who is representation for, anyways?
This Week in Reading:
The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan
The Astonishing Color of After is the story of Leigh, a biracial high school artist dealing with the aftermath of her mother’s suicide. Her mother returns to her in the form of an enormous red bird, leading Leigh to Taiwan, where she meets her maternal grandparents for the first time. The bird is a metaphor but is also not a metaphor— it leaves physical gifts that are visible to the rest of the family, literal red feathers randomly appear in the house. In Taiwan, she finds magical incense that transports her into her family’s memories when lit, allowing her to piece together her mother’s life and try to understand why it ended the way it did.
The book covers so many topics that are uncannily pertinent to me: being half-Asian, being an artist—but somehow its relevance to my life made me connect to it less instead of more. (An aside: with a few notable exceptions*, I find that writers are rarely able to imagine up art pieces that are as compelling as the projects an artist could actually make. In The Astonishing Color of After, Leigh makes slightly surreal charcoal drawings of people around her and her artistic breakthrough is learning how to add…color? Okay. I mean, I guess she is only sixteen, and sixteen year olds make terrible art, but come on.)
I occupy a very niche intersection of demographics. Leigh is not the same as me, but is perhaps the closest likeness I have come across in fiction. Growing up, I was hyper aware of the fact that I wasn’t represented in popular culture. There were plenty of white families on TV, and a handful of black and Latinx families, but I rarely saw any Asian ones, and never, ever, a family where the parents were of different races. Even PBS sanctioned Arthur featured fully segregated families: bunnies married to bunnies, aardvarks married to aardvarks. In my teen years I began to see more biracial characters in the YA novels I read, but usually this characterization felt like an uninformed stab at diversity, writers joyfully pulling from two different cultural traditions to create vibrant multi-racial families. Never did they capture the in-betweenness of being biracial, the feeling of lack that haunts you. Being biracial does not allow you to possess two communities; instead, you are only able enter each of them halfway.
Emily X.R. Pan does a better job than most at portraying the in-betweenness of her biracial protagonist—being in an Asian space with her Asian family and having strangers point out how different she is, attempting to return to a homeland and feeling completely out of place. Pan clearly wrote this novel from her own personal experience, and it is accurate to that experience. It is accurate, too, to my experience— but it also doesn’t feel like enough. It is difficult to criticize someone’s personal truth; her perspective is not inaccurate, but it feels like an approximation. So many of the scenes in the book have been identically replicated in my own life, but instead of feeling seen, I felt bored. Being called exotic as a compliment? Old news. Parents that actively discourage art as a profession? Been there, done that. These experiences are still not represented frequently enough to be considered trite, but they do feel extremely basic—the 101 of being half-Asian.
From my investigations, it seems like Pan is fully Taiwanese. The experience of being raised in a family that is culturally different from the society outside of your home can bring up a similar feeling of straddling two worlds, but it is inherently different than being biracial— when that push and pull exists within your very house and body.
Who is representation really for anyways? Is it for me? So I can feel seen? Or is it for other people—so they can see me more clearly? This novel is about me, but perhaps not for me. The Astonishing Color of After is in no way bad or problematic, if anything it is good to have a book like this out in the world, good that people can read it so I don’t have to explain the same aspects of my identity ad nauseam. I’m sure that many of the novels that I have found illuminating about identities outside of myself would seem laughably basic to the groups they portray. In our diversifying media landscape, inclusion often comes with the stipulation of being educational.
My friend Daniel (who is not Arab) was telling me that he had started watching Ramy, that new Hulu show about a first-generation Egyptian American. He was enjoying it, but also felt like the show was constantly explaining the joke to its non-Arab audience. Would Ramy be funnier to people who grew up in that community, or would they be irritated by its attempt to pander at an American audience? When a story is constantly keeping a broader audience in the corner of its eye, it runs the risk of losing its initial target. Stories don’t have to be for everyone, but is it even possible to craft narratives that are for insiders and outsiders simultaneously? The answer in all of these conversations about representation is, as always—more. If we had more stories, all kinds of stories, we wouldn’t need each one to represent a universal experience for an entire population. If we had more stories, people might not need to be educated constantly.
It is only because Leigh is so much like me that I notice her lack of depth— I want a new insight on my own experience instead of a broad outline. Reading this book was like hearing someone describe my own experience to me as if I was a stranger. I know! I want to snap, I was there!
Studio-ing
After finally getting my MFA apps in, it feels good to be back in studio actually making art. I’ve been working on these jock tarot cards for the better part of a year. I’m more than halfway done, but there are 78 cards in a deck so it’s slow going. A few recent faves from this work in progress:
Further Reading
The thick description and metaphor of this book reminded me of my all time favorite YA novel, I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson (one of the few writers who can describe art as well as an artist can). *Other writers who thread that needle: Celeste Ng in Little Fires Everywhere and Kevin Wilson in The Family Fang.
P.S. A big thank you to Clair, for giving me this book for Christmas— I swear I didn’t hate it!!