I hate Amy Tan

Soooooooo much. Name any “Asian-American” author and I probably hate them too. Even the other day, we were reading a short story from an Asian-Canadian writer, and I just hated that too. The worst part was when we had our class discussion, and everyone was talking in the matter-of-fact way about how “traditional Asian culture is like this, they do things this way, this is what they believe in.” I mean, the story itself wasn’t bad. The lady who wrote it definitely has a talent. But it’s essential the SAME STORY Asian-Americans have been fed about ourselves since our required reading of the Joy Luck Club in high school: backward/superstitious parents, a culture of shame (the main problem is always a “western” thing like divorce or not getting into medical school), and an overall middle class perspective. Nothing else really gets published or gets mainstream unless they meet these requirements, it seems.

My own family is Chinese, they lived in Vietnam through the American invasion and occupation (my aunt was born with deformed feet from the chemical warfare), and today I have two brothers and one sister. I consider my family fairly “traditional” and as coming from a harsh background, in the same way people like Amy Tan love to depict themselves. None of us are submissive products of “Confucian culture”, none of us are “caught between two worlds” like we’re aliens or something, and none of us live in constant, traumatic fear of parental shame. And no, my sister is not a depressed, lonely, self-hating Chinese like how Amy Tan likes to depict all Chinese women as. In short, I find it annoying that people think they can understand who I am from books, and on a higher level, I feel that the fact that Asians aren’t respected as regular people reinforces the unusually high rates of alienation and suicide among the (East) Asian population (as well as marginalization of other groups, like working class or prison inmates).

Anyway, my name is Cuong. I’m Chinese-American…. I guess (I really hate how long and unnecessary that sounds). 我会写少少汉字！(“I can write a little bit of Chinese” – it would be super-embarassing if I wrote that wrong) Right now, I’m trying to get started with studying agriculture, which intersects in a lot of surprising ways to stuff like economics, politics, nutrition science, anthropology, history, and so on.

A friend of mine is majoring in ethnic studies or whatever it’s called. She always tells me about all the stuff they study about the “Asian-American experience” in her classes, and it just sounds like more of the same crap to me. At least she’s conscious of it, though, and plans to write a Amy Tan-like novel of her own just to milk some cash out of that fad.

But this class seems different, I guess. It looks like all these crazy projects and the hassle of getting ten busy people together several times a week is ten times more work than a normal class (Actually, make that nine busy people – our leader just dropped the class. Excellent!). But I have a feeling that this is not going to be another Amy Tan fan club type of class (The professor sang about leftist revolution in The Philippines on the first day of class. So what’s the worst that can happen?) And going out into the community rather than just “studying” it sounds fun, and in fact something I deeply believe should be the point of education. So, like our group member Kyle says, BRING IT ON!

Cuong Truong