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140
Mixed Feelings
REBECCA RAINOF*
“Rather than ‘speaking about’ a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T.
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Minh-ha suggests we ‘speak nearby.’ . . . I am only capable of ‘speaking nearby’ the Asian
American condition, which is so involuted that I can’t stretch myself across it.” (103)
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
I find “speaking nearby” appealing as a model for relating to culture. Nearby can be
intimate, a loved one pressed to your side. It can be removed, a detached observation or
indifference realized once impinged on, unsettled. Nearby can be inside and outside at
once, inclusion and exclusion, affiliation and alienation. Sometimes, nearby can mean
misplacement or displacement, as when one is racially misidentified or nudged out of a
category. Nearby can also be far away, the feeling I have when looking at black-and-white
photographs of Heart Mountain prison camp, a site of Japanese American incarceration
during WWII, its barrack rows receding to a distant vanishing point. I imagine my
mother a squalling newborn in this place beyond her recollection.
A confession: I was hesitant to read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings when it was
recommended to me. Internally, I braced myself to feel excluded from its vision of Asian-
American identity. As a mixed-race person, I often find myself outside the cultures
expected to provide coordinates for mapping selfhood. Rather than participating in
discussions about race, I have at times defaulted to silence, feeling that speaking about
culture outside the eccentric circle of my family (a unit with its own silencing complex-
ities) risks trespass in every direction. As a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
British literature, a sense of belonging or racial identification has never been the source
for my academic fascinations. Yet, after getting tenure, I allowed myself to pursue a
personal project of researching my family’s post-war experience. I thought of my aca-
demic and personal projects as separate, diverging along questions of identification and
belonging. It turns out they are more closely connected than I expected.
Hong surprised me by unsettling belonging as the grounds for speaking authority.
Minor Feelings resists a uniform vision of Asian-American identity, the collapsing of
multivalent experiences into a pangaeaic lump, to question throughout: “Is there even
*Rebecca Rainof, Department of English, Princeton University, 22 McCosh Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544,
USA. Email: rrainof@princeton.edu
Literary Imagination, volume 23, number 2, pp. 140–150
doi:10.1093/litimag/imab039 Advance Access Publication 20 August 2021
ß The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars,
Critics, and Writers. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.comMixed Feelings 141
such a concept as an Asian American consciousness?” (28–29).1 The category Asian-
American is especially tricky, a term of convenience that fails to capture people’s expe-
riences. In place of answering her question about defining what it is to be Asian-
American outright, Hong adopts unexpected positions from which to write about iden-
tity, a stance she associates with Richard Pryor’s standup comedy, insisting: “If I’m going
to write nearby my Asian American condition, however, I feel compelled to write nearby
other racial experiences . . . publishers want ‘the Muslim experience’ or ‘the black expe-
rience.’ They want ethnicity to be siloed because it’s easier to understand, easier to
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brand.” She continues, “Ever since I started writing, I was not just interested in telling
my story but also in finding a form—a way of speech—that decentered whiteness” (104).
Minor Feelings compels me because it does not just decenter whiteness, it decenters Asian
Americanness too and, more to the point, entrenched cultural belonging as the stronghold
from which to launch any cultural reckoning (including An Asian American Reckoning). Being
“mixed” may make me less comfortable with ways of reading, writing, and living based on
unambiguous belonging or siloed identity, prompting me to gravitate to nearby-ness as an
alternative model. Yet, reading Hong’s book helped me to understand how these feelings are
also Asian-American feelings, and more expansively, they are feelings available to anyone who
reads literature by someone whose experience and identity differs from their own—which is to
say, anyone who reads literature. Hong achieves her decentered vision of identity in part by
shifting from using “we” to “I.” In the first essay in her collection, “United,” she declares “we”
to be “a pronoun I use cautiously” (29). Plurals and possessives can be deceptive, calculatedly
unclear. The media cycles through stories of racial and ethnic imposture, ranging from Rachel
Dolezal’s ethnic fraud to Jessica Krug’s confession of having “assumed identities within a
Blackness that I had no right to claim,”2 to even more slippery cases where identity is inscribed
or implied on the level of grammar. A recent correction of an op-ed by the New York Times
warned that author Claudia Lawrence’s “references to ‘our community’ and ‘we’ in connection with
the Native American community create the impression that she is Native and writing from that
perspective.”3 When pitching the op-ed, Lawrence had falsely represented herself to the Times as
a Native woman, and tried to maintain an ambiguous claim to that identity with collective
pronouns. Belonging can be such a potent source of authority that some are tempted to
appropriate it seeking a platform from which to “speak about” race.
How refreshing that Hong declares “uncertainty” (28) instead of belonging as her chosen
stance for a reckoning. Quoting Jeff Chang saying he wants “to love us” but does not know
who “us” is, she sets these questions at the gates of her book: “Who is us? What is us?” (28).
First person plural statements accordingly fall away throughout the essay collection, used
sparingly to undermine a narrow vision of a speaking “we” or a spoken-of “them” (“We
1
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020).
Quotes will be cited parenthetically.
2
Jessica Krug, “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies,” (2020, September 3). Medium.
https://medium.com/@jessakrug/the-truth-and-the-anti-black-violence-of-my-lies-9a9621401f85
3
Claudia Lawrence, “Deb Haaland Is Our Hero. Here Is a Warning for Her.” (2020, December 29).
The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/opinion/deb-haaland-interior.html142 Rebecca Rainof
are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world. We are
the math-crunching middle managers”(9)). In their place, readers encounter observations made
by a sensing “I” who describes physical experiences, both Hong’s (a phantom facial tic, a torn
cuticle) and those of others whose bodies have been seized, violated (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s
rape and murder, David Dao’s experience being dragged off a United flight). Her accounts
often center on proximity as an uncomfortable bodily position, one generative of self-reflection
and critical interpretation, but not necessarily soothing or self-confirming. The example of her
pained pedicure illustrates these discomforts when a stooped Vietnamese teenager, the son of
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the nail salon’s owner, resentfully rips away her cuticle. “He was so ungainly in that supplicant’s
crouch, making me feel ungainly in my vibrating massage chair” (12). The pedicurist’s chair
becomes the inflamed contact zone between diverging Asian-American experiences, the place
where proximity breeds discomfort. In Hong’s vision, speaking “nearby” isn’t a cozy affair.
To “speak nearby” shifts the grounds for discussing race from belonging to an often
uncomfortable and destabilizing proximity. It offers—and moreover, insists on—room
for thinking across binaries (in or out, pro or anti), for reservations, flexibility, uncer-
tainty, curiosity, and a state in which I often locate myself: that of mixed feelings. In her
dissonant vision of minor feelings—a “racialized range of emotions that are negative,
dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic” (55)—Hong can be said to model mixed feelings
too as a generative position from which to think, write, teach, and learn about race and
culture. As a position, mixed feelings resist being siloed or siloeing others into identity
categories, and in art and literature often calls forth what Sianne Ngai labels a
“Bartelbyan aesthetic” of “equivocality”4—a commitment to uncertainty, a conviction
in equivocation. Resisting the corralling forces of identity has been part of this year’s
urgent call to speak out, with, for, and nearby others. Speaking in proximity to others
from a position of “mixed feelings”—a perspective born of complex resistance towards
self-identification as the grounds for engagement and expression—allows one to voice
concerns with care and respect, but also without ceasing to express altogether. As a
teacher of literature, accepting and allowing students to share mixed feelings—helping
them to speak from a decentered, tentative, observing, curious, productively uncomfort-
ably place—has been the stance I can most acceptably, and on my own terms, stand.
I have come to associate Hong’s “speaking nearby” with the stories of Hisaye
Yamamoto, a writer who steeps characters and readers in uncomfortable proximity.
Yamamoto was one of the first Japanese-American writers to gain acclaim after
WWII, and her writing is still widely anthologized and taught at universities, often in
Asian American Studies courses.5 A colleague kindly handed me Seventeen Syllables and
Other Stories, Yamamoto’s collected prose written between the 1940s and 1980s, after
hearing about my personal project to research literature of the Japanese incarceration and
postwar family fracture. Reading Yamamoto became one of my ritualized attempts to
draw near to my mother, culminating in a proposal: would she like to go with me to the
4
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 9.
5
For further background on Yamamoto, see Amy Ling’s entry in The Columbia Companion to the 20th
Century American Short Story (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).Mixed Feelings 143
Heart Mountain pilgrimage, a weekend of performances, workshops, museum visits on
the site of the prison camp where she was born? We would share a room in the Holiday
Inn, drink wine in the lobby bar and watch TV together at night. My mother says yes. I
buy registration tickets for us both. Then she says no. When I get there, I am surrounded
by other middle-aged women whose mothers refused to go with them. Some cite the
trauma of their mother’s experiences. My mother cites an aversion to close quarters with
strangers. “Why would I want to hang out with a bunch of old Japanese people I don’t
even know?” she intones flatly.
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In many ways, to “speak nearby” for me means at times naively imagining the places my
mother occupied, using research as an act of conjuration. But it also means that often the
closest I can get to seeing alongside is through fiction—a realization that spurred my initial
reading of Yamamoto but not my final sense of her work’s revelations. Although only one
short story, “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” takes a prison camp as its setting, almost all of
her works illustrate the conditions and consequences of the Japanese incarceration. The
contact zone Hong localizes in the nail parlor chair finds its corollary in Yamamoto’s imag-
ined encounters between seatmates on mass transportation, notably in “The Wilshire Bus,” a
story about strangers on a crosstown bus in post-war Los Angeles, and “Death Rides the Rails
to Poston,” a murder mystery about Japanese-American “evacuees” first published in the
Poston Chronicle, the mimeographed prison camp newspaper. In both stories, a fellow
traveler’s adjacent body, a sense of being flanked by “tenseness” or “loneliness,” becomes
the conduit for registering larger cultural conflicts, for opening onto Joycean epiphanies
about indifference, personal responsibility, a cleaved and frayed “we.”
In what I interpret as a sardonic play on “Murder on the Orient Express” (Yamamoto
picking up and playing with the word “Orient” in the title), her mystery story “Death
Rides the Rails to Poston” does not unfold on a European luxury liner but on a swel-
tering train full of Japanese Americans undergoing forced relocation to Poston Arizona,
where Yamamoto was herself imprisoned for three years.6 The car is a mobile prison; no
one, not even a flagging pregnant woman with an injured leg has been permitted to open
the windows under the military’s watchful gaze. Like Agatha Christie’s text, the story
features a murdered man despised by all, and a train car full of suspects: “‘Everyone on
the car hated him. They all had reason to kill’” (134).7 Our protagonist Shu is the last
person aboard and the lone car passenger not from Oceanside. In the opening, he notices
the rows in front and behind one man to be conspicuously empty, a radius of rejection.
This oddity inspires Shu to sit beside “ostracized” Koike, whose body encapsulates an
even more concentrated ostracism within a train of banished Japanese Americans. The
6
In the preface to the revised and expanded edition of Seventeen Syllables, which newly included “Death
Rides the Rails to Poston,” Yamamoto shares the view that “I see now that it records some of the details
of that May day in 1942 when all Japanese from as far south as the Imperial Valley and San Diego, and
from as far north as Laguna Beach, obediently converged at railroad stations in San Diego and
Oceanside and filed into trains that took us to the Colorado River Relocation Center (Poston) in
Arizona” (129).
7
Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllabus and Other Stories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1998).144 Rebecca Rainof
reason for Koike’s isolation: “He had merely done his patriotic duty and accompanied
FBI searchers into Japanese homes and helped to look for contraband and reported
suspicious actions” (132). Needless to say, murder ensues. The man’s lapse into a per-
ceived drunken stupor masks death by morphine, and Shu becomes the detective
through whose point of view discoveries are focalized.
The story, however, takes an understated and unpredictable turn. The denouement of
the whodunit dissolves to become discomfitingly beside the point. The murderer—the
wilting pregnant woman—had no particular motivation for the killing. As a bookish
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young woman named Pat explains to Shu, “‘I don’t think Mrs. Ogata hated Koike any
more than anybody else did. It was just that she was more sensitive and neurotic than the
others and more unable to control her hate. And the condition she was in, the hurried
process of evacuation, the oppressing heat—everything combined in such a way that she
was unable to stand it any longer” (140). Without a motive, the murder seems arbitrary,
its very senselessness evoking a larger condition of senseless punishment: the forced
relocation and imprisonment of Japanese Americans.
Yamamoto’s tale then can be said to slyly go off the rails of the detective-hero plot that
first set its course to instead reflect on the conditions of its historical setting. In place of
reading about the triumphant uncloaking of a murderer, I found myself confronted with a
curious shift in narration and tone; the story leaves Shu’s point of view to recenter dartingly
on Pat, his new chosen seatmate. Pat had observed the murder as it took place but had
remained silent. Stunned, Shu asks why she didn’t “speak up,” at which point the story
inhabits Pat’s inner consciousness via free indirect discourse: “How could she tell him that
since evacuation had become a reality her life had somehow taken on the quality of a
dream and that she felt numbed, as though nothing now were awakening her and that she
was beginning to feel whole and alive once more?” (141). At the end of the story, Shu still
“didn’t quite understand” Pat’s unexpressed and complex mixed feelings of indifference as
both understandable and also intolerable, culpable and sympathetic. Holding hands, the
two conclude “both smiling radiantly at each other” (141). Murder plots are exchanged for
courtship plots, uncomfortable nearness for pleasant proximity, but like Austen’s ironic
ending of Northanger Abbey (“The bells rang and every body smiled.”)8 the spun confec-
tion of this ending lingers as more unsettling than the previous acrimony laid bare.
The eruption of free indirect discourse from Pat’s numbed yet astute perspective
displaces and disrupts Shu’s energetic detecting, pointing readers elsewhere to more
complex mixed feelings. Pat’s feelings become an appropriately wavering ethical compass
in a disorienting world divested of true north: they are neither righteous indictment nor
complacent (as Shu’s appear in the conclusion). Holding Pat’s hand, Shu’s consuming
concerns about the murder fall away, and he thinks “who was he to criticize anybody
else’s action?” As in many of Yamamoto’s stories, the act of shrugging off—a moving on
or turning away that is both sympathetic and questionable—only forces the reader to
confront a lingering discomfort. The narrator gives glimpses of Pat’s mind via free
8
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995), 235.Mixed Feelings 145
indirect discourse, creating dramatic irony that readers know her inner thoughts and the
protagonist Shu does not. I found this irony curious: it drew me in intimately, sidled up
alongside me, but also implicated me. In one sense, the whodunit lies slack but perhaps
more accurately, its tautness has been displaced from the conventional murder mystery
plot to the conditions of its unfolding: the forced imprisonment of Japanese Americans
under the noses of neighbors and fellow citizens.9 I found myself holding one end of this
tightly wrung cord: Who are we to criticize? Who are we to intervene? Who are we?
These questions are refined and redirected in a later story, “The Wilshire Bus,” which takes
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place on a bus that connects disparate parts of Los Angeles, the east and the west, inner urban
communities and coastal seaside wealth. The story unfolds on an actual historical and long-
running bus line—it is the bus I took home from high school, the same bus my mother took
decades before in her commute across Los Angeles. Yamamoto chooses this bus line carefully as
it implies sprawling differences to be crossed within a single community, interpersonal distances
that belie the protagonist Esther’s sunny opening reflections that she “always enjoyed the long
bus ride very much because her seat companions usually turned out to be amiable, and if they
did not, she took vicarious pleasure in gazing out at the almost unmitigated elegance along the
fabulous street.” Yet, we immediately learn that this vicarious pleasure opens onto other
vicarious sensations—some of them, it turns out, not so vicarious after all. “It was on one
of these Wednesday trips that Esther committed a grave sin of omission which caused her later
to burst into tears and which caused her acute discomfort for a long time afterwards whenever
something reminded her of it” (34).
The incident occurs when an elderly Chinese couple boards the bus, the woman
sitting next to Esther. “Esther turned her head to smile a greeting (well, here we are,
Orientals together on a bus), but the woman was watching, with some concern, her
husband who was asking directions of the driver” (35). This is the first of two examples
of a parenthetical “we” given from Esther’s quoted first-person perspective. The overture
to kinship goes unnoticed, the hail unrecognized, as the woman looks in concern to her
husband. Behind them, a drunk man blasts random opinions loudly. In response, the
older Chinese woman eventually “jerked around to get a look at the speaker and Esther
felt her giving him a quick but thorough examination before she turned back around”
(35). The man then unleashes a lengthy racist diatribe beginning with the injunction
“Why don’t you go back to China?”
In a story all about unreciprocated calls, calling (or not calling) others out, and failed
solidarity, the action of turning a head or refusing to do so registers seismically. “As he
talked on, Esther, pretending to look out the window, felt the tenseness in the body of
the woman beside her . . . . Esther herself, while believing herself properly annoyed with
9
Maya Angelou recalls this historical period in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
telling of the transformation of San Francisco and explaining a pervading feeling of “indifference”: “The
Asian population dwindled before my eyes . . . the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without
protest . . . No member of my family and none of the family friends ever mentioned the absent
Japanese. It was as if they had never owned or lived in the houses we inhabited . . . The air of collective
displacement, the impermanence of life in wartime . . . tended to dissipate my own sense of not
belonging” (206–208) (New York: Random House, 2015).146 Rebecca Rainof
the speaker and sorry for the old couple, felt quiet detached. She found herself wonder-
ing whether the man meant her in his exclusion order or whether she was identifiably
Japanese” (36). The phrase “exclusion order” recalls both the Chinese Exclusion Act and
Executive Order 9066, which unfolded through 108 “civilian exclusion orders” issued by
the United States Army and General John L. Witt, mandating that “all persons of
Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens” be forcefully relocated to prisons.10
We learn fleetingly that Esther had been imprisoned, and that she is visiting her husband
because he fought in the war and was injured.11 Esther recalls people wearing “I AM
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KOREAN” and “I AM CHINESE” buttons when the Japanese were imprisoned and
following their release, and questions her own sense of being “in the present case
immune” to the racist spewage.
These reflections lead to a change in Esther’s stance towards the woman. “Trying now
to make up for her moral shabbiness, she turned towards the little woman and smiled at
her . . . shaking her head a little to get across her message (don’t pay any attention to that
stupid old drunk, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, let’s take things like this in our stride)”
(37). Both this and the earlier parenthetical (“here we are, Orientals together on a bus”)
reveal Esther’s incomplete attempt at kinship through shared gazes, through belated turns
of her head towards the other woman, conveyed through the cozy enclosure implied by
parentheticals themselves. These overtures are unobserved at first, and later, rebuffed as
belated, facile, and on some level, insincere. The parentheticals include the only unspoken
examples of “we” and “our” rendered from a first-person perspective in the story (“we . . .
Orientals,” “our stride”), a “we” held separate from the narrator’s voice via the parentheses.
In the end, a “mild-looking” (36) man with glasses speaks “clumsily” to the Chinese
couple, “we aren’t all like that man. We do not all feel the way he does. We believe in an
America that is a melting pot of all sorts of people” (37). The mild man commends the
woman behind Esther who had to sit next to the drunkard, saying she deserves a purple
heart, the military award recalling the fact that Esther is on the bus to visit her husband at
a soldier’s hospital for wounds from fighting in WWII (Yamamoto’s brother was killed
fighting in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a unit of Japanese-Americans who fought for
the United States armed forces).12 The melting pot language is silently taken to task in
10
Executive Order No. 9066, February 19, 1942; General Records of the United States Government;
Record Group 11; National Archives.
11
Matthew Elliott notes that “dissenting voices in each story are subtly pressured or actively coerced to
consent to what ultimately amounts to their own historical erasure” (48). He further observes that
“Esther’s internment is an absent presence in “Wilshire Bus”; it is the repressed trauma that informs
Esther’s silence, and the story recounts her gradual recollection of this forgotten past and her realization
of its impact on the present” (56). See “Sins of Omission: Hisaye Yamamoto’s Vision of History,"
Melus 34, no. 1, Witnessing, Testifying, and History (Spring, 2009): 47–68.
12
In an interview transcribed by Densho, Yamamoto is asked to comment on “how you feel about the
442nd” in discussing her brother’s death. She responds, “Well, we are repeatedly told that if it weren’t
for the sacrifices of the 442nd that we wouldn’t have been allowed to go back to California as soon as
we were. But . . . since what was done to us was wrong in the first place, I don’t see that they should
have had to do that to prove anything.” Hisaye Yamamoto, interview by Chizu Omori and Emiko
Omori, 3/21/94 (denshovh-yhisaye-01), Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection, Densho.Mixed Feelings 147
the parentheticals that cannot perform any kind of alchemical turning of the bus into a
“we” that is at all protective, at all a space of solidarity. The man’s well-intended
speech—a oratorical act that fails to provide an antidote to or inversion of the drunk
man’s previous oratory—excludes the Chinese woman from his “we” even as it extends a
parting gesture of sympathy. The gesture comes too late, for everyone present allowed the
drunk man to exit with his feeling of being “certain of the support of the bus” (35)
unchecked, the old couple facing his attack in isolation.
Now, with her “saving detachment” stripped away, Esther is overwhelmed by the
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“infuriatingly helpless, insidiously sickening sensation of there being in the world noth-
ing solid” (37). Her tears finally pour forth when she reaches her husband in the hospital,
but he “smugly” misunderstands her signs of “weakness” as feminine longing for him, as
error she doesn’t correct but confirms with nods and smiles, saying “yes, weren’t women
silly?” (38). The ending recalls “Death Rides the Rails to Poston” in the final clasping of
romantic union. These final gestures are the poison pill of both stories, a pill passed onto
the reader. The partial epiphanies in Yamamoto’s stories, followed by hand holding and
head patting, are not cathartic, but convey a sense of distance increased. These endings jive
with Ngai’s insistence on the “ironic and noncathartic aspect of ugly feelings.”13 The last
gestures push the stories further away from catharsis, reveal the drive to smooth and hide
winning out over the impetus to wrestle with difficulty. Ultimately, the tonal smoothness
(like Austen’s) belies an ironic detachment Ngai associates with “meta-response”: “there is
a sense in which ugly feelings can be described as conducive to producing ironic distance”
for “it is hard to feel envy without feeling that one should not be feeling envy, reinforcing
the negativity of the original emotion. This process of ironic detachment, of critically
feeling that one shouldn’t be feeling, becomes activated in the reader as well. Yamamoto’s
provoking proximities urged me personally to “feel an acute discomfort for a long time”
(34) too.
Clearly there are lots of ways of responding to Yamamoto’s fiction. Many find her
works to speak for an Asian American experience that faced historical erasure.14 Her
short stories and memoirs find their place in college courses partly because they help
students explore hidden or excluded Asian American histories, and help instructors to
teach about these histories. And yet, like Hong’s Minor Feelings, Yamamoto’s stories
fascinatingly resist the encapsulation of being made representative of Asian-American
13
Ngai, 10.
14
King-Kok Cheung writes that Yamamoto’s work represents “in part the lost annals of Asian
Americans” that her writing seeks “to recoup through memory, imagination, and scattered records”
(11). Cheung describes Yamamoto as “a Nisei writer who excels at coding through muted plots and
innocent disguise” (28) in Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Like Cheung, many scholars commonly read Yamamoto’s
prose as revealing larger cultural approaches to silence or reticence, often while considering intergenera-
tional conflicts in her stories and essays. See for example, Naoko Sugiyama, “Issei Mothers’ Silence, Nisei
Daughters’ Stories: The Short Fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto” Comparative Literature Studies 33, no. 1,
East-West Issue (1996): 1–14, and Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald and Katharine Newman, “Relocation
and Dislocation: The Writings of Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi,” MELUS 7, no. 13
(1980): 21–38.148 Rebecca Rainof
consciousness. It is not that her works ignore or debunk a longing for representation and
belonging; it’s that they insistently probe attempted, failed, or even tepid belonging,
efforts at identification that fall apart in one’s hands. Her works include the seeds for
resisting a model, a syllabus construction that verges on the pedagogical equivalent of
“speaking about” Asian-American identity: “teaching about” identity and culture. People
who might read Yamamoto seeking information about the Asian-American experience, a
shoring up of identity as a way of understanding it (as I myself did in first picking up
Seventeen Syllables), will get something different, something surprisingly complex and
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hard to pin down, works that exemplify and illuminate a state of mixed feelings rather
than identification. These mixed feelings are, at least, what I found. That I found them
in the work of an Asian-American author, one I had assumed would define and delimit
Asian-American identity for me, proved all the more illuminating.
In this way, Yamamoto gave me an unexpected realization: that all my field trips,
historical research, and topical readings on racialized trauma—although revelatory—
were also usefully beside the point, for these missions continue to yield understandings
more expansive and unsettling than any pointed goal of identity confirmation.
Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables does not so much convey a honed sense of inherited
Asian-American consciousness as offer a model for discomfort in proximity that I find
instructive as a reader, but moreover, as a teacher of literature. Feeling the strangeness of
proximity, approaching literature with curiosity rather than certainty, learning how to
“speak nearby” authors’ and classmates’ differing experiences: these are the skills litera-
ture teachers cultivate. Yet, for proximity to be uncomfortably productive, and not
punitively unproductive, students’ differing experiences cannot be effaced or glossed
over, turned away from with facile if seemingly sympathetic gestures.15 As Kaitlyn
Greenidge writes of her fascination with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women:
If you are a black girl reading the American canon, you often have to perform a special
equation . . . we have to will ourselves into the bodies on the page, with a selectivity and an
internal edit that white readers of the same canon do not necessarily have to exercise.
“So what?” one might think. Isn’t reading fiction an exercise in empathy? But empathy for
whom, and for what higher purpose, always complicates this supposedly benevolent ac-
tion. Is empathy really empathy if it’s generally asked to flow in only one direction?16
Greenidge’s argument is not that the “American canon” cannot speak to readers who
have to perform “a special equation,” but that this reading across difference takes work.
As a teacher, acknowledging this work of reading is extremely important, but it is also
wrong to assume that students don’t want to do that work, that they are unaware of the
“equation” they are performing in having their empathy, their affiliation, their identifi-
cation flow in a given direction. Acknowledging that state of affairs and cultivating the
15
Unproductive discomfort can be argued, in bad faith, to be productive, as in recent cases of professors
using slurs in classrooms to perform freedom of speech.
16
Kaitlyn Greenidge, “The Bearable Whiteness of Little Women” (2020, NYTimes, January 13).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/opinion/sunday/little-women-movie-race.htmlMixed Feelings 149
ability and skills to find meaning in a range of texts is part of the work of teaching, and
part of the productive aspects of learning to “speak nearby” as a classroom practice. I find
this desire and this work further animated by Min Jin Lee in her recollection of being a
college student at Yale taking her first writing workshop. When she asks another student
to define Stonehenge in class, she is faced with a roomful of “lovely blue, green, and hazel
eyes” that “looked at me with surprise and pity because I hadn’t heard of the prehistoric
stone configuration. But, in their attractive, polished faces, I saw that Stonehenge was as
familiar to them as having a gun held to my face was to me.”17 Her fellow students’
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assumption of shared cultural familiarity—Stonehenge as the monolithic Anglo
“touchstone”—alienates but does not prevent Lee’s participation. “I did not withdraw
from the class. I stayed because the professor was very good. Each week, as I sat in that
tower in Connecticut, I thought of my parents at the store in New York.”
And so, I find that a way to be near my mother’s experience, an experience radically
different from my own, does not necessarily come from a set of researched keywords.
Instead, it comes from reading. One way to be nearby to my mother, to see and feel
nearby, is to read nearby to her—which means not reading “about” her experience but
returning to the books she herself read. These books have been with me for years, and
not only in a recent burst of research zeal, but woven through my consciousness with
every year: when she gave me Keats’s “To Autumn” to memorize as a child, handed me
Jane Austen in early high school, when she told me Virginia Woolf would change the
way I see the world. These were the works that shaped my mother’s experience in those
days long ago of taking the bus over great distances to attend East Los Angeles Junior
College, when she was the first person in her family to go to college.
Her community college professor, Booth Woodruff, recognized an eighteen-year-old
girl’s craving for literature and gave her an armful of books that would become her
favorites and part of her legacy to bestow on others: a collection of Romantic poetry,
John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and more. She practiced writing using Dos Passos’s
camera eye technique and Woolf’s method of traveling seamlessly between people’s
consciousnesses, a way of glimpsing other subjectivities “nearby” and imagining them
as a shared consciousness. Years later, after completing graduate school, my mother
would remember her years at community college as the most deeply meaningful educa-
tion of her life. “My teachers at community college cared about me like no one else. To
them, it was personal.” There had been high school guidance counselors who discour-
aged her (“another Ikeda”) from thinking about college, judging her by her family
background. But in her first college experience, she found through mentorship and
her reading a path forward that had been previously unavailable and obscured.
17
Min Jin Lee, “Stonehenge” The New Yorker (13 June 2019).150 Rebecca Rainof
Although I didn’t fully recognize it growing up, putting the same books into my hands
was a way of sharing experiences, crossing distances, bridging silences—of speaking in a
steady voice nearby to me all along.18
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18
My thanks to Briallen Hopper, Keri Walsh, and Beth Boyle Machlan for their helpful comments
during the writing process.You can also read
