hardboiled

a thread of a narrative

I hadn't expected to be this excited about a piece of fruit. After reading that Bing cherries were developed by a Chinese horticulturist in the 1870s, I spent the next few days announcing the fact to anyone who was available to listen. I thought they would be as astounded as I was to hear that a Chinese man, Ah Bing, had lived and labored in an era of America's past that I imagined to be populated by black and white.

In College Park, Georgia, I grew up alongside children of European or African ancestry. Elementary school teachers taught how both groups made their homes in America through very different means, but for me, these histories united in their singular impact of showing that these groups had earned a place here. The Pilgrims were familiar figures to me by second grade, “Emancipation Proclamation” the two longest words in my third grade vocabulary, and I read enough historical fiction to know about NINA, Brown v. Board, and Eastern European enclaves in New York City before I was done with fourth. In my eyes, these stories were what made my friends and their families Americans – they lived as extensions of a continuing American story that we all knew very well.

I didn't resent being educated in terms of the African or European American experience. I did, however, become uncomfortably aware that I had no similar explanations for my own presence here. High school's sporadic brushes with coolies or the Japanese interment failed to solve the problem, for the Asians in question were always transient beings that dropped out of our discussions as suddenly as they appeared.

The more I tried to make sense of my presence here, the less I was able to fit Asians into America as I knew it. Most Asians I met seemed to come and go, and I doubted that other immigrant groups had shown such consistent failure in expressing their intentions to stay. In my mind, this already disqualified us as a legitimate immigrant community. To make matters worse, my parents had arrived in America as educated, reasonably well-funded students, my father had a stable job, and I attended school alongside black and white children without any threat of segregation. Immigrants were supposed to fight from the bottom up. I felt oddly anxious that we had secured a middle-class lifestyle when I wasn't aware of any struggle to bring us this far. Perhaps Asians were in America as historical anomalies. There were no satisfactory stories relating Asian Americans to a larger history, no precedents suggesting how we were to proceed into the future.

This may have been one of the reasons why, when I was smaller, I'd talk as if I planned on moving to Taiwan when I grew up. I picked up my parents' habit of saying “hui Tai Wan” - “returning to Taiwan” - whenever I referred to our visits, and regarded time spent there as respite from the questions cluttering my American life. Unlike Georgia, where things were often too new to be significant, in Taiwan there was a continuity with the past. That continuity was present in the language we spoke, in the graves of previous generations and my parents' childhood homes. I assumed that if I were to ever live in Taiwan, I could just pick up the legacy my family had established there over the years.

When I became older I recognized complexities in this situation that had escaped my childish perspective. My spoken Mandarin is fluent but my literacy abysmal. My palate, style of dress and manner of speech are all markedly different from those of my cousins. I disagree with my parents over the values they were brought up with and the values I've acquired, and it eventually occurred to me that our disputes did not bode well for my chances of assimilating into Taiwanese culture. We spent last December in Taiwan, and as I anticipated, one of my uncles couldn't stop exclaiming over how “American” I had grown up to be.

The fantasy of claiming Taiwan as a homeland had died years before my uncle pronounced me a foreigner. Being recognized as such didn't sting; I think it wasn't Taiwan itself that attracted me, just its idealization as a place where I would belong. After the December visit, I concluded that there were aspects of Taiwanese society I could never be reconciled to, and realized with some reluctance that I preferred America for many reasons. Even so, giving up my claim to a Taiwanese identity did little to resolve my confusion. Apparently I had become a different kind of Asian after living in America. I was cut off from the past and future in two different places. Existence as an Asian American seemed suspended in the present, profoundly detached from everything I understood.

When I learned of Ah Bing's accomplishment, I was a little dumbfounded at finding that something so common to supermarkets and summer barbeques were associated with an Asian person. Bing cherries are ubiquitous enough to be unremarkable, and it is precisely their ordinariness that grips me. They're no less new to this country than the African or European Americans of my childhood, and yet they are linked to Asian Americans, a people I perceive as passing through too invisibly to leave a mark. Ah Bing must have worked hard at perfecting this fruit in order for it to bear his name. He must have dreamed stubbornly to become an orchard foreman when race relations were working against him. Evidently he made a way for himself, and the aftereffects of his experience are this small but pervasive legacy - Ah Bing is the first to convince me that Asians have pressed through these foreign atmospheres in the past, for he left a token I could recognize. Knowing that Asians have labored and dreamed in America, that there is evidence of their striving that gives some relief. If there have been Asians before me who took steps to occupy an American space, perhaps I would not be wrong in taking a few steps into America instead of always feeling as if I am somewhere on my way out. Here is the small narrative thread I have been trying to get my hands on for years.