A “prodigal” is someone who is “profligate” and “wasteful.” A “Chinese prodigal,” per David Shih, might refer to someone who is wasting his Chineseness, the potency of an identity.
Shih’s memoir Chinese Prodigal: A Memoir in Eight Arguments opens in 2019 in Wisconsin, where he first gets word of his father’s ailing in Texas. His father is a Chinese immigrant, and the author was born in Hong Kong and arrived stateside at a year old, in 1971.
In two short weeks, his father has passed, and Shih has not made it back to his father’s deathbed. He has broken a core taboo in Chinese culture in which filial respect is paramount. His non-action is sacrilege. As a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire where he had been for some 20 years, he did have his hands full with work. He had not realized his father’s health issues were perhaps that serious.
Still, that event seems to have triggered some soul searching about who his father meant to him and his identity as a Chinese American with a half-white half-Chinese son.
The eight arguments of the title weave Shih’s personal experiences, politics, social conversations, and both ancient and more recent history around race, into a thoughtful work of racial politics in the U.S. The memoir entangles the world of yesterday, the author’s of today, and that of his son into the future.
Shih came at his teaching work, including topics of ethnic studies, in some part accidentally. He came at his own evolving idea of Asianness from a tabula rasa. For example, he did not realize that Filipinos were considered Asian. He did not see Asian issues as any part of his English literature learning or academic identity until an intervention from the famous Hawaiian poet Garrett Hongo.
Over time, though, he accrued the awareness of identities in a globalized world. His learning became a form of social combat for a better functioning pluralistic democracy. He formed sophisticated and defensible positions on racial constructs that enable a fairer and more just world. He was able to communicate the humanity of the “other” through historical events and wars, even as he initially perhaps saw himself in the mainstream and catered to his white interlocutors who controlled who was accepted socially and on what terms.
The author does not shy away from difficult moments. He describes his father, a seller of chinoiseries at various fairs and events, confronting another business owner in another booth with challenges to her race, gender, and skin color, in an ugly clash, when the author was young. Of such moments are racial awakenings made, to the negative or the positive. Is this the inheritance that an individual may choose to keep or to discard?
Dr. Shih understands the limits of racial awareness. He writes:
When my son is older, I will continue to say that he is half Chinese, half white, but I will also tell him that the matter of his race is often beyond his control. At any given moment, he will be whatever race whiteness needs him to be. He will be white; Chinese; or half Chinese, half-white. It does not have to be a curse if you know what is happening to you and can survive.
Where “increasing diversity aggrieves a ruling order,” the powers that be may prefer citizens to be “monoracial, even as its most optimistic say ‘multiracial’ or ‘biracial’ or ‘mixed race’ or ‘half Chinese, half white’—all the words I didn’t have as a boy.” There will be efforts at social erasure. Putting a name on the phenomenon has been the result of generations of work in this space and work that is being achieved currently. Naming realities enable the centering of race and racial identity “instead of racism in public life.”
He points to a fragility in social relations that are revealed in how societies and people treat what they perceive of as the other: “The question of ‘What are you?’ has more to do with the maintenance of white identity than with an interest in multiracial identity.”
He argues eloquently against considering mixed race their own category and not maintaining a racial group identity based on specifics as suggested by some thinkers in the field (e.g. a general “mixed race” vs. “quarter-Chinese, quarter-Caucasian, and half-East Indian,” for example). Such an approach of separating multiracial people from their belonging to “a parent’s monoracial group” is about “seeking to de-legitimize group-based resource claims such as affirmative action.”
Shih asserts that many are striving to maintain a “white supremacist state” with their actions and ideas. He defends public sports figures who switch nationalities based on an aspect of their self-identities, including Naomi Osaka and Eileen Gu, who gave up their American citizenship to play for other countries in the Summer 2020 Olympics.
He observes:
The radical prospect of mixed-race identity is neither the elimination of extant racial categories nor the addition of a ‘multiracial’ category to go next to them. It is the disruption of the logic that feeds them. After all, the census already had added a ‘multiracial’ category in 1850 under a different name, and what the word ‘mulatto’ accomplished was to create more non-white people still Black enough to re-enslavement by the Fugitive Slave Act passed the same year. Whiteness has never had difficulty with making room below itself.
He sees racial narratives as constructs of historical (and contemporaneous) control:
I wonder why blood did not build a family for us as broadly as it did for Black Americans. Of course, we were never part of a criminal conspiracy like slavery, whose viability depended on the fiction of race.
He points to SAT test-taking by strategy and other routes for Asian Americans to “pass for white.”
He tells an anecdote about supposedly being an “affirmative action hire” because of the requirement for specialization in “ethnic American literature” but then pulls that back later in the text when he discovers that he was termed a “’non-preferred minority,; which very often included Asian Americans.” Technically speaking.
The challenges of identity and social labeling are fraught but interesting and relevant. This is a contested space.
Shih’s Chinese Prodigal: A Memoir in Eight Arguments makes the debates around race accessible, even as the facts are disquieting. Why is it so hard for people not to scapegoat others? Why is it so hard for people not to try to engage in advantage-taking even if it means downing others on false narratives? Why do people so quickly go to violence to address discomfort? If making change involves people becoming aware of the issues, in the relatively safe spaces of academia, it will also require their want to try to be ethical and decent and caring people.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
