Dear Editors,
I want to begin by thanking you for posting "Asian
American Voices in Poetry." This is a wonderful and even groundbreaking
recognition of the large, vital, growing community of Asian American poets, and
I'm delighted to be included alongside so many other great writers. I'm
particularly impressed by the work of not just listing these authors but of
creating bios for each of them--a tremendously important contribution, given
that little information about many of these writers, even the established ones,
is available online.
I do want to raise one significant concern about this
feature. I find the decision to list the "country of heritage" for
each author troubling. I acknowledge the good intentions behind this choice,
but I fear, as others have pointed out, that it reinforces the image of the
Asian American as perpetual foreigner. I was not born in China, so to see
myself listed as "Timothy Yu, China" is a rather alienating
experience, one that makes a curious statement about my identity and my work.
What does it mean for me to be labeled "China"? Does it mean that I
have more in common with others on the list who share the label
"China" than with those who have other labels?
There is a significant difference, I would suggest, between
labeling me "China" and calling me, say, a Chinese American. Asian
Americans in particular have often struggled to be recognized as Americans at
all; as several others have pointed out, your feature on Latina/o writers, in
contrast, does not list each writer's "country of heritage." The
corresponding claim that Asian American writers "emerge out of a broad
range of Eastern influences" risks exoticizing Asian American writers,
since it assumes that all of us feature some kind of "Eastern" element
in our work.
Many authors on this list may simply view themselves as
Americans. Others, like myself, may identify more strongly with a community of
other Asian Americans--a pan-ethnic, politically defined category that is
defined more by links and connections in the present, or by US histories of
race and racism, than by evocations of some ancestral past.
I would urge you to strengthen this feature by removing the
"countries of heritage" entirely. If you choose not to remove these
labels, I respectfully request that my country be changed to "Asian
America."
Best,
Timothy Yu
