Biting the Hand

November 1, 2022

The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles, Lee was compelled to question issues of identity and complicity following the 1992 race riots, the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King, and the killing of Black teenager Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper. She started getting answers as a PhD student in English literature who found her inspiration not in Jane Austen but in authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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January 16, 2023
English professor Lee (Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals”) dispels the myth of the docile Asian and calls out the absurdities of racial hierarchies in this incisive memoir. Asserting that America’s Black-and-white racial binary renders other cultures invisible, Lee interrogates her Korean American culture and upbringing, the stereotypes foisted upon Asian Americans, and ways to dismantle a destructively entrenched white supremacist ideology. Whiteness, she writes, casts “Asians as perpetual foreigners and the model minority” and “Black people as perpetual criminals and the problem minority.” Meanwhile, beneath the composure of her Korean Americans mother, simmered shame and rage in the form of hwa-byung (“anger/fire disease,” which Lee calls “the curse of being Korean and a woman”) and enforced by chae-myun (a “code of behavior” she describes as “a kind of social armor”). Lee assiduously identifies what constitutes white and Asian America, but her analysis somewhat falters outside of these two spaces; aside from explanations of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising—ignited by the beating of Rodney King by white LAPD cops—and an introduction to the concept of “skinfolk vs. kinfolk,” for instance, Black America is much less defined. Still, Lee’s self-reflective voice and sharp assessment of societal failures yield a revealing and righteously infuriating work.

February 15, 2023
The Korean concept of han captures a condition of sorrow and rage that echoes through generations, the legacy of a long history of invasion and war. Lee, the daughter of Korean immigrants to California, grapples with this inheritance as a member of the so-called model minority in this clear-sighted memoir humming with justified anger. Her parents immigrated in the early 1970s after her father's harrowing escape across the North Korean border, bringing the anxieties of war into their new lives. Lee recounts milestones on her journey to reject the insidious exclusionary culture of white supremacy in modern American society, from her childhood audition for the role of a Vietnamese boat child on Designing Women, to her experience as a teenager of the racial uprisings in L.A. after the Rodney King verdict, to the overt racism she encountered at Princeton. She untangles the complexities of existing outside the Black/white racial binary that has long defined American society, powerfully calling on anyone who has felt invisible to aid in the dismantling of the existing power structure.

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Starred review from February 15, 2023
A Korean American scholar and writer reflects on how America's White supremacy culture has shaped her life and politics. Lee, a professor of African American and Caribbean literature, begins her story with an anecdote about she and her mother hurling bottles of juice at each other in a mutual fit of incandescent rage. Their anger, writes the author, arose from their multigenerational exhaustion with coping with the pressures of White supremacy. Lee then describes a White teacher's negative response to an essay she wrote "about how the 'popular girls' at our school were invariably white and wealthy and (often) blond," and she also digs into relevant historical moments, including the response to the Rodney King verdict in 1992. In doing so, the author traces how her relationship with Whiteness has both fueled her rage and stoked her desire to resist the oppression inherent in America's racial hierarchy. At first, Lee remembers being unwittingly tolerant of this structure, as when, at age 8, she rejected a Black Cabbage Patch Kid because she said she wanted an Asian doll--even though, secretly, she admitted that she would have taken a White doll instead. In adulthood, Lee realized that no matter how hard she tried to align with Whiteness, that culture would never serve her. "Asian Americans," she writes, "are the beneficiaries and the victims of white supremacy...but we have a choice. We can uphold the power structure or we can dismantle it." Throughout the book, the author advocates for choosing the latter. From the opening scene, in which Lee takes "passive-aggressive" revenge on a racist professor by coming to class in an "Angry Little Asian Girl" shirt, the text consistently glimmers with humor, vulnerability, idealistic clarity, and, as promised, incandescent rage. Lee's honest, compassionate analysis of her past mistakes leaves readers plenty of space to address their own. A lively, wise, and immensely insightful memoir about Asian America's relationship with Whiteness.

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