Home // November.14.2019 // Jonathan Han

Characters of Identification

My mother has a photo of herself when she was first in America, at the time very pregnant, standing by the edge of an inflatable pool. She and my father had come to the United States for the sole reason of my birth. Since there is nothing for a young Chinese couple to do in Germantown, Tennessee, they did not tarry after I was born. Thus it was I found myself being three months old when we returned to Hong Kong.

Since then, the question of what I should call myself has arisen in both private conversations and in how I present myself in public. I grew up in Hong Kong while knowing I was an American, without knowing what that meant at all. I visited America only once in my childhood, and that was a trip to Las Vegas—hardly a repatriation. Before the new rise of China in the late 2000s, I felt certain I was American; something about being American in a former British colony was exotic. But after the Olympics in Beijing, watching the pomp and fanfare that comes with new money and a nation on the rise, I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem too bad to be Chinese. When asked, “Are you American or Chinese?” I had no good answer; I still don’t.

A similar question was asked almost eighty years ago when the Japanese were sent to internment camps: “Are you American or Japanese?” According to Erika Lee in The Making of Asian America (Simon & Schuster, 2015), the government had designed a questionnaire that wanted to know if the persons interned would swear unqualified allegiance to America and renounce any form of fealty to the Japanese emperor. Some answered ‘yes,’ indicating they would swear allegiance to the US – and many of these went on to fight for America during the war. Others, in particular first-generation immigrants and not US citizens, found it hard to answer the questionnaire. They believed “if they answered “yes,” they would become stateless.”

The response “Japanese-American” would have split the difference, but the term wasn’t an option on the table in the 1940s. Even if it had occurred to those being interned, the term doesn’t take the form of a proper answer to the ultimatum set before them: Are you Japanese or American? One or the other?

Even now, a compound – tied together by the thread of a hyphen – is far from perfectly clear in describing mixed identity. In the eyes of some, the hyphen induces anger and suspicion. Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at a Columbus Day celebration at Carnegie Hall in 1915, told the crowd that “There is no place here for the hyphenated American, and the sooner he returns to the country of his allegiance the better.” That the term “hyphenated” carried, or carries, a derogatory connotation strikes me as a shame; a punctuation mark of great utility has become a racist’s big stick. Eric Liu, a former white house official, has a more sensitive approach to the hyphen. He explains in a CNN opinion piece:

I call myself “Chinese American” – without a hyphen. American is the noun, Chinese the adjective. Or, rather, Chinese is one adjective. I am many kinds of American, after all: a politically active American, a short American, an earnest American, an educated American.

This is not a quibble about grammar; it’s a claim about the very act of claiming this country.

The hyphenated form, “Chinese-American,” to me signifies a transaction between two parties, as in Chinese-American diplomatic negotiation or Chinese-American commerce and trade. The hyphen implies a state of interchange across nations. It does not name a person, much less a citizen.

Liu’s statement makes clear the political symbolism of removing the punctuation, normalizing race as just another aspect of his American identity, not burdened by distasteful connotations of “transaction.” I would go even further. By including the hyphen, the adjective becomes prominent, or protuberant, as though the hyphen were pulling the “Chinese” out of the “American” – as though America cannot fully contain the foreign “Chinese.” On the other hand, the hyphen keeps the “Chinese” tethered to the “American.” Literary scholar

Christopher Ricks recognizes the push-me-pull-you dichotomy inherent in the hyphen. In his 2002 book The Force of Poetry, he succinctly notes:

The eye sees the hyphens as forever both holding together and holding apart the elements which seek to constitute the non-word as a word. All punctuation is at once a uniting and a separating. Like mortar, it holds bricks together and holds them apart. (326)

Seeing may not be believing, but it comes close, the appearance of the hyphen suggesting the entangled relationship (straight though the hyphen may be) between the entities on either side of the hyphen. In Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (Riverhead Books, 1995), the political character John Kwang puts a question to the protagonist:

“Mr. Park, if you would tell us the Korean-American position on this please.” [John] liked to linger on the hyphenation.

The hyphen seems to stretch longer the more John lingers. Chang-rae Lee’s focus on the punctuation here reminds us the hyphen has as family, besides its siblings the en-dash and em-dash, a second cousin, the minus symbol.

Moving on to the more authoritative grounds of dictionaries: Bryan Garner, in his Modern English Usage (fourth edition), specifies that “the hyphen must appear when an ambiguity or miscue is possible without it,” but does not offer insight as to whether Americans should be hyphenated. However, with examples on hand, Garner does explore how the variant term hyphenization…

denotes the designation of ethnic origins by using compound forms such as African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American, and the like. With its -ize infix, hyphenization carries negative connotations of divisiveness. (477)

The lexicographer’s observation is supportive of Eric Liu’s outlook on the hyphen, though he refrains from stating clearly whether it is the hyphen itself, or the conjugative act of “hyphenization”, that bears the racist implication.

The editors of The Chicago Manual of Style (fifteenth edition) relate the use of the hyphen to readability:

A hyphen can make for easier reading by showing structure and, often, pronunciation . . . Hyphens can also eliminate ambiguity . . . With the exception of proper nouns (such as United States) . . . it is never incorrect to hyphenate adjectival compounds before a noun. (7.85-86)

However: by the sixteenth edition the Manual editors grow more proscriptive, arguing that the heritage label of Americans should be left unhyphenated even when appearing as an adjectival phrase.

Both the Manual and Eric Liu describe “Chinese American” as compounding an adjective and a noun. Yet the term “Chinese” refers to both race and nationality for most Chinese people. In the United States, our great multiculti melting pot, we have only recently been able to distinguish one from the other. Whether or not a hyphen is used, “Chinese” in such a compound phrase would refer only to the ethnicity, but not the nationality. This accurately describes Eric Liu, but would be misleading if used to describe those interned Japanese Americans for whom maintaining multiple nationalities is crucial. To give a more contemporary example, consider the dual citizenship of many Korean Americans. Surely “Korean” is not an adjective applied to the noun “American”? In the self-oriented American reading, the hyphen is a one-way bridge from Asia to America. Ideally, neither nationality would have to take the back seat.

I am not spurning Liu’s position. Far from it; he makes an admirable point of placing individual citizens [1] above their roots, so that identity isn’t reduced to a transaction between countries. Instead, I wish to examine how a more careful close reading of these compound descriptions can show us how to avoid the shortcomings of both sides of the hyphenization dilemma. To wit – let us consider compound labels as homographs.

Take the compound description “Asian American. At least three distinct meanings reside in these words. The first, to use Eric Liu’s words, refers to “a state of interchange across nations.” The second meaning is refers to an American national like Liu who is ethnically Asian. And the third refers to an Asian national who is also a citizen of the United States. The English language has not yet differentiated these three meanings; as with most homographs, dissimilarity comes with context. Removing the hyphen can only help to distinguish the first meaning from the second and third, and solely in a printed context.

Can English further disambiguate the superimposed meanings of the homograph, instead of simply relying on contextualization? With the word “bank” it is obvious which definition is being referred to in any given usage, since the contexts are sufficiently different: “I went to the bank to make a withdrawal” as against “I lay upon the river bank.” But with “Asian American,” the spread of possible meanings is tighter, with less light showing between them. “I identify as an Asian American.” Oh? How do you mean?

As an Asian American, I naturally concern myself with those words first; but the questions I explore here – of label ghettoization, linguistic ambiguity, and hyphenate self-identification – don’t pertain only, or primarily, to Asian Americans. Other groups of Americans, African, European, et cetera., face this questions as well, with diverse ancillary complications. Latin Americans, for example, might take issue with how the word “American” in the label applied to them or used by them is so often taken to refer only to the northern American continent.

The categories of race and nationality don’t fuse so inseparably in every descriptive compound. Consider the word “Eurasian,” where “European” and “Asian” have blended together into a single term that refers to a whole range of possible ethnic origins. A Eurasian can be French or Vietnamese; the term doesn’t point to any particular nationality covered by its geographic range.

There is a small injustice in the word “Eurasian,” a small grammatical inequality. [2] The entirety of the component word “Asian” is present, whereas more than half of “European” is jettisoned. What’s more, the word “Eurasian” said aloud sounds humorously similar to “You’re Asian.” In two ways, then the Asian aspect asserts dominance over a mixed term. Probably this verbal inequality is the result of phonetic happenstance and not geopolitical malice.

The protagonist narrator of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press, 2016) may be unnamed, but he is not wholly unconcerned with self-identification. He objects to the word “Amerasian”, calling it a “portmanteau word to describe my kind.” [3] He goes further:

a small nation could be founded from the tropical offspring of the American GI. This stood for Government Issue, which is also what the Amerasians are (21)

Nguyen’s play on the word “Issue” works wonderfully well, not only as an official distribution, but as a signpost to the problems therein. For example, “I am an Amerasian” is a mouthful, twisting the tongue. In uttering it, a word that is not English stumbles from my throat. And what of the Amerindians, as the peoples indigenous to the Americas are called by anthropology? I saw good luck to the fastidious Indian American who needs to know why is an Amerasian but not an Amerindian.

One also encounters terms like “wasian”, for “white Asian”, and the cognate “blasian”, “black Asian”[4]… but these terms only refer to mixed race, and don’t attempt to differentiate race from nationality.

* * *

Suffice to say, the ubiquity of the critically underexamined hyphen is troublesome. Might we be content with an aesthetic solution? Visually, the level line of the hyphen implies a kind of equity, balancing the two halves of, say, “Korean-American.” Therefore, the hyphenated (hyphenized) “Korean-American” could only be used to delineate two nationalities, versus a complex identity subsumed into the single category of “American.” It is likely this interpretation asks too much significance to pivot on too delicate a point.

Admittedly, this lexical exploration has been meandering and not conclusive, but all good things must come to an end. Accordingly, let me conclude with a final proposal. Let’s reverse the order of terms. Yes, it sounds strange to say “American Chinese” – partly because the demonym “Chinese” is often used as an adjective by default. In this weird, transposed form, it is suggested, not explicit, that “Chinese” is the noun and not the qualifier. The tables turn! Well, there might not be an urgent need for clarification over all this murky terminology. Dual citizenship has been a prominent feature of the American demographic landscape for more than half a century, and somehow we muddle through. If that’s because these questions of difference are largely swamped by the overbearing bias toward American ethnonationalism, it’s not clear to me that the joisting-ground of word choice is where the matter will be sorted out.

Notes

For convenience, I use the words “citizens” and “nationals” interchangeably, though the distinctions between the two terms are important and tricky. // return >>
Referring to grammata (Greek: “letters”) and not to the whole system and structure of language, “grammar.” “Orthographic” has to do properly with the conventions of spelling, rather than the constituent l-e-t-t-e-r-s of a word. // return >>
Etymologically, the word “portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau, being a combination of the French words “porte” and “manteau” – one of the few occasions when the word is what it means. Interestly, portmanteau is not used in contemporary French as in English; the French say mot-valise, a back-formation meaning, literally, “suitcase-word.” Some language users prefer the term “frankenword,” after Frankenstein’s monster made-of-parts. No reference to the Franks or France is intended. // return >>
Presumably an African American Asian, and not an Afrasian. Or is that African-American? The perils of punctuation are compounded by the risks of elision. These words are, incidentally, compounds and not portemanteaux, as they don’t make use of the source words in full. // return >>

Banner graphic source: Photo (cropped) of a bridge between Shek O and Tai Tau Chau, Hong Kong. Photographed by Malcolm Koo in 2015, and made available for use under the terms of the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Sourced via Wikimedia Commons.