> on the question of return
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: Asian American myopia and my obsession with returns.
Hello friend,
The last time I went to China, my cousin told me that I could become a doctor in Hong Kong. “You can speak English and Chinese,” he told me. “They would love to have you there.”
That will never happen, I thought back then, and still think now. The more interesting question is why—why did my cousin so readily believe that I would belong in Hong Kong? Why didn’t I think the same?
My cousin saw it as a way for me to return to the motherland. “If you feel too distant from your extended family,” he seemed to say, “just come back.”
Come back. What a tricky pair of words, implying a return. Can you return to a place where you’ve never really been?
I’ve been thinking about how I call my visits to China 回国, “a return to the country,” and whether I can return to place that I’ve never called home, and to what extent my living in Taiwan right now is a return. Now is a return in the sense that I belong here in ways that I don’t in the U.S. My language and appearance, which make me stand out in the states, help me blend in here.
But I don’t see any of this as a return. It’s more like I’m tracing a ghost—trying to see what my life could have been like had I grown up in East Asia, had I really belonged here, had I a place to return to here. It’s an impossible visualization precisely because I am not that ghost.
In an Instagram post from Fulbright Lotus, Brain Tsui said:
I often questioned whether I was qualified to teach about “American culture.” I’ve never decorated a Christmas tree (for that matter, the house too—ours was always the unlit one on a street full of LED cheer), or had football on during Thanksgivings. At times I felt that my understanding of American culture came from the same movies, sitcoms, and images that my Hong Kong students consumed. My students knew that America was diverse, and that there was more to what they saw on screens. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of imposter syndrome when I discussed my “American” cultural experiences. Why oh why was I revisiting my teen angst again over this simple task.
It’s that last part—“why oh why was I revisiting my teen angst again”—that gets me. I feel it too. Why can’t I stop obsessing over the question of belonging?
In a profile of Stephen Yeun that’s been circulating (h/t Jenny), Jay Caspian Kang writes that “Not everybody cares about our obsessing over belonging and not-belonging and displacement.”
I keep thinking about this one moment in the profile, about what it was like for Yeun to work on Burning, a Korean film.
The five months Yeun spent shooting the film in Seoul allowed him to imagine what life would be like if his parents had never immigrated to North America, or perhaps if he had decided to pull up stakes and pursue a career in Korean film.
Yeun’s imagining is analogous to my imagining. What if I was born in China? What if I moved to Hong Kong to be a doctor? What if I stayed in Taiwan?
Maybe the way to make peace is to indulge in impossible fantasy, to indulge in the idea that my trips to China or Taiwan are a return.
I also worry that me writing about these obsessions is performative, as if I’m performing what a non-Chinese American audience wants to hear about Chinese Americans.
I know I’m especially sensitive to this because I’ve just read Interior Chinatown, which is all about Chinese American performativity. I love Nicole Linh Anderson’s take on the novel:
It is about understanding your own identity as refracted and explained by the White understanding of the Asian American experience. Is that not Chinatown—a place designed to be not like China, but like how Americans imagine China to be?
When I wrote a collection of short stories about Chinese Americans for my English thesis, I felt so much like I was just performing the same immigrant story that people wanted to hear. My obsession with this question of identity seems to dilute any meaning that might come out of it. I’m so obsessed that it becomes myopic, as if my particular questions about my Chinese American identity could stand in for the questions of all Asian Americans. Of course, that kind of thinking is silly, but assumptions about Asian American homogeneity shape Asian American discourse.
It was heartbreaking to read the part of Anderson’s review about whether people sensed a hierarchy of “types” of Asians.
The majority of Asian Americans said yes, and moreover, the hierarchies they offered up overlapped greatly. Over and over Japan and Korea ended up at the top, followed by Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Mainland China came after that, always preceding Southeast Asia. The Philippines routinely was ranked in last place. South Asia was often excluded altogether, or placed somewhere near the bottom, with India seen as having a higher status than the other South Asian countries. Central Asia didn’t even register…I’m drawing attention to this invisible Asian hierarchy because it illustrates how disparate the Asian American experience is even within the Asian American community.
That hierarchy is terrifying for its invisibility, the way it reinforces geopolitical relations and class divisions. Something I think about now that I didn’t think of even a couple years ago is how my obsession with my identity reinforces a dominance of East Asian narratives among Asian American writing. How this newsletter might reinforce that kind of erasure.
There’s a call on the internet to stop using the term “Chinese New Year,” because the Lunar New Year is celebrated across Asia.
My desire to have a place of return is less about belonging (I’ll never belong the way my cousin envisioned) and more about solidarity—knowing that people feel the same hauntings and the same imaginings.
Cheers,
Tiffany