But the vending machine with the tiny Hello Kitty toys had been the real attraction. Here in the private darkness of the movie house, where no white friends could see her, she had spent all her nickels and dimes in pursuit of plastic rings, sparkly necklaces, and puffy stickers. With the complete concentration of a veteran safecracker, eight-year-old Lindsey would carefully crank the silver handle with her sticky little hand and listened to the clicks.
It is odd the way cultural appropriation works. Take the very same paragraph and change not a word and present the results as having been written by a person outside the cultural reference within the paragraph and you run the risk of vehement accusations of racism even when the content may not really strike one as particularly offensive. The above paragraph suffices as example: written by the author who clearly is familiar the Asian cultural references she writes about since she is a member of that culture. Absolutely nothing in this cute little scenario is offensive or immediately pushes one to frame it within any sort of prejudicial framework. It is an anecdote revealing a very specific and widespread pop culture influence.
“So, the Siamese cat is out of the bag. I’ve got yellow fever, all right. I love rice, udon, and kimchee. If I’m at McDonald’s, I always order the Chinese chicken salad. I love Asian women, especially Koreans. I love the idea of geishas, and I have fantasies about having sex with dim sum waitresses on top of those rolling carts! Wanna see my personals ad?”
That tension—or, rather, that potential for tension—is at the center of much of the narrative as the protagonist wanders through the minefield that is the experience of being an American citizen of Asian descent. Even more to the point, the experience of being part of the female section of that population. Always precarious, the stakes were raised in the closing decades of the 20th century when Asian pop culture began infiltrating the American mainstream. In a way, the book raise an interesting question in a subtle way buried in the subtext more than openly raised: do Asian Americans have it better or worse since they were transformed from the inscrutable enemy of World War II into the enigmatic entertainment icons of the millennium? Is it really a step forward for this cultural subgroup to see alphabet characters tattooed into the skin of millions or was it better to enjoy the anonymity and spotlight afforded by the advice to forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown?
Chinatown was taking off her makeup and getting ready for a night’s slumber. In an hour or so all the restaurant guests would return to their own neighborhoods and the streets would be deserted. All that would remain would be a dark and sleepy Chinatown, wrapped in a flimsy night- gown of moonlight.
And speaking of Chinatown, what exactly would a novel about Asian Americans in the big city be without a visit or two to the section of the city Jake was so memorably warned about? One is urged—against, not explicitly—to wonder whether Chinatown as an essential part of the Chinese American experience carries racist overtones or not simply as a result of literary expectations? Seriously: what would a novel specifically about Asians in San Francisco be without so much as a mention of Chinatown for the white reader? Could the lack of just one single scene in that world-renowned tourist attraction impact a non-Asian reader’s acceptance of its fundamental sense of realism? These are not issues which the author directly addresses, but through the distancing device of pop culture referencing they nevertheless inevitably get raised for the intuitive and attentive reader.
