What kind of Vedic rabbit hole of temporally acausal connections have we tumbled through? I mean, holy mother of Carl Gustav Jung, throw down the I Ching, man, this is heavy, the serendipity of this, the Deschampsian plum-pudding wheel of karma that’s spun me off in this direction.
Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 289
Greedy land developers. Estranged Korean–Chinese American brothers. Chocolate ice cream. Buddhist precepts written on paper airplanes. Organic brussels sprouts. These are but a few of the plot elements that propel Don Lee’s second novel Wrack and Ruin (2008). Lyndon Song, former world-renowned sculptor, is besieged by visitors to his organic brussels sprout farm, including his Los Angeles wannabe movie producer brother, who is also a former Wall Street embezzler; an aging and washed-up Hong Kong martial arts film star; a former art curator turned shiatsu masseuse; and two environmental activists trying to save the snowy plover from a golf course developer. Although clearly a satire, at the heart of Lee’s novel is an organic message that emphasizes the interconnected nature of all beings and experiences as well as a respect for the land and for the linkages among people, animals, and the food we produce and consume. In this novel, to act Asian American and to eat Asian American become forms of political engagement rooted in a desire to be understood outside a dominant white hegemonic culture and outside stereotypical and Orientalized portraits of Asian Americans and foodways.
Wrack and Ruin continually upends expectations of model minority stereotypes and self-consciously questions what it means to be an Asian American artist and, by extension, what it means to act Asian American: what it means to live as an Asian American in our day and age. Food serves as an organizing device, as well as a plot element, yet not in the ways that one would typically associate with the term “Asian.” Food in many ways centers this novel, but not as a simple or simplistic ethnic symbol, signifier of racial difference, material of assimilation, or sign of hybridization. In this chapter, I expand on Anita Mannur’s observation that “the deliberate recasting and reframing of which foods are deemed ‘exotic,’ un-American, and desirable can be read as a strategic attempt to understand and undermine the continuing link between Asian Americans and their foodways.”1 Mannur recognizes that decoupling food from ethnicity and race releases Asian American identities from being exoticized and racialized through stereotypical associations with food and eating, thereby making them objects of consumption rather than subjects who are “consumers and producers of American taste mechanisms.”2 Indeed, Wrack and Ruin does not fetishize authentic Asian-ethnic foodways; instead, Lee’s invocations of food and eating become political acts through their apolitical affiliations, calling on readers to understand action and eating as forms of racialized politics through their de-ethnicized materiality.
“‘You know the problem with us?” Woody said to Lyndon. “We’re fucking typical Asian men. We don’t talk. We’re emotionally inaccessible.’”
Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 145
As the title of my chapter suggests, there is a way in which one can act Asian American as well as eat Asian American, but what does that really mean? What does it mean to act or to eat “Asian American”? Is this about one’s identity, one’s behavior, one’s performance, or the materiality of the food items that one is consuming? Moreover, just what is this adjective, “Asian American”?
“Asian American” acts as a racial rather than an ethnic descriptor, meaning that it is not tied to a particular Asian ancestral homeland or ethnic national identity. Rather, “Asian American” exists as a constructed, political marker, one created during the 1960s civil rights movement.3 Scholars and journalists like Daryl Maeda, William Wei, Frank Wu, and Helen Zia traced the development of a racialized Asian American community and the rise of the Asian American movement, specifically its development as a political affiliation encompassing various Asian-ethnic groups.4 To be Asian American in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to affirm one’s difference from the white mainstream majority as an oppressed nonwhite “other” in solidarity with people of color.
After the civil rights era, the term “Asian American” has been used most in academic and activist arenas to demarcate a group of people who have ancestral roots in Asia and whose experiences in the United States remain marked by a history of disenfranchisement: exclusionary immigration and naturalization laws, antimiscegenation statutes, housing discrimination, illegal incarceration as enemy aliens, and, today, racial targets as terrorists. In other words, those who either consider themselves Asian American from a census perspective or who choose this term out of an activist sense of shared history are distinguished through their difference. To be Asian American means that one’s nationality may always be called into question owing to one’s racial difference; accordingly, citizenship for Asian Americans is always suspect.
This definition has plagued the field of Asian American studies and Asian American literature (from the points of view of both the literature and the literary criticism). A look at novels labeled “Asian American literature” reveals that they are written by people who may identify as Asian American but whose works usually cohere around a single Asian ethnicity. Chinese American writer Gish Jen centers her stories on Chinese American families.5 Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri describes the lives of Indians in the diaspora.6 Korean American Chang-rae Lee populates his novels with Korean and Korean American characters,7 and Vietnamese American Monique Truong’s novels focus on Vietnamese characters living both inside and outside the United States.8 Most Asian American novelists feature Asian-ethnic characters who share the ethnic ancestry of their authors. While there are notable exceptions9 (Don Lee being among them), Asian American authors usually write about the ethnic group to which they belong, and works of Asian American literature are usually defined by the Asian ethnicity of the writer as well as the protagonists and/or characters of the novels.
Similarly, Asian American scholarship, whether literary criticism or ethnography in general, tends to focus on questions of Asian ethnic specificity, for example, how Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans, and Japanese Americans navigate their worlds or how they have been perceived as Asian ethnic “others” within a larger U.S. historical framework.10 Seldom do scholars of Asian American studies define the term “Asian American” in their works, relying on assumptions about what this racial umbrella term means and whom it covers. I am not criticizing scholars who use the term in this manner; indeed, almost all researchers of Asian American people and literature (myself included) make assumptions about the definition of “Asian American.” However, it still begs the question about the efficacy of this term and what it means, exactly, to act and eat as one who identifies as Asian American, since this is a racialized, political term that has currency only in a U.S. context. As the literary critic Sau-ling Cynthia Wong explains, “Asian America” is a concept that does not travel well, so to talk of an “Asian American” diaspora “is simply quite meaningless,” since “the loosely held and fluctuating collectivity called ‘Asian Americans’ will dissolve back into its descent defined constituents as soon as one leaves American national borders behind.”11 What unites Asian Americans in the United States is their shared difference with other people of Asian descent.
Asian American literature and scholarship thus concentrate on Asian ethnic peoples, experiences, and histories. Likewise, food is usually thought of as being ethnic rather than racially specific. Restaurants in the United States generally serve cuisine tied to an Asian nation (pan-Asian fusion restaurants notwithstanding), and the way that we talk about the Asian ethnic food that we cook and consume is through ethnic-national markers. We eat Chinese soup dumplings, Japanese miso soup, Korean bibimbap, Thai curry, Indian samosas, Vietnamese banh mih sandwiches, and Filipino chicken adobo. There are notable Asian and American hybrids—the fortune cookie12 and California roll13 come readily to mind—but outside pan-Asian fusion dishes14 and the local Hawaiian dish loco moco,15 there are no truly Asian American foods, and we generally do not talk about, think about, or cook Asian American food.
Despite the lack of a coherent Asian American cuisine, eating Asian American—or eating as an Asian American—can be understood as a form of political engagement, a recognition of the political and racialized moniker that the term “Asian American” connotes. This means that eating Asian American and acting Asian American are forms of social engagement, awareness, and activism, a means of distinguishing Asian American practices from mainstream, hegemonic, or assimilative norms. In other words, Asian American eating and acting become active forms of resisting Asian stereotypes that demean, belittle, and objectify Asian Americans, stereotypes that usually are trafficked through foodways.16 To eat and to act Asian American is to acknowledge the ways in which Asians in America have been subjected to institutional forms of white supremacy and a complicated history of racialization that has pitted them against other minority groups.17
Their food finally came, two waitresses bringing out all of their backed-up orders at once, the grilled asparagus and eggplant, yakitori, the duck breast marinated in sake, tempura, braised short ribs with daikon, fried softshell crabs, soba salad, gyoza, marinated mackerel, steamed egg custard, ohitashi, and potato croquettes. There wasn’t enough room on the table for everything, the rims of plates stacked on top of one another. Looking at the spread in totality, they realized they’d ordered way too much food. Still, they dug in.
Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 213
Don Lee is among a handful of Asian American writers who have explored different Asian ethnic American characters and perspectives in his works of fiction. The Korean American Lee does indeed write about Korean American characters. But his first short story collection, Yellow: Stories also contains Chinese American, Japanese American, Filipina, black, mixed-race Filipino-white, black–Korean Amerasian, Latino, and white American characters.18 Set in the fictional world of Rosarita Bay in Northern California, Yellow is a short-story cycle in which a minor character from one story appears as a major character in a later story.19 Even though the characters are clearly described using ethnic and racial signifiers, the stories themselves (with the exception of the last one) do not make race a central conceit or force. Instead, Lee creates stories about artistic ambition, loneliness, romantic disappointments, the ambivalence of impending parenthood, and coming to terms with various kinds of losses: romantic, familial, career, and youth.
With Wrack and Ruin, Lee returns to the fictional world of Rosarita Bay.20 This time, instead of providing numerous snapshots of the various residents in this sleepy California coastal village, Lee concentrates on a pair of siblings, Lyndon and Woody Song. These half Korean and half Chinese American middle-aged brothers have been estranged from each other for more than sixteen years because of Woody’s embezzlement of his clients’ (which include the Song parents) funds when he worked as a financial planner with Credit Suisse First Boston. The novel alternates between Lyndon’s and Woody’s third-person narrations in consecutive chapters, with each brother’s chapters taking place entirely from his perspective rather than from that of an omniscient narrator.21 During the 2005 Labor Day weekend, the novel pivots from Lyndon’s organic brussels sprout farm to different locales around Rosarita Bay, featuring the characters who attach themselves to one of the brothers: Sheila Lemke, Lyndon’s ex-girlfriend and Rosarita Bay’s mayor; Yi Ling Ling, a B-list martial arts movie star whom Woody brings to his brother’s farm for the weekend; JuJu LeMay, Lyndon’s best friend and Ling Ling’s new paramour; Laura Diaz-McClatchy, a former art curator turned shiatsu masseuse; Dalton Lee, an acclaimed independent film director and collaborator on Woody’s latest film deal; and Trudy Nguyen, a Vietnamese American adult transnational and transracial adoptee and little sister of Woody’s former best friend, Kyle Thorneberry. The various debacles hinted at in the novel’s title—the physical, emotional, mental, and financial devastations and debilitations that afflict both Lyndon and Woody—and the brothers’ estrangement itself provide the tension in the novel. Central is the question of whether Lyndon will sell his twenty-acre farm to the Centurion Group, a development company that is constructing a luxury housing complex around a premiere golf course, serves as the novel’s major plot device, with Woody’s business interests hinging on whether he will be able to convince his brother to sell his farm.
Although it may seem obvious to say that this Korean American author’s third published book is a work of Asian American fiction, its Asian American elements are self-conscious ruminations that raise questions about the issue of identity politics, the relationship between race and aesthetics, the responsibility (if any) of artists of color to their racial communities and the larger society, and the challenges of upending stereotypes by giving characters rich inner and outer lives, characters who just happen to be people of Asian ancestry. Lee’s first collection of short stories, Yellow, features different inhabitants of Rosarita Bay, both Asian American and non–Asian American, and Wrack and Ruin adds a variety of characters to Rosarita Bay, some of whom hail from the Asian diaspora. In addition to the Chinese Korean Song brothers, whose story anchors the narrative, there is the multiracial Laura Diaz-McClatchy, a woman who is initially described through Lyndon’s unspoken appraisal of her as a “petite, late thirties, Latina,”22 but who later discloses to Lyndon that her middle name is Kobayashi and that her Japanese mother trained her in the family’s generations-old tradition of shiatsu message.23 Some of the residents of Rosarita Bay from Yellow briefly reappear in a single paragraph as a nod to his first work of fiction: Hank Low Kwon; Dean Kaneshiro; Caroline Yip; Eugene Kim; Evelyn Yung; Janet McElroy, whom Lee notes is “a half-black, half-Korean psychotherapist”; and Brian, the “adopted Amerasian son”24 of Evelyn Yung.25
The characters in Lee’s work have both typical and atypical traits and histories associated with Asians in America. Trudy Nguyen, the Vietnamese adopted daughter of a wealthy WASP family, rejects her parents’ money and name upon returning to the United States after a trip to Vietnam. Trudy confesses to Woody that her unsuccessful attempt to find her birth parents “‘made me realize I didn’t belong there, in Vietnam,’” yet her closing question, “‘But where did I belong?’” reinforces the kinds of cultural confusion that many Asian transracial adoptees feel, and it also reflects the psychological and emotional state of many Asian Americans (adoptees and non-adoptees alike) who question their ability to really feel a sense of belonging in the United States as a racial minority.26
In addition, Lee subverts the stereotypes associated with Asian Americans, most notably that of being hyperaccomplished and overachieving. When Lyndon muses about how different he is from his compulsively driven, competitive brother, he notes that “their parents hadn’t been particularly demanding in that regard, never meting out any bourgeois, upwardly mobile, model-minority pressure for their sons to go Ivy League.”27 Upending the stereotype of Asian Tiger parents who push their children to excel at all costs, Lee casts Woody’s quest for success as an internal manifestation, one that derives from the brotherly favoritism he perceives his parents bestowing on Lyndon rather than from external Asian parental forces.28 The slacker, pot-smoking Lyndon is portrayed as someone who succeeds despite his lack of aspirations, as he describes himself as one who has “‘always taken a principled stand against ambition and discipline,’” a clear departure from the model minority Asian American.29
Yet beyond subverting stereotypes, Wrack and Ruin is most self-consciously an Asian American novel due to its central preoccupation with the dilemma that Asian American artists, whether of fine arts, films, or novels, face in struggling to produce art that is “art” rather than “Asian” or “Asian American.” As the art historian Alice Yang observes,
There is, first of all, little agreement as to what constitutes Asian American art, as such. Is it simply a descriptive label referring purely to the racial background of the artist? Or does the term serve a critical purpose designating a kind of art with shared concerns, vocabularies, and histories that imply the combination of Asian and Western modes? If so, what does Asian American art look like? Can there actually be a common denominator, given the many different ethnic groups that are covered under the rubric, not to mention the wide array of interests and stylistic approaches adopted by individual artists?30
While Yang’s rhetorical questions cohere around the dilemma that the conceptual category of “Asian American art” produces, they are equally instructive in thinking about how to define creative works labeled as “Asian American.”31 Should artists of Asian descent living in the United States always be known through a racialized or ethnicized lens (the Asian American sculptor, the Taiwanese director, the Korean American writer) rather than simply as a sculptor, a director, or a writer? Just what makes a work of art, or a novel like Wrack and Ruin, Asian American?
Remembering back to when he was an international sensation in the art world, Lyndon notes that “apparently he was not an artist. He was an Asian-American artist.”32 While the “he” in this quotation refers to Lyndon, it could just as easily refer to the author, Don Lee, who ponders the boxes placed on Asian American artists when, through the perspective of Asian American filmmaker Dalton Lee (who could easily be Don Lee’s fictional alter ego), he observes,
“Why are we stuck with comfort women, picture brides, geishas, and greengrocers, with exploring our roots and searching for our birth parents and examining what it means to be Asian American? I mean, come on, why does it always have to be about race and identity? I’m sick to death of race and identity.”33
Filmmaker Lee goes on to acknowledge that “nothing happens in this country without the involutions of race. But if we let it dictate what we can and cannot do and start limiting ourselves as artists, then we’re no longer free.”34
The frustration inherent in Lee’s alter ego/author statement about racial labels that confine and constrain artists of color from producing their work, irrespective of these labels, speaks to the complex racial politics in Lee’s novel. Again, using one of his characters as a mouthpiece for his own beliefs, Lee comments on the opinions of some in contemporary writing circles who believe that writers of color receive literary attention not because of the quality of their work but because of the color of their skin: “‘His latest peeve is with minority writers. He claims most of their books would never have seen the light of day if they’d been white, that they’re getting the benefit of literary affirmative action. He’s coming off as vaguely racist.’”35 Spoken to Lyndon in a flashback scene by his soon-to-be girlfriend, Sheila Lemke, about her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Stephen, Lee uses this scene to further complicate the pressures facing Asian American artists. They are perceived by white society as being nothing but affirmative-action no-talents who don’t deserve fame and recognition because they are capitalizing on their ethnic ancestry and, at the same time, they are being interpreted by the general public as producing art that “is about assimilation and diaspora, about racism and post-colonialism,” which is what Lyndon discovers when he is interviewed by critics who choose to see shades of the DMZ and Marco Polo and Korean aphrodisiacs in his sculptures, even though this was not how he wanted his work to be read.36 Indeed, as art critic Margo Machida affirms, “amid such diversity, where differences frequently outweigh similarities and all that might be held in common is a presence in this nation, the fact that there is a wide and divergent range of perspectives among Asians in the United States should come as no surprise.”37 While the diversity and differences among Asians in America should come as “no surprise,” Don Lee’s description of the flattening of artists of Asian heritage into representative “Asian American artists” whose work must always demonstrate an essentialized Oriental ethos reinforces the political nature of Asian American art.
Lee also singles out the pressures placed on Asian American artists by critics, both Asian American and non–Asian American. Filmmaker Dalton Lee complains about “the white hegemony” who “like it when we segregate ourselves.”38 Lyndon appears caught in a double bind by Asian American critics who initially slam the sculptures he creates out of made-up ideograms for “exploiting his ethnicity, of being a phony, of falsely exoticizing his work in order to cash in.” Lyndon is declared “the Uncle Tong of the art world.”39 Yet in a subsequent sculpture series on birds and fish, Lyndon “got shellacked by the Asian-American pundits as well, this time for not including any discernible Asian references. … They rebuked him for trying to deny his cultural heritage and whitewashing himself. For being, in short, a Twinkie.”40 Through Lyndon’s and Dalton’s perspectives, Lee raises questions of identity politics that plague Asian American artists: the unrealistic and unfair expectations placed on Asian American writers to simultaneously produce art that speaks responsibly to Asian American communities, that does not self-Orientalize, and that still rings true to the vision of the artist of Asian descent.
What are the politics invoked in producing Asian American art or acting Asian American? Perhaps it is simply that being Asian American cannot be confined to a singular definition or art form. Again, quoting Machida:
Not only is there no such thing as a singular or definitive contemporary Asian experience in America, but with the convoluted mingling of influences in a world where mobility reigns and boundaries between cultures are increasingly porous the broad range of Asian reactions to life in this nation are not reducible to limited paradigms such as assimilation versus separatism, tradition versus modernity, or East versus West.41
Just as there is no single or definitive Asian American experience, there is no singular or definitive identity surrounding the term “Asian American.” To be Asian American, one must simply identify as Asian American. To use this label self-consciously and self-referentially is to acknowledge the political force of history that this term encompasses. Don Lee’s recognition of forces like white hegemony and the damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t attitude of Asian American critics demonstrates that he is not advocating for a deracinated existence for Asian Americans. Although Lyndon and Dalton each identify as Asian American, Lee has each of them question what it means to be Asian American. These are the questions that author Don Lee himself appears to be wrestling with, as Wrack and Ruin tries to work out a balance between what it means to exist as part of the Asian diaspora in the United States, one who may eat Asian ethnic food and watch martial arts films from time to time but who is also a wind surfer and a brussels sprout farmer and an activist trying to save an endangered bird species.42
If acting Asian American in Wrack and Ruin becomes a political statement, so, too, does eating represent a type of Asian American politics for the Asian diasporic characters of Rosarita Bay. One of the notable aspects of Lee’s novel, and part of what makes it a truly Asian American novel, is that all the characters of Asian descent appear to be of the second generation, and their eating habits reflect the kinds of tastes found among Asian Americans who are not of the immigrant generation and who are highly Americanized.43 While this novel may not seem at first to be about eating, the primacy of foodways—all that we associate with the cultivation, production, and consumption of food—permeates the narrative. Indeed, food—or, more specifically, meals—becomes an organizing force in Wrack and Ruin, and the plot circulates around when the main characters, Lyndon and Woody, sit down to eat, wake up to eat, prepare meals, indulge a food craving, or eat out in various diners, restaurants, and bars. During a massage session with Laura Diaz-McClatchy, Lyndon gets a whiff of chocolate ice cream, which leads him to eat strawberry yogurt as a substitute for the ice cream he craves (and that isn’t in his freezer), which is the prelude to his simple dinner of zucchini and chicken stir-fry with rice. The following day he runs into Laura, and they both indulge their desire for chocolate ice cream at a local shop, Udderly Licious, and while walking around town and eating their cones, Lyndon asks Laura to go to dinner with him, which in turn leads to various plot progressions in character development and narrative revelations. The initial whiff of chocolate ice cream and Lyndon’s desire for consuming ice cream propel his character into action, and scenes of consumption—the ice-cream shop, the bar where Laura gives him her phone number, the Japanese restaurant where they go on their date—figure prominently in the narrative, serving as integral settings for the unfolding of the novel.
In this opening chapter, Lee demonstrates that his Asian American protagonist indulges in meals one would assume would be part of his Asian ethnic heritage, such as cooking rice in a rice cooker and preparing a stir-fry meal for dinner, yet his consumption of strawberry yogurt and chocolate ice cream suggest more typically American tastes. I draw this distinction not to assert that Lee is deliberately trying to ethnicize or racialize Lyndon as “Asian” through an association with cooking rice and stir-fry. On the contrary, while Lyndon does eat foods that conform to his Asian palate, his eating habits run the gamut of ethnic cuisines. The meals that Lyndon and other Asian American characters enjoy throughout the novel are, in many ways, truly American, representing a multiracial, multiethnic American food landscape that twenty-first-century diners assume are commonplace. The characters in Wrack and Ruin eat Mexican enchiladas, Japanese tapas, gourmet dark chocolate, chili, chowder, grilled cheese sandwiches, burgers, eggs, lattes, bagels, pasta carbonara, and, of course, brussels sprouts. Commenting on the fluidity of consumptive practices and tastes of residents in New York City’s extraordinarily diverse neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, Martin Manalansan describes the influence of “Asian pan-ethnic sentiments” that “have been influential in eroding the cultural borders between Asian consumers of various cuisines.”44 Like Manalansan’s Asian ethnic informants, the characters in Lee’s narrative have developed Asian pan-ethnic gustatory and gastronomic practices in keeping with the panoply of foodways found in America.
Indeed, what is most important about Asian American consumption in this novel is its plurality and diversity. To eat Asian American is not to limit oneself or to be limited by Asian ethnic food practices. But it also does not mean repudiating the food of one’s ethnic heritage. Asian American characters eat a variety of foods that may or may not be from their ethnic tradition. But just as he portrays their identities as second-generation Asian Americans, Lee portrays these characters and the food they eat as more than simply the sum of their Asian ethnic identities. They are more than just Asian American type-cast personalities acting in ways typically or, more accurately, stereotypically associated with Asian American characters. The Asian Americans in this novel possess a depth and complexity belied by their initial introduction, which is in keeping with the way that actual flesh-and-blood Asian Americans exist in real life: as more complex individuals than are rendered through two-dimensional portraits in typical mass media outlets.45 Perhaps most refreshingly, Lee does not portray Asian Americans as struggling with their ethnic or racial identity. Food is not the barometer for how authentic or inauthentic they feel about their Asian heritage. Instead, food is just one more cultural product for ingestion, signaling an acceptance of the characters’ Asian American-ness through the range of what they consume, which includes both Asian and non-Asian foodstuffs.
A case in point is brussels sprouts. While eating a midday meal of grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches in the farmhouse kitchen, Ling Ling asks Lyndon whether he actually likes brussels sprouts, which leads Lyndon into a Forest Gump–like catalog of all the ways that he knows how to prepare them: “He knew how to sauté them, bake, them, steam, fry, boil, braise, roast, stew, and blanch them. He knew how to serve them lyonnaised, au gratin, and a la barigoule.”46 Through the symbol of brussels sprouts, we can understand the political implications of acting and eating in Wrack and Ruin. The primary tension in the novel is whether Lyndon will sell his organic brussels sprout farm to the Centurion group so it can build a golf course on his property. For Lyndon, the farm and his relationship to his crops and the land are a synergistic part of who he is, linking him to nature. He realizes that “whether he was here or not, it would go on, this cycle, for thousands of years, like it had before him. Knowing this was humbling. It made him feel insignificant, and paradoxically that feeling was useful, freeing. He would do whatever it took to keep this farm.”47 The farm and the brussels sprouts that he grows connect Lyndon to a larger cycle of nature, which he is both a part of and apart from, demonstrating his organic connection to his farm.
In this narrative, it is this message—the organic part of it—that speaks to the political nature of acting and eating. In an early scene, Lee describes Lyndon’s ruminations on why he farms organically:
Lyndon hated it, the idea of it, the residue of all those pesticides and herbicides on the sprouts, the trace elements of toxins seeping into the earth and contaminating it for decades. But, contrary to assumptions, Lyndon wasn’t a reformer. He wasn’t some sort of idealistic, hippie-dippy enviro-activist, not even a vegetarian. He just wanted to farm in a way that was simple and pure, and keep his life uncomplicated.48
Lyndon’s organic sensibilities aren’t simply for environmental or dietary reasons, since he is neither a green activist nor a vegetarian. Instead, his refusal to sell to the Centurion Group and to turn his farm into a piece of overly processed, toxic commercialized real estate signals his desire to be interconnected with nature. At the end of the Labor Day weekend, Lyndon finds himself attached to people in his community and making choices that demonstrate his awareness of how his life is tied to the lives of others, as well as how much he is tied to the land. The novel emphasizes an organic connection among the characters that illuminates how intertwined everyone’s lives truly are.
Food becomes the arena for this organic interrelatedeness. Udderly Licious—or, more specifically, the two teenagers working behind the ice-cream counter—also reappears throughout the novel, demonstrating the connectedness of various characters with food and with one another. In fact, the two teenaged ice-cream scoopers, Jan de Leuw and Andre Meeker, initially figure as background characters to the main narrative. Yet what develops during the weekend and throughout the novel is the prominence of these two seemingly minor characters: from Lyndon’s brief encounter with Jan as they pass each other in Laura’s shiatsu waiting room; to Woody and Trudy’s witnessing of Jan and Andre’s lovemaking while riding bareback on a horse; to the revelation that Jan and Andre are part of an environmental terrorist organization, the Planet Liberation Front (or PLF) and, as such, are responsible for two events that severely affect Lyndon’s and hence Woody’s lives: they release an elephant at the chili and chowder festival, and they accidently release turpentine into Lyndon’s irrigation pond. This last act of unintended harm, by Jan and Andre, make them responsible for the novel’s denouement and subsequent resolution of what will happen to Lyndon’s organic brussels sprout farm, illuminating the intertwined nature of Lee’s narrative, which begins and ends with the influences of the seemingly minor ice-cream scooper (and bearer of the chocolate ice-cream fragrance that lingers on the shiatsu mat): Jan de Leuw.
This may be food’s central feature in this novel; Lee’s “organic” message that everything is truly interconnected. The series of coincidences, reunions, and serendipitous meetings are integral to the novel’s overall theme of organic unity. In the first chapter, while Laura is treating Lyndon’s neck spasm by massaging other parts of his body, she tells him that “‘it’s all connected. … Everyone assumes that things are isolated, but they’re not. Every part speaks to another.’”49 Lyndon begins the novel as a hermetic and isolated individual and spends the weekend, and the bulk of the narrative, coming to terms with the many different encumbrances and relationships that he has with his family, lovers, enemies, friends, and friends of friends. Lee emphasizes the sense of connection and community, of interconnection and interrelatedness, that the characters all share with one another.
While the characters exist as individuals with their own separate stories, Lee highlights the organic wholeness of the narrative through the confluence of the characters’ various story lines in the climax of the novel. In the penultimate chapter, all the characters we have been following converge on Lyndon’s farm, through either their direct presence or their indirectly influential actions, all of which culminate in the dramatic unlocking of the barn door and the secret that Lyndon harbors there. While Ed Kitchell (head of the Centurion Group) and local sheriff Stephen Lemke (ex-husband of Lyndon’s ex-lover) believe that the barn is full of marijuana, the open barn doors reveal an elaborate art sculpture of “bent rods and wires, hammered sheets and plates, all welded together and twisting intricately into thousands of branches … a sandblasted, oxidized, patinaed grove, which shimmered in luminous shades of red, orange, black, blue and green.”50 The metal jungle that Lyndon had been working on for seventeen years “was not art,” as the narrator pointedly tells us, but an organic creation that mirrors the messy, conjoined nature of humans existing together, a metaphor for the interrelationships of the characters themselves:
It was a single, massive linked sculpture that would be impossible to separate from the barn, that could never be dismantled or moved or installed in any gallery or museum. And while the individual parts were lovely and exquisite, with their workmanship and detail, the whole made no sense—no sense at all. It had no shape, no definition, no pattern or apparent meaning.51
The sculpture in the barn is like life itself, integrally linked together without apparent purpose or meaning and impossible to separate one part from another. This is also the message in Lee’s narrative: that Lyndon and Woody, try as they might, cannot escape the bonds connecting them to others, in ways large and small, in the narrative, bonds that become solidified through the shared meals and their relationship to various foods and foodways in Wrack and Ruin.
The Fourth Noble Truth was that the end of suffering could be attained through the pursuit of morality, meditation, and wisdom, as described by the Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 320
In the brief concluding chapter of Wrack and Ruin, Woody and Lyndon are joined together: no longer does one brother’s perspective exclude the other. Instead, the narrator allows us into each sibling’s actions and thoughts, and the novel ends with a scene of commensality: the two brothers join in eating dinner. By combining Lyndon’s and Woody’s perspectives in this final chapter, Lee emphasizes the organic message of his novel: that the two brothers, who are vastly different from each other and who may never be the best of friends, are nonetheless connected to each other. Both have suffered emotional, psychological, and physical injuries throughout the weekend. Quite literally, both brothers are wounded: Woody is on crutches with a broken toe and sprained ribs, and Lyndon has a sprained knee and his left arm in a sling. Each brother sustained his injuries because he put himself in harm’s way while rescuing others, and each brother does so not once but twice, hurting himself in order to protect someone else.52 Lyndon and Woody, in other words, try to do what is right. According to the epigraph to this conclusion, the end to suffering can be achieved by following a path of right living; one of the central tenets of Buddhism is understanding the sense of interconnectedness that all beings, human and nonhuman, share with one another.
Right living and right action are prominent ideas in this novel, emphasizing the themes of organicism and justice. The fact that Lyndon does not sell his farm to the Centurion Group but to a nonprofit land conservancy group can be interpreted as the right action, the right thing for Lyndon to do in terms of his organic connection to the environment. It can also be seen as an act of environmental justice: his decision is the opposite of moral or ethical compromise and affirms the values of preservation and conservation.
Indeed, the idea of doing the right thing, despite failure and injury, is continually emphasized throughout the narrative. Trudy acknowledges that while she and her partner, Margot, had been unable to save the snowy plover, a bird species displaced when the Centurion Group began constructing the golf course and luxury homes, the birds’ demise at the hands (or beaks) of predatory ravens causes Trudy to become introspective: “But you know, I’m okay with it. I can accept it. It’s part of the natural cycle of things, not something caused by people, so we did our job. Now we’re going to another project, in Hawaii.”53 Trudy understands that while it was regrettable that the plover chicks could not be saved, the attempt was worthwhile, and she and Margot will continue their environmental activism in another location. Trudy’s circumspection reinforces the idea of organicism promoted in the novel, as earlier she tells Woody: “‘We have the atoms of our ancestors in each of us. You have Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha, inside you right now! The whole planet, everyone dead and alive, is breathing together! Isn’t that remarkable to think?’”54 Trudy’s exhortation reinforces the message that we can obtain from Lee’s narrative: we all are interconnected, and we all are part of an organic whole. Whether we are hurt in the process of right action or we are able to save others is not the point; the point is that it is always worthwhile to act because our actions tie us to a larger community.
Don Lee creates an Asian American community in this novel not by creating stereotypes of Asian behaviors; instead, his community in Wrack and Ruin is populated by many people who just happen to be Asian American, along with their identities as farmers, actresses, environmentalists, and artists. Yet the deliberateness of creating a work that has so many characters of Asian ethnic descent—and of having two Asian American characters, Lyndon and Dalton, question the notion of how Asian American art is perceived—speaks to the politics always inherent in the term “Asian American.” My last claim is that Lee’s invocation of the term “Asian American” in his novel signals an understanding of racial rather than ethnic or national politics. His characters do not think about being Korean or about their U.S. citizenship. Their concerns deliberately pertain to how they, as Asian American artists of color, are interpreted by others, as racially Asian in America, as always interpellated through their racial identity. To invoke terms like “Asian American” is always to invoke issues of racial politics and what it means to be a racial minority with the weight of anti-Asian racism and oppression that circulates within the term “Asian American.”
Actions and eating in an Asian American politicized framework remind readers that our most prosaic, everyday consumptive choices, whether what we consume in our kitchens or the local cinema multiplex or the art museum can become a call to social justice. The meals shared and food farmed in Lee’s narrative underscore the organic connections among land, people, and items of consumption that transcend traditional boundaries of ethnicity and race and complicate our notion of affiliation and affinity. As literary critic Wenying Xu observes, “Sharing food plays a central role in the formation of social groupings. … We eat together, and sometimes cook together, to affirm our feelings of family, community, friendship, love, and comfort.”55
The last pages of the novel depict the antagonistic brothers eating, their enmity not resolved but briefly suspended during their shared meal, one that Lyndon prepares: steamed rice, grilled steaks, and braised brussels sprouts, which are described in fine detail: “He had browned slices of thick diced bacon, sautéed them with shallots, added chicken stock, thyme, parsley, as well as some sherry, salt, and pepper, and a bay leaf, then the sprouts, brought everything to a boil, and simmered it, covered, for fifteen minutes.”56 Although Lee leaves us with a recipe for brussels sprouts, what he actually leaves readers with is a sense of interconnectedness, of briefly being in-the-moment and harmonious, with someone who is close enough to be your brother but whom you may regard as your greatest enemy. In this novel, food serves to temporarily, if not permanently, bind people together. The last line of Lee’s novel may very well describe not only the meal that Woody and Lyndon eat together but the narrative that readers of Wrack and Ruin have just consumed: “Now he served the sprouts with the steak and the rice to his brother—a simple meal, not much to it, just the basic elements, but filling.”57
1. Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 173.
2. Ibid., 177.
3. I want to be very clear that when I use the term “Asian American,” I do so in the racialized and politicized sense, which recognizes the social construction of “Asian American” as a racial signifier but also acknowledges that just because race is constructed, it does not mean that it is not real or that its effects (institutional racism/white privilege and supremacy) are not deeply felt and experienced.
4. For more on the history of the Asian American movement, see Daryl Maeda, Chain’s of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in American beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).
5. See the following books by Gish Jen: Typical American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991); Mona in the Promised Land (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); The Love Wife (New York: Vintage Books, 2005); and World and Town (New York: Knopf, 2010).
6. See the following books by Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies (New York: Mariner Books, 1999); The Namesake (New York: Mariner Books, 2004); and Unaccustomed Earth (New York: Knopf, 2008).
7. See the following books by Chang-rae Lee: Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996); A Gesture Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999); Aloft (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004); and The Surrendered (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010).
8. See the following books by Monique Truong: The Book of Salt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003); and Bitter in the Mouth (New York: Random House, 2010).
9. See the following books by Don Lee: Yellow: Stories (New York: Norton, 2001); and Wrack and Ruin). Other Asian American writers who have either written outside their Asian ethnic ancestry or have included Asian ethnic American characters beyond those of their heritage are Shawn Wong, American Knees (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Susan Choi, American Woman (New York: Harper, 2003); and Han Ong, Fixer Chao (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). This, of course, does not include American writers of Asian ancestry writing about non-Asian American characters; for example, the works of Sigrid Nunez, with the exception of her first novel Feather on the Breath of God (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), which feature non-Asian Americans or de-racinated characters who appear to identify as white. For more on Asian American writers writing about non–Asian American characters and the definition of Asian American literature, see my “The Place of Transgressive Texts in Asian American Epistemology,” Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 1 (2010): 205–25.
10. Works by such eminent scholars such as Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Huping Ling, Asian America: Forming New Communities, Expanding Boundaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Little Brown, 1990) all use the phrase “Asian American” in the titles of their works, yet the works themselves look at specific Asian ethnic examples, even while acknowledging the racialized aspects of Asian ethnic Americans in their studies.
11. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered,” Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1and 2 (1995): 17–18.
12. For a detailed genealogy of the fortune cookie as an American invention, see Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2009).
13. See Trevor Corson, The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi from Samurai to Supermarket (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
14. How much one can consider pan-Asian food to be “Asian American” food may be debatable; however, given the plethora of pan-Asian eateries in the United States and the popularity of fusion cuisine in general in the United States, pan-Asian dishes and Asian-fusion food seem to be uniquely Asian and American creations. For a good analysis of pan-Asian fusion food, nationalism, and narratives see Anita Mannur, “Easy Exoticism: Culinary Performances of Indianness,” in her Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).
15. Loco moco is a favorite dish among people living in Hawai‘i. It was developed at a Japanese American–owned diner in the late 1940s and is composed of a hamburger patty on a bed of rice, topped with a fried egg and gravy. Here, rice, a staple of many Asian cuisines, and a hamburger, the quintessential American food, are combined into an Asian American food staple as loco moco, which does not seem to be widely known outside the Hawaiian Islands.
16. The subject of my first book, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (New York: Routledge, 2004), argues in part that the Asian American bildungsroman featuring foodways tied to ethnic identity serves as a counterdiscourse to the racist depictions of Asians in America that have been conflated through their association with various foodways. For example, Chinese immigrants were vilified as rat eaters.
17. Specifically, I am thinking about the model minority myth, which is mainly associated with Asian Americans and valorizes their accomplishments as minorities in America, with the unspoken comparison with African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, implying that these supposedly “darker” minority communities should also pick themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve success as Asian Americans did. For more on a critique of the model minority myth, see Rosalind Chou and Joe Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008); and Stacy Lee, Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1996).
18. The term “Amerasian” refers specifically to the children of a male U.S. serviceman and an Asian woman that were conceived during one of the many wars in Asia that the United States participated in during the twentieth century.
19. Readers familiar with the geography of the California Bay Area will quickly recognize the town of Half Moon Bay, disguised as the fictionalized village of Rosarita Bay. Similarly, San Vincente stands in for San Mateo, although other prominent cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, exist as themselves, as do the major freeways running through these coastal towns and hamlets.
20. Told in the genre of a neo-noir detective-style novel, Lee’s first novel, Country of Origin (New York: Norton, 2004), takes place in Japan, and hinges on the search for what happened to a black-Japanese Amerasian woman, Lisa Countryman.
21. The one rupture of the focalization taking place through the perspective of one of the Song brothers can be seen in chapter 9, which opens with the declaration that “the first annual Rosarita Bay chili and chowder festival was a miniature version of the town’s larger, more established pumpkin festival. … An inspector from the San Vincente County Health Department was on-site to ensure that the guidelines for food treatment, per its environmental health standards, were being strictly enforced” (284). While Lyndon could ostensibly have this information, he is not introduced until a page and a paragraph later.
22. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 15.
23. Ibid., 25.
24. Lee, Yellow, 286. Readers of Yellow will remember Brian and his brother Patrick as the half-Filipino, half-white sons of Davis and Lita Fenny.
25. While the Asian ethnicities mentioned in Wrack and Ruin include Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Samoan, Japanese, and Vietnamese, notably absent are characters from the South Asian diaspora. Indeed, the novel’s Asian American characters in this work and in Lee’s other works are predominantly East Asian American. Although Lee is not responsible for including all Asian ethnicities (to do so would be impossible, given the breadth and scope of what the term “Asian American” covers), I believe it is worth noting that even as his novel attends to certain members of the Asian diaspora, it is not a comprehensive look at what it means to be Asian American.
26. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 193.
27. Ibid., 72.
28. The reference to “Tiger parents” is a play on the “Tiger mother” stereotype promulgated by Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), which seems less about how to properly parent in the Asian style and more an exercise in narcissistic memoir writing.
29. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 76.
30. Alice Yang, Why Asia? (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 104.
31. Yang’s book is listed among the works that Don Lee referenced while writing Wrack and Ruin, and her influence can be most strongly seen in Lyndon’s internal flashback during his date with Laura Diaz-McClatchy when he recalls his former life as a celebrated Asian American artist.
32. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 219.
33. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 267. The character Dalton Lee seems to be modeled partly on Asian American director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow) through the similarity of the two independent filmmakers who made a splash at the Sundance film festival with their Asian American movies. However, the ideas about the constraints placed on Asian American artists, as well as the fact that Dalton Lee’s character is an avid windsurfer, suggests that Don Lee (also a self-proclaimed avid windsurfer, according to his website, www.don-lee.com) is using Dalton Lee as a mouthpiece for his own frustrations with being pigeonholed as an Asian American writer.
34. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 268.
35. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 81. Nam Le, a writer who was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, educated in the United States, and currently divides his time between the United States and Australia, also ruminates, through his fictional characters, about the belief among writers that “ethnic literature’s hot” (9) and that writers of color “exploit” (10) their ethnic backgrounds and life experiences in order to win book contracts. For more, see Nam Le, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the first story in Le’s debut collection The Boat (New York: Knopf, 2008).
36. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 219.
37. Margo Machida, Asia/America (New York: Asia Society Galleries and the New Press, 1994) 67.
38. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 267.
39. Ibid., 220–21.
40. Ibid., 222.
41. Machida, Asia/America, 108.
42. Indeed, Lee continues to wrestle with the question of what defines Asian American art in his latest novel, The Collective (New York: Norton, 2012).
43. The only character of Asian descent who is not American is Yi Ling Ling. But as someone who was born in Hong Kong (a very cosmopolitan city), educated in England, and travels around the globe as a goodwill ambassador (she is headed for Vietnam at the novel’s close), Ling Ling is, in many ways, the kind of world citizen unbound by simple allegiances of nation and race that Eleanor Ty writes about: “one of those mobile, cosmopolitan citizens” (141). For more, see Eleanor Ty, Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
44. Martin Manalansan IV, “The Empire of Food,” in Gastropolis: Food and New York City, ed. Anne Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 102.
45. For more on the connection between mass-media and popular culture depictions of Asian Americans and food that have typecast them as stereotypes, see my Consumption and Identity.
46. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 86. By saying “Forest Gump–like catalog” I am referring to the scene in the film Forest Gump in which Bubba lists all the ways he knows how to prepare shrimp, an extensive cataloging that appears to last for several days.
47. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 164–65.
48. Ibid., 50.
49. Ibid., 18.
50. Ibid., 313–14.
51. Ibid., 315.
52. Lyndon first pushes Yi Ling Ling out of danger when the roof of the Boat House bar collapses; the following day he pushes his ex-girlfriend, Sheila Lemke, out of the way of a rampaging elephant set loose during the chili and chowder festival. Woody rescues Margot and Trudy from the same rampaging elephant; the following morning, while rushing Lyndon’s dog Bob to the vet, he breaks his foot and strains his neck in a car accident, all in an attempt to save Bob’s life.
53. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 277.
54. Ibid., 189.
55. Wenying Xu, Eating Identities (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008) 3.
56. Lee, Wrack and Ruin, 332–33.
57. Ibid., 333.