Bridges with Asia: Asian Americans in the United States

Bridges with Asia: Asian Americans in the United States:
Asia in the Asian American Imagination: Perspectives from the Arts

Asia Society

May 2–4, 1996

Plenary Session Moderator
	Vishakha N. Desai ₁ Vice President for Cultural Programs, Asia Society

Presentations
	Am I My Sister’s Keeper? Asia American Writers and the Responsibility of Representation Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni ₂ Author and Professor, Foothill College, Los Altos, CA
	Making Waves Christine Choy ₃ Chair, New York University Tisch School of The Arts, Institute of Film & Television, Graduate Division
	Inventing The Earth Luis H. Francia ₄ Sarah Lawrence College and The Village Voice, New York
	Cultural Efforts At The East–West Crossroads: The Case of Cambodia Sam-Ang Sam ₅ Executive Director, Cambodian Network Council, Washington D.C.
	Performing Gender/ Performing Nation Or Biminbop Yong Soon Min ₆ Assistant Professor, Department of Studio Art, University of California, Irvine

Moderator Vishakha Desai began this panel with the following issues:

the role of Asia in Asian Americans’ art,
the perception of Asian Americans’ art in their homelands and in the United States,
the potentially confining nature of an Asian American identity for an artist, and
the need for Asian Americans to contextualize their work in Asian or American settings.

The panelists focused on particular aspects of these issues. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni spoke on the potentially confining nature of her Asian American identity. On the other hand, she and Christine Choy discussed the role of their art in freeing their imaginations and themselves from their Asian American identity. Sam-ang Sam addressed his responsibility as a member of Cambodian community to preserve Cambodian culture. Luis Francia explored notions of home in Asian American literature. And finally, Yong Soon Kim used her work as a means to probe the multifaceted dimension of Asian American identity.

Asian American, moderator Vishakha Desai stated, is a fluid concept. Many definitions exist for so many peoples, yet at the same time each of these definitions can still be confining. And while scholars have analyzed this concept, it is the artists who have been able to portray it with the most complexity. They are able to transcend boundaries of experience using only their imaginations.

Since Asian American artists have explored their identity through their art and have delved into so many of the issues that concern other Asian Americans, it is appropriate to turn to them for insight into the souls and minds of others.

Chitra Divarakuni told a story that illustrated both how the art is perceived in their homelands and the United States, and the constraints of identity for the Asian American artist. The story recounted the experience of a young South Asian American woman writer living in San Francisco. This woman abhorred media-constructed stereotypical images of Asian Americans which are one step from racism and another from hate crimes. She was tired of the dragon lady/geisha, houseboy/karate warrior/math wizard, model minority mold. So, she wrote a novel speaking out against these stereotypes and media exploitation and explored the depths of Asian American identity. She even found a publisher. But she was devestated by the reviews which accused her of being wooden and flat, the mouthpiece of a liberal agenda. She tore up her book and threw it off a bridge.

The potentially confining nature of an Asian American identity was brought forth in this woman’s experience. When an author writes out of a sense of responsibility, creativity and imagination can become lost. The writer felt obligated to destroy stereotypes that she would never face in her nation of origin in Asia. She felt the weight of being her “sister’s keeper.”

But Divakaruni also noted that one’s Asian American identity is not necessarily confining. After her initial failure, the young woman, succeeded when she began to listen to her heart. She began to write about what moved her, what touched her emotions. She would still incorporate her concerns for Asian Americans, but that was secondary. When artists write what moves them, their obligation to their community will be fulfilled.

Christine Choy also emphasized the importance of imagination and freedom of expression in her art. Her interest in art began in 1972 when she saw a film on the Vietnam War that changed her perspective. At that point, she realized the power and potential freedom of this medium. Choy decided to make movies documenting her personal experiences, her anger, and her frustration.

Choy described her eclectic background. With a Mongolian mother and a Korean father, she grew up exposed to multiple cultures. Having moved from Hong Kong, to Korea, to Japan, and then to the United States before she was fourteen, Choy experienced a wide range of political and cultural systems. In the United States, she struggled through school to become an architect only to find her profession obsolete. She then turned to film.

Because of her multidimensional background, Choy was able to free herself from “isms,” such as racism. Her life provided her with sufficient experience to realize that something existed to invalidate every ism that existed. Once she was free of the constraints that isms by nature imply, her imagination soared.

In continuing to expound on her esoteric aesthetic philosophy,

Choy explained that imagination has no logic. This lack of logic and the resulting contradictions truly move people’s emotions. Therein lies the potential for truth. People are illogical and full of contradictions. By freeing herself of isms and using her imagination, Choy was able to portray Asian Americans in all their contradictions, revealing both their positive and negative aspects. She was not only able to portray them as they are, she was also able to move audiences’ emotions through her representations, as well as magnifying their impact. Choy’s depictions are not stereotypical. She has freed Asian Americans from the constraints of the isms that so often attempt to define them.

For Sam-ang Sam, his responsibility toward his community and country of birth, Cambodia, weigh heaviest on his mind. Cambodia’s recent history has greatly influenced Sam’s professional choices. From 1975 to 1979, the nation was under the dictatorial regime of Pol Pot which slaughtered millions and engendered immeasurable hardships. These developments have affected Cambodians in the United States, the vast majority of whom are refugees. As a refugee and survivor of numerous atrocities, Sam admits that his first responsibility is to his community in the United States and then to his homeland. By preserving Cambodian culture, not only is Sam serving his community, he is “taking up the torch” for those suffering back home.

Sam said he feels that first-generation Cambodian immigrants could help subsequent generations by preserving Cambodian culture and promoting cultural programming. An understanding of their culture will give young Cambodian Americans cultural pride, a sense of identity, and knowledge of their roots. In addition to bridging intergenerational differences, it will instill youth with an understanding of their homeland and perhaps a sense of responsibility to their community, people, and country.

Because cultural programming is so vital, Sam feels that Cambodians must join the fight to preserve funding for the arts which facilitates several programs in the Cambodian community. Since Cambodians cannot afford to be viewed negatively amid the prevailing mood of xenophobia in the United States, these programs are their only line of defense against debilitating media stereotypes. Through this cultural programming, Sam not only hopes to promote an understanding of his home country but also to encourage people to pressure the Cambodian government to initiate change.

For Sam, Cambodia represents healing, reconciliation, the building of trust, and the recovery of a nation’s infrastructure and peoples. But Sam added, while the homeland is important, Cambodians are here to stay. They are an asset, not a liability.

Home, in the imagination of Asian Pacific American (APA) writers, is no longer a fixed physical space or something to be inherited. But as Luis Francia explained, APA writers are constantly constructing and negotiating this space. Foregrounding or backgrounding this process with images of the homeland figures significantly into the works of APA writers. Home is explored through restlessness, rootlessness, exile, multicultural identities, memory, language, and history. In the global economy, a world in which frontiers are constantly shifting, home and the space it occupies becomes an even more unsettling question. In the United States, a nation of immigrants, home is constantly being modified. American then becomes a synonym for new or hybrid.

Many APA writers have reconfigured home within a postcolonialist framework. It becomes a resistance to imperialism, an attempt to move the center or even discredit the notion of a center. APA writers must also deal with the challenge of putting down roots in the hostile and tenuous United States. It is difficult to assert one’s culture when the legacy of racial exclusion is so prevalant. The hyphenated status of the APA comes into question. Does the hyphen drive a wedge or build a bridge between their two states of being?

Despite their postcolonialist approach, APA writers have not glorified Asia as the homeland. Instead, they are ambivalent toward Asia. To some it is a paradise lost, which attains a purity in opposition to the APA’s displacement. For others, Asia is another shard of a fractured identity. Ultimately, APA writers are seeking refuge, parity, and a mediation of their “otherness,” in the United States.

Yong Soon Min, like Francia, dealt with the fractured identity produced by an Asian and American background. She challenged the notion that it was the “Eastern” half that created artistic difficulties by noting that this fractured identity was much more complex. Asian Americans are not trying to assimilate into the American culture. Min used the curatorial framework of an exhibition of Korean American art to illustrate its Western bias. In dealing with issues of culture, identity, assimilation, inclusion, and individual reconciliation between East and West, the curators wanted the artists to discuss freedom versus cultural determinism, the life of an artist versus cultural responsibilities, and Western modernism versus Asian tradition. In this series of dualities, there is a clear implication of the restrictiveness of Asian culture.

Other Asian American shows have dealt with the identity issue in a much more complex and informed manner. A Filipino American show attempted to look at the effect of diaspora on the Philippines and on those who fled. Artists explored the economic and cultural difficulties that immigrants encountered, an inevitable consequence of diaspora.

In her own work, Min explores themes of identity, the role of Asia, and the fractured self created by history, both in the United States and Asia. In Alteridem/Performing Personae Min traces the parallel development of photography with anthropology. She explores the relationship between the artist as native informant and the anthropologist who relies on this figure. Artists outside of the mainstream, in multicultural nations like the United States, she contends, are often positioned as native informants. In another piece, she alludes to the division of Korea and the militarization of women. In yet another, she questions the divisions of her Korean identity and Korean American identities brought about by the country’s division. Finally, in DMZ Xing,Min examines the history and experience of Vietnamese refugees and the Vietnam War in relation to her personal experience. Having established a link between the Vietnam War and the Korean Conflict, she came away from the experience with a whole new perspective on both peoples and wars.

All five artists have explored the Asian American experience through methods different from those used by scholars. By using imagination to explore reality, artists, as Christine Choy noted, have freed themselves from the logic that is required of scholarship. They have instead rendered a true and dynamic mosaic. Their explorations are constantly evolving along with the culture that motivates their exploration.

Discussion

Since the panel discussion also took the time alloted for questions from the audience, people were encouraged to address their questions to the speakers individually after the session.

Endnotes

Note 1: Vishakha N. Desai is currently Vice President for Cultural Programs at the Asia Society. She has also been the Director of the Asia Society Galleries since 1990. She is responsible for the special exhibitions of Asian art, the world renowned Rockefeller Collection, and other art-related programs organized by the Asia Society. In 1993, she was appointed as Vice President for Cultural Programs to develop multidisciplinary projects involving visual and performing arts as well as other humanities and social sciences. Under her direction, the Society has inaugurated an ambitious and diverse program to present contemporary art by Asian and Asian American artists, while continuing to organize exhibitions of traditional Asian arts with new contextual foci. Prior to assuming her current position, Dr. Desai was at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, first as the head of Exhibition Resources and as the Acting Director of the Education Department and later as the Assistant Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Islamic Art in the Department of Asian Art. She has also taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University and Columbia University. Back.

Note 2: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an award-winning writer and poet whose work is featured in The Open Boat: An Asian American Anthology (Doubleday, 1992), and New Indian Writing in English (Penguin, India, 1995) is also editor of the cross-cultural anthology, Multitude(McGraw-Hill, 1993). She has written three books of poems, including Dark Like the River, The Reason for Nasturtiums and Black Candle. Active in women’s issues, she is President of MAITRI, a Bay-area not-for-profit, volunteer organization for South Asian victims of domestic violence. Her latest book, Arranged Marriage (Anchor/Doubleday, 1995), recently won an American Book Award. Back.

Note 3: Christine Choy, Chair, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Institute of Film and Television, Graduate Program, has made a number of award-winning films, including the documentaries In the Name of the Emperor, Sa-I-Gu, Homes Apart: The Two Koreas and Who Killed Vincent Chin?, as well as several short and experimental films. Ms. Choy has worked as a director, producer, cinematographer and editor on her productions. Her most recent production is Hunting Season, a CD-ROM on the Yoshi Hattori case. She is a trustee of the Asia Society. Back.

Note 4: Luis H. Francia is a poet, critic and journalist. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and have been included in various anthologies, including the forthcoming Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffee House Press, 1996). He has published two books of poetry, the latest being The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1992), and edited a seminal anthology of Philippine literature in English, Brown River, White Ocean (Rutgers, 1993). His poems and essays have been included in various anthologies, The New Doreligion Book of Philippine Poetry (Anvil, 1993) and Film and Politics in the Third World (Praeger, 1988). He is a writer for The Village Voice, a contributing editor to A. Magazine, and the New York correspondent for the New Delhi-based Cinemaya and the Hong Kong-based Asiaweek. Mr. Francia also teaches a course in Asian American literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Along with Eric Gamalinda, he is currently co-editing Flippin’, an anthology of short fiction and poetry by Filipinos writing in America. Back.

Note 5: Sam-Ang Sam, Executive Director of the Cambodian Network Council and Advisor of the Cambodian-American Heritage, is active in Cambodian refugee resettlement and in the preservation of traditional Khmer dance and music. He is the author of Silent Temples, Songful Hearts: Traditional Music of Cambodia (World Music Press, 1991) which was selected by the Folkways Division of the Smithsonian Institution as one of the top publications of traditional music for 1991 and the producer of the documentary film Preserving a Culture: Traditional Khmer Dance and Music. In 1994, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for the preservation of Cambodian culture and for leading community development activities in the US and Cambodia. Back.

Note 6: Yong Soon Min, an artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine, works in media ranging from photography to installations. She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women at Huairo, China; Camerawork Gallery, London; Kumho Museum, Seoul; Fourth Baguio Art Festival, Philippines and the Havana Biennial, Cuba. One of her current projects is a Percent for Art Commission for a new library building in Queens, New York. Back.