IDENTITY PUZZLE THE ACCIDENTAL ASIAN Notes of a Native Speaker By Eric Liu Random House 206pp $23 Eric Liu, an MSNBC commentator and former Clinton White House speechwriter, never identified himself as an Asian American until he participated in a cable-TV debate last year. The topic: a National Review cover headlined ''The Manchurian Candidate'' and depicting President Clinton, the First Lady, and Vice-President Gore in slanty-eyed, yellow-face caricature. The image was meant as a comment on alleged illegal campaign donations from Asian nationals to the White House. To his surprise, Liu felt real anger as he parried with a National Review staffer. The 29-year-old author realized, perhaps for the first time, that there might be danger in a growing sentiment that paints Asian Americans as shadowy foreigners. A self-avowed ''banana'' (white on the inside), Liu contemplates this unfamiliar twinge of race consciousness: ''I...am an accidental Asian,'' he writes. ''someone who has stumbled onto a sense of race; who wonders now what to do with it.'' As Liu discloses in his reflective yet inconclusive book, The Accidental Asian, he disavowed his ethnicity for most of his life, to pursue a place among America's mostly white elite. But today, the Yale University grad, now at Harvard Law School, wonders what he might have lost. Ambivalence reigns. Despite his endorsement of a vague third way between white and nonwhite cultures as America's future, Liu hasn't really decided where he stands. Yet his thoughtful and gently humorous examinations do shed light on important, underexplored issues about Asians Americans' place in the New World. Liu may strike some Asian Americans as a sellout. A second-generation Chinese American who grew up in a middle-class part of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., he calls himself ''an assimilist in recovery,'' unsure whether he wants to complete all 12 steps to ''full, self-actualized Asian Americanness.'' He doubts such a thing exists, as Asian American identity is based more on external threats than on any unifying culture among groups as disparate as Filipinos and the Hmong. On the one hand, he says Asian Americans enjoy a freedom to choose whether or not they want to identify themselves as a group, since they don't now face virulent bias requiring solidarity. But he acknowledges that outside hazards exist. If the innuendos made in the Donorgate scandal--that Asian Americans try to buy prestige, have undue political influence, and are rooted in foreign soil--had instead been made against Jews, that group would have raised holy hell. But, writes Liu, the ''smart set'' believed ''that those who complained were simply 'playing the race card' to impede a legitimate inquest.... The fact that Asian Americans could be so easily pilloried, so readily transformed into symbols of corruption, indicates how little power they wield, not how much.'' Such well-crafted insights--plus the portraits of loved ones such as his irrepressible, Yoda-like grandmother Po-Po--give the book character. They are a sign that, in the future, the author may arrive at more developed conclusions. BY CATHERINE YANG RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``The Accidental Asian'' Return to top of story

Updated May 28, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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