A Bonafide Cosmopolitan

This book was hard for me to read. My notes in the margins strongly object to and question what I took to be generalizations, simplifications, and romanticized (and false) definitions of diversity. The reason, I think for my strong reaction, is because 1) I am from the Bay Area and have my own hard won analysis of diversity and culture here, and 2) I have never lived an immigrant or refugee experience, and 3) Lam didn’t until the last chapter begin to make himself vulnerable and earn my interest and trust as a reader so that I might have a window into this unique experience. By no means do I need to agree with everything I read, but I think being authentic in terms of emotion and personal truth, makes a story believable and worth telling, no matter the subject. I didn’t get that for much of the book, and I wanted it.

I began to see Lam in a more complete picture when admitted to having a deep shame, which he didn’t call shame (I am), on page 164 when he writes, “[m]y new language was shaping me the from inside out….[I] had stopped speaking Vietnamese altogether, had more or less shaved the Vietnamese accent from my tongue, and, at times, pretended that I was American-born. I even changed my Vietnamese name to an American one…. (164)”

Later he goes on to say—and this is illuminating to me as a frustrated reader who feels I know nothing about the author whose personal essays I have deluged through for 166 pages—“[p]erhaps this is why, though I have spoken about the war and my Vietnamese childhood, I have found it difficult to write in depth about it in English. While I could easily write about my Americanization process, to examine my Vietnamese childhood in English has seemed, at times, nearly impossible. Or, rather because I used English to construct my new self, that language became incapable of reaching the boy who once dreamed in his mother tongue, who wandered in his mother’s garden. (167)” A constructed new self. Is that the cosmopolitan self? Is that the only self in there? This quote was so telling to me. He did easily write about his Americanization process. And he did not examine, on an emotional level, how he constructed himself, which is why I felt wanting through the entire book. What this paragraph does is finally show me why, which is what I wanted, and what I think is so necessary in any non fiction. Some self revelation needs to take place, I think, some vulnerability.

Before the above mentioned moments, the writing came off as pretentious, removed, oddly authoritative, and trying really hard to prove itself, to who I am not sure. To other “cosmopolitans” is what it seemed. More than anything, it wanted to gain citizenship there, among the upper class, with the people at the “center.” The removed tone is obviously due to Lam being trained as a journalist. He reported on his life and his history. What bugged me more than that was his authoritative tone in doing so.

I felt constricted by his definitions of California and Asian cultures, especially because he represents only an upper class point of view, not the entire picture. He just can’t and shouldn’t be speaking for an entire population and geographic region. For example, Lam writes authoritatively, “[t]he civilization known for Confucian morals, Taoist mysticism, and martial arts…has whole heartedly embraced Western culture and mores. (102)” Could it ever be that simple? And what about when he discusses the Vietnamese psyche, “[w]hat transformed the Vietnamese psyche was a simple, yet potent idea of progression. (56)” Lam is also an authority on the Chinese psyche. He writes, “[t]his image of Chinese defenselessness carved a deep wound in the collective psyche. (104)”

And, to me, listing off ethnic foods that are at bay area grocery stores doesn’t constitute diversity, or change, or that Obama has saved us and made us equal as he alludes in his Obama essay. Lam’s global village sounds so easy, finished. I read it as a very surface-level and truly upper class and thus privileged understanding of race and class in America. Yes, sushi is popular, and everyone loves Pho. Yes, we have a black president. But, how about immigration legislation in Arizona? How about the fact that Troy Davis was just executed? S much felt missing from his analysis and utopist view of the Bay and California. In his Obama essay, Lam writes, “[a]ll the while unprecedented mass movements from south to north have irrevocably changed the north: salsa vies with ketchup as the top sauce; tango, Latin jazz, Jamaican reggae, and Mexican hip-hop liven up American dance floors; Spanish becomes increasingly the second language of choice; and so on. (119)” It’s too easy. This “global tribe” he talks about, and “the age of globalization,” a term he throws around, are just too simplified and sugar coated for me to swallow. And the fact that he, the author, is removed from the conversation because he is reporting, makes the content of most of the essays feel like a generic advertisement for diversity and multiculturalism in California.

For me, the thesis statement of this book is here:

“And if a Vietnamese teenage refugee was once overwhelmed by his losses, his inferiority complex, and by his alienation on the western shore, the Vietnamese American writer, through his struggle to find words to redefine himself, has become a bonafide cosmopolitan. (120)”

We get it. You made it. You are cosmopolitan. You made your point.

The deeper issue, and the one in the subtitle “writing in two hemispheres,” is what he attempts, but fails to examine fully, that is, what makes his experience unique. What is it about the complexity of writing in your stepmother tongue? I’d love to know.