[Fic] American Gods: The Journey West
Jan. 1st, 2008 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
springgreenSpoilers: None
Disclaimer: Not mine!
Summary: Listen, and I will tell you how Monkey comes to America.
Notes: Written for st_aurafina for Yuletide 2007. Rachel, Yoon, Vom Marlowe, and Mely all guessed me correctly! (I felt so obvious writing this!)
Read The Journey West
Fandom information
American Gods is a book by Neil Gaiman about old myths and gods coming to America. There is also other stuff, but really, all you need to know is that Gaiman posits that gods come to America with their believers.
Factual notes
"Sandalwood hills" is the translation of the Chinese name for Honolulu. I think it may have originally referred to all of Hawaii, though I'm not sure. "Golden mountains" are, of course, California. "San Francisco" in Chinese is still called "Old Gold Mountain" (Australia was called "gold mountain" later, leading to the need for distinction).
The "no women" was because most of the first Chinese immigrants were men intending to make money to send back home, or to make enough to later move their families over. Most of them were never able to, because of immigration laws that turned away Chinese women. The reason why there's a larger and older Japanese-American population here is because more Japanese women were allowed here. Also, of course, the "no women" is because of all the scare tactics about evil Chinese men kidnapping white women into prostitution and drugging them with opium, never mind the history behind opium use in China. The first wave of Chinese immigrants came fleeing worsening conditions in the falling Qing Dynasty, conditions that really weren't helped by things like the Opium Wars or other Western attempts to break China open for "trade."
I think Monkey making new monkeys from bits of his fur is right from the book, though it's been a while since I've read it.
It's 1971 because of the Immigration Act of 1965, which finally repealed national quotas for immigration and led to the second large wave of Chinese immigration here. Though many Chinese people came here after the Communist takeover of China, the second wave was largely composed of those coming over from the Chinese diaspora, people whose parents had fled the Communists by migrating to Taiwan and Hong Kong, who then moved to America and had kids like me.
Some commentary
Through all of last week, I called this The Little Story That Could. I feel vaguely guilty and amazed and incredibly grateful for the attention it's gotten; I wrote it with an hour and a half left on the Yuletide clock and burned two batches of latkes on the stove in the process.
I lie a bit -- the story was written in about an hour, but it's been brewing in my head for a year now, ever since seeing an American Gods pinch hit for Yuletide 2006. I didn't get the pinch hit then (or now, even!), but I knew then and there I was going to tell the story of Monkey and the history of Chinese immigration to America. I've thought about writing it as a manga short story with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vom_marlowe as well, though I was and still am unsure of how to script it.
I wish I had had more time to proof the story. I wanted to include more on Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia and Thailand and Vietnam and Hawaii and Korean Americans. "Island nations and peninsular cities" was written in reference to Taiwan and Hong Kong, but it is of course also all the nations and cities of Southeast Asia where the Chinese diaspora has spread. I also wish I had included more on the third wave of Chinese immigration from mainland China, but I ran out of time.
I wrote this in anger and pain and hope, with the need to see myself in fiction and the knowledge that most stories of America are not my stories of America. I love that one of the central figures of American Gods is Anansi, but I rolled my eyes at the ever-familiar Norse mythology, of the feeling that immigration had somehow stopped way back when, that the new gods were Technology and whatnot. Because while they are, people are still coming here and bringing their own gods and their own stories.
This story is my "fuck you" to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the laws barring Asian Americans from citizenship and naturalization, to the Japanese internment camps, to the murder of Vincent Chin. I mock the sentence in the Wikipedia article saying "After World War II, general anti-Asian prejudice largely dissolved."
This story is also my attempt to write myself and people like me into American history; I am American, yes, but I am also not, because I am Chinese, because I will not assimilate, because the red white and blue and the land of the free is what I grew up on, but it's also what kept me out, because I also grew up reading and hearing about Monkey and Li Bai, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Yellow River and Xi'an. It's also not just American; it's an attempt to write people like me into the Western world.
That said, the granddaughter in the story isn't me or anyone specific I know, though it could be a lot of us.
I'm incredibly touched that people liked the story and even more affected by the people who commented or recced saying it was their story too. It is their story as much as it is mine; we are all the mothers and daughters and friends in it.
Disclaimer: Not mine!
Summary: Listen, and I will tell you how Monkey comes to America.
Notes: Written for st_aurafina for Yuletide 2007. Rachel, Yoon, Vom Marlowe, and Mely all guessed me correctly! (I felt so obvious writing this!)
Read The Journey West
Fandom information
American Gods is a book by Neil Gaiman about old myths and gods coming to America. There is also other stuff, but really, all you need to know is that Gaiman posits that gods come to America with their believers.
Factual notes
"Sandalwood hills" is the translation of the Chinese name for Honolulu. I think it may have originally referred to all of Hawaii, though I'm not sure. "Golden mountains" are, of course, California. "San Francisco" in Chinese is still called "Old Gold Mountain" (Australia was called "gold mountain" later, leading to the need for distinction).
The "no women" was because most of the first Chinese immigrants were men intending to make money to send back home, or to make enough to later move their families over. Most of them were never able to, because of immigration laws that turned away Chinese women. The reason why there's a larger and older Japanese-American population here is because more Japanese women were allowed here. Also, of course, the "no women" is because of all the scare tactics about evil Chinese men kidnapping white women into prostitution and drugging them with opium, never mind the history behind opium use in China. The first wave of Chinese immigrants came fleeing worsening conditions in the falling Qing Dynasty, conditions that really weren't helped by things like the Opium Wars or other Western attempts to break China open for "trade."
I think Monkey making new monkeys from bits of his fur is right from the book, though it's been a while since I've read it.
It's 1971 because of the Immigration Act of 1965, which finally repealed national quotas for immigration and led to the second large wave of Chinese immigration here. Though many Chinese people came here after the Communist takeover of China, the second wave was largely composed of those coming over from the Chinese diaspora, people whose parents had fled the Communists by migrating to Taiwan and Hong Kong, who then moved to America and had kids like me.
Some commentary
Through all of last week, I called this The Little Story That Could. I feel vaguely guilty and amazed and incredibly grateful for the attention it's gotten; I wrote it with an hour and a half left on the Yuletide clock and burned two batches of latkes on the stove in the process.
I lie a bit -- the story was written in about an hour, but it's been brewing in my head for a year now, ever since seeing an American Gods pinch hit for Yuletide 2006. I didn't get the pinch hit then (or now, even!), but I knew then and there I was going to tell the story of Monkey and the history of Chinese immigration to America. I've thought about writing it as a manga short story with
vom_marlowe as well, though I was and still am unsure of how to script it.I wish I had had more time to proof the story. I wanted to include more on Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia and Thailand and Vietnam and Hawaii and Korean Americans. "Island nations and peninsular cities" was written in reference to Taiwan and Hong Kong, but it is of course also all the nations and cities of Southeast Asia where the Chinese diaspora has spread. I also wish I had included more on the third wave of Chinese immigration from mainland China, but I ran out of time.
I wrote this in anger and pain and hope, with the need to see myself in fiction and the knowledge that most stories of America are not my stories of America. I love that one of the central figures of American Gods is Anansi, but I rolled my eyes at the ever-familiar Norse mythology, of the feeling that immigration had somehow stopped way back when, that the new gods were Technology and whatnot. Because while they are, people are still coming here and bringing their own gods and their own stories.
This story is my "fuck you" to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the laws barring Asian Americans from citizenship and naturalization, to the Japanese internment camps, to the murder of Vincent Chin. I mock the sentence in the Wikipedia article saying "After World War II, general anti-Asian prejudice largely dissolved."
This story is also my attempt to write myself and people like me into American history; I am American, yes, but I am also not, because I am Chinese, because I will not assimilate, because the red white and blue and the land of the free is what I grew up on, but it's also what kept me out, because I also grew up reading and hearing about Monkey and Li Bai, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Yellow River and Xi'an. It's also not just American; it's an attempt to write people like me into the Western world.
That said, the granddaughter in the story isn't me or anyone specific I know, though it could be a lot of us.
I'm incredibly touched that people liked the story and even more affected by the people who commented or recced saying it was their story too. It is their story as much as it is mine; we are all the mothers and daughters and friends in it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 12:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 10:17 pm (UTC)I would recommend Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston. It's set in '60s San Francisco. Wittman Ah Sing is a Chinese-American writer who decides to write a play based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It has been a few years since I read it, but I remember it as looking at Asian-American identity in that period across ethnicities.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 11:12 pm (UTC)Yay! Looking forward to it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 02:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 02:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-03 11:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:06 am (UTC)(And yes, FWIW, I've always heard that the "Sandalwood Mountain" name applied to Hawai'i as a whole. Long before the days of the sugar and pineapple plantations, sandalwood was the first great post-contact export (http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Apr/14/il/FP604140306.html); the trade was so frenzied that the sandalwood forests were overharvested to near-extinction by the early 1800s.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 09:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-04 03:51 am (UTC)I also grew up reading and hearing about Monkey and Li Bai, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Yellow River and Xi'an
This gives me a strange and perhaps counterproductive urge to have a kid so that she can grow up hearing about all those things from her auntie Oyce. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 12:40 am (UTC)Also, bwahaha. I shudder at the thought of what I would do to a kid... ;)