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Notes -
Sentenced to 1000 Pages of Contemporary Diaspora Literature Written by Asian-American Women
Here's a link that's not login-walled.
Asian-American women are not OK, at least if you go by what they write about.
All the books the author read feature a difficult mother-daughter relationship, with the author giving a hilarious quote of "Chinese mothers spent a thousand years binding their daughters’ feet, so maybe there is some deep need to torture their female offspring, which can nowadays only find an outlet in forcing them into piano lessons and telling them they are getting fat. "
They all mourn being unable to speak their mother tongue, but make no significant attempt to actually learn it.
The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism. "Neurotic about not being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about only being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about being too Asian. Neurotic about not being Asian enough. Neurotic about taking after their mothers. Neurotic about not living up to their mother’s expectations. Three of the books feature visits to therapists."
They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible. They think white society is a hair's breadth away from putting them all in concentration camps. They all have white boyfriends, which presumably fill the same niche that orcs do in hentai, with their physical characteristics (especially their height) always being brought up.
They think white people are just as obsessed with them. What might seem like a casual conversation to the white person feels like an intense struggle for racial supremacy that both people are obviously aware of to the Asian woman.
Article is login-walled so I'll just free-associate with the bit that's visible.
Never heard of this concept of "diaspora literature" before. Is this just an Asian thing, or can any "foreign" group write it? The reference to mangoes makes me think of The House on Mango Street, which is about Hispanics in Chicago. This was one of a number of such books that they made us read in high school, although I don't remember any about Asians.
Even then my classmates and I made fun of the fact that we had to read all these stories about "growing up [ethnic]" when hardly anyone in our class was of the ethnicity in question. In fact I think there would've been more Asians than Hispanics in that class.
Then again, a growing-up story focused on our lives would have made for a very boring book. "Got home from school, procrastinated by playing video games, had dinner while parents watched TV, got picked up by friend who just got his driver's license and likes to brag about it by driving everybody around, hung out and shot the shit, went home, realized it's almost midnight and I still haven't started my 10-page essay on The House on Mango Street due tomorrow...." Or maybe this is more a guy/girl difference than an ethnic thing.
Is this what diaspora literature is about?:
Although it sounds like these Asian authors are not particularly fond of their families.
You really just need to go down one or two social levels to find some very good indie lit about the white/white-enough-hispanic growing-up experience (because at that point drugs, dinergoth girls, etc. add some stakes). I would recommend Calvin Westra's work highly, as well as Mixtape Hyperborea.
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