SOURCE: Wang, Qun. “‘Double Consciousness,’ Sociological Imagination, and the Asian American Experience.” Race, Gender & Class: Asian American Voices 4, no. 3 (1997): 88-94.

[In the following essay, Wang examines the theme of personal identity in several works by Asian American writers, noting that the characters' emotional turmoil often stems from their struggle to harmonize two different social roles.]

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues (C. Wright Mills, 1959).

The term “double consciousness” was first used by African American sociologist and educator W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois in his much celebrated book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It describes the experience of African Americans who are caught in the clash of two cultures: “an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” According to Du Bois, such an experience possesses the potential for undermining a person's sense of identity, especially when that person has to look “at one's self through the eyes of others” and measure “one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois, 1903:45).

In Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation, Barbara Molette and Carlton Molette observe that, although Du Bois's theory “describes a phenomenon as it existed in the very early 1900's” and “some evolutionary progress” has been made since 1903, “the phenomenon of double consciousness remains a painfully persistent force in African-American reality and in the art that grows out of that reality” (1986:9). Indeed, throughout the history of the United States, the double consciousness “phenomenon” has demonstrated not only its persistence, but also relevancy to millions of Americans' lives, especially those who are first generation immigrants and those who struggle to identify their ontological and cultural relationship with both the mainstream culture as well as with their ethnic heritage.

To survey Asian American literature, for instance, is to discover a large group of works in which characters' psychological confusion, emotional frustration, and cultural alienation are occasioned by what C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination calls people's false consciousness “of their social positions.” These characters' emotional struggle often results from their having to look at themselves “through the eyes of others” and measure their souls “by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

In China Men (1980), Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston creates four characters whose eagerness to adopt a new culture brings into question their understanding of the ontological significance of their relationship with their own heritage. Ed, Woodrow, Roosevelt, and Worldster are first generation immigrants from China. They can barely speak English. But Worldster has “a thick moustache” and tries “to look like Clark Gable”; Ed dresses “like Fred Astaire”; Ed and Woodrow once “caught sight of themselves in windows and hubcaps” on Fifth Avenue in New York City and thought “they looked all the same American” (Kingston 1980: 60-64).

The four characters used to be close friends and partners in business. But Woodrow, Roosevelt, and Worldster have completed their cultural metamorphosis by closing Ed out of a partnership contract for a laundromat. In doing so, they have betrayed a well-honored traditional Chinese ethical code once cheerfully chanted by Ed, the dupe in the money game, “Friends were fairer than brothers; there was an equality” (Kingston 1980: 61). Woodrow, Roosevelt, and Worldster's betrayal of their friendship with Ed, thus, is skillfully juxtaposed by the writer with their betrayal of their own culture.

Japanese American writer John Okada's No-No Boy (1976) takes a realistic look at how the relocation camps have affected and changed the Japanese American community. Ichiro Yamada is a Nisei, a second generation Japanese American. He refuses to join the army during World War II and is treated by people as a traitor to the country. In his search for his true identity, Ichiro feels he is caught in an imbroglio, a dilemma that resembles the “double consciousness” experience. His confusion is revealed in his imaginary conversation with his mother:

There was a time that I no longer remember when you used to smile a mother's smile and tell me stories about gallant and fierce warriors who protected their lords with blades of shining steel and about the old woman who found a peach in the stream and took it home and, when her husband split it in half, a husky little boy tumbled out to fill their hearts with boundless joy. I was that boy in the peach and you were the old woman and we were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America. Then there came a time when I was only half Japanese because one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it.

(Okada, 1976: 15-16)

In Japanese, the word Ichiro means “firstborn.” Ichiro's experience both during and after the war, however, adds an ironical ring to his name. It is suggested in the way the country mistreated its own firstborn second generation immigrants: the relocation camps had plummeted both Issei (first generation immigrants from Japan) and Nisei into an emotional abyss, reminding them of their physical and cultural differences from other Americans, forcing them to reassess their relationship with the Japanese culture and, as a result, alienating many of them from both their ethnic culture and the mainstream American culture.

In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills (1959) posits that to broaden the sociological imagination is to develop

the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations between the two.

By underlining the importance of the capability “to shift from one perspective to another,” Mills is calling our attention to the dynamics of a process through which “the cultural meaning of the social sciences” (p. 8) is generated. It is a process which accentuates the dialectical relationship between individual and society, between “the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure,” and between biography and history. For, as Mills points out, “older decisions that once appeared sound” now may seem “products of a mind unaccountably dense.” We need to “acquire a new way of thinking” and “experience a transvaluation of values” (Wright, 1959:8).

It is true that the experience of “double consciousness” has tormented many Americans for centuries. To celebrate the culturally diverse nature of American society is to accept the “double consciousness” experience as both the source for stress and creativity. For those same people who have been struggling to find balance in between the mainstream culture and their own heritage are also blessed with choices. In other words, to be hyphenated Americans is to possess the luxury of being able to choose from different cultures. Or as Brave Orchid, the dynamic mother in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), puts it: “When you come to America, it's a chance to forget some of the bad Chinese habits” (Kingston, 1976:139).

Confucianism, for instance, with its emphasis on courtesy, individual responsibility, and familial and social harmony, has played an instrumental role in maintaining stability and peace in China which, for centuries, had been torn by endless wars and meaningless deaths. But the kind of “harmony” Confucius had envisioned was built on the feudal ethical code of the three cardinal guides (ruler guides subject, father guides son, and husband guides wife) and the five constant virtues (benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and fidelity) and its infrastructure supported by patriarchy and primogeniture.

In Articulate Silences (1993), Chinese American scholar King-Kok Cheung suggests that the “two-toned language” used by many Asian American writers results from the distrust of inherited language and that of traditional myth with patriarchal ethos. This distrust brings many Asian American writers to the conclusion that they must cross cultural borders in search of ways to not only “revise history,” but also “transfigure ethnicity,” for “the point is never to return to the original but to tell it with a difference.” The use of “two-toned language,” thus, concretely objectifies Asian American writers' attempt to negotiate a ground on which they can find their own identity.

In appearance, Fukunaga, the protagonist in Japanese American writer Toshio Mori's short story “Japanese Hamlet” is caught in the clash between American culture (boundless optimism and individual freedom of choice) and traditional Japanese culture which places practicality above ideals and dictates that in the collision between individual aspiration for self-fulfillment and a person's social and familial obligation, the person should forfeit his/her claim to individual freedom in exchange for communal harmony. But Fukunaga's ambition of becoming a ranking Shakespearean actor and the identifiability of his experience and that of Hamlet suggest that the story's thematic appeal is as specific as universal.

Both Fukunaga and Hamlet are mediocre actors; both are trapped in the world of inaction and procrastination, wasting a lot of time and energy in fantasizing about what might and could happen instead of making things happen; both are “play-acting,” but not “acting”—their self-created unreality impugn the ontological significance of their relationship with reality. If, in the article “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” Frank Kermode is right in suggesting that it is in the perplexed figure of Hamlet, “just because of our sense that his mind lacks definite boundaries, we find ourselves” (1974:1135), Fukunaga's experience is indeed as Japanese as American. For the tragicomic power of the story is generated by conflicts between dream and reality, between commitment and effort, and between individual choice and communal pressure, conflicts which are as indigenous to the Japanese American community as to the United States.

In The Joy Luck Club (1989), Chinese American novelist Amy Tan intermingles the thematic treatment of intercultural conflict with that of intergenerational conflict. The mothers who immigrated to the United States from China and still have very strong cultural ties to the country want to raise their children in the traditional Chinese way. But the daughters who are second generation Chinese Americans (people born in the United States of parents who were first generation Chinese immigrants) feel that they are trapped in the conflict between traditional Chinese culture and the mainstream American culture, between their aspiration for individual freedom and their sense of familial and social obligations, and between their false and true identity. Paradoxically, however, the daughters' experience of struggle between values of their parents' generation and those of their own and between traditional Chinese values and modern American values is as frustrating as constructive. For it eventually brings the daughters to the conclusion that they must ontologically embrace what they cannot culturally reject: they are just as American as they are Chinese.

During her interview with Angels Carabi, Tan divulged that her constant search was “to find a harmony between the self and the world”: “harmony” and “unity” were the ways she perceived the world and they were the ways she felt the world should be (1991:17). Tan's thematic preoccupation with balance and harmony in The Joy Luck Club is not only revealed by chapter titles such as “Half and Half,” “Two Kinds,” “Four Directions,” “Without Wood,” “Best Quality,” “Double Face,” and “A Pair of Tickets,” but also accentuated by the writer's skillful use of structure. The book starts with the mothers' telling stories about their experience in China and their journey to the United States and it ends with them coming to the conclusion that, as much as they would like to believe they are still a hundred percent Chinese, they all have two faces: one Chinese and one American.

The daughters, through the experience of intercultural conflict, have also come to the realization that “Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.” When Jing-mei Woo is asked to join the Joy Luck Club, she is reluctant. Although she half-heartedly accepts her Chinese name and tells her aunties that it is “becoming fashionable for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names,” she is not aware of the fact that it was impossible for her to find her true identity without reclaiming her relationship with her ethnic cultural heritage. After joining the Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei starts to understand her mother. The trip to China finally has enabled her to see that together with her sisters, they look just like their mother: her “same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.”

As is demonstrated in Asian American literature, what many writers are searching for is a ground on which they can find their own identity, whether the identity is Asian or American, or American Chinese or Chinese American. In Chinese American Amy Ling's article, “Creating One's Self: The Eaton Sisters,” the author reiterates “what has by now become almost a truism”: “the self is not a fixed entity but a fluid, changing construct or creation determined by context or historical conditions and particularly by power relationships” (1993:306). By using the example of the Eaton Sisters who had adopted identities of their choice in creative writing, Ling convincingly reveals the dialectical relationship between creation and recreation and between the permeability of the boundaries of the self and the influence of historical conditions. To understand Asian American literature in the postcolonial period is, indeed, to resist the temptation of totalization, to accept the plurality of the Asian American experience, and to appreciate Asian American writers' effort to democratize American literary voice by (re)presenting what has been mis(sing)-represented, by celebrating the cultural diversity of American society, and by calling readers' attention to the peculiarity and uniqueness of the Asian American experience.

Bibliography

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American Library.

Cheung, K. K. 1993. Articulate Silences. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

Kingston, M. H. 1975. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage.

Kingston, M. H. 1980. China Men. New York: Vintage.

Ling, A. 1990. Between Worlds. New York: Pergamon.

Ling, A. 1992. “Creating One's Self: The Eaton Sisters.” Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. S. Geok-lin Lim and A. Ling. Philadelphia: Temple UP. 305-18.

Mills, C. W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Molette, C. W. and Molette, B. J. 1986. Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation. Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall. 10.

Mori, T. 1991. “Japanese Hamlet.” Pp. 125-27 in Imagining America. Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy L. NY: Persea Books.

O'Kada, J. 1979. No-No Boy. Seattle: U of Washington P.

Tan, A. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy Books.