frankenstenian creations

I'm currently reading Notes of a Native Son. (Before you become mildly impressed by my literary curiosities, let me confess that it is for a class, for though I'd love nothing more than to be the person who reads great things for pleasure, the spare hours of my time are mainly devoted to facebook instead.)

Back to James Baldwin, a self-proclaimed black writer who writes of his awe of his father. He is certainly preaching to the converted with me. I hold something similar for my own mother. I used to be unable to explain it to my American friends, but thanks to a currently popular memoir, the term "Tiger Mother" now seems adequate enough. Before the Yale Law tiger mom came forward, the closest anyone came to speaking my words was Amy Tan. My mom read her first, a story out of The Joy Luck Club. She hated it. "This is how she repays her mom?" She said, her outrage spilling into a hard look that she gave me, as if daring me to write a story as well. I promptly got her the entire novel for Mother's Day. My own cowardly form of taunting. It sits unread by her to this day. I, on the other hand, lapped up the book's contents voraciously.

Asian-American transitions, however, is not where I envision my final destination as a writer. I desperately immersed myself in Tan in hopes of moving past it, of writing something more universal, politically-void, and beyond cultural lines.

I'm afraid of being cast into the realm of Amy Tan before I can even do any such thing. Maybe I really am an Asian American writer before I am a female writer, or a college-educated writer, or a funny writer. But am I the person who gets to figure that out? Maybe it will turn out that the critic (the proverbial failed writer--"those who can't write, become critics") gets to decide. Or maybe it will be the public. Or the ink flowing from my pen. At the risk of sounding deterministic, my most hated of all philosophies...

do I write my subject or has it already written me?

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