In her first collection of stories, Chinese-American novelist Gish Jen turns stereotypes on their heads. A young man finds that the path to seduction winds through some treacherous territory. So there it was. Through the hurled abstractions, we learn that we're unpopular.
Ivory towers disintegrate to sandboxes in an instant.
But for me this only tautens my determination to make the conversation about our ideas, not our identities. On another, even more infamous occasion, I had complained about something my Chinese housemate was always cooking, which I was never able to identify, not because I disdained to ask but because we can't speak each other's languages. So it must have been on the behalf of these groups that my mostly white classmates who were listening were so scandalized. I'm not-yes you are trap and curious to know what she really believed, I ventured. No, not like whites.