As a new New Yorker, it’s almost a rite of passage to lament how boring and homogenous your hometown is. For me, that place is Orange County, California. But to say that it is boring and homogenous glosses over its sordid history of racial discrimination, religious fundamentalism, and Reagan-era policy. Indeed, even as your average resident professes to be disinterested in politics, an undercurrent of conservatism continues to run through the region via the Santa Ana River, from Yorba Linda to Huntington Beach.
The place has redeeming features, though (no, not Disneyland). Garden Grove, my birth city, is home to a large Vietnamese-American diaspora. As a kid, my parents enjoyed a certain mutualism with the Vietnamese-Americans in the area—every month, I’d get a five-dollar haircut and a bowl of pho as a reward for sitting still. Unbeknownst to me, a burgeoning community of Asian-American refugee writers was also growing up.
Like myself as an edgy adolescent, the Orange County (OC) Asian-Am lit movement struggled against its parents. Books like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) had brought needed readership to the genre. However, Asian-Am lit in the 1990s and 2000s relied on ancient mythological and cultural symbolism while tastefully sidestepping the traumas of post-colonial life. In effect, these books were written for white audiences. The OC movement changed that by portraying the daily lives of real Asian immigrants, for Asian immigrants. But the genre remains constrained by its focus on interracial interactions and its reluctance to abandon seemingly inoffensive but harmful “model minority” stereotypes.
The Sympathizer (2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, set in OC, revolutionized Asian-Am lit. In it, Nguyen writes a down-to-earth spy thriller describing the immigrant experience against the backdrop of Cold War fallout and betrayal. The unnamed main character, a secret Communist spy, is tasked with infiltrating the Vietnamese diaspora in Orange County to quell its remaining capitalist regime. Marxist and post-colonial themes pervade the novel, but Nguyen focuses notably on the relationship between Vietnamese refugees and white Americans.
As any Angeleno on Hinge will know, aspiring filmmakers are endemic to the city. Nguyen exploits this regional feature by introducing our spy to The Auteur, who is directing a Vietnam War film. The next seventy pages of the novel take place on the set of The Hamlet, where our spy is roped in as the film’s cultural consultant. He tries his best to save the garish writing of the Viet Cong, but is powerless to change the casting:
“In my naivete, I had simply assumed that once roles were created for Vietnamese people, Vietnamese actors would be found. But no. We looked, Violet told me yesterday, when we had found time to sip iced tea together on the hotel veranda. Frankly, there just weren’t any qualified Vietnamese actors. Most of them were amateurs and the handful of professionals all overacted. It must be the way they were trained. You’ll see. Just withhold judgement until you see these actors act . . . What Violet was telling me was that we could not represent ourselves, we must be represented, in this case by other Asians.”
The Auteur’s casting and writing decisions reflect a reality that Asian-Americans had long known but had never written down: that in the eyes of the American establishment, we were a faceless monolith, versatile as movie extras and expendable as casualties of war.
Nguyen’s focus on the white gaze resonated with us, and others took its mantle. Enter Interior Chinatown (2020) by Charles Yu. Yu is a SoCal native and current Orange County resident. His book, however, is only vaguely OC: Interior Chinatown is a screenplay for a TV crime drama, Black and White, set in fluorescent Chinatown. Our narrator, Generic Asian Man, aspires to ascend to the hallowed status of Kung Fu Guy.
And stylistically, no notes. In the middle of the second act, the characters jump from the screen and materialize as dynamic, breathing figures; the line between crime drama and inner dialogue becomes increasingly blurred. As the novel rushes towards its conclusion, even genre boundaries break down: is this a crime drama or a rom-com? Coming-of-age story, or Kill Bill training arc? Is the narrator in a psychotic break, or is Yu using magical realism to raise the stakes? Whatever the case may be, his directorial vision works: the climax, in the form of the Generic Asian Man’s come-to-Jesus courtroom defense, risks being cliché and campy but never is.
What does read clichéd is his description of the immigrant experience. Yu’s Generic Asian Man presents a somewhat outdated interpretation of Asian-American anxieties. On the menu: getting into a good college, honoring your parents, idolizing martial arts, lacking good Asian movie stars, and repulsing white folks with the smell of Chinese food. It’s all valid, but even in 2020, there was no shortage of discourse on these issues, between books, graphic novels, documentaries, movies, and one (un)subtle Facebook meme group with over 1.7 million members. Reiterating his grievances, but unwilling to expound on them, Yu fails to dialogue with his subject matter adequately.
Even worse, I worry his complaints fall on deaf ears. The book is for Asian-American men who feel constrained by our racial stereotypes. But our stand-in, the Kung Fu Guy, never gets a word in. Instead, other racial groups, prejudiced by Asian-American stereotypes, tell him what to be. In this way, Interior Chinatown falls into the same trap as The Sympathizer, which focused on the perspective of SoCal’s political and media elite. For example, when Generic Asian Man (here, Special Guest Star) meets the titular Black cop in Black and White, the two get off to a bad start:
SPECIAL GUEST STAR
You’re part of the system. Your face is on the poster. Your name is in the title.
TURNER
I am? It says Miles Turner? No, it doesn’t.
It says: BLACK.
(then)
I’m not a person. I’m a category. Giving me the lead doesn’t make me any more of a person. If anything, less. It locks me in. Do you know where I started? Do you know what it took? You can’t come in here, five minutes ago, talking about how hard you have it. If you don’t like it here, go back to China.
Interior Chinatown’s B plot doesn’t resolve. As Turner takes the stand in the climactic courtroom scene:
TURNER
He thinks he can’t participate in this race dialogue, because Asians haven’t been persecuted as much as Black people.
(to you [Generic Asian Man])
Don’t you need to take some responsibility for yourself? For the categories you put us in? Black and White? I mean, come on? Do you think you’re the only one who’s trapped?
The Sympathizer and Interior Chinatown obviously resonate with audiences: both now have respective screen adaptations. But Interior Chinatown trends in a worrying direction. Despite his birthright citizenship, the Generic Asian Man amplifies the alienation of Nguyen’s refugees. What contributes to this alienation? History plays a role: Yu makes direct reference to exclusionary national policy that impeded Asian-American assimilation. But there is no positive definition of “Asian-American,” just a reliance on stereotypes. By asserting our identity based on others’ perceptions, we continue to reinforce our status as model minorities. Tragically, the Generic Asian Man becomes just as faceless and expendable as Nguyen’s movie extras.
Blight is spreading across Asian-Am lit. Portrayals of authentic Asian-American experiences à la Nguyen and Yu, particularly by women authors, have recently received vicious online criticism. Unsurprisingly, the male pioneers of the genre escape unscathed. Mainstream media, on the other hand, continues to platform Asian-Americans insofar as they remain sufficiently proximal to whiteness—and profitable. For instance, Beef, the TV mini-series that initially received acclaim for its portrayal of OC’s Asian enclaves, recently set its second season at a country club. Reliance on others’ Asian stereotypes and the model minority myth is strangling the genre.
Asian-Am lit urgently needs to reevaluate its growth trajectory. What is to be done? It’s surprising that neither Nguyen nor Yu looked to their own backyards for inspiration. Indeed, Orange County is not just Black or White or Asian. Latinos are the second largest ethnic group in the OC and have suffered exclusionary immigration policies, racial stereotypes, and redlining into barrios. The concessions Asian-Americans receive in employment and education as a result of our “positive stereotypes” incentivize us to adhere to the model minority myth. Unencumbered by model minority stereotypes, Latin American literature put down stronger roots. It’s these verdant grounds that bore Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender (translated by Natasha Wimmer), published in March of this year.
In Now I Surrender, Enrigue brings his imaginative style to the nineteenth-century expansionist era, when Mexican and U.S. armies jockeyed for control of the Apache-occupied Chihuahua Desert. The Chiricahua Apache people, led by their commander Geronimo, surrendered to the combined U.S. and Mexican armies in 1886 after a months-long bloody campaign. They were then displaced to Fort Marion, Florida, where they would remain for the next quarter-century, away from home.
Now I Surrender is so violent that it almost reads as a spaghetti western; Enrigue does not sugarcoat the grisly ways the Chiracahuas butchered their colonial intruders. Equally violent, though, are the tactics the Mexican and American governments used to suppress the Apache people. Amid the chaos, Enrigue interjects with the benefit of hindsight:
“When the Chiricahua—the most determined of the Apache nations—had no choice but to become part of either Mexico or the United States, they chose a third, completely unexpected path: to fight until the end. I will move to Canada, the gringos always claim, but they never do. I’d rather die, say the Mexicans, but then we all go on and accept the new state of things anyway. The Apaches said they weren’t interested in integrating when the conquistadors made contact with them in 1610, and they kept on saying no until the most celebrated band of Chiricahua warriors fit into the single train car that carried the last twenty-seven of them out of Arizona.”
These meditations—combined with his interpretation of the Chiracahuans as shrewd war tacticians—re-center the colonial narrative on the Apache people and reimagine the Mexican-American identity as both colonizer and colonized. For better or worse, Geronimo’s character is now a complication to Mexican-American heritage, which could have otherwise been dominated by White-Hispanic relations. Meanwhile, the Apache, emboldened by their struggle for independence, push both U.S. and Mexican borders back, run around them, interrupt Enrigue’s meditations—and, at the book’s climax, break away from their historical context and disrupt the Western narrative entirely.
Asian-American assimilation and the Apache genocide are different beasts. But like Geronimo, we have figures that loom larger than life, complete with heroes, villains, martyrs, and gods. The characters in our screenplay should be complex and uncomfortable to think about. These messier depictions of the Asian-Am narrative are essential. Asian-Am lit has grown past the limits of the walled Garden Grove: once iconoclastic, ideas like the “bamboo ceiling” are now anodyne. Mainstream media seems content to let our ecosystem smother itself. It’s up to grassroots writers and artists to imagine a new Asian-American literary movement—maybe from someplace less boring and homogenous.