For our series on the new Asian America, andrealongchu asks: Why does the half-Asian, half-white protagonist make us so anxious?
The problem is that such a thing may not exist. It remains a very open question whether the disparate immigrant populations huddled under the umbrella of— a term coined by student activists at Berkeley in 1968 — have enough in common to justify a shared politics or even a shared identity.
That is a lot to ask of a child. It is a strange thing for fully Asian writers to look to mixed Asian people for relief from their racial anxieties when actual mixed-race Asians, who, it turns out, can write their own books, have little reassurance to offer. “I’ve always blamed my tendency to vacillate on my mixed ethnicity.
Yet at the same time, Lena represents a genuine antecedent to the protagonists of the mixed Asian novel. Like her, these characters are diffident, aimless, frustrated; they are stalled in their careers and ambivalent about their romantic partners, as if the acute experience of racial indeterminacy has diffused into something more banal.
There are two ironies here. The first is that Lydia can taste Asian food only through acts of terrific violence that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the original colonial act. Lydia is also of European stock, after all, and it can be difficult to parse the reclamation of heritage from the crime of cultural theft — hence the narrative contrivance of her inability to source pig’s blood, which renders her actions understandable if not exactly justifiable.
If there is a final principle of the mixed Asian novel, it is that no amount of resemblance can guarantee relation — to a parent, to a culture, to a race, or a racial politic. It is not every mixed-race Asian who can, for instance, walk through Chinatown like Bird inand feel “oddly at home” surrounded by faces like his mother’s. Compare this with Willa inwho anxiously researches restaurants online when her younger half-sister Charlotte proposes they meet for soup dumplings.
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