When Korean American writer Julia Lee was a graduate scholar at Harvard in the early 2000s, her teacher cracked a joke a couple of canine who was taken to the again of a Korean restaurant and eaten. As her classmates laughed, she turned “hot with anger and shame.” Instead of confronting her trainer, the subsequent day Lee wore a brilliant pink “Angry Little Asian Girl” T-shirt to class. “In retrospect,” Lee writes, “putting on the T-shirt was a dumb way to protest, but it was the only way I could tell my teacher ‘fuck you.’”
Lee is now an affiliate professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, specializing in African American and Caribbean literature—and he or she is not silent. Her memoir, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, seamlessly blends her personal experiences with piercing discussions of identification and racial stratification, serving up conclusions more likely to problem readers throughout the ideological spectrum. In truth, recognizing the want for fixed reexamination in our white-centered society, Lee even challenges her personal views. At a 2018 educational convention, as an example, she realized, “My brain had calcified. I was resistant to change. Gender pronouns puzzled me. Land acknowledgments confused me. My immediate response was to react like lots of people do—blame it on woke culture run amok or mock how cringingly earnest my colleagues were. It was always other people’s fault that I felt uncomfortable—not mine.”
In sections titled “Rage,” “Shame” and “Grace,” Lee traces her mental evolution by way of the occasions of her personal life. She demonstrates a knack for significant storytelling as she recounts her father’s harrowing escape from North Korea as a baby, and her enrollment at a non-public all-girls faculty in a rich Los Angeles neighborhood whereas her mother and father struggled to make ends meet. In L.A., Lee was “a little Asian girl, thrown against what Zora Neale Hurston calls a ‘sharp white background.’” In 1992, at age 15, she witnessed firsthand the riots that occurred after a jury acquitted 4 cops for bodily battering Rodney King throughout a visitors cease. Lee writes that it was a “primal scene of racial awakening—for myself and for the Korean American community. We were not white. We were not Black. We were caught somewhere in the middle.”
Later, as a Princeton undergraduate, Lee felt herself “drowning” amid an entire system “built upon whiteness and in service of whiteness.” Along the approach, she contended with melancholy, culturally clueless therapists, an offended mom and emotions of isolation when she turned a mum or dad. At Harvard, she acquired what she calls “life-saving” recommendation from novelist Jamaica Kincaid: “You must bite the hand that feeds you,” which means that she should dare to critique the tradition of white supremacy even when that tradition expects her to be grateful only for being allowed into elite areas.
Biting the Hand is an distinctive account of an evolving understanding of energy and privilege, providing readers insightful new methods to look at their world.
Discussion about this post