Varieties of Asianness, Varieties of Autism

I am Asian American or, more specifically, third-generation Chinese American by way of southern China(Toysan county), raised in northern California (specifically, Oakland and Berkeley). Chinese nationals, residents of Hong Kong, immigrants to the US from Fujian and Shanghai and other regions of China—-have had a very different experience to me (and often speak a different language from the Cantonese dialect my grandparents spoke—-Mandarin, to cite one example). Japanese and Japanese Americans, Koreans and Korean Americans, Indians, Pakistani, the Hmong, Laotians, Vietnamese, Philippinos, Thai, Nepalese—-I know I am leaving some group out from the different parts of Asia. And yet I feel a commonality, a common sense of recognition and community and culture, when I speak to a young woman from Nepal in one of my classes, or another student who came from Pakistan to the US when she was a child, a Phillipina woman who became one of my son Charlie’s favorite therapists, or the Japanese mother and the Korean father of other autistic children I spoke with at the YMCA pool yesterday.

There is, it can be said, a spectrum of being Asian American, and no one person’s experience represents that of the whole group; no one of us can speak for the entire “Asian American experience.”

But the sum total of each person’s experiences forms a part of a whole that is “Asian American.”

By analogy, even though the truth holds that if you have met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person, there is something common and similar across the spectrum of autism, from Temple Grandin to my son Charlie. Same and very different.

In Assorted things I’ve meant to say, from the other side of the usual time-barrier, her post about her CNN interview on February 20th, Amanda Baggs writes about the experience of being interviewed on national television. Baggs comments on the reactions of others to her television appearance; on her own reactions on seeing her taped appearance (her first reaction was that “I didn’t belong there”; she also notes that, due to the experience of feeling (very understandably) “terrified” with cameras and television reporters following her around all day,” I looked a lot more autistic than usual (I don’t know any other way to put it)” ); and people who she had not known before who have contacted her after the interview. Baggs points out that “autistic people are not uniform in the least bit” and writes this about the varieties of the lives of autistic persons:

We’re regular people, with regular, messy lives. We don’t fit into tidy categories. If ever a group of people didn’t read the rulebook when being born, it’s us. Many of us have additional things going on besides being autistic. Michelle Dawson has a visual impairment, Sharisa Kochmeister has CP, Gunilla Gerland and Donna Williams come from unstable families, Thomas McKean has a fantasy world and hears voices, Gunilla Gerland and Jerry and Mary Newport have all done drugs of some kind at some point, Dawn Prince-Hughes was an exotic dancer, Jim Sinclair is intersexed, Jeanette Purkis was involved in crime and at one point diagnosed with a personality disorder, Donna Williams and Thomas McKean and Adriana Rocha and a number of others have talked about experiences that most people would consider paranormal, Georgiana Thomas saw demons when she was younger that vanished when she became a Christian, Adriana Rocha thinks she’s the reincarnation of John the Baptist, Jerry and Mary Newport as well as Donna Williams have savant skills, Sue Rubin has Noonan’s syndrome, Kassiane Sibley has Rett’s syndrome, Jim Sinclair and Laura Tisoncik use wheelchairs, Jim Sinclair and Mary Newport have both talked about losing various skills at certain ages older than the usual so-called “regression” age, Sondra Williams and Jerry and Mary Newport and Liane Holliday-Willey and Donna Williams and Dawn Prince-Hughes are all in marriages or committed relationships and some of them have children, Liane Holliday-Willey and some others can fake normalcy enough to pass, Donna Williams and some others have had personas they used in order to pass, many of them had prior misdiagnoses of mental retardation or schizophrenia or personality disorders, and so on and so on and so forth.

Just as there are not “tidy categories” into which to fit Asian American experience, so does it seem to me that there are many ways of being autistic, and these add up to the autism spectrum.