James Kyung-Jin Lee has a book called Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority. Published in January 2022 by Temple University Press, Lee examines the question, “What happens when illness betrays Asian American fantasies of indefinite progress?” discussing the model minority myth and its erasure as reflected in “illness memoirs.” Which, as he points out, is a relatively new category within Asian American literature. Pedagogies of Woundedness is an academic narrative and one that highlights a new perspective on how Asian American illness memoirs have come to join the larger genre of Asian American literature. Why didn’t they exist previously? And what does it mean when “the model minority” shows its vulnerability?
Lee establishes the model minority myth early on, opening on Julie Yip-Williams’ 2019 memoir, The Unwinding of the Miracle, involving her terminal cancer diagnosis. “All this seems so incredible and new,” he says, “as if Asian Americans have started dying only recently, in large part because they’ve long been expected to be harbingers of nothing less than the good American life, showing the rest of the United States how it ought to be done” (p. 4). On the same day in 2019, too, Graywolf published Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias. Of this fact, Lee states, “It was as if, in an instant, scales fell from the eyes of U.S. publishers and readers alike: if as a collective, Americans demanded of their Asian American colleagues lives of exceptional mobility and affirmation of the U.S. cultural project, then perhaps…Asian America could also provide a pedagogy to optimize this narrative…Asian Americans can you teach us how to die well?”
LOL.
In his survey of Asian American illness memoirs, Lee writes, “In 2017, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee published her memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life with Ecco, the first time in U.S. history that a major trade press published a work of nonfiction by an Asian American whose narrative was primarily occupied by illness” (p. 96).
When my 2014 BuzzFeed essay about my stroke went viral, I was barely cognizant that Asian Americans hadn’t yet pierced the American psyche with regard to illness and to Lee’s point, fallibility. I had simply written about something that happened to me and my path navigating a damaged brain. I was stunned by its reception. Editors wanted to publish such a narrative; my schedule was filled with editor and agent calls for three straight weeks. It was assumed that America was ready, based on the data; I don’t think any of us had at the top of our minds that Asian American illness memoirs were not yet a Thing. I engaged my dream agent (and made some agent and editor friends along the way), and ended up with a book deal. I temporarily ditched my novel-in-progress and wrote a memoir called Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember based on the essay. I wrote furiously for a year.
Dear Reader: at a point in writing my memoir, I wondered whether to even center my Asian American identity in the narrative. Yes. This was a conscious decision I had to make. My editors thankfully tacitly understood who I was and how I was raised and my cultural context were key components to how I experienced brain damage. Sadly, I felt like I was taking a risk by doing this so explicitly; even though I had no idea I was the first, the only illness memoirs of which I was aware were written by white writers who didn’t have to make explicit their cultural context. Sadly, I was indeed taking a risk.
Yes, in the book reviews, there were folks who asked why I included my Asian American upbringing at all within my illness memoir.
My memoir was published in February 2017, in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, and I blamed many publishing headwinds on that guy (I still do). But there was, I now realize, another headwind: being the first. This was the beginning of a new neighborhood. And there were not yet any neighbors.
Speaking of neighbors: there can be a partnership between scholars and creative writers, one that writers often ignore. Scholarly writing is where I learn most about my own work and the ways in which readers interpret the messages I have sent, whether unconsciously or consciously. And to learn whether my writing has broken new ground as the scholar themself forges new territory.
Some of my most satisfying writing was in the academic term papers I wrote during my MFA–I still have fond memories of writing my term paper on golem imagery in Frankenstein and Great Expectations (Estella is a golem!). Literary writers who attended higher education institutions have if they’ve taken any non-STEM courses at all, likely produced academic writing. And literary writers who attended secondary education institutions most likely wrote academic essays. In this way, many of us have dipped our toes in scholarly work. And it is where, at least in my case, my writing began.
In an undergrad Asian American Studies class, my professor (who is part of the Asian American literary canon and who I won’t name because I am about to criticize him) said, “You should write it. Don’t be a scholar and just study it.” He made clear his opinion that creative writing was superior to scholarship. At the time, what he said was inspiring–I mean, I was nineteen years old and supposed to be premed and didn’t want to go to med school and my secret dream was to become an author, so please give me a break. But I didn’t realize it was at the sacrifice of scholarship. And that this kind of hierarchical perspective isn’t healthy whatsoever, because a literary writer needs readers. And the most thoughtful readers are often scholars.
I’ve never said no to a teacher who teaches my book in class and invites me as a guest speaker. In fact, one of my very favorite things to do as a writer is to zoom into a class. It is an honor to meet students whose academic insights into my writing often surpass those of book reviewers, especially those who question why I bring up being Asian American at all in a…(wait for it) memoir. I’m delighted when I read blog posts by students, those in Professor Lee’s classes included, who’ve read my book. It is good medicine, especially when I need correction or when in the long slog of writing my next book I question whether or not I should continue to write at all.
Scholars are our good neighbors for myriad reasons. And James Kyung-Jin Lee’s Pedagogies of Woundedness is an excellent partner to the burgeoning field of Asian American illness memoirs. May it be an influence as well.
Recent Comments