Samantha

*Note the events discussed in this narrative did not occur at my current school

Fish Cheeks. The Joy Luck Club. Anytime I hear these titles, I shudder. These works were meant to make me feel seen, instead, they drowned me in emotions of despondence. 

I first came across Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan in my seventh grade English class. As a Chinese girl, I was excited when I learned we would be reading a short story with a Chinese girl protagonist in class. Yet, my joy quickly dissipated as I progressed through the story. 

I read that the protagonist’s family members were chewing with their mouths open, burping, and not using communal utensils at a dinner in front of their American guests. I was confused. I had lived in China for eight and a half years and never observed the behavior I was reading about–in my homeland.  To make matters worse, in response to a discussion question about why the protagonist had felt embarrassed, one of my classmates said "Well her family had no eating etiquette." My English teacher agreed, anxiously, I silently begged that she would tell our class to remember that this behavior wasn’t the norm in China, but she didn’t. For the rest of class, I felt ashamed and paranoid that my classmates thought my family and I engaged in the unseemly actions we read about. 

Fish Cheeks would return to haunt me during my Freshmen year accompanied by The Joy Luck Club, another Amy Tan book. Although my first experience with an Amy Tan work in English had been bad, I tried to reassure myself that it would be better this time. I was incredibly wrong. Immediately, I noticed that The Joy Luck Club had cultural inaccuracies; with one leaving me at a loss of words. My class had read a scene where a woman cut off a piece of her own flesh and put it in a soup to try and cure her dying grandmother. It sounded absolutely barbaric, as if it had been added into the story to cater to its American audience’s perception of China being an exotic, foreign country. Then, my English teacher–who had a doctorate degree–proceeded to ask me about the ritual. I told her it was a false piece of information about my culture, yet she didn’t believe me. She claimed that because Amy Tan was Chinese, it had to be true. But what about my words? Did living in China for over half my life not give my words any credibility?

Frustrated, I went home to research Amy Tan. I wanted to know why a mainstream Chinese American author was spreading false information about our culture. Initially, I felt satisfied that many people found her work problematic for containing false cultural information and catering to portraying Chinese characters with Chinese stereotypes. Yet as I dove deeper, I saw that Tan had responded to her criticism with the fact that her works weren’t intended to be a general representation of the Chinese American experience. Although I believe Tan is still wrong for propelling Chinese stereotypes into her work, such as all Chinese American children wanting to be white children (completely false), I also realized ignorance from non-chinese readers contributed to my frustration. Representation matters, but I’d rather not see my culture represented in the materials I read in English class if it’s haphazardly thrown around by the person teaching the material.