From my fragmented Mandarin to my distaste of “chow mein,” I avidly explored the facets of my Asian-American identity in creative writing. When I picked up the pen, I found myself writing about my mother’s rice rations during the Cultural Revolution and the internal strife of life between two cultures, inspired by writers like Ocean Vuong and K-Ming Chang.
To venture outside of these topics felt like a betrayal of my culture; yet this seemingly self-imposed restriction was actually a betrayal of my identity. As I drew similarities between the works of Asian-American authors, I recognized that our culture limits the creative expression of writers of color by rewarding their stories of trauma.
Despite the restrictions, the perspectives of authors of Color are still important. Schools across the country include books in their curriculum that encompass socioeconomic and linguistic diversity to promote the principle of “windows and mirrors.” This influential teaching method describes how reading literature can promote empathy with individuals from different backgrounds (windows) and empower readers when they see themselves represented (mirrors).
Nevertheless, the publishing industry remains predominantly white. Between 1950 and 2018, 95% of books that were published in the United States were written by white authors. This underrepresentation highlights how the industry has failed to produce works that adequately reflect its readership, with more than one-third of children reporting that they did not feel represented in books. In her famous TED talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the dangers of inadequate representation, which causes readers to oversimplify an entire culture into a “single story.” Without diversity in literature, the public defines different racial and ethnic groups by their “single story,” filling in the gaps of their awareness with misrepresentation. A popular example is Lane Kim and her mother from “Gilmore Girls,” whose story has contributed to the perpetual foreigner archetype.
This “single story” often amplifies a few negative aspects of a culture, most notably trauma. Our culture’s innate fascination for sensational subjects places stories about suffering at the forefront. The practice of exploiting suffering for viewership is one that we see every day on social media, where trauma voyeurism has sky-rocketed.
Many students encounter this emphasis on trauma within the classroom as well. For example, I read “When the Emperor was Divine” and “The White Tiger” in high school. Despite my gratitude for the inclusion of books outside of the literary canon, these texts demonstrated that not all stories were equally helpful in understanding different perspectives. While often not intentional, these works perpetuated the portrayal of their respective culture through a lens of suffering.
In fact, the publishing industry perpetuates trauma stories by promoting the conflation of a writer of Color’s identity and suffering. This insidious association implies a lack of value from positive or neutral stories from an author. The publishing industry exacerbates the expectation on people of Color to represent their race and reinforces the belief that their racial identity is defined by trauma.
Publishing’s relationship with Black authors demonstrates this conflation between self and race. The industry tends to publish batches of books about Black life every 10 to 15 years. This cycle reshuffles the same themes about overlooked histories and oppression, and the market’s demand for these stories perpetually places the burden on Black writers to reintroduce their trauma.
Similar to Black authors, Asian Americans face restrictions on their creative expression. While Amy Tan and Maxine Hong spearheaded representation, the industry adopted their writing as a cookie cutter for future Asian-American authors and equated success with stories centered around their cultural experience. This expectation limits Asian-American writers from exploring non-Asian themes and restricts their writing to their family’s immigration or oppressive governments in the homeland. The pressure to write palatable stories for the majority culture reinforces the archetype of Asian-American exoticism and encourages these authors to capitalize on their personal trauma.
Beyond the publishing world, the pattern of rewarding suffering persists even in the college application process. After the University of California system banned affirmative action in admissions in 1996, UC admissions officers noted the overwhelming number of essays about adversity and trauma that students wrote in hopes of an acceptance. Even in high school, Americans romanticize suffering, and our culture’s desensitization to these stories means that we overlook the painful impacts of trauma.
To end the oversaturation of suffering stories, we must implement a twofold solution. The first part is to pressure publishing to diversify their staff and authors. In response to recent activism and movements like Black Lives Matter, publishers hired a greater number of nonwhite employees, revised their diversity policies and purchased manuscripts from more nonwhite authors. The industry’s susceptibility to public opinion demonstrates the power of mass movements.
Through social media or book sales, we must also support authors who explore all aspects of their background, not just the trauma and suffering. These stories illustrate that culture and identity inform each other yet remain different. Demand for these works encourages the publishing industry to confront their preset notions for writers of Color and to produce more inclusive texts.
The second part of the solution is to challenge our own expectations for the stories that authors of Color can tell. By reading from more perspectives, we subvert generalizations by filling in the whole picture of a writer’s experiences. To minimize the over-amplified association between oppression and historically marginalized groups, we also must confront our cultural fascination with trauma. Awareness of a community’s trauma should not be a badge for allyship — mere acknowledgement only begets complacency.
To cultivate a trauma-informed society, we must recognize the difficulty of uncovering painful histories, the potential of these stories to re-trigger writers and readers, and the pressure that authors face to exploit their suffering for financial success. To end our obsession with trauma means to gain awareness of the commodification of suffering and to re-sensitize ourselves to the costs of these stories. Through a mosaic of stories and mindfulness, we can push for a literary culture that provides equitable and authentic representation.
Sarah Zhang is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at sarzhang@umich.edu.