“Being a quiet, good model minority serves white supremacy until it doesn’t. And suddenly, if there’s a war with an Asian country, down you go. You’re now the enemy, you’re the spy,” said Taiwanese American author Elaine Hsieh Chou during her event on USC campus Wednesday morning.
Chou finds herself grappling with the complicated concepts of culture, background and identity both in her life and in her new collection of short stories called “Where Are You Really From?”
The event format featured Chou in conversation with Dr. Dorinne Kondo, the former Director of Asian American Studies at USC. They discussed Chou’s new book and its complex themes of prejudice and the development of individual identity as it pertains to environment and culture.
“It’s rare to find writing that resonates so much with these specific experiences of being in academia, especially as a marginalized person,” said Ariel Chu, a Taiwanese American PhD candidate at USC who attended the event. “So it was really insightful to come talk to her and hear about her process and also about her relationship with institutions like these.”
Chou is a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction and Thurber Prize for American Humor Finalist for her past works. Additionally, she authored “Disorientation”, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, which she is now set to adapt for the screen in partnership with AppleTV+.
Her work centers on Asian American struggles with identity and acceptance — a topic Chou has personally reckoned with.
“If you write explicitly about race, you can be accused of trauma porn,” Chou said. “If you don’t write about race at all, you’re self-hating, you’re not supporting community, you’re invisibleizing us when we already have no representation or very little representation.”
Mindful of achieving the perfect middle ground, as well as of her own life experiences, Chou has used her work to tell stories she finds important, unexpected and challenging, both to read and to write.
“All of the stories I wanted to write give space to Asian American characters and Asian characters that I just hadn’t seen that often, which is what I wanted us to be: grotesque and messy and cruel, and not just the quietly striving model minority immigrant,” Chou said.
Throughout their conversation, Chou and Dr. Kondo shed light on the importance of stories like those featured in “Where Are You Really From” by drawing from their own life experiences as Asian American women in academia.
Dr. Kondo shared her own journey as a PhD candidate at Harvard, highlighting what it was like to be the only woman of color in the space at the time, and the importance of increased Asian American representation in literature as these issues continue to impact individuals across generations.
“[We’ve both encountered] various experiences of sexism, racism, misogyny, you know… different decades, and yet there’s a theme and a thread that connects us,” Dr. Kondo said.
Conversations, such as those sparked by the complicated themes showcased in “Where Are You Really From,” are becoming increasingly relevant for Chou’s readers as the political landscape in the U.S. shifts.
“Some people have told me it’s quite tied to what’s going on with immigration,” Chou said. Although the messaging feels timely, she was never worried about the novel’s relevance.
“I wrote that in 2018 or 2019. Like, America just sucks,” Chou said.
She shared that although her work centers around Asian heritage, in her new novel, she also confronts the complexity of the tension that persists in the duality of her identity.
“What does it mean to be American when it’s just imperialist and exploitative? Like, is this an identity that I even want?” Chou said. “But when people denied me, suddenly I would want to stake a claim to be like, I am American. Because, regardless of how I feel about America, I’ve been raised by America.”
The title of Chou’s collection of short stories stems from the common micro-aggressive question she herself has been frequently asked throughout her life: “Where do you really come from?” She has often felt that her answer has not been satisfactory to any group, and hopes to challenge the status quo with the content and characters in her new anthology.
“I think I’ve realized by now that one of my fixations is being othered, and how it intersects with being fetishized and hypersexualized, Chou said. “I hope [my] readers can feel uncomfortable, and go with me to the darker places that do make you feel uncomfortable.”