Chinese Prodigal by David Shih (Atlantic Monthly Press)

David Shih’s Chinese Prodigal extends an open invitation to rummage through a well-furnished mind, in the same way  readers might root through their grandmother’s attic. Moving from one essay to the next is like opening a box, heavy, intriguing and filled with valuable items that seem to have little to do with what was unearthed earlier.

“After years of sharing my ideas with students,” Professor Shih says in a lengthy introduction, “I wanted to try to write them down to see if I could do it.” That he does, presenting many ideas with James Baldwin’s goal in mind; “...to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”  

His sentences are clean bones searching for their skeleton. Shih is a good writer whose words frequently have the clear ring of aphorism, and his ideas are provocative and mind-expanding. What they lack is a solid frame to bring them into a cohesive whole. 

Shih echoes the quest of Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?) in separating race from ethnicity. Unlike Kwan, he has lived almost all of his life in a country where race is poorly delineated and ethnicities shift positions, depending on what the dominant race wants them to represent. “Asian” as the name of a race in America simply means not black and not white, a liquid category that swings between “model minority” and “yellow peril” with scant reason for either stereotype. Within that racial construct, individual ethnicities also rocket between class markers, with Chinese and Japanese vying for top of the list and Southeast Asians working their way up from the bottom. 

Shih’s father has no illusions about the U.S. A man who worked hard to achieve “an honest lifetime,” he has accepted racism as an established American truth, telling his children : “Chinese people will always be second-class citizens in this country.” He refuses to let his children learn Chinese, wanting them to speak English without any trace of an accent and chooses the name “Frederick” as his own English name because he’s able to  pronounce it correctly. His offspring’s  achievements give them a place in the white world that they gained through  the mastery of English that he had insisted upon, although, Shih says, “language, like blood, can make a family. The gift of fluency  has given them a tool that is superior to their father’s  command of the language and this weakens the power of his patriarchy.

Shih’s portrait of his father is the  highlight of his book. Through uncovering this man, he lets his own private thoughts escape. When he tells how his father’s favorite grandchild was Shih’s son, a boy who strongly resembles his white mother, this leads him into an examination of being a Chinese father to a biracial child. He examines the “ethical dimension to the decision to have mixed-race children in the United States,” and then explores the historical truths and the current events that led to this train of thought. How will America view his son? What social world will he inherit?

The term Asian American, he reminds readers, is a recent one that supplanted “Oriental” or Asiatic. It came into being after the death of Vincent Chin in 1982, a man killed by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who attacked him because they assumed he was Japanese. The murderers were acquitted at a trial that brought people of Asian descent together in a united protest. 

“A word better than Oriental wouldn’t have made a difference in my father’s life,” Shih says, while later telling how “a burgeoning sense of myself as a person of color” helped to weaken the idea of hierarchy among America’s races. “People of color” outnumbered the white race and blurred the lines of the social construct that white men had created to protect and preserve their power.

The eight essays in Chinese Prodigal are excoriating, flaying the cruelties of U.S history toward immigrants of color as well as those that exist in the present, brought out from the shadows by politicians who condone and elevate racism. Shih’s mingling of the personal with the historical and the political at times becomes a tangle of confusion but his academic expertise wins out. He has things to teach and his country has a lot to learn.~Janet Brown