Transcending Race and Nation: East Asian Identity in the Contemporary Spanish Autobiography

Abstract

Over the last fifty years, as East Asian immigration to Spain has grown, so too has a desire to transcend identarian borders between race and nation. East Asian Spaniards born in democracy come of age chafing against a polarized paradigm that conceives of their race as fundamentally at odds with their nationality. I analyze two autobiographies by East Asian Spaniards that contend with and contest this binary: Chenta Tsai Tseng’s, pseudonym Putochinomaricón, Arroz tres delicias: Sexo, raza y género (2019) and Quan Zhou Wu’s La agridolce vita (2023). Each autobiography recounts its authors’ struggles to reconcile diametrically-opposed identities as members of the growing East Asian diasporic community in Spain. In centering transcendence as a textual act, I illuminate the ways in which new identities are created through the autobiographical text, and the way in which the act of writing offers an archive of alternative identities from which to establish textual selves as open to the heterogeneity of rapidly-diversifying Spain. I conclude by framing these autobiographies as spaces in which urgent, yet uncomfortable dialogues around heterogeneity and homogeneity in Spain take place.

Keywords:

• Asian immigration
• Spanish autobiography
• racism
• national identity
• graphic novel
• migration in Spain

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Tsai Tseng uses gender neutral pronouns (elle) in Spanish; to reflect this in English, I use they/them.

2 By formal requisites, I refer to those highlighted in Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, in which an autobiography is a retrospective prose narrative created by a real person about their own existence, emphasizing their individual life experience and the development of their personality (5).

3 Some authors have written more than one autobiography, which this number takes into account. This list does not differentiate between the closely-related autobiographic forms discussed above. Authors include Agnès Agboton, Taleb Alisalem, Ibrahima Balde, Ruben H. Bermúdez, Desirée Bela-Lobedde, Isaac Ebelle, Moha Gerehou, Najat El Hachmi, Mohamadou Jia, Sani Ladan, Aaron Lee, Meryem El Mehdati, Rocío Quillahuaman, Edmundo Sepa Bonaba, Lori Tharps, Khaly Thioune, Chenta Tsai Tseng, Ousman Umar, Margaryta Yakovenko, and Quan Zhou Wu. Note that this list cannot be inclusive as more autobiographies are constantly published.

4 In a vivid example of just how ingrained stereotypes of East Asian Spaniards are in Spain, journalist Fermín Cabanillas, writing for EFE, once began a 2023 article by reminding readers, “[l]os chinos no esconden dinero a la Hacienda española, no viven o se divierten solo entre ellos ni se dedican únicamente a los bazares” (n.p.).

5 Agridolce is the Italian term for agridulce, a reference to the author’s first work in this series.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Posey

Alison Posey is a postdoctoral researcher in Romance Studies at Duke University, where she researches Afrohispanic, Equatoguinean, and Peninsular minority literatures. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph Writing Against Death: Autobiographic Lives in Afrodiasporic Spain and has published her research in journals including Romance Notes and the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos.