The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker FROM THE PUBLISHER
What is race for? That bracing question animates every page of The Accidental Asian, a powerful work from one of the nation's leading young voices. In these personal and poignant reflections on assimilation, Eric Liu articulates a vision of American identity that will provoke and inspire. Weaving narrative and analysis into a series of elegant essays, Liu addresses a broad range of questions: Is whiteness America's fundamental race problem? Are Asian Americans really the New Jews? Should we fear the rising might of China? What does a journey through Chinatown reveal about our own lives? What might intermarriage mean for Asian Americans - and for the future of race itself?
SYNOPSIS
A personable and poignant defense of assimilation, written in the tradition of Richard Rodriguez and Henry Louis Gates Jr., in which one of the nation's leading Asian American voices tackles issues of race, identity, and politics.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
In this candid, well-crafted memoir, Liu, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, explores his identity as a second-generation Chinese American. Although he was raised to assimilate, Liu recalls that his discomfort as an adolescent when trying to fit in was problematical because his hair and skin tone marked him as different from those around him. He also shares haunting memories of traveling to China and visiting his grandmother in Manhattan's Chinatown, events that engendered ambivalent emotions both of alienation from and attraction to his heritage. Liu's concerns about the concept of "Asian American," which he regards as based on physical characteristics rather than shared ethnicity, are rendered thoughtfully, as are his positive feelings about intermarriage. (His wife is a white Southerner with a Jewish grandmother.) He is impassioned, however, about the fallout from a scandal surrounding the activities of democratic fund-raiser John Huang. When Liu calls New York Times columnist William Safire "a Jew and defender of Jews" for unfairly stereotyping Asian Americans because of Huang's questionable actions, this strikes a discordant note.
Library Journal
Part memoir, part treatise, this slim book will sound familiar at first to any Chinese: being called banana, nerd, yellow, slant-eyed, buck-toothed. And Liu describes typical clashes between Chinese parents and their Americanized offspring. But Liu, a political commentator and speechwriter for Clinton, at present attending Harvard Law School, cogently discusses such topics as Chinese being called the "New Jews," the meaning of Chinatown, fear of the "yellow planet," and problems of assimilation. In particular, Liu offers insightful and original comments about being Asian American, a construct that is totally false but one he has learned to use because of the many positive consequences. Liu has researched his topic well, citing Peter Kwong's and Ronald Takaki's works, among others.
Library Journal
Part memoir, part treatise, this slim book will sound familiar at first to any Chinese: being called banana, nerd, yellow, slant-eyed, buck-toothed. And Liu describes typical clashes between Chinese parents and their Americanized offspring. But Liu, a political commentator and speechwriter for Clinton, at present attending Harvard Law School, cogently discusses such topics as Chinese being called the "New Jews," the meaning of Chinatown, fear of the "yellow planet," and problems of assimilation. In particular, Liu offers insightful and original comments about being Asian American, a construct that is totally false but one he has learned to use because of the many positive consequences. Liu has researched his topic well, citing Peter Kwong's and Ronald Takaki's works, among others.
Kirkus Reviews
Provocative musings on the subjects of race and identity from the perspective of a second-generation Chinese professional. Liu, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, recounts his past and present struggles with his Chinese identity in a society into which he has easily assimilated. Caught between two cultures, Liu finds himself at home in neither. In trying to define something uniquely Chinese about his upbringing as the son of two educated upper-middle-class professionals, Liu recalls his father's "honorable" struggle to hide from friends and family members his years on dialysis after his kidneys failed. "As a Chinese boy in an American world, I was accustomed to facades," he states. But in retrospect he wonders if this concern with image and normalcy is particularly Chinese or simply human. Now, as a Harvard Law student married to a white woman, Liu is conscious of his race primarily when racism rears its head, as it did in the recent scandal over whether the Chinese government attempted to influence the 1996 presidential election. Otherwise, Liu's sense of himself as an Asian-American is purely "accidental," an invented identity thrust upon him and other Asians who have almost nothing in common. They do not, for instance, share a common religious faith or heritage, which makes it even harder for them to identify as a distinct group. Ambivalent throughout as to the values of particularism versus universalism, Liu finally emerges as a universalist who chooses not to incorporate Chinese ritual into his wedding. "I certainly won't want to infect my Chinese-Scotch-Irish-Jewish children with bloodline fever. I won't force them to choose among ill-fitting racial uniforms," he writes. Incisive, balanced, and frank, The Accidental Asian deals persuasively with the often-overlooked struggles Asian-Americans face in defining their identity in the turbulent American landscape. (Author tour)
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