In defense of the immigrant novel

on my love for and simultaneous aversion to the immigrant novel.

I’ve been thinking about my love and simultaneous aversion for the immigrant novel. In an interview, Ling Ma, a Chinese American novelist, talked about feeling “pressured to write a traditional immigration novel.” She recounts being told by a faculty member at Cornell to write about where she came from. The immigrant novel, in this instance, became a microaggression,  an expectation, an affirmation of foreignness.

“The immigration novel was answering and I wasn’t interested,” says Ma. So she released a book called Severance, a post apocalyptic, capitalist satire.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Severance and what Wikipedia calls the “American immigrant novel” is that Severance is not burdened by expectation[1]. The story snakes freely across genres and in doing so, captures “the sense of being caught between two worlds, the dissociative feeling of loneliness and alienation that accompanies life as a capitalist drone, as a post-apocalyptic survivor, or as the only daughter of Chinese immigrants,” as described by the AAWW.

My own aversion to the genre comes from feeling like the immigrant novel is a box that I can never escape. A box that simultaneously represents my lived experience and the assumptions that the genre imposes on my lived experience. The immigrant novel is a source of comfort to me – something that reflects back experiences I don’t have words for. But the immigrant novel is also a vortex, pulling into itself varied stories of displacement, assimilation and the bittersweet pain of forgetfulness. 

Every genre has its tropes, and authors typically try to avoid or subvert them. But the immigrant novel is unique as a genre because the immigrant novel threatens to say something about the author’s identity. And the immigrant novel threatens to reduce identity to a trope.

In another interview, Ling Ma admits that “though Severance does contain an immigrant narrative, it was something I initially resisted—and of course, it had to be wrapped up in an apocalyptic conceit.” Beyond its conceits, Severance is a novel that examines a culture of work endemic to late-capitalism. Through the viewpoint of the protagonist, Ma demonstrates how exactly this a culture of work is internalized by many second-generation immigrants. 

It’s clear that Ma has many things to say about capitalism in this book. And she doesn’t shy away from contextualizing her critique in an immigrant narrative. But perhaps delaying that narrative, as it is traditionally portrayed, is also a way of delaying the eventual auto-categorization that a reader may make. And why might that categorization be undesirable?

Perhaps the hesitation I have around the immigrant novel also has to do with Ling Ma’s aversion to answering. Implied, is the crucial question: who is the immigrant novel answering to? 

I’ve recently started reading Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. It’s arguably the quintessential immigrant novel. And one that gained widespread recognition and acclaim back when such narratives weren’t given much attention. I remembered seeing Joy Luck Club in the library as a child, but I never read it. I likely judged the book by its cover, which when I last googled, was scattered with a familiar Chinese takeout label font, ornamental patterns, and dragons. Even before I understood orientalism, I was skeptical of such imagery. 

Later in life, I avoided Joy Luck Club, because there was no other book that so polarized the Asian American community. Lillian Li, author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant, reflects on reading Joy Luck Club at three different points in her life. In middle school, she felt that the “magic of Joy Luck was singular.”

Then in college, she found herself irritated by the novel’s orientalist bent, feeling “embarrassed by the mentions of spirits, of East Winds and Mah-Jong.” But in two years time, Li reread Joy Luck Club with a changed perspective. “The book told me what I perhaps knew all along, which is that my mother is my ghost… That I have been writing about ghosts all along.” 

At the surface level, the immigrant novel can feel both familiar and abrasive at the same time. In reclaiming the cultural artifacts that have been used to appropriate, mimic and mock, the immigrant novel confronts the complicated borders of orientalism. And those borders are uncomfortable. 

When I write, I also fear falling into what is understood in the West as Asian stereotypes. I wonder whether to write about ruining a chi-pao on Chinese New Year or whether to write dialogue in broken English. Then I wonder where these fears come from, and I realize that these fears have been generously gifted to me by decades of bad Hollywood movies and TV shows. They are the byproducts of Western media treating other cultures like a buffet. 

In spite of one’s personal truths or the desire to reclaim one’s cultural upbringing, the immigrant novel cannot always surmount stereotype. Even if an immigrant novel is written for and to one’s own, even if it’s answering to the right people, the immigrant novel bears the burden of history. It carries along with it, a legacy you and your people didn’t write. It can still be criticized, overlooked, or even blamed for doing more harm. To write an immigrant novel is to play with fire and let it burn even brighter.

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[1] In this piece, I’m using Wikipedia’s definition of the “American Immigrant Novel,” as the working definition for the traditional immigrant novel. Reading this Wikipedia entry and the unshakeable feeling that this huge genre was being distilled in the way that it was, became an important catalyst for these long weeks of thinking and questioning…

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By the way,

• Do read Severance. It’s a great and harrowing book.

• Drop me an email if you’d like to read/discuss Joy Luck Club together!

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