“Navigating Crisis: On Asian American Solidarity in a Post-Covid America,” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne (Fiction ’20)

2020 fiction graduate Daniel Tam-Claiborne was recently featured on LitHub. Read an excerpt of his essay below:

The stories we tell about ourselves say a lot about how we’d like to be seen. Here’s mine:

Before it was the Pacific heir to the American century, China was an apparition lodged in the back of my throat. My mother, whose family fled China following the Japanese invasion in the mid-20th century, grew up in Cuba and came to America when she was six years old. She married—and, not long after, divorced—my father, an Anglo-American Jew, and I grew up the eldest of two children in a shared one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

My identity as Chinese American has long been central to my “origin story,” but the truth is, there is an inherent tension between who I espouse to be and the person I am. For anyone who identifies as mixed race, this tension is all too familiar: being too much of one thing, too little of something else. Being mixed race means only ever having partial authority, and the very nature of my heritage has had the unintended effect of leading me to double down on race as a marker of identity. In other words, race is the primary lens through which I would want me, the protagonist of my own life, to be read.

POC and marginalized writers often wrestle with an obligation to present race in their prose and have historically been seen as “writing on behalf” of their identity. I wanted to understand how other contemporary Asian American writers grapple with marking identity, and especially race, in their characters through choices in dialect or speech, and what, if anything, they can teach us about how Asian Americans can use their voice today.

Read the rest of the essay here: https://lithub.com/navigating-crisis-on-asian-american-solidarity-in-a-post-covid-america/