Meet the Researchers:
Narratives of difference
Interview with Professor Betsy Huang
As a native of Taiwan now living in the United States, English professor Betsy Huang has been especially drawn to narratives whose characters struggle with differences based on race, ethnicity, and culture. In a recent conversation, summarized below, she talked about her interests in ethnic American literature and in science fiction, and how, ultimately, these two seemingly different genres are related.
What drew you to the study of English?
I think people usually answer that question by saying that one has always been a reader, has always loved reading fiction or poetry. I have a variation on that narrative. When I was about seven or eight, living in Taiwan, someone gave me a set of world literature-both eastern and western-translated into young adult Chinese. I started reading these texts, everything from ancient Chinese classics to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dickens.
For me, that reading experience was an encounter with different cultures. The people in these texts were people who were very different from those I saw on a daily basis. Then I moved to the United States at the age of ten and re-read many of the same works, but this time in the original English or in English translation. I think that fiction has not only always been my means of escape, it has also trained me from an early age to take an interest in cultures different from my own.
But here I can add a more familiar narrative-that of Chinese immigrant families. When I immigrated to the U.S. with my parents, we dealt with-and are still dealing with, to some extent-many of the issues that typically concern immigrants: how to establish new roots in the U.S. while maintaining ties to Taiwan, how to climb the socio-economic ladder, how to deal with the rather pervasive racism even in the ethnically diverse New York City, where we settled. Reading continued to be my means of learning and escape, but in those years it was clear that my parents valued my interest in literature as a hobby, but not as a viable career option. Children of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. are typically pushed toward science or business professions. Professions in the arts or humanities are generally not encouraged nor accepted.
Why do you think that is?
The feeling among many Chinese immigrants is that when you immigrate to the United States, you do so for economic opportunities. The discourse of economic opportunity is that you have to be practical and pursue a profession that allows you to accrue property and wealth.
The American Dream.
Yes, but on a purely financial level. The ideological dimensions of the American dream-freedom of choice, the ability to have a voice in government-those things are secondary to the more materialistic aspects. The study of literature is not one of those "practical" paths. This is not to say that Chinese immigrants are only concerned with material wealth. Their encouragement of more "practical" professions for their children often reflect what they perceive to be the only way to secure membership in the American society.
Consequently, I planned to study engineering when I entered college. But after one semester, I dropped engineering and took up English. I realized I had to decide early on what I wanted to study, and engineering was not it.
It must have been a difficult choice for you to make in the face of family expectations.
Yes. I had a lot of persuading to do with my parents. To this day they're still resistant to my decision!
And when I took up literature as my major, I studied primarily British and American literature. It wasn't until my graduate program that I was exposed to ethnic-American literature, and then I realized that my story is very much the same as those told by many immigrant writers, or writers that are sons and daughters of the immigrant generation. Then the fire was lit in me to study the struggles of ethnic minorities in this country as told through literary narratives.
In addition to the identification with your personal experience, what is it about the portrayal of cultural conflict that you find compelling and important?
In a broad sense, I think the U.S. is very ambivalent about this concept of ethnicity. On the one hand it touts ethnic diversity as a strength. But on the other hand, I think many Americans are very fearful of the increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural face of the American populace.
The U.S. is struggling with what it wants. On the one hand it wants to say it is a nation of immigrants, and that it's the most ethnically and culturally diverse country in the world. It wants to be seen around the world as a model for democratic pluralism. But on the other hand, we don't need to look far to see in this country all kinds of conflicts that are primarily the results of ethnic tension.
Right now the relationship between race and ethnicity in the U.S. is particularly interesting. For the most part I think that we're moving away from discourses of race, because supposedly-and this is more of a neo-conservative idea-we're beyond race. Supposedly we've figured out that race is a social construct and we know how to deal with that.
But now I think ethnicity has become the center of everyone's anxiety. Ethnicity is a much more flexible term than race. On the one hand, ethnicity denotes kinship and sameness, but on the other it's a term that is used to establish and recognize difference. It captures that ambivalence that the U.S. has towards cultural difference. And fiction covers many of the nuances of people's daily struggles with ethnic difference.
Coming from an American perspective, I think you're right about that ambivalence. And if that ambivalence wasn't so strong, I don't think there would be so much emphasis placed on continually saying how wonderful diversity is. It's as if we're trying to convince ourselves that multi-culturalism is a good thing.
Yes. Absolutely. I think you have your finger on it. We're trying to convince ourselves that ethnic diversity is a good thing, but we're not quite convinced. Many people simply don't know how to deal with difference. For them, difference is only acceptable if you can find some point of similarity that then humanizes the other person.
Perhaps the attitude is that it's okay if you come to this country and you're not like us right away, but you better hurry up and become like us.
That's the assimilationist discourse. Assimilation is taken to be something that all immigrants should go through, the process in which the ethnic Other transforms into an American Self. From this perspective, to become American oftentimes requires the erasure of one's ethnic background and markers-things like language, dress, and cultural practices.
Of course, the desire to be among people who are like you appeals to everyone, both those who are "ethnicized" and those who are not. There are very insular ethnic communities, like New York's Chinatown, for example, that are very suspicious of outsiders. In a broad sense, ethnicity becomes a way for individuals and groups to distinguish between insiders and outsiders.
What are you focusing on right now in your research?
This summer I'm looking at literary representations of ethnic politicians in the U.S., particularly in the 1996 novel Native Speaker, by Chang-Rae Lee. What makes this particular novel interesting is that it portrays a Korean-American city councilor in New York City who might or might not run for mayor. All of the obstacles that he has to deal with as an ethnic politician are brought to light. How does he represent a particular ethnic population on the one hand, but also present himself as someone who could represent the interests of all Americans, regardless of ethnicity? He wants to be both ethnic and American, and it seems that oftentimes there's no middle ground. In our current political discourse, one is either ethnic or American. Media coverage of political issues prefers to reduce complex issues to binary terms, and it's difficult for a politician with a hyphenated identity to work outside of these binaries. He or she has to figure out what is "American" in the eyes of the dominant culture and give a convincing performance of it, or risk being discredited as an "ethnic pol" with narrow, specialized interests
Yes, I'd also like to do some research in the area of science fiction. Science fiction appeals to me because it and ethnic-American literature seem to share a similar preoccupation with difference. They share the same linguistic and thematic vocabulary, and they both address, analyze, and deconstruct notions of race, alienness and alienation, immigration and its more sinister relative, "invasion," the native versus the foreign. When I teach my science fiction or ethnic literature courses, I feel I can rely on the same theoretical models to interpret the literary texts. So it seems to me that there's something to be explored there.
I would think that any literature dealing with difference would appeal especially to college students, because at that time in their lives they're trying to form their own identities and figure out where they fit in.
Yes. Ultimately, all of this is about identity-individual, communal, ethnic, national. I think this body of literature appeals to them because difference is the broadest term we can use to talk openly about otherness and deal with multiple aspects of oneself. No one is completely and utterly normal. Everybody feels "other" in one way or another. That might be based on their ethnic background, or sexuality, or even in terms of mainstream versus subcultural kinds of practices. So I think that if we could enable people to understand ethnicity in the broadest possible way, that it's not just about giving ethnic minorities voices in the dominant culture, but that it's about how everybody is ethnic in one way or another, and how we negotiate those differences. And we need to figure out how to deal with difference on the level of difference, and not accept them only if you can find some degree of sameness.
Can you talk about some potential research directions available to undergrads in English?
There are archives throughout the country that have extensive collections of writings by immigrants. I'd like to work with students to delve into these collections. Historians have been very good at working with some of these primary materials, but their task has been primarily to recover suppressed or ignored history. I'm more interested in literary production, and I think this is an understudied area.
Students are also very tuned in to popular culture, which is where race and ethnicity tends to get taken up, commodified, and strategically employed.
I would like to encourage students interested in this area of research to immerse themselves in very ethnically diverse urban areas-like Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Chicago, Boston, or even right here in Worcester-to understand how richly ethnic American culture is. I'd like them to compare the narratives generated by different ethnic groups in the country-members of the dominant culture included-and reconceptualize what we understand to be "American" about American literature. While many of our students come from cities, others come from more rural or suburban areas that, while perhaps more racially diverse than in the past, may still be quite culturally homogenous. I would encourage these students to seek out fellowships, like Clark's Anton Fellowship, for example, and other sources of funding that would allow them to go to places that would radically change, through observation and analysis, the way they understand race and ethnicity.
I hope that students will approach me to consider of some of these possible projects. Also, I hope that, as more students take courses in ethnic American literature, we'll begin to design new projects that will allow us to think about ethnicity in new and more positive ways.