Where Is the Asian American Portnoy?

On Carolyn Lei-Lanilau’s ‘Ono Ono Girl’s Hula’

Salvador Dalí, Extravaganza, 1959

Some years ago, Tablet, a Jewish online magazine for which I was once a frequent contributor, ran a series of articles considering the parallels between the experiences of American Jews and Asian Americans: success, assimilation, complaints about quotas at Harvard as well as a habit of annoying Anglo-Saxons with a striver mentality, hunger for status, and frustrating dedication to all the external signs of a now-vanished WASP elite (the house in Connecticut, the perfect sweater) without cultivating its dedication to the appearance of ease, poise, and discretion or the maintenance of a low speaking volume in restaurants.

The parallel was not quite between American Jews and Asian Americans today, but rather between the latter and American Jews of the mid-20th century — which, one must say (with whatever combination of admiration, envy, and regret) was their prime, equivalent in retrospect to the flowering of intelligence and culture of modern German Jewry that Hannah Arendt celebrated and critiqued in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen. The great era of Jewish contributions to American life included, besides intellectual, political, and commercial dimensions, a run of fiction of such quality that for a time “the great American novel” meant “the great American Jewish novel.”

As critic Theodore Solotaroff demonstrated in the essays and reviews of The Red Hot Vacuum, there was a consensus or wager among a set of Jewish writers in New York that there could be among them at least one astounding, canonical novelist to chronicle the experience of assimilated second- or third-generation Jewish America. Or rather, that such an author could transform that experience into the material from which to make himself a central, enduring figure of American and even Western literature. And it worked!

Most of the contenders of course failed, and we can quibble about the relative ranks of the also-rans. Personally, I’d rather reread Chaim Potok’s poignant — that is, stabbing — My Name Is Asher Lev than any of Saul Bellow’s pseudo-Rabelaisian, crankily reactionary displays of what he must have been very pleased to imagine as erudition and humor. (If you’re into politically incorrect Jewish male writers of the period, please read Bernard Malamud’s lyrically cancellable The Tenants rather than Bellow’s whingings about the state of the youth.) But whether or not he was the greatest of those authors, and whether or not it was his best book, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint stands at a pinnacle for its power to make what ought to be the unlovable, and even scarcely communicable, seething of someone “assimilated” but somehow still just slightly “other,” who rages against and within America, diaspora, family, women, and especially, sex, incandescent and enlivening to generations of readers.

So if Asians in America are “the new Jews,” I wondered — that is, the Jews of the 1950s and 1960s — where is their Portnoy’s Complaint? Are they even trying to write one? Asian American literature is by now a three- or four-generation old branch of American letters and ranges from challenging experimental work published by Kaya Press to dreary tales for airport bookstores about stinky lunches and coming to terms with one’s parents. Much of it, as with any literature, is terrible (see Ocean Vuong and Michelle Zauner) or competently boring (Chang-rae Lee), but in my search I was concerned not only about quality but about the particular way that Roth channeled anxieties about belonging and difference through the theme of sex — and through an exuberant prose that leapt from the page like white-hot arcs of cum.

If Asian Americans, like Jews before them, were yearning for (and resenting those who already had, and resenting themselves for wanting) comfortable suburban homes and a place at the best colleges (that is, to live and study among the most top-shelf sort of white people), mustn’t they also be feeling the same about white hole and cock? Mustn’t there be some literary evidence of this, and a writer with the genius to make the friction of those contradictory desires the sparks to kindle a great work of fiction?

I turned for answers to On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast of 1995. By far the standout entry in this anthology was a short story by the poet, linguist, and educator Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, “From the Diary of Bu Yau Shu Cai or a Translation from the Ancient Secrets of Forbidden Fruits.” Told in a style that combines the breezy, carefree tone of chick lit or brunch talk with parodies of tales of imperial Chinese courtesans, it deals, among other complaints, with the Chinese American female narrator’s mouth being too small for oral sex and her growing obsession, in middle age, with real Chinese men, guys who don’t speak a word of English. It begins: “Well, I never had sex with an Asian-American and Tian ah, heaven forbid that ever happens.”

It continues, in a mockery of then-fashionable theory and the narrator’s fetishization of things Chinese:

Once I had a semiotician for a lover. Oh, he was jealous. I couldn’t powder my skin or twirl my neck without him interpreting . . . . And I was forced to speak English to him. When it was time for us to challenge our wits skin to skin, I refused to roll out the golden carpet for him. I shrieked and moaned in Chinese. I never said “Fuck me, baby,” in English. No, I was a rotting melon for him: he liked the calamity.

We then get to the story’s central problem:

I have a classic beauty’s mouth: a red dot, no more. And my gatekeeper whom I dearly miss created the smallest and most delicious jiao zi on all earth for my mouth so that it need not stretch or shove or shift to accommodate the delicacy . . . how could I swallow my young husband’s too-big cannon . . . this was a question for my mother, my soul’s inspiration.

The story was republished in Lei-Lanilau’s 1997 book Ono Ono Girl’s Hula, which tells, across a series of fragmentary essays, stories, and poems, a semi-autobiographical narrative about a very horny, very pretentious woman. Ono Ono Girl’s Hula cannot be called a novel — I’m not sure, in fact, what it is genre-wise. But although its style is distinctly postmodern and unstraightforward, with jarring shifts of form and tone, its voice and key concerns echo Roth’s from a generation before, as Portnoy tried to screw and talk his way from the diasporic margin to the assimilated center to the half-imagined homeland.

Lei-Lanilau, as we learn, is of mixed Chinese Hawaiian ancestry, and like her narrator (with whom she encourages us to conflate the author) studied French, and French Theory, before turning to Chinese philosophy, literature, and men, just as China was, in the 1980s, “opening up.” Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s celebration of avant-garde practices of fragmentation and polyvocality, the text experiments with typography and includes extended sections written in self-invented pidgins:

Premierfois, francais et chinois ces les langues ecrier rongyi parce que ces langues sont tres scientifique, you medite you measurement . . . Zai Meiguo wo bu yau l’idée de bai ma fei ma. Ma shi ma: fei shi fei, bai ma, hei ma, hong ma; ma shi ma. C’est mathematique.

Many sections, however, are in an accessible register that might be described as the voice of a charmingly narcissistic friend leaving you a long voicemail message about how her day went. For example, recapping a date with a white guy:

Well, he called me to have a voice and brain check and it went okay. I suggested that if we hated each other, I could just come home after the concert, which he was reaaallly looking forward to. Not me, really . . . But I was willing to be well-behaved . . . I figured that if it was a bust, I could (as history has proved) write about it.

Well, the eyeliner went on easeee as grease. I had a chance to suede-proof my new Ken Coles.

What can I say? I looked the way Amy Tan would want to look.

Things don’t go well at the Mahler concert:

I hate the symbol of the symphony — bastion of white whiter whitest whiteout . . . No soul. No love. A lot of head sounds which whites justify as “excellence.” I was glad it was over when it finally was. So he asked if I would like a bite to eat. Now who eats that late? You know the answer: white people. Of course, I was willing to be a white person for a day.

Your tolerance for this sort of breathless, hyperbolic complaint may vary — for me this competes, in its expansion of petty grievance into comically enormous hostility against whole groups, with the tradition of Jewish fuming that makes up so much of our national humor. What the latter, and what Lei-Lanilau are up to, I think, differ vitally from the mode of linking personal annoyances to “political” struggles characteristic of much more of contemporary Asian American and other minority writing — and from that writing’s new “based” counterpart, the sub-Houellebecquian sexual misery tale cut with pseudo-sociology and neo-phrenology, exemplified by Substack’s own ARX-Han.

To melancholically ruminate about how one’s last name is always mispronounced, or brood about the nuances of “eros and identification” in one’s exquisitely problematic desire to fuck a white guy, is boring (although it will get you published in our best little magazines). Lei-Lanilau is not out to tarry in the ambivalences of desire, or to intellectualize this into a benumbed, safe simulation of itself — she’s out to exaggerate, amplify, and disseminate her situation so that it becomes vivifyingly hilarious.

In another episode, to ward off the advances of a white man she supposedly doesn’t want to sleep with (but hasn’t invited over), she spreads Vicks VapoRub over her breasts, which only turns him on. Soon she is gripped — oh no! — by his “powerful Nazi wrists” and finds herself succumbing. And she’s as ambivalent about “real” Chinese men as she is about white men. When she marries one of the former, her fantasy is spoiled by meeting his family:

I like foreigners! But who do these people think they are as they peel green onions on the floor of my living room! They arrived fumed in mothballs with large kitchen knives and blankets. I hate these people: they make me feel like Arthur Waley who sailing to and arriving at China refused to get off the boat because he didn’t want his dream/China to be destroyed.

The text is full of Hawaiian, Hakka, and Mandarin phrases and references that mean nothing to this white reviewer. They surely would reward research — as studying early 20th-century Dublin bus schedules and popular ballads rewards a certain class of readers of Joyce. But I’d like to emphasize in this review that Ono Ono Girl’s Hula is fun, even if, like me, some of its pages find you clueless. After all, the book has the unfortunate fate of having more Google Scholar citations (10) than Goodreads reviews (9); it was picked over by scholars of multiculturalism in American and Asian American literature before it ever found an appreciative public. This is an acceptable fate for texts like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental prose poem Dictée of 1982, which like Ono Ono Girl’s Hula is a genre-busting multilingual work influenced by French Theory and explores its author’s relationship to diaspora, memory, femininity, etc. It is just as boring as this sounds. Ono Ono Girl’s Hula, however, is never boring.

While much of Asian American fiction and poetry from Cha on, whether written for an elite audience of MFA holders or a mass readership with tastes shaped by Oprah, plods along through themes of “trauma” and strained, therapized hints of abstract “joy,” Lei-Lanilau revels in her obsessions. She’s always excitedly staging herself as a character, playing to the galleries — and attacking more staid, solemn, dignified representations of Asian America: “Asian Merican lit is not writing about the William Burroughs aspect of drilling deep into daily life . . . those ‘other’ Asian American accounts are so removed and outdated. And also, no mo guts, their kind talk: full stomach of descriptive talk, the veneer . . . .”

Unfortunately for Lei-Lanilau, and for American letters, while Philip Roth’s skewering of American Jewry’s (or celebration of his own) psychosexual hang-ups was met with controversy intense enough to guarantee celebrity, Ono Ono Girl’s Hula, published by a university press, received only tepid applause and the interest of a few dull scholars before being forgotten. A better career move would have been to orchestrate some boycotts from humorless Asian American community leaders! Even in its unsuccess, however, Ono Ono Girl’s Hula proves that what might seem by now to be the most tedious themes, fit only for the sadsack novels of insufferable, whimpering losers — feeling some type of way about family, identity, and the choice between white or Asian cock — can be funny, weird, vulgar, affected, and entertaining. Take note, Asian American writers. Your stinky lunch stories don’t have to suck!

Blake Smith is a historian and translator. He lives in Chicago.