Bicultural chic

In Waking Up American, a wonderful amalgam of female voices illustrates how many different ways there are of doing so

By Brigid Gaffikin

THOSE OF US new to this country like to cut down the ugly idea that there are only a handful of ways to be American. We're frustrated by others who are blind to the ongoing history of migration. We're puzzled that anyone would still insist that ethnicity and identity are locked to landscape in irrefutable ways. But, as the essays in Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally show, none of this changes the fact that plenty of people both here and elsewhere believe as much, often fervently.

So what's a bicultural girl to do? Angela Jane Fountas has gathered a wonderful amalgam of female voices that illustrates how many different ways there are of tackling the question. There are no ready answers in this collection, no happy resolutions. Being bicultural, these writers argue, is a process. It's a way of understanding oneself in relation to the past and the present, in terms of one's family and in the eyes of total strangers. And so Lisa Swanstrom travels to Panama to see, as she puts it, "if I can figure out, after all these years, where my mother is coming from." Before she arrives, she's convinced her mother's blending of Christianity and witchcraft is a personal quirk; once in Panama, she recognizes its deeper cultural roots.

Each essay in this collection helps rework what American means. Some writers are comfortable constantly shifting skins and identities. Monica Villavicencio tells us this: "By the time I was an early teen with a passport full of stamps, I was accustomed to the feeling of being foreign and didn't give a second thought to my otherness." Villavicencio, whose mother is Filipina and whose father is Nicaraguan, declares, "In this era of culture as fashion, I love how I am immediately exotic."

Others explain how damning stereotypes can be. Tina Lee slams the suffocating ideals from within Chinese culture, and the typecasting from without, that dictate how Chinese women should behave; she restyles herself as Hello Kitty with an AK-47. Yet, she adds, to remain bicultural is no simple thing: "I remain painfully aware of what it means to be 'Chinese' and 'Chinese female.' I know the history, I understand the diasporas, and I am well-versed in the socioeconomics. Therefore, I feel the guilt, the obligation, and the need to hold onto my cultural heritage."

There's no discussion in this collection of the privileges of becoming "white"; none of these women shed a former self for a new, assimilated one. Being bicultural, they explain, isn't a step toward adopting a monocultural identity. And so, with humor and sadness, they describe constant assaults on the most taken-for-granted aspects of their lives, as the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, and the routine is unmoored from the everyday and made exotic: A lunchbox of homemade adobo chicken becomes little more than "weird"; Buddhism is labeled a cult; brown skin is sexualized and objectified.

Being bicultural is fraught with difficulties, Lee and others show, because it so often calls for living in a limbo state between cultures, identities, and selves. Emiene Shija Wright, whose father is Nigerian, gets angry at her African American mother for, she says, "trotting me out like an exotic dog or life-size souvenir." But she feels like a fraud too, for capitalizing on her difference by letting herself become "the girl from Africa" in school. Fountas recalls how she envies her Greek American cousins "for their ability to live in both worlds and get lost in neither."

But living in a cultural limbo can leave a person powerless, and bicultural fluency also requires an ease at shifting between cultures. Maliha Masood recounts the adolescent tightrope walk of being Muslim and American. Each morning at school, she and a friend switched their baggy, modest outfits for tighter, more revealing "disguises" stashed in their lockers. They learned, she says, "to navigate the slippery slope between [their] cultural dualities without falling through the cracks."

Most of these essays trace an autobiographical arc that ends, if not with resolution, then with a profession of greater confidence in the narrating self. But within this framework, the range of tones and styles is vast. Some essays are blunt, some conversational. Others sparkle with dry wit, as when María Elena Fernández describes with great amusement her efforts to shed her Chicana self and pass as Mexican when visiting her family in Mexico City. Laura Fokkena's account of her teenage awkwardness around her German relatives is equally fresh and funny. She juxtaposes her embarrassment at her frequently naked cousins with their critique of her American propensity to pick, sculpt, and mold her body so it conforms to an abstract and unreachable idea of female perfection. Other narratives are intensely personal, sad, and raw, and frank enough to make reading them feel intrusive. Rosie Molinary tells the story of her growth from adolescence to adulthood like she's picking at an old wound. It's as if she's trying to flinch again to show us how much it hurt. Between Fokkena and Molinary, others convey a sense that they've long settled the big questions and are revisiting them only to guide us, as tourists, through some long-abandoned childhood haunt.

We're tourists throughout much of this collection. Many authors incorporate other languages into their essays. Spanish, Tagalog, Greek, Farsi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Vietnamese, Swahili, Urdu, and Japanese interrupt the unwitting hegemony of the English the essays are written in. Not that using another language is a shortcut to feeling more comfortable with one's identity. Rasma Haidri pretended she spoke her father' s Urdu in an attempt to illustrate a deep connection to her Pakistani ancestry, and blurted out an awkward, made-up language to strangers. It was, she concedes, a hopeless cause, and afterward she felt only lost and frustrated. Anne Liu Kellor found that her limited grasp of Chinese alienated her from the culture she was trying to immerse herself in – and that this befuddled her attempts to articulate herself the way she could in her native English: "I found myself increasingly starved for the part of me that spoke, thought, and breathed in English. I missed my English mind, which could choose carefully between words like longing, hunger, and desire, understanding intuitively their subtle yet crucial distinctions."

The flavor of travel writing emerges in other ways too. Travelers might declare they're searching for the unfamiliar, but so often their destination is already known through stories, guidebooks, and images seen in advance of the journey. And so these women too return to ancestral homelands to recognize themselves in the eerie familiarity of somewhere they no longer fully belong. Victoria Gomelsky observes of her return to her St. Petersburg, Russia, birthplace that "unlike most tourists, who travel to experience the foreign, I am going halfway around the world to experience the familiar." Of course, just where a reader might locate herself in the rich cultural spectrum represented here will affect her reading. One essay might remind her she's an outsider looking in the back window of someone else's private world; another might bring back warm memories of family or feelings of immediate, if distant, kinship with the author.

Some of the essays feel contrived in places because they lean heavily on stock classroom expressions. Learned universalizing and stilted theorizing deprive the writing of individuality and specificity. It's as if the authors are trying to fit their narratives into a ready-made model of revelatory autobiography. Even if we're all in different ways beleaguered or blessed by a slew of oppressive paradigms, constructions, and privileges, these designations sound empty when they're not fleshed out by examples from the variety of everyday, lived experience. Racism, revelation, joy: Their effects on these women's lives are driven home more effectively in this collection by detail and anecdote. Patricia Justine Tumang's rather theoretical account of being queer and middle-class is less interesting than her descriptions of a general disbelief among the Kenyans she meets that someone who appears Asian could also be American, or her larger story of learning to be Filipina, queer, and American both at home and abroad. Others manage the reflective stance more adeptly, as with Molinary's description of her identity in terms of "my Latina" and "my gringa." Identity, she implies, is part of who we are, not something tacked on to us.

But Tumang also articulates the sometimes oppressive nature of constant questions about ethnic and national identity in a way that speaks to all the essays: "Identities carry a history and legacy that have more meaning than what I tell others I am. Embracing 'American' as an identity and rejecting it at the same time, I acknowledge that although I was born in the United States, being American doesn't define all of who I am." Jenesha de Rivera takes the same tack: "Although society finds many ways to fragment my identity, in my experience the parts are never separate." After all, there's also more to life than being – or not being – American.

Brigid Gaffikin is a Bay Area writer.

Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally

Edited by Angela Jane Fountas. Seal Press, 256 pages, $15.95 (paper).