There's a story behind the title of Paisley Rekdal's collection of
essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. It happened in a Chinese
restaurant in the 1960s, where a young high school student was beginning to
realize she more than likely wouldn't be heading off to college after
graduation, and a recent arrival alienated his coworkers with his sullen
demeanor and his tendency to do martial arts when he should be working.
"She met Bruce Lee before he became the archetype of Asian American kitsch,
the exotic kung fu fighter," Rekdal explains. "And I found it odd that the
figure that would not assimilate ultimately became successful, while my
mother, who was born and raised in America and taught from the get-go to
assimilate, could not succeed in the way that she wanted to succeed."
Rekdal's essays consider what it's like to be a biracial American both in the
United States and in Asia; she relentlessly examines her feelings of alienation
and her relationships with her family and friends. There's a strong
metaphorical aspect to the unfolding of her accounts which Rekdal attributes
to her primary self-identification as a poet; in fact, she's released her first
book of poems, A Crash of Rhinos, almost simultaneously.
RH: What prompted you to switch from poetry to essay
writing?
PR: I had never really thought about writing about biracialism until I
was at graduate school, and someone in my poetry class, the only black woman
in our program at the time, accused me of being ashamed of being half
Chinese. I hadn't really thought I was ashamed; I had never even thought
about my biracialism before. Around that time, I went to Taiwan with my
mother and I saw her really struggling to try to fit in to Taiwanese society,
trying to appear to be more Chinese than she really was. Suddenly, I saw her
as being potentially ashamed of me being half Chinese. That's when I went
back and I wrote the essay, "We Do Not Live Here, We Are Only Visitors." At the
time, I thought that was it; I was never going to write about this subject again.
Then I was living in Asia and traveling around, and a lot of these subjects kept
coming back, so I started writing more and more about it. But I never thought
I could write poetry about it--I always thought of poetry as sort of being
beyond race, beyond my family life. I felt like the essay form would allow me
to tell and explain a lot of things that poetry, the form itself, wouldn't let me
do.
RH: Though you have written the occasional poem about your
family life. Including one poem that tells a story about your
grandfather...
PR: ...and his laundromat, right. [As a child, Rekdal was told that,
during the Second World War, her grandfather had bought a laundromat from
a Japanese neighbor who was about to be imprisoned by the government, and
that he gave it back years later for the same price.] I wrote that poem way
before I knew that the laundromat story was actually false, had never taken
place.What's interesting in that poem is the idea of my grandfather's morality.
What kind of character was he? It doesn't deal at all with the fact that the
story isn't true. It treats the story as if it's absolutely true. When I found out
that it wasn't necessarily a true event, I thought about pulling the poem from
the book; then I realized that these are the aspects of growing up in my family,
and it would be nice if my child could see both of them.
RH: You'll tell your child the story of your grandfather in the
laundromat, because of what it says about your mother that she
told this story about her father.
PR: Yes. I was thinking that if there is an ideal reader for these pieces,
it would probably be a child, another family member later on who wants to
understand what sort of ethnicity they came from, that their mother struggled
with. So I think it is an important story to have, even if it isn't true.
Most of my experience is that there isn't one absolute truth, but you have the
sense that there is, you know, that if you could just figure out . . . Maybe this
has to do with me being biracial and constantly feeling like I'm thinking in
several different ways about how people might be perceiving me. And
somewhere in all these different perceptions, there is a true Paisley. I always
feel it's the same way with family stories, with people in general, which is that
there's a true individual and then there's the way that that person gets
represented in daily life.
Lying is a big theme that comes through the book, I hope. Lying and
miscommunication, literal and metaphorical miscommunications. I'm
fascinated with the way that people try and represent themselves and yet
easily get misrepresented through the stories they might tell or the stories
they want to tell, or the lies that they tell about themselves in order to make
themselves different. My family is sort of a perfect representation of that;
they don't like to talk about some of the stories that make them Chinese-
American because they want to be seen as normal, and as soon as you have
stories that make them seem exotic or different or strange in any way, they
suddenly cease to become "norma"l Americans.
It was a conscious choice on my grandmother's part not to teach my mother
and her brothers Chinese, not to tell them the stories of what she'd gone
through, so that they would be become as American as possible. But now,
interestingly, my mother is interested in it, I'm interested in it, and it's a way
of figuring out, well, how am I going to be normal if I don't understand
whether I'm normal or not?
RH: When you were living in Asia, there were frequent
misunderstandings between you and your hosts or your employers
about what was expected of you.
PR: It goes back to that idea of stories. They had this story about me and
how I was supposed to behave, what I was supposed to want to eat, what I was
going to look like...based on their idea of what it means to be American. At the
same time, I had my story about what it means to be Korean. Somewhere
between those two stories was the truth and we could not seem to worm our
way through these various stories to actually communicate.
RH: There's also a feedback effect to some extent; being aware
of their conception of you influenced your own conception of
yourself and your identity. That particularly comes through when
you write about your boyfriend's visit to Korea, and how the way
your Korean students viewed him affected your relationship.
PR: It was frustrating. At some point, I just had to separate myself from
it, be very aware of what was happening. Once I started seeing our
relationship the way my girls saw it ... it was not the way I wanted to have a
relationship. I didn't want to have a cutesy love, filled with hearts and flowers
and all these unrealistic expectations. I also didn't want a relationship that was
about a white guy dating an exotic Asian. And I didn't like the idea of
privileging white male beauty in this [Korean] environment. But as soon as I
was able to say, "Well, wait, my relationship is ultimately apart from society,
even if it does have these political connotations," then I was able to deal with
how it was viewed by others.
RH: Looking back at these experiences, many of which are not
pleasant, must have been difficult.
PR: Maybe it's because I write poetry, but I tend to think metaphorically
and I tend to think in terms of emotional events, lining things up emotionally,
and chronology falls by the wayside. The trick here was to create essays that
mimicked a journalistic sense of what had happened at the time, but to
manipulate them so that the emotional content of totally random events
somehow flowed together and created its own story. That meant I had to
change characters occasionally. I had to put dialogue from other friends in
different friends' mouths. I had to totally mess around with the chronology in
order to line things up .
Eventually, I was able to look at myself very clinically. I try and use myself as
a figure to be critiqued in several essays. When, in Japan, I deny being half
Chinese, for example, I want the readers to say, "Wow, I can see why she would
come up with that, but it's wrong." I want them to understand emotionally
what went through my mind, even if they don't agree with it.
RH: Do you want to continue with essay writing, or return to
poetry?
PR: I just finished a second manuscript of poetry that deals with
transgender issues, and with art, femininity, and morality. It's a weird
collection, but I really like it. I'm starting to send it out now. I also just
finished the second draft of a novel called Homecoming Queens, but it's a
radically different book, more a black comedy meets murder mystery. I think
I'm going in very different directions [than the essays].
RH: It certainly seems like this book is a self-contained work
that says everything you need to say about the subject.
PR: That's how I felt too. I had said to myself that once I was finished
writing these essays, I wouldn't have to think quite so much about the topic of
biracialism. I talk in the book about becoming race-obsessed; while I was
writing this book, I was. Once you start writing something, suddenly you see
images of your topic everywhere. It's a relief for me to finish these essays, so
I feel like I can step back and take a more objective perspective and enjoy the
conclusions that I've come to--which are that I'm biracial and it's fine.
RH: As you said earlier, as a poet, you're really more concerned
with more universal themes and issues.
PR: Yes, though I hesitate to not think of some of the themes in this
book as universal. People have asked me that a lot: "Why should somebody
who's not biracial read this book?" The search for identity is absolutely
universal, and I would imagine any immigrant culture has these stories. Irish
Americans have these sorts of stories. Jewish Americans have these sorts of
stories. Chinese, Japanese, African Americans have these stories. And lying
and miscommunication happens across gender too. So I would hope that
people see this book both as a very personal book about biracialism and as a
universal book about how identity gets formed through other peoples' eyes
and your own mythmaking.
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