Haunting the Hyphen: Infrastructural Belonging in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill

In 2019, the Associated Press dropped the hyphen for dual identities, but Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill (1996) shows that the in-betweenness the hyphen once marked has not disappeared. Instead, it has migrated from typography into the infrastructures that route everyday life. Focusing on the diasporic experiences of later-generations, this article reads Diamond Grill as a study of diasporic belonging at infrastructural thresholds such as swinging kitchen doors, counters, menus, payment systems, receipts, accents, and names. Building on previous studies on diasporic space, I argue that Wah renders belonging not as a “third space” of reconciliation, but as procedural becoming of brief empowerments, limited authorizations tied to labor, and exposures through verification that happen in daily routines. Crucially, these routines reprise earlier border events such as the head tax, immigration cells, and documents for identity verification, but these checkpoints return in scaled-down form within daily operations. Reading the hyphen as a door, this article reframes uneasy belonging as a practice sustained at infrastructural thresholds where audibility, labor, and recognition are continually negotiated. In these hinge moments, diasporic subjects can enact their hyphenated identities, simultaneously inhabiting both and neither. At the same time, the hyphen-door also builds borders that later generations must cross over and over again. Rather than dissolving in-betweenness, Diamond Grill leaves the seam visible, preserving its practices and offering a vocabulary for studying diaspora beyond the hyphen, which resurfaces in the ordinary procedures that make belonging both possible and precarious.