Katha Pollitt on her familiarity with Asians

[Brad DeLong]

>Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 17:55:03 -0500
>From: Katha Pollitt <kpollitt at thenation.com>
>Subject: you can post this if you like
>
>Dear Doug -- re asians.  In the story, as I think is clear, I meant
>Asians as opposed to Asian-Americans.  Ben was born and brought up in
>Manila, he is not a US citizen, his first language is Tagalog, then
>Spanish. His family still lives there and he is marrying a filipina.I
>have many Asian American friends, for example Rakesh, but alas none who
>grew up in say China or India or Japan and moved here as adults.
>   Some Asian-Americans prefer to think of themselves as Asians. That
>Asian is also a racial" classification makes this easier. But to my way
>of thinking they are no more Asians than My Mother, whose parents were
>born in Czarist Russia, was a European.
>
>  It may also be that if I concentrate my failing brain I can think of
>another Asian I know.  Just the way I actually probably did speak to
>other men during the course of a day other than Ben, My London boyfriend
>and the guy at the newstand. The story has a slight quality of
>exaggeration and overthetopness. It is streamlined and pared down in
>order to make a narrative that does a lot of work in few words and is --
>I hope -- funny.  It would be a mistake to interpet every sentence
>entirely literally. One of its themes is the naivete and lack of
>experience of the narrator herself -- someone who does not know the
>world as well as she should. She moves in a small circle of people and
>experiences. Not knowing Asians is one of numerous ways  of making that
>point.
>   but yes in real life as in my essay I do spend too much time on e
>mail.
>
>xox
>k

Well, let me just say that I very much hope that the separation 
between the first-person narrative persona "Katha Pollitt" of the New 
Yorker article? story? and the real Katha Pollitt is large. For one 
thing, I hope the real Katha Pollitt is in better emotional and 
psychological shape--he isn't worth it, and there's no use kicking 
oneself for being unobservant. People whose actions are ruled by 
their testicles are sneaky, and if one focuses on being "observant" 
of such people than one falls into paranoia.

As I've said in the past, Katha Pollitt's essays are one of our 
national treasures: she's an immensely wise and thoughtful cultural 
and political observer with the pen of an angel. My (selfish) desire 
is for Katha Pollitt to look forward, and not to look back as "Katha 
Pollitt" appears to be.

Brad DeLong