4 Things I Have Taken Away From “Gospel learning and Teaching.”

From “Gospel Learning and Teaching“ by David M. McConkie:

1. Attitude is everything in teaching/learning.

A successful teacher and author said: “What matters most in learning is attitude. The attitude of the teacher.”

2. One cannot teach successfully what one does not like; you need to love what you teach.

Successful gospel teachers love the gospel. They are excited about it. And because they love their students, they want them to feel as they feel and to experience what they have experienced. To teach the gospel is to share your love of the gospel.

3. Should encourage/challenge the students to apply in their lives what you have taught them.

The role of the teacher is “to help individuals take responsibility for learning the gospel—to awaken in them the desire to study, understand, and live the gospel.” 12  This means that as teachers we should not focus so much on our performance as on how we help others learn and live the gospel.

4. Scriptures will train us with the basics of communicating with heavens; after that, all is possible!

When was the last time you knelt in prayer and asked the Lord to help you not just with your lesson but also to help you to know and to meet the needs of each student in your class?  No class is so large that we cannot pray for inspiration regarding how to reach each student.

Brothers and sisters, it is contrary to the economy of heaven for the Lord to repeat to each of us individually what He has already revealed to us collectively. The scriptures contain the words of Christ. They are the voice of the Lord. Studying the scriptures trains us to hear the Lord’s voice.

The Victory Tunnel of Young Soccer Players is the Image of Children Triumphantly Returning to Heaven

The speaker uses imagery, the victory tunnel of young soccer players, as something to be witnessed when these children triumphantly return to their Heavenly homes with the help of adults like us.

via Recently Added.

Last spring my husband and I attended a soccer game of our four-year-old grandson. You could feel the excitement on the field as the players ran in every direction chasing the soccer ball. When the final whistle blew, the players were unaware of who won or who lost. They had simply played the game. The coaches directed the players to shake hands with the opposing team members. Then I observed something quite remarkable. The coach called for a victory tunnel. All the parents, grandparents, and any spectators who had come to observe the game stood up and formed two lines facing each other, and by raising their arms they formed an arch. The children squealed as they ran through the cheering adults and down the path formed by the spectators. Soon the children from the opposing team joined the fun as all the players—the winners and the losers—were cheered on by the adults as they ran the path of the victory tunnel.

In my mind’s eye, I had another picture. I had the feeling I was seeing children living the plan, the plan Heavenly Father has created for each individual child. They were running the strait and narrow path through the arms of the spectators who love them, each one feeling the joy of being on the path.

"Hybridity" (an excerpt from my identity paper)

HYBRIDITY: Deep down inside, nonetheless, I feel that even this new title, “Asian American,” is too restricting for me, especially in light of the fact that I am an Angelino who inter-socializes with peoples of all cultures. As Cohen (1997) hypothesizes, as a postmodern cultural diaspora, I ultimately and inevitably have dubious political allegiances. That is, though I maintain certain sociopolitical ties with 1) my legal country U.S., 2) my mother land Korea, and 3) the host countries of Taiwan and China, by not completely assimilating to any of these national/cultural norms, I live in what Cohen (1997) calls “no-group lands” (p.189). In this no-group land, then, my existence is a composite of liminality, syncretism and ambiguity, ultimately rendering my identity geopolitically fluid and culturally amorphous. In tiny increments, I have gradually come to embrace myself as what Bhabha (1998) calls a “postcolonial cultural freak”—an indistinguishable, marginalized, and multi-cultural member in our society (pp. 1331-1344). Now, I accept and even thrive on the fact that my identity cannot be fixed to one national/cultural locale. It is in constant flux; it can never be compartmentalized into this or that category. Rather, my subjectivity is forever in the making. It is an unoccupied whirling void without a shape. It has immeasurable depth that can soak up any culture, selectively or wholeheartedly. It is thus fluid and amorphous. I simultaneously feel that I am Korean, Chinese, and American, and lately, an Angelino. Who knows what I will be tomorrow? Perhaps, a denizen of the entire world.

Why I Disagree with Both Leroi’s and Thomas’s Definition of “Race”

 Part I

         “The billion or so of the world’s people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants  in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race.  At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well.  Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.”

—Armand Leroi, The New York Times 3/14/05

I disagree with Armand Leroi’s above comment.  It is scientifically inconclusive to say that race is biologically based.  However, I do recognize that race can serve as an important indicator that allows us to gain a better understanding of differences that exist among the different groups of people, such as the prevalence of certain diseases in some races but not in others.  Yet, I find Leroi’s statement to be problematic for two reasons:  First, the premise of his study is inflated and not holistic, in that the range of genetic differential that he attempts to categorize as different racial types of humans cannot exceed .01%, since according to human genome film, Homo sapiens are 99.9% genetically identical.  Second, his theory of genetic racialization is based on an inconstant and fluctuating sample of human genes.  That is, his sample base of human genes are not stable enough to make a scientific claim, in that Homo sapiens always have been, is in the process of, and will continue to be subject to evolution which involve the following unpredictable and incalculable forces: (1) external/natural environment, like climate, gene flow, and genetic drift; (2) internal/biological environment, like mutations, endemics, and blood types; (3) cultural behavior, such as various breeding patterns, migrations, diet, and beliefs. 

Bluntly put, Leroi’s scientific claim about human variation at genetic level is not based on precision over the whole population.  For instance, though the discovery of DNA has revealed human diversity with greater precision, virtually no one genotype is exclusive to one race.  For example, according to Molnar, though African-Americans show a higher frequency of sickle-cell genes, other ethnic groups also display sickle-cell genes, and they are categorized into different geographical types as they are found in locations such as Senegal, Benin, Bantu, and Asia (Molnar 162).  Also, in England, within one race of blood type-A patients who are afflicted with stomach cancer, a study of the frequency of this disease “revealed a difference between regions:  The mortality rate was higher in the North than in the South,” depending on other elements of people’s blood type (Molnar 99).  In other words, in this case of stomach cancer in England, racial type was not an indicator of why some have cancer and why some don’t.  Race is but one element of infinite number of other factors that determine the susceptibility of certain biological difference at a genetic level.  In other words, to borrow Alan Goodman’s term in his essay “Two Questions About Race” (2005), Leroi, as a scientist, is making a grave error because his concept of “genes as an indicator of different race” is based on a “shifting concept” (Goodman 3).  Goodman further critiques that Leroi “tends to forget about the 94% of variation that race fails to statistically explain (Goodman 3).  Rather, Goodman says that “race is an inherently unstable and unreliable concept, [which may be] . . . fine for local realities but not so for a scientific concept” (Goodman 3).  If, within this .01% of biological variability, certain traits are more common in one group of people than others, Leroi exaggerates this variability and postulates this tendency out of context as being a significant indicator of race disparity. 

Unlike Leroi, Molnar, on the other hand, believes that “study of biology forces us to reject perceptions of superficial differences, many of which are due to factors of nutrition, child growth, and climate” (Molnar 2).  In terms of nutrition and child growth as factors, I have personally noticed a change in appearance of Koreans brought up in US versus my other relatives who have never left Korea.  Korean immigrants in US more or less adopt American diet.  Consequently, unlike their relatives in Korea, Korean immigrants of US drink more milk and eat more pizza like the mainstream Americans.  This change in environmental and behavioral factors, in turn, affect genetic expression of the growth hormones in Korean immigrants’ children: Higher intake of dairy products causes their children to grow taller and stronger than their relatives in Korea.  As I am not a scientist, though I cannot validate my aforementioned hypothesis—that higher intake of dairy products produce taller people—Molnar cites cases in which diet seems to be a significant element in genetic makeup:  First, according to Molnar, Cross-culturally, and particularly in Asia, Africa, and in many European countries, more adults, opposed to infants, are classified as mal-absorbers of milk, because adults drink less or no milk compared to infants (Molnar 129).  However, a large percentage of adults in North America and pastoral tribes in East Africa are classified as absorbers due to their more exposure to dairy products (Molnar 129).  Thus, Molnar says that “milk-using experience . . .contribute[s] to high frequency of the gene for adult lactase persistence in some peoples of the world” (Molnar 129). 

Not only culturally specific “diet” affects human genome, but culturally particular “belief/behavior” also plays a role in genetic frequency.  For instance, albinism  type II, tyrosinase positive, is most frequently seen in Africans and Native Americans (Molnar 126).  One explanation for this phenomenon in one group—at least in the Native Americans—can be traced back to their cultural proclivity to the spread of Albinism:  In their culture, Albino males are treated well, doing lighter domestic jobs with women at home, which increase their prospect of mating and thus the chance of procreating more albinos (Miller, lecture).  In terms of both lactose tolerance and albinism, then, culturally particular human behavior—such as diet and sexuality—affect human diversity at a biological level.

 According to Molnar, climate is another indicator of human diversity.  For example, one type of protein called Haptoglobins (Hp1) which “have the capacity to combine with the oxygen-carrying pigment, hemoglobin” has the highest frequency in tropical locations (Molnar 120).  Molnar says that this is probably due to the fact that “this Haptoglobin (Hp1) type would be an advantage in populations where hemolytic anemia is very high”: the tropical areas (Molnar 121).  Another example of climate as an indicator of human diversity is that, though there are numerous exceptions, in general, “taller people [are] farther from the equator (as in northwestern European) and shorter people nearer [to] the equator” (Molnar 181).  Likewise, people are fatter and lighter in the northern cold regions versus their thinner darker counterparts in the warm humid areas (Molnar 186).  Even the various head sizes of human show correlation with the climate: In colder climates, the people on the average have “rounder heads than peoples in the tropics,” as “surface area and volume is a critical factor in heat radiation to regulate body temperature” (Molnar 188, 9).  Also, in terms of heat radiation/heat conservation, Homo sapiens’ other body parts like arms, legs, facial features, teeth, and hair are affected by climate, ultimately increasing the multiplicity and individuality of Homo sapiens, though within the .01% of human variation.  Most crucially, however, these milliard differences in human are merely correlations between climate and human variation; they are tendencies, not facts. Thus, any observation and assumptions about the phenotypical variation in humans—however genetically detailed the data may be—still do not stand as facts.  Ultimately, then, the very idea, such as that of Leroi’s—that humans are divisible into few racial types by observing their genes—is problematic, as many precursors to genetic difference, like climate cannot be measured by scientific methods.

Molnar explains that in any given population, studying its gene pool and frequencies are affected and shaped by other immeasurable factors such as “mutation,” “natural selection,” “genetic drift,” and “gene flow” (Molnar 56).  Mutation not only causes change in genetic codes but introduces a new variety of allele, increasing the number of different genotypes/phenotypes within a population (Molnar 59).  It is often driven by humans’ natural biological tendency to adapt, known as “natural selection” (Molnar 60).  For instance, polymorphism shown in human blood types is often a result of natural selection.  An allele such as Hbs, which is advantageous under harsh slavery conditions, for example, “appears more in several populations in Africa,” theoretically due to natural selection (Molnar 146).   Although its high frequency in several parts of India is hard to explain, at least in eastern Nigeria, it seems that this Hbs gene frequency was “spread by population migration and interpopulation contact, . . . because of its selective advantage” (Molnar 148).  The effect of natural selection is also seen in malarial cases—a widespread disease in mostly tropical areas.  For example, abnormal hemoglobin SCT are less able to support malarial parasite growth, and thus natural selection favors individuals with SCT, in that they are less likely to die from falciparum malaria than persons with all normal hemoglobin (Molnar 150).  The point is, how in the world Leroi can scientifically factor these natural phenomena into his truth claim—the genetic human variation?  Human variation, though parts of its aspects may be recognizable at genetic level, its holistic picture is impossible to neatly grasp, because human genes will be different tomorrow than what they are today; they are inconstant; they mutate. 

Gene flow and genetic drift are other random human social phenomena which forestall any human attempts to categorize genes into few racial types.  According to Molnar, “gene flow refers to exchanges between different population gene pools so that the next generation is a result of admixture” (Molnar 63).  Over the human history, Molnar says that invaders, colonists, travelers, and traders have all collectively contributed to this gene flow phenomenon (Molnar 63).  Thus, throughout the human history, this high rate of admixture, the phenomenon that is accelerating in our contemporary world, has been an important factor which prevents the development of unique gene combinations.  Evidence of diversification of genes due to gene flow can be seen in the case of sickle-cell traits in black populations.  According to Molnar, African-Americans in the US have, on average, less than one-fourth to one-half of the Hbs found among West African populations today (5-10 percent versus 20 percent)” (Molnar 160).  He says that “this reduction, occurring over the three-and-a-half centuries of their occupation in the New World. . . may be accounted for either by admixture with Euro-Americans or by an elimination of the selective advantage of the carrier of the sickle-cell trait.” (161).  On the other hand, Molnar states that Genetic Drift indirectly influences the course and intensity of natural selection, in that when a breeding population is too small, there is a possibility that not all gene combinations will be represented in the next generation—so called a “sampling error” (Molnar 64).  In short, smaller the population sample, higher the rate of gene frequency change between the generations (Molnar 65).  Thus, population size is another unmanageable, irregular factor which scientists like Leroi cannot accurately assess in analyzing human variation. 

   In conclusion, according to  Molnar, “the record of DNA markers tell us little about how we gained certain of these complex traits—how we acquire a certain size and appearance, a skin color, or rates of growth” (Molnar 179).  Molnar has also warned against scientists like Leroi, in that he says that “no matter how we may define or classify clusters of populations today, their composition will undoubtedly change over future generations, as a result of major alterations in evolutionary forces through human adaptation and because of continuing migrations and interbreeding,” which, I might add, has increased rapidly in our contemporary world (Molnar 2).  Likewise, Alan Goodman in his essay “Two Questions About Race” (2005) says that “we just don’t know” enough about human genes to make such a conclusive scientific claim.  Rather, human diversity is better explained in terms of “evolution and history” (Goodman 3).  Because Homo sapiens consist of enormous range of physical variability, any scheme to divide humanity into a few racial types is bound to be fallacious and misleading (Miller, lectures).  Thus, when Armand Leroi claims that race is genotypically distinguishable, he is—according to the human genome film—arguing and exaggerating the difference he sees within the narrow zone of .01% variability among different peoples, since cross-racially, humans are 99.9% genetically identical.

Part II

“Instead of obsessing about race, we could try to build a race-blind society.  Instead of feeding      the fires of neuroticism, we could start teaching people to forget about race, to move on.  But to   do that, first we must sideline the entire race relations industry—whose only function, it seems, is    to make us all deeply anxious about ‘race’—a concept they simultaneously believe has no objective reality.  “

 —Sean Thomas, Sunday Telegraph (London) 3/13/05

I also disagree with Sean Thomas’s above comment.  I find the idea behind it to be, well, wishful thinking at best.  To be “race-blind” means what?: that we forget the history of racial oppression which is so embedded in the collective unconscious?; that we do not recognize the multicultural reality of the United States?;  that we adhere to one set of ideas about American culture?;  if so, whose?  The phrase, “move on” is a phrase that Ralph Ellison has mocked in his Invisible Man.  There are people who actually fear remembrance of history and a culturally pluralistic society.  I suspect that this is what is behind Thomas’s message.

For one, the effects of imperialist colonialism of the past still linger among us.  Take India, for example, Eurocentric colonial nation building left ethnic strife among the colonized.  According to Kottak, “over a million Hindus and Muslims were killed in the violence that accompanied the division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan” (Kottak 82).  Similarly, “problems between Arabs and Jews in Palestine began during the British mandate period” (Kottak 82).  Moreover, during WW II, both Canada and US ordered expulsion of Japanese from their mainstream centers (Japanese internment).  In the history of a young nation of merely 200 some years, US has enforced numerous discriminatory immigration and property laws against those other than “white”—e.g., Chinese exclusionary Act, to name just one.  Thus, contrary to what Thomas suggests, race is not something that can be “[taught to] to forget. . . [and] move on,” because it has, it does, and it continues to affect the people of color in enormous and powerful ways.

The effect of racism is inscripted in both collective consciousness and in real life of colored people.  For instance, not only in US, but world-wide, people with darker pigmentation are the poorest (Miller, professor).  In US alone, more people of color, particularly, blacks and Latinos, are disproportionately incarcerated.  They are paid the least.  They live in and their children go to worst schools.  They are thus the least likely to succeed physically, intellectually, economically, and politically.  Their sociopolitical odds, then, are enormous.  In short, it affects every aspect of a colored person’s life: wealth, education, career, health, and the list can go on. 

Now, I would like to discuss about my personal observation/experience with racism in higher education.  Because the nature of my discussion is somewhat theoretical and subtle, before I immerse into my argument against intellectual racism within the canonical circle of Western countries, US in particular, I would like to first reiterate Kottak’s definition of racism:  According to Kottak, “when an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological basis, it is called a race.  Discrimination against such a group is called racism” (Kottak 67, emphasis added).  Well, what I have observed is that this racism against ethnic group exists even in the intellectual community, namely, among the canonizers—those who compile textbooks of higher educations.  For the purpose of this essay, I call this a “canonical racism”—the racism of anthologizers against works of ethnic writers. 

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture.  Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized literary works of ethnic writers.  Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added).  What Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

For example, a decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award.  Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best “American writers” under forty.  This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee.  However, his book, Native Speaker, though he won “the twenty best American writers under forty” award, was automatically labeled under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon, because according to Deleuze and Guattari, Lee’s Native Speaker fits the definition of “minor literature”: work of a minority writer in a major language (English).  The value of this incidence for my argument is that it illustrates what I mean by canonical racism in intellectual community in US. Frankly, I believe that none of this labeling business should be espoused in the process of anthology.  If a writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature.  No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America. 

Pertinent to canonical racism is an essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen.  Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1).  In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible.  With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with.  Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans. 

John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism.  In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” and critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222).  According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.”  Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic works are often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222).  However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). 

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature.  For example, in many literatures written by Western writers, women of color are portrayed as physically, intellectually, and culturally inferior—e.g., they are usually a slave, maid, prostitute, or mentally insane (like Rochester’s wife from Jamaica in Jane Eyre).  She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists, meaning that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340).  Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345).  In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, then, their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers must be re-represented/revised; however this cannot happen without the “equal access” in the canon (347).

Like Spivak, critics like Bhabha also demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities.  He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added).  He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements,”’ meaning minorities (1340).  He asks the Western canon to endow equal access into their literary circles those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

In conclusion, just as my personal observation of canonical racism illustrates, even though race makes little sense on the genetic level, this does not mean that it is not real in a social sense.  Thus, Tomas’s notion of a “race-blind” society is naive.  Other than teaching people to treat others as individuals and not collectively as a race or group, how do you create a “race-blind” society?  It is just not possible.  Perhaps I’m pessimistic, but it’s a utopian ideal that is not realistic.  Moreover, what does he mean by the “race relations” industry? It seems to me that the only people who obsess about race as an issue and are anxious about it are those who feel the need to overlook race.  As I have mentioned in my introduction of my first essay, race can be an important indicator and an important measurement to gain a greater understanding of other groups of individuals, not only biologically to cure diseases, but to improve our social conditions.  However, to create this race-blind society is to argue that there are no differences among us.  It is only through open dialogue (e.g., in intellectual community) not by pretending that all of us could be “race-blind,” that we can “move on” towards racial equality (Thomas 2005). 

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston:

       Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

        David H. Boston:

Goodman, Alan. “Two Questions About Race” 20 April 2005

        <http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman&gt;

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

        Bedford Books, 2000

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H.

         Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. On Being Different. 2 Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Molnar, Stephen. Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups. 5 New Jersey: Prentice Hall,

          2002.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H.

         Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

         American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

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…just incase you are unaccustomed to receiving thank you letters from students for hiring good professors…

I took proactive actions to advocate one of my most respected professors in CSULA, one of which was a letter to the Dean.

Nov 30, 2005

California State University, Los Angeles

College of Health and Human Services

Re: Dr. Suling Cheng

Dear Dr. Marlene Zepeda,

Hello, my name is Jessie Chen, a student of Dr. Cheng’s CHDV 140 this quarter.  I write this letter to you as a student representing Dr. Cheng’s class. 

I’ll get right to the point: I would like to thank you for appointing Dr. Cheng to teach this class.  She is a superb teacher.  In fact, if I had the power/authority, I would give her a “perfect teacher award.”  Of all the professors I had so far, she is the only professor who has the aptitude to incorporate the state-of-the-art pedagogy into her lectures—the power point presentations and video clips.  As a student, I deeply sense its effectiveness—i.e., video clips make scholarly concepts come alive and accessible, while power point outlines highlight and organize focal points of the discussions into a holistic perspective. 

In sum, she has strategically and ingeniously structured her class in three major ways: (1) her daily activities and weekly quizzes minimize students’ non-attendance, since in order to accumulate these points, the students must be present; (2) her aforementioned high-tech visual aids increase students’ comprehension of and engagement into the discourse being discussed; and (3) her website in which she posts students’ accumulated points invariably motivates students’ academic excellence in terms of grade.  In addition, other aspects of her class—such as her eloquence, kindness, humor, and other efforts, like trying to connect points of discussions to current, real life situations—collectively make her a “perfect professor,” and thus her class, a priceless academic asset to the students.  It even has the power to convert a student who was initially dismally-interested in the course into a devotee of it, at least until the spell wears off (this is me). 

I will briefly explain why I have decided to write this letter, just incase you are unaccustomed to receiving thank you letters from students for hiring good professors: My current situation with an awful professor this quarter for my other class (Eng 410) has sensitized otherwise a very passive me into a critical student who now demotes professor’s negligence (Several students and I have reported this particular professor to the department) and promotes his/her excellence.  In other words, just as most of us would report a negligent professor, I felt that a good professor should be reported to the department as well for his/her ingenuity and distinction.  Thus, although I am not a CHDV major, I am informing and appreciating you for an excellent, dedicated teacher in your department. 

Thank you very much for you time.

Respectfully,

Jessie Chen (writerjc2006@yahoo.com)

The Healing Power of My Childhood Motor Stimulations

The Healing Power of My Childhood Motor Stimulations

 

        I had the most wonderful childhood in every aspect.  My parents were always busy and hardly home, but they made sure their children were well taken care of, and had plenty of friends to play with.  Our house was on a hillside, surrounded by the mountains. 

As a child, I remember that “playing” meant “doing things outside.” Everyday, it was given that some child friend of mine, often much older and stronger than I, would holler me and my brother to come outside and join them for some new adventure up in the mountain.  As a child, though I did not know at the time, was exploring the nature by using my “gross motor skills—walking, running, and climbing.  

In the mountains, there are plenty of fun things to do that require “fine motor skills” as well.  For one, I remember that few girls and I would go find red bits of rocks, grind them to powder, then sprinkle it to our painstakingly chopped and marinated “kimchee,” which we had prepared from only the most natural ingredients—the fresh weeds, flowers, and wild berries.  While the boys were practicing their “flying skills” like the “Six Million Dollar Man” (the TV hero of that time), using both their gross and fine motor skills (their legs for power and fingers for steering), we girls were busy making sure that the dinner would be ready for them—these hard working boys who came home exhausted and famished.  “Hmm, this is very good…really delicious,” they would comment as they ate when they came back to our make-believe home.  The more noise the boys made in their pseudo-chewing, swallowing, and commenting on how sweet, salty, or sour the food was, we, the girls, felt a greater sense of accomplishment and pride.  Though I don’t remember exactly how old I was then, I do remember that it was many, many days, perhaps, years of playing like this in the mountains before I was put into a kindergarten.

One day, when I was much older, my mom with tears in her eyes confessed to me that I did not talk until I was five years old, because I was born with speech impairment and weak muscle tones due to my mother’s drug overdose, when I was only a two-month-old fetus in her uterus (the real reason why she was overly obsessive with me).  Thus, she said that as soon as she saw that I was beginning to talk at the age of five, though it was a real stretch in her budget, she elatedly put me into the most expensive kindergarten in Korea at the time for my further cognitive development. 

I don’t exactly know how this transformation happened, really—from being almost mute to verbal speech and weak muscles to walking and running.  My mom thinks it is because I lived and played in a mountain area where air was fresh, and had fresh spring water and goat milk to drink on a daily basis.  She may have a point there.  In addition to my mother’s hypothesis, as a student of Child psychology, I think there was perhaps one more factor to this supposition—my early years of both gross and fine motor stimulations on a daily basis in the mountains.  If my speculation is true, then my family’s then shoddy demographics was a blessing in disguise, in that we had to live in the most impoverished mountain district where children had no toys or TVs in their house, so had to adventure out to the mountains for entertainments.

My Mother’s Psychosocial Influence on Her Two Daughters

My Mother’s Psychosocial Influence on Her Two Daughters

My mother: I either adore or abhor her, but never free from her.  I have often envied orphans.  How free they must be!  Nothing about my mother is normal.  She is eccentric, neurotic, possessive, manipulative, manic-depressive, superstitious, religious, greedy, and magnanimous.  She has been an entertainer all her life.  She dances, sings, acts, and does everything else to prove that she is the queen of stars!  She is too much!  Oh, how I have prayed for freedom from her!  Her obsessiveness made my life unbearable to a point of running away from her as a teenager.  She is the reason for everything that had gone wrong in my life. 

As I got older, however, I started to perceive her from a different angle.  Not only has she torn me down, but also has built me up.  Some quiet nights, I weep as I softly play the piano for I know that I owe her for the talents I now enjoy.  Her obsession of me—the person whom she loves the most, in her words—has given me an unbeatable confidence in strange ways.  Though I knew that there were people better, smarter, and prettier than me, I always knew that I was the best thing for my mom.  She loved me in powerful ways!  The power that cannot be bought with money, the power that helps me to move forward against all odds, the power that orphans can never fathom nor enjoy has become mine.  I hate to admit that she has molded the very essence of my being.  

Now that you know what kind of psychosocial power my mother had on me, you might guess that my sister has turned out to be as self-confident as I am—not exactly.  As I have mentioned in my first essay, my sister, who was once known as the genius of my family, has always suffered from severe psychological insecurity which, she says, stems from lack of maternal love as a child.  Interestingly enough, my sister, in an attempt to psycho-analyze herself after many years of receiving psycho-therapy, went back to school at night for a second M.A. degree in Psychology.  As a student of psychology, what she enviously told me back then about the powerful influence my mother had on my indomitable self-confidence makes sense to me now, as her psychological concepts coincide with what I study in this class—that mother’s emotional, physical, and mental interaction with her child has life-long effects.  In other words, my mother’s almost exclusive, overtly expressive love for me has killed my sister’s young fragile spirit as a child growing up under my shade, and according to her analysis, has caused her to become a chronically insecure person.

From the course textbook, I was bemused to learn that not only do “rats become smarter if they are frequently held [loved] when they are young,” but more significantly, “mother’s licking and grooming of her pup . . . leads to decreased release of stress hormones, which [in turn] leads to increased tolerance of potentially stressful conditions . . . in adulthood” (53).  This theory applied to humans means that, just as the rats in this study, there is an undeniable causality between mother’s loving care of her infant and her child’s psychosocial development, which, in turn, validates my sister’s quasi-argument of “my mother’s insufficient love” being the culprit of her lack of self-confidence and insecurity as an adult. 

Further, this same theory also helps me and my mother understand why she was so determined to outdo me in every realm of her life—e.g., going to college at sixteen or becoming an auditor of L.A. County at nineteen.  What is so extremely sad and ironic about this is that while I was trying to free myself from my mother’s obsession of me, my sister was emotionally and physically killing herself to gain more of my mother’s love by proving that she is better than me in every aspect.  Indeed, my mother is a powerful figure whose love built up one daughter’s self-confidence, while the lack of it demolished another.

Crying Toddler

Crying Toddler

        The last trip I made to Taipei was purely enjoyable.  Everything was great until the last day.  However, as soon as I saw a young couple with a toddler in front of my assigned seat in the return flight back to LAX, my jubilant mood was compelled to shift gear to a contemplative mode, since I had to speculate whether this was a good baby or a fussy, crying one.

        Just as I suspected, as soon as the plane started to move, this infant of probably no more than a year old, started to cry.  I told myself that this baby is probably startled by the plane’s sudden movement, and crying is his only way to communicate his fear with his parents.  The father held the baby and tried to cuddle him, but he won’t stop crying, until his mother gave him a bottle of juice.  Appreciating the mother’s expertise in handling her son, I told myself that the baby must have been thirsty for him to cry like that. 

But as the plane started to fly high with a sudden increase of pressure, the boy now started to shriek.  He cried and cried, stopping only once in a while to suck the bottle intermittently.   No one or nothing can stop him from crying now—his father and mother’s alternating hugs, massaging his back, stroking his hair, standing up and walking around while holding the baby.  None of this worked.  Many passengers who were near enough to hear this baby shriek started to fumble about with their bodies and made nasty faces.  I was one of them.  I kept making ugly faces for the next thirteen hours, until the plane landed at LAX. 

In retrospect, I guess for this toddler, “flying” was a traumatic experience.  This toddler, who looked about a year old must have been cognitively developed enough to know that his environment has drastically changed.  And since at this stage, he can only babble or vocalize few simple words, such as “mama” or “baba,” he had to resort to “crying” as his only means of communicating his infantile sense of “life threatening situation.”  Though this crying baby was responsible for miserably ending my festive mood, I must say that from the Child Development point of view, this baby is lucky to have patient loving parents, who don’t neglect his “cries” as one of many meaningless temper tantrums.

Chang Rae Lee’s “Native Speaker”: Diasporic Power Art

Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” discuss the “literary struggle” of a Diasporic literature (Jewish literature), an idea borrowed from Franz Kafka, who believes that Diasporic literature is “something impossible” when it is written in the language of the host country, because its cultural authenticity is compromised in the process (Richter 167).  What Kafka’s “literary struggle” suggests, then, is that in order to retrieve a true authentic meaning of a diasporic literature, the reader must be able to de-code the culturally cryptic, narratological intensions of the author, so, too, is the Native Speaker.  Overtly, the novel is about the three protagonists’ social descent due to their Asian complex, while covertly, it is about their ascension into the three hierarchical powers of America: (1) “finance,” by Henry’s father who is an “adopter”; (2) “intelligence,” by Henry who is an “assimilator”; and (3) “politics,” by Kwang who is a “merger.”  Ultimately, the social ascent of the three diasporic characters is achieved through what I call a “diasporic power art” for two reasons:  First, because their industrial successes are rendered through intense, dynamic reinventions of their diasporic subjectivities and conditions in semi-fictitious ways.  Second, because each of their individual American becomings can be aesthetically described as a “diasporic cultural art” which entails “cultural aesthetics”—the elements that elevate/cultivate one’s cultural refinement.

Asian diasporas are adept cultural artists, who reinvent themselves in order to acclimate from one end of cultural atmosphere to another—from East to West.  The nature of diasporic condition—living not in one’s motherland but in an adopted/foreign land—requires nomadic “choices,” “versatility,” and “resilience.”  It requires constant mental, physical, and cultural adjustments, but most importantly, entails recasting of their personas.  Linguistically, culturally, and phenotypically, since the East and West are arguably not the most alike, Asian diasporic acculturation into Western decorum and society is more adversative and intense.  Their inchoate American becoming is molded and remolded into an often indeterminate subjectivity by turbulent, (at times traumatic) bipolar cultural forces, thus their new life in America is almost a fiction to their consciousness.  It is a process that requires both artful nimbleness and itinerant hardiness on their part, which can be described as a “diasporic cultural art,” something that cannot be gauged by methodical or political formulas.  Rather, its appreciation comes through the lens of “cultural aesthetics”—elements that elevate or cultivate one’s cultural refinement.  Of the infinite elements of what one considers/includes as cultural aesthetics, there are at least two prevailing traits shared by all three diasporic characters which enhance/sanctify their immigrant life: (1) their ability to make prudent or conscientious choices; and (2) their nomadic versatility—the ability to reinvent themselves as needed.  The three characters in the novel employ in varying degrees these and other diasporic cultural aesthetics, not only to cultivate their nascent American subjectivities, but more primarily to adapt to their new culture.

Just as the immigrant stories of the three characters in Native Speaker —Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—differ from one another, so are the colors and shapes of their diasporic arts.  To fare well in their new adopted land (America), these three characters reinvent themselves as three different types of semi-fictitious personas: (1) Henry’s father as an “adopter”; (2) Henry as an assimilator; and (3) Kwang as a “merger.”  Each of these characters half-fictitiously “chooses,” in most part, what function they want to play for the dominant in power.  For instance, Henry’s father selectively “adopts” primarily one ideology of America—capitalism—while he largely ignores the others.  He therefore chooses to “adapt” to America’s economic conditions in the ghettos for financial gains.  Henry, on the other hand, wants to be singularly American, so he chooses to assimilate by gaining American intelligence.  Finally, Kwang dreams of coalition among different ethnic groups in America, so he chooses to merge different cultures for a political reason.  These brands of diasporic characters face challenges unique to their own type, and each of their moral or sociopolitical “rise” (ascent) and “fall” (descent) involve synergy of multifaceted cultural aesthetics aforementioned.  While on the plot level, their ultimate “fall” as an “adopter,” “assimilator,” or “merger” may be merely sympathetic to the readers of Western consciousness, it is simultaneously unnerving and heartening to the diasporic readers, because behind each of the character’s “fall” is the antithetical message of “rise” (hope) for them.

I. The Father’s Fall and Rise as an “Adopter”

As an opportunistic “adopter” of Western ideologies, Henry’s father fully subscribes to American capitalism, even at the cost of demoralization and intellectual enervation.  In Henry’s words, his father considers “capitalism” to be the “unseen force” and has been “single-minded[ly] determine[ed]” to succeed “through [his] twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto” (49).  As an owner of labor-intensive grocery chains, he is proud that he is a rich man, though not proud of the industry.  He suffers intellectual atrophy and dehumanization, not only because his high scholarship from Korea is wasted—a top “industrial engineer” with a master’s degree from the best college—but because his limited English and ethnic isolation displace him from the social and intellectual centers of the U.S. (56, 57).  Though he lives in an upper class neighborhood, the wealth he amasses merely becomes an ethnic signifier—“Oriental Jews”—which does nothing to help him blend in with the mainstream Americans (53): “he never fe[els] fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley (affluent neighborhood)” (52).  His American becoming is thus at the social periphery, where he is a perpetual outsider without affect.  More tragically, he is even diminished to ethical immorality.  Henry describes his father’s demoralized mentality in America: “If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, .  .  . the need to adapt” (297, emphasis added).  Thus as an ambitious adopter of capitalism, Henry’s father “falls” (becomes dehumanized), as his subjectivity alters from his former intellectual Korean self into an American nobody—the metamorphic versatility of a diaspora.

Indeed, at a glance, the intellectual and moral “fall” of Henry’s father seems to be a high price that he pays as an adopter of American capitalism.  Worst yet, since he loses his wife early from cancer, and he himself dies rather young without fully enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the readers get a sense that his life in America ultimately signifies “death” or nothingness.  Yet from a historical context, there is more to his immigrant story than just the cost of dehumanization and death.  Jae Min Shin’s chronological analysis of Korean immigrants in his editorial column of Korea Times sheds insight into Henry’s father’s historical background and his financial motivation.  Shin reports in his editorial that until the 1960’s, Korean immigrants in America largely consisted of poor class: students, war-orphans, and females married to Americans; but in the 70’s, it shifted to the middle class capitalists with visions of economic expansion in America; then since the 80’s, it consists of even a higher class of entrepreneur Koreans with large investments in American companies (Shin D8).  According to Shin’s data, then, as a product of the 70’s and 80’s Korean American opportunism, Henry’s father has, in fact, successfully played his role as an “adopter” of American capitalism.  In other words, his principal reason for coming to America is not to augment his scholarship, but to make “enough money [so] that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man,” even if that debases him into laboring with “a handful of vegetable stores” (333).  Thus, the cost of dehumanization and intellectual degeneration on the part of Henry’s father are factored in as a “fair” sacrifice to fulfill his financial desires.  In a word, he “chooses” to be what he is in America—an opportunist.  Then regardless of one’s intention, this “option to choose a different nation-state” as one’s new home is the advantageous “power” of the contemporary diasporas, which eventually does translate to his financial success in America, more than what his homeland, Korea, offers.

As a former industrial engineer, Henry’s father not only realistically estimates the “most” financial success he can accrue in America as a first generation immigrant, but maps the “maximum” his son, Henry, can approximate by purchasing a house in an affluent neighborhood.  With what he can financially provide, he wishes that his son will do better than him, and Henry, too, wants to do better than his father by studying hard, obviating his mother’s “tears. . . from her concern over [his] mediocre studies” (77).  Thus as a capitalist, Henry’s father’s seemingly dehumanizing existence is actually the intended, prudent course he willingly takes to humanize his son, and between the two, there is an inextricable causality, as the father’s “fall” (dehumanization) paves a way for his son’s intellectual “rise” as an upper class American.  Henry later comes to a deeper appreciation of his father’s sacrifice for him: “I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow . . . I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide” (333).  Considering the fact that Lee (the author) himself has intellectually “risen” from his well meaning immigrant parents, it is helpful to know that he has respectfully dedicated his first novel, Native Speaker, to his parents: “For my mother and my father.”  If we infer from the author’s reverence paid to his own parents, then the opportunistic immigrant life of Henry’s father which is devoid of human sociality does not suggest—contrary to its face value—that it is meaningless and pathetic.  Rather, the moral of this story is about how the father’s financial success can elevate/cultivate his son’s intellectual and social refinement in their adopted land, which sanctifies the father’s immigrant struggles.

II. Henry’s Fall and Rise as an “Assimilator”

Since, Henry as a spy is immorally engaged in treacherous activity against his own people, Henry’s moral “fall,” then, is textually a valid outcome.  While Henry’s father is a single-minded adopter of American capitalism—who enjoys a certain degree of independence due to his socio-political alienation—Henry, as an “assimilator,” on the other hand, is more scrutinized by the American society.  Henry is “a linguist of the field. . . [with] the troubling, expert power” (171, emphasis added).  Henry’s intellectual status is what Crystal Parikh in his essay, “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and minority Discourse,” describes as a “gained social position” of “minority intellectuals, [who] in gaining access to the mechanisms of cultural and political representation, no longer speak from a marginalized position” (Parikh 258).  Henry relies on his “gained intellectual position” to define himself as singularly American, an ultimate “assimilator,” by pledging allegiance to the dominant in power.  In order to keep his vows with the established— though his work involves extensive racialization and exploitation of ethnic minorities, including his own—he blinds himself to the racial dynamism in his work (Dennis’s private detective agency).  As a spy, he instead abuses his own cultural insidership and familiarity to “sell out” his own people.  He fictitiously and perfunctorily performs the racial dance which his superior, Dennis Hoagland, choreographs: “I am the obedient. . . the invisible underling. . . [and] this [is] my assimilation, so many years in the making” (202, emphasis added).  Most tragically, Henry’s fictitious selves created through the “legends” at his work—the fiction that allows him to be many persons at once—are the vestiges of a schizophrenic assimilator, who has morally “fallen” (22).

Henry’s versatility of being “many persons at once,” however, is precisely the auspicious edge of postmodern Asian Americans, when interpreted from a contravening contemporary point of view.  As an assimilator, the remnant of Asian silence in Henry is a cryptic language to those around him, including his most intimate wife, Lelia, and superiors at work, Jack and Dennis.  For example, Lelia cannot decipher “Henryspeak” (Henry’s reticence), and Jack and Dennis cannot decode the silent language and affinity exchanged between Henry and Kwang.  Henry, on the other hand, can both penetrate and dismantle theirs at will: “I and my kind possess another dimension.  We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.  You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears” (320, emphasis added).  What Henry articulates in this passage is, in effect, an enunciation of the cultural edge of the contemporary polyglots—the irreducible linguistic versatility of diasporas.  

In our postmodern world, the versatile polyglots also have more “options,” both publicly (occupational) and privately (moral).  Henry—as someone with intellectual and cultural edge—is  a “denizen,” a royal assimilator not to be condemned, but to be emulated for the conscientious choice he ultimately makes between the oppressor (his boss) and the oppressed (him and his people).  According to Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas, “denizen” is a privileged postmodern diaspora with “considerable wealth and portable skills—a different group from the unskilled labour migrants of the nineteenth century” (164, 168).  In other words, in contrast to “the unskilled labour migrants” of the past, postmodern diasporas no longer need to tolerate any forms of oppressions, if s/he has the proper social, professional, or legal training/resources—in other words, “intellectual power” (Cohen 168).  As an educated person, Henry finally understands that an assimilator also has “options”: that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture does not mean one must allow oppression.  Upon this epiphany, he unshackles himself from his boss’s demonical bondage (Dennis’s detective agency).  Assertively, to the messenger of his boss, Jack, who asks, “Dennis thinks you will come back,” Henry answers, “Dennis is wrong” (288).  Henry continues, “Listen, Jack.  This is my mind finally speaking” (288).  The fact that it is Henry, not Dennis or Jack, who has the last word in the final scene of their relationship, symbolically and literally diminishes the power of the institutionalized racism in America.  Thus, as a contemporary assimilator, Henry exercises this “right to choose” as a denzen—to quit, if he must, those who oppress and exploit him and his people.  Ultimately, then, Henry’s such capability to make moral choices—free from vocational insecurity—is the prerogative of the diasporic intellectuals.

As an intellectual diaspora, Henry’s “right to choose” stretches farther than rejecting oppression; it extends to disseminating his linguistic expertise to other migrants.  At the end of the novel, Henry makes a conscientious choice.  He becomes an ESL teacher to share his intellectual privilege with the underprivileged.  He disseminates “knowledge of power”— English—unto the ethnic migrants of America, to help them better entrench their future in their new land.  Clearly, the fact that Henry converts from being a treacherous assimilator (his moral “fall”) to an intellectually nurturing teacher (his moral “rise”) is the acme of contradicting moment in the novel, which Lee deliberately dramatizes for didactic implications.  One way of interpreting Lee’s antithetical narratology is to deduce that Henry’s moral “fall” and “rise” is about an assimilator—with an intellectual power in America—making conscientious “choices” between his two cultures.  Henry ultimately chooses empathy and responsibility towards his fellow diasporas, and this change of attitude in Henry exemplifies what Lee may hope to see in other diasporic elites towards their marginal counterparts.

III. Kwang’s Fall and Rise as a “Merger”

From one’s “gained position,” if Henry falls morally, so does Kwang, politically.  If Henry is a fictitious assimilator, Kwang, on the other hand, is a versatile diasporic “merger,” who is faithful to both his past and present cultures, and plays his bi-cultural roles for a higher stage—politics in America.  He is a consummate actor of both cultures.  He is in Henry’s words someone who is “effortlessly Korean [and] effortlessly American,” simultaneously (328).  Unlike Henry, who as a spy aids in the deportation and dispersion of the ethnic migrants, Kwang—“an ambitious minority politician [with]. . . unwavering agenda [and] stridency”—labors to reconcile the hostility among the variegated minority groups in New York (139).  Similarly, unlike Henry’s father who is unmindful of racial “irony,” Kwang is both sensitive and sensible to racial issues, and attempts to form a political coalition among different races (58).  His career as a New York City Councilman, however, ends tragically, as his illegitimate fund-raising apparatus—the Korean money club “ggeh”—is disclosed by his most trusted staff members, Eduardo and Henry (280).  These two, who betray Kwang, work for those who represent the major political powers in America: Dennis Hoagland (Henry’s boss), De Roos (Kwang’s opponent), and indirectly, INS.  Thus, Kwang’s “messianic” political rise—as a prototypical self-made “American [in]. . .flyer[s]”—is pulverized by his political superiors for subtly contesting and threatening the White American politics (141).  As a diasporic merger, Kwang’s political “fall” ultimately intimates the vulnerability and indeterminacy of his self-claimed American persona in the political stage.

Read literally, Kwang’s political fall is tragic and discouraging.  More than any other characters in the novel, Kwang as a politician, espouses and magnifies his diasporic consciousness—sensitivity to multi-pluralism.  Unlike Henry and his father, he rejects tertiary roles in racial plays that are strategized by the so-called superpowers of America.  Rather, from his diasporic margins, Kwang encroaches inroad to challenge the very core of the American racial politics.  He is in Henry’s words “a larger public figure who [is] willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family [ethnic enclave],” and is not “afraid like [Henry’s] mother and father” (139, emphasis added).  Henry “hadn’t yet envisioned” that a public career is something that “a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion,” but is what Lee would like to have his (fellow diasporic) readers to pay a closer attention to, as a source of America’s deep seated racism (139, emphasis added).  Thus, it is precisely the turbulent theatricality of Kwang’s public career—especially his political “fall”—which crystallizes Lee’s desire to raise political awareness in his readers.  Ultimately, Kwang, among the three diasporic characters, is the one who is portrayed by Lee as someone who reaches the highest pivot of the American hierarchical achievements: politics, which wields more influence than Henry’s father’s financial success or Henry’s intellectual aptitude.  He is the consummate diasporic cultural artist.    

Furthermore, if we flip the lens, Kwang’s “fall” in the political arena projects an inverted vision that is ineffably surreal and inspiring to the readers.  Contrary to those who think Kwang would commit suicide as a result of his political calamity, Henry as a fellow Korean American understands Kwang’s Korean way of facing life crisis, thus he believes otherwise.  Henry believes that no matter how bitter Kwang’s ignoble political defeat may be, he will choose life over death, as if Kwang is a Christ figure.  Henry solemnly narrates that “Koreans don’t take their own lives.  At least not from shame” (333, emphasis added).  Henry further explains why: “My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.  If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure” (333, emphasis added).  According to the mother’s definition of “noblest art,” then, Kwang indeed is the noblest hero who suffers sublimely.  Like Christ, he bears his cross—his political fall—without saying anything and answering nothing “as if he is deaf” (342).  Though the angry crowd “scream at him like he is a child . . . and spit on his shoulder, . . . nothing registers in his face” (342).  In Henry’s words, Kwang “is already in another world” (342).  As it is demonstrated through Kwang’s Christ-like suffering that seems to transport him to another spiritual world, diasporas’s tendency to “hope” and capacity to “persist and endure” are some of the noblest “diasporic cultural aesthetics,” which sublimate their immigrant tribulations and inspire the readers. 

Thus, just when the readers of Western consciousness think that Kwang is being buried by his superior political opponents, the fact is Kwang’s political fall is largely an enactment of self-induced, masochistic punishment to himself for failing his people.  It stems from his unremitting loyalty to his political constituents.  It is Kwang’s way of “enduring crisis with Korean nobility” (333).  Because Lee pitilessly encapsulates Kwang’s political fall in a racially and socially claustrophobic denouement, it does not allow catharsis for the readers, but ingenuously does the reverse.  Psychologically and aesthetically, Kwang’s political “fall” to (fellow diasporic) readers—who similarly persist and endure social injustices in America—is liable to produce de-catharsis in varying degrees:  Mildly, it may evoke a nagging “reciprocal yearning” to counter the situation.  Powerfully, it may induce a strong “insurgent impulse” to combat the racial situation in America.  Thus, instead of the purging effect, Kwang’s political fall intoxicates the (fellow diasporic) readers with the unquenchable emotions, and that is the narratological scheme of the author—Lee’s way of producing powerful and lingering feelings of political injustice in the readers through his literary reversal psychology.  Indeed, Lee’s deployment of de-catharsis inversely stir and turn the readers’ interests towards more political awareness and participation in American minority politics.

Thus, decoding the author’s alternate intensions enlightens us with the deeper meaning of the text—a moment of revelation.  This kind of reader’s moment of intellectual and spiritual union with the author’s encoded message is delivered through the power of diasporic literature—the diasporas’s cognitive and cultural bond with its literature which is impenetrable by their predominant counterparts.  For instance, while it seems to the Western consciousness that the moral or sociopolitical “fall” of the three characters—Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—signifies their ultimate failure in acculturating into Americanism, its contravening interpretations suggest otherwise:  They are diasporic heroes, who reach their individual “maximums” in the three hierarchical levels of American successes: (1) finance; (2) intelligence; and (3) politics.  Then what is easily neglected, but should be paid its due recognition to these characters, is that they—as the best positioned and equipped characters to make a difference in American politics—wield their silent de-cathartic affectivity by influencing their readers to adopt sensible anti-racist measures.  Thus, “diasporic power art” is the effect of an exceptional diasporic literature.  Through its exemplary diasporic protagonists who display nomadic finesse—like versatility, bold choices, or resilience—it inflames profound cultural reflections in the reader.  

Works Cited and Consulted

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. Boston:

Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.”

        Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 249-84.

Shin, Jae-Min. “Desperate Immigration (Jul Mang Yi Min).”  Editorial. Korea Times. 23 Sept.

        2002, D8

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature (Published in CSULA Significations 2007)

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature

While attempting to defend the Western literary canon, Edward W. Said in “The Politics of Knowledge,” reveals the Eurocentric mentality towards subaltern literature: “[literary] politics has needed to assume, indeed needed to firmly to believe, that what was true about Orientals or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans” (191). In essence, Said is trying to articulate his theory of “politics of knowledge”—that, in the canon war, an author’s “racial identity” translates to his/her “knowledge” and the quality of his/her work. In other words, if an author is other than “white,” then, his/her literary work is less likely to be received as equal to that of the “white” standard, thus subaltern. In this canonical dichotomy between the “White” and the “other,” America—the land of diversity—is no less a culprit to its steep division, in that, we, as well, divide our literature as either belonging to “white” (American Literature) or “other” (ethnic literature). This system of racialization in the American canon is illogical and problematic, because it is, in effect, denying the transnational subjectivity of America —the fact that America as a nation is a “nation of immigrants that produce cultural hybridity,” and thus its multiethnic literatures are, in fact, its primary building blocks. What American canon needs, then, is a re-conceptualization of “American literature” as inherently transnational, to include the works of minor/ethnic literature as its indispensable parts, categorized only by their different genres and chronology, thus obviating separate ethnic curriculum in institutions.

In order to show why ethnic literature should not be an extraneous component to, but an essential core of, an American literature, first part of this essay explores the racist and nationalistic milieu of the Western canon itself. First, it reviews the definition and the function of “ethnic” and “minor” literature to deduce why these types of literature would be marginalized by the canon. Second, it discusses cultural hybridism largely from the point of views of the critics who advocate fair and equal representation of the ethnic minorities in the Eurocentric texts. Third, it psychoanalytically probes into the notion of “foreigner” or the “other” to illustrate that the canon—by segregating ethnic literature as not part of its own—is, in fact, being self-antagonistic. Then the second part of this essay focuses on arguing against the biased practice of canon in couple of ways: First, it introduces an example of an ethnic literature (Native Speaker) in America to show how it is received and why it is labeled as a minor literature. Then the rest of this essay argues against and proves why the canonical segregation of any literature written in America as “ethnic/minor” is an act of self-negating the intrinsically hybrid, transnational “Americanism.”

I

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture. Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized ethnic literature. Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added). Like Said, what Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

The canonical bias—which both Johnson and Said acknowledges—can therefore be stifling to ethic/minor literature of the colored writers. With this racism within the canonical circle in mind, I beg questions pertaining to the works by postmodern writers, particularly, those who fall into what Homi Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” calls the subjects of “liminal cultural locations.” They are those with ambiguous bi-cultural locality, or more popularly known as “diasporas”—ethnic minorities who are living, not in their homeland, but in their adopted land. Their cultural bi-locality places them in between the superior and the inferior social status. They are, for example, Americans who are not fully Americans, but “half Americans,” as their prefixes will designate: Afro, Latino, Asian-Americans. In short, they are America’s “ethnics,” and their literature is labeled as “ethnic literature.” Etymologically, “ethnic” is one who is not a Christian or Jew, but a Gentile, heathen, pagan, or simply the “other.” Similarly, according to Oxford’s contemporary definition, “ethnic minority” is a racial or other group within a larger system; hence, foreign or exotic” (emphasis added). Thus, “ethnic literature” is not really “American literature”; rather, it is a “foreign or exotic” literature of “racial or other group” within America.

It is precisely this widely accepted notion that “ethnic literature does not represent American mainstream culture, but that of the “foreigner’s,” which spurs American canonizers to rather marginalize it at its best, or exclude it at its worst. Since ethnic literature in their minds is “exotic” and “foreign,” it cannot be translated as part of an American culture, nor can it help them constitute and transmit “homogenous Americanism” through literature. John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism. In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” in that its “assertion of the continuity of Western tradition exactly corresponds in its intensity to the assertion of nationalism” (222). He further critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222). According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.” Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic literature is often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222). However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). However, Guillory admits that this fictitious conviction on the part of the canonizers—that the Western canon should represent the “great works of Western civilization only”—is “nevertheless a very powerful one (because it is ideological)” (221).

Then, what exactly is the distinctive trait of ethnic/minor literature that is more likely to be excluded from the Western canon? Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” define that “minor literature” is what “minority constructs within a major language.” They further list three other characteristics of the minor literature: (1) its language deterritorializes; (2) it is always political; and (3) the text serves as a collective enunciation. As an example, Deleuze and Guattari point to Jew’s experience of Diaspora to illustrate how their literature can de-territorialize cultural and national boundaries. They say that the act of “de-territorialization” happens as a result of a special situation where dispersed (often traumatized) Diasporas, who live in their host countries, cannot write their stories in their own language. However, left with no better way of emotional survival, they ironically write their Jewish story in the language of their oppressors, effectuating de-territorialization of the cultural and national boundaries. As it is shown in this example of Jewish Diasporas, the ultimate threat that a minor literature poses for the xenophobic authorities in the canon would be that it not merely transgresses its linguistic territory, but that it unavoidably penetrates the master’s culture, potentially undermining national solidarity.

Though the canonical authority in power may wish to bolster national solidarity through literature, critics like Bhabha demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities. He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added). He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements”’ (1340). He asks that our contemporary “critic[s] must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present” of the marginalized, hybrid postmodern subjects (1340). In other words, Bhabha is asking the Western canon to include those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature. She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists. Spivak believes that western academic institutions commit “translation-as-violation” (344) both in a literal sense (linguistic translation) and in a representational sense (fictional misrepresentation of the women of the third world). She claims that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340). Spivak is insulted not only by the assumed racial and intellectual superiority of the Western universal masculist, but also by its feminist counterparts. She believes that feminist writers of the first world are complicit with their masculist counterparts, in that, they, too, grossly misrepresent the women of the third world in their writings. Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345). In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, Spivak is, in effect, insinuating that ethnographic texts should be written and critiqued by those with cultural familiarity and authority. Consequently, for these culturally appropriate writers to re-vision their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers and to create a new “just representation” of their presence as equal humans, they need, according to Spivak, an “equal right” in the literary circles, which also implies an “equal access” in the canon (347).

If those in control of the canon, or more specifically, American canon perceives minor literature to be less than American, it is because they see the minorities as “foreigners,” “the others,” who in their eyes cannot and is not yet fully assimilated to their culture. However, Julia Kristeva’s analysis of “foreigner” in Strangers To Ourselves, shows how the “others” are in fact “our nocturnal selves”—the dark strangers who are repressed within ourselves. Psychoanalytically, she explains that Freud’s “Uncanny, [means that] foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners; we are divided:” (181). Hence, she says, “foreigner is neither a race nor a nation” (181). In fact, Kristeva believes that “it is [only] through unraveling transference—the major dynamics of otherness. . . [which is] . . . the foreign component of our psyche—that, on the basis of the other, [we] become reconciled with [our] own otherness-foreignness” (182). Most significantly, according to Kristeva’s theory, the so called “the other,” “the foreigner, “the stranger,” or “the inferior” is, in fact, none other than “ourselves.” We are all “an integral part of the same” (181). Then psychoanalytically speaking, the Eurocentric canon war is, in fact, self-antagonistic, in that each time it alienates/negates entry of what they perceive as “foreign texts” into its collection, it is ironically diminishing and self-effacing its own culture. Thus, if Kristeva’s interpretation of the Freudian “uncanny” is adopted, it would drastically change our concept of “foreignness,” and this change of our mind, in turn, would ideally dissolve the canonical racism in America.

II

Whereas Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves probes the notion of a “foreigner” in a psychoanalytical sense, a novel, Native Speaker explores the reality of being a “foreigner” in America. A decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American writers under forty. This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee. Lee’s Native Speaker is an example of a “minor literature” which fits the definition of Deleuze and Guattari, in that it is written by a minority in a major language. Fittingly, Lee’s Native Speaker as a minor literature demonstrates how a “half American” (prefixed American), or more specifically, a Korean American writer, can write with the effect of racial, cultural, and national de-territorialization between Korea and America. Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, Native Speaker bears two other characteristics of a minor literature: it is “political” and “collective.” It exposes the political tension felt by the Asian immigrants in America, and one Korean protagonist’s immigrant life collectively expresses the life of all Korean Americans. Ultimately, the value of this novel is that it helps us examine how ethnic literature is received and labeled by the American canon.

On a plot level, the protagonist in the novel, Henry Park, is a second-generation, Korean-American private spy who works for a white racist, Dennis Hoagland, to spy on his own people, John Kwang. Henry is instructed by Dennis to get close enough to Kwang so he can betray him. Henry’s reports on Kwang, which of course are written in excellent English, surpass any native speaker in their fluency, form, and efficiency (Dennis rewards him for this). However, as Henry spends more time with Kwang, he identifies with Kwang, and starts to realize that he must do what he has avoided all his life: face up to and evaluate who he really is. Is he an American? Korean? Or Korean-American? Although he is an American born citizen with American education and American mentality, he is no longer sure that he is American, and thus clings to what his American wife—who is the “standard barrier”—says who he is (Lee 12). Though later she apologizes, the list she hands him cataloguing who he is, is long enough to kill the hope of any Korean-American who thinks s/he can become singularly American: “You are surreptitious / B+ student of life / first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss / illegal alien / emotional alien / genre bug / Yellow peril: neo-American / great in bed / overrated / poppa’s boy / sentimentalist / anti-romantic / ____ analyst (you fill in) / stranger / follower / traitor / spy” (Lee 5). Her list basically sums up who Henry Park is to the dominant U.S. culture, and more specifically, by the American canon.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Native speaker fits the genre of a minor literature, but does it really? True, it is written by a minority in a major language. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a “minor literature” is problematic for two reasons. First, the term “minor” implies that it is smaller in scale and/or is less significant than its “major” counterpart. Like the definition and connotation of “ethnic literature,” a “minor literature” similarly intimates something that is tangential, inauthentic second-class literature. Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s point that minor literature is “political” and “collective” in nature is also true, but these qualities are not exclusive to minor literature; rather, all literature is “political” and “collective.” Who in American/Western canon has written anything that was not political, and has not either implicitly/explicitly spoken for the group the writer represented? How is literature even possible to be written in a purely nonpolitical and noncollective manner? This is not possible, and if such a writing is possible, in that it is purely “objective” (as opposed to political) and “personal” (as opposed to collective), then, are not these two conditionals—“objective” and “personal”—mutually exclusive? In other words, can a writing be “purely objective” but “purely personal” simultaneously? Besides, is not “personal” (such as the list made by Henry’s wife) inherently “political?” Thus, the two of the three constituents of a minor work listed by Deleuze and Guattari—“political” and “collective”— cannot be used to label and place ethnographic literature under a “minor literature.” The point is that frankly none of this labeling business should be espoused. If the writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature. No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America.

To illustrate why labeling any literary work as “minor/ethnic” is nonsensical, I would like to point to an example from the Native Speaker. On a plot level, an example of this racial categorization is again the previously mentioned list compiled by Henry’s wife, which symbolically documents in print her sundry reasons why she is impelled to de-legitimize her Korean American husband as not a true American. However, Henry’s white American wife, by writing this list, ironically creates a “minor literature,” since her list is “political” and “collective”: it politically alienates her husband from her culture; and implicitly, her list collectively makes a claim about Asian-Americans in general. Then who is to be blamed, in this case, for being political and collective? Meanwhile, Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker is segregated under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon.

Why can’t Henry’s American wife, who is the “standard barrier,” and metaphorically the American canon, allow Henry to be singularly American? He does what is required of him, but, her list, indicts him of being too alienated or “foreign” to be singularly American. Obviously, his wife has not been convinced by Kristeva’s theory that the “foreigner” (her husband) whom she resents is, in fact, “herself.” Pertinent to Henry’s dilemma of wanting to be singularly American is the essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen. Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1). In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of an American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible. With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with. Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans.

Though the canonizers intentionally or unintentionally mold “white race” as the true “American culture” through literature, just as African American history and culture cannot be cognitively nor textually segregated from “Americanism,” so is the ethnic/minor literature. For the variegated ethnic subcultures and their history are inseparable constituents of America. Although the nation’s white elitists may rather regard ethnic/minor literature as not American, more often than not, however, it overwhelmingly represents authors who are American citizens with American education and American mind (like Chang Rae Lee) invariably writing in some ways about “Americanism.” Thus, the fact that American canon routinely place literature written by its diasporic/hybrid scholars under the “ethnic category”—which automatically precludes them from being included as an essential part of the whole—is both insensitive and illogical, in that it defies the multicultural make up of the American populace.

Today, any large cosmopolitan country like England, and even China, for example, is transnational in nature, because it is made up of diverse peoples and cultures, let alone “America”—the land of liberty, equality, and diversity. Yet disturbingly, contemporary critics such as Said, Spivak, Guillory, and Bhabha would all agree that Eurocentric nationalism/racialization is the invisible force in the canon war that divides and groups, includes and excludes the wide-range of literature. However, Bhabha warns that “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334). Similarly, Said in “The Politics of Knowledge” critiques that the illusion of culturally homogenous nationalism in the canon debates is that it is perceived and internalized “as if…it [is] pure and unchanging from the beginning to the end of time” (192). In other words, Said is trying to explain that (canonical) nationalism as a concept is susceptible to mutation and hybridization over time. Thus, the insistence on the part of the canonizers to forge and transmit monolithic Western culture through racially selective process of canonization not only threatens the sociopolitical harmony, but is a futile act of resisting the global currency. Instead, the authorities of the Western canon, more narrowly, those in control of the American canon need to re-assess and realign the concept of “American” as inherently transnational in scope to include the works of the prefixed American writers as singularly “American,” without qualifiers or separate curriculum.

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers To Ourselves. Roudiez, Leon S. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.” American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.