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Introduction
“Role
of Dead Man Require Very Little Acting”
(from
Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936; 20th Century-Fox),
starring Warner Oland as Charlie Chan)
Charlie Chan is our most famous fake “Asian” pop icon—known
for his obsequious manner, fractured English, and dainty walk.
Absurdly cryptic, pseudo-Confucian
sayings rolled off his tongue:
“Observe.”
“When
weaving nets, all threads counted.”
“Woman’s
intuition like feather on arrow. May
help flight to truth.”
“Necessity
mother of invention, but sometimes stepmother of deception.”
“Boy
scout knife, like ladies’ hairpin.
Have many uses.”
“Best
place for skeleton is in family closet.”
“Chinese
people interested in all things psychic.”
“If
strength were all, tiger would not fear scorpian.”
“Observe.”
The character of Charlie Chan was created by a white man named Earl
Derr Biggers in 1925. Ingrained
in American popular culture, Charlie Chan is as much a part of the
demeaning legacy of stereotypes that includes Fu Manchu, Stepin’ Fetchit,
Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Amos N’ Andy, Speedy Ganzalez, Tonto, and Little
Brown Brother. I grew up in the Philippines watching Hollywood movies
featuring yellowface, blackface, and redface actors giving me their
versions of myself. It was so
easy to succumb to the seductive, insidioius power of these skewed,
wide-screen images. Better than books, movies were immediate and reached more
people—both literate and illiterate.
Movies were instantly gratifying.
Bigger than life. I
was a child. The movies were
God. And therefore, true.
The slit-eyed, bucktooth Jap thrusting
his bayonet, thirsty for blood. The
inscrutable, wily Chinese detective with his taped eyelids and wispy
mustache. The childlike,
indolent Filipino houseboy. Always
giggling. Bowing and
scraping. Eager to please,
but untrustworthy. The
sexless, hairless Asian male. The
servile, oversexed Asian female. The
serpentine, cunning Dragon Lady. Mysterious
and evil, eager to please. Effeminate.
Untrustworthy. Yellow
Peril. Fortune Cookie
Psychic. Savage.
Dogeater. Invisible.
Mute. Faceless
peasants breeding too many children.
Gooks. Passive
Japanese Americans obediently marching off to “relocation camps”
during the Second World War.
The images have now evolved into subtler stereotypes.
There’s the greedy, clever Japanese Businessman, ready to
buy up New York City and all the Van Goghs in the world.
There’s the Ultimate Nerd, the model minority Asian
American student, excelling in math and computer science, obsessed with
work, work, work. There’s Miss
Saigon, the contemporary version of Madame Butterfly—tragic
victim/whore of wartorn Vietnam, eternally longing for the white boy
soldier who has abandoned her and her son. There’s The Lover, the
pathetic Chinese millionaire boy-toy completely dominated by his
impoverished, adolescent, blondie waif dominatrix in both Marguerite Duras’
popular novel and the recent film version.
Often portrayed as loyal servants and children, we are humorless,
non-assertive, impotent—yet we are eroticized as exotic playthings in
both Western film and literature. In
our perceived American character—we are completely non-threatening.
We don’t complain. We endure humiliation. We
are almost inhuman in our patience. We
never get angry.
I grew up in the Philippines reading the literature of the Western
World—Hawthorne, Poe, Cervantes, to name a few.
Of course there was also the Old and New Testament of the Bible
which we were expected to study and deconstruct in loving detail; we were
a majority Catholic country, after all, legendary for our faith and zeal.
My reading in books in English cam from the United States—Fun
with Dick and Jane. I
though all Americans were blond and freckled, ate apples, and all
fair-haired children had dogs like Spot.
Everyone lived in modern homes, with mowed lawns and picket fences.
It was a David Lynch movie cliché without the perverse undertones.
Even though we also studies Tagalog, one of our native languages
(now known as Pilipino), and read some of the native literature (I
remember Jose Rizal in particular, and an epic, romantic poem by Francisco
Balagtas), it was pretty clear to most of us growing up in the fifties and
early sixties that what was really important, what was inevitably
preferred, was the aping of our mythologized Hollywood universe.
The colonization of our imagination was relentless and hard to
shake off. Everywhere we
turned, the images held up did not match our own.
In order to be acknowledged, we had to strive to be as American as
possible.
And then I came to the United States of America.
We settled in San Francisco, California—a city we probably felt
most comfortable in because of its closeness to water (we could leave
anytime and go back “home”), and because there was a growing and
already visible Asian community (we had easy access to our culture,
whether we wanted it or not). The
irony was not lost on us, back then.
We were also confronted by the new and unfamiliar: Chicanos,
African Americans (still called “Negroes”), and an incredible variety
of white people of various ethnic origins.
I was ignorant of the difficult history and contributions of Asian
Americans in this country. I
had no idea Filipinos were exploited as cheap farm labor in California
places like Watsonville, Salinas, and Stockton; they were firebombed and
run out of town by angry mobs threatened by loss of jobs throughout the
Western states; they were forbidden to marry white women, harassed openly,
and even lynched for being involved with them.
Filipino women were outnumbered by Filipino men one to a hundred in
the 1920s and ‘30s, according to Fred Cordova’s remarkable book, Filipinos:
Forgotten Asian Americans. I
was unaware of the signs in California public establishments that were
common sight in the 1930s: “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”
This had never been taught us back in Manila, an was certainly not
part of my high school social studies in San Francisco in the sixties.
Americans were the good guys.
For Filipinos, especially, American was generally perceived as our
savior, our benefactor, our protector; as Carlos Bulosan wrote so
sincerely and poignantly, and as I imagine he believed to the bitter end:
“America Is in the Heart.”
In my American high school classes, I was again reading Hawthorne,
Poe, Melville, Dostoevski, Dickens, the occasional Emily Dickinson or
Brontë sisters. Sui Sin Far,
Richard Wright, John Okada, Lawson Inada, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin,
Toshio Mori, and Carlos Bulosan did not exist in our curriculum.
I graduated from high school in 1967, unable to pinpoint the source
of my unease. I had been in
America exactly four years. There
were sit-ins going on, downtown on Van Ness Avenue.
A strike San Francisco State University a few blocks away from my
high school. John F. Kennedy
and Malcolm X had been assassinated.
The Black Panther Party was born.
How did I fit in? Chicanos,
African Americans, and even militant Asian Americans were forming
alliances. Could Asian Americans, in fact, be “militant”?
Were we really a part of the Third World?
The Third World. Not
exactly a term my family would take pride in.
Back where I came from, “Third World” lacked glamour.
It was synonymous with phones that didn’t work, roads that were
badly in need of repair, corrupt politicians, and naked children with
rickety bones and bellies bloated from hunger.
Who am I?
Shake
syntax, smash the myths, and if you lose, slide on, unearth some
linguistic paths. Do you
surprise?
Do
you shock? Do you have a
choice?
—
Trihn T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other
My
mother bought me my first portable typewriter.
There was no question. After
all, my maternal grandfather had been a writer and a teacher.
Everyone in my family enjoyed books.
I had always been encouraged to write, although I’m not sure I
was taken all that seriously. Poems
were my way out of isolation. I
read anything I could get my hands on, and by sheer accident, stumbled
upon a new wave of irreverent and blasphemous American writers.
This was not the white-washed America I’d been taught to revere. These were poems and poets who were talking back to me.
These were words that go American people upset.
LeRoi Jones’ angry incantations.
Victor Hernandez Cruz’s precocious, sly, and rhythmic ditties.
The thrilling indulgence of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
The fierce drag queens and teenage hustlers of John Rechy’s dark
“City of Night.” The
swaggering power of Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping.”
I am, I am, I am.
With
no real idea of myself as a
postcolonial Filipino, Asian American, or as a female person of mixed
descent, but armed with this new and disturbing inspiration, I began to
seriously write and read. I
found other provocative books which unsettled me and made me ask
questions. In spite of my
political ignorance, I was blissfully driven to put word to paper, perhaps
to express what I did not know. Words
were my favorite instruments of illusion and communication. In slowly discovering the works of other Asian and Asian
American writers in the early Seventies, I delighted in my rude
awakenings. Some of my first
readings included: Jose Garcia Villa’s elegant poems and stories; Frank
Chin’s powerful “Goong Hai Fot Choy” excerpted in Ishmael Reed’s
seminal multicultural anthology, 19 Necromancers from Now;
Bienvenido Santos’ bittersweet portraits of Filipino manongs
in his short-story collection, Scent of Apples; N. V. M. Gonzalez’s wistful novel, The Bamboo Dancers;
John Okada’s searing indictment of racist hysteria against Japanese
Americans in No-No Boy; Toshio
Mori’s haunting novel of an Issei woman, Woman from Hiroshima.
Unfortunately, these books were difficult to find back then, and
still are now. Many are
out-of-print.
And
thank god for the other Asian American writers who became my streetwise
teachers, co-conspirators, and artistic family in the blossoming Bar Area
of the 1970s: the late Serafin Syquia, the late Bayani Mariano, Al Robles,
Janice Mirikitani, Kitty Tsui, Geraldine Kudaka, Oscar Peñaranda, Lou
Syquia, Nellie Wong, Russell Leong, Genny Lim, Presco Tabios, Norman Jayo,
George Leong . . . all those who volunteered to work with the manongs
and other senior citizens living at the legendary I-Hotel, all those who
passed through the open doors of the Kearny Street Writers Workshop,
sharing food, drink, gossip, poems, stories, and first attempts at
scripts. We collaborated on
many literary projects with other Bay Area writers and artists of color
like Ishmael Reed, Roberto Vargas, Thulani Davis, Avotcja Jiltonero, the
late Buriel Clay, Alejandro Murguia, Jim Dong, Janet Campbell Hale,
Ntozake Shange, and Rupert Garcia, to name a few.
Some of us were part of an artistic and media collective known as
Third World Communications. We
no longer wanted to sit around waiting for the publishing industry to
notice us; we raised money, edited, designed, and published our own books,
knowing all along that there was a growing readership out there.
The
first Aiiieeeee! anthology, published in hardback in 1974 and in paperback in 1975, was
an absolute breakthrough for Asian Americans.
The brash, refreshingly outspoken editors of this landmark
collection were Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and
Shawn Wong. Receiving my copy
as a gift from Frank Chin (who declined to be included in this anthology)
proved a joyous revelation. I
was not alone, pure and simple. There
were other writers—poets, essayists, novelists, playwrights—like me,
and yet not like me at all. We
may share the same yearnings for adobo
and pinakbet, but some of us had
worked in Alaskan canneries or as migrant workers in California, and wrote
from that brutal experience; others wrote sophisticated existentialist
fiction reeking with black humor; still others wrote of the conflicts and
tensions within Asian American families, and the surreal displacement felt
by many immigrants. Others
owed their anarchic allegiances purely to rock’n’roll.
Some were my contemporaries, immigrants like me.
Others had been in America two or three generations.
There were many who had experienced firsthand the indignities and
harsh realities of incarceration in the so-called “relocation camps”
like Manzanar, Tule Lake, or Poston, Arizona.
Our histories are often painfully entangled, and yes—we quarrel
amongst ourselves. But we are
definitely “not new here.”
Besides
presenting the individual literary work of the editors, the first Aiiieeeee!
gave us a sampling of the poems, plays, and stories of: Carlos Bulosan,.
Luis Chu. Hisaye
Yamamoto DeSoto. Wakako
Yamauhi. Diana Chang.
Toshio Mori. Oscar Peñaranda. Sam
Tagatac. John Okada.
Momoko Iko. Russell Leong, a.k.a. Wallace Lin. My writer’s education owes a big debt to this first Aiiieeeee!
The sound was, and is “more than a whine, shout or scream. This is fifty years of our whole voice.”
The
energy and interest sparked by Aiiieeeee! in
the Seventies was essential to Asian American writers because it gave us
visibility and credibility as creators of our own specific literature.
We could not be ignored; suddenly, we were no longer silent.
Like other writers of color in America, we were beginning to
challenge the long-cherished concepts of a xenophobic literary canon
dominated by white heterosexual males.
Obviously, there was room for more than one voice and one vision in
this ever-expanding arena.
There
were fourteen writers included in the first Aiiieeeee!
anthology. Since then, there
has been more cause for celebration.
A number of notable novels, memoirs, essays, and collections of
Asian American poetry, plays, critical theory, social history and fiction
have been published by big and small presses to critical and commercial
acclaim in the brief, seventeen-year period spanning 1976 to 1993.
And
then of course, came The Big AIIIEEEEE!,
this time billed solely as “An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese
American Literature” and again edited by Chan, Chin, and Wong and
published in 1991. This
second volume boasts 619 pages and features twenty-eight writers of
fiction, poetry, and essays. Three
Filipino Women—three novellas by one of
the Philippines’ most distinguished writers, F. Sionil Jose—were
published in one volume in America in 1992.
That same year, Trevor Carolan’s The Colors of Heaven,
a collection of Pacific Rim writers from China, Japan, Taiwan, the
Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Australia, Indonesia, and New
Zealand, was published. 1993
has already brought us Garrett Hongo’s anthology of Asian American
poetry, The Open Boat; Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp; Luis Francia’s anthology of Philippine literature in English, Brown
River, White Ocean; and Fae Myenne Ng’s
long-awaited first novel, Bone.
Hmmm.
We’ve come a long way, Charlie baby.
In
the thirty years I have lived in America, I never really thought I would
see the literary landscape change, splitting off into so many challenging
and liberating directions. As
the first anthology of Asian American fiction by a commercial publisher in
this country, Charlie Chan is Dead proudly presents forty-eight writers.
Almost half of are being published in a major collection for the
first time.
*
*
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Some
of these writers were originally poets, some still are.
Others only write fiction. Some
were born in the Philippines, some in Seattle.
A few in Hawaii. Others
in Toronto or London. Some
live in San Francisco. Oakland.
Stockton. Los Angeles.
New York City. Santa
Fe. Family in Panama.
Singapore. Tokyo.
Manila. Pusan.
Chicago. Hayward.
Boston. Brooklyn.
Beijing. Mindoro.
Washington, D.C. Seoul. Greeley,
Colorado. India.
Penang. Moscow, Idaho.
Asian
American literature? Too confining a term, maybe.
World Literature? Absolutely.
This
is an anthology I created for selfish reasons; a book I wanted to read
that had never been available to me.
In many ways these stories, cultures clash.
We are confronted by characters in all their contradictions and
complexities. They make love,
worry about the future, hurt each other, endure hardships.
They grease their hair, conk and lacquer it; dance slick like James
Brown, shimmy across the floor, get loud and have fun. They get high.
Sell their bodies. They
audition for jobs as anchormen and women.
They are lost in nostalgia, homesick for their country of origin. Exiled. Displaced.
Assimilated. Rebellious. They
lie and cheat; they betray themselves and others.
They are tough and noble. They
survive. They remind us that
in our civilized anguish, we are still beautiful and amazing.
In
this collection, some of us retell familial and cultural mythology, yet we
also write out of more personal and perhaps more terrifying truths.
For many of us, what is personal is also political, and vice versa.
We are asserting and continually exploring who we are as Asians,
Asian Americans, and artists and citizens of what Salman Rushdie calls
“a shrinking universe.” The
choice is more than whether to hyphenate or not. The
choice is more than gender, race, or class.
First generation, second, third, fourth. Who is authentic or fake.
Dead or undead. Mainstream
or marginal. Uncle Tom or
Charlie Chan. And the
language(s) we speak are not necessarily the language(s) in which we
dream.
Jessica Hagedorn
New York City
1993
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