ARTIST
PROFILE
IN
According to Lillian Li,
University of Michigan MFA
and author of “Number One
Chinese Restaurant” (2018),
the
success
of
Chinese
restaurants in America is
the best-kept secret in the
business. Following the Gold
Rush and the completion
of
the
Transcontinental
Railroad,
Chinese
immigrants were blacklisted
from
most
industries
by
white workers who feared
they would drive wages down
and were confined to the
“women’s work”
of
laundry
and
cooking.
Many
of
the
original owners
of
Chinese
restaurants had
no
culinary
training
and
could
only
estimate
the
flavors of their
homeland,
making
them
sweeter, saltier
and
tangier
when
they
realized
that
American
palates
preferred
bold
flavors. In an interview with
The Daily, Li pointed out that
“Now there are more Chinese
restaurants in America than
McDonalds. It’s actually one
of the most inspiring stories
of entrepreneurial underdog-
ship, and it’s crazy that most
people don’t know it. America
loves the underdog, but they
don’t like the underdog when
it has a foreign face.”
“Number
One
Chinese
Restaurant”
is
a
dark
family epic in the tradition
of
two
other
University
MFAs, Celeste Ng (“Little
Fires
Everywhere”
and
“Everything I Never Told
You”)
and
Jesmyn
Ward
(“Sing,
Unburied,
Sing”
and “Salvage the Bones”).
The
novel
follows
three
generations of the highly-
dysfunctional
Han
family
and
their
employees
at
the Beijing Duck House, a
thriving Chinese restaurant
in the D.C. metro area, as
they attempt to reconcile
their
competing
visions
of
business
success
with
their
tangled
personal
relationships.
When
a
mysterious fire razes the
Duck House, this ensemble
cast of characters is forced
to
confront
the
tensions
that have simmered beneath
the surface for years, and
to choose where their first
loyalties lie: to family, to
ambition, to integrity or to
survival.
The novel is loosely based
on
Li’s
own
experience
working
in
a
Chinese
restaurant, a job so strenuous
that she left after only four
weeks. Li said, “It gave me
a look into the emotional
difficulties of a service job,
particularly a service job
where
you’re
working
in
a Chinese restaurant and
have a Chinese face. There’s
an extra level of alienation
and
dehumanization
that
happens with the customers
to the servers. It made me
wonder what it would have
been like if I had been in that
space for longer than four
weeks, if I hadn’t had the
opportunity to leave.” This
notion of being trapped — by
a toxic work environment,
by
family
obligation
and
by
the
characters’
own
insurmountable
flaws
—
resonates
throughout
the
novel
in
a
way
that
steadfastly
resists
sentimentality
or idealization.
Li’s worldview
flirts
with
pessimism but
never
steps
fully over that
line,
landing
instead
on
a
sometimes
grim,
often
funny
and
always sharply
observed realism. She said,
“I think it’s a worldview that
is interested in the darker
side of human connection
and
intimacy,
but
also
understands that you have
to have some moments of joy
and grace, even within that
darkness.”
In
Li’s
novel,
these
“moments of grace” tend to be
rooted in love, vulnerability
and
self-sacrifice,
while
darkness
manifests
in
the desire for
wealth, prestige
and
power,
embodied most
clearly in the
nefarious,
Godfather-
esque figure of
Uncle Pang. In
a twist on the
Faust
legend,
Jimmy
Han,
owner
of
the
Duck
House,
must
decide
between selling
his soul to Pang
in
exchange
for
fulfilled
ambition
and
freeing
his
family at last
from the mobster’s clutches.
For Li, this kind of moral
arithmetic is typical of the
way business and ambition
require people to rearrange
their
value
systems.
She
is
suspicious
of
highly
profitable
businesses
in
general,
and
her
novel
functions as a twist on the
American Dream narrative, a
national myth that positions
economic
success
as
the
key to true belonging and
respect. Li said, “I think
the American Dream is an
incomplete narrative. It’s all
about grand success for your
life, that you can end with
much more than you started
with. And I think that that
can only happen if there is
some kind of original sin. If
you trace any success story
far enough back you will
see a real crime. Success
basically
means
that
you
have more resources than
your neighbor, so how did
you
get
those
resources?
And how did you get so many
more resources than your
neighbor did? But those little
crimes are very normalized
in our society.”
Li’s
work
also
speaks
eloquently to the ways these
calculations
of
success
change across generations.
For the first generation of
Duck House owners, success
can be measured in purely
economic terms, while their
sons realize that no amount
of money can buy them the
respect and prestige that
they truly desire. Li said, “I
was trying to speak to this
idea that for most groups
of people, no matter how
much money you have, you
still can’t buy your way into
influence.
Because
money
has entered the bloodstream
of our society so much, it
seems to be the only way to
get the universal things that
people want: to be desired, to
be attractive, to be respected,
to have dignity. What this
book says is that money can’t
buy everything, but there is a
reason why we think it can.”
Li’s distrust of profit as
the
primary
measure
of
success expands into her
own experience
with
the
publishing
industry, as an
author and as
a
bookseller
at
the
cult-
favorite
bookstore
Literati. Li has
no
desire
to
make
writing
her main source
of income, and
her respect for
the publishing
industry comes
precisely from
the things that
decrease
its
profitability.
Li said, “What
I
love
about
the publishing
industry is that they are
uniquely bad at business.
Bookstores can return any
books they don’t sell. There’s
no
formula.
Nobody
can
predict what book is going
to sell well. It kind of defies
a lot of attempts to make it a
really profitable, smoothly-
running business machine.
You can be bad at business
and still be successful, and
that’s really heartening!”
ALEC COHEN / MICHIGAN DAILY
ALICE LIU / MICHIGAN DAILY
Lillian Li on publishing
and her role in business
English, Business & arts
“My job is all about how do we get
people to move,” Marcus Collins,
the chief consumer connections
officer at the advertising agency
Doner Company, said. “That is, how
do we leverage what we know of the
behavioral sciences, the evolving
media landscape and a close
proximity to culture in an effort to
get people to adopt behavior.”
In addition to working for
Doner, Collins is an intermittent
marketing lecturer at the Ross
School of Business. Collins started
as a musician before entering the
business world and has collaborated
on
marketing
with
dominant
cultural forces like Beyoncé and
iTunes. This unique background
gives him critical insight into the
crossover between business and the
arts, and how to go about knocking
down the partition that consistently
separates the two.
In
a
sit-down
conversation
with Collins, we touched on
the polarization of the arts and
business, specifically within higher
education:
“There’s
a
certain
pragmatism to business, I mean
the business school, it’s a practice
school.” Collins elaborated on the
natural inclination to discount the
arts due to its theoretical nature,
with a recurring theme of “art for
the sake of the body of knowledge
that we amass.” However, Collins
shifted to note how critical it is for the
arts and business to collide. “When
we look at art as a manifestation of
culture, it’s completely different,”
he said. Collins referenced Emile
Durkheim, a father of sociology,
when he defined culture as “the
system by which beliefs, values,
communication and artifacts are
adopted by a populace of people.”
He noted that “when the culture
moves, we move in concert. That is,
the people who align to the culture,
they act in solidarity with the group
of people.” In simple terms, it moves
as so: Who do businesses want to
influence? People. What influences
people? Culture. And the arts, well,
they play a ridiculously large part in
culture.
For
English
and
Business
students,
like
myself,
who
consistently feel like oil and water,
Collins established a clear mix of
the two. When we view art as a
manifestation of culture which
dictates human behavior, it becomes
extremely practical and business-
like to be in close proximity to
the arts. Collins highlighted this
relationship when he discussed how
culture, and consequently the arts,
is used to develop strong marketing
tactics. He described art as “a lever
that you pull from a pragmatic
perspective of going to market, of
being a business person.” Collins
reiterates art as quintessential to
human behavior: “What we feel
drives what we do. Art is evocative
that way, it stimulates particular
emotions,
which
stimulate
particular behavioral outcomes.”
In this way, business cannot be
without the arts. How humans
exchange and transact with one
another is so closely related to not
just culture, but to how we feel,
which largely comes from artistic
influences.
Collins masterfully put this into
perspective, using my own writing
as an example to draw from. “We
discount art on a theoretical level,
we say, ‘this is subjective or this
has nothing to do with commerce.’
Like you writing an essay, what does
that have to do with commerce?
But when your essay becomes the
manifesto for a populace of people
and their culture, now you as an
author of said prose, are really
powerful.”
Collins
emphasized
that “culture is the vehicle by
which
art
becomes
tangible.”
This operationalization of art is
wildly powerful for businesses. Art
allows them to connect with their
consumers and develop the genuine
relationships necessary for the
success of a firm.
This, however, suggests the other
inevitable link between business
and the arts: authenticity. The
seemingly inevitable event of a “sell-
out” is something that all creators
fear. Collins explained how artists
and businesses alike must maintain
their
convictions
to
capture
human admiration, matching their
behaviors to their belief systems.
“Authenticity comes from one’s
ability, one’s grit, to maintain their
convictions,” Collins said. “Living
up to your convictions is a cool
thing. And when a brand does that,
it gets adopted by people who see
the world similarly.”
Collins provided clarity with
examples, detailing how Pabst Blue
Ribbon saw dramatic increases in
sales when their belief system of
self-expression and egalitarianism
matched
with
“hipsters”
who
believe in the same values that
PBR does. Collins illuminated the
idea that businesses and artists
approach authenticity in similar
manners: “This is my belief system
and the populace of people who
believe what I believe connect to it.”
Collins referenced “the old Kanye”
as a prime example of having a
belief system and finding a dense
community that readily connects
with it.
The crossovers between business
and the arts are clear, and Collins’s
career speaks tribute to that. On
an everyday basis, however, how
does one interact with academic
entities that are so often placed on
opposite ends of the spectrum?
After attentively listening to my
trials and tribulations as a Business
and English student, he provided
immense hope, delving into the
means of operating with agency in
the “business-arts” space.
When asked what combines
the arts and business together,
Collins responded immediately.
“Humanity,” he said. “You have to
see the humanity in the business
like you see the humanity in the arts.
The idea of transaction is personal.
Business is about exchanges. We
try to humanize things to make
meaning out of it.”
Business and the arts share
connection and empathy, even
when humanization seems miles
away from the likes of business. “If
you don’t understand people, you
don’t understand business,” Collins
said. “Business is all about people.
Everything we do in business is
about getting people to take on a
behavior.”
Collins constantly reminds his
students that marketing is about so
much more than just selling things.
“Marketing is going to market,”
he said. “Well, what is the market?
People.” Lucky for me, and lucky for
Daily Arts, the arts spur emotion
and behavior like none other and
therefore have a powerful capability
to
alter
the
market.
Collins
summarized what students in the
space of business-arts should hold
steadfast in: “How do you leverage
the arts (visual, written, audio) and
use those as vehicles by which we
interact with humanity?”
To Business and art students
striving keep their energy flowing,
this ode from Collins may spark
your zest. “Your foot in each world
is what makes you so powerful,” he
said. Collins elaborated that artists
do not only know the culture, they
drive the culture and at the end
of the day, businesses latch onto
culture manifested by the arts.
“Brands who lead culture are more
successful than brands who follow
... it’s more so about, ‘how do I
make these things come together
by leveraging the power of the arts
to solve problems creatively?’ And
then look at the world of art and
find, ‘how do I operationalize this
from a transactional perspective?’”
he said.
As a student who started
out business-focused and now
desperately clings to the arts, I
decided to seek out the inverse
perspective. For students who
start
with
arts
and
follow
with
entrepreneurship
and
marketability, how do they move
towards the avenue of considering
their art from a transactional
perspective? Daily Arts reached out
to Jonathan Kuuskoski, assistant
professor of music in the School of
Music, Theatre & Dance and chair of
the department of entrepreneurship
& leadership. Kuuskoski made it
glaringly apparent that students
with the inverse of my academic
path converge into a similar space
of mixing the arts with business
and that the resources to do so are
abundant. Kuuskoski works to help
students in the performing arts
live a sustainable life, and provides
them the correct resources to do so.
Kuukoski’s department provides
over 20 courses in topics such as arts
management, arts marketing and
financial management, in addition
to providing immersions, coaching
and funding for internships and
ventures.
Kuuskoski noted a commonality
in students who want to make
their art at all costs, but need help
selling it. He guides students in
navigating this process, particularly
in reaching for collaborations and
partnerships and in establishing
their personal strategy. His advice
included finding a vision. “How
would the world look in 10 years if
you achieved your goal?,” he said.
“What’s the vision for your work,
that goes beyond the generic ‘make
great art?’”
Just as Marcus Collins spoke
of
authenticity,
Kuuskoski
emphasized the importance of
holding true to one’s convictions.
“Start by reflecting back on your
core values, so you can articulate
what is distinctive about the ways
in which your artistic output will
set you apart,” he said. Moreover,
Kuuskoski touches on humanity as
a means to traverse business and
the arts, just as Collins reiterated
that “business is all about people.”
Kuuskoski relays to his students
that “every successful artist has a
circle of collaborators, of people
who were meaningful to them.
These people could be potential
investors and supporters.”
In
reflecting
upon
my
conversations with both Collins and
Kuuskoski, it became extremely
apparent that businesses aim to
infiltrate our culture and ways
of behaving, and that these ways
of behaving often spur from art,
even if companies aren’t aware of
it. As Collins said, “Being close to
the culture means understanding
the artistic artifacts that come
out
of
the
culture.
Having
proximity to the arts allows you to
operationalize that in a business
realm.” Consistent closeness to art
is not only a passion of mine, but
it’s also extremely powerful when
used in a continuous manner with
business. I aim to harness the power
of this concurrence, and Collins and
Kuuskoski gave me the assurance
and moral to do so.
Now there are
more Chinese
restaurants in
America than
McDonalds
SAMANTHA CANTIE
Daily Arts Writer
JULIA MOSS
Daily Arts Writer
B-SIDE SECONDARY
What I love
about the
publishing
industry is that
they are uniquely
bad at business
6B — Thursday, January 24, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com