By Audrey Fong
There comes a time in every Asian American’s life when a well-meaning non-Asian person says something that leaves them silent. Because what do you say to a non-Asian person who insists that they know more about your culture than you do? Or when they ask why Asians are such bad drivers (but not you, of course!)? Or my least favorite, why do Asian women purposefully seek out white men as romantic partners? For many people (including myself), the immediate response is silence because you’re in such shock that someone would say these things to your face, especially when the person is someone you consider a friend, a mentor, or a generally good person.
Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation, a satirical coming-of-age story following a young woman in the process of an amateur investigation, is filled with these types of well-meaning white people. And while the novel’s initial antagonist is Vivian Vo, a postcolonial studies Ph.D. candidate who happens to be cooler and more accomplished than the protagonist Ingrid Yang could ever hope to be, the true antagonists of Disorientation are well-meaning white people, who fetishize Asians and Asian culture and who uphold racist stereotypes of Asian culture. To be clear, I am not saying that Hsieh Chou’s writing reflects a hatred for all white people—rather, that her novel warns that even well-meaning white people can be harmful.
The basis of Disorientation is that in the process of trying to finish her dissertation on a famous Chinese American poet named Xiao-Wen Chou, East Asian studies Ph.D. candidate Ingrid Yang discovers that Chou is a white man in yellowface and that the East Asian studies department is aware of this but purposefully continues to support Chou because he is the most famous faculty member at the university. As she investigates Chou’s yellowface, Yang confronts her identity and experience as an Asian American. This journey causes her to struggle increasingly with her conceptions of race and with her feelings for her white fiancé, Stephen – one of the novel’s many well-meaning white characters.
Within the first 50 pages of Disorientation, Hsieh Chou introduces us to a handful of instances in which well-meaning white people say something offensive or just plain awkward to Yang. For instance, over Yang’s engagement dinner, Stephen’s mother tells them, “You two are so brave…I know interracial couples aren’t accepted everywhere in this country…but your love is stronger than hate.” While Stephen’s mom certainly does not mean offense, her comments are unnecessary and act as a verbal pat on the back because unlike other places – and other people – in the country, she wants everyone to know that she and her family are accepting of an interracial relationship. In another scene, Yang overhears her faculty advisor, Michael, asking an undergraduate, “Have you, too, experienced an identity crisis related to being Chinese American, or as Chou said, ‘forever caught betwixt east and west’?” Like he did with Yang, Michael is pushing this student to become interested in Chou to further support his area of research. He is putting into this student’s head words and feelings they may not necessarily be feeling in the guise of support. Within three pages, Hsieh Chou introduces us to two of the situations with the greatest influence over Yang and the novel’s plot – her engagement to Stephen and her dissertation on Chou guided by Michael. In both cases, Stephen and Michael appear to be supportive individuals, but they also clearly have an unnatural fixation on Asian culture and race.
These two instances may not seem disturbing, but that is precisely Hsieh Chou’s point. She wants readers to understand that these well-meaning individuals’ comments and microaggressions are detrimental to Yang’s wellbeing and sense of self. In one scene, when Yang is looking for a man she hopes will help in her search for the real Chou, she meets a conspiracist named John Smith, who believes China is taking over the world. Even though this man accuses Yang of being a Chinese spy and hurls racial slurs at her, this run-in lasts only five pages. And besides the initial shock, Yang leaves the scene unharmed. For the most part, she feels more disappointed that this John Smith is not the one she is searching for. Meanwhile, the microaggressions she faces from well-meaning white people are sprinkled throughout the whole novel, speaking to how these microaggressions happen more often to Yang and affect her more.
Later in the novel, she returns home to retrieve a lucky rabbit foot. To find it, she must go through a box filled with mementoes from grades K-12. While doing this, memories flood back to her – boys making Kung Fu sounds at the exact moment she hits a ball in PE, kids slapping “made in Taiwan” stickers on her, and friends forcing her be the yellow Power Ranger when they played. Of these events, Hsieh Chou writes that Yang tolerated “the microscopic nicks and scrapes she sustained each day” alone. Hsieh Chou is not speaking of literal physical injuries, but rather of the nicks and scrapes Yang felt emotionally and developmentally from these experiences. Even at 29 years old, Yang remembers these memories and they still haunt her. The longevity of these events’ impact on Yang is shown in how little of Yang’s childhood she wishes to share with the current people in her life, and even with the reader. Unlike her colleagues who delight in sharing old photos of themselves online, Hsieh Chou writes that Yang has no desire to dredge up her former self, illustrating how traumatic these racial transgressions were to her.
These two aforementioned scenes – with conspiracist John Smith and with her ex-classmates – are relatively small instances within the novel. The two together serve more to highlight the difference between outright racism and subtle nicks than to act as major plot points. The larger issues that propel Disorientation forward are how Yang’s fiancé, Stephen; her academic advisor, Michael; and the white man pretending to be Chou, John Smith (not to be confused with conspiracist John Smith) are all well-meaning white individuals who negatively impact the lives of Asian Americans.
Out of the three, men like Stephen are arguably the most ubiquitous. These men hide their yellow fever behind their seemingly intelligent appearance, meekness, and excessive attentiveness. Throughout the novel, we get glimpses of the ways in which Stephen hides his Asian fetish by saying it’s work related (he’s a Japanese translator) and by being suffocatingly attentive to Yang’s needs (such as carrying a bleach pen around in case Yang spills something on herself). Surely because Stephen, and men like him, are so meek and attentive, they cannot be threats, right? As the novel progresses and she experiences a sort of racial awakening, Stephen becomes an aggravating and unnerving force in Yang’s life. Impacting Yang individually, Stephen continuously upstages her in a veil of love for her. As Stephen gains fame for his translation of a Japanese novel and Yang begins to question his interest in Asian culture, Yang gets mad at him for his obsession with Japanese culture. Misreading Yang, Stephen learns Chinese to surprise her at her own birthday party with her parents. By doing so, however, Stephen misplaces the attention from the birthday girl to himself, earning praise for his poor pronunciation of Chinese words. Essentially, he claims to learn Chinese out of love for Yang, but then uses it to upstage her on her birthday.
While the birthday scene only affects Yang, this well-meaning white man’s actions have a much wider effect on Asian Americans and how Asian culture is perceived within the novel. Even though his translation of the Japanese novel receives mostly praise, he does receive one negative review, critiquing his translation for hyper focusing on the sex scenes and deleting scenes in which the Japanese female narrator thinks, journals, and is shown as human. Stephen reacts angrily to this critique. However, since Yang becomes more aware of his obsession with Asia before this scene, she understands the reviewer’s critique and it troubles her. In one argument, Stephen defends Smith’s yellowface, saying he is “a man who devoted his entire life to a foreign culture” and “isn’t walking in each other’s shoes how empathy is created?” Yang snaps in response, arguing that of course Chou’s popularity aligns with Stephen’s goal because Stephen makes “a living from being an ‘expert’ in a foreign language” and that his job is like being “the gateway for non-Japanese people to access Japanese culture.” Herein lies the issue in a well-meaning white person who dedicates their life to a foreign culture – they control the narrative of that culture and how it is viewed by people within white society, regardless of whether or not it is accurate. It also, as Yang points out, takes opportunities away from Asian American and Asian individuals.
On top of Stephen removing opportunities from Asian Americans and Asians, Stephen’s role as a “gateway for non-Japanese people to access Japanese culture” is also problematic because he fetishizes Asian culture, particularly Japanese culture. As Yang digs into Stephen’s past, she learns his past girlfriends were all Asian. Since we do not learn the exact type of Asian each girlfriend is, it can be assumed that Hsieh Chou purposefully did not include their countries of origin to show how for Stephen, any Asian girl is good enough – an argument that is only strengthened by the fact that Stephen refers to Yang as Chinese continuously despite her being Taiwanese. His fetish for Asians in general is only compounded by the fact that he had purchased a schoolgirl outfit – one of the main images on Diorientation’s cover – for Yang. Anyone familiar with yellow fever understands that the Japanese school girl fetish is a popular fetish that both sexualizes underage girls and infantilizes grown Asian women. Between his work as a translator and his sexual preferences, Stephen is portrayed as a dangerous, well-meaning white person. He is exactly the type of white male that would be referred to colloquially and derogatorily as a weeb and is the epitome of the white men love Asian women joke.
Like Stephen, Michael, Yang’s dissertation advisor, is a white man interested in Asian females. He has a Chinese wife that he found when he was “looking for love…in Shanghai” and describes her in stereotypes of Chinese women – “The absolute picture of femininity. Grace, beauty, virtue. The way she held her chopsticks!” The way he describes their meeting exposes his yellow fever, because what sort of non-Chinese person purposefully heads to Shanghai for love if not out of a fetish? Like Stephen, Michael is damaging in that he is a well-meaning white person who enjoys being an expert on your culture. Like Stephen, he profits from being an expert on Asian culture and acts as a gateway to Chinese culture as the head of the East Asian studies department and as the foremost scholar on Chou. As the head of the department, Michael is more damaging than Stephen because he has institutional support and because he can paint his interest as “academic,” not a fetish. He also wields influence over students at the university. A few examples include the aforementioned scene in which Michael asks the undergraduate if they relate to Chou and that Yang never wanted to study Chou. She only researches Chou because as her academic advisor, Michael pushed her to do her dissertation on him. While one could view this as a well-intended action because Michael wanted to help connect her with her Chinese American roots, the problems are that Yang is Taiwanese and that Yang never had an interest in Chou. Michael pressured her to do so because it suits his position as the most-famous Chou scholar to keep Chou relevant and it benefits the university to have continued academic interest in Chou because he was their most famous faculty member. The worst part of all of this is that not only did Michael pressure Yang to study something that benefits him more than it does her, but that Michael is aware that Chou was actually a white John Smith the whole time. By encouraging Yang and other Asian American students like her to study Chou and embrace his work, Michael deceitfully attempts to legitimize Chou’s voice by having Asian Americans lend their support to a fake Chinese American artist.
Undoubtedly, within Disorientation, John Smith is the biggest offender out of all of the well-meaning white people. Smith paraded as a poet named Xiao-Wen Chou by doing yellowface. Within the realm of the novel, Chou is recognized as the most well-known Chinese American poet. For clarification, Chou is believed to be dead in the novel. Smith explains to Yang that he got tired of pretending to be Chou, so he killed Chou off. In one eulogy Yang watches, a speaker says “we are most indebted to Chou for his role in demystifying China and articulating the Chinese American immigrant experience.” By pretending to be a Chinese American, Smith continues a long tradition of white people trying to convey to Asian Americans what Asia is really like and of being an expert on your culture (Think: PF Chang’s is owned by white people, a white woman started a business that claimed to make congee for the Western palate, chop suey font). What makes this increasingly problematic and damaging is that Chou paints China from an orientalist perspective and paints China as mystical and exotic – the image of China that white people desire.
Chou’s work also plays into damaging stereotypes of Chinese Americans. Vo, the postcolonial studies Ph.D. candidate, explains one of her papers, “Pleasing the White Master: Traditional Asian American Literature and the Good Little Immigrant Myth,” to Yang, saying, “I argue that Chou did a disservice to Asian American advancement by writing literature that upheld the model minority myth and other destructive stereotypes. That, rather than call into question his relationship to whiteness, he produced literature white people wanted him – no, needed him – to write.” One example in which Smith perpetuates Asian American stereotypes through his Chou persona is how in his play, he “didn’t want the actors to pronounce their l’s and r’s,” a choice that perpetuates Asians’ inability to speak “perfect” English and plays into the idea of them being “perpetual foreigners.” While Yang tries to convince herself that Smith had “never meant to hurt anybody,” Smith did hurt Asian American advancement as Vo argues by playing into these stereotypes. Through Vo insisting that Smith’s work is damaging to Asian Americans, Hsieh Chou argues that Smith’s intentions are unimportant because the impact of his work is ultimately damaging. By Michael and the university supporting Smith’s charade as Chou, his work becomes even more damaging because it holds institutional power and because his work becomes the basis for several Asian Americans’ academic careers, absorbing years of their graduate study, and having untold impact on their psyches. In the case of Yang, she does not earn her Ph.D. At her dissertation defense, she chooses to expose the university and Michael for all the ways in which they protected Smith and perpetuated his work’s importance instead of moving forward with her defense. She is violently removed from the auditorium and thus ends her eight-year long career as a Ph.D. student. She leaves with no degree, showing how Michael and Smith together damage one woman’s life.
Ultimately, through Stephen, Michael, and Smith, Disorientation argues that well-meaning white people can still be dangerous and detrimental to Asian Americans. They may appear supportive, loving, and understanding, but it’s through their lack of understanding and their well-intended off comments that they effectively shut down our voices and use theirs to establish themselves as experts on our culture, thus defining who they think we should be. Hsieh Chou’s novel shows that white peoples’ well-intended fascination with Asian culture can lead to dangerous fetishes and damaging stereotypes. It is an affirmation that all of the awkward, uncomfortable conversations and questions Asian Americans have faced from well-meaning non-Asian individuals are in fact damaging. We are not being sensitive when we leave these conversations and experiences feeling disgusted, angry, disillusioned, or used. Disorientation is affirmation that these run-ins are detrimental to our wellbeing.
Disorientation is available from Barnes & Noble, Eso Won Books, Kinokuniya, The Last Bookstore, Skylight Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.