Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(27)

Pity the Asian accent. It is such a degraded accent, one of the last accents acceptable to mock. How hard it is to speak through it to make yourself heard. I am embarrassed to say that I sometimes act like that white woman. When I phone in my order to a Chinese restaurant and the cashier doesn’t understand me, I repeat myself impatiently. When I call Time Warner and reach a representative with an Indian accent, I am already exasperated because I heard that Indian call centers barely train their employees. I have a theory that Seamless was invented so Americans don’t have to hassle with immigrant accents. Automation will replace Indian call centers for this very reason. Machines will flatten the accents of nationalities already flattened by English.

I have noticed that a new TV Asian accent has emerged, an accent used by no Asian except for Asian American actors onscreen: this accent is gentle, sitcom-friendly, easy listening. I have a hard time with the rare Asian American sitcom on offer, since they are so pandering and full of cute banter. But then, I’m of the extreme opinion that a real show about a Korean family—at least the kind I grew up around—is untelevisable. Americans would be both bored and appalled. My God, why can’t someone call Child Protective Services! they’d shout at the screen.



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    Ever since I started writing poetry seriously, I have used English inappropriately. I played with diction like an amateur musician in a professional orchestra, crashing my cymbals at the wrong time or coming in with my flute too early. I used low diction for the high occasions, high elocution for casual encounters. I wrote a companion poem to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” as a salesman’s pitch; wrote an epic narrative poem in my own invented pidgin. I wanted to pull all the outside Englishes inside and drag inside English outside. I wanted to chip away at the pillar of poetry. More than chip. I wanted to savage it. But what did I expect to find as I savaged? Was it sufficient enough to break English to point out how ill-fitting it was?

My grandmother used to watch the old dating show Love Connection religiously. She didn’t understand English at all, but she still found it uproariously funny to watch two people talk at each other on the couch. Laughing along to the laugh track, she’d turn to me to see if I was laughing, then turn back to the TV to laugh some more. That canned soundtrack, echoed by my grandmother, was a hollow cave of sound that sharpened the cheerless tension in our household. While she watched, I sat, vigilant and ears pricked, increasingly agitated by the laugh track’s annoying demand that I join in. My home was a provisional space in which the present was always wasted in dreaded anticipation of the future. I always knew when my mother was in one of her moods, though I never exactly knew when she’d strike, so I waited and waited until I heard her shriek my name at the top of her lungs, which was my cue to leap up and slam all the windows shut so our inside sounds wouldn’t leak outside.

    As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love. I’ve always been so protective of making sure that my family’s inside sounds didn’t leak outside that I don’t know how to allow the outside in. I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I’m turning English against my family.



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How far can I travel harvesting bad English before I’m called a trespasser? While I have borrowed from Hawaiian Pidgin and Spanglish in the past, I would think twice before using these languages now. When the film Crazy Rich Asians premiered, the twittersphere called out as “blackface” the actor Awkwafina’s accent, an accent not far removed from the K-town one I heard growing up in L.A. It never occurred to me that those K-town girls were doing blackface. I thought they were just talking the way other teens around them talked.

At the time of my writing, this country has seen a retrenchment of identities on both sides of the political spectrum. The rise of white nationalism has led to many nonwhites defending their identities with rage and pride as well as demanding reparative action to compensate for centuries of whites’ plundering from non-Western cultures. But a side effect of this justified rage has been a “stay in your lane” politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure—while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap—but reduces racial identity to intellectual property.

    When we are inspired by a poem or novel, our human impulse is to share it so that, as Lewis Hyde writes, it leaves a trail of “interconnected relationships in its wake.” But in the market economy, art is a commodity removed from circulation and kept. If the work of art circulates, it circulates for profit, which has been grossly reaped by white authorship. Speaking on this subject, Amiri Baraka offers an invaluable quote: “All cultures learn from each other. The problem is that if the Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie, I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi.”

We must make right this unequal distribution but we must do so without forgetting the immeasurable value of cultural exchange in what Hyde calls the gift economy. In reacting against the market economy, we have internalized market logic where culture is hoarded as if it’s a product that will depreciate in value if shared with others; where instead of decolonizing English, we are carving up English into hostile nation-states. The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.