Going for the Knockout: Confronting Whiteness in Gus Lee's "China Boy"

Abstract

Would Ahab have been content merely to go the distance with the White whale? --A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (1956) would not have written Boy had my stepmother been alive. --Gus Lee, qtd. in Sherwin In his semi-autobiographical first novel, Boy (1991), Gus Lee raises serious issues with the solemnity of a stand-up comedian. Reflecting on his childhood, the protagonist/narrator says, I was trying to become an accepted black male youth in the 1950s--a competitive, dangerous, and harshly won objective. This was all the more difficult because was (14). While the issues are assimilation, violence in America, and the construction of national, racial, ethnic, and gender identities, the tone of self deprecation and rendering of childhood experiences without sentimentality has echoes of comic monologues by Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. But Cosby and Allen never created a mother like Edna. Here the similarities end. For the Chinese experience of assimilation is different from those of Blacks and Jews just as their experiences of assimilation differ. (1) Although Edna does personify the wicked stepmother of legend and fairytale, her racial otherness as white complicates the stereotype and is integral to Lee's engagement with white America. (2) Given that she is seen solely through the eyes of her seven-year old Chinese American stepson Kai Ting, it is not surprising that she is first described in terms of her difference to his Chinese birth mother. But the absence of any other white characters in the novel, in particular the absence of any positive white characters, implies that his stepmother is meant to be a representative white figure and that whiteness, power, and oppression go together. (3) In contrast, the range of black characters makes it impossible to equate Blackness solely with either good or evil. (4) As this essay will demonstrate, the conflict between the novel's Chinese American protagonist and his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stepmother is racialized in ways that the conflict between Kai Ting and his African American antagonist Big Willie is not. This makes confronting whiteness a significant, though not immediately obvious, theme of the novel. Boy is packaged by its publishers (in its cover design and in its inclusion of the protagonist's family-tree, for example) to suggest that it will meet an American audience's expectations of Oriental exoticism. However, from the novel's first paragraphs, in which Kai Ting recalls being soundly beaten and called China Boy shitferbrains by a black rival on the streets of San Francisco, Lee's concerns are with violence, race, and gender in a specifically American context. While studies of Lee's text have up to now focused on the motif of violence and its status as a marker of differences between Chinese American and African American characters, whiteness and the protagonist's attitude toward it have not received any substantial attention. (5) As a result, Boy can be mistaken for much contemporary writing which, according to bell hooks, makes race always an issue of Otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even (hooks 54). Undeniably, there is much in the novel that might suggest this (for example, the fight scenes between Kai Ting and Big Willie); however, an examination of the role of Kai Ting's stepmother within the text indicates that Lee has a broader agenda. The novel is one of resistance. In Boy Kai Ting confronts American whiteness in the person of his stepmother. He acquires strength to defeat her by association with other non-white characters and through boxing. Like most Chinese American novels, Lee's text is about the complexities and tensions of assimilation within US society and culture. Kai Ting's father clearly wishes his Chinese son to adopt what he sees as American ways. Kai Ting describes himself as having understood calligraphy and valued food as a result, but physical games and sports . …