I often read two books at the same time. I keep one next to my recliner, the other next to my bed. One is always a novel, the other is usually nonfiction. If one of them, usually the novel, is exceptional, I might put the second book aside. If neither book holds my attention, I might not finish either one. There was a time when I finished most of the books I started, but I don’t do that anymore. The older I get, the more I realize that I need to weed out mediocre books and read only the best ones.
This week I have been reading the novel James by Percival Everett and a compilation of personal essays titled Asian American X. James is the retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim. Asian American X is a series of personal essays written by young Asian Americans describing what it is like to be Asian American.
Usually the chair-side book and the bedside book have nothing to do with each other. This week is an exception. The books I am reading now mesh together so well that I won’t even call it coincidence (even though I think that it is). In very different ways, both books are about being not white in a white-dominated society.
When I initially glanced at the table of contents of Asian American X, I was drawn to an essay titled “Half and Half.” My daughter is half Taiwanese and half Wisconsinite, so I hoped the essay would offer me insights about Clare. As it turns out, Jenny Chen, the author of “Half and Half” is not mixed race at all. She is 100% Chinese from Taiwan. The title of the essay refers not to the author’s parentage, but to having been sent from Taiwan to America as a middle school student. Chen is half Taiwanese and half American by place of residence, not genetics.
Still Chen’s work hit me personally, but not in the way I was expecting. She surprised me by summarizing almost exactly the content of the book I am currently writing. Had Chen not written her short essay twenty years before I even had my idea for a book, I would have thought she’d hacked into computer and borrowed heavily from my draft outline. Now it looks like I am the one committing borderline plagiarism. My book, with the working title Tiger Mom and Wisconsin Dad, is about the education of Manyu’s and my biracial daughter. One third of the book is about the values taught to Clare by her first generation Taiwanese American mother (e.g., the importance of studying, respect for her elders), and another third is about all that she’s learned from me (e.g., the importance of play and the need to sometimes question the authority of her elders). The final third of the book is a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of our daughter’s bicultural upbringing.
Chen’s essay, written when she was in her early twenties, is based upon having spent half of her life in Taipei and half in an upscale suburb of New York City. The heart of the essay is two ten-point lists. The first list consists of lessons for life that were impressed upon her by her Asian parents when she lived in Taiwan. The second list, also lessons for life, describes all that she learned after moving to the US. The only significant difference between Chen’s essay and big sections of my book is that Chen believes she gleaned her American lessons all on her own, whereas I suggest that Clare got hers from me.
I believe nothing written today is entirely new, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed seeing my best ideas laid out in an old essay written by a woman just out of college. Yet this disturbing realization was on my mind as I started reading James. (To Be Continued…)
* Chen, Jenny. 2004. “Half and Half.” In Asian American X : An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices. (Arar Han and John Hsu, eds.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
** Everett, Percival. 2024. James. New York: Doubleday.
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