Since this is the last post of the year, I guess I'll say a couple things about Asian American literature in general and my experiences with this class.
This class was actually not on my list at all when I signed up for courses (I also thought that I would have a 3rd period class, so I thought it wasn't even an option). I was kinda salty that I ended up in this class, since I'm pretty sure my other requests had openings, but turns out I really like what we read this term. I don't think there was a single story I didn't genuinely enjoy reading (I'm also a massive sucker for short stories and sci-fi, so I'm a bit biased there).
This is, when we talk about Asian-American literature, it's not like African-American lit where we can point to Harlem and say, "there, that's black culture". There's Chinatowns, but for some reason we don't make that same connection, assign that distinct cultural value to an area, (taste of China? We talk about Asia, but we don't really talk about Asia and America, what it means to have a foot on both shores and no home in either).
And I think that's something important, that a lot of upper-middle class Asian families have taken care to seem American as ever. It's about assimilation- my parents don't find anything to be particularly proud of in coming from China. It's funny, because when my sister and I talk about history and racism and slavery, 'we' refers to the exclusively white slaveowners, because I don't think either of us have experienced the systemic discrimination that I know even other Asian-Americans have. There's a very permeating culture of "don't get offended, it's just a joke", or "stop being so sensitive: look, I'm Asian and I'm nor offended", despite the fact that there are vastly different experiences in the Asian-American community. In my world, in an upper-middle class Andover bubble, my experiences fall firmly into and uncomfortable avoidance of my background.
Because I have the luxury of distancing myself from my ethnicity, in a world where my classes are more than half Asian and I speak English with no accent, in a world where I can afford to dress like everyone else and if I never use a knife in commons because I just never learned how or avoid certain words because I've never heard them spoken aloud, well, that's petty change that I can brush aside.
