CHINESE PRODIGAL

A Chinese American English professor reflects on how race has shaped his life.

When Shih was growing up, he never identified as Asian American, a racial moniker forged in the crucible of political struggle that felt illegible to young people like him, who couldn’t imagine a pan-Asian identity. “I grew up in the seventies and eighties,” he writes, “a time when the significance of Asian-ness was still being hashed out.” As he grew, though, experiences like the birth of his biracial son, his appointment to the English department of a predominantly White university, and the murder of a Black man, Akai Gurley, at the hands of an Asian American cop changed the way he viewed his place in America’s complex racial geography. It was an evolution his immigrant parents did not always share. “Back then,” he writes, “I couldn’t explain [to my parents] how our rights had been fought for by the Black Americans they didn’t know and not gifted to them by the white Americans they did.” Eventually, Shih came to understand himself as an Asian American who troubled the model-minority myth by losing an engineering scholarship and unexpectedly gaining an affirmative action–based fellowship to graduate school for English several years later. He also began to make sense of his parents who, he writes, ultimately supported his stereotype-defying decisions as well as his White wife and future in-laws, relationships he situates within the context of the Supreme Court decision allowing interracial marriage. Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart.

A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir.