Rethinking Difference and Identity: Don Lee’s Yellow

Abstract

Asian American writers' immediate concern has always been how to render the compelling diasporic experience of immigrants, and how to mediate the irreducible chasm between one's indigenous cultural identity and the dominant culture that one must assimilate into. Don Lee, however, is radically different from them in the sense that he is deeply concerned with the subtle psychological problems one encounters while living in American society as a minority. Lee examines the predicament of Americans born of Asian parents in a predominantly Anglo-American society, and the irreducible hiatus and inevitable tensions often unnoticed by white Americans. At first, the reader may find Lee's protagonists too decadent and vagrant, excessively forlorn and tormented, suffering from inertia and boredom. A close reading of the text, however, reveals that Lee, as James Joyce does in the Dubliners, depicts the spiritual paralysis of Asian Americans living in a small town called Rosarita Bay that encapsulates them in a sinister, malignant way. Don Lee is unique in the sense that, instead of complaining about racial intolerance in American society, he has doggedly explored the possibilities of Asian Americans by redefining the concepts of difference and identity. He does not perceive 'difference and identity' as a crisis. Rather, he perceives them as a new possibility for Asian Americans living in multicultural America. While other Asian American writers are struggling with the more immediate problems of the first-generation immigrants such as language barriers, nostalgia, or acculturation, Lee focuses on more profound issues of the second or third generation immigrants. Paralyzed by the comfort of American society and confined in a closed small town, some of Lee's protagonists are incapable of escaping from confinement and gravity, despite feeble gestures of protest. Yet their quest continues. Don Lee's first collection of stories Yellow well illustrates this new insightful thematic concern of Don Lee's that would surely broaden the horizon of Asian American literature.