identity

During my panel discussion (with my editor Alvina Ling and YA author Justina Chen Headley) at the North American Taiwanese Women's Association conference in Houston, I discovered that my book ,"Year of the Dog" is controversial. This was a bit of a surprise to me, as "Year of the Dog" is almost a memoir, filled with my personal childhood stories, interwoven with my mother's. I thought it would be an easy fit with the Taiwanese women.

But I had underestimated how deep politics run in people, so deep that it even effects their view of children's books. In my book, I easily interchanged the labels Taiwanese and Chinese--the two nationalities that I was considered as a child and which had blurred to mean the same thing to me. This, to some of the conference attendees was a gross mistake. The Chinese were the enemy.

When one or two of the women approached me later about the subject, I tried to defend my position. How I was trying to write books true to my experience, that my book was not about politics of Taiwan vs. China, but about being Asian American. That it was the Asian-American identity I was portraying, not the Taiwanese identity.

"That is because you are 2nd generation and don't know," one woman said to me, shaking her head, "You don't know. We remember. We saw the blood, we felt the oppression. If you did, you would never call yourself Chinese."

In the recent years, I have finally felt that I have come to terms with my identity. This is what has enabled me to write my stories and talk to kids about my experiences. Now, suddenly, I felt like that rock was being shaken.

"I can understand why it bothers some of them," Alvina said to me, "To them it is as if a Holocaust survivor wrote she was German. They feel like it is an insult to what they've suffered."

This fills me with mixed emotions. I would never attempt to downplay the suffering that the older Taiwanese generation felt by the Chinese, but I can't help feeling that there must be a way to remember without bitterness. The deepest and most hurtful racism I have felt in my life has not been from Caucasians, but from other Asians. Asians make up a huge percentage of the population, but they are rarely a force in American politics, media or children's books. There's no Coretta Scott King Award for Asian picturebooks (if there is, few have heard of it which goes to show how much less importance it is given). And perhaps that is because we cling to our specific labels so tightly. Maybe if the different Asian races could relax and bond together as Asian-Americans, we'd actually be a force in the US. Or, at least,be able to enjoy my book.