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Cindy Gao

Author's Statement

This collection was my final project for Model Minorities?: Introduction to Asian American Studies (76-211), taught by Sarah Hae-In Idzik. This course was illuminating to me because I’d expected it to be a historical and linear recounting of Asian American history, but the course instead approached the Asian American experience through an ethnic studies lens – what it meant from political, cultural, or economic perspectives to be Asian American. As such, we also explored it through different artistic mediums, like a zine oriented around community care during the pandemic or a project exploring the Asian American experience through tarot cards.

I wrote the following work for the course’s final project, which was meant to address an issue or cultural object that illustrated a nuance about Asian America. The project was also meant to exist in conversation with readings and conversations from class and to support, subvert, or complicate the understandings we’d gained from those. The discussions and readings from class that stuck with me the most centered around authenticity, like what connotations labeling food as “authentic” carried, or what the end goal of our wanting to be part of America should be – would cultural assimilation destroy something “real” and authentic about the Asian parts of our heritage?

I originally thought this project was going to be about the many different facets of authenticity – what does it mean to be authentically Asian? Authentically American? I quickly found myself narrowing in on a generational angle to authenticity. Probably because I am one myself, I was drawn to the question of how second-generation immigrant children come to think about their identities and their multicultural heritage, and how this intersects with the beliefs of their parents.

My work unfolds through a series of poems and reflections. Through this framing, I do ask questions about authenticity, since authenticity and second-generation identity are inextricably linked. Second-generation children of immigrants often have to answer several questions of authenticity. What does it mean to be authentic in the eyes of their parents, who may have one set of expectations for them and America, which has others? What is a genuine and authentic “Asian American feeling” to have, and how are these feelings influenced by what we feel vs what we feel like we should feel? Given that we have an Asian heritage and an American upbringing, how do we build our own authenticities? 

- Cindy Gao

Talking Around

[untranslated]

Problems, like stray daughters and words overloaded with meaning,
need a stricter definition. You hurt because you don’t know your body’s parameters. Try as you might, you cannot be the nerves of the whole world. You feel it’s your duty,
yet when have you ever done your duty? How can we look at the same history
and see two different things? It is a problem of language that we fight
for the same things – love, safety, justice – and cannot agree what they are.
This country washes through you and your brother, diluting everything. Your childhood slips
through your fingers like water. Your head has been splintered into abstraction. Remember.
If you can’t solve a problem, simplify it. Then simplify it again. Solve through the shadows
until any of it means something. Child, I know this is the poem you write
because you can’t write the poem you want to.  Your confusion is a matter of language.
You don’t have the words for what you are and they don’t have the words
to understand you. Have you forgotten we are all just trying to survive?
We do not trust you. We simply cannot read you.

Reflection: [untranslated]

This piece is a persona poem – a style of poem where the author writes from a voice that is not their own. Here, I take the perspective of my mother, trying to represent many of the conversations we’ve had. It’s also an American sonnet – a form of poetry used by poets like Terrance Hayes that removes most of the traditional (metric and rhyming) constraints on the sonnet, but generally keeps the constraint of fitting into fourteen lines with a “turn” (volta) marking a shift of thought in the poem. I wanted to pick a form that was very explicitly marked as “American” and follow its constraints to mirror the theme of how to “fit into America” – I consider the volta here to start at “Remember / If you can’t solve a problem, simplify it…” and be the shift where the parent starts talking about their solution – comprehensibility.

Thematically, I was thinking about generational differences in the Asian American community, particularly different generational perspectives on what “authentic” Asian American problems actually are and how to solve them.

One generational perspective is on the model minority stereotype. Some older generations play into it more and view it as something honorable or less of a problem, whereas younger generations may believe that it separates Asian Americans from other minority groups by encouraging the belief among Asian Americans that belonging can be earned through productive labor and political silence. That is, belonging can be achieved by working hard and not complaining. By perpetuating the idea that Asian Americans have unique and superior “value systems” and have gotten where they are through hard work, the myth implicitly puts down other groups as not hardworking enough or smart enough. This can make Asian members of other minority groups feel like they’re not “Asian” enough or “good enough” at being a model minority.  As Claire Jean Kim points out in her introduction to Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World (2023):

Asian American scholars and activists sometimes make rhetorical and discursive choices that undermine the Black struggle, albeit inadvertently. When they claim that Asian Americans are minorities, too, deserving of equal consideration with Black people, they abstract from history and disavow the ways in which Asian Americans are, on the whole, advantaged relative to Black people. (6)

Kim urges Asian Americans to think about where they stand in comparison to other minority groups, and make sure espousing “Asian American problems” doesn’t take away from other minority groups advocating for their problems. Or in the words of Anthony Ocampo’s reflections on his book Brown and Gay in LA:

Most of the gay men I interviewed described coming out as a daunting decision, one that forced a collision between the value systems of the gay community and the immigrant family and its community. For example, within the gay community, there is an ethos that one should be out and proud about one’s sexuality; however, in the context of the immigrant family and community, where being gay is associated with stigma and shame, some men said their parents encouraged them to keep mum about their sexuality. (138)

Here, Ocampo reveals the struggle between “gay community problems” – the need to be out and proud, and “Asian American problems” – the need to not rock the boat among the immigrant community and family. The partitioning of “Asian American problems” isn’t exactly a false partition – there are definitely problems more associated with being Asian American – but it also isn’t entirely true. The process of defining “Asian American problems” and making them seem authentic and specific to Asian Americans can ignore the entanglements that all citizens of the United States have with each other, or all of the entanglements our identities have with each other. Problems can’t be viewed through pure compartmentalization – hence the line, “we fight  / for the same things – love, safety, justice –  / and cannot agree what they are.”

There’s a view of history that puts civil rights on a linear and always progressing timeline – group A gets rights, and then group B gets rights, et cetera. But there is the counter view that groups get more freedom by uniting, that the fight for civil rights across specific groups is one unified fight, that rights can be endangered at any time, and any marginalized group’s rights being endangered poses a threat to any other marginalized community. I think there is a generational, but also widespread tension between thinking on a local, individual-community level and thinking globally, and a very human tendency to think that just because something isn’t happening locally, it isn’t a broader problem anymore, either. I often struggle to conceptualize the scope of the “Asian American experience,” if such a thing exists, partially because different groups of Asian-Americans experience America differently. There are experiences that I know to exist that I don’t personally have. I think it helps to focus on how my individual perception of the world has been shaped by the push and pull of my various identities, and see my existence as “forms” of the broader patterns often described in studies and papers. I have been shielded from some forms of “otherness” and anti-Asian discrimination because of some aspects of my identity and feel alienated from parts of the Asian-American community because of other aspects of my identity. Often, experiences as described in an academic setting won’t apply fully to any one person, and this is because of the unique context they exist in – a context that becomes fuller the more other parts of an identity are factored in.

Generations, too, are divided by the question of how to exist in the United States. Discrimination is obviously a problem faced by the Asian American community, but what is the solution? Assimilation is an option, but is it problematic to assimilate when that promotes an inauthentic view of what it is to be Asian? It’s obviously reductive to say that the older generations are pro-assimilation and the younger generations aren’t, but for this specific poem I was thinking about the student protests at San Francisco State College (SFSC) during the mid-1960s, which addressed admissions decisions excluding non-white students and the perception among students of color that what was taught in the curriculum was irrelevant to what their lives looked like as students of color. These protests clashed with the beliefs of SFSC’s president at the time, S.I. Hayakawa. In Chains of Babylon : The Rise of Asian America, Daryl Maeda contextualizes this debate as:

[centering] on the proper way to understand the racial position of Asian Americans and how to go about seeking justice and equality. Hayakawa believed that assimilation would eventually solve the problem of racism; invoked the model minority thesis, which asserted that Japanese Americans had gained acceptance and middle-class status by working hard and avoiding vocal protests; and consistently allied himself with conservative whites. In contrast, his radical critics believed that racism and exploitation were permanent and fundamental features of a capitalist and imperialist society. (41)

Maeda characterizes this pro-assimilation view as an attempt to be as straightforwardly American, and therefore non-disruptive to America, as possible. Assimilation is about gaining trust by being legible, and part of this legibility is conforming to beliefs about your people. In this case, assimilation involves avoiding vocal protests and seeking equality through other means. Hayakawa believed that these means were semantics – that the “science of general semantics pointed to the benefits of social integration. He implored his audience, ‘We ought to ally ourselves with organizations that tend to bring people together instead of separate them into labeled groups’” (46). In other words, he believed that racism was a fundamentally irrational structure that could be solved with precision of language – another way of being legible. However, a younger generation Asian American might argue that racism is rational and purposive, not a product of irrational carelessness. Because the problem of discrimination – what its root causes are, how it starts and originates – is differently defined, there is no unified opinion within the Asian-American community on how to “solve” it.

My goal with this poem was to explore where perspectives in generational opinion and thought differ and come together. I wanted to take a step back and acknowledge that all Asian Americans, regardless of generation, are fundamentally fighting for a concept of justice and differ about how to achieve it. Some older Asian Americans may believe that justice purely for Asian Americans can be achieved, while some argue that justice is achieved through making it safe to be any minority, and cannot come at the cost of compromising another minority group’s fight for justice. Some older Asian Americans may believe that justice can come through assimilation – being readable and understandable through hard work and education, while others believe that assimilation can’t be a solution, that hard work to serve American systems is not a solution to a problem that is created by American systems.

Circumlocution

You’ve heard this one before. I call on the long history
of art easier than my own language, so I cry
sing, muse, and channel my art history professor.
She talks about the Greeks at Thermopylae
as if they have invented the idea of sacrifice. She says they died, of course,
They’re not necessarily going to win. These people
need to connect their suffering to the meaning of suffering.
This is language – to make meaning of nothing. To say without saying
this is what I have sacrificed. The work of the parent,
feeding their life into the abyss, but look at me now!
I’m dancing on words! I’m spinning straw
house weakness into golden strength! I’m
so tired of walking this well-worn path that is not comforting in its wear,
but frustrating. So much is forgiven if you destroy the rules
because you know them well enough to break them. I fuck up
in the same ways, different contexts. I butcher language
and it is called cuisine, not bloodshed. I channel creation
easier than country, reinvention easier than tradition,
and bring down my words against the rules of language
like a sledgehammer in a china shop, out of art and not
destruction. I hack until performance becomes real,
when the actor is so unafraid they become their mask. I confess–
I am still afraid. I come from the country of uncertainty,
where self-censorship makes us take one thing and use it to mean another.
We speak a language two layers deep. We squirrel
silent quarrels away in our mouths til winter.
We imply half of what must be said and hang –

Reflection: Circumlocution

Circumlocution is talking around a thing.  I learned circumlocution in my Chinese class when I didn’t know the word for something but still wanted to talk about it. One of the central things I was thinking about as I was writing this poem was all of the ways that language can be indirect.

The main theme of  “Circumlocution” and its punchline (to me, at least) is that all of the poem and my below analysis of it has been (un)said, or indirectly said, before. Erin Khuê Ninh’s book Passing for Perfect describes how:

Among many a second-generation Asian American, this frame is common sense, especially as Antonio Gramsci used the term: to convey that certain perceptions of reality may seem logical, inevitable, even though they are culturally specific and serve the interests of those in power. (5)

Implication is one type of indirect language. Through implication, a shared set of expectations can be created without ever being discussed, because it all references this “common sense” perception of the world. “Common sense” expectations  are never directly stated, but are engrained nonetheless. When talking to their second-generation children, parents will often use the language of sacrifice. One of my friends recounted her dad’s story of surviving on one bowl of rice a week when he first arrived.  My mom told stories of how adulthood involved learning how to be lonely in a new country as she pursued a career she didn’t really want for the sake of bringing her family stability. To cope with this sacrifice, it’s often expected that the children will use everything the sacrifice had bought to succeed in their lives. The children are expected to maintain or raise their status by converting the given opportunities into better opportunities in life. This is never explicitly stated, but we all know the expectation is there. As one of Anthony Ocampo’s interview subjects said:

‘To be the first generation of kids born in the United States, we are basically living proof of what that sacrifice meant,’ he explained. ‘That was a big part of why I went to college. That was also a big part of why I didn’t want to come out. To be thinking that my parents came over here to plant their roots and have a family and sacrifice so much, and I’m going to kill that.’ (2)

As second-generation children, we symbolize the result of sacrifice to our families. When we do well in school or get into good colleges or go on to positions of power, we demonstrate our ability to be fluent in this new culture. My family, at least, doesn’t really talk about this, or about our emotions and the other nebulous, unseen things at all. Is it paying off? I don’t know!

 My parents placed a premium on education, so I learned to read well at an early age. This meant that when I was in elementary school, my mother had me teach her how to speak enough English to blend into her workplace. To this day, I think learning to write precisely and becoming proficient in English language settings has been one of the things I’ve done to repay my parents’ hard work. Aside from the obvious “you can achieve so much by talking your way into things”, knowing the language of a country is key to being able to effortlessly exist in it, and it’s this effortless existence that makes other people think you belong in a space. From elementary school on, I came to understand how much power being able to use language “well” granted. This also meant that I came to really love writing, where I came to the realization that being fluent and comfortable with writing gives you affordances. Dysfluency and fluency can sound the same. With both, you can mess with sentence structures and how words work (“verbing nouns” is a big one in poetry) and making up words. If you’re fluent in the language you’re messing with, this is seen as a work of art, of creativity, and of expression, but if it’s your second language, this is seen as a sign of not belonging. In reality it is just as artistic and expressive.

My increased proficiency in English through the American education system came at the cost of preserving my Chinese proficiency. I went to Chinese school when I was younger, but as a kid, I also didn’t see how fortunate it was that I had a way to renew cultural ties at all. I complained enough that I stopped going. By high school I had stopped learning about Chinese culture and language in an immersion setting and did it for an AP class. Learning Chinese academically in such a setting muddled my understanding of the culture for a bit. When I recall something that feels particularly “Chinese,” I have to think for a moment about if it’s something I’ve actually experienced or felt or if I think it should be something I’ve experienced or felt, given what I’ve learned in school.

This tension between things we have actually experienced and things that we think we should have experienced drives a lot of my hesitancy around writing diaspora poems. I’ve talked to other members of the Asian American writing community and we’ve mostly agreed that it’s reached a point where certain topics, like food or pressure to perform or the expectations of our parents, feel ridiculously cringey to write about. These topics are seen as overdone and the classic second-generation immigrant sob story, and writing about them feels like playing into it. This is the story that’s dug up whenever an art or writing competition happens or an essay is due, because at this point it’s the story that people expect from us.  Sometimes I feel like I’m performing my Chinese-American experience, like I’ve read a script that tells me what to say and how to feel.

This script doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world, and you won’t find the script as a whole in any one piece of media. I just know that it intuitively feels like the logical and inevitable conclusion of my Asian-American thought process. Does the fact that the story is expected make it inauthentic? I don’t know, and this means that whenever I try to talk about the concept of parental sacrifice and its resulting generational expectations, I find myself asking – is this experience something I know from authentic experience because it’s a form of “common sense”, some cultural norm? Or is it something I’ve fooled myself into “knowing” because it’s something I think I should know?

These are the sort of questions I think many people who write diaspora poems wrestle with. Writing a diaspora poem feels like talking about your own experiences while talking around (never directly mentioning, sometimes alluding to, sometimes trying to subvert) the larger, expected story about diaspora.

Tarot - The Comic

A response to Mimi Khúc’s “The Asian American Tarot” project

The Comic’s tool is their fluency. Comedy creates fluency, smoothing over familial conflict, turning strangers into people you are united in feeling with, reminding a community that nothing is as serious as the fact of our togetherness. Comedy requires fluency, understanding the expectations you are held to before you subvert them. The Comic is themselves a subversion of expectation in a country that is determined to see them as cold, stoic, and never fluent in anything. Through punchlines, punching up, and being punched down, the Comic is acutely aware of how being inundated by talk punches holes in a person’s head. That we come to take the shape of what is breathed into us. The Comic jokes about being the Model Minority because there is nothing like laughing in shared relief, but looks beyond well-trod descriptions towards new possibilities. The Comic tips their hat at their ancestors, the storytellers and Scholars, but scoffs at the mask with tragedy in one neat half and comedy in the other. Sometimes things are so funny they are sad, and sometimes things are so sad they are funny. Like the Fool, others may see their joy as naive or frivolous. The Comic knows, though, that you cannot separate their bark from their bite. The Comic knows that their skill at swinging a spotlight illuminates something so bright, so real, no one can look directly at it. The Comic knows that this metamorphosis from sorrow to sunshine is some of the most serious work there is.

Reflection: Tarot - The Comic

This poem thinks about how to create new authenticities, how to tell our stories in authentic ways, and how to avoid holding ourselves to the ideas of authenticities that hurt us. I’ve been thinking a lot about comedy and humor as a means for telling authentic stories.

Comedy and its punchlines are useful as a rhetorical package to quickly get across many complex ideas. Jokes are rooted in ideas about reality that are “known” and prevalent but can be hard to articulate otherwise. Here, I’m thinking about Ronald Reagan’s classic Soviet joke (a man goes to buy a car but is told it will be delivered ten years later. The man asks if it’ll be delivered morning or afternoon and when asked why it matters, he says that the plumber is coming in the morning), which Reagan uses to make his points about Communist bureaucracy funny and digestible to his American audience, thus taking away the bite of his Cold War enemy.

As a package, comedy is very fast and digestible, and (obviously) has been and can be definitely used to push negative ideas about Asian Americans. A small example but one that comes to mind is the concept of a B as the “Asian F” setting very high standards. However, comedy also gives you the fluency to push back against these received ideas. Comedy can spin mistakes into something that can happen to anyone, can smooth over conflict, and defuse situations. Comedy is a type of fluency in a place where people expect Asian Americans to be, as Claire Jean Kim says, “permanently foreign and unassimilable” (109). But if they are to be called foreigners, at least they know enough about what it’s like to be different to write jokes about it. However, because jokes are so packageable and digestible, it’s still true that repeating tired jokes – like that of the model minority – can still cement them as a norm. In the words of Ninh: “If you have enjoyed what Tiger parenting memes say about you (laughed ruefully, maybe, but knowingly): Congratulations, you have tested positive. With your click, like, and share, you affirm an identity set apart from other racial groups: a feeling that our bar is higher” (6).

I think comedy provides the opportunity to subvert tired rhetoric and tell authentic stories. Revealing and laughing at contradiction and absurdity because you disagree with their versions of the truth is sometimes the only thing in your power to do. One example lies in the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?, a 1989 Asian American documentary chronicling the circumstances around the racially motivated killing of the Chinese American auto worker Vincent Chin in 1982. Despite it being a record of an incredibly frustrating and ultimately futile search for justice, the cinematography in Who Killed Vincent Chin? is often comedic, with its jump cuts between Chin’s mother grieving and the white murderer, Ron Ebens, dropping banal understatements that reveal his lack of understanding about what he’d done. The documentary also gives Ebens enough rope to hang himself by giving the audience room to consider his absurd statements, like complaining that his jail experience after killing something was not nice. This laughter is important– there is nothing trivial in the ability to reconstrue your own story.

itadori / knotweed

after Tyehimba Jess

As a landmark I ground your site.                          As a weed I invade your manicured sight–

a reminder that before us there were others who lived and grew and died. Others that

will survive in what we nourished or          we poisoned. Like tree rings holding in drought, I’m

weathered with all our years. I blanket the ruins that were once here. I’m the one at the end

tucking you in one last time.           closing your eyes with two light touches, then starting again.

I find a home again in my body, which whispers

like fallen leaves to me that quiet is soon, but       why not put down roots in the dry places?

We will love the deserts, the places they mark out as wasteland, the countries we haven’t crossed.

Like a mother my hands are full. I give            Like a daughter I have a greedy mouth. I take

up the future I am always fighting for, knowing others will follow. I am the frontier now,

the pioneer you never imagined,               but I have always been a body of bodies in motion,

painting the seas with my movement. We have been striking out for the unknown with

food instead of fists to fill a stomach,                                  our new names but same selves,

weaving together roots and dust and stone as old as hope.

Reflection: itadori / knotweed

“itadori / knotweed”  was inspired by the “Uprooted: Plants out of Place” exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The exhibit was on photographer Koichi Watanabe’s photos of  itadori (or knotweed, as it’s called in the US). It’s a plant that grows easily in ruins and barren areas, and thus “overtakes” the land around them. It’s considered in many places to be very invasive. The migration metaphor writes itself, with the “rendering of Asian Americans as foreign contagion” (Hsu 130).

I know this poem as a “syncopated sonnet,” used heavily by Tyehimba Jess in their book Olio. It’s not as multidirectional as theirs, but you can read the whole poem as you would read a normal poem, left to right and top to bottom. I think an alternate reading of this poem can also be reading by “perspective.” I imagine the bolded segments to be the voice of itadori/the parent – the plant by its native name in its home. The non-bolded segments would be knotweed/the child - the plant by a new name aboard, and the italicized segments would be them speaking together. So you could read the left half as starting “As a landmark I ground your site. / a reminder that before us there were others who lived and grew and died. Others that / will survive in what we nourished or / weathered with all our years. I blanket the ruins that were once here. I’m the one at the end ”, and the right half as starting “As a weed I invade your manicured sight– /  a reminder that before us there were others who lived and grew and died. Others that / we poisoned. Like tree rings holding in drought, I’m / weathered with all our years. I blanket the ruins that were once here. I’m the one at the end ”.

This poem differs thematically from the rest to convey that the relationship that exists between generations of Asian Americans is not exclusively a fraught and antagonistic one. I think about the queer community and how we cling to the wisdom and support of our queer elders because we don’t have many (but that is worth the discussion of a whole other project), and I think about my parents’ stubborn search for a better life and how I can go and talk to them right now. This is in part why the framing of Khúc’s Dear Elia (2023) as a letter from mother to daughter was so impactful: it had the feel of generational knowledge being passed down.

While I was writing this poem, I was also thinking about preserving memory, about how itadori/knotweed grows around the ruins of buildings, and about taking up old fights. Who Killed Vincent Chin? ends with the director telling us that after watching the film, a new generation of Asian Americans were inspired to become criminal justice lawyers in order to prevent future acts of injustice. Though the fight may never be finished, though there are still ruins and relics of injustice, keeping history alive inspires newer generations to keep trying, to keep growing.

This poem also considers the way contemporary writers complicate our views about  migration. For example, Erika Lee’s introduction to The Making of Asian America: A History (2015) urges us to view immigrants as transnational, fluid between nations –

Furthermore, contemporary Asian Americans are creating new, multi-layered identities. They are simultaneously racial minorities within nations, transnational immigrants who engage in two or more homelands, and diasporic citizens making connections across borders. Like many contemporary immigrants around the world, they ‘don’t trade in their home country membership card for an American one,’ as anthropologist Peggy Levitt explains. Rather, they ‘belong to several communities at once.’ (7)

Though being a pioneer and exploring frontiers are traits very closely associated with being authentically American, they are less often applied to immigrants, who are nevertheless pioneering, exploring and finding themselves in a new homeland, building a new identity. Immigrating doesn’t make anyone less of anything – less American or less of their other identity. It just adds another layer to a complex and authentic self.

Conclusion

There are many narratives about immigration that fall into what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “single stories,” or reductive and simplistic narratives that place bounds on what is “expected” for a group. In immigrants’ case, the single story encompasses what immigrants are like and what kind of roles they come to play in their children’s lives, to name a couple. With “Talking Around,” I’ve tried to find new ways to look at second-generation stories. Yes, we don’t always get along with our parents. Yes, we still love and respect and try to honor their sacrifices. Yes, immigrating makes it hard to navigate a new country, but there is beauty in this process of mixing homelands and figuring them out. We try to be true to their intentions while also trying to be true to ourselves. All of this is a complex and authentic part of the Asian American experience, because authenticity is fluid and found in what we are and what we do. We make new authenticities simply by living and existing in the worlds we are always negotiating between and living and existing in.

Works Cited