Wendy Lee’s new novel, Happy Family, is an excellent example of something that is not ethnography, but firmly situated inside the complexity of her narrator’s situation—that of a Chinese immigrant au pair to a Chinese girl adoptee, and working for her white adoptive parents in their attempt to provide their daughter with authenticity of some kind.

Oddly, during my graduate work at Iowa, I found models for how I wanted to work in the works of Gregor Von Rezzori and Mavis Gallant, who wrote about European characters from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and with complex political ideas that they lived out, and they did it without the lead-footed treatments and without making those backgrounds invisible.

As a writer of Asian descent, I’ve always been preoccupied with this idea of not being an “Asian American” writer, in the sense that I don’t want to be niched into writing a story about Asian-American issues. I want to write about *people* and if my characters are ever Asian, I want that to be the background of the very human conditions that they face, and not have to write about strict parents and sushi and chopsticks and Chinese New Year and words like “chink” and “gook”. I think that’s why so far I’ve stayed away from specifying the race of most of my characters, because I don’t want it to become a focal point of anything. Though I worry sometimes that having an Asian last name alone will be enough to make it difficult for me to sell anything to people who aren’t Asian.

In any case, great post.