Born Confused

There aren't a great many of Asian consciousness fiction novels. I wasn't expecting Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier to be excellent, but it surprised me in being quite good. Granted, parts of the book were somewhat shallow although considering that this is about teenage girls, (not that all of them are shallow it wasn't overly surprising.

Dimple seems to be rather fortunate in her parental lottery not necessarily just because she has a whole family as is pointed out in the book, but because of her parents' openness and a certain amount of flexibility in their thinking.

I do think that the novel runs a bit longer than it needed to. It will probably not reach the heights of the joy luck club and is certainly not as serious, but it's a book that weaves the clash and confusion of two different cultures for a more modern feel. Modern day clash seems to be less dire although it still exists and this novel achieves that tone well.

Understanding as a Political Tool

Most Americans don't know very much about Asia beyond the fact that everything seems to be produced in China, the Japanese are kinda weird, and Indians get all of our outsourced work. This doesn't paint a great picture of Asia. We asians should try harder to spread a greater understanding of who we are. This is in keeping with my feeling that not explaining how we can't handle certain situations the same way as a white family in this post is lazy. Without an understanding of who we are, how can we expect our political goals to achieve the greater part of sympathy?

Many Taiwanese take part in political parties back home and may have some affiliation with groups in the US which are trying to break the glass ceiling for those who work here. We put the facts of how our numbers in high ranking positions are lower than they should be despite our obvious academic achievements. I feel that a part of our problem is a lack of understanding of our culture and who we are. We don't have that many notable artists (more on the lack in a later post) which try to bring our story into the American consciousness (beyond kung fu movies) so we have to get our story out in other ways. This includes explaining in better detail how are family situations are instead of just assuming others won't be able to understand.

The LGBT movement has had a great amount of success in part because most people know 1 or 2 and those 1 or 2 are very vocal about their situation. Obviously, our situation may not be quite as dire. We have a relatively good standard of living because of our high education level, but that ceiling is still there.

So, Asians, think about how to explain your life and tell people who are not asian because inside the group we understand. Outside, there needs to be more understanding.

A Bit of Intro

Before I get too deep into explaining things, I feel a bit of introduction is required to give you some perspective of where my views come from.

I am a second generation Taiwanese-American. This means that my parents immigrated to the US (they are considered first generation), and then I was born here. There is sometimes some confusion about what the consider children who immigrate to the US. I would say that a child who immigrates here before the age of 10 could be considered to have a mindset similar to a second generation although they are technically still first generation. I digress.

I consider myself to be more Asian than not although that is certainly not always the case, and is largely dependent on how Asian the population in the area that a child grows up in is and how traditional/insistent the parents are. I feel I had a greater degree of freedom in terms of career choice and being able to go out with friends. I had a few Asian friends who had a lot of restrictions in those regards. I also had Asian friends who had a lot more freedom to go out all the time, grades were not a huge concern, and generally didn't seem to have too much pressure at home. The latter type really wasn't the norm. The spectrum between mine and the first type of family is generally the reality.

So it is from the second generation perspective of a not too restrictive household that I set off to explore some issues.