Notes on the Hyphen: Re-encountering Language and Identity
Image credit: An Endless Birthing, Edward Lee (Issue 13)
By Smile Ximai Jiang
In the two-part miniseries “Words in Motion,” Smile Ximai Jiang examines the relationship between language and identity through the works of writers Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ross Gay, and Kenji Yoshino. These essays—featuring a flower in the crack in the sidewalk, a misnomer for bumblebees, and the experience of “covering,” among other things—attempt to articulate the notions of naming and creative authenticity. Here, Jiang hopes to pinpoint how and why how we say what we say matters.
“I am speaking now / the way you do. I speak / because I am shattered.”
—Louise Glück, “The Red Poppy”
In Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, Kenji Yoshino examines his experience with language and diasporic identity by diagramming the intersection of personal narrative and legal argumentation. Yoshino’s definition of identity often implicates the ownership of language—because of his racial identity, Yoshino felt the need to prove his proficiency in English, resolving to “collect English words like amulets” to protect himself from being reduced in America (120). Later, in college, this covering morphed into an avoidance and disdain of “classes marked as ethnic, like Asian-American literature”; Yoshino dived into canonically white literary traditions, which allowed him to distinguish himself as a literary scholar, well-versed in Shakespearean canon, who transcended the boundaries of his ethnic identity (121).
Like Yoshino I, too, carry with me a strange and perhaps unsubstantiated hesitation toward Asian-American literature. For the longest time, I felt as if the glaring “Asian-American” banner automatically disqualified me—an Asian person in America but not necessarily an American who is ethnically Asian—from truly connecting with and understanding the words on the page. I do not know what qualifies me for the hyphen. I think and write better in English, though Chinese is my mother tongue. I hesitate to call myself a person of color, since the term is relatively new to my vocabulary. I am wary about the use of foreign languages in a work written in English, for English-speaking—and largely white—audiences. Often, such orthographic maneuvers verge on sprinkling in non-English words to assert (perhaps unearned) cultural authority or credibility: if you know, you know. Other examples include invoking vaguely ethnic imagery such as chopsticks and baozi. I remain conscious of the fact that I call on “bamboo beds” and “mung bean husks” even in my own poems, an act which feels like jazz hands, a shrug that precludes any possibility of a reader glimpsing cultural knowledge, assuming that they have never experienced such pieces of culture. I wonder if the inclusion of these foreign words or images alienates language from American readers. But if I change my writing to ensure anyone can understand it, am I truly writing what I want to write? A more pressing question invariably rises: who am I writing for?
Because I do not write in a vacuum and instead participate in a community of writers and publications, I need to consider the audience and accessibility of my work. I often wonder if literary magazines accept my work because I write, however amorphously, about an immigrant or diasporic experience. When my first poem was published, I agonized over which name to use —“Smile Jiang” or “Ximai Jiang”—because identifying as an anglophone poet seemed to require minimizing my Chinese-speaking self (I chose to use both, with my Chinese first name caged in parenthesis before I finally settled on “Smile Ximai Jiang”). When I submit to literary contests such as the Scholastic Writing Awards, I wonder if my poems only receive recognition because they help boost organizations’ curated image of diversity. The concept of artistic authenticity vexes me because I do not have the slightest idea of how to attain it. In a workshop, the poet Shangyang Fang told me that one should only feel compelled to use words in a foreign language in a poem written in English if the foreign words are absolutely integral to the architecture of the poem itself. I wonder how one should distill the artistic value of a piece of writing from the cultures or experiences from which it stems, or if we even need to do so in the first place.
“Everyone writes from experience, and no writer should ever feel the need to legitimize their writing according to an arbitrary rubric of authenticity. I can only hope that my experience can be interpreted as a quilted text that justifies itself and resists standardization.”
These questions leave me with a deeply personal tangle of contradictions. I worry that my qualms with the assertion of cultural authority in diasporic anglophone literature verge on policing language—demanding linguistic purity or an artistic environs severed from one’s cultural experiences, or even advocating for the surgical removal of foreign or native tongues within works with diasporic sensibilities. I also do not want to undermine authorial intent or agency, to equate the incorporation of a non-English language with a performance of culture. A profound uneasiness accompanies this admission, because I feel as if I am harming, or at least performing a disservice to, writers stranded in similar circumstances. Everyone writes from experience, and no writer should ever feel the need to legitimize their writing according to an arbitrary rubric of authenticity. I can only hope that my experience can be interpreted as a quilted text that justifies itself and resists standardization.
Cultural categorizations approximate identity by delineating fault lines that subsume individual experiences under the cloak of the collective. In Covering, Yoshino positions authenticity as a spectrum of covering and reverse-covering on which people gravitate toward often conflicting poles of behaviors and presentations. Assimilation demand facilitates this forcefield by mandating complete alignment with a group, marginalized or otherwise. In Japan and at home, Yoshino’s father instructed Yoshino and his sister to be “one hundred percent Japanese in Japan” (169). At Phillips Exeter, Yoshino joined student government instead of Asian-American affinity groups on campus at the behest of his father, who insisted that “only pure Americans could teach [him] to be American” (119). Yoshino struggled with balancing both covering (becoming American) and reverse-covering (flaunting his Japanese heritage) demands. But what does it mean to embody a hyphenated identity? What does it mean to be a Japanese person in America, or an American person in Japan? Yoshino’s dilemma with cultural groupings and expectations speaks to me. The hyphen forcibly gluing together porous national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries with “Americanness” often fail to capture my experience as a young person moving through a dizzying world.
In a recent conversation, one of my English teachers encouraged me to sharpen my consideration of diasporic identity by situating it in a more specific, and perhaps more American, context. She reminded me that the hyphenation of identities is in many capacities a distinctly American phenomenon, because nowhere else in the world is the formation of a national identity so entrenched in the erasure of marginalized individuals’ personhood. Yet identity is shifting, and multiple, and fluid: I often feel the need to assert different aspects of my identity in different spaces I inhabit. For example, walking through Concord, Massachusetts, I am more aware of the fact that I look different from most people I pass by. As part of the ethnic majority in China, I was more concerned with distinguishing myself as someone who could “master” English like a “native speaker.” While I wrestle with these discordant experiences, I do not find it necessary to eradicate such contradictions. By confronting the discomfort of occupying middle ground, I resist the impulse to singularize the plural, to erase the plurality of selves that have always been parts of a whole.
“I do not care about belonging to a nation-state, any nation-state. I care about the people who have hugged and fed and held and loved me, and those that I have tried to love back. People call me by other names, and I have come to learn myself in other words.”
I believe language should defy the boundaries of nationhood or ownership and instead attend to individual possibility. Despite having been pressured to conform to covering and assimilation demands, Yoshino remains grateful to his father “for teaching [him] to be bold, to be unafraid of the center.” The center abounds with possibilities wherein he roots his varied selves firmly at the “center of any experience—Japanese, American, or otherwise.” Yoshino’s dedication to the written word often occupies this “center”; Yoshino underlines the fact that his “pleasure in language feels largely independent of any identity”—an unequivocal assertion that unites his fractured voices and resounds in my mind (120). Language transcends predetermined notions of nationhood, belonging, and ownership.
I do not care about belonging to a nation-state, any nation-state. I care about the people who have hugged and fed and held and loved me, and those that I have tried to love back. People call me by other names, and I have come to learn myself in other words. Daughter, sister, friend. Reader, writer, joy-seeker—all that tether me to the experiences that have shaped me more than any label, any piece of land that is not, simply, this boundless, possible earth.
Smile Ximai Jiang is a poet from Shenzhen, China who resides in Massachusetts. She serves as an editor for Polyphony Lit and The Lumiere Review. Smile is a 2023 poetry mentee of The Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, Palette Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, Surging Tide, Rust & Moth, and diode poetry journal. Smile loves sumo oranges and her cat. She tweets at @smiii_jiang.