Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America

by Julia Lee

Overview

Julia Lee is angry. And she has questions.
What does it mean to be Asian in America? What does it look like to be an ally or an accomplice? How can we shatter the structures of white supremacy that fuel racial stratification?

When Julia was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she?

This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answers—not through studying Victorian literature, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Their works gave Julia the vocabulary and, more important, the permission to critically examine her own tortured position as an Asian American, setting off a powerful journey of racial reckoning, atonement, and self-discovery.

With prose by turns scathing and heart-wrenching, Julia lays bare the complex disorientation and shame that stem from this country’s imposed racial hierarchy. And she argues that Asian Americans must work toward lasting social change alongside Black and brown communities in order to combat the scarcity culture of white supremacy through abundance and joy. In this passionate, no-holds-barred memoir, Julia interrogates her own experiences of marginality and resistance, and ultimately asks what may be the biggest question of all—what can we do?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250824677
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/18/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	71,604
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Julia Lee is a Korean American writer, scholar, and teacher. She is the author of Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals” and The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, as well as the novel By the Book, which was published under the pen name Julia Sonneborn. She is an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches African American and Caribbean literature. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

01/16/2023

English professor Lee (Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals”) dispels the myth of the docile Asian and calls out the absurdities of racial hierarchies in this incisive memoir. Asserting that America’s Black-and-white racial binary renders other cultures invisible, Lee interrogates her Korean American culture and upbringing, the stereotypes foisted upon Asian Americans, and ways to dismantle a destructively entrenched white supremacist ideology. Whiteness, she writes, casts “Asians as perpetual foreigners and the model minority” and “Black people as perpetual criminals and the problem minority.” Meanwhile, beneath the composure of her Korean Americans mother, simmered shame and rage in the form of hwa-byung (“anger/fire disease,” which Lee calls “the curse of being Korean and a woman”) and enforced by chae-myun (a “code of behavior” she describes as “a kind of social armor”). Lee assiduously identifies what constitutes white and Asian America, but her analysis somewhat falters outside of these two spaces; aside from explanations of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising—ignited by the beating of Rodney King by white LAPD cops—and an introduction to the concept of “skinfolk vs. kinfolk,” for instance, Black America is much less defined. Still, Lee’s self-reflective voice and sharp assessment of societal failures yield a revealing and righteously infuriating work. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2023-01-19
A Korean American scholar and writer reflects on how America's White supremacy culture has shaped her life and politics.

Lee, a professor of African American and Caribbean literature, begins her story with an anecdote about she and her mother hurling bottles of juice at each other in a mutual fit of incandescent rage. Their anger, writes the author, arose from their multigenerational exhaustion with coping with the pressures of White supremacy. Lee then describes a White teacher’s negative response to an essay she wrote “about how the ‘popular girls’ at our school were invariably white and wealthy and (often) blond,” and she also digs into relevant historical moments, including the response to the Rodney King verdict in 1992. In doing so, the author traces how her relationship with Whiteness has both fueled her rage and stoked her desire to resist the oppression inherent in America's racial hierarchy. At first, Lee remembers being unwittingly tolerant of this structure, as when, at age 8, she rejected a Black Cabbage Patch Kid because she said she wanted an Asian doll—even though, secretly, she admitted that she would have taken a White doll instead. In adulthood, Lee realized that no matter how hard she tried to align with Whiteness, that culture would never serve her. “Asian Americans,” she writes, “are the beneficiaries and the victims of white supremacy…but we have a choice. We can uphold the power structure or we can dismantle it.” Throughout the book, the author advocates for choosing the latter. From the opening scene, in which Lee takes “passive-aggressive” revenge on a racist professor by coming to class in an “Angry Little Asian Girl” shirt, the text consistently glimmers with humor, vulnerability, idealistic clarity, and, as promised, incandescent rage. Lee’s honest, compassionate analysis of her past mistakes leaves readers plenty of space to address their own.

A lively, wise, and immensely insightful memoir about Asian America's relationship with Whiteness.

Kirkus Reviews

Biting the Hand—vivid, powerful, and empathetic—grapples with the story of how ‘America’ got made, is made, and will be made. The harshness of this story is often forgotten or misused. This book reminds us of some of its complicated truth.”
—Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place

“An awe-inspiring memoir that traces Julia Lee’s search for her place in America. Lee sheds light on nuances of the Asian American experience that will ring familiar to anyone who has ever struggled to know where they stand. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of Korean Han, the Asian American experience, and the power of resilience.”
—David Chang, founder of Momofuku

“Biting the Hand messed me up, and I love it. The book was able to circle and ultimately pounce on something I’ve been afraid to write through for years. Julia Lee has really written a lush treatise on the politics of expectation. It’s phenomenal.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“Hopeful, honest, and bitterly funny, Julia Lee offers a captivating story of teaching and learning, listening and speaking out, how we distinguish who we’re supposed to be from who we might become.”
—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“A brilliant, fearless, vulnerable examination of our shared journey navigating racial caste structures in America. This is the book of my heart that wasn’t my story to tell, so I’m elated that Lee cracked open her heart for us to travel with her.”
—Kimberly Jones, author of How We Can Win

“A memoir that brims with wit, intelligence, vulnerability, and delicious rage, Biting the Hand is the fiery manifesto of an ‘angry little Asian girl’ that delivers on so many levels. A perfect distillation of scholarship, lived experience, and revolutionary call for the liberation of all peoples.”
—Phuc Tran, author of Sigh, Gone

“[Biting the Hand] consistently glimmers with humor, vulnerability, idealistic clarity, and, as promised, incandescent rage. Lee’s honest, compassionate analysis of her past mistakes leaves readers plenty of space to address their own. A lively, wise, and immensely insightful memoir about Asian America's relationship with Whiteness.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Julia Lee] dispels the myth of the docile Asian and calls out the absurdities of racial hierarchies in this incisive memoir…Lee’s self-reflective voice and sharp assessment of societal failures yield a revealing and righteously infuriating work.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[A] clear-sighted memoir humming with justified anger…[Lee] untangles the complexities of existing outside the Black/white racial binary that has long defined American society, powerfully calling on anyone who has felt invisible to aid in the dismantling of the existing power structure.”
—Booklist

From the Publisher

Julia Lee performs her new essay collection, which discusses the complex lived reality of being the child of working-class Korean immigrants in California. During the 1992 riots in her hometown of Los Angeles, Lee had a front-row seat to the horrors of white supremacy. As she attends college and moves on to grad school, she has her own racial reckoning as she examines her complicity in America's racial hierarchy. Lee's narration is powerful. She communicates all of her anger and frustration at the racism she experiences and sees around her. She shatters the idea that Asian Americans are the "model minority," clearly laying out her points while also imbuing her performance with intense emotions that come from living in America's racist society. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MAY 2023 - AudioFile

Julia Lee performs her new essay collection, which discusses the complex lived reality of being the child of working-class Korean immigrants in California. During the 1992 riots in her hometown of Los Angeles, Lee had a front-row seat to the horrors of white supremacy. As she attends college and moves on to grad school, she has her own racial reckoning as she examines her complicity in America's racial hierarchy. Lee's narration is powerful. She communicates all of her anger and frustration at the racism she experiences and sees around her. She shatters the idea that Asian Americans are the "model minority," clearly laying out her points while also imbuing her performance with intense emotions that come from living in America's racist society. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MAY 2023 - AudioFile