Book Publishing’s Ethnic Cool Quotient
Noy Thrupkaew / SPRING 2002
“YOU KNOW, YOU REALLY SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR THE NEXT Arundhati Roy.”
I plucked at the phone cord wrapped around my neck, sighed, and said, “Oh, absolutely.”
It was 1998, and I was working at a publishing company that had just launched an imprint featuring “the writing of women of all colors.” It was my internly task to call independent booksellers across the country to find out what and whom they thought we should publish. Their advice inevitably boiled down to variations on one response:
“That Indian subcontinent is really hot. Oh, oops, do you say ‘South Asia’ now?”
“Nah, our customers don’t really like stuff in translation. But have you read that Jhumpa—”
Yes, yes, yes.
Literary brown ladies were the new new thing. Arundhati Roy’s poetic, multilayered novel
The God of Small Things
had just garnered the Booker Prize. Jhumpa Lahiri would debut in 2000 with
Interpreter of Maladies,
her collection of elegantly written short stories that went on to win a Pulitzer. But Roy and Lahiri were just the beginning of what was to become a craze for South Asian and South Asian-American women’s writing.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time the publishing world had found its
newest darlings in female writers of color. And it wasn’t the first time bookstores would create pretty displays of books by authors of a “hot” ethnicity, or the first time readers would strip those displays as neatly as ants eating a sandwich at a picnic. The early ’90s saw an explosion of Latina narratives—Laura Esquivel’s
Like Water for Chocolate,
Sandra Cisneros’s
The House on Mango Street,
Julia Alvarez’s
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.
And Terry McMillan’s success with
Waiting to Exhale
in the mid-’90s ushered in a rash of books in which middle-class black women griped about their no-’count men, among them Connie Briscoe’s
Sisters & Lovers,
Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant’s
Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made,
and Eric Jerome Dickey’s
Sister, Sister.
Color had become a marketing boon. Interviewers probed into a writer’s upbringing, seeking out ethnic factoids for a voracious public. Details about unusual foods, struggles with immigrant parents, and cultural oddities were all fair game. And in the case of attractive authors, whose images were emblazoned all over magazines and poster-size publicity photos, one could hardly be sure what was for sale anymore—the “company” of a beautiful, exotic woman or the power of her words.
Looking back, the doyenne, the matriarch, the empress dowager of all women-of-color literary trends is Amy Tan. The 1989 release of Tan’s
The joy Luck Club
was accompanied by a hailstorm of publicity for both book and author. There had been other Chinese-American female authors to gain a measure of literary fame—Maxine Hong Kingston is probably the best known—but Tan’s sales and crossover appeal far exceeded theirs; her book, with its interwoven stories of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters, consumed the public’s imagination.
What is it that makes a certain ethnic genre hot? If I could nail that one down for sure, I’d be rolling around in a room filled with nothing but money. But one can hazard some guesses. Many of the Asian-American and Latina books had lots of incense and spirits—“ancient Asian wisdom” and religious tidbits, or mystical realism in the form of pissed-off ghosts and fantastic visions. They also featured nearly pornographic discussions of food; Isabel Allende’s
Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses
even had recipes. The mystical stuff and the food seem to reflect the way that some white people come to different cultures—through seeking religious or spiritual enlightenment, or by exhibiting their open-minded, adventuresome selves through eating our
food. Our cultures are “better” somehow—closer to the earth, purer, more attuned to sensory pleasure—but in nice, nonthreatening ways, wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom.
The Asian ladybook title game illustrates this point further. Asian-American women’s fiction titles often fall into one of three categories: i. they have some nature-related detail (Gail Tsukiyama’s
The Samurai’s Garden,
Mia Yun’s
House of the Winds
), 2. they feature a familial relationship (Tan’s
The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Kitchen God’s Wife
), or 3. they contain a number (Mako Yoshikawa’s
One Hundred and One Ways
, Tan’s
The Hundred Secret Senses
). The nature aspect seems to show that we are in touch with the elements; the familial touch displays how wonderfully traditional we are in how we understand ourselves, especially women; and the numerical detail demonstrates that we are an ancient, wise people fond of the fairy-tale trick of enumerating knowledge. (Some titles even double up on these techniques, such as Mira Stout’s
One Thousand Chestnut Trees
.)
But when we aren’t better than the West in cute, quaint ways, we have to be a lot worse. A host of Asian historical memoirs seem based on a simple formula: Asia was hell; the United States is a hell of a lot better. Thank God I’m here! This is not to disparage the truly awful circumstances of many of the authors’ lives or their bravery and resilience in writing of their suffering. Being abandoned, purged, “reeducated,” jailed, tortured, chased, hunted, raped, and/or nearly murdered in Cambodia, Vietnam, or China would leave scars on anyone’s soul. But that there is an entire genre so dominated by the Asian-hell-to-Western-heaven motif is disturbing, and Southeast Asian memoirs have an even more complicated twist, especially considering the lack of Southeast Asian women’s fiction. There are many reasons for that dearth—years of war, relative unfamiliarity with English, a new and oft-traumatized or poverty-stricken refugee population. But Southeast Asian women writers also have a hard time overcoming U.S. narratives about the region. Movies about Southeast Asia are inevitably about the traumas of the Vietnam War or Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia:
Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter, The Killing Fields.
The women in these movies aren’t given a chance to speak for themselves; they spend their screen time undulating around poles, prattling in broken barroom English, or screaming without subtitles. Now that Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian-American women are finally armed with words, they are writing a
crucial piece of history with the stories of their lives. But the emphasis on their war-torn experiences, to the exclusion of the imagined realms of fiction, is troubling. It’s as if audiences are excused from being interested in worlds created or dreamed of by Southeast Asian women that are without bloodshed, or without Western involvement.
THERE’S A FLIP SIDE TO EVERYTHING, OF COURSE. DESPITE all the doom and gloom I’ve laid out so far, literary trends can be good for women writers of color. At least more voices are finding their way onto the store shelves; one can’t protest the fact that Americans are expanding their reading horizons, or that female authors of color are receiving much-deserved attention. I’m not advocating a return to the color closet for authors—why shouldn’t ethnicity be ripe for novelistic exploration? And even if the books are published as part of a trend, they are often far from formulaic.
Still, it’s hard to balance those sweet and sour sensations each time the next ethnic girl wonder strikes it big with her book. Happiness over her success is often marred by the onslaught of exoticized marketing. After a while, ethnicity seems as much a commodity as anything else. And as such, it becomes subject to the fickle nature of the marketplace—ethnicities without a sexy hook, or without much media presence, lose out. Even though there are staggering talents among African women writers, for example—Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Buchi Emecheta come to mind—their day may be long in coming. A trend can also stymie the publication of books that fail to conform to a popular ethnic formula by being perhaps too radical, too unpleasant, or too accusatory.
Furthermore, there’s the problem of the “one-nigger rule”—the one spot in an establishment set aside for “diversity.” If the general public is filling its color quota with one flavor of the month, there usually isn’t appetite for another. People of color wanting to get in run their eyes over a book catalog, a masthead, a table of contents, a list of personnel—checking for the SOB in the one POC slot. It’s a shameful catfighting tendency, but one that cultural attention deficit disorder and tokenism foster. Trends may make the publishing world seem inclusive and diverse, but there is still a gatekeeper and the hordes in front of him, clamoring to get in.
When the South Asian-lit craze appeared in the late ’90s, it became a juggernaut among ethnic trends, shaking the book world from top to bottom
with the potent combination of crossover appeal and literary acclaim. The work of Indian women had been notably absent from our bookshelves (aside from a very few South Asian and South Asian-American women, like Anita Desai and Bharati Mukherjee, whose time came before the Tanera mass marketing of ethnicity and authoress), and now stores were suddenly flooded with it—Kiran Desai’s
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,
Indira Ganesan’s
Inheritance,
Lahiri’s
Interpreter of Maladies,
and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s
Mistress of Spices,
among others. The books and the attention they brought with them were especially welcome, considering that even before the onslaught of what some U.S. publishers call “the
God of Small Things
effect,” the modern Western literary realm of India was already a rich one for men: Vikram Seth earned one of the largest advances ever for
A Suitable Boy;
the cranky V. S. Naipaul snagged a Nobel; and the style of Salman Rushdie has so often been emulated by a new generation of South Asian writers that some literary critics even call them Midnight’s Grandchildren, after Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children.
Plus, India’s literary past has also been forced to encompass the uncomfortably colonial narratives of Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster.
On the happy side, these new books were generally wide-ranging in style and topic, some drawing on Raymond Carver more than Rushdie or Seth, others exploring the complexity of a diasporic identity. As much as one can generalize, these authors were writing some wonderful literature. And although the texts were often seen as part of a single, monolithic publishing identity, their styles and subject matters varied greatly, with a broader range than was usually present in a given ethnic trend.
Inevitably, however, I started to feel an itch of irritation. It wasn’t just the spread of the craze and the concurrent cultural obsession with all things Indian—something chafed beyond the sight of Madonna blotchy with mehndi and mangling Sanskrit, or the ubiquity of shitty boxed chai. There were many other dark reasons why this infatuation bugged as much as it pleased. For one, there was the distasteful fawning over the authors’ beauty: Roy was gushingly named one of
People’
s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” in 1998, and, after winning her Pulitzer, Lahiri was crowned a “Woman We Love” in
Esquire.
There was the awful sameness of booksellers’ responses when asked about exciting female authors of color—all South Asian this, Indian that. And although many of the subsequent books
avoided the kind of mystical realism that editor Pankaj Mishra—who signed Arundhati Roy and recently penned his own book,
The Romantics
—has disparagingly called “Rushdie-itis,” a few do share a certain tinkling, quirky, food-based exoticism, a tired roundup of the angst of arranged marriages, bitchy squabbles over whose chutneys and pickles are better than whose, and slobbery details about saris.
Writing in the
Vancouver Sun,
Punjabi-Canadian critic Phinder Dulai offered up a biting criticism of what he termed the Indo–North American novel: “A kind of culinary alchemy dresses up what could be gritty reality and betrays an unfortunate middle-class romanticism about the country left behind … In the North American-style Indian novel, the focus is on domestic family prattle while larger themes of migration, racism, caste and generational conflict are barely touched. When things get too hot, the characters can slip away to the kitchen or the pickle factory to cool off.” And here we come up against the other side of trendification’s double-edged sword: Readers of color can place as many restrictions on “their” writers as mainstream expectations can. I agree with much of Dulai’s argument, particularly his critique of the annoying food fetishes and the gloppy romanticism. But while his points about whitewashing are well articulated, not every author can write the great Indian treatise on injustice. Many do grapple with serious themes: Lahiri, for example, addresses the bloody creation and partition of Pakistan and India, poverty, harsh discrimination against women, and familial fractures. And Roy definitely takes on her share of political topics. But is the onus of political seriousness necessarily greater for writers with brown skin? Some would say so: When an author of color makes it big, he or she is sometimes viewed as the returned messiah, full of potential uplift but also heavy with the responsibility to take on all the experiences of the oppressed and relay them to the world in great tablets of wisdom. When the author reveals him- or herself to be a mere human telling a tale spun from one imagination, the crown of thorns is angrily snatched back, to be placed on the head of the next likely candidate. This sort of pressure is almost too much to bear: Who wants to be a sure-to-fail Jesus, dealing with the dashed expectations of a disappointed people? Those crushed hopes have more to do with the gatekeeping forces of literary cool than the power of any one author’s pen. One must cast blame not at the feet of the authors, but at those who are deciding what and whom we might read.