The Art of Identification by Rex Ferguson;Melissa M. Littlefield;James Purdon;

Author:Rex Ferguson;Melissa M. Littlefield;James Purdon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature—History, Identity (Philosophical concept)—History, Identifi cation—History, Identifi cation— Social aspects—History, Essays
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

At the pancake breakfast where we had been filming, a red-faced veteran from WWII drew a bead on me and my crew, standing in line by the warming trays, our plates stacked high with flapjacks and American bacon.

“Where are you from, anyway?” he asked, squinting his bitter blue eyes at me.

“New York,” I answered.

He shook his head and glared and wiggled a crooked finger inches from my face. “No, I mean where were you born?”

“Quam, Minnesota,” I said.

“No, no. . . . What are you?” He whined with frustration.

And in a voice that was low but shivering with demented pride, I told him, “I . . . am . . . a . . . fucking . . . AMERICAN!”30

Here anyone familiar with Asian American novels or Asian American politics or living as Asian American recognizes the question and the assumptions underlying it. But Ozeki makes Jane the one in this interaction who is a “demented” nationalist. This encounter takes place shortly after Jane and her crew land at the local airport in the midst of Gulf War fever as soldiers are leaving on deployment. Her outrage is thus tainted by what this claim to being “a . . . fucking . . . AMERICAN” means. In earlier Asian American novels, taking a stand against the stereotype of the perpetual foreigner and against the claim that Asian American history is shorter than that of some White immigrant/hyphenated groups was prioritized despite the problematic implications of claiming one’s identity as American and thus accepting imperial or domestic racist politics in making that claim.31 But here, Ozeki questions Jane’s momentary willingness to be as militantly American as someone with war-hungry, nationalist Gulf War fever. Ozeki then drops the issue of “claiming Americanness.” Jane encounters the assumption that she is Japanese only when she is with her (actually Japanese) film crew and before she speaks in English. This has the effect of making the trope seem outmoded.

There are other ways in which Ozeki moves away from the traditional tropes of ethnoracial identity and protest to adopt those that are more biological and less overtly those of naming or categorization. First, it is notable that My Year of Meats is unusual in being a Japanese American novel with no internment narrative. In many earlier Japanese American texts, the loss of partly personal, partly public history is indexed by the internment, something unacknowledged in much of American history and often such a painful subject in Japanese American families that children’s questions go unanswered. But this is a Japanese American novel that does not mention internment. Jane’s mother is a war bride, not an internee. Jane’s biological connection to her racial ancestry is primarily a problem of personal biological production, not of reproduction of culture or recovery of history. She is not an internee’s daughter but a DES daughter with a damaged fallopian tube and a high risk of early-onset, rapid-progression cancers. Jane wonders whether her mother might have seemed a natural candidate for DES because

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