Asian Minor
The Accidental Asian
By Eric Liu
Random House; 210 pp. $23.00
Malcolm Muggeridge had a story about his days as a newspaper correspondent in Moscow
during the time of the Stalin famines. He went with a Russian colleague to see a Chekhov
play. Afterwards, he asked her what she thought of it. "I can't see what they were
all so unhappy about," replied the woman. "They had enough to eat, didn't
they?"
I am afraid my gut reaction to these autobiographical essays was somewhat similar. Eric
Liu is the offspring of two immigrants from Taiwan. His father was a manager at IBM. His
childhood seems to have been cloudless. He grew up in a quiet suburb and went to Yale. His
twenty-nine years have been spent in a cocoon of comfort and security, disturbed only by
his father's death from kidney disease when Eric was twenty-two. He was a speechwriter for
the Clintons. Now he is attending law school--three years' immersion (to borrow an image
from George Orwell) in a lukewarm bath of political correctness. What on earth can this
person have to tell us? And what, for goodness' sake, does he have to complain about?
The answers are, in order: not much, and--of course!--"racism". Mr Liu, you see,
wants an "identity", and the "identity" he wants is
"Asian-American". And what in God's name is "Asian-American"-ness?
Why, it's a "lifestyle"--which is to say, an assemblage of mannerisms and
attitudes cultivated in order to make oneself feel kind of special. Where does
"racism" come in? This I could not fathom, since Mr Liu flatly denies that
"Asian-American" is a racial category. The offspring of Polynesians or
Pakistanis (the latter a branch of the white race speaking an Indo-European language) are
"Asian-American" in his calculus. On the other hand, he reserves the right to
whine about "racism"-- to spit venom at Bill Safire for his comments on the
Chinese funny-money scandal, to raise the sad specter of Vincent Chin, killed by laid-off
auto workers who thought he was Japanese, to imply that the nomination of Bill Lann Lee as
an Assistant Attorney General was foiled by "racists", to display his righteous
indignation at the NR cover of 3/24/97 showing the Clintons in yellow-face.
Look. From time to time people will be murdered by others who don't like their color. This
proves nothing larger than the occasional vileness of human nature. The fuss about Chinese
campaign contributions is entirely justified. China is the most corrupt country in the
world, and we should strive mightily to keep their way of doing things out of the U.S.A.
That is not "racism", it is just prudence. Likewise, the opposition to the
nomination of Lee was nothing to do with his being of Chinese ancestry, and everything to
do with his being a business-hating regulation-crazy Clintonoid lefty dork. And that NR
cover was funny-- could we have some more like it, please?
In common with, I think, most white people, I have no race consciousness, and regard the
whole "race" business as, at best, indoor relief for unemployable intellectuals,
and at worst as a money racket run by shake-down artists. I have, as it happens, been
living among Chinese people for most of my life. I feel quite at home in a roomful of
Chinese and can read the classic poetry with pleasure. Yet the maunderings of these
"Asian-Americans" are more alien to me than the cargo cults of New Guinea (to
which, come to think of it, they bear more than a passing resemblance). Sample:
"College is supposed to be where Americans of Asian descent become Asian Americans,
where the consciousness is awakened." Oh, that's what college is supposed to be? And
here was me thinking it had something to do with education!
This is the second autobiography I have read recently. The other was Crossing the Line,
by Alvin Kernan, an account of the author's service in the U.S. Navy during WW2, after
growing up on a remote ranch in Wyoming. His book and Eric Liu's have some things in
common. They are both decently well written (though Mr Liu has a regrettable tendency to
lapse into Creative Writing: "I am bathed in yellow light..." yada yada). Both
stop in the author's twenties: Kernan's because that is the end of the part of his life
that he judges other people might find interesting, Mr Liu because that is as far as he's
got-- no doubt he will have much, much more to tell us as soon as he has finished law
school. Yet two books more different in spirit could hardly be imagined. Kernan endured
much and saw great horrors. Liu has endured little out of the ordinary, and seen less.
That is not his fault, and in fact he seems to me a likeable guy, with whom I should not
mind spending some time--half an hour, perhaps. It is just that we live in an age when the
sterner virtues are not much called for, and hedonism and narcissism, and the stirring up
of rancor over imagined grievances, and the parading of manufactured emotions and
try-it-out "lifestyles", and all the vapid babble of fashion and celebrity and
"cool" and "identity" are what fill the marketplace. This is
depressing for those of us who think that life is a serious business, that words have
meanings and ideas matter, but it is bonanza time for people like Eric Liu. He will be a
very successful lawyer. |