Back to the Basics: Who Is Researching and Interpreting for Whom?
I have always hated questionnaires. My conscious memory of this reaction goes back to grade school standardized exams when I gave the wrong answer to the question whether one takes butter out beforehand to soften it. Never having had that form of congealed fat in my Chinese home, I simply did not know the cooled nature of that artery hardener! My answers to the JAH questionnaire, it appears, were also far from typical. What three to four books were most influential? The Bible was the hands-down winner. But for me? The writings of the Chinese Daoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonizedquite a postmodern pastiche! My favorite movie about the United States? Not Gone with the Wind, the overall favorite. It was George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, where zombied Americans of all creeds and persuasions gravitate to the local indoor mall to wander aimlessly.1 Growing up Chinese and "Oriental" in United States midwestern culture fostered a skepticism in my soul. I was born in the heartland of the U. S. of A. and yet was called a "gook." Daoist philosophy, far more than the transcendental mysticisms of the Bible, helped me weather such existential angst. When I was seeking to find my voice at the University of Wisconsin in the early seventies, only Harvey Goldberg, a radical and gay scholar who taught French history, and the faculty of Afro-American studies had any idea of what would be useful for me to read. Memmi's complex psychological analyses and W. E. B. Du Bois's double consciousness made innate sense to me, with the added dimension of my being neither white nor black but Chinese American and Asian American.2 De facto racialized as an "alien" foreigner, I could never simply narrow my concerns to a nationalist frame of mind. The survey respondents' lack of interest in,