Writer, journalist, and activist Irwin Tang knows what it's like to live in fear. He also has no problem parading his sexuality. What do the two have to do with one another? The answer might surprise you.
Irwin Tang is not Black. He's Asian—but that certainly hasn't stopped him from penning one of the more counterintuitive works of our time—How I Became a Black Man. Part memoir, part absurdist tales, all Irwin Tang—How I Became a Black Man is a kind of identity manifesto. Which is to say that it shows what being true to oneself actually means—and that eating potstickers or listening to hip-hop is only part of the equation.
Tang is also a true-blue Texan, growing up in College Station, and eventually attending both Texas A&M University (where he received his undergraduate degree) and the University of Texas-Austin (where he obtained his master's in Asian studies). While a student, he championed various causes, including the establishing of a Center for Asian American Studies at UT, and serving as a member of an anti-Apartheid organization. Post-graduation, he was handpicked by Cesar Chavez to work for the United Farm Workers, which he did so for about half a year. He also found time to enroll at the University of Southern California, where he acquired another master's degree, this time in fiction and screenwriting.
More recently, Tang has been active in a different community—the literary kind. In addition to his How I became a Black Man, a book on Chi Huang—a doctor who treated street kids in La Paz, Bolivia—will be out next year. Journalistic endeavors include an editorial he wrote for Asian Week which ignited the Shaq-Yao controversy. Asian Week is also the home of the lion's share of his freelance work. APA spoke to him on the phone about what an Asian in America has to do to get some love.
APA: What does How I Became a Black Man say about Irwin Tang's identity?
IW: I never thought it was all that important to have a very specific identity, so I was a little bit of everything at different times. I dunno if it has much to do with being utterly alienated from society and being self-loathsome that I refused to be anything for too long or I would fixate on it or feel the need to destroy it. But when you grow up one of the few Asian kids in College Station, Texas, which is very conservative and a highly racist town, yeah, you do have to shift your identity a lot just to survive sometimes. And in addition to that, dealing with somewhat overly attentive and paranoia-inducing parents.
APA: Was the kind of racism that you experienced in College Station explicit and blatant?
IW: Yes. And frightening. And paranoia-inducing. Because you never knew when something was gonna happen, when someone was gonna push you, or call you a name or when you would come home and find your home vandalized. After a certain point, you think it's everywhere—when the family station wagon's tire blows up, you think someone put a nail through it. It wasn't that entirely psychotic to think those things because the Ku Klux Klan was active in that area, and going to school I experienced it on a daily basis—I had to defend myself. The worst thing that happened—when I first wrote the book, I thought I put it in there, but I guess I left it out—having a noose tied to a limb in our front yard when I was a child. It was very much a feeling of ubiquitous animosity for me. For a lot of other Asians, it was different, they dealt with it differently. Not that there were a whole lot of other Asian kids.
APA: Has it changed at all?
IW: Um, I dunno if it has changed that much because when I go to College Station these days, I don't put myself in a position to experience any of it. I don't hang out at Texas A&M university, I don't hang out at nightclubs or with high school kids. So I'm guessing it might have changed slightly, but even when I was going to Texas A&M University from ‘88-92, every year we would put up an anti-Apartheid shanty and every year it would get torn down. And one year, someone spray-painted “White Power” and “KKK” on it. I was the head of an activist, left-wing organization, and one time the Corps of Cadets came marching by, with this chant about dropping napalm on little Vietnamese babies or something like that. It was all I knew, I grew up there, I never lived anywhere else; it was all normal to me, but I guess to the rest of the nation, it's pretty insane.
APA: In your book, you talk quite a bit about the obliteration of identity. How has that shaped your larger view on things, the way you've gone about things in your life?
IW: I certainly spread myself around; even in high school, I was a nerd, then a punker, then I was one of the “brothas,” as my sister used to call me. I was a member of all these sub-groups. And I really identified with Black culture because I really loved the music and my best friend was Black, and the other guys I met through him. And we rapped and we hung out in the middle of the night in parking lots, rapping, beatboxing, about songs with afro sheen—cause my buddy had an afro back then. So my identity was kind of spread out. Of course, I was very Chinese; I didn't know it but I was, that's just what I was—I believed in stuff other people wouldn't believe in, I ate stuff other people wouldn't eat.
I still identified very much with African-American culture in college. I was an active member and at one point, the president of the Students Against Apartheid group in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. But of course, I was also involved with any sort of left-wing activity on campus. Because I was born as an Asian-American, I was always concerned with the welfare of Asian-Americans and Asians around the world—I participated in more than one post-Tiananmen Square demonstration and so forth. But really what politically made me an Asian-American were the Los Angeles riots in 1992. I had to choose. The choice was so stark at that moment. I was so confused, I spoke to some of my fellow African-American activists on campus, and I posed the question to an entire crowd during the L.A. riots at Texas A&M University. I said: “We have to decide, can an Asian-American own a store in a Black neighborhood, does that person have a right to do that?” And I could not get an answer. Stone cold silence. I was in tears, holding a microphone in my hand. A lot of people I had spoken to in rallies before I could not get an answer from.
To me, that political shift tended to move me along personally. Then I went to UT-Austin, I worked as a community organizer for the United Farm Workers of America. I was so honored when Cesar Chavez came to speak at Texas A&M in 1992; he actually asked me personally to work for the United Farm Workers of America, and so in 1993, I worked for them for half an year, during which Cesar Chavez actually passed away. Then after that, I went to UT-Austin; I went to study Asian Studies and earn my master's degree. And that was a time during which I became much more interested in Asian-American issues, so my identity was still spread all over the place.
APA: I feel like there's a very interesting relationship between Asian culture and Black culture which seems especially pertinent nowadays. I mean, you see a lot of overlapping issues, but also the fact that Asians aspire to be black, or be infused with the things that are associated with Black culture, namely hip-hop. Well, it used to be that Asians who “represented” themselves well would be considered “Whitewashed.” Now, they're considered “Blackwashed.” Where do you see that divide? Did you have to reconcile that growing up?
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IW: I never felt the need to reconcile it. No one ever came up to me and said, “You're too Black, why don't you be more Asian?” I got some teasing from my sister and stuff, but she hung out with her basketball friends, she had a lot of black friends, so it really wasn't a big deal. To me, it just felt good, it was comfortable, it was liberating to hang out with African-American kids, as opposed to my white nerd friends. That was kind of the divide I saw in my life at that time and maybe the real dichotomy was that I was hanging out with kids that weren't nerds, because with them, there was kind of a confining sense of humor sometimes. I just loved rap, basketball, and a lot of the things my African-American friends did. I just think people should just be what they feel like being.
APA: There's also something more empowering about Black identity and Black culture that a lot of Asians seem to aspire to, given perhaps that the most prominent civil rights movement in American history revolved around the rights of Blacks.
IW: Especially with Asian men and Black men—we suffer from the same issues, but they're opposite issues. The sexual identity, the caricaturized versions of our sexuality are set against each other. When one makes that sort of leap from Asian to Black, when one walks with the sense of Blackness, whatever that means to that person, I'm sure some Asian men feel like they've gained some sort of sexual identity. Whereas being an Asian man in America means sometimes walking around an asexual being. And this is actually one of the things about me and about my book and about this identity that I create for myself, which is really very much me—I am a sexual being, and one that is bold and not scared to express oneself. To me, it seems a lot of the Asian-American males that are chosen by publishers have a very formal, clean, asexual voice. When they try to sound sexual, it just doesn't sound right.
People write from their experiences and publishers choose works that they're comfortable with, so we see that every day when we turn on the television—Asian men are asexual kung-fu masters who don't get the girl. I didn't purposefully write in sex scenes; in fact I took a bunch of them out, because I felt like for this first book, it needed to be my PG-13 work, just because no one had ever heard of me and I didn't want to go too far. I have other works that I needed to protect, that might've been badly affected.
APA: Is one of those works your writing on Chi Huang?
IW: Yes. That is being published by Tyndale House next year, and it's about Doctor Huang—he works with street children in Bolivia. The book is about his first year in La Paz, and the book is about the bond that grows between himself and five of the street kids he meets. I went down to La Paz in 1999, and it's just a heartbreaking scene down there on the streets, and Chi has a lot more guts than we will ever know because you have to be on the streets with him to know how much danger he's in every time he walks around out there. He's out there doing surgery on the streets because these kids have wounds, cuts, terrible infections, and basically, he helps the kids try to see the light in living under a roof. Because a lot of times, the kids have been treated so badly by adults, they're not gonna go live in an orphanage or some place they might be controlled by adults. So he treats kids and tries to get them to live in transition homes he's built in La Paz. He's built two homes and there's a third one coming along; he houses street children, and the kids get better treatment in his homes than anywhere else in La Paz—education, work-training, meals, and of course, psychological counseling. But yeah, his friendships with kids, it's like he became one of the street kids, they trusted him because he put his life on the line for him. And they would do the same; for instance three men attacked him, and these street mothers whose children he'd been treating for dysentery, just grabbed these three men and started beating them while Chi was laying on the ground, almost unconscious. He really earned a reputation out on the streets for being a mensch.
APA: In addition to your identity being spread out, the nature of the things you do tends to be also very spread out. Which brings me to some of your freelance journalist work and the whole Yao-Shaq controversy. How important was it to present this issue to the public?
IW: It was amazing to me how little people understood about Asian-Americans, and that was one of the reasons such little attention was paid to it, because White folk and Black folk didn't know that something wrong was happening. There were people saying, “What's wrong with what he did; he was just trying to speak Chinese?” or “How can Shaq be racist, he's African-American?” The fact is that Asian-Americans get racism hurled at them probably more so than any other group in America because it's so well-accepted. Because Americans have not learned for whatever reason that a ching-chong taunt or the pulling back of the eyes, or yelling out, “Hey, Bruce”—that it's racist. People didn't understand that, and it was amazing to me that people still don't understand that, and I don't think Shaq understands that, and I think that's why it was so easily accepted. And I was actually attacked by some people for what I said.
But also, people don't understand how sick one feels when one encounters racism like that. They might understand it from some other perspective but not from the Asian-American perspective. When I heard those remarks on the radio that day, I was so angry that night, I couldn't sleep, I pictured an ax going through Shaquille O'neal's head; these evil thoughts just kept going through my head. So when that happens to you … maybe that's the difference between me and some other people is that I let stuff get to me so badly, I can't stop myself from doing things. I called up the L.A. Times, the AP and everyone else—the Tony Bruno show that was playing the racial taunts over and over again, and bouncing anti-Asian jokes around for the fun of it. I called them, saying this is awful, you need to pay attention to this; people would straight up tell me that's not a story, that's not interesting, you don't have anything there, or “we'll get back to you on that.” So I said, “I'm gonna have to write something on this.”
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So Asian Week said yeah, and I think my anger kind of came through a little too much for my comfort level in that editorial; I read it a year later, and I was thinking, wow, I don't know if I'm comfortable having written some of those things. But it's important because America is not used to hearing our rage. Because rage stems from pain, and I try to warn people through my freelance work, like, hey, if you don't treat Asians right, it's gonna come back to you. I think Americans are hopeful in thinking that all the races fit into neat categories and Asian-Americans are the happy, model minority group.
APA: What about Yao's subdued response to the whole incident?
IW: The great thing bout Yao Ming is that we get to see an Asian man being himself and human in all his aspects—his pain, his glory, we get to see him put in an uncomfortable position and react like a human being. Americans aren't used to that, they're used to seeing two-dimensional villains like Dr No, or the nerds or gangsters they see on television. The great thing about Yao Ming is that we get to see all aspects of humanity, and the way he reacted to the whole thing was so human, so himself; that was one of the best things he could've done, was to be himself. I kind of felt bad that the whole controversy put him on the spot.
APA: You also wrote an article on Jin Tha MC though now, he's just known as The Emcee. Is he a viable role model, since he's one of the few Asian-American artists in the mainstream, or at least trying to become part of the mainstream? And does his race get in the way of him being able to do so?
IW: It doesn't help that other emcees are allowed to dis him in a racist manner. That kind of takes you down a couple of notches—anytime you get dissed, and you're not able to come back with the same power of disdain, it's difficult to maintain one's stature. Part of it is every artist has trouble getting radio play or MTV or BET, and I'm not sure why he's not getting enough of that. But I think he's definitely got skills and the great thing about him is that he does not back down from anything. And I think that's the thing that Asian-Americans might take from him. He's not a big guy as far as I can tell. He readily admits he's not a gangsta, yet he'll stand toe to toe with anybody.
APA: What do you think is the responsibility of the Asian or Asian-American artist these days? Does he or she have one necessarily?
IW: Asian-Americans are closer to the streets than a lot of people might expect. I mean, who's running all the damn restaurants and convenient stores; we're right in the thick of it. We need street cred. We wanna be able to walk down the street and get respect wherever we go, and Jin Tha MC might be part of that, and I might be part of that—who knows? And that might have to do in part with presenting all aspects of our humanity. One of the worst aspects of being an Asian-American in America is to have parts of our humanity absent in our interactions with other people. I approach other people and I sometimes feel a mask over my face; they have already put a mask on me. I think part of the responsibility of Asian-American artists is to help present a fuller understanding of our humanity, which means we are people with histories, with sex lives, with the full range of emotions, and a wide range of cultural roles, and so on and so forth. In that sense, Asian-American artists have a very difficult time fulfilling those responsibilities because there are very few Asian-American-owned media and in the meantime, a lot of our filmmakers would prefer making movies about White folk—where's our Spike Lee?
As far as books are concerned, publishers are still salivating over Joy Luck Club, still looking for the next Amy Tan, mother-daughter, AmerAsian love affair. Which is so limiting of our humanity. I hope that some of our more well-established writers will appeal to their publishers to get a fuller range of writing styles and images.
www.irwinbooks.com