hardboiled

negotiating the third space

On a campus where 45% of the undergraduates are Asian American, I've sometimes wondered at the presence of social clubs, community service organizations, performance troupes and the like built along lines of Asian ethnic identity. I, and perhaps others, tend to imagine ethnically-based groups as sidelined minorities uniting for the preservation of their interests, or as having a distinct cultural flavor and purpose. At UC Berkeley, Asian Americans constitute the majority and rarely appear to be oppressed. The bulk of Asian Americans I'm acquainted with seem so Americanized that I doubt their ethnic roots can color their organization in any substantial way.

My idea of ethnic organizations as being centered around culture and advocacy makes Theatre Rice easier for me to understand. A self-described modern Asian American theater group, it is shaped by the cultural aspects of the members' backgrounds as much as it is by their artistic visions. Theatre Rice's current director, fourth year Yue Tu, sees part of the their purpose as counteracting the absence of Asians in campus theater productions. "I think the best way to change perception is through action. In Theatre Rice, we actually act upon what we're going out to say--change perception [by giving] people the opportunity to perform," he says.

Whereas both Asians and non-Asians participate in their productions, and although their pieces rarely cover Asian-specific topics, the club is doing something that makes sense in the context of what I expected. To an extent, Theatre Rice acts in response to pressures within and without the Asian American community that limit its members from entering the entertainment industry. Commenting on the pressures within, Tu says "[My family] never put an emphasis on theater and performance. For a lot of Asian Americans, parents don't stress the arts in terms of really performing...the arts are often a way of teaching method. For example, a lot of [kids] are taught instruments not because parents want them to become great violinists or pianists, but because they want them to learn hard work." These internal pressures aren't the only restrictions Theatre Rice wants to address, though. "When there's a casting call, the parts are not written for Asian Americans. A casting director would probably not cast an Asian American for Romeo and Juliet, or Superman, or Batman." Tu continues, "No Asian American has ever won a 'Best Actor' or 'Best Actress.' Role models in the entertainment industry have traditionally not been Asian American."

Reflecting on my acceptance of Theatre Rice as an Asian American organization, though, alerts me to a vaguely disturbing thought. What allows Theatre Rice to better fit my idea of an ethnically-based group is my recognition of its outsider status. While not traditionally Asian, Theatre Rice does place more of an emphasis on their relationship to Asian culture, and show how that relationship puts them in tension with the mainstream. It could be that my intuitive conception of Asian Americans centers on their separation from American society, their connection with their countries of origin and their insistence on maintaining that distinction. This idea of mine would make Asian American clubs just islands of Asians trying to preserve their differences in America. "Asian American" as a single term then has no meaning; I've set up a dichotomy in which people have to be either Asian or American.

Before coming to college I read Eric Liu's memoir, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, in which he observes that his father became "a different kind of Asian" after immigrating to the US from China. The phrase struck me at the time, but I forgot about it until I visited Cal Queer & Asian (Cal Q&A). Then I began struggling for a new term to describe this group that my dichotomy didn't work to define.

Like Theatre Rice, the need for Cal Q&A came about due to the need for Asians to be included in certain communities--here, specifically, the queer community. As one of the club chairs observes, "Queer culture is almost an entirely different culture... and a lot of it is dominated by white people." Because of this, he says, Berkeley needs "a space for people who identify as Asian and queer to get together-- kind of a support group where we... interact with people who face the same intersectionality." Indeed, after listening to the club members discuss what it means for them to be both queer and Asian, it's evident that there are concerns here that wouldn't be as easily addressed in a purely queer-focused or Asian-focused group. "There's this big stereotype that Asians are the model minority... people expect that you'll be able to achieve a lot of stuff, always be the straight-A student in class and accomplish a lot," says a freshman girl. She juxtaposes this to the pressures she feels as a lesbian: "Being gay means being defined by what you can't do. You can't get married, have a child, visit your partner in the hospital."

The intersectionality Cal Q&A members face is further emphasized by Charlie Trung Nguyen, who brings up a similar conflict as a gay Asian American male. "Being queer didn't mesh with what I was raised to be," he says. Many Asian cultures have a high expectation for sons to carry on the family line, and this is an expectation Trung couldn't meet. "Being queer means you can never bear children...it's so important in my family to pass on a name. I'm the oldest male...I was seen as the one who would make the family proud. Being queer was definitely not something that would make my family proud."

What makes these sorts of statements a direct challenge to my dichotomies is this: although not all issues discussed in club meetings are explicitly linked to the members' ethnic backgrounds, the examples given above are. The problems of "model minority" and familial structures are specific to Asians in America, and by bringing them up, Cal Q&A becomes, in a sense, a space for expressing ethnic identity. But at the same time, this is a very non-traditional form of expression, because many Asian countries do not yet have open discourse on queer sexuality. Mainstream American society is not highly attentive to queer Asian culture either, and given this situation, there's obviously no ready-made niche for Cal Q&A anywhere. What these youth of Asian origin are doing in Berkeley, CA is creating a link between racial and sexual subcultures to the racial and sexual mainstream – and doing this in a single space.

This may be what Liu meant by "a different kind of Asian." The youth of Cal Q&A have come to express their Asianness differently than their parents, perhaps differently from their counterparts overseas, taking what they've received from two cultures, processing it through their own experience, and synthesizing it into something distinctly their own. Unlike what I initially expected an Asian American club to be, Cal Q&A is neither duplicating an Asian culture nor being completely absorbed into the American one.

Many of my original assumptions about Asian American student groups were wrong. Some of the empirical facts were incorrect; Asian Americans are marginalized more than I was willing to recognize, as proven by Theatre Rice and Cal Q&A. More importantly, however, I had a conception of Asian American identity that I recognize in retrospect to be too rigid. It's perfectly fine for Asian Americans to assist each other in entering the larger American community, it's perfectly fine for them to fight for their rights as a group. There's more to it, though, because instead of discussing them in terms of outsider status, it's equally necessary for me to recognize them as possessing a hybrid identity. Asian Americans occupy a third space, which is to be understood not in terms of where they've come from or the larger world they currently dwell in, but their assembly of varied parts into a distinctly unique whole.