The Privacy of Hak-Shing William Tam: Imagining Asian American Families in Proposition 8 in California

Abstract:In terms of Asian Americans whose reputations have been popularly derided, the concerned parent activist Hak-Shing William Tam perhaps ranks among the top. Tam was a citizen proponent of California's Proposition 8 in 2008 to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage and became a hostile witness for the plaintiffs in the subsequent 2010 lawsuit to overturn the amendment, Perry v. Schwarzenegger. In this paper, I explore Tam's claim to privacy in his understanding of these events, both in terms of his sexualized imagination of liberal civil society and his suffering from what he understood as violations of his own privacy. I argue that Tam tried to operationalize an understanding of society that idealized the "Asian family" as the bulwark of an order composed primarily of secure private spaces, which speaks (I further claim) to longstanding anxieties within Chinese America about how what Gary Okihiro calls the "social formation"–an interlocking institutional network that composes a governing apparatus–subjects Asian Americans to ongoing colonization. In so doing, I hope to show that Tam's concerns do not only speak to concerns in Asian American studies about pervasive evangelical influence in Asian American communities. Instead, they reveal that Asian American conceptions of the private sphere are ideologies that circulate within our communities and should be taken seriously in Asian American studies.