By Justine Trinh
CW: suicide
As stated on my Soapberry Review bio below, my research interests include family and trauma, and specifically how they relate to the second generation. While this topic is broad and covers many different facets, some of the things I look at are how the second generation can tell their own stories. When I met author Joanna Ho at a library signing event and she inscribed in my copy of The Silence That Binds Us the words“let’s take back the narrative,” my interest was piqued. I knew this was a book I needed to read.
Maybelline “May” Chen is not the perfect Chinese Taiwanese daughter. While Celeste Wu, the daughter of family friends, just got a summer internship at Google, and May’s brother, Danny, just got into Princeton, May wants to be a writer, which is not the expected STEM career path. Compared to Celeste and Danny, May is not seen as high achieving as them. But despite the exciting news of his Princeton acceptance, Danny quietly struggles with depression and commits suicide, shocking his friends and family. While May and her family are reeling from their loss, Nate McIntyre, a prominent white businessman, accuses May’s parents of putting too much pressure on Danny, which led to his suicide, and blames “the Asians” for “being the real problem” because they are “the real reason [the white] kids are more stressed.” May wants to fight back against these racist accusations, but her parents order her to remain quiet. Instead of listening to her parents, May challenges Mr. McIntyre’s harmful words through her writing and takes back the narrative.
I struggled reading this book, and I had to separate myself, as a person in her twenties who has become jaded by systems of oppression, from the reader who would have appreciated this in their teens. Growing up during the time of Twilight and the Hunger Games, many of the protagonists of these young adult books I read were white with people of color as support characters. While these books were enjoyable at the time, it was clear that people who looked like me were not the main characters and these stories were not about people like me. If The Silence That Binds Us came out when I was a teenager, I would have devoured it because May looked like me and I have experienced some of the issues that the book discussed. This is not to say there is not still a dearth of diversity within the publishing industry, because there is. It is like what actor Manny Jacinto said: “At the end of the day, Tom Cruise is writing stories for Tom Cruise. It’s up to us—Asian Americans, people of color—to be that [for ourselves]. We can’t wait for somebody else to do it. If we want bigger stories out there, we have to make them for ourselves.” So, I commend Ho for writing this book that focuses on Asian American issues.
I did appreciate that Ho mentions topics within Asian American history. When I was May’s age, I had no idea that Asian Americans had a place in American history because it was not taught in my high school history classes where colonial history was prioritized. The books I read did not mention anything about the Chinese laborers that worked on the railroads or the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; I did not know enough to even Google these things. I just knew I was Asian, and I did not belong. It never occurred to me that I was Asian American.
The Silence That Binds Us introduces teen readers to these concepts. While Ho’s descriptions of Chinese laborers are not extensive essays, they still give her readers enough key terms to look it up themselves if they want to know more. For people who grew up within the American school system, this could be their first time ever hearing about this history, and they can get interested early on instead of learning all these things later in life or never at all.
Ho also discusses Black and Asian solidarity and Black Lives Matter in a way accessible to her teen readers. One of my biggest criticisms of Ryan Lee Wong’s Which Side Are You On was how didactic it was, and while at times Ho’s work comes off as didactic, it has to be because of her young adult audience. The nuanced conversations that May and her friends are having are difficult ones to broach, and Ho frames them as learning moments like when May asks her Black friends Marc and Tiya what André Johnson, a Black kid that was shot and killed by the police, did to warrant such attention. May initially thinks that the cops must have been called for a legitimate reason such as stealing something, and she cannot fathom that they murdered him because of his race. Throughout the book, May learns about the challenges her Black peers face as well and realizes that she was wrong to assume André committed a crime that led to him being killed. However, Ho makes it clear that it is not up to people of color to explain themselves and their culture, but it is our responsibility to educate ourselves as Tiya tells May, “I want to be able to talk with you about race, but I don’t want to be your coach.”
My jadedness with this book comes in the form of personal experience. As I wrote in my review of Mimi Khuc’s dear elia, I have experienced racism before when another graduate student in my department told me I spoke an English that needs to be translated. This person said this to me in front of other people, and this was not an isolated incident as she continues to do and say racist things towards me. While my department administration conceded that it was inappropriate for her to say those things to me, they wanted to protect the other student and themselves because they themselves did not want to come off as racist towards the other graduate student, who is also a person of color. No one stood up for me, and no one supported me when I stood up for myself. Among my peers I was met with apathy, and I was told to get over it. So, I could empathize greatly with the racist comments that were said to May and her family because I know how it feels to be the target of such vitriol and told to remain silent.
But at the same time, it was hard for me to suspend my belief that there were a great number of students who would come together against social injustice based on my own personal experience. Although May is met with some resistance by the Black Student Union and the Asian American Student Union, they still band together and attend the rally to speak up against social injustice. This is not to say people have not come together to protest or speak out against social issues, but I am also aware of the growing wave of apathy that makes it hard to mobilize people. I understood within the young adult genre, this happy ending was necessary, but a part of me struggled with this aspect. However, the more I thought about this, I realized that this reflected a world I wanted to be real. I want students and people that are passionate enough to come together when someone like Nate McIntyre wants to blame a certain community of color for his problem. I want communities to stand in solidarity because racism affects all of us, not just a specific community.
Despite my personal jadedness and gripes, The Silences That Binds Us comes at a time that is necessary and introduces young adult readers to more nuanced perspectives on race. I have two younger cousins that are eleven right now, and I cannot wait for them to discover this book and start having these kinds of conversations that they are having at school or at home. The idea of people of color being the “problem” is not going away anytime soon and is reproduced in supposedly liberal places such as the university. I want my cousins and people younger than me to be prepared for these attitudes now and to also realize they have community—because this is the only way to “take back the narrative.”
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.