{"id":1642,"date":"2025-11-20T20:57:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T01:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/?p=1642"},"modified":"2025-11-20T20:57:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T01:57:55","slug":"the-legend-of-negotiating-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2025\/11\/20\/the-legend-of-negotiating-whiteness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legend of Negotiating Whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something that stood out to me in their interview with Rosie Knight was when Shing Yin Khor said:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHow much of the American story is shaped by clever marketing but built by the marginalized?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This strikes me hard. It then became a powerful lens for me when I think about Ocean Vuong\u2019s On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel that, just like The Legend of Auntie Po, shows us the intersectionality of race, queerness, family, and marginalized lives shaped by American narratives. While Khor rewrites the Paul Bunyan myth to center a Chinese American girl, Mei, Vuong documents how the forces of whiteness structure everything from intimacy to labor for Vietnamese immigrants through his own story, a letter, to his illiterate mother.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a world, the America\u2019s world, where even myths are intertwined with the country\u2019s history of colonization, marginalization and slavery, Vuong\u2019s answer comes through his reframing of the Vietnam War. Rather than accepting the U.S. narrative of rescue or moral authority, he insists, <\/span>\u201cAll this time I told myself we were born from war, but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence, but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.\u201d<\/span> Just as Khor uncovers the erased labor of Chinese workers beneath the Paul Bunyan myth, Vuong reveals how the war\u2019s mythology obscures the real Vietnamese lives shaped, and scarred, by it, even in our own language: \u201cMa, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the experience of being a non-white person in America is about trying to navigate whiteness.\u201d Ocean\u2019s relationship with his first lover, Trevor, is one of the clearest signs of this \u201cwhiteness navigation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe was white. I was yellow. In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The intimacy between them is always shadowed by racial difference. How even queerness can\u2019t erase the imbalance of how both boys move through America. Trevor\u2019s whiteness shapes the terms of desire, just as Mei must negotiate white expectations in the logging camp, or with Bee, her \u201cbestfriend\u201d who\u2019s also white.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Whiteness, in a way, also shapes labor. At the nail salon where Ocean Vuong\u2019s mother works, the most repeated phrase is \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d spoken by Vietnamese women whose survival depends on appeasing white customers. This echoes Khor\u2019s observation that marginalized people are forced to adapt themselves to white comfort simply to live.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ocean\u2019s words mirror Mei\u2019s imaginative rewriting of myth: \u201cI\u2019m angry that I have to make my own God,\u201d she says, yet she creates Auntie Po as a way to protect herself, her family, and to seek for freedom, when institutions fail them.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what both Mei and Ocean Vuong has in common, is their creativity as a form of resistance. Ocean himself enters the country without English, bullied for his difference, yet eventually turns the English language, once a tool of power, into his means of resistance. He said:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because\u2026 I was trying to break free.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mei, who made up her own God, who speaks English under her dad\u2019s word of how it made her more American, uses that same language to tell her own stories of Auntie Po, both stories that insist on the humanity and creativity of those who have long navigated the boundaries set by whiteness.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something that stood out to me in their interview with Rosie Knight was when Shing Yin Khor said: \u201cHow much of the American story is shaped by clever marketing but built by the marginalized?\u201d\u00a0 This strikes me hard. It then became a powerful lens for me when I think about Ocean Vuong\u2019s On Earth We\u2019re … Continue reading The Legend of Negotiating Whiteness<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5697,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5697"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1643,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions\/1643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}