Some of my best friends are Jewish. Really. Why that is, I’m not sure. But it’s fitting, I think, considering how often I myself am called a Jew.
–Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian
Upwardly mobile and wildly overrepresented in America’s elite colleges, it’s no surprise that Chinese- and other Asian-Americans have been labeled “the New Jews.” Nor is it therefore entirely surprising that two of the most acclaimed books written by Chinese-Americans in the last decade examine Chinese-American identity through the prism of Jewishness.
The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, Eric Liu’s 1998 volume of essays and personal reflections on Chinese- and Asian-American identity, features a chapter titled “The New Jews.” Gish Jen’s 1996 novel Mona in the Promised Land is about a Chinese-American girl growing up in a largely Jewish New York suburb.
While these two books represent different genres of writing, they invite some of the same questions: What are the authors saying about Jewish- and Chinese-American identity? And what are they saying about the larger issues of race and ethnicity in America?
The protagonist of Gish Jen’s novel is Mona Chang, a second-generation Chinese-American girl coming of age in the largely Jewish suburb of Scarshill (based on the author’s hometown of Scarsdale, New York). Jen crafts hilarious, bittersweet stories out of the great themes of adolescence: puppy love, jockeying for popularity, youthful rebellion, as well as the charged questions of race and identity in the Nixon years.
The Changs moved to Scarshill for a reason familiar to Jewish families: good public schools. (“For they’re the New Jews, after all, a model minority and Great American Success. They know they belong in the promised land.”) The fact that Mona is the only Chinese person in her class is something that she manages to turn to her advantage, regaling her classmates with made-up tales about Chinese culture and praising their mothers’ Chinese cooking. (“‘Very authentic.’ She tries to be reassuring. After all, they’re nice people, she likes them.”)
Mona rapidly becomes acclimated to a Jewish milieu, making liberal use of the word “oy” and attending “so many bar and bas mitzvahs, she can almost say herself whether the kid chants like an angel or a train conductor.” Mona’s best friend Barbara Gugelstein brings her to meetings of the temple youth group, of which she quickly becomes a pillar.
Soon Mona, who values the questioning involved in Judaism, is chatting about conversion with the temple’s free-spirited Rabbi Horowitz. He is skeptical at first, but after some intense study, Mona is sitting in a mikveh. “Through a sheet, three witnesses listen solemnly to the dunk. She chants her Shema Israel. She burns her special four-stranded candle. Her three witnesses sign neatly her nice framable certificate. And in this way, she becomes Mona-also-known-as-Ruth, a more or less genuine Catholic Chinese Jew.” Her friends call her “the Changowitz.”
Mona’s mother Helen is initially angry about Mona’s conversion. “How can you be Jewish? Chinese people don’t do such things,” she says. But Mona reminds her of her own culpability in the matter: “You are the one who brought us up to speak English. You said you would be like bamboo instead of acting like you were planted by Bell Telephone [“bend in the wind” versus “stand there stiff like a telephone pole,” Helen had said]. You said we weren’t pure Chinese anymore, the parents had to accept we would be something else.” To which Helen retorts, “American, not Jewish,” as she hands Mona some pork to slice. (“Lucky for them, Mona is the kind of Jew that does not observe the many rules regarding fins and hoofs, mollusks and ruminants.”) Mona answers, “Jewish is American. American means being whatever you want, and I happened to pick being Jewish.”
Gish Jen, reached on her car phone, answers my burning question about her relationship to her faintly autobiographical book. “No, I’m Catholic,” she laughs. “But I think everyone who lives in New York is a little Jewish. It’s part of what it means to be a New Yorker today.”
And how did she think up the idea of Mona becoming Jewish? “One day, for whatever reason, I wrote down, ‘Mona turns Jewish.’ And first I thought, ‘You can’t write that!’ And then I thought, ‘Ah, now why can’t you write that?’ When you have that feeling, like you can’t write that, that’s often a very good sign for a writer,” Jen says. “There’s a nerve there, because the fact is that for a Chinese-American to turn Jewish is much funnier than for an Irish-American to turn Jewish. It sheds a light on both constructions. It means that we have ideas about what it is to be Chinese-American that are different than what it means to be Greek-American.”
But while the differences between Chinese and Jews give the story its kick, what the two groups share as American middle minorities, between white and black, is also significant.
“For someone like Mona,” explains Jen, “I don’t think that she would ever have imagined, and quite rightly so, that she could ever be a part of the dominant white mainstream. So for her, the model of Jews is a way of being a successful minority. Always a minority, always a particular group, but with a distinct and successful place.”
In Mona in the Promised Land, it seems, making it in America is ultimately not so much about assimilation, but about having a voice. After Mona says that her parents don’t identify as a minority, and particularly not an outspoken one, Rabbi Horowitz responds, “Your parents want to be WASPs. They are the only ones who do not have to make themselves heard. That is because they do the hearing.” (Jews, Mona learns, make themselves heard by writing letters to the editor.)
Jen’s own youth among the Jews of Scarsdale was a lesson in assertiveness. “A lot of what I took away from the New York Jewish culture of Scarsdale, which is where I grew up, had to do with the sorts of things that Mona takes away, which is a different attitude towards authority, more of a sense that you can speak with your own voice and that’s all right.”
In The Accidental Asian, Eric Liu, a second-generation Chinese-American and a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, also notes the Jewish propensity for speaking up. Chutzpah, Liu suggests by way of informal cultural history, is one of the great Jewish contributions to American life. He discusses the subject with famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, a man who literally wrote the book on chutzpah. Liu confesses that his Chinese mother thinks that Dershowitz “talks too much,” although she has always been outspoken herself, and her son is proud of that. He writes, “A society where everyone knows and values chutzpah is already quite Jewish.”
Liu credits Jewish-Americans with having “changed our food, our images, our language, our humor, our law, our literature.” Whereas Asian contributions to America, he says, are generally direct imports from Asia, citing “feng shui and Ayurvedic healing and Nintendo.” Jews, Liu believes, contributed so much to American life because a hundred years ago they were ghettoized, cordoned off as a people apart, but left to cultivate a distinct Jewish-American identity. In contrast, the Asian-Americans who came in new waves beginning in the 1960s have had unprecedented opportunities to assimilate, “not forced, by the ostracism of others, to sustain and draw sustenance from their heritage . . . [but] freer to adopt other styles, to invent their own.”
Liu sees this as something more to be celebrated than mourned. A central theme of The Accidental Asian is the author’s ambivalence toward Asian-American and Chinese identity. The former he feels is artificial, a vague name that doesn’t correspond to any particular culture. The latter he recognizes as a rich heritage, but one that he is too assimilated, too Americanized, to be ab
le to identify with strongly.
Liu writes that he envies those, like Jews, who have “the sort of meta-memory–the memory of memory–that pulls individuals into a tribe.” But Liu is also hesitant to embrace a heritage based on ethnicity: “I am deeply skeptical that The Analects [by Confucius] or the Tao Te-Ching worked their way into my cultural DNA; if I were Jewish, I’d likely be just as skeptical of the Torah and the Talmud. Talk of racial character, of a racial way of thinking and being, simply makes me nervous.”
What Liu really celebrates about Jews is their success in being absorbed into America, transforming America with their particular contributions in the process: “Jews assimilated, we know: became American. But America assimilated too: became Jewish. You could write a book about the Jewish influence on the cultural and social idiom, but then, you would only be writing a book about twentieth century America.”
That people refer to Asian-Americans as “New Jews,” Liu cites as proof “not merely that the Old Jews have assimilated. It means also that here in America, the very metaphor of ‘the Jew’ now stands for assimilation.” And the metaphor of “the Jew” can be applied broadly to others, presumably including Chinese- and other Asian-Americans. Liu writes:
Who shall be a Jew?
Whosoever shall arrive at these shores and be regarded as a sojourner, an alien, beyond the pale; whosoever shall resort to clannish ways and strange methods to promote his kind and find, by dint of unseemly ambition, that he exercises influence in this society far out of proportion; whosoever shall, by negation, remind his countrymen of what it means to be a countryman, to belong; whosoever shall alter the very flavor of the society that swallows him; whosoever shall do all these things without meaning to do anything but live by a creed that will, in the end, spell his brilliant unmaking: he, too, shall be a Jew.
Is Jewishness over for the “Old Jews?” Liu does not deny the possibility. For him, the unique opportunity America offers its citizens is the opportunity to escape ethnic labels, and the Jewish-American achievement has been to integrate into the culture to an extent that, if they do not wish to be, they are no longer compelled to be Jewish.
On the prospect of raising a family with his wife, who is a quarter Jewish, Liu writes, “[Jewishness] is a remnant that Carroll and I could easily discard. I have a feeling, though, that we will save it. We will weave it into a patchwork of our own, give our children the knowledge, the choice, of continuity. What will people call those children? New Jews, perhaps. New Americans, for certain.”
Debating intermarriage with Jewish conservative Elliott Abrams in the online magazine Slate, Liu states his credo: “It is my own peculiar faith that America has a great mission of synthesis–and that in fulfilling that mission we should look first not to the lost ‘world of our fathers’ but to the undiscovered world of our children.” This is charged language of assimilation as faith, a faith in synthesis that trumps particular cultural and spiritual heritages except inasmuch as they survive as “remnants” in the “patchwork.”
On balance, Gish Jen has the more compelling grasp of how ethnicity is lived in America. The picture Jen paints of identity in America is piecemeal, cemented together and built up, anecdote by anecdote, towards an incomplete and infinite whole. Mona talking race with the African-American cook who works for her parents and Mona discussing faith and life with Rabbi Horowitz have a sure footing in the rocky terrain of ethnic life in America. Jen fully appreciates the richness of cultural diversity.
With its appreciation for difference, Mona in the Promised Land shows that Jewish-Americans and Chinese-Americans share a common apartness as much or more than sameness. As Gish Jen says, off the cuff, “People lump the Jews and the Chinese together. I say wait, wait, wait.” She pauses a moment. “Wait, wait, wait.”
