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The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women. - Review - book review
MELUS, Winter, 1999 by Susie Lan Cassel
The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women. Ed. Sharon Lim-Hing. Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1994. 467 pages. $16.95 paper.
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This anthology is important as the first to be devoted to the often neglected or tokenized space of lesbian and bisexual Asian and Pacific Islander discourse. It sets itself apart from related works which have focused on genre in Asian Pacific American writing (The Open Boat with poetry, Our Feet Walk the Sky with ethnicity, Charlie Chan is Dead with contemporary fiction, Making Waves I & II with feminism, and On a Bed of Rice with erotica), lesbian women of color and "radical" women of color (Piece of My Heart, This Bridge Called My Back), and lesbian erotica (Pearls of Passion). In its ethnic and sexual concerns it is most like Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology but broadens the scope to include bisexual authors. As Sharon Lim-Hing, the editor, writes, "it was clear to me that Asian and Pacific Islander lesbians should have our own book, apart from just a few of us representing all of us in the larger spectrum of women of color anthologies, apart from appealing furtively in collections of works by predominantly straight Asian women, and apart from helping to provide diversity for white-dominated anthologies." To this end, she has assembled an "array of voices" that explore the triple oppressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia but, importantly, also celebrate the struggles of activism and creativity, the beauty of desire and dream, the warmth of comradeship and understanding, the joy of life and love. The Very Inside consciously and admirably maintains balance in its ethnic and thematic inclusion and for its unique contribution remains an important anthology for its time.
Lim-Hing has fittingly organized this volume according to theme rather than historical period, genre, ethnicity, alphabetization, or their combination/intersection. This arrangement permits an infusion of the issues of race, sexuality, and homophobia (among others) throughout the five sections; it also reinforces the editor's intention to create a work representative of whole peoples instead of a work that isolates race and sexuality as attributes alone capable of representing "the" lesbian and bisexual Asian Pacific Islander experience.
The collection aptly begins with a section entitled "Origins, Departures" which explores--often through memory--multiple facets of identity, including the ancestral, national, sexual, ethnic, bi-cultural, and bi-racial. Next is the unit "Finding/Founding Community" which, in addition to an account of the 1989 Asian Pacific Lesbian Network Retreat at the University of California, Santa Cruz, includes very interesting cross talks: one between two Cambodians, and another by four Hawai'ians concerning the problematics of Hawai'ian identity, the absence of an adequate Hawai'ian language of sexuality (not even a term for lesbian), and the politics of the Hawai'ian sovereignty movement. "Waking from a Dream of Love," the third segment, contains the title poem, "The Very Inside," by Indigo Chih-Lien Som, and the best first line in the collection: "My lover has a lover whose lover is Alissa" (Mattison, "Misplacing Alissa"). Here, we see stories of jealousy, devotion, envy, fear, experimentation, eroticism, and play, the latter exemplified in my favorite piece, Suniti Namjoshi's "When My Love Lay Sleeping.... " ("When my love lay sleeping / it was not I / it was the sun who splashed her / with sticky honey. / The sun / put it there. I merely watched / patiently...." Located in the fourth division, "Life Struggle," is a series of protests levied against imagined communities that neither understand nor accept the narrative personas. These "struggles" are constructed along opposing lines of race, sexuality, family, class, culture, love, and (child) abuse. Finally, "Out of Fire, Grace," is an awkward combination of the somewhat dissimilar concerns of activism and creativity. This section gives accounts of important and relevant events like a March on Washington, the Lesbians of Color Conference (Malibu, 1983), and the "I Am Your Sister" Conference honoring Audre Lorde (Boston, 1991). It also addresses important but disparate issues, such as breast cancer, pidgin, leadership, historiography, and citizenry.
Despite the commendable use of theme as a useful and appropriate organizing principle for this work, the five particular categories and the works selected to elucidate these categories occasionally left more to be desired. Admittedly, there is significant and inevitable overlap in studies of identity that necessarily challenge the thematic division of any anthology; yet included unexpectedly in the last section, ostensibly on activism, is an explication of lesbianism in early Indian texts (e.g. the Mahabharata and Ramayana); the themes of Hawai'ian identity and politics covered in the second section are revisited in the final section; and there is significant crossover between issues in the "Life Struggles" pieces and those in all other sections.
