A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

You come with me
In your dark brooding –
Like a craving –
To visit the ancestors’
Gravesites to pray. 426
The generational link is often missing, which might partly be due to the proverbial Asian
silence. In Chris McKinney’s The Queen of Tears, the younger daughter wants to drop
out of college because she dislikes studying Asian American literature:
Kids like me, Mom. Second generation. Some can speak their ethnic language but
not read or write it, like me. […] But we all pretend like we know what’s going
on. But in truth, we’re just twenty-something-year-olds swapping sob stories and
using ridiculously big words to rationalize our experiences. Ivory tower, Mom,
looking down on the masses, isolated, out of it. […] Dad was second-generation
Korean. His parents came and worked the sugar plantations of Hawaii. He grew
up dirt poor, he was in World War II and the Korean War because he thought that
was his only way out of plantation life. […] It’s like what right do I have to dwell
on my heritage and call it my own when I never experienced any of the stuff you
guys experienced? (61-2).
She questions the authenticity of those who grew up the American way, but her demands
are too essentialist:
You know, back at school, there’s this girl from Hawaii. She writes papers on
being Hawaiian, being local. But she’s never done drugs, never stolen a car, never
been in a fight. She’s never been abused by a parent, never had to buy food with
food stamps. How can she write about being Hawaiian or local without these
experiences? She has no right to represent people whose lives are much different
than hers (62-3).
McKinney is very good at depicting clichés, bringing them to life. His characters are
derived from ethnic and other stereotypes yet they breathe and fight as individuals. In
426 In Chock/Lum 1986: 51-2. Yonsei means fourth-generation Japanese. Kono’s poem corresponds to Wing
Tek Lum musing about how funerals and other Chinese-related traditions are triggers of memory but also
mere habits emptied of meaning, their significance lost. He wistfully acknowledges: “Maybe it’s for this
loss that I still come here” (Lum 1987: 36, “What? Another Chinese Holiday?”).
163