Looking for the Great Asian American Love Story

Romance. Falling in love -- the joys and ecstacies. Falling out of love -- the hurt of broken hearts. Love is an essential facet of the human experience. Daryl Chin, a writer and film curator, declaims what he views as a preoccupation with "Asian American" themes and subjects in Asian American film -- "immigration...laundries, piecework at factories, [and] restaurants" -- to the exclusion of broader subjects. I agree with Daryl that Asian American filmmakers, along with Asian American artists in most other disciplines, haven't yet begun to scratch the surface of Asian American life. Except for Philip Gotanda's The Wash, a love story between two elderly Japanese Americans, there is a glaring absence of contemporary artistic work about Asian American love -- that is to say, works about Asian Americans who fall in love with other Asian Americans.

Just examine our contemporary plays, poetry, fiction, music, visual art, photography, and dance. A highly sexual and political book of poetry of the '70s, Janice Mirikitani's Awake in the River, has one singular love poem, but it is dedicated to her African American husband, Cecil Williams -- and it is his blackness that inspires her passionate imagery. The male Asian American writers that came of age in the Asian American Movement of the late '60s and early '70s -- Frank Chin, Lawson Inada, Garrett Hongo, et. al. -- never approached the subject. One writer/poet, Ronald Tanaka, even went so far as to write a poem called "I Hate My Yellow Wife."

One quick explanation might be that many were married to or related to Caucasians. Betty Lee Sung's new study, Chinese American Intermarriage (Center for Migration Studies, 1990) suggests a correlation between higher education and higher income (read "class") with higher rates of intermarriage, mostly between Chinese and whites. Much to-do has also been made of the astronomical percentage of Japanese Americans who out-marry, to the point of concern about their extinction as a people.

I would submit that today's Asian American artists reflect these social trends. They are educated, Film- or English-MFA's, middle-class, and career-aspiring. Aesthetically and politically, they share more with the prevailing mainstream culture than the concentrated social life of Chinatown and Little Tokyo -- or, for that matter, the Asian American Movement and its cultural struggle. And -- as Charlie "Bird" Parker stated -- "If you haven't lived it, it won't come out of your horn."

This same "quick explanation" might be applied to a Maxine Hong Kingston, one of Asian America's most celebrated authors. Though both Kingston and her nemesis Frank Chin might not like to admit it, their shared imagery of the Chinese American/Chinatown family community life is cold, suffocating, and cadaverous. It is a world where parents and the weight of tradition seem to stifle and oppress the young, individualistic Chinese American. In Chin's early works, for example, morbid images abound of the dying father as a metaphor for Chinatown society. Nowhere is there rejuvenating, exhilarating, liberating love, with its attendant metaphor of a community that is a source for selfhood and liberation. One also wonders about the strong anti-female tones of Chin's harangue against Kingston (both her work and her success) and his notions of "Asian American emasculation" akin to those among African American male writers, in the decrying of the "feminization" of African American literature. If these examples are to be believed, among oppressed people of color in a white racist/supremacist society, men and women are united neither in political and cultural struggle, nor in their intimate relations.

The "quick explanation" might also apply to younger writers like Cathy Song Davenport and Amy Tan, whose The Joy Luck Club features wholesale extinction among Chinese male characters who marry Chinese women. Ruthann Lum McCunn's story of Chinese heroine Lalu Nathoy, A Thousand Pieces of Gold, features another romance between Asian and white.

As far as the eye can see or the ear can hear, Asian American art forms are devoid of consummated Asian American love stories. But our cultural heritage offers more expression of love than most of us are aware of, or would think likely. From the mid-19th century, when the first wave of young, male Asian laborers came to America, to the mid- '60s with that period's liberation of immigration quotas, Asian American social history was a period of exclusion and severe oppression. Asian labor was a tool to be used and then discarded. Aside from the self-contained plantation system of Hawaii, Asians in the United States were largely a bachelor society, making the raising of families impossible. Among Chinese on the West Coast, for example, men out-numbered women twenty to one; the majority of these few Chinese women were prostitutes. Many of the Japanese women in America were picture brides, participating in marriages based not on love, but commerce. (Because of the stronger position of Japan as an emerging industrialized, capitalist power, United States immigration laws for Japanese tended to be less harsh, though eventually Japanese immigration to the U.S. was halted too.) The Chinese American population on the mainland declined until the 1960s. Unable to procreate, this lonely bachelor society felt the cutting-off of immigration as a blow akin to genocide.

Anti-miscegenation laws also contributed to this genocidal condition. The Filipino manongs, with their reputation as flashy and flamboyant dressers and dancers (and as "ladykillers"), frequented "taxi dance" halls. With virtually no access to women of their race, these young Filipino male workers found companionship with white American women working these dancehalls for a "dime a dance" -- often spending an entire day's wages in a single night out. Much Filipino American poetry and the musical theatre work, "A Song for Manong," has depicted this period as one of desperate loneliness in which the illusion of romance was a continuing part of exploitation. Dance halls and brothels allowed these Asian bachelor workers to get their rocks off, but for them, "true love" was impossible.

Research into early Asian American cultural forms reveals poignant expressions of love, albeit in the context of pain, suffering, and struggle under oppression. The most significant, but perhaps least known examples are the sugar-cane songs of Hawaii's Japanese American immigrant workers. These hole hole bushi are one of the first truly Asian American musical forms -- a transformation of traditional folk songs, or bushi, suffused with Japanese working class sensibility, in both lyrical content and musical aesthetic. Because the hole hole bushi were sung exclusively by women, they are an essential part of any feminist analysis of Asian American culture. Female laborers sang them in the act of stripping sugar cane, or "hole hole" -- hence the term hole hole bushi. Encompassing the lives and emotions of the Japanese American immigrant working women, many of the hole hole bushi spoke of disappointing arranged marriages, and served as a double entendre-coded communication between these women and men with whom they had extramarital relations:

Asu wa Sunday jya yo
Asobi no oide
Kane ga hanawai
Washa uchi ni

Tomorrow is Sunday, right?
Come over and visit
My husband will be out watering cane
And I'll be home alone.

(from "Hole Hole Bushi: Voices of the Canefields, Songs of the Heart," Karleen Chinen, The Hawaii Herald, May 4, 1984)

Other immigrant ballads, such as the Chinatown woodfish chants, expressed feelings of longing for lovers left behind, and the hardships of separation and sexual frustration. Similar expressions of love struggling against oppression are found in the Japanese American tanka poetry of the internment:

han-nen buri
tsuma to akashu shi
sono te o ba
han-nichi bakari
arawazu ni ori.

After a long half-year
I take my wife's hand into mine
And for at least half a day
I do not wash away her touch.

(from Poets Behind Barbed Wire, ed. by Keiho Soga, et. al.)

Contrary to expectation, the cultural expression of the early Asian immigrant was sensual, affectionate, passionate, militant, tender, and sarcastic; it exposed the breadth and range of human emotional expression through the experiences and struggles of Asian American life. During a period of bitter exclusion, anti-miscegenation, and frustrated sexual relations, the hope and experience of love endured through the writings, songs, and drama of Asian America. One reason why little is recognized about this experience is that many Asian American studies scholars have a concept of Asian American literature and culture that only encompasses works in English and made available by white publishers or impressarios -- leading to the narrow notion that Asian American literature "firsts" are Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea, John Okada's No-No Boy, and Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart.

The Asian American Movement of the '60s and '70s produced cultural work that was highly charged politically, tended to oppose white racism in its struggle for "identity", but did not emphasize the affirmation of what makes for life's most intimate and essential experiences - - e.g., being in love. Singer/songwriter "Charlie" Chin, often described as a "romantic," did not marry an Asian American woman until he was well past the age of 40 -- I have yet to hear a love song from him. You would also think that the jazz-pop band Hiroshima, in their drive to be Top 40, would have written at least one love song about Asian Americans. (Even my own love ballads, such as "Pretty As a Morning Sunrise" and "We'll Make Tomorrow!", while dedicated to Asian American women whom I've loved, aren't overtly Asian American in their lyrics.)

The racism of the media in perpetuating the white man's erotic-exotic fixation on Asian women can't be denied. Asian female models lend their exotic appeal to products ranging from clothing to shampoo. But since when have Asian men been in commercials selling beer, cars, cologne, and all the other trappings of bourgeois success and the Good Life? Prevailing stereotypes of the Asian man depict him as sexless, servile, comic, and undesirable -- or as the epitome of Fu-Manchu evil lusting after the white virgin, always to be foiled by the white hero. Asian males are typically portrayed as loners, with family, wife, or lovers absent or safely hidden away. In Charlie Chan's many cinematic adventures, we never get a clue about Mrs. Chan -- How did Charlie ever get so many sons? (Even Mrs. Columbo eventually appeared, and got her own television series!) I have yet to see an Asian American man make love to a white woman on stage, in film, in literature, in song, or in dance; the one time in my memory was James Shigeta in Sam Fuller's The Crimson Kimono (1959), but there, the price paid by an Asian man to love a white woman was death.