host country and representatives of their model minority group.” jain’s reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s work, in particular, is compelling, given the well-documented criticism that Mukherjee has received for both essentializing South Asian identity and pandering to an often simplistic view of American identity. In How to Be South Asian, jain acknowledges these complaints, but insists that Mukherjee’s characters cleverly “manipulat[e] narratives of the country in order to assimilate without, well, assimilating.” What does assimilating without assimilating exactly look like? In the case of Mukherjee’s popular novel Jasmine, her protagonist Jyoti finds ways to assert her agency as an immigrant and undo the stereotypes of the exotic “Indian princess,” while also performing these stereotypical scripts to get ahead.

The term jain uses is ambivalence. To be ambivalent toward assimilation is to confront, manipulate, and accommodate nationally-endorsed narratives (American and South Asian) to carve out an identity that reflects, as jain puts it, one’s multiple sites of belonging.

At first glance the title How to Be South Asian in America might appear prescriptive, like some survival guide for post-racial identity-politics. But jain’s quirky title reflects the performative quality that goes into identity formation. The categories “South Asian” and “America” are both rigid and unstable in jain’s study, and at every turn, she underscores that her title’s tidy system of coordinates is actually a crosshatch of gender, race, class, and the state. And while in our present moment certain narratives vie for dominance as the narrative of South Asian Americans — the oft-celebrated stories of upward class mobility at one pole, or the stereotypical images of Apu and Outsourced at the other — jain’s study reminds us that these identity categories are always more complex when read more closely.

Take, for instance the historic moment that the New York Times article on Schenectady appeared: While certain South Asians were viewed as “an opportunity” for city officials in the rust belt, others, in that same moment, were attacked and harassed as suspect nationals in America’s post-9/11 landscape. jain’s book doesn’t offer any easy answers, but instead gives us more questions: What exactly are the stories of national, racial, and ethnic identity that we have been telling ourselves? Who is allowed into America’s national narratives? And on whose terms?

* * *

Manan Desai recently finished his PhD in English at the University of Michigan.  He currently serves on the board of directors at the South Asian American Digital Archive.

(originally published at Hyphen Magazine)

Bharati Mukherjee’s  Miss New India follows the journey of Anjali Bose, a 19-year-old girl from a small town in Bihar, who leaves her family and their expectations behind to seek big-city opportunities in Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley of India.” Energetic, smart, and fluent in English, she is one of thousands of young men and women like her who come from all corners of India to work in call centers, answering customer service calls outsourced from America.

The Bangalore that unfolds through her story reflects the “New India”: a society in which the traditional barriers to social and economic advancement — caste, hometown, mother tongue, gender, etc. — are less and less relevant: “So that was the secret of Mumbai’s and Bangalore’s great success. You work at KFC or Starbucks or Barista, and the person next to you, and your boss, and the people you serve have absolutely no interest in your community or where you came from.” In Bangalore, identities are fluid, evolving. The individuals who populate Anjali’s circle in Bangalore reflect the diversity of the city’s inhabitants, all possessing complex identities: American expatriates, Indian repatriates, visiting NRIs (“nonresident Indians”), foreign-born Indians, and native-born Indians from all corners of the country. English is their lingua franca.

This multi-layered identity characterizes the city itself; Mukherjee’s Bangalore is a complex tangle of New World and Old World, clashing values, and innovation. High rises tower among ruins of crumbling, colonial mansions. Minnie Bagehot, the decrepit mistress of the boarding house where Anjali stays, insists on replicating Raj-era parties, serving champagne and spreading moldy linens, even as squatters camp on her dilapidated property. And Indian investors embrace the opportunities of American outsourcing, even as they debate the prudence of being tied to American prosperity.

Anjal,i too, seems conflicted about her own identity –- she alternately goes by Anjali, Angie, and Anjolie — and at a few points in the novel, she ruminates on it:

I am Indian, she thought. I’m Indian in ways no one else in this house is Indian … I have no roots anywhere but in India … Everyone in my life has tried to change me, make me want something alien, and make me ashamed that I might not be good enough. Why should I want to change my name and my accent, why should I plead for a chance to be allowed to take calls from people who’ve spent too much money or driven their cars into a ditch?

And yet this is about as far as she goes in engaging with matters involving her identity, India, and this moment in history. While conversations about India’s past, present, and future take place in the periphery among the minor characters, Anjali’s lessons in the big city are about money, fashion, men, alcohol, and sex — the stuff of Sex and the City.

Anjali is at best an archetype, rather than a fully developed character — which may not be completely unintentional. She is the Miss New India and, like Rosie the Riveter of another era, Anjali is an icon of her place and time. The novel seems to acknowledge as much when Parvati, Anjali’s mentor-cum-mother-figure, makes this murky observation about Anjali: “The best I can come up with is you’re like a reflecting pool. You give back wavy clues to what we are or what we’re going to be.”

Shinwha Whang grew up in California. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

(originally published at Hyphen Magazine)

For anyone who has ever admitted to being more likely to think than to act, Japanese master Natsume Soseki’s novel  And Then will resonate keenly, even harshly. Its protagonist Daisuke is the Meiji-era version of a couch philosopher, who spends his days in Tokyo reading the books in his library, writing correspondences to his acquaintances abroad, visiting geishas, and bolstering his personal philosophy of life. Periodically, he will take a trip to his wealthy father’s house to collect his allowance. He is, he believes, self-contained — and thinks the fact that he is simply a spectator of the world around him only better positions him to be a stellar critic of it.

Through the eyes of this man-child, we are introduced to Soseki’s meditation on the troubling early years of adulthood, a time further complicated by the societal changes besetting a modernizing Japan. In his late twenties, well-educated, and with nary a finger ever lifted in gainful employment, Daisuke has perfected a careless sort of existence, the placid surface of which begins to crack when Hiraoka, an old school friend, returns to Tokyo with his frail wife, Michiyo. The latter is a figure to whom Daisuke seems fatefully and powerfully drawn, despite the certainty of social ruin if he tries to claim her as his own.

But And Then, first published in 1909 as the second in a trilogy of novels and re-released now with a lucid translation by Norma Moore Field, is less a love story (though it is that, too), than it is a bitter ode to self-awareness. Daisuke is the sort of individual who feels physical aches due to his highly evolved sensibilities, and who reflexively sets himself apart from the world in which he lives: ”Society appeared to him like a flat surface partitioned according to a complex color scheme. And he could only think that he himself had no color whatsoever.” As a keen observer of his surroundings, he lives in a state of perpetual separation, finding points of difference in every quadrant of his life.

Fans of Soseki’s earlier works, like the playful I Am a Cat or the popular Sanshiro, will find And Then a denser and more interior work. Daisuke philosophizes for pages on end, the starkness of which becomes tedious at times. Faced with the possibility that his father will stop supporting him financially, Daisuke is so disheartened that he altogether skips over workable solutions and instead perceives “his own shadow in the crowd of beggars that roam[s] between man and beast.” (The reader may groan in a few other spots as well.)

Still, as with many masterpieces involving a silly, noble and often unlikable protagonist (like the intensely alienated character of Oba in Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human), readers often willingly take the bad with the good. The reward is to witness the evolution of such characters, as self-containment gives way to a hobbled attempt to live in the real world. Whether this ends in disaster is, of course, not the point. And Then is just such a work: it’s worth reading for the
fierce knot of revelation and despair in the last few pages alone.

Jane Y. Kim is a journalist and fiction writer who lives in Brooklyn. She works at Kaya Press.

(originally published at Hyphen Magazine)

Home is both everywhere and nowhere in Dilruba Ahmed’s debut collection of poems,  Dhaka Dust. Spread over continents and set in places as far flung as Ohio, Venice, and Dhaka, Ahmed’s poetry captures people caught between their numerous sites of belonging. It’s a motif announced early in the collection’s epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop: “Continent, city, country, society: / the choice is never wide and never free. / And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?” The diverse characters in Ahmed’s poems — from the anxious passenger boarding an airplane to the daughter listening to her mother’s translations of Tagore — are all, in some ways both “here, or there,” but never quite at home.

A worldly, cosmopolitan vision is at work in Ahmed’s collection, often reminiscent of Agha Shahid Ali (whose name appears in an epigraph and a dedication) but at times also the recent writing of Khaled Mattawa, whose polyglot and sprawling collection Tocqueville captures the economic unevenness that marks our new multinational-dominated world. In Dhaka Dust, the image of a boy asking for change in a Mississippi parking lot quickly gives way to the bustle of merchants and hawkers in a Dhaka Bazaar. Surplus scarves from The Gap hang around the necks of Bangladesh’s auto-wallas who shuttle the speaker around town. These poems may very well cover the author’s own personal geography, but nevertheless their sequence and quick transitions also force us to make sense of the juxtapositions.

What’s important here is that Ahmed never presents these interspersed settings as cute cause for celebration. Over and over, the women and men who inhabit these poems appear as dislocated subjects, thinking through their lived spaces with equal parts familiarity and anxiety. A woman in the title poem rides in a Dhaka rickshaw, hiding under her orna — her scarf — the “laminated map and digital camera” that out her as an outsider. And while she takes in her surroundings, finding connection through “bits of children’s songs,” she is also confronted with “other words [that] surface: / sweatshop and abject poverty.” Elsewhere, while buying bangles from the bazaar, a sister underscores her difference, reminding the speaker, “they know / by your walk you aren’t / from here.”

Photo of the author by Mike Drzal

Yet, her characters are not so easily located in America either. In “Southeastern Ohio,” Ahmed paints a scene familiar to so many of us first- and second-generation Desis, who found ourselves in ad hoc places of worship and community, growing up decades ago. Ahmed writes, “In stuffy gyms that passed / for mosques, my sisters and I / parroted words without grace.” In one of the most compelling poems in the collection, Ahmed describes a Muslim man obsessing over an unpaid jaywalking ticket while he anxiously waits to board a plane. Here we see Ahmed’s subtle metaphors at play. If the crime of jaywalking signals the policing of street crossings, it also faintly echoes the policed, national crossings the speaker tensely negotiates. Arriving at the gate, he wonders, “Which swallowed Arabic vowel / will trap him this time?” These are important, even political, poems, and yet Ahmed never compromises the nuance of her language for easily digestible polemics.

What’s so promising about Dhaka Dust is precisely that Ahmed never evades our contemporary moment, taking on a globalizing, anxiety-stricken world while always focusing on the contradictory ways that her speakers live through them. Over the course of these poems, Ahmed subtly crafts the emotionally complex terrain that captures the sprawl and dislocation that shape our early 21st century psychology.

Manan Desai recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and currently serves on the board of directors for the South Asian American Digital Archive.