Finding Inner Warmth In Our Stories

This article is part of our Spotlight on Chinese American Authors. Sign up for our newsletter to receive family-friendly activity, recipe and craft ideas throughout the year!

Despite receiving a top-flight American education, I grew up without learning about the perseverance of Chinese rail workers, the patriotism of World War II’s Flying Tigers or the resolve of advocates fighting for civil rights during the Chinese exclusion period.

At home, it would be years until my bookshelf could include Lisa See’s historical novels, Wendy Wan-Long Shang’s young adult adventures or Celeste Ng’s haunting fiction. There were no movie nights starring famous Chinese American actors and ABC’s Fresh Off The Boat had not yet arrived on our shores.

I reflect on this shortage of Chinese American stories during my childhood without criticism or complaint. Personal identity is multi-faceted and I found plenty of role models and sources of pride as I grew to become a dedicated student, athlete and lover of food and music in suburban Connecticut.

I’ve realized in recent years, however, that the exclusion of Chinese Americans from the American canon had an impact that I’ve struggled to put into words. After all, how do you express the way you were affected by the stories you didn’t hear?

Michelle Kuo, the author of 2017’s Reading with Patrick, grew up under similar circumstances in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Attending public schools from kindergarten through high school, she remembers in her book that she “…never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher.”

Growing up in suburban Michigan, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Michelle found solidarity with African Americans in the work of seminal black authors. King. Douglass. Baldwin. After graduating from Harvard, Michelle joined Teach for America and moved to Helena, Arkansas, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta to, in her words, “teach American history through black literature.”

I found that reading Reading with Patrick was like looking through a prism. Michelle offers a sharp critique of American race relations and the criminal justice system, while coming of age facing pressures that I’m sure are familiar to my Chinese American contemporaries — feeling the influence of parental expectations, balancing self-interest with the common good and finding the courage to make unconventional decisions.

In a town forgotten by the rest of the country in many regards, Michelle took her students on a journey of self-discovery, in which reading and writing stories about themselves lit sparks of inner warmth and self-worth. It’s a process of remarkable simplicity that holds powerful lessons for the parents of Chinese Americans and other marginalized groups in the United States.

Ultimately, I came to understand during my recent conversation with Michelle that the power stories provide is the experience of seeing and being seen. It’s about having people who share your story strive, persevere and achieve, then imagining yourself climbing to similar heights.

The absence of stories at school, in literature and on screen carries with it the implicit message that a particular group doesn’t matter or exist in our national imagination. The detrimental impact on kids is obvious, especially if they lack the other sources of support and strength that I had growing up.

Fortunately, parents, teachers and community leaders can connect kids with stories that nurture their sense of agency, the ability to see themselves as protagonists in their own narratives. Getting started can be as easy as reading children’s stories at bedtime, visiting memorials to Chinese American achievement and sharing other points of pride.

Michelle generously shared her experience teaching in the Mississippi Delta and the process for helping kids find themselves in a community’s stories. She talks about social justice in America, the understudied relationship between reading and writing, and the power of simply saying, “I am.” These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Reading with Patrick made me think about the marginalized communities that remain missing from the American imagination. Why do stories compel people, especially young people, to look back at themselves? What happens when a group’s stories are not told?

It’s interesting that when you’re growing up, you don’t understand that there is an absence. I think kids are naturally generous people and don’t have these categories that we learn about later on. There are these categories of class and race that a person doesn’t realize until a formative or memorable moment that coheres previously vague experiences of race, gender or class. Before that, we’re just trying to connect with other people, to feel successful and part of a group.

So, when I read any story as a kid, whether it was about white people mostly, then about African Americans in middle school and high school, I didn’t think to myself, “Where are the Asian stories?” Maybe I thought the question, but there wasn’t that type of resentment that you feel as an adult.

The absence of stories about African Americans in rural places is truly a kind of violence. Kids in rural Arkansas don’t grow up reading stories about themselves partly because they don’t grow up reading stories period. There’s such an absence of books, bookstores and libraries, and books are very expensive. The schools are under-resourced. Half the teachers at my school were substitutes.

It’s important because stories are the way we make sense of ourselves. When we read about other people, we start thinking about our own lives as a story, as something that has momentum and meaning, where we get to be heroes or villains, to have strong or weak character. When I was telling students to tell their stories, you could see the lightbulb go off, the idea that they have something worthwhile to say about themselves and that there was something about their lives that was worth recording, writing down and telling others.

As I grow older, I understand that the absence of stories shapes your personality, your sense that you have a right to think about your experience. I even found that in the past year talking about my book, my default was to be apologetic about inserting myself into this conversation about race. The whole point of the book is that we’re not part of the story and that very few people have told our story! This generation of Asian Americans, our generation, the second generation, for Taiwanese kids at least, we’re the first to come after 1965 to get to write our experiences.

You reflect early in your book about having “…never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher.” Given the many components of identity, why is it important to be reflected back racially? How did this absence affect you as you were growing up and what lasting impact was left once you reached adulthood?

When I was teaching 100% African American classrooms, I had assumed that what they needed and wanted was to be reflected back. It was really important for me to learn how mistaken I was. Yes, you want to teach many types of literature reflecting back African American characters, but my students had this curiosity about other races, other ethnicities and the world. They wanted to know where my parents came from, where I came from. They live in such an isolated remote area that it was really powerful to realize that they wanted to read Japanese literature and Chinese literature and things about other cultures.

Every kid has an individuality that we have to help them realize, which doesn’t necessarily have to involve race. That being said, Asian Americans have a very different problem than African Americans in terms of the kinds of literature that are taught. There are so many levels to this. One is that there isn’t an Asian American canon that’s standard in secondary schools.

Another is that there’s such an ignorance about Asia. Even today, the way we talk about race in America is so provincial in some ways. There’s so little understood about American colonialism in different parts of Asia. We firebombed and destroyed Japan. We razed Korea. We destroyed Cambodia and Vietnam. The list goes on. What that means is that you see people looking at Asian Americans like one monolithic pre-privileged group, rather than as the descendants of people from these very different countries with very painful traumatic histories, and in many cases Americans are strongly implicated in their current conditions.

When I was growing up, I didn’t think being Asian American meant anything important, because my assumption was that African American history meant something and Asian American history didn’t. But if I had learned about different Asian histories, how African Americans and Asian Americans worked together in different eras, I would have seen alternative paths for solidarity between races, for collaboration, for a sense of international sphere, and that in turn would have made me feel more curious and passionate about my parent’s history.

I didn’t ask my parents questions, partly because they came from countries that were authoritarian with a very prescribed history and they didn’t tell me about it. If we don’t get reflected back when we read and learn as kids, we devalue the experiences of our parents and we feel less American than others. I’ve only realized over the past year how much I was trying to prove myself to other people that I was American. There’s a profound insecurity in that.

I think we are taught that in schools, because we never learn about Asia and Asian America and we don’t have a sense of being part of a longer lineage of people who fought exclusion laws and blatant racism. As a former immigrant rights lawyer, one thing I try to tell people is that the basis for deportation and for excluding immigrants comes from the Chinese exclusion laws, the most naked, transparently racist laws there were. I don’t think we know when we’re growing up that we have this longer heritage of exclusion, heroism and survival.

You begin your book by saying that you went to the Mississippi Delta to teach American history through black literature. You walked a path from simple reflective poetry to young adult literature, arriving finally at the works of James Baldwin and Frederick Douglass. What did you learn about the journey of self-discovery young people take through reading about their stories and history?

I think there’s a really powerful understudied relationship between reading and writing. When you start to immerse yourself in a poem, in a story, you really exit your habits of thought and begin to absorb another person and another place into your brain. That is so powerful for any person, but especially powerful for a young kid who lives in the middle of nowhere in a place that Americans don’t really acknowledge exists. Especially today, nobody talks about rural places that are majority black. It still shocks people that there are still these places that are so directly reflective of the legacy of slavery and sharecropping.

For Patrick and some of the other kids in my class, they read every day, so many different stories, so many poems. They wanted to take the words of these texts and use them and make them new again, so that they could do it again with their own hands. Creating anything is always this strange, mystical, self-individuating experience, but with words it’s especially moving for the students because they listen to a lot of hip hop and they have a sense of music, because some of them go to church and they know that the preacher makes gold out of words. There is an inclination that words can make music already.

When the students shared their work with one another, they felt seen for the first time. As intelligent, as clever, as vulnerable, as full of more feeling than they might let on. To be seen by other people differently is something that happens when you become an artist or a writer, and you’re capable of creation. The culminating moments of the book are Patrick’s letters to his daughter. He knew that when you are able to create sentences of meaning and solidity, you don’t need a teacher anymore to tell you that it’s good. You know it. We’ve all had that feeling. It’s like when a singer hits a high note. There’s a way in which you’ve transcended your reality and I think that’s how he felt when he was writing. He was sharing and showing his daughter what he could do. And that is lovely.

One thing the book questions is the idea that education is valuable only as a means to XYZ, to prosperity, to a job. No, it didn’t work out that way for him, not yet. But there is something intrinsically valuable about creating something lasting, which is what he did with those letters.

Given that Chinese Americans remain effectively missing from American education, I reflect that it’s up to parents and community leaders to fill the gap. Walk me through a similar progression of self-discovery for young people who identify with Chinese American identity, heritage or culture.

Start with an “I Am” poem, which is making worthwhile the individual personal experience, rather than imposing some potential ideological idea of the world onto a kid, which is the mistake I made when I first got there. Find some way to balance beautifully their natural curiosity about other backgrounds with knowledge of their own, so that it’s this constant dialectical process of thinking through one’s background by looking at other backgrounds.

How to do that? I don’t know if it’s as crude as switching back and forth between a book about Chinese Americans during one period and then a different ethnic group of the same period. There must be a better way. Part of what makes this hard is that Asian America is a “made up” category. Even in Chinese America, there are so many ethnic groups. There is so much tension and fragmentation among Asian American groups that it’s hard to know who to build solidarity with.

I think you want to teach kids most of all to have compassion and knowledge of those who are the poorest, the least of us, whoever they are, whatever they look like. It might be about poverty, sexuality, about migrant status or where they come from. If I had to prescribe any rule, that would be it. So stories that reflect that warmth towards others who are in positions of vulnerability. The idea that Asians, contrary to popular racial discourse in America today, have certainly been in vulnerable positions now and in the past.

There’s a counterargument that history can best be left in the past, especially when it contains painful memories. What advice do you have for parents, in terms of the personal and community stories they introduce in their family discussions? Why are family stories relevant and important?

The family dynamic is so different, depending on class, nation and region. In my experience, one should never underestimate the grip of parental attitudes on his or her choices. I made the mistake of underestimating how my parents had shaped and determined a lot of my choices. We like to imagine ourselves as being independent, strong willed actors. It’s embarrassing, especially to those of us who think of ourselves as strong people, to say we did something because our parents thought it would be the right thing to do.

But when I think of my own choices since I was a kid, I can really see how I am more risk averse and less radical than I’d like to be. Every step of the way, I’ve tried to break free from that framework. I also understand more now as I’m older about their lack of political radicalism and a legacy culture from a country where activists were disappeared, where there was no such thing as a journalist.

We kids carry the trauma of our parents without even realizing it. Then we’re told in America that because we’re Asian American, we’re privileged and don’t get to talk about race, which is just crazy. The key thing people need to know is that you can respect your parents without following their advice, you can love your parents without acceding to their wants, and that if they have strong opinions about your choices, you can consult other adults in fields that you’re interested in and see what they say. It’s not betrayal. We feel so indebted to our parents, we feel we know they have made so many sacrifices, but we only have one life to live. At some point, the way we convince our parents that our choices are right is by achieving stability and happiness with our lives. And you can do that in many different ways.

Most American classrooms are mixed to some degree, so while it’s important for African Americans and Chinese Americans to hear their stories in school, it’s also important for every other student. How do the non-minority students benefit from hearing diverse voices and an honest appraisal of history?

I just posted this NPR story about a study showing that across the board, kids of all races prefer teachers of color, which I think confirms so many of my instincts about non-minority kids. They don’t usually come into the classroom with a suspicion about whatever liberal ideology about diversity. They are kids. They want to learn, they tend to be less likely to see people in terms of their race and, if they do, to be more blunt and transparent about it.

That transparency is inspiring, because you know where people are coming from and you can work with that. I don’t have any doubt that non-minority kids are more likely to embrace an honest appraisal of history than non-minority adults. And that’s because kids tend to be less ideological. I think this is why storytelling is so important. Stories shape people’s perceptions, stories powerfully move people, so different stories about minorities including James Baldwin and Asian American writers like Julie Otsuka and Maxine Hong Kingston, these writers help give a sense of humanity to people that non-minority kids might otherwise not care about. When a non-minority kid sees his minority friend get really excited about something, it becomes personal for them.

I think with kids, and with adults too, you always want to bring these larger political stories to them in the form of a human story. In my experience, it’s the best way to make a person stop and feel, then you can circle back to the larger political narrative.

In closing, what message do you have for Chinese American kids today who may be struggling to feel an inner warmth toward themselves? What sources of pride would you direct them to and what place can Chinese Americans claim in the American narrative?

It is really hard. I think the more I started to understand that most Americans in progressive circles don’t care that much about Asian Americans, I felt not warmth toward myself, but I did feel greater self-understanding, that I wasn’t crazy. I don’t think we’re permitted to talk about race or that when we do people don’t really pay attention.

There’s such ignorance about Asia, there’s ignorance about American colonialism in Asia, there’s ignorance about different Asian American groups, different ethnic groups in China, political differences between Asian countries, such poor grasp of international history. Even educated progressives just don’t get it about Asian Americans. It’s taken me a while to realize that. I was one of these people who was really passionate about race and class, but didn’t want to sound like I was whining about my experience.

I think an inner warmth comes from when we tell our own stories and make it real and talk about our feelings of invisibility while situating that within a larger frame. It comes from acts of creation, acts of communication and acts of confrontation.

There’s a certain kind of reckoning that comes when you can situate yourself in this broader global history and then there is solidarity when you see current movements right now that feel in sync with your politics — students protesting in Taiwan, labor activists in China, an Asian American advocacy group in Los Angeles. It seems like there are these twin emotions of experiencing despair about how much further we have to go, but also a sense of hope that there are movements marching forward.

###

Your turn! Have you read Reading with Patrick? What inspiration do you draw from Michelle’s experience?