Asian time

Some books -- some thoughts, in fact -- get stuck so deeply in my mental crawl space that there's just no way to extricate them, however I might try and whatever amount of time might pass.

This happened with a book I read as a freshman in college twelve years ago: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1). The inextricable part comes from the Introduction where de Beauvoir asks:

"'What is a woman?'... The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: 'I am a woman'; on this truth must be based all further discussion."

How do you identify yourself with one characteristic? The idea has never left me. If Facebook or MySpace allowed only a one-word descriptor on your profile, what would you choose? If I were to do it, I'd have to say, "I am an Asian-American."

One foot in Taiwan, the other foot in the U.S. That's how I think about myself, to greater or lesser extents depending on the situation or time of day, but the thought's never far from the fore. Sometimes it just creeps up on me, as it did on the plane ride back to Detroit after Thanksgiving.

Reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (reviewed here), I got to this passage:

"Everyday life is defined not only by what we do, but also by who we are with.... Cultures differ in terms of how much a person is influenced by others.... For example, traditional Hindu persons were not considered to be separate individuals as we think of them, but rather nodes in an extended social network.... In our time also, compared to Caucasian children, those from East Asian backgrounds are much more aware of parental expectations and opinions even when they are alone -- in psychoanalytic terms, we might say that they have a stronger superego."

From personal experience I'd have to say this is true. Sometimes I think about myself as infected by culture, other times gifted by it, but I'm always ready to defend it, always ready to discuss it. Am I the transmitter of an old world to the new? Or am I the Shiva of my parents' culture, the passageway of their genes but nothing else? How will I feel if I have children -- insha'Allah -- and they don't want to learn anything of Taiwan? Is that fate, or is that choice?

There's a sampling of my Asian-American stream of thought, muddy as it is. But if I feel conflicted about the whole thing, at least I can take comfort in knowing I'm not alone (explanation here and here):


Footnotes
1. You can find the entire text of The Second Sex translated from the French at a web site that I can't endorse for obvious reasons.
2. But I can endorse Tak Toyoshima's site as great place to start digging into Asian-American culture.