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narratives An Asian American scholar on what a "smart girl" is doing raising questions of identity I could identify myself an Asian American scholar - but this is a tricky thing to do, and it requires all sorts of qualifications and explanations. I’m also a professor of literature, however, so confusions and complexities are not supposed to simply frighten me, but also to intrigue and inspire. So what does it mean to be an Asian American scholar? Does it mean that I am an Asian American? I am a native-born U.S. citizen, the daughter of immigrants from India. Or, I should say, one former immigrant, as my mother became a naturalized citizen years ago. But then again, she doesn’t seem to feel any less Indian for becoming an American, so is she, then, still an immigrant? Does being an “Asian American scholar” mean that I study Asian Americans? What does it mean to study Asian Americans; is an Asian American scholar to the Asian American as an entomologist is to an insect? I do study the literature and history of a group called “Asian American.” I also study the literature and history of a group called “Latino,” or sometimes “Hispanic.” I also study the literature and history of something called “America,” which, I have often felt, means something rather different who I am, despite my “birthright” citizenship. This must be the way an entomologist relates to his or her object of study, a fascination with an entirely other species of being. But then I’m told this is a name to which I have a claim, and this is rather unlike the entomologist who can never claim to be an insect. I am employed by a state university in a “joint” position, by an English department and an ethnic studies program, which makes defining who I am all that much more difficult. On any given day, I might be asked to explain metonymy, colonial relationships, thesis statements, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, and to do so with authority. Which leads to a final troubling question: What on earth is a ’scholar” anyway? I always assumed once I was handed a doctorate’s degree, I’d magically become an expert. Certainly, some people have come to trust me as one now that I have it. But, I’ve learned the hard way that if I think I have some expert knowledge to relate to my parents about the Asian American experience, including my attempts to describe them as part of an Asian American experience, then I should think again. Moreover, I have barely been able to read my way through the “canon” of Asian American literature (and don’t forget Latino literature and American literature), those texts thought to be fundamental to one’s knowledge of Asian American experience, much less keep up with the explosion of new literature that is being written and published today. So in what way can I claim any type of expertise? I’m afraid I might be making a mess of things by raising all these questions about what it means to be an Asian American scholar, and I’m not providing many answers. Instead of questions, I could tell stories. As a professor of literature, I’m supposed to like telling, and then picking apart, stories. Here’s one: When I had just begun graduate school in English, I was talking to a friend of my parents, also Indian, who’s known me since I was a child. She said to me, “You’re so smart, why didn’t you go into medicine or something like that?” Anyone who’s an Asian American will recognize this response (if you’re an Asian American and don’t recognize this, does this then make you a less authentic Asian American, I wonder?). Students of Asian descent are supposed to pursue the physical sciences, computer sciences, or accounting. Some rebellious ones go to law school. I know that by ’smart work,” she meant work that pays very, very well. She speaks for almost an entire generation of Asian immigrants entering the United States after an overhaul of immigration laws in 1965, and I know there are legitimate reasons why they feel this way and want this type of life for me. Nonetheless, I was offended. Another story: At a wedding reception I attended recently, I was talking to a woman I had just met and she asked why I, an Indian (-American) woman, was interested in Asian American studies. This makes sense to me, because, after all, South Asians in the U.S. remain relatively invisible. They emerge in the national consciousness only as motel and convenience store owners, but not as people who live as Americans. They certainly aren’t visible as part of an Asian American racial formation. But I’m taken aback anyway. I have a feeling that if I told her that I studied Shakespeare or French literature or colonial American history, I wouldn’t have had quite the same question put to me. These are, after all, universal, or at least national, areas of interest, so my interest there is conceivable. In contrast, I’m inferring, ethnic studies is an exercise in navel-gazing, whether that navel-gazing is benevolently described, in the name of multiculturalism, as “finding yourself,” or less benevolently to be divisively segregationist. Since I don’t really exist in the social landscape as an Asian American, Asian American studies is a very weird place for me to be working. I don’t mean to lay the blame for my frustrations only on this woman, because I think her response tells me something about my own parents’ continuing inability to remember the subject of my dissertation. When I started graduate school, I told them that I was interested in immigrant women’s writing, and they have continued to the present day to tell people that this is my area of specialization. While immigration and gender are important aspects of this work, I have for years studied them as parts of U.S.-based ethnic studies. But the blockage in my parents’ grasp of this larger field of study is telling. It seems to ask of me, “What does any of this have to do with us?” All of this is no less grounded in the assumption, their assumption, that Indians (as far as I know, my parents have never called themselves “South Asians’) do not really exist in America and have nothing in common with Asian (i.e. East Asian) Americans. The other answer, “immigrant women’s writing,” makes sense. They attribute my feminism to my Americanization, my assimilation. On the other hand, to them, my studying immigration must seem to be my way of understanding why they are so backwards and traditional. This is, after all, the mythic story of immigration and assimilation; people leave the old country as a place that only existed in the past and become modern when they enter the United States. But all of this strikes me as odd. I’ve never thought of my parents as all that un-progressive. When they arrived in the U.S. in the late 1960s, they both came from solidly middle-class families, with all the bourgeois sensibilities that the middle-class in a post-colonial nation aspires to. They spoke English, not fluently (they still don’t today) but competently, and both my mother and father had undergraduate degrees. In addition, for as long as I could remember, I always seemed much more concerned about gendered inequities and women’s subordination than most of my white girl friends, so I’d come to believe that this had much to do with my Indian parents as with my Americanized socialization. I can’t help but feel that my stories are small and insignificant. So what if a person here or there challenges the professional choices I’ve made? So what if my parents don’t quite know the name of the field I study? In truth, these are only distracting incidents; to call them obstacles would be overstate the impact they have had in my life. But sociologist Avery Gordon has eloquently described just how necessary distractions are in order for us to tell the stories that we ultimately need to tell. Distractions, Gordon explains, are like ghostly openings into the well-laid plans of our daily lives, personal and professional. When distractions seize upon us, the way a ghost might enchant us, we make detours onto paths that otherwise remain invisible, disavowed, or buried, with all of the possibilities they hold for us also left unseen. This is how I end up in literary studies and ethnic studies at the same time. The stories I tell about my own life hold distracting questions, and I am drawn to this place where people write and read literature in order to answer them. I work with literature, because I believe it is a compelling space where people grapple with the traumas, privileges and paradoxes of race, class and gender. The distractions I’ve described above come together as another, much more significant, question: What does it mean to be a person of color in the United States who is neither black nor white? We live in a nation where race has always been understood in terms of a white majority and a black minority, and this substantially remains the case today. Where does that leave those who are neither black nor white? To ask this question is not to dismiss or disavow connections between, say, the experiences and identities of Asian Americans or Latinos, on the one hand, and African Americans on the other. The civil rights movement may have come out of a specifically black history of oppression, but its importance to the lives of all people of color cannot be overstated. However, we also have to take seriously the claim of those predominantly middle-class Asians and Hispanics who feel no debt to, or identification with, African American activist history. Answering the question, what does it mean to be a person of color who is neither black nor white, translates into a larger political and social project, a project that has to be undertaken if we are to remain committed to democratic politics in this next century. I suppose I’ve offered no real resolution to the issue of my identity here - just a catalogue of troubling questions. Perhaps the only conclusion I can offer is this: None of this is separate from what I do for a living. One could say that as an Asian American scholar, I make a living by living as an Asian American. To live as an Asian American, rather than as an Indian, or even as Chinese or Korean, or as “just American,” is not only to live with all of the troubling questions, but to call them up and to think about them constantly, critically. These “problems’ that I’ve encountered in trying to pin down my own identity motivate my teaching, research and academic service. These are all very big questions, so I figure a ’smart girl” like me can make a lifetime’s worth of work in trying to answer them.
Crystal Parikh is an assistant professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Utah. View all topics in the Related Sites Read the entire identity issue |
