A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

of a most promising young pianist. 417
This acknowledgement is ironic, for any degree of prejudice and othering has the power
of weakening the subject’s identity, and of stifling the creative expression of ethnic
minorities. Sumida elaborates:
The tone of ‘Grateful Here’ tells us that the poem is informed not by Lum’s own
discovery that he is mistaken for an alien on the mainland, but by a knowledge
that this awareness is undercurrent and commonplace throughout his community:
the poem is based on Lum’s knowing the development, dominance, and meaning
of a ‘dual identity’ theory about Asian Americans and the theory’s historical
consequences, for instance, in the Japanese American internment. 418
These thoughts are closely related to another mainland commonplace, namely that “all
Asians look alike – indeed, are interchangeable.”
In the multiracial and multiethnic community of Hawaii, on the other hand,
misidentification of ethnic groups/mixtures is something close to a cardinal sin.
[…]The issue of misidentification brings up the paradox of Local loyalty to ideas
of ethnic integrity and pan-ethnic cultural identification: how is it possible to
assume the communal perspective of a Local without losing some of the
distinctive ethnic markers? 419
“Chinese Hot Pot,” a poem which proposes a more flexible alternative to the American
melting pot, a fondue, might suffice as Lum’s answer:
My dream of America
is like dá bìn lòuh [...]
as each one chooses what he wishes to eat
only that the pot and the fire are shared
along with the good company
and the sweet soup
spooned out at the end of the meal. 420
Food as motif or metaphor is often used by Lum, though with much more positive
connotations than the ones elaborated by Wong. She mentions his comfort food poem
417 Quoted in Sumida 1991: 261.
418 Sumida 1991: 262.
419 Gima 1997: 74.
420 Chock/Lum 1986: 63.
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