When an Asian writer becomes a household name in America’s mainstream literary market, Asian activists will step up and call that Asian writer a sell-out. When a certain piece I had written got published in a semi-prominent outlet and many white people expressed support for the piece, Asian people accused me of selling out, of self-loathing.
Back when I was into that whole Academia gig, I published papers and law review articles on white privilege, postcolonialism, and other theories in critical race studies. I have led coalitions in my heyday, I have marched, I have protested, I have spoken out, and I have participated in grassroots movements. On a day to day level now, I spend over 55% of my free time (yes, free time, as in outside of what I already do at the office) providing pro bono legal services to Chinatown. Make no mistake, I love my community with the kind of zealous love that few from it share.
And yet back in college when I wrote a paper exposing the many hypocrisies of the Asian community, citing examples, some of the groups and individuals that got made into an example came forward and accused me of hating my race.
Why had they concluded that I hated my race? Because I criticized it. Why had I criticized the Asian American community? Well, of course because I secretly wished I was white, and really, really wanted to be loved by white people.
Many Asian groups on campus had rallied for censorship. White people turned it into a First Amendment issue. Some members of those Asian groups asked, “What does religion have to do with this?” And that made me feel like saying, “My points in the paper exactly.” The piece had criticized Asian Americans for shirking from their civic duties and being politically ignorant.
Anyway, as I said, that was all past tense. It came up recently however when I published something else, a personal narrative about my experiences in mainland China.
First, that piece caused certain individuals to accuse me of being a sell-out. Apparently to them I criticized China for the intentional purpose of pleasing white people and lending credence to an already prevailing Sinophobia. Second, that college publication came up as further proof of my self-hatred for being non-white. Who says bygones are bygones?
I can’t understand the censorship. That personal narrative had been as factual as I could have made it. It is fact that when I stood outside the Forbidden City and pointed at the giant portrait of Chairman Mao while making a passing comment about him being a fat, horny fascist who fucked 13-year-old virgins because he thought it’d make him immortal, soldiers pulled me out of the line I had been standing in, detained me for five minutes and strictly ordered me never to do that again.
It is fact that when I wanted to talk about the banning of Falun Gong in China with a taxicab driver, he tensed up and warned me never ever to talk about Falun Gong publicly in China. So when I was not in a public arena, when I was home in the private quarters of my cousin’s apartment, I raised the Falun Gong issue again, and she tensed up, started whispering, like maybe somebody might hear, and told me that’s something nobody there talks about. What do you mean nobody talks about it? A religion/philosophical practice gets summarily banned in a country and nobody wants to talk about it?
It is fact that China suffers from pollution. There is smog over Beijing that puts a great shadow over it, makes it impossible to ever see blue sky or the sun. There is graffiti on historic landmarks like the Echo Wall. There is garbage and litter on Huang Shan, Yellow Mountain, otherwise one of the most beautiful places on earth I have ever seen.
It is fact that many Chinese women attend nightclubs with the goal of having a one night stand with a white man. They don’t want to be with Asian men. They consider the number of white men they have slept with as something to brag about. It is fact that Communist propaganda bombard the airwaves, on the radio and on TV, of media created for the sole purpose of inducing nationalism and ethnocentricism. And yet everywhere one turns, there is the evident worship of money, capitalism, and the West.
For writing about what I saw, I was accused of selling out, of portraying China in a negative light because that’s what white Americans want to hear, want to read about.
If I air China’s dirty laundry, no one sees it as an act motivated by a fundamental desire for progress, a desire to change China for the better. Instead, they see it as self-loathing. When did self-criticism for the actualization of self-awareness become self-loathing?
