Su Cool for School

READ! The Monster by Stephen Crane

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Making regular blog posts is proving to be difficult—but if I can’t make posts that are particularly insightful or original, I thought the least I could do is share some of the cool stuff I’ve been reading for my classes (and there has there been a lot of reading).

I’ve read only one other thing by Stephen Crane before, back in my undergraduate studies, called Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. As I read many things over the course of the past few years, some of which remain in my memory about as strongly as a stranger’s face I’ve passed on the street, I didn’t quite know what to expect of Crane’s short story. All I remembered about Maggie was that it had been set in New York and ended tragically after following the life of a desolate girl. Sure enough, The Monster was also tragic and eerie—the best kind of read. It’s apparently considered one of the best American short stories, and while “best” is subjective and not a word to be used lightly (I can never pick a “best” or “favourite” anything), I highly recommend it. You can read the full story online here.

The story is about a black man who runs into a fire to save a young boy, the son of an affluent (and white, duh) doctor. In the process, burning acid from the doctor’s mysterious laboratory drips onto his face and he becomes what the other characters describe as faceless (I was thinking something like Slenderman, but there are descriptions of his one remaining eye, him talking and listening, so his facial features seem intact to an extent). Although initially considered a hero for jumping into the burning house to save the boy, he is quickly shunned by the town as a monster and is even accused of being crazy and harmful even as he does nothing but whimper in his pain or offer polite gestures in an attempt to maintain social relations. The doctor takes it upon himself to look after the man (he saved his son after all), while other characters tell him he should have let him die. There’s a lot of town gossip and finger pointing, and the readers can begin to see that a monster, to this town, could mean many things. It could mean mentally ill, physically deformed, something racial, perhaps even class-based, or an unfortunate combination of these things.

I’ve always been fascinated with monsters in literature (I remember doing a high school project on “man-made monsters” in Othello and Frankenstein, and seriously sympathizing with Frankenstein’s monster—even though in hindsight he did do some terrible things like murder people, which cannot be excused due to poor parenting). In class this past few weeks, a particular definition of what a monster is in our reality—I’m not talking fantasy creatures or scientific experiments gone bad—really struck me. According to the book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “the monster is not an accident but the ever present possibility that can destroy the natural authority in all domains.” What does this mean?

Well, from what I understand, this means that the monster could be seen as a figure of resistance, or revolution. “Natural authority” is never really a thing (power is a construct, am I becoming one of those obnoxious graduate students who continuously refer to Foucault in some way?), only packaged in this way to validate authority. And who has seen old books like Frankenstein call supposed monsters abhorrations? They are only abhorrations because others abhor them, not because of an essentialized monstrosity. People label monsters when they see something supposedly different from them, people who make them feel uneasy because they see in the monsters what they themselves could be (disfigured, mistreated, segregated etc.) or as people they have marked boundaries against, boundaries that they know are flawed and that the monster has the power of crossing or at least highlighting. Monsters are the figures that can point out the unfair hierarchies and restrictive boundaries placed by societies. Monsters push us to consider uncomfortable questions, like Crane’s monster: how does the justice system fail us? How is there racial prejudice, or prejudice against the non-normate body? Who has the authority to say whether someone in pain should live or die?

My professor jokingly asked—then should we all be monsters? At the very least, we should not be afraid to be deemed monstrous for fighting against problematic societal structures. All this talk about monsters seems fitting as we enter October and Halloween: so go forth and be monsters.

READ! East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee

When I first moved to New Zealand from Korea in first grade, I knew nothing about Korean literature beyond Korean folktales I read in the form of picture books. I only opened my eyes to the joys of reading when I started reading in English, first to better my grasp of this new foreign language and second as a source of comfort I could turn to in an alien environment. I spent all my birthday money on books, spent lunchtimes and weekends reading at home, under trees, on beaches. Naturally, I dreamed of becoming a writer throughout school, churning out bad attempts at fantasy novels. When someone told me I needed a pen name if I ever hoped to be a bestselling author because of my strange Asian name (later in life, I also realized I needed a lot more things like actual talent, perseverance, and connections—but such is the nature of reality that often crushes childhood dreams) I was baffled and hurt, but had no comebacks. If I could go back in time, I would provide a list of all the amazing Asian authors I know.

The thing is, at that point in my life I didn’t know there were Asian authors writing in English (neither did the person who suggested a pen name, it seems). Although the Asian American identity is something that is talked about and celebrated, Asian New Zealanders weren’t really visible when I was growing up. Despite the fact that New Zealand has double the Asian population of America (12% in comparison to 5.6%), I simply didn’t see Asian newscasters, musicians, prominent TV characters, and most importantly, literary figures I could look up to. As I began to think about potential research interests in undergrad, I wanted to cover Asian New Zealand writers only to find there weren’t enough to do research on.

This explains how happy I was to discover Asian American (and hopefully more Asian diasporic) literature when I came to America. After a heavily British-influenced high school education where I read Shakespeare, Brontë, or Keats, it was refreshing to see narratives resembling that of my own life. I wrote my undergrad thesis on Asian American female autobiography/memoir and it confirmed I wanted to study this field more in depth. Recently, I got to read a Korean-American novel called East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee, by Younghill Kang, deemed the father of Korean-American literature. I want to record for myself what I found most fascinating about the book, and for any potential readers, illuminate points of interest that might convince them to read it too.

The novel is categorized as a fictionalized autobiography, and follows the story of Chungpa Han, who arrives in New York and travels around North America with scholarly dreams. Trained in classical Asian literature as well as Western classics, he goes around quoting ancient Chinese poets and Shakespeare as he navigates this new country. He quickly becomes disillusioned with the American dream when he has to do menial labour in order to support himself rather than simply focus on his intellectual growth. I don’t know any ancient Chinese or Korean poets like he does, but we share a love for literature and I was fond of this character. His pursuit of a graduate degree was also relatable, as well as the fact that he makes this journey from East to West. (Although when I first moved to New Zealand, which was my first point of contact with a Western country, I actually moved from East to more East, geographically. The “West” is a weird concept—if you want to find out more check out Contrapoint’s video about what the “West” could mean here.)

There’s a lot going on in this book, from a tragic romance between another Korean man and a white American girl that results in both of their deaths, the mistreatment of other minority groups, and its historical relevance as a vivid snapshot of New York City in the 1920s. One of the themes that most interest me, however, is the idea of citizenship and nationhood as I’ve personally lived most of my life outside the country of my citizenship. Because the novel is set before the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Asian Exclusion Act, we know that both the main character (and indeed, the author until his academic contacts petitioned for him) could not be granted legal citizenship in the US. Yet, the title of the book dictates that the intention is to become a Yankee, so it’s worth contemplating what it is to be American despite of and without the right paperwork. The idea of national identity is particularly complex in the book as he attempts to define the “American,” which he can only really do through contrast with Korea. Grappling with Korean identity is particularly difficult for him as at the time the book is set Korea is under Japanese colonial rule, and in the shadows of not just Japan but China as well. Chungpa throughout the book is often called “Chinaman” by other characters who have no notion of a country called Korea, and funnily enough even a contemporary book review refers to the novel as a book about a Chinese youth (you can see the review here). Nowadays, what it is to be Korean is further complicated by the split between the North and South. But this book is a good starting point to think about how a Korean identity is forged, especially for a Korean overseas.

The form of this novel is interesting too, as the genre of the autobiography is often grounded in what it is to be “American”—think Benjamin Franklin, stories that focus on individuality and personal narratives of success. However, I think it’s also important to remember this is a fictionalized autobiography: although many events of Chungpa’s life overlap with Younghill Kang’s, this deliberate choice might be an example of clever storytelling to protect the author from backlash with some of the social critiques being made. A lot of people have also confused the author and narrator as the same person in past reviews, perhaps because minority authors are often only expected to have something interesting to write about with stories highlighting their own foreignness rather than having the agency to produce something more creative. The strange paradox of the nonfictional genre being fictionalized may also tie into debates about authenticity that is prevalent in Asian American literary studies, especially when the text deals with a culture that might, supposedly, not be ‘authentically’ portrayed to other English-speaking (or white) readers.

While on the subject of form/style, one thing that immediately surprised me when I opened the book was the amount of references to Greek philosophers and other canonical Western literature. Chungpa even reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as it is newly published at some point in the book, continuously engaging with outside texts. In almost every page, the narrator references a famous Western author as if that legitimizes his writing. Indeed, the character of Chungpa sometimes wins favour from other characters by quoting Shakespeare or some other famous poet. I think this attempt at validation may still carry over to modern day, when I begin to think I may subconsciously mention American TV shows or cultural references as if to say, hey I’m up to date with Western culture, I’m not FOB, accept me (this is problematic, of course. We shouldn’t expect or need to beg for acceptance by watching bad shows or knowing particular memes, which are great but only if you genuinely enjoy them and not as a tool for people to treat you as a real person). By referencing all these works, the narrator also reflects on the distinction between American and Asian art by saying that American artists make art as self-advertisement, for fame and individual acclaim while many classical Asian poems are anonymous because people care more about the words that are circulated than about the authorship being preserved. I’m not smart enough to do an analysis of this as it stands today, but cool to think about the good old debate on the purpose of literature and art (also, read Foucault’s “What is an Author”!).

Within two blog posts I’ve established a theme of never having any conclusions or particular angles. But, to future Su—read this blog post and know you did read this book, and return to some of the loose threads of thought you started here!

The Overwhaleming Moby Dick

Reading Moby Dick for the first week of grad school seemed oddly fitting to my recent experiences at orientations bombarding me with new information, and new classes in which I was exposed to unfamiliar names, concepts and theories that the other students animatedly discussed in the face of my shrinking self-confidence. The monstrous book is what might be considered an encyclopedic novel, crammed full of disparate pieces of knowledge that no reader can possibly hope to absorb all at once. In a way the whole book is a testament to the futility of hoping to understand something in its entirety, as seen in Ishmael’s desperate attempts to depict the whale through literary references, cetology, philosophy and more but only highlighting the fact that the whale is an ever-elusive creature, always half-submerged in water and hidden from full examination.

This was my second time reading Moby Dick, and despite how much I passionately complained about the difficulty of getting through the book, there were many parts of the book that were fascinating to me. There is of course, Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which contemplates why the albino whale in question is so terrifying in relation to its whiteness, a colour often associated with beauty and racial superiority but strikes all the more terror when coupled with danger. This I particularly enjoyed because I’ve always been drawn to ideas of the sublime and monstrosity (before I decided I was going to pursue something along the lines of Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, I nursed a fondness for the Gothic genre). I also liked discussing the homosexuality hinted at through the characters of Ishmael and Queequeg which had me shipping the couple until the very end, when they are together even in death as Ishmael floats as the only survivor on Queequeg’s pre-made coffin-turned-buoy, Titanic style (or less romantically, as someone pointed out, Ishmael the white man survives on the fruits of the native man’s labour, as the cannibal Queequeg had painstakingly carved out the coffin for himself earlier before he met his watery death). Because the novel is so abstract, the story can be seen as an allegory for just about anything, from slavery, colonialism, capitalism, human agency versus fate, and so the list goes on. The number of possible readings makes me somewhat uneasy, but the book was a good start in helping me accept my fate of perpetually feeling like I don’t quite know everything I should know—welcome to the life of a graduate student, or any human being—and at the same time feel excited about the endless possibilities of meaning-making because we aren’t bound to just the one interpretation.

All these readings of Moby Dick had been somewhat familiar to me before from my undergraduate studies, but something that really struck me was seeing the book through the lens of disability studies. I had never considered the book could be a narrative about disability, and of course this speaks for the the invisibility of disability in most cases, that it wasn’t even on my radar. There is of course Ahab, who lost his leg to Moby Dick and is now hunting him down for revenge, but looking for disability in the book, I could suddenly see it everywhere. Ahab’s mood swings and Ishmael’s depression are “abnormal” conditions, but disabilities can be found in the scars or blindness of poor injured whales, other lost limbs, inability to participate in social exchanges, age, and even skin colour when the white characters exploit others of colour. I’m not saying that race is a disability, exactly; but historically it is seen as a factor that limits individuals from physical and social mobility much like other supposed disabilities, and something that pushes these individuals to the outskirts of society. The same can be said when we reach old age (I always fear: when we are unable to keep up with the new generation of technology, are we disabled in some way?) and even other sexual orientations (reason why there are overlaps in crip and queer theory). Taking disabled as simply the opposite of able-bodied, whatever that term means as dictated by society, all of us at some point whether from temporary injury, age, etc. will be disabled. This made me see the concept of disability in a whole new light, and that I too had been brainwashed into regarding disability as something at the fringes of society instead of a powerful force that helps form through contrast and deliberate difference what the “norm” is. Because I’m interested in ethnic literature and issues of race, it was eye-opening to see that “the disabled” are a minority group because of structural oppression as well, not necessarily because of numbers or some lesser quality.

Do I have a neat or profound conclusion from all these thoughts? No. After all, focusing on the final product of any process is a very capitalist mode of thinking, something that aids in devaluing certain individuals if they cannot contribute productive labour, such as disabled populations. But in the spirit of Moby Dick, there doesn’t have to be a definite answer or comprehensibility anyway.