On Lipstick, Rodeo Queens, Creative Compatibility, and Making a Difference

BY NATASCHA KARLOVA

At 8 AM pink clouds peek through a cold-frosted window in Joan Burbick’s office in Avery Hall. Books of 19th century American literature and history, modern cultural theory, and stories about the American West fill the office bookshelves. It’s a crowded space with too many chairs and two large conference tables, where she meets with students and faculty in her role as director of graduate studies in the Department of English. A small radio/CD player sits atop a filing cabinet in a dark corner. On one wall hangs a poster for an exhibit featuring photographs of Native Americans in traditional dress. Behind these photographs are the words ‘The camera never lies.’

Alex Kuo, Joan’s husband, slinks in wearing a black bomber-style leather jacket and sits at one of the large tables. The furrow across his brow says he feels unsettled, whether because of the interview or another meeting which overlaps. Joan is making tea in the English department office, and as she comes back to her office, her tea fills the room with the aroma of an herbalist’s shoppe. Her tight smile looks ready to meet yet another obligation.

Both at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, Kuo teaches comparative American cultures and English, and chairs the CAC department. Burbick teaches American studies and English. More than just professors, however, their most recent published pieces, Lipstick and Other Stories by Alex Kuo and Rodeo Queens and the American Dream by Joan Burbick, have attracted lots of attention. In fact, Kuo’s collection of short stories won a 2002 American Book Award. Such attention makes them buzzworthy in the literati’s spectacles. They are Washington State University’s literary celebrities.

They face each other from opposite tables. As the discussion begins, Joan and Alex thaw from static, reclining positions to animated conversational gestures. Alex brings his hands out of his jacket pockets onto the table. Joan moves out from behind her laptop.

The Amy Tan Paradigm

“It’s been a long time. I’ve been publishing for forty…forty-three years,”: Kuo said of receiving the news of winning the 2002 American Book Award for Lipstick. “I found out from some people on the committee who made that decision that they had to bend a few rules,” Kuo said. Typically, American Book Award winners are published in the U.S. with an American locale as setting. Some of the challenges presented by Lipstick to the standard rules of the award: it was published overseas, in Hong Kong, and most of the action takes place in Beijing, China, not the U.S. However, the writing’s strength convinced the committee to bend the rules.

As a child, Kuo bounced between China and the States. Born in Boston, he moved to wartime Chongqing, then Shanghai, then Hong Kong, then back to the U.S., where he finished high school. Since 1989, he’s continued traveling back and forth frequently. Perhaps because of such geographical flux, Kuo’s writing actively involves Chinese Americans in current contexts, electrifying their seemingly stagnant image in American culture. He achieves a similar effect in his short story “The Great Wall, Al, Flo, Zeke, and M”, in Lipstick, when he brings Americans to China with hard, clear eyes, not wrapped in the mists of memory:

It is an ironic turn on this ultimate symbol of tyranny [The Great Wall of China], that the individual lens can turn Earth’s most visible matrix between order and chaos, good and evil, and incidentally, light and dark, as in ethnicity, into a delusionary experiencing of history just by being there for three hours…For him, the moment has come to mean the tall Mongolian lady in blue visiting this matrix that was drawn to keep out her kin. (119)

With this story, he brings readers into contemporary China, and shows them what The Great Wall has become: a tawdry tourist trap. His American character eases the transition of viewpoints for his readers. Kuo reflects on the modern meaning of monoliths, both physical and nonphysical. These kinds of insights give Lipstick the meatiness of something approaching truth.

When Kuo’s agent sent it out, 57 trade publishers in 42 weeks rejected Lipstick, originally titled Between the Lions. He mentioned that the rejection notices were not the usual (Gee, your writing’s fabulous, but not what we’re looking for right now); some of them, “were kind of interesting…And in fact some of them said Amy Tan is out there and there’s only room for one Asian American writer, which is a really odd comment to make for various reasons.” His writing struggles to shift the depiction of Asian Americans away from that Amy Tan paradigm of “emigrant experience or mythical stories from historical periods,” said Kuo in a May 2002 interview for Hong Kong’s English newspaper, the South China Morning Post.

Since his writing confronts America’s ideas of what and where Asian Americans should be, Kuo sees these rejections as a sign of the racism and cultural hegemony inherent in the mainstream publishing industry. His real difficulty arises when he wishes to publish a substantial work. Asia2000 also published his previous novella, Chinese Opera in 1998 and Limberlost Press, in Boise, Idaho, published a book of poetry in 1999 entitled This Fierce Geography.

Kuo feels that the most popular, best selling Asian American writing (see: The Joy Luck Club) plays to America’s stereotypes of Asian Americans, specifically Chinese Americans, and has made getting published by a mainstream publisher in the U.S. nearly impossible for him. Ironically, the same attributes publishers cited in their rejection letters won him an American Book Award. A major press, SohoPress of New York, has finally picked up Lipstick for publication and distribution.

Hats

Pink clouds evaporate to icy blue sky. Joan and Alex have dropped their shoulders and laugh easily. The discussion shifts to how creativity functions in their relationship as a creative couple. “Yeah,” Alex says with a crooked smile, “I steal her titles. I used to think I was really good at titles. But I’ve stolen quite a few titles from her, including my novel!” He continues by saying, “Well, actually, I think it’s taken that route only in the last couple years. What I have in mind is the titles for three pieces, albeit they’re major pieces, like Lipstick, Long River, and the one I’m working on right now, Free Kick.” Joan says that creativity clash or overlap isn’t “so much of an issue because we both have very different backgrounds, training, different experiences.” While they don’t read each other’s works in progress, they are each other’s initial editors. Joan says, “I suppose anything a good editor does is bring in freshness.” Alex chimes in saying that an editor provides “a different hat.”

Like an editor provides a new perspective, Burbick’s book tells an old story from a new view. “I hope the book moves readers to think about everyday life in the West—and how to make the West a richer world, humanly,” Burbick said in a September 8, 2002 Seattle Times interview with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, William Dietrich. Julie Hale, in her review of Rodeo Queens in the October 2002 edition of BookPage, said “Poignant and unique, these are personal stories that intersect with the history of our nation.” Rodeo Queens represents a huge departure for Burbick from her previous books, Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language in 1987 and Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America in 1994. Both books were published by academic presses, the former by University of Pennsylvania Press, and the latter by Cambridge University Press. After moving to the Inland Northwest in the 70s, rodeo caught Burbick’s attention as a topic of inquiry. She began investigating the role it plays/played in the creation of a mythical American West.

When she moved here, Burbick began to examine the photographs of all the rodeo queens since 1935, published annually by the Lewiston Morning Tribune. “These women and their stories would give me a feel for, an understanding of how everyday life was lived with these huge mythological stories about the frontier and rodeo,” Burbick said with an expansive hand gesture, implying that these huge stories were hovering over us. Starting about 1995, she traversed the tumbleweed roads of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon collecting stories from former rodeo queens, many of whom were surprised anyone would be interested in their lives, their stories.

Beginning with the first Lewiston Roundup Rodeo Queen from 1935, Burbick masterfully cruises through the decades by profiling individual rodeo queens from specific years. In her book, Burbick shares the especially interesting story of Leah, a member of the Umatilla/Cayuse tribe and queen of the Pendleton Round-Up in 1952:

She showed me a picture of herself with President Harry Truman, presenting him with a Pendleton blanket. When I asked her what that was like, she told me she had been afraid…“Well, it was my short hair,” Leah replied. She loved her stylish bob... When she met Truman, she was afraid “her braids would fall off.”…in looking at this picture of her in her buckskin dress and braids, I had not noticed the fake hair, worn for the pleasure of the president. It had seemed so ‘natural.’ (90)

With each profile, Burbick examines how gender and race play into our ideas of nationalism and our selfimages as Americans. Burbick interviewed these women, usually left out of stories or discussions of nationalism, to relate nationalism to the minutia of their lives.

Since listening to women discuss their everyday lives constitutes Burbick’s primary research, she chose to write Rodeo Queens in an easily accessible tone, not just for her academic peers. However, this decision meant finding a voice balanced between academic and personal.

These two voices blend for maximum effect when Burbick shares her reflections on rodeo while still driving her point. Raised in Chicago, Burbick’s summer vacations to her Uncle Steve’s home in Colorado fostered an early fascination with the West and its myths: “It was from Uncle Steve that I first heard the expression ‘Western justice,’ and later winced at its meaning,”(213). Switching from academic writing for University of Pennsylvania Press and Cambridge University Press to general audience writing for PublicAffairs Press presented a tremendous challenge for Burbick. She mentioned that Rodeo Queens originated as a scholarly book, stuffed with cultural theory. It eventually transformed into a refreshing experiment in her writing.

Mercy Corps

The writing philosophy Burbick and Kuo share influenced her decision to write for a public audience. They both firmly believe a writer has a social responsibility. In a cover story interview with James Grinnell for the November/December 1999 issue of The Bloomsbury Review, Kuo recounted arriving in Beijing the autumn after the Tiananmen Square incident, and said this experience “reaffirmed my conviction that a writer’s job must include the political.” They feel that applying writing to the non-academic world bridges the gap between the academics and the public. Towards this end, Joan said, “I’d like to see more academics engage in bringing their ideas to a larger audience. I think there are places to cross over that are very important, and necessary, I think, for certain types of conversations to go on within a larger audience”—because the public is necessarily involved in those issues and ideas. Therefore, Kuo and Burbick wish—out of their feelings of social and political responsibility—to involve and engage the public in these topics of international or national concern.

Mercy Corps (please see: http://www.mercycorps.org), a non-profit, non-governmental organization based out of Portland, Oregon, opens windows for Alex Kuo, as their volunteer writer-in-residence, to address the public and include them in the social and political responsibility he feels. Currently, his duties consist of writing stories, initially fiction, and taking photographs to send to national magazines and journals in hopes of being published.

The warmth of the blinding sun energizes us and reminds us of other engagements. As a wrap-up, we move on to their adult children, one daughter and two sons. In response, Joan smirks and says “I’d want them to be a nuclear physicist.” “Or a writer,” Alex says with laughs all around. Joan asks Alex about “that one thing I don’t want my sons to be… English majors?…” “Professors… I have a t-shirt with that on it,” replies Alex.