Don Lee’s Long War on Asian-American Stereotypes


EPISODE
stories
by Don Lee

Few fiction writers have worked tirelessly to break down stereotypes about “Orientals” like Korean-American Don Lee. The protagonists in her 2001 short story collection “Yellow” vary in ethnicity (from Korean to Japanese to Chinese) and occupation (from professional elites to crazy poets), suggesting the heterogeneity of contemporary Asian-American life. Lee’s novels, whether about Asian spies in Japan in the 1980s (“Country of origin”) or bohemian Asian artists (“The Collective”) in Cambridge, Mass. But the organizing arrogance of all his fiction remained consistent: Asian Americans are not monoliths.

“The Partition,” by LeeYellow” represents a return to form, echoing many of the same thematic and stylistic concerns of its debut. The opening story, “Late in the Day,” follows the failed career of the once promising independent filmmaker and now his career as showrunners for wealthy Californian Asians. “Confidentials” linger in the casual romantic adventures of two Asian Americans: one high school dropout who promptly tells us that “there is no exemplary minority”, and the other, an attractive English professor at Johns Hopkins. In “Ufos” (short for “Ugly Orientals” and there is an unprintable adjective in between), a Korean-American news reporter who has plastic surgery and anglicized her name to Victoria Crawford is dating two men at once: a white man with an Asian fetish named Richard and an Asian doctor named Yung-duk Moon and claimed to be a UFO. The story ends with a twist, perhaps something predictable in Lee’s hands; Victoria leaves Yung-duk in a moment of sudden persecution, but later realizes that it may be the real UFO herself.

Here we encounter the same figures and metaphors from “Yellow”: exhausted, struggling artists; sloths; lovers with internalized self-loathing that makes them violently bitter and paranoid. Many different faces fall into the loose and muddy “yellow” category, but the “Section” is largely populated by the following. East Asian descent (that is, those who historically fall into this category); South and Southeast Asians are rarely featured in their books. Yet Lee tells the stories from a collective perspective, presenting an ever-changing vision of all the feels of being yellow.

Many of the stories in “Episode” feature aging characters who look back nostalgically to an earlier period in their lives. “Years Later,” the shortest story in the collection, depicts a young woman’s erotic encounter, culminating in a proleptic vision of her hitherto unknown future: “She wanted it to last forever, that feeling—youth, time, glory, everything before She, waiting, the extraordinary life—but he felt it rolling over him, and he surrendered to it.” Phrases like these, aimed at moving the reader into action, often hint at a melodrama overwritten. Lee’s stories are often about disappointment, but his prose can also disappoint at such dull moments. .

The book concludes with an ambitious three-story cycle titled “Les Hôtels d’Alain” that follows the traveling bildung of an Alain Kweon from his youth, as an aspiring theater actor, to his middle-aged years, alone as a middle-aged actor. now runs a successful chain of artisanal boba stores. At the end of the last story, Alain says: “I had an amorphous idea that my boba tea business would be a way to affirm and celebrate the racial heritage of me and other Asian Americans. “Still, boba tea wasn’t something Korean or Okinawan or ethnically my thing. It was just another appropriation, another commodification under the guise of cultural identity. What did it cost? … Was it all a lie?”

These questions echo with horror throughout “The Partition.” In some ways, Alain is a kind of Everyman—the aimless, estranged American man who populates the classic short stories of John Cheever, JD Salinger, and Richard Yates. However, when viewed through the lens of Lee’s important career and contributions, it is hard not to read Alain as a metaphor for the collective struggles of contemporary Asian-American self-representation. And there is so much more to do.



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