The Life of the Oriental Mind
Introducing the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus
In this life I have worshipped so many lies.
Then I workshop them, make them better.
In Sally Wen Mao’s 2019 poem “Occidentalism,” the myriad experiences of Asian America encounter the historical legacy of the West. For Asian and Asian American classicists, such connections may come with insidious emotional riders: guilt, frustration, self-questioning, an absence of cultural capital. Shared experiences of cultural dissonance in Classics and a desire for community led to the formation of the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC), an organization that aims to address these incongruences by bringing together Asian and Asian American classicists and collaborating with our allies. For many of us, Mao’s formula felt dependable and safe: worship, workshop, repeat.
The initial spark for the AAACC occurred the morning of the first day of AIA/SCS 2019. At a session on national identity and reception, Kelly Nguyen was presenting on classical reception in Vietnamese diasporic literature. I had gone to support her, the only person of color and woman speaking to a room of white faces. In an experience well known to people of color in white classrooms, I locked eyes with the only other nonwhite person in the room: UC Berkeley graduate student Chris Waldo.
When the three of us convened after the panel was over, we became fast friends. “How are we the only Asians in this room?” we joked, knowing the answer perfectly well. The white moderator, standing a few feet away, laughed nervously.
Many conversations followed, and after triangulating between several Asian and Asian American classicists in the wake of AIA/SCS 2019, the AAACC was born. In the weeks to come, the founding members repeatedly expressed surprise and delight as more and more Asian classicists began to respond positively to our mission. We were so accustomed to being the only Asians in our white spaces, while unbeknownst to many of us a support system was within our reach.
In order to foster this support system for Asians and Asian Americans in Classics, the AAACC intends to create a mentorship network among students, scholars, and professionals to build community through visibility. Academically speaking, the AAACC aims to promote Asian and Asian American work from all levels of education, an objective that we hope to advance through an annual undergraduate paper prize. Recruiting and retaining Asian and Asian American students in our classes necessitates an interdisciplinary approach to Classics, and the founding members of the AAACC have already found success drawing on fields like Asian American studies, comparative literature, (post)colonial studies, and diaspora studies.
Asianness spans continents and colors, forming a nebulous group of Americans replete with contradictions. But fundamentally, stories of Asian America and Classics have their roots in stories of arrival. The backgrounds of the founding members of the AAACC prove the lasting effects of diaspora in our families’ vastly diverse arrivals to the United States: a Korean American adoptee, first-generation Americans with southern Chinese roots, a mixed-race Chinese American by way of Hawaii, and a Vietnamese refugee. Our socioeconomic backgrounds reflect the realities of the restaurant industry and single-parent homes as well as upper-middle-class upbringings in competitive public school districts. Existing prejudices surrounding money (making it, spending it, saving it) and education (making sacrifices for it, earning it, flaunting it) continue to shape how we choose to appear in our professional lives as classicists.
As Asian Americanist Mark Tseng-Putterman writes, the respectability politics of Asian elitism play out on a stage set for a white audience, even in moments of supposed victory. Historically, it has been much easier for Asian classicists to assimilate into the white academy than to address identity. Add the centuries of western colonialism and imperialism in Asia, and it’s no surprise that Classics continues to be a desirable but ultimately unattainable class marker of the global West.
If only recovering the silenced history
is as simple as smashing its container: book,
bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross
borders the way our bodies never could.
On a microlevel of academic interaction, the lies to worship and workshop feel like minor adjustments, a sort of exercise in cultural literacy. As an undergraduate, I quickly learned that the academy loves a code-switcher, a role many Asians know well from juggling multiple languages and cultures from birth. By slipping into a persona who could quote couplets from Catullus and articulate complex comparisons of epic poems, I could forget that at home my family ate steamed fish bone-in (which white people definitely do not do) and didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July (which white people do… a lot). For years, I learned to trust my white brain: it learned how to dine continental and dress tastefully for an academic conference. Best of all, it would eventually get me into graduate school. Even as I took advantage of my model minority status, whiteness was just out of reach for me. Impossible, but only just. I might not have looked like a white person, but if I studied Classics, my brain could be a white person’s brain.
Like many other young classicists of color, I wonder why I chose to study Classics as seriously as I do. As hard as I try to recreate my own motivation, no romantic, full-bodied narrative emerges about falling in love with elegiac poetry in a high school Latin class or being struck by divine inspiration after seeing the Parthenon for the first time. Instead, I often speculate that my choice resulted from a years-long process of performative whiteness. Growing up, I resented my Asianness so much that I refused to explore my background and instead excelled in subjects I thought only white people were good at, like reading and writing. When it came time for me to pick a major as an undergraduate and a postgraduate path later on, it seemed natural to lean into what I had always been good at: reading, writing, and acting white. Classics was the perfect fit.
But learning to scan hexameter at sight did not preempt a professor’s ignoring my raised hand as he welcomed my white male peers’ translations, class after class. My mastery of Latin declensions did not stop a fellow American from asking me how I spoke English so well, after I had explained my fieldwork in detail. My learning to excavate and interpret stratigraphical data does not prevent regular microaggressions at my prestigious white institution. Despite my best code-switching behaviors, developed over years of internalized resentment, my Asian face always betrays my carefully curated white persona.
Performative whiteness is not uncommon in the experiences of Asian and Asian American classicists. As a person of mixed race, archaeologist and professor Elizabeth Wueste acknowledged in an interview that she used to downplay her heritage, believing that leaving her personal identity out of her career was “not only professionally appropriate but also more academically rigorous.” Compounded by familial pressure to succeed academically and a cultural aversion to talking about mental health, the urge to suppress her identity remained throughout her postgraduate education and into her career as an academic. Racial impartiality meant that her scholarship would seem more reliable, regardless of her own modern experience with marginalization, colonialism, and empire. It meant the raceless, colorless gravitas of the life of the mind.
Professor Jinyu Liu also expressed her past compulsion to conform academically, avoiding any comparative study between the Greco-Roman world and China early in her career. “I wanted to do hardcore Roman history,” she said, observing that this desire was encouraged by her Chinese advisors back home. In their eyes, doing western Classics western style was the best way to establish herself as a serious scholar. But despite their advice, Liu’s American training was not an infallible defense. Her immigrant status and Chinese face often leads to automatic assumptions that she is an Asian historian, not an ancient historian.
And yet the complex relationship that classicists of color have with whiteness rarely comes into play as our field asks questions about inclusivity. In my experience asking white professionals about the promotion of diversity in Classics, I have often found that the default answer is the inclusion of ancient marginalized communities in curricula. It seems that women, barbarians, and rural populations satisfactorily provide the avant-garde takes that Classics so desperately needs. When I ask the same question of classicists of color, overwhelmingly the answer is that a modern representation of race and ethnicity makes the greatest impact. Being the only minority in a class about ancient minorities is nevertheless an isolating experience; in contrast, encountering other people of color in a white space can make all the difference.
Visibility pays dividends in mentorship beyond spreading passion for the field. Founding members Caroline Cheung and Elizabeth Wueste both wished that they had known that they weren’t the only Asians in the field when they had chosen to commit themselves to Classics. In his own academic formation, Chris Waldo credits the mentorship of professors Angeline Chiu and Kristina Chew, the latter of whom has relied on her own network to balance her career and raising her autistic son. These connections, professional and otherwise, come close to recovering our history and claiming our space.
Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde
dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts
still shudder through us like small breaths.
Proximity to whiteness in Classics comes with tantalizing cultural capital as well as toxic disadvantages. The AAACC’s founding members, all of us fair-skinned, hail from the East or Southeast Asian American diasporas, and are either holding or working towards advanced degrees from prestigious white institutions; we are increasingly aware of the groups we might unconsciously exclude. Asians and Asian Americans experience racism through hate speech and hate crime, but our demographic also occupies an undefined space between exclusive whiteness and undesirable otherness. The treatment of Asians as white-adjacent fuels the model minority myth and promotes complicity in the oppression of other marginalized groups. Indeed, privilege granted through performative whiteness can lead to passive (or outright) participation in and support of white supremacy; specifically, antiblack racism still permeates Asian and Asian American culture today.
While levels of Asian privilege differ in the context of Classics, old habits of gatekeeping others and policing ourselves remain. Internalized racism often manifests in what Elizabeth Wueste recognizes as an oppressive, hurtful, and pervasive pressure to achieve. The field of Classics, which naturally reinforces an elitist system of academic achievement — how many years of Greek have you had again? — also reinforces the double standard of success for all people of color. Drink the Kool-Aid or not, slip behind the white persona or not, Classics has built a gatekeeping system sometimes run and perpetuated by people of color themselves. As novelist Lisa Ko writes, the vulnerability of acknowledging both roles of oppressor and oppressed is much less alluring than simply claiming Asian pride.
Not to say that the need for Asian and Asian American activism in Classics does not exist. Classics postbaccalaureate student Mariam Usmani points to the phenomenon of cultural amnesia. Whether willful or passive, forgetting events of oppression in the United States belies a fraught past, marked by racist scapegoating and complicated by waves of immigration and subsequent cultural assimilation with varied levels of success. Asian Americanist Ellen Wu writes that the model minority myth became established in the American psyche by the 1960s as “domestic exemplars, upwardly mobile, and politically docile.” These stereotypes, which continue to thrive in our public fora, are particularly harmful in a field accustomed to monochromy not only in the diversity of its scholars but also in its iconography, symbolism, and modern cultural associations.
Is it possible to envision a future that embraces the experiences of all classicists? In a recent conversation about pedagogy with Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Brown Classics’ only nonwhite faculty member, she described how she intentionally meets her students where they’re at, recognizing that they are not caricatures of eighteenth-century Caucasians speaking exclusively in participial phrases. “It’s not your dad’s Classics class,” she quipped.
“My dad still doesn’t know what Classics is,” I said.
“Mine doesn’t either!” she said. We laughed, not out of mockery or shame, but because we both knew the truth: that Classics has denied entry to men like our fathers and still denies entry to women like us.
The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates
in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,
pick it up, read about all the ways her bodyis a thing. And I won’t be there to protect
her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead–rewrite this.
People laugh: in Classics the stakes are so low because every person we study has already died. No translation can resurrect historical personages and no archaeological data can reconstruct ancient metropolises. But the utterly unavoidable emergency is that we have the institutional power to affect the lives of those who are still living. The AAACC exists to serve the undergraduates, young professionals, and nontraditional students that deserve at least as much attention as the generations we study from western antiquity.
Occidentalism requires neither worshipping nor workshopping. The new formula: rewrite, rewrite, repeat.
Follow the AAACC on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @aznclassics and online at www.aaaclassicalcaucus.org.
Stephanie Wong is the outreach coordinator of the AAACC and an ancient historian-in-training at Brown University. She has written about her experience as an Asian American in the New York Times.
