COLUMN: An Identity of Non-Choices

Guest Column At Penn, a staggering percentage of the campus population is Asian American; undoubtedly, our presence is both substantial and diverse. We occupy all facets of the University -- from the English seminars to the Biology lecture halls, from the dance troupes to the cultural groups. Implicit in our diversity is the belief in choice -- that is, we regard choice as imperative to the shaping of our identity; we can choose to live on the (Asian Hall) in the high rises or the fraternity houses, choose to write for the Penn Review or Mosaic. This is essential to both our identities as individuals and as Asian Americans. However, choice implies freedom, a freedom to shape our identity and in many ways, control it. But the irony to all this is that our identities are not a product of choices but of non-choices; that our identities evolved from a continual process of negating, not affirming the issues that surround us. What is Asian American? In playwright Frank Chin's words, Asian American is not Asian nor white American, but distinctly (and uniquely) Asian American. But for Chin and many like him, Asian American is a result of denying what you are, or more accurately, what you are presumed to be -- neither a "yellow white" nor a foreigner, neither half of each nor more of one. And being Asian American is a product of non-choices -- the non-choice of being the model minority, the non-choice of being obscured in the analects of American history, the non-choice of being seen by many as possessing an Asian sensibility that denies me the absolute right to claim myself a red-blooded American. Asian Americans, our choices are not choices; they are a result of the processes that have made us invisible, that have made us turn away from truly defining ourselves. There is nothing profitable in holding on to a sensibility that has yet to be truly created; right now it is only profitable to reject what it is not. Understand the power of this negation -- that we have all but denied ourselves out of existence. Understand, too, that the non-choices make us react, but not create. We are invisible on our classroom syllabuses, invisible when we stroll down Locust Walk, invisible in our school paper because, from the moment we where born,we're given non-choices that were said to define us. We say we are neither Bruce Lee nor Charlie Chan, neither assimilated Americans nor foreign sojourners. But then, who are we? The power of non-choice was never felt more harshly for me than this past summer. Working as a reporter intern for the New York Daily News, I was given the assignment of the Chinatown serial rapist. The victim was a six-year old child of Cantonese immigrants and my editor sent me out everyday for five days after the rape to talk to the family. They where hoping I might get the girl to speak about the experience and recount her side of the story. On my last day, I rode the dimly-lit graffitied elevator up eleven flights and knocked on the same gray-blue metal door of the victim's apartment. Not surprisingly, no one answered. But standing in that hallway I noticed something for the first time -- there was not another reporter in sight since the story died down a week ago. And here I has, knocking tirelessly at a door I knew would never open. The realization hit me. It didn't make sense but then again, it made all the sense in the world. It was because I was Chinese American and, to my editors, if being Chinese meant anything in the Chinatown community, it meant I could get my foot in the door and have the family do for me what no white, black or Latino reporter could. Because of the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes I was given the non-choice of possessing some continuous link with Asian-ness -- that their faith in my success was somehow linked to my "foreignness." Never mind that I barely spoke Mandarin and the family spoke Cantonese -- I had been all but erased in my editor's desire for a "scoop." My reaction, of course, was to reject this provincialism -- in my repudiation, I affirmed my Asian- American identity. In the course of this, however, I realized that my Asian-American identity was constantly a product of my rejections; it didn't work the other way around. My Asian-American identity was a result of what I was not -- not what I am. There are those of you who will disagree with me, who say they know and understand what Asian American is, who have worked hard at defining and shaping it. To you I ask, "How do you account for our asymtotic existence inherent in our cultural groupings, always touching but never blending into each other? How do you account for the need of sovereignty within Korean-American, Chinese-American, Filipino- American communities and so forth if our greater identity is to be Asian American?" Why is the word "Asian American," so problematic to define? In my last few weeks at Penn, I am left to wonder what will happens upon graduation, when large percentage on campus suddenly find themselves reduced to three percent -- just three percent of the entire population in the U.S. What power do we have to transcend these diffused numbers? In our quest to stop others from defining us, will we continually forget to define ourselves?

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