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by Jeff Tan

To be young and Asian in America is a special brand of torture. There is an unspoken dictum of silence that grips Asian youth, a denial of our place in popular culture. Asian youth walk in America not quite sure where we fit in-black children have a particular brotherhood, Hispanic children have a particular brotherhood, white children own everything else. We cannot lay claim to jazz or salsa or swing; we cannot say our ancestors fought for equality against an oppressive government or roamed the great hallways of power across the globe. We do not have a music, a common hero, a lexicon of slang. Asian youth experience personal diasporas every day.

I went through a long period of time not knowing who I was. I strove to emulate my cousins in Manila and Hong Kong, the true Asian scions of my family. I would drape myself with the accoutrements of an Asian life-except I had no idea what being Asian meant to someone of my generation. I took my cue from popular culture and what I imagined my cousins overseas were like, which meant I did math homework quietly and assiduously, enrolled in Chinese school to learn the lilting cadences of my father's tongue, went to Mass on high holy days with my mother. I set out a glass of water for wandering spirits with my great-aunt, a lingering vestige of a native Filipino belief system that is difficult to eradicate even in the face of Catholicism's omnipresence in the Philippine islands. Anne Lamott would have shaken her head at me, at the savage, uncompassionate way I ripped myself apart. "You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard," she says in Bird by Bird (99), waxing philosophical about the way a writer should not look at the world, but indeed that was what I was doing. Pay attention! I was yelling at myself, define what is Asian within you and be done with it!

I never felt like it worked, though. I felt like a bad character actor, some horrible caricature of what an Asian boy was supposed to be. I felt like I was appealing to some great, unseen audience. Truly, Orwell knew what he was talking about in "Shooting an Elephant." He speaks of the way that the native peoples exerted control over the way he acted, says that he became "a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib" (461). Substitute "Asian" for "sahib," though, and I could just as easily have said that same thing during the unclear years of high school. To co-opt Orwell's imagery, I wore a white man's sort of Asian mask, and could feel my face grow to fit it (461).

***

My grandmother has an umbrella that she's owned since the mid-forties. Stories are told about this umbrella in my family, about how my grandmother received it from my grandfather during their courtship, about how she would carry it with her even when the skies were clear and lucid, about how she laid it across the back of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in a moment of characteristic ire during an argument with the dictator. In my family's lore, the umbrella is inextricable from the wielder; my grandmother and her umbrella share a definitional relationship, each one speaking to the other in terms that characterize them both.

Three years ago, I went back home, to that little archipelago of heat and humidity. I wanted to see this umbrella, I recall, I wanted to see this bastion of my grandmother's strength, this emblem of the strong and formidable matriarch that I loved fiercely from afar. In my mind's eye she couched the umbrella in the crook of her arm like a lancer carefully balancing the heft of his weapon.

Her home is situated in one of the wealthy quarters of Manila, atop a slight hill that provides a majestic view of the sprawling megalopolis below. I remember roaming its hallways with awe, thinking that yes, indeed, this opulence and splendor were what I sought for so long. The elegantly appointed rooms, the subtle landscaping, the Filipino radio playing softly in the background-this, surely, was what being Asian meant.

I did not see my grandmother use the umbrella within the first two weeks of my stay in Manila. "What was wrong?," I wondered idly. She would have used it at least a dozen times, I felt, would have used it to direct the driver around a roadblock or smite the infidels who dared try Americanize her nation. I felt doubt rise within me-was my grandmother's umbrella not her weapon of choice? Was I projecting doubts and anxieties onto something that was, in the end, just a simple sunshade?

But no! Of course not! This was "the" umbrella, the instrument with which she defined a generation of dozens, the staff with which she shepherded a sprawling flock of children and grandchildren and beyond. This, for sure, was some sort of power.

My grandmother smiled when I asked to see it, pleased that her simple geegaw had earned such a prefix. My heart sank, though, when I saw it. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this. . .this. . .umbrella simply wasn't it. It was a fine thing, to be sure, felt easy and light in the hand, but it was just an umbrella. And. . .it was too new. How could it be my Grandmother's Umbrella, this new contraption with shiny new parts and unbroken awning?

"Ang bagay na ito at ang kabuuan ng lahat," my grandmother said when I asked her about it.

It is not as elegant in English as it is in Filipino, the words denied their significance and poetry, but it translates as "It is the thing and the whole of the thing".

I could not fathom what she meant for a while-how could this bethe umbrella? The fine ivory handle was unmarked and pristine, and the haft could be no more than five years old. In my mind's eye the thing was tattered, held together by my grandmother's force of will. It was a far cry from this clean new gadget.

"Sometimes," she said to me later that day, sensing my confusion, "the umbrella needs repair. The latticework of the arc has broken many times, and if you think this umbrella's awning could stay whole in Manila, where hurricanes are a monthly occurrence, then you are not the clever grandson I thought you were. But see here, the lines and the form of the umbrella remain. It still serves its purpose, though that which makes it up is different from that which came before. I have had to have parts of it replaced over the years, yes, but it is still my umbrella. It is the same umbrella your grandfather gave to me over fifty years ago, the same umbrella that I have carried with me every day for fifty years. It is the same umbrella that I hope one day someone in this family will carry."

. . .It is a process of synthesis, being young and Asian in America. The Old World is not so readily transplanted to an America of fast food and forthright discourse between generations. The unique situation of Asian youth in America is one of the contemporary immigrant-other minorities have lived in the U.S. for so long that there is no mother country for them to draw their characters from, but Asians are, for the most part, first and second-generation people. The Old World looms large and conflictive in the forefront of the mind. How, then, to be Asian while in America? How to reproduce China and Japan and Pacific Rim nations when there are Chinese youth and Japanese youth and Pacific youth in those nations who do the job infinitely better?

Yet the distinction between my Manila and Honk Kong brethren and myself exists only on the most superficial of levels. There is more to being Asian than mimicking my cousins and playing into some dominant white culture's notions of what a readily identifiable Asian youth is. Honor, reverence, the search for identity-these are not Asian things, but things Asians are. These are things that permeate everything I do.

My grandmother's words quelled some nascent struggle within me, brought peace to my dichotomous spirit. Finally, I could look in the mirror and see not a white man's conception of an Asian face, but my own countenance clear and fair.

I have had parts replaced. My music is not my cousins', my slang is not my cousins'. I am louder than they, a little more adventurous than they, a little more emotional and approachable than they. They listen to J-Pop and MTV-Asia, while I cock my ear for John Coltrane and the Stereophonics. They speak Chinese and Tagalog and English, while I speak Spanish and English and a little French. They worry about continuing the family firm, while I go to poetry slams. They celebrate José Rizal Day, while I wave a multi-hued American flag on the Fourth of July.

Does that make me any less Asian, though? My grandmother and her umbrella certainly pose an eloquent argument to the contrary.

Ako ang bagay na ito at ang kabuuan ng lahat.

I am the thing and the whole of the thing.

Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. New York: Random House, 1995.

Orwell, George. "Shooting an Elephant." Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 458-463.

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