I’ve just completed two semesters as a Freshman Composition teaching assistant at Purdue University. As an Asian American instructor working in a small, rural Midwestern town, it has been difficult for me to utilize Asian American texts effectively in the classroom. This is not because the university insists on a strictly white curriculum (Purdue lets me teach whatever I want) but because explaining anything to do with race to small-town Indiana college kids is a challenge.
Last semester, I taught Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, Shortcomings, to my students. One was confused and dismayed by the Asian lesbian character, and others were confused about the main character’s sway toward assimilation and about the forces that impacted this flow. Stripped of any understanding or curiosity about the intersection of race and desire in relationships, my students could only see Tomine’s characters out of context.
The character Ben Tanaka, for example, spends a lot of time whining as a way to hide his disdain for his Asian American girlfriend’s interest in Asian American film and as a way to hide his secret desire for white women.
My students considered Ben Tanaka a one-dimensional character – merely a man who whines for no reason except to unnecessarily annoy his girlfriend. At best, a few perceptive students might say things like, “It seems like he’s ashamed of his culture and wants to be more accepted.”
“Yes, and what about his culture is he ashamed of, and who does he want to be accepted by?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” the student answers.
I don’t press the issue too far beyond this. Doing so would mean pressing the issue far beyond the scope of what my class is designed to teach, which is freshman rhetoric and composition.
My friend, a fellow college instructor from the Midwest, suggested that ignorance can be positive because it presents the instructor with the opportunity to be the person to help students see the world in new ways. She believes that working with these students offers a chance to guide them through something more than just smooth transitions between paragraphs and the proper use of MLA citations.
When I taught Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Interpreter of Maladies, I found that students were talking for the first time in their lives about immigration, assimilation and political issues outside of the U.S. At the same time, I’ve often asked myself: aren’t my young students supposed to be more hip, progressive and attuned to contemporary culture than me, a suburban man in his late 30s?
Not necessarily. At Purdue, I feel obliged to bring in books articles and films that will give my students more exposure to a diversity of cultures and viewpoints, perhaps more so than I would if I were teaching at a UC school.
Of course, a colleague in San Francisco might say that my approach is too conservative and simplistic, pointing out the flaws in multiculturalism and arguing for a more sophisticated, complex picture of identity.
The fact that academics, especially in the Midwest, tend to dismiss “ethnic” writing as too limited in subject matter and inferior in craft, doesn’t help. Dismissing “ethnic” writing in this way is an all-too-common cultural cliché with a historical context attached to it, but I doubt that they would do the homework, and surely there are bigger battles to fight. The challenge, for an Asian American instructor, is to find out what those battles are in academia.
I have decided to keep these ideas to myself this year and to teach a more standard, European and Euro-American perspective on culture. But who knows, I might start bringing in stories by Nisei writers and asking the students to write about the relation between California laws and the internment during World War II. Playing it by ear is, after all, Asian America’s greatest strength.
Kenny Tanemura is a teaching assistant and MFA in Creative Writing candidate at Purdue University. He lives in Lafayette, Indiana.
RE: “But who knows, I might start bringing in stories by Nisei writers and asking the students to write about the relation between California laws and the internment during World War II. ”
Perhaps you will even consider bringing in German American and Italian American writers and asking them to write about the relationship between U.S. Law and internment of Euro Americans during World War II.
And you may want to ask them to write about the kidnapping of more than 5,000 Latin Americans of German ancestry from several Latin American republics.
Perhaps all will have learned more about the deep dark secret of the internment of ethnicities other than Japanese.
Those freshmen composition classes primarily seek to build basic writing skills essential to completing an undergraduate program. They do not purport, to shove Asian-American gay/lesbian/transexual literary perspective, down the throats of 18-year-olds from rural America struggling to adjust to the academic rigor and social diversity of college environment.
To help your students to acquire adequate writing skills within reasonable time, you should focus on the familiar narratives and personal experiences of those students, drawn from the lives of Middle America, and Midwest in particular.
The task of building acceptable composition skills within two semesters is daunting enough for most freshmen, and your proselytizing them about the beauty, subtlety, and complexity of Asian-American travails is making that task unbearably strenous.