“I Don’t Know Who I Am” (But Who Does?)

Kathryn Gretsinger, Jen Sookfong Lee, Ling Zhang, and Kevin Chong

I felt an interesting if subtle shift take place toward the end of the ironically titled Bamboo Lettering, a Saturday afternoon panel discussion involving Kevin Chong, Jen Sookfong Lee, and Ling Zhang, moderated by CBC radio journalist Kathryn Gretsinger. Two or three questions from the audience were of the writerly type: How do you come up with your story ideas? What do e-books mean for writers? What sort of research did you do? The intention of the event was to explore how Canadian writers of Chinese descent navigate the issues of identity, race, culture, family, or as the Festival program described it, “the tension between avoiding your heritage and embracing your heritage.” And those questions were certainly well aired and discussed. However, as the event progressed, and the personalities of the three writers emerged through what they read from their work, and through their responses to Gretsinger’s politely astute questions, the whole issue of “Chinese-ness” or Otherness seemed to drop away. As if the audience and the panel at a certain point had had enough of the topic and it was time to move on. And we were left with three writers discussing their work and the business of writing with an audience interested in hearing the details. Much as it should be, and as it would be with a panel of white Canadian writers.

Toronto writer Ling Zhang set the tone early, stoutly rejecting any labels that might be applied to her — Chinese writer, Chinese-Canadian writer, Chinese-Canadian woman writer, and so on — and in so doing probably broadened the discussion and opened it to possibilities beyond its original intention. Born in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province in China, Zhang came to Canada as an adult in the 1980s, but the only description of her she feels is apt is “Ling — a writer.” To Gretsinger’s question “How does who you are affect what you write?” Zhang responded, “I don’t know who I am so I don’t know what I’m writing about.” How many of us have not been struck, at times, by strange existential feelings associated with one’s identity? Who, exactly, am I? The momentary sense of being unanchored in the world. Although I was born on the opposite side of the planet, and have had a life experience very different from Zhang’s, I understand her meaning perfectly. Zhang described writing about the diverse characters in Gold Mountain Blues — white, Chinese, First Nations — and her mental repositioning in preparation for engaging with these different identities. The surprise came in the actual writing. She found herself completely forgetting about generic identities as she “peeled the skin off these people.” At the core, her characters were all just people. I imagine an onion in which race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, profession, sexual orientation, are only the outer layers. Who we really are lies in the deeper, hidden layers below, and ultimately may be just as mysterious to us as it is to others.

Zhang brought the perspective of middle age, a well-developed career as a writer (writing in Chinese, for the Chinese market, until recently), and a completely separate career as an audiologist to the discussion. The sense I get with Lee and Chong, a full generation younger, and growing up in a bi-cultural environment in Vancouver, is that to some extent they’re engaged in defining themselves through their writing, in a way that Zhang isn’t. Chong perhaps most obviously. He described himself as “a bit of a navel-gazer,” prone to “fecklessness,” who “writes for readers a lot like myself” — by which I understood, struggling to establish one’s bearings in life, along with slackerish cohorts, rather than a member of any particular race. Like Zhang, he rejects convenient categorizations, but also said, “It’s great to be an Asian-Canadian writer . . . if I can define what Asian-Canadian means.” I speculate that the tangle of two cultures gives Chong something to react against, or react within, providing a focus to the dramatized struggle for self-definition. Associating novelists too directly with their characters is invariably a mistake. However, Malcolm Kwan, the protagonist of Chong’s new novel Beauty Plus Pity, an aspiring model fresh from a failed engagement and newly alerted to a Eurasian half-sister he didn’t know existed, certainly gives the author fertile ground to explore the multilayered question of identity.

Lee’s attraction to and exploration of the louche underworld of burlesque in a Vancouver Chinatown of the mid-twentieth century, a resonant setting in her new novel The Better Mother, could also be interpreted as an act of self-definition. A reaction, perhaps, to the proprieties of Vancouver’s Chinese community, surrounded by a white majority paradoxically perceived as corrupting and censorious, a community in which daughters might be given far less latitude than sons. (As a white guy who has married into that community, I’ve been afforded some insights.) The titles of Lee’s two novels are interesting. The ‘better’ mother is a white burlesque dancer who provides a young boy in Chinatown his first glimpse of an alternative way of defining oneself. On more than one occasion, Lee joked about her mother not being present in the audience. I get a sense there might be some real relief underlying the joke. Lee also spoke about her emotional exhaustion upon finishing her first novel The End of East, which she worked on intensely for a number of years. “I was thinking about it too much,” she said, regarding the question of identity. At the time she thought, “I’m never writing about Chinese people again!” I’ve yet to read The End of East, but at least one of several possible meanings of “end” could be a personal end for Lee, closing a certain chapter, or book, in her life.

Some version of self-definition through writing is true of every writer, and the feeling of exposing or betraying those closest to us, the associated guilt, is a common component of writerly angst. But both are perhaps made more acute by the added dynamic of straddling two competing versions of yourself, neither of which you feel is who you are.

I learned of the plagiarism controversy involving Zhang and Gold Mountain Blues only after the event. I’m not sure it really changes the gist of anything I’ve said here, although it certainly adds another layer to the onion. You can learn more from the web sites of Zhang’s publisher Penguin Canada, Quill & Quire, or the National Post.