{"id":1539,"date":"2019-12-18T10:48:33","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T15:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2019-12-18T15:56:40","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T20:56:40","slug":"asian-american-longing-to-be-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/han\/asian-american-longing-to-be-white\/","title":{"rendered":"The Asian-American Longing to be White"},"content":{"rendered":"

Born in Kyushu, Japan to her <\/span>issei <\/span><\/i>(first-generation immigrant) mother Hide Shiraki Yasutake, Mitsuye Yamada lived in Japan for the first three-and-a-half years of her life, raised by a neighboring family (her mother had returned to Seattle, Washington immediately after giving birth). In fact, Yasutake herself, as the speaker of Yamada\u2019s poem \u201cHomecoming,\u201d shares the profound emotional guilt she felt for leaving her daughter in Japan, and that she had done so only to care for her two sons back in Seattle, one of whom was gravely ill. Powerfully, Yasutake notes that it was the love she had for her children which allowed her to persist through such heartache. She tells her daughter that life would be too painful without such love, morbidly referencing her friend, a mother of eight, who had committed suicide by hanging: \u201ccould not know what pains to live \/ without love \/ my friend kill \/ herself hang \/ her family with eight children \/ don\u2019t know \/ how she could \/ do it for good reason \/ I think of her often \/ bring me comfort\u201d (\u201cHomecoming\u201d 51-61). <\/span>Yamada continued moving back and forth between Kyushu and Seattle throughout her childhood, but remained in America once she began attending Cleveland High School in Beacon Hill, Seattle, a residential area known for its large Asian demographic. <\/span><\/p>\n

Chinese-American feminist poet Nellie Wong, a contemporary of Yamada, describes in her poem “When I Was Growing Up” of her stark lack of self-acceptance (with respect to ethnicity) during childhood and of how sh<\/span>e had desperately longed to be white. She describes the self-hatred for her dark skin: \u201cand no matter how much I bathed, \/ I could not change, I could not shed \/ my skin in the gray water\u201d (Wong 50-52). Furthermore, despite having grown up in America, Wong became increasingly self-conscious of her minority status, as \u201cbeing Chinese was feeling foreign, was limiting, was unAmerican\u201d (Wong 30-32).<\/span><\/p>\n

Pressured by the profound longing to assimilate into white girlhood, Wong notes how she had even begun to \u201c[feel] ashamed \/ of some yellow men, their small bones, \/ their frail bodies,\u201d hoping one day to live in \u201cpurple mountains . . . uncongested with yellow people in my area \/ called Chinatown, in an area I later \/ learned was a ghetto, one of many hearts \/ of Asian America\u201d (Wong 37-39, 54-60). Note therein the latter half of the quote, taken from the penultimate stanza, Wong\u2019s subtle, positive change in tone with respect to her views of Asian-Americanness. First describing Chinatown a \u201cghetto,\u201d Wong quickly appends to the city\u2019s description its status as the \u201cheart\u201d of Asian America, suggesting pride and appreciation where there was once shame and disgust. The final stanza begins, \u201cI know now that once I longed to be white,\u201d a beautiful, succinct demonstration of Wong\u2019s departure from her self-conscious, adolescent self (Wong 61).<\/span><\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHomecoming.\u201d <\/span>Camp Notes and Other Poems<\/span><\/i>, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, pp. 4\u20135.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wong, Nellie. \u201cWhen I Was Growing Up.\u201d <\/span>This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color<\/span><\/i>, by Moraga Cherri\u0301e and Anzaldu\u0301a Gloria, 4th ed., SUNY Press., 2015, pp. 5\u20136.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Born in Kyushu, Japan to her issei (first-generation immigrant) mother Hide Shiraki Yasutake, Mitsuye Yamada lived in Japan for the first three-and-a-half years of her life, raised by a neighboring family (her mother had returned to Seattle, Washington immediately after … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-han"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1586,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}