On Liminality

Today's post will be on a much more personal note than the recent run of job-related ruminations.  Let's talk about "liminality," or the sense of ambiguity or disorientation that many immigrants (and children of immigrants) experience at trying to fit into a new culture while retaining some of the values and/or mindsets of a previous culture.  Like Dr. Spock (the Vulcan, not the child psychologist), I have always been a child of two worlds.  I am simultaneously Asian and American, American and Asian.  I should be a happily-assimilated fourth-generation Japanese American and happily interracially married and "lazy like only a good native-born American can be," but (thanks in no small part to the Second World War) I am pushed-and-pulled between second- and fourth-generational status.  Raised with a strong dose of Confucian filiopiety and the Protestant (work) ethic, I was also surrounded by a culture in which "hyphenated Americanism" (acknowledging multiple, simultaneous, and legitimate identities) was downright un-American.  How does one square that circle?  No doubt some in my situation take refuge in a sense of cosmopolitanism, of being "a citizen of the world."  I on the other hand - Sisyphus-like - endeavored to bear the burden of the world (two worlds, actually) upon my semi-broad shoulders, of living up to parental and personal expectations and duties.  Eventually, frail humanity rears its Janus-faced head, and one has the option of the blue pill (way of the "Angry Asian Man" and/or loveless Korean guy) or the red pill of going down the rabbit hole and embracing one's liminality.

From my early teen years through college, I did not like to look in the mirror, because to do so was to recognize that I was ugly.  By ugly, I mean not blond-haired and blue-eyed like the A-list Hollywood stars and many actors on television commercials.  Well, I also did not have the sharp nose that could singlehandedly break through an iceberg and thereby save thousands of lives on the Titanic, nor was I six-feet-plus tall like a basketballer or broad like a footballer.  Like Stephen Colbert - even before the advent of the "Colbert Report" on Comedy Central - I did not see race; I tried to imagine myself as white, or better yet, invisible.  Fortunately, a direct descendant of Calvinist theologian and College of New Jersey (Princeton today) President Jonathan Edwards (re)assured me that I was "the whitest guy.on campus."  What a relief.  I was so (outwardly) comfortably a part of the model (or invisible) minority that I was in fact, visibly white.  Yet I failed to follow one of the acceptable Asian paths to financial security and family pride (what I've dubbed the "Asian trinity"): doctor, lawyer, engineer.  No, since my preteen years I've had a strong vocational calling towards academia (and, worst of all, the HUMANITIES!).  As a hetero American-Asian male, should one date "within" or "without" one's ethnicity?  Parental wisdom: "Don't date/marry a white girl.  She'll divorce you and take all your money."  Fortunately, we in the humanities don't earn any (large sums of) money that we can speak of....

(The very WASPy Rev. Jonathan Edwards)

Until recently - with the publication of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - it was difficult to articulate this sense of liminality to WASPy friends.

Parting Shot

In case you did not get enough of Professor Chua's cultural essentialism the first time 'round, she is publishing a new book comparing Jews, Chinese, Nigerians, and other upwardly-mobile ethnic groups.

Your obedient servant,

The History Major