Chinese American Chick Lit
January 23, 2004
Are there really guys who prefer East over West when it comes to hooking up?Yes, according to Lindsay Owyang, the protagonist in The Dim Sum of All Things.
These men, “hoarders of all things Asian”, creep up on unsuspecting Asian women in bookstores, restaurants, park benches and coffee houses — heck, just about everywhere.
“My husband and I both notice it,” laughs author Kim Wong Keltner. “One time he said, ‘Look at that white guy sitting alone in the Chinese restaurant with the Cantonese-English dictionary.
“Just because you’re not Asian and you happen to be going out with someone Asian doesn’t mean you have a fetish. But I think there are people who target Asian women because they’ve seen so many images of the Asian woman as the back-scrubbing peon who will do anything she’s told to do.”
Published this month by Avon Trade, Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things obsesses over race, sex and identity issues while exposing and at times perpetuating stereotypes in the Asian Pacific American community:
“Lindsey didn’t want to be part of one of those interracial couples where the woman was attractive enough but the white guy was inevitably: a) overweight b) bald c) spore-like …
“Lindsey looked up for a moment and fixed her eyes on a skinny Chinese man sitting a few tables away. His bad posture and lack of muscles, paired with his camellia-white skin, inspired another vignette.”
In these passages and throughout the novel, Wong Keltner writes about what she knows. Third-generation Chinese American on her mom’s side and fourth on her paternal side, she grew up in San Francisco and attended Lick-Wilmerding, where she was one of the few APA students. Like Lindsey, she hated Chinese school and felt more American than Asian. But she wasn’t always comfortable with her identity.
“Little situations happen at work or in social situations; someone says some weird thing and you say to yourself, ‘Should I tell them that what they said was totally racist or will I appear uptight?’ I think every Chinese American goes through that at least a little bit.”
Wong Keltner describes in her book a real-life situation where a friend complains to Lindsey that Asian girls are “stealing all of our men.”
“Her friend is referring to all the Caucasian guys that she wants to go out with who have Asian girlfriends. Her friend says, ‘Oh, I don’t mean you, you’re white anyway.’
“Lindsey is conflicted. Does she tell her friend, whom she never knew had these thoughts, ‘That’s a really messed up thing to say’? But she is tongue-tied.”
So much of Dim Sum mirrors Wong Keltner’s life that even her father has mistaken Lindsey for his daughter. Wong Keltner says, “The character, Lindsey, has a deformed toe, and I heard my father saying to my mom, ‘Does Kimmy have a midget toe?’ ”
In reality Wong Keltner, 34, is married to speech therapist Rolf Keltner. She started writing Dim Sum in 2000 after the death of her maternal grandmother, Lucy, on whom Lindsey’s grandmother (Pau Pau) is based.
When Wong Keltner started dating her husband, she was worried about what her parents and grandparents would think because he wasn’t Chinese. Similar to Lindsey, she discovered that her grandmother was far more tolerant than she expected. “Maybe because she had gone through war, she had seen so much, she couldn’t get worked up about a little thing like that,” she says.
Dim Sum started as a tribute to Lucy. “I wanted to remember her, and I knew that a few years go by and you forget those silly, funny, subtle things. So I started writing about her and just let it go where it took me. I didn’t have a linear process. I wrote all the things I felt and then took all of those components and put them together.”
Wong Keltner, who has degrees in English and art from UC Berkley, was working at Mother Jones magazine at that time. She spent nights writing, and after two-and-a-half years, the book was complete.
She hopes the book inspires other APAs to write. “I think there’s a serious lack of stories that tell modern Chinese American stories. Everyone I know, they work at Oracle, they work at regular jobs. They might be disassociated with their Chinese culture. If they find out about anything Chinese, like Feng Shui, it’s from InStyle magazine. They’re like everybody else.”
As well as working on her second novel, Wong Keltner has a new job as a mom. Her 5-month-old daughter, Lucy, is named after her grandmother.
The author says she plans to nurture her daughter’s Chinese heritage. “I don’t speak Chinese, but my husband and I want our daughter to learn. I went to so many years of Chinese school and hated it.”
When pressed about the hypocrisy, she adds, “Yeah, I don’t know how I’m going to swing that one. Maybe we’ll have to go together.”
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