Sketch: "Eye Contact" in Shawn Wong's American Knees
Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase, first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first prize from the Society of Professional Journalists in the humor category in 1997.
Most commentators agree that his novels are works written to disturb the conceptions about Asians being merely sojourners, silent, passive, nerdy, and asexual. In an interview quoted by Philadelphia City Paper’s Betty Liu, Wong points out that Asian-American writing often focus on the immigrant experience. As he says, “I sat down to write a book that would move us up a couple of generations in an urban environment. We go shopping, we go to barbecues, we eat potato chips. We’re also racist.”
American Knees / Americanese
The title, American Knees (1996), has several references: One, it is based on a backyard chant where the singer lifts the corners of their eyes up and down and say, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.” Variants also include outright questions: “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Dirty Knees?” and “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Americanese? You must be Dirty Knees.” (“Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, Look at These”) As such, there is the fundamental reference to what one looks like, to the physical, generally speaking, implying that this physical difference is the main difference between Asians and Caucasians – though it also implies lumping all of Asians apart from the Chinese and Japanese to just dirty knees. This can be understood to refer to the stereotypical notion of “Yellowface” based from the incredulous idea that all Asians look alike, even to other Asians.
Two, according to a review of the work in Melus, it is an allusion to Americanese, making it sound like a race, though it is actually referring to a body part. If we take the title as Americanese, it refers to, on the one hand, the racial element of identity in being Asian American, and if we take it to mean American Knees, on the other, it refers to the element of physicality in identity. The review continues, as the title is “appropriated to body parts and not nationality, [the work] is Wong’s attempt to scramble the codes of Asian American nationality.” (Chiu 132) That is, the work forces its readers, who I presume are Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike, to grapple with questions of identity: are the characteristics of the characters in the novel elements of their race or nationality, or of their physicality? We shall see these questions and the characters’ thoughts on these questions, in “Eye Contact.”
Without the benefit of reading through the whole novel, I resorted to the Encylopedia of Asian-American Literature for a brief description of the other characters in the novel. The work revolves around some other characters than the ones in “Eye Contact”: Brenda Nishitani, Aurora’s best friend, who only dates white men; Betty Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee haunted by the memories of war; Raymond’s recently widowed father, who wanted him to marry a Chinese picture bride; and the two we get to meet in the chapter, Aurora Crane, a Japanese/Irish-American photographer who, though at first did not give any real thought to it, eventually became “confused about her mixed identity;” and finally, the protagonist, Raymond Ding, “an intelligent 40-year old assistant director of minority affairs at a community college.” (Su-lin Yu 16)
“Eye Contact”
“He [Wong] confronts issues of gender, race, and sexuality in Hollywood style... The novel narrates a comical, touching love story about an Asian-American couple who must negotiate family traditions, racism, and sexism. Wong’s intentions of writing the novel are not only to expose the falsehood of the stereotypes but also to demonstrate the diversity within Asian America.” (Su-lin Yu16) Taking this description of the book’s themes from the Encylopedia as my framework, I will discuss issues with family traditions, sexuality and sexism, as well as race and racism, in line with the larger and multifaceted question of identity within the chapter.
Issues with family tradition
I’ll just deal with this briefly, since the chapter did not explicitly contain this theme. We can somehow see this in Aurora, when she admits that “she was not at home with mother meeting not so coincidentally her mother’s idea of a ‘nice Japanese boy’.” Raymond, moreover, seems to be the epitome of this issue, as he is described by both Liu’s review and the Encylopedia as one who “betrays his duty of being a good Chinese son by getting divorced” from the perfect Chinese American wife. He also refuses to follow his father’s wishes that he marry a Chinese picture bride, and succeeds in “bedding almost every woman in the book.” This theme is also portrayed in Raymond’s eventual acceptance that he was no longer a good Chinese son, and his realization that there are more essential things than keeping up with “his ‘good’ Chinese image” (Chiu 132).
Sexuality and sexism / race and racism
What interests me in this short part of the work is that Wong integrates fundamental issues – especially sexism and racism, as one under identity in the context of preference, through the multiple soliloquies and monologues presented throughout the chapter.
Liu states that “Wong’s novel is a humorous and multi-faceted look at inter- and intra-radial dating among Asian-Americans, his characters... [are] not the typical sons and daughters of a Confucian family struggling with... American pop culture...”. This struggle in sexism and racism is seen in the context of dating preferences interspersed throughout the chapter. For instance, when Aurora realizes, to her horror, that it was only she and Raymond who were Asians in the entire party, she automatically knows that almost all of the other guests would try to introduce them to each other, since “it made sense to them” (508) to do so. She speculates about what their conversation would then be like: it would be a long series of awkward questions dancing around racial identity: the barely concealed crassness in “What are you?” to the devious “Where are you from?” masking the real, inept question, “What nationality are you?” or “What are you, you know, what race?” until whoever it was she was talking to patronizes her and touches her skin without permission as though she was exotified by virtue of being half something and half Asian. Or, in some instances, she speculates, some people would not ask, but would squint “as if squinting can detect racial ancestry and blood lines,” until they, perhaps including Raymond, would realize that she was some sort of Asian (509).
She continues her observation: unlike black men greeting each other with “hey, home. What it is?”(510), Asian men, especially with Asian women, do all they can to avoid even eye contact. As she states, “Asian people could tell she was part Asian, perhaps not part Japanese, but something. They would know at first eye contact. This eye contact thing between Asian men and Asian women was where the war began. This is how it happens.” (510) This war is based on the fundamental question of identity, in terms of the implications of acknowledging fellow-Asians, especially between men and women, in America. In fact, the entire chapter is about this acknowledgment of sameness amid glaring difference within a White society, which manifests itself in one form: Asians stereotyping Asians themselves. In the work, “cultural stereotyping... is twofold – imposed by the culture and self-inflicted.” (Asian American Novelists 393) That is, this recognition by stereotyping manifests in a sort of racism towards your own kind, simultaneously catering to the sensibility of the imposition of American culture. (I see this then as a double movement.) Aurora was almost begging to be right about Raymond to be Chinese: “Oh, it would be so Chinese to bring oranges. And of course, the plastic shopping bag – Chinese Samsonite. He was made.” (510) Though “she knew she was being cruel,” (511) she cannot help but be like her friend who says, “We deserve once in a while to find one that’s already been made over with the cute clothes, contact lenses, cute haircut, nice shoes by some other woman.” (511) In short, her friend is saying that if the person happens to be Asian, at least he should have made himself into someone trying to fit in well with society. She herself shares this strange sensitivity to cater to the White attitude towards Asians, thinking condescendingly, “perhaps she should speak a little to the ‘Oriental’ at hand in case people were watching.” (512)
On the other hand, Raymond was also speculating about what their conversation would be like. Finally sitting on the opposite ends of a piano bench after entering via separate doors, they are thrown together by virtue of racial similarity while engaging in this double movement of cultural stereotyping. He thinks, “Was she part Korean or Japanese?... Or maybe he was altogether wrong and she was native Alaskan or Indian or Latino? What a relief that would be.” (513) An irony comes full force with the acknowledgement of their belongingness, similar to the Buddhist yin and yang – what we may think as the resources the first-generation immigrants had put on the pedestal of their identities – but this line of thought ends with the pronouncement, “that was just so much Orientalism under the rug.” (513) As Raymond says, “Eye contact, then it’s gone.” (514) Both Raymond and Aurora want to be politically correct in White society and its White expectations, both eager to “get over this Asian thing between them.” (513) What the first generation venerated, i.e., the Asian heritage they took with them all across the Pacific Ocean, seemed to have become an “Asian thing” for the second generation, tacitly acknowledged and recognized, although almost as a chore or a burden.
This is concordant to the White stereotyping in lumping Asians together and assuming that they are all alike and they naturally belong together and at the same time stereotyped together. For instance, when later on Aurora and Raymond kiss on top of the top of the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, they are automatically assumed to be shooting an Asian movie, making Raymond feel “conspicuously Chinese.” (515) These assumptions disregard that Asians are as diverse, if not more, than White American society. As stated, Wong wanted to break the stereotypes surrounding the uniformity of Asian culture as seen by White society. As such, just because Asians in White America share certain features does not mean they do not assess and discriminate each other by virtue of difference in race as well as gender. This explains the awkwardness of the hypothetical conversations going through Aurora’s and Raymond’s heads, that there seemed to be no proper, politically correct way of asking what each other’s races were, since Americans have already labelled them as Asians and they were both catering to the sensibility behind this umbrella-label by mainstream White society. This also explains their respective reliefs in having established each others’ races, which also takes the pressure off from the paradoxical expectations of Whites and makes them eventually establish a relationship.
Identity
Their connection happened in the kitchen, where “No one interrupts them because they’re the only Asians at the party” (515) while once in a while someone says “oh, I’m glad you two [Asians] have met.” (515) Away from White expectations, they do manage to avoid the awkwardness of questions establishing race, and eventually managed the start of what turned out to be a very sexual / physical relationship on the one hand and a racially-tinted one on the other. Again, American Knees and Americanese. Both Aurora and Raymond wonder, fundamentally, whether their respective concerns about who they were stem from questions of race. It is Wong’s brilliance that makes questions of physicality in terms of sexuality and questions of physicality in terms of race that questions of identity are formed. This intertwining can be seen in the homonymity of American Knees and Americanese (the latter as a metonymy for all things American).
For Aurora, questions of identity occur within her desire to be stable, to be strong. In order for her to be strong she thinks she has to “inherit a son’s sense of the world,” utilizing the very English metaphor of King Lear “handing the kingdom over to the loyal daughter” (522) knowing that she will never be part of that inheritance – and this is where the integration of identity and race come in – because “she is not white. She’s part white, but it still makes her not white.” (522) As Liu’s review puts it, Aurora’s life question is an identity crisis: “which half [of herself] is empty and which is half full or is she just a half-peeled banana?”
In being a “child of many colors,” (512) as Raymond speculates about her namesake, she seemed to be the person in the chapter whose main desires centered around the human, as “in reality [she] only wanted to know how long Raymond’s hair was and what he wore,” (523) sometimes missing the fact that what defines her in her context is also fundamentally connected with “the race issue.” (523)
Being a child of many colors, she rebelled against and simultaneously wanted to be a half-peeled banana, always in view of White American assumptions about minority communities. That is, her struggle, very much like Raymond’s as we shall see later, are rooted in the separation, if indeed there can be a separation, among the human and race and the physical and ultimately, identity.
Raymond’s questions of identity was more pronouncedly racial, who “argues with himself about race and gender, about race and identity being a flimsy excuse, a coverup, a scapegoat.” (523) Having found his identity in the sixties, when “Negroes became Blacks and Raymond became ‘Asian American’ without a hyphen,” (523) he would throw the terms “biracial” in the sixties and “multicultural” in the seventies, as though adopting these terms would make it easier to grapple with his own questions. In the chapter, we see his character development and struggle mostly through explicit sexual encounters, making Wong’s integration of sexuality and race more defined, as stated, Wong is overturning the Asian stereotype of being repressed, and “devoid of sexual prowess.” (Liu) What Wong ends up creating, according to Liu, is “an oversexed male character who sleeps with almost anything,” overcombatting the said stereotypes in a satirical fashion. More important than that, however, is Raymond’s entire character and its facets: being the son who rebels against tradition, being the assistant director of minority affairs at a community college which repressed his “banana tendencies,” and made him “see everything in terms of ethnic implications,” (Su-lin Yu 16), being the lover who has to understand, in the end, that “true love is beyond racial and ethnic differences.” (Su-lin Yu 16)
As such, he is the perfect complement to Aurora, who almost jumps straight to human concerns (almost bypassing race), while he is fixated on justifying racial issues, almost missing the human. Also, Aurora, being a half-peeled banana, and he, the unpeeled banana – or, “ he’s popcorn – you know, yellow yellow yellow yellow until you put him under pressure, then he turns white.” (132) In the end, however, they get back together, presumably understanding how to understand how banananess figures into their very identities.
Conclusion
It made sense to me that the reference to the chant, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” with the accompanying pulling of the corner of the eyes to make them slant, can easily be associated with the chapter’s title. For one, slanted eyes are stereotypically Asian, and eye contact refers to the very awkward and almost dreaded contact between Raymond’s and Aurora’s presumably slanted eyes, and all that ensues with this contact. The slanted eye makes the first contact, and seeing that it is another slanted eye that it makes contact with, the relation suddenly and always already becomes overburdened and overdetermined with racial questions and fundamental matters of identity pressured from both mainstream White society and other Asian communities. Again, “Eye contact, and then it’s gone.” In the chapter we see one of the most powerful messages regarding race, that it “was always present in public and in private,” (523) making it enmeshed with all of the characters’ relationships and identities: through the slanted eyes of one another and through the bigger eye of American society. There is also, however, the eye contact within the private and the public, between Asian minorities and Whites, between Asians and Asians, and within the privacy of one’s own self, which gets reflected, and seen, by the public – Asian and non-Asian alike. These contacts, because ultimately they do not just take place by the eyes but with entire mindsets and worldviews, make it impossible to fully separate questions of race from questions of sexuality from questions of gender from questions of identity.
Hence, the relevance of the chapter’s title cannot be overstated: actual eye contact is twofold (and not just in the sense of two people sharing eye contact): the eye that sees, physically, biologically, and the eye that understands what it sees, ethnically or racially, sexually. Identity is built along all these levels and means of seeing. It is ultimately the human that Wong wants to focus on, utilizing characters that only happen to be Asian, while integrating and problematizing the multi-faceted concerns of just happening to be a minority: the automatic weight of race and face (if you are Asian, that is) to the question of identity. Questions relying on the double movement of self-inflicted and external cultural stereotyping, then, must have a terminus: the human.
Works Cited
Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. 2000. Google Books.
“Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, Look at These.” Everything 2. 2001.
Chiu, Monica. “American Knees by Shawn Wong.” Melus 22.1 (Spring 1997): 132-134.
“Shawn Wong.” University of Washington.
Su-lin Yu, “American Knees.” Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature. Seiwoong Oh. 2007. Google Books.
Wong, Shawn. “Eye Contact.” Handout for ELL 325. 508-524.
Most commentators agree that his novels are works written to disturb the conceptions about Asians being merely sojourners, silent, passive, nerdy, and asexual. In an interview quoted by Philadelphia City Paper’s Betty Liu, Wong points out that Asian-American writing often focus on the immigrant experience. As he says, “I sat down to write a book that would move us up a couple of generations in an urban environment. We go shopping, we go to barbecues, we eat potato chips. We’re also racist.”
American Knees / Americanese
The title, American Knees (1996), has several references: One, it is based on a backyard chant where the singer lifts the corners of their eyes up and down and say, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.” Variants also include outright questions: “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Dirty Knees?” and “Are you Chinese, Japanese, or Americanese? You must be Dirty Knees.” (“Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, Look at These”) As such, there is the fundamental reference to what one looks like, to the physical, generally speaking, implying that this physical difference is the main difference between Asians and Caucasians – though it also implies lumping all of Asians apart from the Chinese and Japanese to just dirty knees. This can be understood to refer to the stereotypical notion of “Yellowface” based from the incredulous idea that all Asians look alike, even to other Asians.
Two, according to a review of the work in Melus, it is an allusion to Americanese, making it sound like a race, though it is actually referring to a body part. If we take the title as Americanese, it refers to, on the one hand, the racial element of identity in being Asian American, and if we take it to mean American Knees, on the other, it refers to the element of physicality in identity. The review continues, as the title is “appropriated to body parts and not nationality, [the work] is Wong’s attempt to scramble the codes of Asian American nationality.” (Chiu 132) That is, the work forces its readers, who I presume are Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike, to grapple with questions of identity: are the characteristics of the characters in the novel elements of their race or nationality, or of their physicality? We shall see these questions and the characters’ thoughts on these questions, in “Eye Contact.”
Without the benefit of reading through the whole novel, I resorted to the Encylopedia of Asian-American Literature for a brief description of the other characters in the novel. The work revolves around some other characters than the ones in “Eye Contact”: Brenda Nishitani, Aurora’s best friend, who only dates white men; Betty Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee haunted by the memories of war; Raymond’s recently widowed father, who wanted him to marry a Chinese picture bride; and the two we get to meet in the chapter, Aurora Crane, a Japanese/Irish-American photographer who, though at first did not give any real thought to it, eventually became “confused about her mixed identity;” and finally, the protagonist, Raymond Ding, “an intelligent 40-year old assistant director of minority affairs at a community college.” (Su-lin Yu 16)
“Eye Contact”
“He [Wong] confronts issues of gender, race, and sexuality in Hollywood style... The novel narrates a comical, touching love story about an Asian-American couple who must negotiate family traditions, racism, and sexism. Wong’s intentions of writing the novel are not only to expose the falsehood of the stereotypes but also to demonstrate the diversity within Asian America.” (Su-lin Yu16) Taking this description of the book’s themes from the Encylopedia as my framework, I will discuss issues with family traditions, sexuality and sexism, as well as race and racism, in line with the larger and multifaceted question of identity within the chapter.
I’ll just deal with this briefly, since the chapter did not explicitly contain this theme. We can somehow see this in Aurora, when she admits that “she was not at home with mother meeting not so coincidentally her mother’s idea of a ‘nice Japanese boy’.” Raymond, moreover, seems to be the epitome of this issue, as he is described by both Liu’s review and the Encylopedia as one who “betrays his duty of being a good Chinese son by getting divorced” from the perfect Chinese American wife. He also refuses to follow his father’s wishes that he marry a Chinese picture bride, and succeeds in “bedding almost every woman in the book.” This theme is also portrayed in Raymond’s eventual acceptance that he was no longer a good Chinese son, and his realization that there are more essential things than keeping up with “his ‘good’ Chinese image” (Chiu 132).
Sexuality and sexism / race and racism
What interests me in this short part of the work is that Wong integrates fundamental issues – especially sexism and racism, as one under identity in the context of preference, through the multiple soliloquies and monologues presented throughout the chapter.
Liu states that “Wong’s novel is a humorous and multi-faceted look at inter- and intra-radial dating among Asian-Americans, his characters... [are] not the typical sons and daughters of a Confucian family struggling with... American pop culture...”. This struggle in sexism and racism is seen in the context of dating preferences interspersed throughout the chapter. For instance, when Aurora realizes, to her horror, that it was only she and Raymond who were Asians in the entire party, she automatically knows that almost all of the other guests would try to introduce them to each other, since “it made sense to them” (508) to do so. She speculates about what their conversation would then be like: it would be a long series of awkward questions dancing around racial identity: the barely concealed crassness in “What are you?” to the devious “Where are you from?” masking the real, inept question, “What nationality are you?” or “What are you, you know, what race?” until whoever it was she was talking to patronizes her and touches her skin without permission as though she was exotified by virtue of being half something and half Asian. Or, in some instances, she speculates, some people would not ask, but would squint “as if squinting can detect racial ancestry and blood lines,” until they, perhaps including Raymond, would realize that she was some sort of Asian (509).
She continues her observation: unlike black men greeting each other with “hey, home. What it is?”(510), Asian men, especially with Asian women, do all they can to avoid even eye contact. As she states, “Asian people could tell she was part Asian, perhaps not part Japanese, but something. They would know at first eye contact. This eye contact thing between Asian men and Asian women was where the war began. This is how it happens.” (510) This war is based on the fundamental question of identity, in terms of the implications of acknowledging fellow-Asians, especially between men and women, in America. In fact, the entire chapter is about this acknowledgment of sameness amid glaring difference within a White society, which manifests itself in one form: Asians stereotyping Asians themselves. In the work, “cultural stereotyping... is twofold – imposed by the culture and self-inflicted.” (Asian American Novelists 393) That is, this recognition by stereotyping manifests in a sort of racism towards your own kind, simultaneously catering to the sensibility of the imposition of American culture. (I see this then as a double movement.) Aurora was almost begging to be right about Raymond to be Chinese: “Oh, it would be so Chinese to bring oranges. And of course, the plastic shopping bag – Chinese Samsonite. He was made.” (510) Though “she knew she was being cruel,” (511) she cannot help but be like her friend who says, “We deserve once in a while to find one that’s already been made over with the cute clothes, contact lenses, cute haircut, nice shoes by some other woman.” (511) In short, her friend is saying that if the person happens to be Asian, at least he should have made himself into someone trying to fit in well with society. She herself shares this strange sensitivity to cater to the White attitude towards Asians, thinking condescendingly, “perhaps she should speak a little to the ‘Oriental’ at hand in case people were watching.” (512)
On the other hand, Raymond was also speculating about what their conversation would be like. Finally sitting on the opposite ends of a piano bench after entering via separate doors, they are thrown together by virtue of racial similarity while engaging in this double movement of cultural stereotyping. He thinks, “Was she part Korean or Japanese?... Or maybe he was altogether wrong and she was native Alaskan or Indian or Latino? What a relief that would be.” (513) An irony comes full force with the acknowledgement of their belongingness, similar to the Buddhist yin and yang – what we may think as the resources the first-generation immigrants had put on the pedestal of their identities – but this line of thought ends with the pronouncement, “that was just so much Orientalism under the rug.” (513) As Raymond says, “Eye contact, then it’s gone.” (514) Both Raymond and Aurora want to be politically correct in White society and its White expectations, both eager to “get over this Asian thing between them.” (513) What the first generation venerated, i.e., the Asian heritage they took with them all across the Pacific Ocean, seemed to have become an “Asian thing” for the second generation, tacitly acknowledged and recognized, although almost as a chore or a burden.
This is concordant to the White stereotyping in lumping Asians together and assuming that they are all alike and they naturally belong together and at the same time stereotyped together. For instance, when later on Aurora and Raymond kiss on top of the top of the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, they are automatically assumed to be shooting an Asian movie, making Raymond feel “conspicuously Chinese.” (515) These assumptions disregard that Asians are as diverse, if not more, than White American society. As stated, Wong wanted to break the stereotypes surrounding the uniformity of Asian culture as seen by White society. As such, just because Asians in White America share certain features does not mean they do not assess and discriminate each other by virtue of difference in race as well as gender. This explains the awkwardness of the hypothetical conversations going through Aurora’s and Raymond’s heads, that there seemed to be no proper, politically correct way of asking what each other’s races were, since Americans have already labelled them as Asians and they were both catering to the sensibility behind this umbrella-label by mainstream White society. This also explains their respective reliefs in having established each others’ races, which also takes the pressure off from the paradoxical expectations of Whites and makes them eventually establish a relationship.
Identity
Their connection happened in the kitchen, where “No one interrupts them because they’re the only Asians at the party” (515) while once in a while someone says “oh, I’m glad you two [Asians] have met.” (515) Away from White expectations, they do manage to avoid the awkwardness of questions establishing race, and eventually managed the start of what turned out to be a very sexual / physical relationship on the one hand and a racially-tinted one on the other. Again, American Knees and Americanese. Both Aurora and Raymond wonder, fundamentally, whether their respective concerns about who they were stem from questions of race. It is Wong’s brilliance that makes questions of physicality in terms of sexuality and questions of physicality in terms of race that questions of identity are formed. This intertwining can be seen in the homonymity of American Knees and Americanese (the latter as a metonymy for all things American).
For Aurora, questions of identity occur within her desire to be stable, to be strong. In order for her to be strong she thinks she has to “inherit a son’s sense of the world,” utilizing the very English metaphor of King Lear “handing the kingdom over to the loyal daughter” (522) knowing that she will never be part of that inheritance – and this is where the integration of identity and race come in – because “she is not white. She’s part white, but it still makes her not white.” (522) As Liu’s review puts it, Aurora’s life question is an identity crisis: “which half [of herself] is empty and which is half full or is she just a half-peeled banana?”
In being a “child of many colors,” (512) as Raymond speculates about her namesake, she seemed to be the person in the chapter whose main desires centered around the human, as “in reality [she] only wanted to know how long Raymond’s hair was and what he wore,” (523) sometimes missing the fact that what defines her in her context is also fundamentally connected with “the race issue.” (523)
Sometimes she felt that... [Raymond] treated his ancestry as a gift to her that would make sense of who she was. She knew she didn’t have to be with Raymond to simply say to herself that she was Japanese American even though some people find it difficult to see it in her face. Being with Raymond people assumed she was Asian and didn’t have to guess. She found herself explaining less, but at the same time wanting to harbor the definition of herself that she had to defend against while growing up.
Being a child of many colors, she rebelled against and simultaneously wanted to be a half-peeled banana, always in view of White American assumptions about minority communities. That is, her struggle, very much like Raymond’s as we shall see later, are rooted in the separation, if indeed there can be a separation, among the human and race and the physical and ultimately, identity.
Raymond’s questions of identity was more pronouncedly racial, who “argues with himself about race and gender, about race and identity being a flimsy excuse, a coverup, a scapegoat.” (523) Having found his identity in the sixties, when “Negroes became Blacks and Raymond became ‘Asian American’ without a hyphen,” (523) he would throw the terms “biracial” in the sixties and “multicultural” in the seventies, as though adopting these terms would make it easier to grapple with his own questions. In the chapter, we see his character development and struggle mostly through explicit sexual encounters, making Wong’s integration of sexuality and race more defined, as stated, Wong is overturning the Asian stereotype of being repressed, and “devoid of sexual prowess.” (Liu) What Wong ends up creating, according to Liu, is “an oversexed male character who sleeps with almost anything,” overcombatting the said stereotypes in a satirical fashion. More important than that, however, is Raymond’s entire character and its facets: being the son who rebels against tradition, being the assistant director of minority affairs at a community college which repressed his “banana tendencies,” and made him “see everything in terms of ethnic implications,” (Su-lin Yu 16), being the lover who has to understand, in the end, that “true love is beyond racial and ethnic differences.” (Su-lin Yu 16)
As such, he is the perfect complement to Aurora, who almost jumps straight to human concerns (almost bypassing race), while he is fixated on justifying racial issues, almost missing the human. Also, Aurora, being a half-peeled banana, and he, the unpeeled banana – or, “ he’s popcorn – you know, yellow yellow yellow yellow until you put him under pressure, then he turns white.” (132) In the end, however, they get back together, presumably understanding how to understand how banananess figures into their very identities.
Conclusion
It made sense to me that the reference to the chant, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” with the accompanying pulling of the corner of the eyes to make them slant, can easily be associated with the chapter’s title. For one, slanted eyes are stereotypically Asian, and eye contact refers to the very awkward and almost dreaded contact between Raymond’s and Aurora’s presumably slanted eyes, and all that ensues with this contact. The slanted eye makes the first contact, and seeing that it is another slanted eye that it makes contact with, the relation suddenly and always already becomes overburdened and overdetermined with racial questions and fundamental matters of identity pressured from both mainstream White society and other Asian communities. Again, “Eye contact, and then it’s gone.” In the chapter we see one of the most powerful messages regarding race, that it “was always present in public and in private,” (523) making it enmeshed with all of the characters’ relationships and identities: through the slanted eyes of one another and through the bigger eye of American society. There is also, however, the eye contact within the private and the public, between Asian minorities and Whites, between Asians and Asians, and within the privacy of one’s own self, which gets reflected, and seen, by the public – Asian and non-Asian alike. These contacts, because ultimately they do not just take place by the eyes but with entire mindsets and worldviews, make it impossible to fully separate questions of race from questions of sexuality from questions of gender from questions of identity.
Hence, the relevance of the chapter’s title cannot be overstated: actual eye contact is twofold (and not just in the sense of two people sharing eye contact): the eye that sees, physically, biologically, and the eye that understands what it sees, ethnically or racially, sexually. Identity is built along all these levels and means of seeing. It is ultimately the human that Wong wants to focus on, utilizing characters that only happen to be Asian, while integrating and problematizing the multi-faceted concerns of just happening to be a minority: the automatic weight of race and face (if you are Asian, that is) to the question of identity. Questions relying on the double movement of self-inflicted and external cultural stereotyping, then, must have a terminus: the human.
Works Cited
Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. 2000. Google Books.
“Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, Look at These.” Everything 2. 2001.
Chiu, Monica. “American Knees by Shawn Wong.” Melus 22.1 (Spring 1997): 132-134.
“Shawn Wong.” University of Washington.
Su-lin Yu, “American Knees.” Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature. Seiwoong Oh. 2007. Google Books.
Wong, Shawn. “Eye Contact.” Handout for ELL 325. 508-524.
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