Asian America and Asia
Ethnic confusion on and off campus
By William Wetherall
Unpublished article submitted to The Daily Californian
21-page manuscript dated 30 March 1975 originally titled
"Ethnic confusion on and off campus: Asian America and Asia"
See also "My husband would have loved this" and other adventures of a philistine alone at the Opera House
Contents
2017 foreword: Inklings of awareness
Asian America and Asia
ASUC Bookstore
San Francisco Ballet
Asian American Writers
Ripping Off Labels
2017 foreword: Inklings of awarenessIn the spring of 1975, I was busy with oral exams, and with correspondence concerning grants for research in Japan, which I would begin that summer. My doctoral thesis would be on suicide in Japan, and my field work would be conducted through the good offices of Katō Masaaki (加藤正明 1913-2003), then the director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Japan, where I would have research privileges. Since suicide included suicide pacts, and murder-suicide, both of which are kinds of "shinjū" (心中), I decided to take in a ballet called "Shinjū" at the War Memorial Opera House or just "Opera House" in San Francisco. It would be performed by the San Francisco Ballet on 20, 23, and 29 March. I bought a "Balcony Circle" ticket for performance on Sunday, 23 March, my 34th birthday. See "My husband would have loved this" for my account of that adventure. I read and clipped reviews of the ballet performance from all Bay Area papers, including one by Maggie Lewis in The Daily Californian, Cal's student paper, which appeared in the 28 March issue, the day before the last performance, caught me in a reflective funk about the state of "understanding" in the United States of things "Oriental" or "Asian", or more specifically "Chinese" or "Japanese" or "Korean" et cetera. And I decided to make my reaction to her review the centerpiece of an article I "donated" to the Daily Cal. Reading it today, over 40 years later, I would pan it as a silly piece written by someone in the throes of trying to figure things out. Am you glad the Daily Cal editors ignored it? you might ask. Frankly, I would have been surprised if they had published it. But no matter how I feel about it now, I still wish it had been published. I know I would have welcomed the attention and return fire I hoped it might provoke. And to this day, I remain curious about its potential response. The editors did not respond to my submission, and the cover. I did not really expect that they wood. I fired it off mainly to vent my disgust with the world, and to asuage my guilt about not being able to do anything about it other than grumble -- not that any changes I would make would improve the world. William Wetherall |
Asian America and Asia
Ethnic confusion on and off campus
By William Wetherall
About this time last year in the ASUC Bookstore, while looking for a volume on Japanese American experiences in concentration camps during the Pacific War, I became aware of the racist implications of the shelving system. It also dawned on me how unknowingly I had shared these implications.
Similar observations over the past year, capped with my attendance cf several important Asian American and Asian Studies events in the Bay Area recently, have made it clearer than ever to me how instrumental this campus and the surrounding community continue to be in furthering confusion about ethnic differences between and among Asian Americans and Asians.
ASUC Bookstore
Books shelved under "American History" in the ASUC Bookstore represent mainly the European tradition in America. The psycholinguistic color of "America" implicit in this shelving label is "White."
Native American Studies" and "Chicano Studies" are combined across the aisle from "European History." Behind "American History" as though symbolically supporting it, the Native American and Chicano groupings are relatively well-differentiated from others in the store and are fairly self-contained.
First to be seen as one walks towards the next set of shelves is the nominally nongeopolitical "Black History and Culture" section. The selections are mostly Afroamerican, however: books on African Blacks ad studies of Blacks in other regions are also included, but for subjective reasons we can't explore here, they tend to overlap into "Sociology and Anthropology."
One next expects to find either two sections marked "Asian American Studies" and "Asian History," or a single section marked "Yellow History and Culture." But opposite Black America is a grouping called "Asian History and Culture," in which one finds but a few of the many titles in print on Asian America. And these few titles are all but lost among the hundreds of volumes nominally on Asia ranging in content from Aikidō to Zen.
Perhaps these scattered books on Asian America have been misshelved; somewhere in the store there may be a special section devoted Asian American life and literature But asking where "Asian American Studies" might be, one learns there is only "Asian History and Culture."
Judging from the shelves of the ASUC Bookstore, Asian Americans do not exist in and of themselves. They are facily identified with Asians. They would seem not to have sufficient traditions of their own to warrant a separate grouping. Apparently their heritage is seen as part and parcel of all that Nonasians label "Oriental.
The selection, stocking, and shelving practices evident in the ASUC Bookstore reflect the ethnic confusion of Nonasian America vis-a-vis Asian America and Asia. A typical example in another context of much the same kind of insensitivity is found in Maggie Lewis's distorted Daily Cal review (March 28) of Michael Smuin's innovative but misleading Shinjū.
San Francisco BalletMaggie Lewis's review of the San Francisco Ballet production of Shinjū was ambiguously headlined "Japanese Make-Believe." She might have made clearer the ultimate meaning of her article had instead she entitled it "Confusing Japan and China with My Stereotypes of Asia." Lewis notes twice, to her credit once, that "Shinju was about as Japanese as a hamburger cooked on a hlbachi." She then proceeds to be the classic hungry backyard critic who confuses the hamburger for sukiyaki and egg foo yung inundated with McDonald's catsup. Not that the ballet need have or could have been purely Japanese or American cuisine, not to mention Chinese condiments. But responsible criticism should strive to resolve the manifold interpretive problems that flavor a work of art, not compound them: particularly when an audience is as predictably uninitiated in the symbolism of a work as it was in the case of Shinjū. Lewis first confuses "paper butterflies and T'ai Chi" with "good, efficient Japanese ideas." Japanese would be surprised to learn that these are their ideas, much less that T'ai Chi -- if such was the intent of those strangely thrusting fists -- had any place in a Japanese period story. Lewis then observes that "the plot of this [story ballet] isn't too intrusive, partly because it's such an old story you already know what's going to happen." Chikamatsu Monzaemon, whose early 18th century puppet plays are said to have inspired the ballet, is probably scratching his parched skull trying to comprehend what the plot was all about -- and why, except for the theme, it was attributed to him. To be continued. |
Asian American Writers
Forthcoming.
Ripping Off Labels
Forthcoming.
The Daily Californian
The Daily Californian or "Daily Cal" is a student-run paper at the University of California at Berkeley. Free copies are distributed on racks at all major campus entrances and elsewhere. During my first two stints at Cal, in the 1960s, the paper was owned by the university. In 1971, while I was in Japan, the university administration fired a few of the paper's editors for publishing an editorial calling for students to retake People's Park, a contested block south of campus. By the time I returned to graduate school in 1972, the paper had become financially and editorially independent of the university, though it's name continues to be licensed from the Regents of the University of California. During my years at Cal, I submitted a number of "To the Ice Box" letters to the editor, several of which were published, and among some classmates, I had a minor reputation as an "activist".