Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

Danielle Marie Herrera
Prof. Maira
ASA 4 A04
1 June 2017

Nam Le's short story "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" exemplifies the pressure for Asian-American authors to write about intergenerational conflict rather than politicizing their writing and describing the race and class struggles of Asian-Americans. Interestingly, Le escapes the criticisms of being apolitical or too political by using the technique of auto-fiction, in which he writes a fictional story, but names the protagonist after himself and includes elements of intergenerational conflict that are both real and fictional. I liked how Andrew mentioned the dominant demographic of books - middle-aged white women - and how authors of color are pressured to mold their work in ways that please this audience, possibly at the expense of whatever the authors actually want to write about. I can relate to this pressure as a musician who specifically is responsible for selecting music for the Filipino-American a cappella group MK Choir on campus. I am often at a crossroads between selecting music in the Filipino language and music that is part of American pop culture. This represents a battle between a feeling of responsibility to represent Asian-Americans in our group's music vs. selecting the music I want to perform and feel we will perform best.