On studying Chinese (and other Asian) philosophy as a person of Asian heritage
My Asian heritage
When Audrey Yap asked me to be part of her panel on philosophers of Asian descent who teach and research Asian philosophy for the APA Pacific this spring in Portland, Oregon, I felt delighted and said yes immediately.
It felt strangely like the gender euphoria I experience when people recognize that I am non-binary (I am cautious and coy about it, so it is totally understandable they do not recognize me as such).
I am not white-passing (I am mixed race) and usually when people do try to guess my heritage, they will say Latinx. My last name, which is of Portuguese (maybe ultimately Spanish?) origin, contributes to this. To my surprise, I have even had people trying to correct me when I tell them I am not Latinx. To know I am not I had to first learn what being Latinx means—it apparently depends on which empire colonized your ancestors, and it's not the right empire in my case. Or a white woman in our suburban neighborhood with whom I often chat telling me I should not wear a top with embroidered flowers if I did not want to be mistaken for Latina. Well…
Anyway, my Asian heritage has always been very important to me, maybe precisely because I don't look like what people think of as Asian. People of Asian descent come in a wide range of different ethnicities, customs, religions. I recognize this as I have helped to build, and am currently on the board of, SLU's AMES (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) Center.
I am of Malaysian (Malacca Portuguese) and white (Belgian) ancestry, and in spite of a lot of explicit racist backlash, our household never compromised on the Asian part of it. It was in so many different things, small and big, but especially the food. We had the Wayang Kulit puppets hanging in our living room. If you have eaten Malaysian food you will not want anything else, it is a fusion cuisine all onto itself and my father is an excellent cook (I know a few recipes, and occasionally cook but I am not that good). We had large feasts on holidays, with some specific Malaccan dishes such as Devil's Curry to be eaten on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas). Friends of my father and even family would come over unexpectedly for dinner (“Have you eaten?” “No I have not. Do you mind?”) and stay for days—a chaotic and strangely warming form of hospitality.
As a child I had a set of about 100 wooden blocks (when I was last at my parental home, I tried to find them back, in vain) with the word in traditional Chinese and a picture, e.g., the picture of a house and 家, and on the back the word “house”, the romanization (I think Wades-Giles) and the stroke order. My father's side has next to Eurasian a lot of ethnically Chinese (Hokkien). When I went there as a child, the second husband of my grandma, was mortified I could not speak it, and proceeded to teach me how to pronounce and say a great many things, which I forgot instantly.
Growing up, I felt protective about this part of my identity, in spite or maybe because of the racist remarks of kids in my school (who often mistook me for Turkish, a very different Asian ethnic identity but probably salient because it was the main ethnic/racial minority in the village I grew up). I heard many passing racist remarks also of adults, such as my history teacher, who told us when I was in my senior year that Asian people have no creativity and are not capable of original thought. “They just imitate everything. Like the Japanese who copied the rust on European ships when copying them.”
A salient moment was when I did my first communion aged six, and my communion dress was made from my mother's wedding dress, which was made of Malaysian fabric. It was white, but if you looked closely you could see a pattern of appliqué white dragons on it for good fortune. So there I sat, in church, with the dragons undulating on my first communion gown, wondering what would happen if that was discovered.
I've always been very keen of my European heritage as well, including the greats of the European canon, and I still write/do philosophy with them, as well as more marginalized European figures such as Margaret Cavendish.
On learning Chinese philosophy through white authors
In recent years, I've become very intrigued by Chinese philosophy, and also by other Asian philosophical traditions. I do not have (I think) any special epistemic advantage coming to these traditions than anyone else would have—ideas such as anatman, filial piety, ritual propriety, or wuwei appeared as alien to me as they would to any non-Asian person.
Indeed, I encountered my first Asian philosophy through the mediation and help of white authors, including Bryan Van Norden, PJ Ivanhoe, Justin Tiwald and others. These white men all did an excellent job making Chinese philosophy accessible and comprehensible. I tried, years earlier, to read the Analects and Daodejing on my own, but it just did not work. I did not understand the underlying philosophical moves and debates.
In particular Bryan Van Norden did such a splendid job making the texts come alive. It was a very profound moment for me, having read his introductory book on classical Chinese philosophy, to slowly and patiently pick my way through the Mengzi with his commentary. It's not an exaggeration to say that I fell in love with the Mengzi and where I first got this sense (that Mengzi discusses in 5B9) that you can befriend dead authors through their works. Mengzi gave me a sense of strength and resilience by giving me the self-trust that the sprouts of goodness really lie within me, as they lie within anyone. You can always find that resource within yourself, even if all else fails.
And then, strengthened by ever more knowledge and experience, I went on to discover the Zhuangzi, a work that had as deep an impact on me as Mengzi philosophically, and Wang Yangming's works, as well as the very astute but sometimes infuriating Xunzi, and finally the Analects and the Daodejing (tip: if you are like me, do not begin with these, they are, or so I found, less accessible than these other works).
Philosophy from somewhere
Audrey's asking me to be part of this panel got me thinking: what does it mean to engage, as a person of Asian heritage, with these works? What does it mean to encounter them mainly through the mediation of white authors? How can one's Asian-ness contribute to one's understanding? Philosophical views, as Huaping Lu Adler points out, are always views from somewhere. So our positionality to these philosophical traditions does matter. Meanwhile, I appreciate that Asian philosophy is truly global and so many white authors engage with it. I am very happy that work on, say, Wang Yangming makes it into the philosophical mainstream with books with Oxford University Press and even papers in Philosophical Review (by Harvey Lederman).
At the same time, we can ask why it is the case that Asian-heritage philosophers seem underrepresented in this endeavor. Of course, underrepresented does not mean absent. There are many excellent philosophers of Asian heritage working in Asian philosophy. For Chinese philosophy, Karyn Lai, Chenyang Li, Hui Chieh Loy come to mind.
I think part of it is that you face all these obstacles, and early in your career especially you have to work hard to be coded as a “serious” philosopher who is worthy of a job. Our methods are very diverse, maybe more diverse than in any other discipline. So we rely on cues of “seriousness” “rigor” “excellence” as well as on prestige to sift out what is worth reading and engaging and what is not. And I do think there's a genuine concern that if you are Asian, working on Asian philosophy, you will be perceived as not expanding the canon and doing daring and new work (as these white authors do) but merely as someone who's working on something they're already connected to somehow. And you want to avoid being pigeonholed like this.
In trying to secure a job, and then a better job, I worried a lot about how I was perceived, and that unhealthy focus on the self only slowly went away. I worry a lot less about whether people perceive me as smart or as a serious philosopher. With that lessening worry has come a great gift: I have truly fallen in love with philosophy. I feel so immensely privileged I can read and befriend people like Mengzi and that I can engage with their thoughts and transmit this to my students.
We should all have the freedom to work on the philosophies that matter to us. It is empowering that we can work on philosophies that we feel a special connection to.
It’s awesome that you have Malaysian-Chinese roots as a half-Malaccan Portuguese. I initially thought you were Portuguese so I guess I was only half-half-right. It’s great that you’re culturally aware owing to the more conscientious upbringing given to you by adults in your family.
Filipino migrants often (but not always) don’t keep their kids culturally aware or even have them gain fluency in the mother tongue/s (yes, there are hundreds of Philippine languages) and often let them get completely absorbed into the host culture (which is a shame).
But I’m also a little surprised that you’re part Hokkien, because in the Philippines, there’s a sense of ethnic purity and very few mixed marriages among them, and the reason for that, that I’ve heard from Manila’s Chinese heritage museum in Intramuros, the Bahay Tsinoy Museum, was mainly economic. Hokkien Chinese in the Philippines usually arrived as merchants from Fujian and would not marry their children off to non-merchants (some class-based prejudice). Portuguese merchants might’ve married into Hokkien merchant families.
Having Chinese (or Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Persian, Indian) roots gives you an easy lane for a cultural reason to do Asian philosophy. It just makes sense to do so to deepen your own sense of identity. I’m a little envious because I only have about 8% Chinese in me, though there are still other interesting, salient reasons besides ethnolinguistic/historical ones to do philosophy.
As a Filipino, whenever I try to find Filipino philosophers in the 20th century, I could never find a truly original work from the Filipino perspective and/or language. I thought there was enough time for an original work by a Filipino (whether in Tagalog, Spanish, or English) to arise, that didn’t need to make use of or make reference to (except to contrast) foreign concepts, especially since the Dominicans and the Jesuits introduced Catholic thought through Catholic universities and the Americans through Ricardo Pascual, a Filipino student of Rudolf Carnap.
Three Filipino philosophers that I actually liked were former President Jose P. Laurel, Fr. Roque Ferriols, and Fr. Leonardo Mercado. But they were never as interesting as the East Asian philosophers that I’ve heard about, because those philosophers fleshed out indigenous ideas using indigenous methods. Filipino philosophers often borrowed or Filipinized foreign ideas. And only Mercado (diwa, which is like essence or relationality but isn’t) and Florentino Hornedo (bayanihan, which is like cooperation, but contextually narrower) made use of indigenous concepts as foundation to their work.
It’s also a shame that, as a Filipino and an Asian, if I’m a grad student in philosophy (which I’ll probably try doing eventually, if writing for a living doesn’t work out), it’s a career block to start out as a specialist in philosophy that matters the most to me. Seems to me it has a lot to do with a kind of linguistic injustice with English as lingua franca in philosophy broadly.
Absolutely loved this post Helen! I’m a mix of Eastern European (Russian) and Chinese ancestry and I’ve been blessed with having Chinese as one of my native languages (alongside English and a bit of Russian). Reading philosophy across different languages and epistemic foundations is truly a blessing, and I think you’d really like Byung-Chul Han’s book: Absence. It summarized the key differences between the Western and the Eastern philosophical traditions. :)