Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Julia Lee’s Biting the Hand:  Growing Up Asian in Black and White America.  Lee is an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount  University where she specializes in African American and Caribbean history.  Biting the Hand… is her memoir of growing up in Los Angeles where her immigrant parents owned a convenience store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.  She is candid about the pressures she felt both as a child and as an adult to succeed.  She keenly records events in her life that forced her to examine critically her experiences trying to make it in a “culture of white supremacy.”  I found her insights as a Korean focusing on her own and Black America’s plight in this country illuminating.

At 240 pages, it is a quick read.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times  

Tony

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The New York Times

Review of Books

Becoming Asian American, From ‘Neither/Nor’ to ‘Both/And’

Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand,” is about forging an identity in a nation of boundaries.

By Jean Chen Ho

April 18, 2023

BITING THE HAND: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, by Julia Lee

Cultural identity, Stuart Hall wrote, is “a matter of becoming.” Although derived from our many histories, both personal and collective, identity is not some inherent essence, rooted in the past. It is instead, according to Hall, in “constant transformation.” Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America,” examines this process, and in particular the forging of her identity as a Korean American woman in a country that still operates under a racial hierarchy.

The book is divided into three parts, beginning with “Rage,” an intimate account of the author’s tumultuous family life and its tortured silences around racial anxiety and inherited trauma. Lee’s parents, survivors of the Korean War, owned a liquor store in Inglewood, Calif., and then a fast-food chicken joint in nearby Hawthorne. The latter business was heavily damaged in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, when Lee was 15. At the time, Lee was an angry teenager who clashed with her “psycho Korean mom” and chafed against the conservative culture of her private all-girls school.

“Shame” presents her time as an undergraduate at Princeton, where she was indoctrinated into an exclusive, elitist culture “built upon whiteness and in service of whiteness.” After graduation, Lee had a short, miserable stint in management consulting, before entering a doctoral program in English at Harvard. But she floundered there, too, feeling isolated and depressed. “I’d assumed that a community of people devoted to literature would be kinder and more humane” than the corporate world she’d escaped, Lee observes. “But as I soon found out, academia is no different from other systems of power.”

Things looked up only when a friend in the African American studies department introduced her to Jamaica Kincaid, who became a mentor. She offered Lee this crucial advice: Dare to critique those in authority who expect your subservience for access to privilege. “You must bite the hand that feeds you,” Kincaid said, and Lee took this to heart.

In the final section, “Grace,” Lee moves through a personal and professional reckoning in order to find her footing as a professor of African American and Caribbean literature, first at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and later at Loyola Marymount University. “I had perfected a teaching persona that was based on my experiences in elite white spaces,” she writes. “But now I was exhausted.” Lee admits to “relearning” how to teach, and how to write, in ways that centered her students (and readers) of color. She became a mother, another reorientation of her identity.

Lee spent decades seeking approval from white teachers and wealthy classmates, contorting herself into a hardworking “model minority” figure at devastating cost to her self-esteem and mental health. It’s a melancholic story of second-generation assimilation that treads familiar narrative ground, perhaps, but Lee’s memoir ultimately enacts a powerful apostasy. Turning from a younger self that was restrictively “Neither/Nor” — Black/white, Korean/American, “model minority”/racial sellout — Lee rejects a compulsory allegiance to whiteness, and compels her readers to do the same. She eventually learns to see beyond herself, to distinguish an emergent Asian American identity that is an accretive “Both/And.”

Throughout the memoir, Lee cites works by Black and Latinx critical race theorists, diasporic literary scholars, Indigenous activists and writers of color, as well as the urgent inquiries raised by the undergraduates she now teaches. I love that a memoir about Asian American identity formation does not rely only on the authority of Asian American thinkers and critics. Lee reminds readers that the term “Asian American,” coined by the student activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka at Berkeley in the 1960s, was inspired and informed by the Black Power and Black Pride movements, and in solidarity with the Third World Liberation Front.

Near the end of the book, Lee introduces readers to the idea of “survivance,” a neologism developed by the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor that suggests the blending of “survival,” “endurance,” “resistance” and, for Lee, “vibrance.” It is a beautiful incantation for the ongoing project of Asian American identity, a matter of infinite becoming, ever in transformation.