Asian-American Writers (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), New Edition

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Asian-American Writers New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Asian-American Writers, New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informa­tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Asian-American writers / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-401-8 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. American literature— Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. Asian Americans—Intellectual life. 3. Asian Americans in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PS153.A84A84 2009 810.9’895—dc22 2008043031 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Contributing editor: Portia Weiskel Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Printed in the United States of America IBT EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents Editor’s Note

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Introduction 1 Harold Bloom South Asian American Literature Ketu H. Katrak

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Postcolonialism, Nationalism, and the Emergence of Asian/Pacific American Literatures Stephen H. Sumida Amy Tan and Asian American Literature E.D. Huntley

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Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition Behind Maxine Hong Kingston Amy Ling Queer Bodies and Subaltern Spectators: Guerrilla Theater, Hollywood Melodrama, and the Filipino (American) Novel 87 Viet Thanh Nguyen Vietnamese American Literature in English, 1963–1994 105 Michele Janette Introduction to Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen 123 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht

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Contents

Asian Americans Imagining Burma: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango Cheng Lok Chua Long a Mystery and Forever a Memory: God vs. Goddess in the Ethnic Novel Guiyou Huang Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in the Novels of Gish Jen 169 Jeffrey F.L. Partridge Chronology

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Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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Editor’s Note My introduction sadly finds Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior to be only another period piece. Ketu H. Katrak theorizes about American South Asian writers, while Stephen H. Sumida summons up fashionable postcolonialism to exalt Asian/ Pacific-American writing. Amy Tan’s stance in relation to Asian-American literary achievement is praised by E.D. Huntley, after which Amy Ling does the same for Kingston. Filipino-American novelists are surveyed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, while Michele Janette chronicles Vietnamese-American writing. Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht more ambitiously seek to define the problem of Asian-American identity, after which Cheng Lok Chua explores Burmese themes in the talented Chang-rae Lee and in Wendy LawYone. Religious dilemmas occupy Guiyou Huang, while Gish Jen’s attempt to broaden cultural horizons is the concern of Jeffrey F.L. Partridge.

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Introduction

I have written once before about Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman,” which is part of her famous fictive autobiography, The Woman Warrior (1976), and I return to it here to consider again the question of ambivalence toward ancestral tradition in Asian-American writing. Ambivalence, marked by its simultaneous negative and positive reactions to a violent past, one that generally featured paternalistic repression of the individual, pervades the work of the authors who are the subject of this volume. Since Kingston, at this time, remains one of the most widely read of all Asian-American writers, her own representation of ambivalence toward an Asian family heritage is likely to remain influential, perhaps more among the general public than among her fellow creators of narratives, lyrics, and plays. Wallace Stevens remarked that the final belief was to believe in a fiction, with the nicer knowledge of belief, which is that what one believes in is not true. That is probably more ambiguously fictive than Kingston’s transformation of her mother’s story about a long-dead, nameless aunt, but it may suggest how much the telling (and retelling) of a story always involves imaginative distortions that are essential if anything fresh is to come into being. Kingston writes of “a girlhood among ghosts,” and ghosts (unless you believe in them) are fantasies, mostly inherited from others. “No Name Woman,” being a fantasy (whatever its basis in family legend), is perhaps best read backward, starting with the third paragraph from the end, where first Kingston quotes her mother, and then adds her own element of supposed guilt: 



Harold Bloom

“Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born.” I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that “aunt” would do my father mysterious harm. I have thought that my family, having settled among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong word would incite the kinspeople even here. But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have.

It is difficult to judge whether this is altogether legitimate, in a strictly literary sense. Kingston certainly seems to be appealing to ideological fashions, very strong thirty years ago, and only starting to wane now. With a great fantasist like Kafka, whose spiritual and literary authority is overwhelming, we have to yield to his dread apothegm: “Guilt is never to be doubted.” But with Kingston, I am somewhat more resistant: I want some justification for that “And I have.” Rereading the two final paragraphs of “No Name Woman” has not provided me with that justification, whether I consider either Kingston’s implicit moral stance or her attempt to elevate her style to a negatively sublime conclusion: In the twenty years since I heard this story I have not asked for details nor said my aunt’s name; I do not know it. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further—a reverse ancestor worship. The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death. Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants give them gifts. She would have to fight the ghosts massed at crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave to decoy her away from village and home so that the ancestral spirits could feast unharassed. At peace, they could act like gods, not ghosts, their descent lines providing them with paper suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles, chicken, meat, and rice into eternity—essences delivered up in smoke and flames, steam and incense rising from each rice bowl. In an attempt to make the Chinese care for people outside the family, Chairman Mao encourages us now to give our paper replicas to the spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they may be. My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead.

Introduction



My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.

“Reverse ancestor worship” is a curious oxymoron; doubtless it seeks to redefine ambivalence, but its irony is too diffuse to persuade a dispassionate but still attentive reader. The fiction that the nameless aunt must beg and fight for food from other ghosts has more artifice than pathos: “My aunt remains hungry” is something of a pistol that does not fire. Kingston’s final metaphor, with its implication that her aunt’s ghost is a menace to her, waiting silently to pull her down into the well of the past, scarcely sustains investigation. The ghost is no menace at all, but a useful fiction to end a narrative. What guilt may exist (and humanly one doubts it) is more than compensated by the fairly successful exploitation of a family legend, a metamorphosis of ambivalence into popular narrative, where it entertains, but perhaps only for a time. Period pieces have their own charm, and the no-name woman, with a story, is likely to attain that status.

K E T U H . K AT R A K

South Asian American Literature

Where did a language go once it was forgotten, I wondered. I often forgot Malayalam, at least little bits of it, but on my childhood returns to Kerala, from Khartoum, it always revived, the deep buried roots stirring again. . . . After all, as a child it was my first spoken tongue. . . . In Manhattan, I am a fissured thing, a body crossed by fault lines. Where is my past? What is my past to me, here, now, at the edge of Broadway? Is America a place without memory? —Meena Alexander, “Transit Lounge”

S

call me a poet dear editor they call this my alien language . . . I have my hopes hopes which assume shapes in alien territories —Agha Shahid Ali, “Dear Editor”

outh Asian American writers in English are among the newest voices in a multiethnic Asian America. Writers of South Asian origin are either first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh; some have also journeyed here via Kenya and Uganda,

From An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung, pp. 192–218. © 1997 by Cambridge University Press.





Ketu H. Katrak

or Trinidad and Guyana, areas where the long arm of British colonization “invited” a predominantly merchant class into East Africa, and a mainly indentured laboring class into the West Indies. Today, new forms of colonization dictated by the geopolitical and geoeconomic realities of a capitalist “new world order” continue to necessitate migrations and relocations from South Asia into North America. Writers from South Asian nations (themselves often invented as nations by the British) encompass a multiplicity of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures. Hence the category “South Asian American” does not indicate a monolithic whole, but rather a collection of differences that are often more compelling and significant than any similarities. The use of the category South Asian American indicates the need for such ethnic demarcations within the climate of a peculiarly North American (United States and Canada) multiculturalism, replete with state policies, immigration quotas, and academic curricular battlefields. Amid this clamor, one must remember to listen to the struggling voices of the actual lived realities of peoples of color struggling to make a “home” within mainstream hegemonies, institutional or on the streets. Even within the same ethnic group there is multiplicity rather than homogeneity, and this is often the hardest fact for any mainstream to recognize. The “internal conflicts” among peoples of South Asian origins have much longer historical and geographical origins than our more recent location in the United States or Canada. As Saloni Mathur points out with regard to Canada, ethnic groups are not “internally consistent” as required by the state. There is no monolithic South Asian ethnicity as “required by the needs of multiculturalism.” Within multiculturalism, there is room for usually only one variety of one ethnicity, not a complex plurality. Such a need for homogeneity is “closely connected,” notes Mathur, “to state power and regulation. . . . The problem, in part, with the doctrine of pluralism as it has been politically employed by the Canadian government is its paternalistic insistence on the notion of diversity, when its underlying agenda has always been unity” (Mathur 1992, 2–5). The multiplicity of differences among South Asians is linked by common histories of British colonization that they share with writers from other ex-colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. I include in the concept of colonization both physical and metaphoric parameters. The imposition and institutionalization of the English language as crucial components of cultural imperialism have left a legacy of writers using the English language even as they grapple with what Trinidadian-Canadian Marlene Nourbese Philip calls “this anguish that is English” (1989, 11). In a now commonplace phrase, the empire writes back, and often in a distinctive English that Philip describes as “Kinglish and Queenglish” (11).

South Asian American Literature



It is important to note that in this analysis of writers one is leaving out whole populations of South Asians who came to the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada between 1904 and 1924, mainly male farmers originally from Punjab. This class often did not speak English, and their experiences of racism, of living through the Asian Exclusion League of 1905, and the California Alien Land Act of 1913 that barred aliens from owning land and that was not repealed until 1948, constitute part of an important historical bedrock for a study of immigrants of the post-1960s. As Sucheta Mazumdar notes: Citizenship through naturalization was denied to all Asians from 1924 until 1943, when over the next ten years the laws were changed on a country-by-country basis. After 1943, with the exception of war brides and family members of U.S. citizens, immigration was permitted only on a quota system which allowed between 100 and 150 Asians annually from each country. . . . The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act enabled Asians to acquire citizenship through naturalization. . . . Between 1943 and 1965 when the quota system was in effect, 50 percent of the quota was reserved for professionals. (Making Waves, 1989, 4, 13)

Facilitated by immigration policies, South Asian immigrants since the 1960s belong predominantly to a professional class, the educated elite who benefited from an English colonial education in South Asia and came here equipped with educational skills and fluency in English. Contemporary South Asian American writers belong primarily to this middle and upper class: Indo-American Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Pakistani American Sara Suleri, Javaid Qazi, Indo-Canadian Rohinton Mistry, Uma Parameswaran, Sri Lankan Canadian Michael Ondaatje, and Indo-Guyanese Canadian Cyril Dabydeen, among others. Asian Indians who have come to America since 1965 have “created a new community,” note Kitano and Daniels, “one that has few connections in ethnicity, in class, in occupation, or in location with the majority of its early 20th-century predecessors” (1988, 96). The 1980 census was the first to use the designation “Asian Indian” and “to put the figures of the 1980s into perspective, about every tenth Asian American was either an immigrant from India or the offspring of such a person” (98). The 1980s also witnessed migrations of a working class that, for instance, in New York runs newsstands in subways. Another such labor force is located in the motel business: “two fifths of all the motels in the Interstate 75 ‘between Detroit and Atlanta,’ note Kitano and Daniels, are owned and operated by Asian Indians” (101). Popularly known as “Patel motels,” they are managed mainly by a Gujarati



Ketu H. Katrak

community that arrived here at times via Kenya and Uganda, often after disastrous ousters by dictators like Idi Amin. In this chapter I will deal with South Asian writers in English, omitting writers in languages such as Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, and Sinhala, among others. The losses of that exclusion must be recognized, particularly of Punjabi literature, the earliest by South Asians. One advantage of studying only English-language writers is a cohesiveness of language, literary forms, and thematic concerns such as ethnicity, loss of homeland, uses of memory and indigenous folklore as sustaining mechanisms in alien environments, reconciliation, and hope in creating new spaces of belonging. I shall undertake a theoretical discussion of the dialectic connection between ethnicity and location; between multiple identities and transforming geographies; and between being at “home” within one’s body, one’s native or adoptive home, and the English language. Writers’ identities as immigrant/ citizen/exile/expatriate are negotiated along issues of race, gender, class, language, and—crucially, in our contemporary time—geography. In a discussion of ethnicity, it is important to analyze how geography intersects with geopolitics and geoeconomics within a contemporary capitalist new world order. Economic and political forces that necessitate migrations and relocations often transform homes into alien homes. How do writers contend with this new geography in their search for home and belonging? Writers’ ethnic affiliations as defined within immigrant spaces can overdetermine their political sympathies between their native and adoptive homes. Ethnicities are transformed, celebrated, or erased in terms of location. In other words, the pressures on ethnicity are experienced and expressed in a climate that paradoxically both propagates and devalues multiculturalism.

L o c at ion a n d t he L i t er a r y M a r k e t pl ace Marginal cultural productions are capitalized on in today’s marketplace. A complex process leads to marginalization. When marginality is utilized as a selling tactic, such modes of production have serious implications for writers and critics, introducing the dangers of a commerce that can change the very terms of what is written and can dictate what themes will sell. The marketplace is a key conditioning factor in producing and consolidating marginality. The commercialization of “multiculturalism,” of “third worldism,” as items for sale in the marketplace has serious consequences for the creative artist/worker. For writers in particular, their ethnicities are evoked as either desirable or undesirable commodities by a literary marketplace that blows hot or cold for reasons that have very little to do with the quality of the work produced. When a marketplace is eager to consume marginal cultural products, and when the game of inclusion and exclusion is played without the play-

South Asian American Literature



ers always knowing the rules—who is considered marginal, and when—such forces have serious repercussions on the possibilities and losses of cultural production. The market traffics in a desire that is racialized and gendered. Meena Alexander, an Indo-American writer who lives in New York, astutely discusses how writers have to be vigilant and resist commercializing factors in the literary marketplace: This new emerging art, without even knowing what we are buying in and are bought in, consists of images magnified, bartered in the high places of capitalist chic . . . one of the things that is incumbent upon us as artists is to create works which, even as they take this phase within the social world, are in some way recalcitrant to it. The power of the media is so enormous. The public language in relation to which our work stands is extremely important. And it is painful because there is an extraordinary intimacy about the work which we are sharing with the public world. (1992a, 26–7)

My own position as a native of India who teaches Third World literatures in the United States reveals some aspects of loss and gain embedded within a colonial history and geography. What one can say where requires mechanisms of self-censorship, often dictated by self-preservation. When I pursued my B.A. and M.A. in India, we followed a tradition-bound syllabus of English literature. It was not until I came to the United States to work on a doctorate that I explored writers from other Third World areas whose cultures and experiences are closer to mine than those of the English male canon. My study of Asian American writers, rich with personal discoveries and intellectual illuminations, has been possible partly because of my geographic location here, which has serious repercussions in terms of my intellectual production, uses of particular languages, theories, and the addressing of certain audiences. This situation is not only a trajectory of colonial and postcolonial history and educational systems but, equally significantly, of “human geographies,” to use Edward Soja’s phrase (1989, 6).

A K a l e i d os c ope of S ou t h A si a n Voice s in Nor t h A mer ic a n L o c a l e s Hyphenated American Identities This is a study of selected writers of South Asian origin, writers who have been productive over the years. One can demarcate a post-1970s, and an earlier generation of writers of the 1950s and 1960s, some of whom were published in the P. Lal series in Calcutta, India. Among the earlier writers

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are Zulfikar Ghose from Pakistan, and A. K. Ramanujan, Deb Kumar Das, B. Rajan, and Peter Nazareth of Indian (Goan) origin (via Uganda). Zulfikar Ghose, who is from pre-Partition India and Pakistan, lived in Britain from 1952 to 1969 and then moved to the United States, where he is a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of four volumes of poetry, ten novels, two books of criticism, and an autobiography. In his poem, “One Chooses a Language,” Ghose explores the dilemmas of people with many languages who write in English: The English alphabet dangled its A for Apple when I was eight in Bombay. I stuttered and chewed almonds for a cure. My tongue, rejecting a vernacular for a new language, resisted utterance. Alone, I imitated the accents of English soldiers. (1967, 5)

In an interview with M. G. Vassanji, Ghose discussed issues of rootlessness, migrations, and identity formations. He has personally lived through the horrors of Partition when his family was uprooted from Bombay, where his father’s “identity as a Muslim was creating difficulties for him,” and instead of moving to Karachi, “which [his father] knew nothing about,” the family emigrated to Britain. The title of Ghose’s first volume of poetry, The Loss of India (1964), encapsulates “enormous personal despair,” loss, and rejection. He notes, “Indian secularism is a myth . . . I could not live in India because I am a Muslim; and I cannot live in Pakistan because I have no interest in being a Muslim.” In this 1986 interview Ghose stated that he had not been back for nearly twenty-five years, “because I might once again be rejected—once again experience the loss of India. . . . Home is in my mind, my imagination. Home is the English language and what I can do with it” (1986, 17). This sense of not belonging to any one place informs Ghose’s work, particularly his novels, which are fantastic inventions and, though often set in Latin American cities, could be located anywhere. He enjoys experimenting “with new forms, new uses of language, rather than being a chronicler of [his] time—I am not interested in my time in the sociological sense. . . . Actually, I never had a heritage . . . [that] I am supposed to be guilty of having broken with” (Interview with Vassanji, 1986, 20). Nor did he have a Muslim education; his father changed his name from the Muslim “Ghaus” to the Hindu “Ghose.” Despite the accusation that Ghose is trying “to escape from the East,” the imagery and landscape of his novels reveal superimpositions of memory and nostalgia about India.

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India-born A. K. Ramanujan, poet, scholar, and translator, worked at the University of Chicago until his recent death in 1993. He is the author of fifteen books that include poetry in English and Kannada. Ramanujan presents a body of work that is most significant in demonstrating the value of the oral tradition in the Indian context. Speaking of Siva (1973) was nominated for a National Book Award. In his poems, “the family,” as Parthasarathy notes, “is one of the central metaphors with which he thinks” (quoted in Lal 1983, 51). As the epigraph (taken from a Classical Tamil Anthology) for Relations, his volume of poems, states, “living / among relatives / binds the feet.” The intricate workings of the Hindu joint family system are explored with biting irony and an objective distance that simultaneously present sympathetic portrayals of wife, mother, father, aunts, and cousins. The persona weaves in and out of family events and memories that are often disputed, as in “Love Poem for a Wife. 1”: Really what keeps us apart at the end of years is unshared childhood . . . Only two weeks ago, in Chicago, you and brother James started one of your old drag-out fights about where the bathroom was in the backyard . . . Sister-in-law and I were blank cut-outs fitted to our respective slots in a room really nowhere.

The preoccupation with family history is balanced by a situating of his poetic psyche in his adoptive home of Chicago, and often the poems bring the Indian and Chicagoan landscapes together, as in “Chicago Zen”: Watch your step. Sight may strike you blind in unexpected places. The traffic light turns orange on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, you fall into a vision of forest fires, enter a frothing Himalayan river, rapid, silent. (1986, 83)

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Ramanujan’s poetic voice is balanced delicately between his past and his present. He retains a strong sense of being part of a rich Indian tradition, along with the texture of his adoptive home and its landscape. Peter Nazareth, located at the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, deals with writers from India, the African diaspora, and Latin America in his critical work The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility (1978). He debates whether the “Third World” has a geographical and historical identity. And he discusses accountability for the production of various Third World dictators and the responsibility of writers in the task of decolonization. Nazareth’s novel, In a Brown Mantle (1972), is followed by a sequel of sorts in “Rosie’s Theme,” a short story (Callaloo, 2 [1978]). A family journeys through five generations in places like Goa, Malaysia, Africa, Canada, and the United States. Rosie adapts to different worlds: “We can live anywhere . . . make a start anywhere and win for ourselves.” Hyphenated-Canadian Identities Himani Bannerjee, born in 1942 in what is now Bangladesh but was then still part of pre-Partition India, is a poet and an engaged theorist about issues of race and multiculturalism in the Canadian context. She has published two volumes of poems: A Separate Sky (1982) and Doing Time (1986), and a children’s novel, Coloured Pictures (1991). As a note on the back cover of Doing Time states, Bannerjee believes that “you cannot change the world with art alone, nor can you do without it.” When asked in an interview with Arun Mukherjee about “what it means to be ethnic and what ethnicity has to do with being a ‘visible minority,’ ” Bannerjee responded: It means that we are not considered to be Canadians. We are ‘immigrant women.’ . . . People’s memories of the places they have come from persist with them. So this spill of memory has to be contained, and the dominant group contains this spill through various means. . . . Multiculturalism to me is a way of managing seepage of persistent subjectivity of people that come from other parts of the world. . . . On the one hand, you have the multicultural ossificatory imperative. On the other, you have the state and the dominant media with their assimilative imperative. . . . I think it is very important that we don’t allow this “other-ization” of ourselves. (1990, 146, 148)

Other noteworthy Indo-Canadian writers are Saros Cowasjee, Rohinton Mistry, and Uma Parameswaran. Cowasjee, who worked as assistant editor for The Times of India, Bombay, moved to Canada in 1963. He has published

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novels, critical studies, and short stories. As editor of Stories from the Raj (1982) and When the British Left: Stories on the Partitioning of India (1987), he explores a changing history from the perspectives of Britishers and Indians, a time of change, a crumbling empire. Rohinton Mistry has published short stories over the years and came to prominence with Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag (1989). Most recently, he won a Commonwealth Regional Prize for Such a Long Journey (1991). Uma Parameswaran, poet, playwright, and critic, is among the only Indo-Canadian writers who has ventured into drama in English. Her play, Rootless But Green Are the Boulevard Trees (1985), is set in her adoptive home of Winnipeg. An immigrant Indian family faces familiar generational conflicts between parents and children, who often inhabit different worlds. Both parents live “with blinkers night and day” and refuse to face what their children must in the mainstream society. Jyoti appeals to her mother, “We need to know, mom, we’ve got to know more about our parents” (92). Vithal’s comment on race and assimilation expresses a biting separatism: They’ve never wanted us and now we are a threat. Serve us right for wanting to try to be one of them. We have to stay separate from them and stay together within and we’ve got to show them that we have as much right to be here as the pissed-off whites who’ve bullied their way into this country these last three hundred years. (100)

Among Indians who emigrated to the United States and Canada via the Caribbean are Indo-Trinidadian-American Ismith Khan, author of novels such as The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man,1 Indo-Guyanese-Canadian Frank Birbalsingh, and Cyril Dabydeen. Dabydeen has published poetry collections, Elephants Make Good Stepladders (1982) and Distances (1989). His novel The Wizard Swami (1985) is described by compatriot Birbalsingh as “a signal achievement . . . one of few novels dealing with Indo-Guyanese experience and written by an insider” (1986, 78).2 Sri Lankan Canadian writers of note are poet Rienzi Crusz (Elephant and Ice, Singing Against the Wind) and Michael Ondaatje, poet and novelist. Ondaatje’s talent as both has been recognized by The Governor-General’s Literary Award and, in 1992, the prestigious Booker Prize for his latest novel, The English Patient. He is also the author of six volumes of poetry. His novels include Running in the Family (1982), a magnificent, surrealist rendition of family members (who remind one of G. V. Desani’s My Family and Other Animals), amply and marvelously fictionalized. Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), unlike most ethnic novels, does not probe the history of his own ethnic group but researches the lives of Macedonian immigrants,

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“the un-historical stories” of ordinary folk not recorded in history books. This laboring class came to Toronto in the early 1900s and constructed several important bridges and viaducts in the city. Ondaatje acknowledges his Sri Lankan Canadian identity, but does not regard being “Sri Lankan in Canada” as his single theme. “I go to writing,” he notes in an interview, “to discover as many aspects of myself and the world around me as I can. . . . [In In the Skin of a Lion] I wanted to step away from a private story into a public one, a social one—although obviously much of the emotion that the migrants feel in the book has a personal source” (1990, 198, 199). The novel plays with antihero Patrick’s own sense of un-belonging although he is native Canadian. Ondaatje is a dazzling writer whose creative consciousness transforms any theme into magical wordplays. He has also made two documentary films. Certain journals that have provided space for South Asian American writers are: Fuse Magazine, Fireweed: A Feminist Journal, Asianadian, Tiger Lily, and The Toronto South Asian Review. The latter, under the able editorship of Indo-Canadian M. G. Vassanji (born in Kenya, educated in Tanzania and the United States), has been an important forum since 1982 in publishing writers of occasional poems, short stories, critical pieces, to those of volumes of poetry or novels. Some noteworthy names that have reappeared over the years in this journal are Indo-Americans Lalita Gandbhir and Roshni Rustomji; Pakistani American Javaid Qazi; and Sri Lankan Canadians Asoka Weerasinghe and Suwanda Sugunasiri. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was much more difficult for South Asian American writers to be recognized within an ethnic category than it might be today. Such ethnic visibility in terms of employment, publication, and daily life is advantageous and problematic, as is represented by a contemporary generation of South Asian writers who openly engage with issues of ethnicity, location, and racism within mainstream institutions.

Et hn ic I de n t i t ie s a n d Tr a nsf or m ing Ge o gr a phie s

But everybody needs a home so at least you can have some place to leave which is where most other folks will say you must be coming from. June Jordan

Relocations are often marked by violence, what Meena Alexander, in her discussion of Asian American aesthetics, calls “an aesthetics of dislocation.” She explains, “In India, no one would ask me if I were Asian American or Asian. Here we are part of a minority, and the vision of being “unselved” comes into our consciousness. It is from this consciousness that I create my work of art. Because of this dialectical element there is a “violence” involved for me even in the production of the work of art” (1992a, 26).

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In a study of literary works and the parameters of the literary imagination, the simultaneity of geography—namely, the possibility of living here in body and elsewhere in mind and imagination—provides significant frameworks for a historical analysis of contemporary South Asian writers, and indeed writers of Asian, African, and Caribbean diasporas. This simultaneity, this sort of mind–body experience, may be somewhat generalizable in literary study. However, I would argue that the simultaneity is of a specific kind for writers with a colonial history whose socioeconomic, intellectual, and cultural conditions require migrations and displacements, for writers who express themselves in English. The temporal trajectory of history, of events unfolding in time, places necessary boundaries around the past, present, and future. When one adds a spatial dimension, for instance, migrations, into this temporal unfolding, the intersection of geography with history opens up new areas for imaginative exploration—returning home through the imagination, re-creating home in narrative, creating a simultaneous present of being both here and there. As Jamaica Kincaid remarked in an interview, “I don’t know how to be there [Antigua], but I don’t know how to be without there” (cited in Kennedy 1990, 89). Kincaid’s view is reflected in the work of other diaspora writers who imaginatively challenge the linearity of time and the specificity of space by juxtaposing their here and now with their histories and past geographies. Within the complex and troubling historical times in which we live a new geography permeates the globe. Displacement of large numbers of people by necessity or by “choice” continues apace in a world where the concept of “home” has derived new parameters. Matters of “choice” in terms of location often turn out to be necessitated by the geopolitical and geoeconomic realities of the world today. Geography importantly inscribes contemporary history. In their very uneasy habitation within borderlands of different ethnicities, languages, and cultures, recent migrations of ethnic peoples provide significant clues for historical analysis. Geoeconomic national borders are redrawn under financial dictates of bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank in a capitalist “new world order” that has unleashed, in Neil Smith’s words, “all kinds of satanic geographies on the third world.”3 As capital travels and establishes new controls over physical spaces, its effects pervade silently, like an undetected cancer, into the bodies of vast populations. Forced relocations are part of a contemporary geography drearily full of dry statistics that must be humanized.4 No doubt, the history underpinning these geographic terrorisms is very important. In his provocative text Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), Edward Soja argues convincingly for “a flexible and balanced critical theory that re-entwines the making of history with the social production of space, with the construction and configuration

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of human geographies. New possibilities are being generated from this creative commingling, possibilities for a simultaneously historical and geographical materialism” (11). Soja’s analysis of “the historical geography of capital . . . [the] changing mosaics of uneven regional development within the capitalist state, and the various reconfigurations of an international spatial division of labor” illuminates the geopolitics of migrations. Spatial factors such as geographic migrations are important to analyze, because, as Soja argues, “space can be made to hide consequences from us.” And since “relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparent innocent spatiality of social life,” we need to analyze “how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (6). In my study of South Asian American writers, Soja’s discussion of “the spatialization of history . . . the structuring of a historical geography” is enabling and provocative, especially when one recognizes that within any external lived reality there is always a set of social relations and that “space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (18).

I de n t i t ie s D ef ine d a n d D ef ie d b y L o c a l e s Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox, my home a neat four by six inches. I always loved neatness. Now I hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand. This is home. And this is the closest I’ll ever be to home. Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir” (1987, 1) The poetic voice of Agha Shahid Ali is one of the most significant contemporary voices among South Asian poets. Agha has published five volumes of poetry. His self-description as “triple exile” from Kashmir, India, to New Delhi, and then to the United States, traces a journey of loss that has been extremely enabling in his creative universe. Agha’s poems explore and contain the anguish of displacement and exile through memories, history, and the Urdu poetic tradition that he evokes from his 1979 collection In Memory of Begum Akhtar to his very fine translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz in The Rebel’s Silhouette. Agha journeys from Begum Akhtar’s voice of loss to the revolutionary love ideals of Faiz, “the poet who redefined the cruel Beloved as Revolution,” notes Lawrence Needham in a fine assessment of Agha’s work. Needham contends that “from Faiz, perhaps, Agha increasingly assumes in his poetry the role of witness, and in Faiz, perhaps, he discovers a model for employing tradition in startling and original ways” (1992, 67). In A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), Agha realizes a unique amalgam of indigenous influences along with a mature situating of his own voice and place in his exile home of the United States. Along with a nurturing,

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often painful, bagful of the bones of memory from other homes and distant locales, Agha re-creates an imaginative simultaneity of place and time, of history and geography. The very loss of “home” inspires in Agha’s poems a very strongly felt sense of space and location—acutely observed geographical locations that exist in history and return to life through his imaginative recreation, as in the tactile and poignant poem “The Dacca Gauzes”: Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. “No one now knows,” my grandmother says, “what it was to wear or touch that cloth.” (1987, 15)

Although the grandmother had worn that fine gauze once, the poem is more a lament about the murder of that art at the hands of the colonizers: “In history we learned: the hands / of weavers were amputated, / the looms / of Bengal silenced, / and the cotton shipped raw / by the British to England.” Further, this history is astutely personalized: “History of little use to her, / my grandmother just says / how the muslins of today /seem so coarse.” In the poem’s closing stanza, the grandmother re-creates that lost time and place, and retrieves in imagination an irretrievable loss: “one morning, she says, the air / was dew-starched: she pulled / it absently through her ring.” Loss is not felt simply as a result of geographical dislocation. Agha’s poems explore other kinds of loss associated with community and religion that are influenced by historical factors and changes, such as the skeptical voice in “Note Autobiographical—2”: My voice cracked on Ghalib as dreams of God crumbled for me: Our servant, his shoes stolen at the mosque, turned deaf to the muezzin’s call . . . my tongue forgot the texture of prayer. (1979, 21)

A commingling of geographies enables Agha to take accountability for the past and present. His poetic voice performs a poignant balancing act between drawing upon memory and re-creating a past without romanticizing it, and residing simultaneously in the present. It is through his clearly felt and imagistic re-creation of actual spaces that he is able to set up a dialogue, even

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a dialectic movement between past and present. The various geographies of his journeyings in different spaces—“Autumn in Srinagar,” “A Lost Memory of Delhi,” “I Dream It Is Afternoon When I Return to Delhi,” “Another Desert”—enable him to situate himself within a unique personal and diasporic history. History and geography commingle as a way of coping with loss, as in his poem “Snow on the Desert” (Agha 1991, 100). The Arizona desert that “was a sea once” evokes a memory of Begum Akhtar singing one night in New Delhi when the lights went out. That voice, time, place, and the poet’s physical presence in the once-ocean-now-desert of Arizona encapsulates “a time / to recollect / every shadow, everything the earth was losing, / a time to think of everything the earth / and I had lost, of all / that I would lose / of all that I was losing.” Another writer who interweaves history and geography remarkably in her work is Sara Suleri from Pakistan, the author of the acclaimed autobiographical narrative, Meatless Days (1989). Suleri, a professor at Yale University, also has a vast scholarly output, her latest text being The Rhetoric of English India (1992). She combines a theorist’s acuteness with a unique feminist awareness in her evocations of family members in Meatless Days. This is a nontraditional, nonlinear life story, equally about Pakistani politics, her family’s roles and responsibilities in the fortunes of changing regimes, as it is about acutely drawn portraits of family members: her siblings; her grandmother Dadi, who “went scuttling through the day in the posture of a shrimp”; her Welsh mother, her journalist father, who when he took to prayer embodied “Islam’s departure from Pakistan . . . the great romance between religion and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan was done.” Suleri’s is a cerebrally recounted story, including assertions such as “the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience” (20). Often, one has to search for the emotionality that creeps up like delicate mist from between the lines, such as the horror and loss of Bhutto’s hanging, which made “Pakistan feel unreliable, particularly to itself. Its landscape learned a new secretiveness” (18). Suleri’s rich text moves blithely amid different geographies and histories—Pakistan, England, the United States, moving from the 1947 creation of Pakistan to contemporary reunions with family members, or re-memoryings of dead family members, unfolding in Suleri’s adoptive home of New Haven.

“ The Ba r be d Wir e Is Ta k e n in t o t he H e a r t ”

For me, in the United States, the barbed wire is taken into the heart, and the art of an Asian American grapples with the disorder in society, with violence. And in our writing we need to evoke a chaos, a power equal to the injustices that surround us. Meena Alexander, “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?”

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Meena Alexander, a poet and one of the finest thinkers of Asian American aesthetics, has published several volumes of poetry and been widely anthologized in journals. Hers is certainly one of the finest poetic voices among South Asian American poets. She has also written a novel, Nampally Road (1991a), and a memoir, Fault Lines (1993). Born in India, Alexander was taken to Sudan at the age of five. She returned to her grandparents’ home in India each summer. Since 1980 she has lived and worked in New York City. As she puts it in The Storm (1989), her fivepart poem, relocations are part of a gendered violence: “Displacement, violence, but also the poise of a ritualised order are all parts of the feminine world” (iii). Alexander’s work voices a deep concern for the survival of the female imagination in different spaces. History, memory, and myth interact as she re-creates strongly felt images of her childhood in Kerala. Her poetic voice seeks an accountability to a history of migration and dislocation as it affects so many ordinary people, whose anonymous stories are evoked in “The Travellers”: Consider us crawling forward . . . small stoppages in unknown places where the soul sleeps: Bahrain, Dubai, London, New York, names thicken and crack as fate is cut and chopped into boarding passes . . . Migrant workers stripped of mop and dirty bucket . . . night nurses raising their dowry dollar by slow dollar, tired chowkidars ekeing their pennies out in a cold country. (1989, 9, 10)

In her essay, “Transit Lounge” (1991b), Alexander records a scene at Bombay Airport where she witnesses about thirty men whose names, written in Hindi, hang from their necks on name-tags along with destinations like Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and other Middle Eastern destinations. She notes the economic necessities of these relocations: “There were whole families in India, dependent on the money these men would send home” (638). With deep sensitivity that recognizes these men “did not know how to speak Arabic or English,” Alexander travels back in memory to her own childhood when those “two languages [had] surrounded” her in Khartoum. Her memory of learning Arabic from her friend Haadia’s uncle, Abdullah Tayib,

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the famous Sudanese poet, is suffused by this urgency to learn how to name oneself. “Unless you learn, who will speak your name? . . . I think it is the pain of no one knowing my name that drives me to write. That and the sense that I am living a place where I have no history. Where all I am is surface and what is not reducible to a crude postcard dangled round the neck” (640). Alexander’s work poignantly explores the anguish of finding a name and the struggle to belong to a place. “We are our outsides,” she notes in “Transit Lounge,” as she observes a homeless man with his “habitat of cardboard,” an image that evokes the need for a home of a different kind for the poet. As she “peoples that underground passage [at the subway stop] with cousins I have not seen for decades, ancient aunts from Kerala, bonded workers on their way to the Persian Gulf, all of us migrants and even those settled in ancestral lands, jolted by time,” her prose spans time and space, and evokes the imaginative possibility of living simultaneously here in body and in several elsewheres in mind and imagery. Alexander explores the need to re-create a past, to use it as a healing bedrock for the onslaughts of life in the present. Similar to the necessity of re-memorying lived spaces of her childhood, Alexander recognizes the significance of family history. Poems and prose are part of Alexander’s House of a Thousand Doors (1988). In “Text from the Middle Earth,” the two voices make “distances heave” as physical and psychic journeyings unravel through the female generations of grandmother, mother, daughter: “Thinking on my mother. / What kept her from harm shall keep me . . . I must trust to this voice to make a place. . . . The sea of this middle earth is always green. . . . In the middle where I am, there is no beginning.” Alexander re-creates her grandmothers: Kanda, whom she never knew, and Mariamma, whom she did. Kanda “was the political grandmother,” remarks Alexander, and Mariamma was house-bound, “her life, in all its pent up power, was lived within the rim of the domestic.” Often in Alexander’s poems, the continuity of history is through the line of the female body, as though memory were ensconced in the cells, muscles, bones. In “Grandmother’s Mirror,” the voice records: “I swore never to forget . . . our childhoods . . . our dates inscribed inside/like welts on grandmother’s palm.” The history is kept intact, wordlessly inside the body and given voice by the poet. The pain of loss and recovery is located also within the female body itself, as opposed to Agha Shahid Ali’s more external resolution through history and myth. Along with the family and the natural world, Alexander creates an archetypal identification with a spirit of femaleness that spans time and space: “lines of women from the field below” come to help the poet-person deliver her child. In the final prose piece, “House of Mirrors,” this continuity is reasserted: “Again and again the child is born, each time in

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this very spot, each time she has a woman’s body. . . . Might it be said, after so many births, that she has a female soul?” (119) In “Grandmother’s Letters” Alexander wonders whether her grandmother Kanda was like her and “invent[ed] a great deal.” The letters that Alexander re-creates are written by Kanda to her husband, who is imprisoned by the British. “Unlock the bars with your gaze, deceive the distances. . . . Let the distances uphold you”—a wisdom that also touches a chord in a condition of exile and the need to conquer distances psychically. The poet in the present also deciphers meanings between lines written from a time in history when her grandmother “was struggling to spell out feelings that lay outside the ordinary territory of her days” (26). In Alexander’s Night-Scene, The Garden (1992b), the “mother’s face” and “a fragrance most maternal” revive memories of the grandmother and the poet-narrator herself at age seven, then move into “No Man’s Land” and the fierce attempt at claiming a heritage, a land, and a language: My back against barbed wire . . . No man’s land no woman’s either . . . I stand in the middle of my life . . . Come ferocious alphabets of flesh Splinter and raze my page That out of the dumb and bleeding part of me I may claim my heritage. (1992b, 26, 29)

In her essay “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” Alexander warns against “play[ing] endlessly in the post-modernist fashion” with our ethnicity as it “is located in our bodies.” For Alexander, art is “always political, even if it is most abstract, even if it is a simple visual image of a leaf falling from a tree.” In her work, she powerfully wrenches the English language into expressions of a complex, deeply felt resonance that place her within her ancestral history as well as her present immigrant locale.

Et hn ic i t ie s Ce l ebr at e d or Er a se d in Ter ms of L o c at ions Although it is important to recognize the importance of “Indianness,” of claiming one’s heritage, the concept needs new definitions within immigrant locales. Meena Alexander links her heritage with that of other Asian Americans in her negotiation of past and present:

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I want to find a way that we can make a durable and usable past that is not just nostalgic but exists in the present. The present for me is the present of “multiple anchorages.” It is these multiple anchorages that an ethnicity of Asian American provides for me, learning from Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans, Indian Americans, and everyone juggling, jostling, shifting, and sliding the symbols that come out of my own mind. (1992a, 27)

Unlike Alexander’s blending of past with present, which retains its specificity in terms of class and education, it is deeply problematic when cultural groups such as the National Federation of Indian Associations (NFIA) present a monolithic cultural identity of all Indians in the United States irrespective of class, religion, and education. This drive for homogeneity seeks to re-create a “national” unity within immigrant spaces. In a fine essay, “Woman, Nation and Identity in the Indian Immigrant Community,”5 Annaya Bhattacharjee recounts how, at a Divali (Hindu New Year) celebration event in New York City, the NFIA put Indian culture on display as timeless and universally applicable to all Indians. Only acceptable representations of culture (mehndi, food, arts and crafts) were allowed. The activist group Sakhi, which deals with South Asian women and domestic violence, was denied permission “to stage a play that would highlight select aspects of . . . women’s roles in Indian society . . . on the grounds that the topics were too political and ha[ve] no place in this exclusively cultural display. . . . The organizers deliberately excluded the participation of feminist, or gay/lesbian, or working-class organizations” (9). Group members of Sakhi were forced to “restrict [their] activities to an area outside the grounds of the main event. This marginal location mirrored the recognition of abuse against women in the Indian community.” Sakhi’s challenge of the stereotyped ideal images of Indian womanhood drawn from mythology was perceived as a “betrayal” of all that this model represents—Indian “nation, culture, tradition, family” (10). Bhattacharjee analyzes how a community’s need to preserve a national homogeneity, often sited in their cultural traditions, places an additional burden on women. In attempts at cultural preservation throughout history, women have been regarded as the guardians of tradition, particularly against a foreign colonizer during nationalist liberation struggles. Now, in this different kind of colonized space, immigrant Indians must demystify a “mythical ‘Indian’ identity” unchanged by history and location. For a woman to leave an abusive space of battering and move out of the heterosexual, patriarchal family is tantamount to betraying a “nationalist” ideal. Ironically, as Bhattacharjee points out, “the terms of cultural preservation are set by the dominant power.” For example, in the United States, Indians,

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along with other Asian communities, are regarded as “a model minority, exemplifying high educational status and financial success” (11). She points out the contradiction in the very phrase “model minority.” In its desire to belong inside an “American dream,” the Indian bourgeois community “actively engages in the politics of minority status and representation within the U.S. These activities, dictated over limited resources for people of color, as well as by a rivalry over an imaginary standard of acceptance into the ‘majority,’ succeeds in making ‘race’ into a number game and a policy issue for Indians rather than an area of radical social change and action” (12).

“ Brok e n I de n t i t ie s a n d D is c a r de d L a nguage s” Literary artists envision different types of negotiations in terms of their personal identities, histories, and geographies. Bharati Mukherjee might be considered the quintessential immigrant-turned-citizen who now embraces being an “American citizen” with a troubling and insistent fierceness. Her personal essay discusses the advantages of moving from a racist Canada into the United States where she feels more culturally integrated. Mukherjee lived from 1966 to 1980 in Canada, where she was treated as an outsider and adopted an “expatriate” identity and state of mind. She describes her move to the United States as “a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration.” Mukherjee bitterly records her Canadian experience where she was frequently taken for a prostitute or shoplifter, frequently assumed to be a domestic, praised by astonished auditors that I didn’t have a “sing-song” accent. The society itself, or important elements in that society, routinely made crippling assumptions about me, and about my “kind.” In the United States, however, I see myself in those same outcasts . . . in professors, domestics, high school students, illegal busboys in ethnic restaurants. (1985, 2–3)

Mukherjee’s adoption of an immigrant as opposed to an expatriate identity has been profoundly enabling for her writing. In her own words, she has “joined imaginative forces with an anonymous, driven underclass of semi-assimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire for permanent return.” Further, Mukherjee does not see her “Indianness” as an isolated configuration that can only be at “home” with other Indian people: “instead of seeing my Indianness as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration (or worse, a ‘visible’ disfigurement to be hidden), I see it now as a set of fluid identities to be celebrated.” Mukherjee takes this further and relates her personal identity to that of her identity as a writer; she “sees [herself ] as an American writer

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in the tradition of other American writers whose parents or grandparents had passed through Ellis Island.” Mukherjee’s novels The Wife (1975) and The Tiger’s Daughter (1971) trace a trajectory of a kind of upper-class female protagonist, socialized within a Brahmin (the highest caste) religious and social code, equipped with an English-language education. By the time Mukherjee publishes Jasmine (1989), she has become an American citizen. Her village protagonist, Jyoti, leaves behind the stranglehold of traditional customs such as dowry and sati—all presented with an objective, distant narrative voice—and embraces the myth of becoming an individualistic American, prepared to forge her own path and destroy what stands in her way: “There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We must murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams” (25). In her struggle to remake herself, Jasmine does not resist several renamings by others, and moves fluidly among new identities thrust upon her. Kali is her only act of self-naming when she murders her rapist, Half-Face. (The novel presents a disturbing ideology of violence as part of remaking oneself in American culture.) Jasmine is intent upon murdering her past as the only way to make a new life. She is described accurately by Karin, Bud’s ex-wife, as “a tornado,” as one who wreaks havoc and takes no accountability. In Jasmine, the adopted Vietnamese Du provides a striking contrast to the protagonist, who regards her own transformation as “genetic,” Du’s as “hyphenated.” He has more agency than she does in terms of directing his young life, when he connects with his Vietnamese sister. Mukherjee’s earlier novels, The Wife and The Tiger’s Daughter, present female protagonists who undergo disillusionments with marriage and struggle between identities as defined within their upper-class home environments in Calcutta, and their movements into an impersonal America where they must face loneliness and redefinitions of their ethnicities. In The Wife, Dimple Dasgupta remains isolated and on the margins of American life, unable to connect with an alien culture. Her predicament is similar to that of newly brought-over wives, sometimes by husbands who travel home for a couple of weeks, “interview” several prospective brides, and select one—there are plenty of bright-eyed women who wish to come to America. Their knowledge of America, often based on Hollywood films, does not include the realities of homeless people, poverty, and loneliness. “Losing” one’s family’s control also entails losing their warmth and love. Dimple becomes suicidal, thinks about where to die—in Calcutta or in New York. The novel concludes with her stuck in her indecisiveness. Mukherjee does not allow her protagonist much interaction with the “natives.” Dimple remains in the claustrophobic apartment space or with other Indians. America hardly exists except as a backdrop, a physical location where she finds herself geographically. Her mental space

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is in turmoil—not really at home anywhere, she desperately needs help but is unable even to accept or articulate her needs. In The Tiger’s Daughter, Mukherjee depicts Tara, an upper-class Bengali woman who comes to the United States for an undergraduate degree at Vassar. Tara marries an American, and the novel traces her conflicts of identity and belonging as she returns “home,” familiar and strange, gets to know the “David [her husband] of aerogrammes . . . a figure standing in shadows, or a foreigner with an accent on television. ‘I miss you very much. But I understand you have to work this out. I just hope you get it over with quickly. . . . Remember the unseen dangers of India. Tell your parents to cable me if you get sick’ ” (63). “A foreignness of spirit” takes over Tara’s consciousness as she struggles between a sense of exile both in her childhood “home” and in the newly acquired “home” of the United States. Mukherjee’s explorations of the personal dimensions of female identity and belonging within marriage, an integral part of traditional Indian socialization for females, now resonates in a new key, as Tara’s husband belongs “elsewhere” and so her home “should” be with him, even though that space is not yet “home.” Mukherjee is more successful as a short-story writer than as a novelist. Her first collection, Darkness (1985), documents the struggles of newly arrived South Asians, their experiences of alienation and racism as they try to find their “place” in American society. Their personal and professional lives within mainstream America often entail severe psychological costs. Mukherjee blasts the myth of the immigrant’s desire to “return home”—a dream that she/he necessarily clings to, often as a way of coping in an alien world. In her latest collection of stories, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Mukherjee “has vastly enlarged her geographical and social range,” remarks Jonathan Raban in The New York Times Book Review (19 June 1988). In a more confident voice than in the earlier works, Mukherjee writes in the same breath about “Polish jokes and Patel jokes.” According to Raban, she “hijacks the whole tradition of Jewish-American writing and flies it off to a destination undreamed of by its original practitioners. Her characters . . . see the surfaces of America with the bug-eyed hangover clarity of the greenhorn afloat in a gaudy new world. Yet they’re not tired, huddled or even poor: they own motels, work scams, teach in colleges, breeze through on private funds. Their diaspora is a haphazard, pepperpot dispersal.” What Raban does not note, in typically New York Times reviewer manner, is Mukherjee’s own upper-class background and the classist and elitist tone she adopts toward her characters. She overtly endorses the meltingpot concept and regards American society as the most welcoming of any in the world toward the “other.” Even when racism is part of her exploration and critique, there is no attempt to place it within a larger political system of exploitation in the United States. Mukherjee gets a lot of mileage out of

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contrasting her own experiences in Canada, which were more overtly racist than in the United States, and endorses this society as “safer” for peoples of color than almost any other in the world. In an interview she remarked: In the U.S. I feel I am allowed to see myself as an American. It’s a self-transformation. Canadians resisted my vigorous attempts to see myself as a Canadian. They exclude, America includes. And everywhere else, in Europe, France, Germany, Switzerland, the newcomer is a guest worker. . . . To be a Swede, a German, a Frenchman is a quality of soul and mind that takes hundreds of generations. (cited in Monagan 1988, 1E)

Mukherjee ignores the fact that to peoples of color of lower class and educational background than hers America is not always welcoming. Also, according to her use of racial categorization, France and Germany may have longer histories of white supremacy than the United States does. And simply to assert that because all Americans do come from elsewhere they are all equal is naive. One need only consider African Americans and the shameful history of slavery, or the nightmare of Japanese American internment camps, and so on. These stories constitute the “soul” of America. The power mechanisms that lie behind such systemic methods of oppressing particular racial groups remain ultimately marginal in Mukherjee’s work. Although she renders her immigrant characters sympathetically, in that sense departing from a Naipaul-esque disdain for colored peoples, her refusal to engage with what lies behind racism and oppression enables her to receive similar types of applause from a Western readership and the critical establishment. In conclusion, South Asian writers have made their immigrant, expatriate spaces in North America extremely productive for their creative work. Through a mist of loss, through the anguish of lost homelands that become, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “imaginary homelands,” writers revisit these geographies most powerfully through their imaginations. They re-create their familial, social, cultural, political histories and locate them in their present spaces, giving them “a local habitation and a name.” They work through complex negotiations of identity and belonging, juggling new words and new worlds. Their variously cadenced voices remind readers of the very different ethnicities to which South Asian American writers belong. Their work reveals the intersections of history and geography, of past and present. They provide new, imaginative ways of returning home through the imagination and of sustaining the human spirit that is capable of inhabiting different spaces simultaneously.

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No t e s 1. For a detailed discussion of Khan’s novels, see my essay in The Dictionary of Literary Biography 125 (1993): 48–53. 2. Frank Birbalsingh 1986. Review of The Wizard Swami, in Toronto South Asian Review 4.3 (Spring): 78. Birbalsingh, author of Passion and Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature (1988), teaches at York University and is an important critic of Indo-Caribbean-Canadian literatures. His text, Indo-Westindian Cricket, was one of a series that commemorated the 150th anniversary of Indians in the Caribbean. 3. Neil Smith, “Political Geographies of the New World Order,” presentation at the “Rethinking Marxism” Conference. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 1992. 4. Recently, there were over one million homeless in Bosnia; 400 Palestinians were held in exilic no-man’s-land; and citizens made refugees such as the 60,000 Muslims fleeing riot-torn Bombay during the terrifying January 1993 pogrom against them. The recent horrors in India vivify the importance of geography and location—real and symbolic—as categories of analysis for “third world” literatures. The controversy has been brewing for the past several years over the issue of site, the location of Ram Janmabhoomi (the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram), at precisely the spot where a 500-year old mosque, Babri Masjid, stood in Ayodhya, India. The Hindu fundamentalist political lobby, spearheaded by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been stirring discontent by propagating a theory that has been discredited by every eminent historian of ancient India, Romila Thapar among others. The BJP’s inflammatory proposition—namely, to tear down the mosque and build a Hindu temple at precisely that site—has proven to be a recipe for disaster. The political fueling of religious differences—“Hindustan for Hindus”—has struck terror into the minority Muslim citizens of India, who have suffered loss of homes, businesses, and lives in the Babri Masjid riots and aftermath since 1993. 5. Annaya Bhattacharjee, “Woman, Nation and Identity in the Indian Immigrant Community,” SAMAR [South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection] 1 (Winter 1992): 6–12.

STEPHEN H. SUMIDA

Postcolonialism, Nationalism, and the Emergence of Asian/Pacific American Literatures

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hen I was drafting this chapter, I had the opportunity to discuss with Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor, a historian of Native Hawaiian and ethnic studies, my questions about examining the emergence of Hawaii’s literatures as a postcolonial historical and, cultural phenomenon. “Postcolonial?” she said. Her eyebrows leaped up. “Since when?”1 Applied to American literary histories, the term “postcolonial” makes an imperfect but, in some ways, useful lens. In “minority” American literatures generally—and because they are often still considered “minority” ones, continuing to struggle for equality—an incongruity of “postcolonial” models arises from this: for peoples of racial minority groups of the United States there has not been a point of “liberation” from colonialism in the political, international sense that the British colonies became “liberated,” gained independence and nationhood, whether in North America or, say, in South Asia. It is arguable that in minority American literatures generally, political and cultural issues are being played out in ways that resemble dynamics of race, class, and gender in postcolonial nations engaged in processes of creating new national narratives out of their old and their recent indigenous, colonial, and current postcolonial histories and languages. Rather than establishing a similarity, however, a comparison between postcolonial literary phenomena and various ways in which Asian/Pacific

From An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung, pp. 274–288. © 1997 by Cambridge University Press.

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American literatures have been “emerging” brings into view, as well as into question, certain distinctions among Asian/Pacific American and other “minority” literatures of the United States.2 From the point of view of indigenous peoples of the United States, colonialism did not end in 1776 and with the Declaration of Independence. The colonizers remained in charge under the new dispensation. The language in which a national literature of the United States emerged was primarily English. The transition from British colony to independent nation did not result in a rejection of English—for the most part the rebels’ native tongue, after all—and a return to an indigenous language and culture predating the arrival of colonists, though such a construct (and adoption of a Native American language) for the new nation was once and again proposed by colonizers. The colonization of the indigenous peoples—and the notion that they are subjects (namely, subjected to) rather than agents of changes—continues despite the fact that, importantly, American culture has been and is alive with changes effected not only by the arrivals of peoples, ideas, and arts from around the world but by influences of indigenous cultures, and with changes necessitated or inspired by the very lands, waters, and skies that comprise the United States.3 Agents of American cultural changes are not exclusively European colonizers; but these changes are not exactly “postcolonial” because they are still largely claimed and owned by the colonizers themselves. In Asian/Pacific American literary history, questions regarding postcolonialism ought first of all to be applied thus to Hawai‘i, a state of the union that has, however, capitalized on an exceptionalism which aims to give the impression that Hawai‘i and its cultures are, in appeal to some recess of the yearner’s desire, most naturally untouched by whatever colonialist grip the rest of the United States may have on the islands. I find it important to begin this discussion with thoughts about Native Hawaiian history, because of how it simultaneously affects the development and characteristics of the Asian American literature of Hawai‘i and exposes some assumptions about class and national values in the Asian American literature of immigration, whether of Hawai‘i or of the continental United States.4 In a colonialist view, 1778 and the first arrival of the British Captain James Cook signify the beginning of the colonization of Hawai‘i by Europeans. But a different view, a view from the shore, though recognizing the fact that Cook interacted with changes historically under way in his time, would place 1778 within a long struggle waged by and among native Hawaiians to unify and gain political control over the entire chain of islands of Hawai‘i (Sumida 1991, 7–19, 160–2). This warfare culminated, not in some kind of Native Hawaiian defeat at the hands and brains of superior Europeans led by one who arrived by accident in Hawai‘i, but in the successful conquest and unification of the Islands, completed in the mid-1790s, by Kamehameha I, first monarch of

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the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Hawaiian sovereignty under a unified monarchy lasted almost a full century, during which many Europeans and Americans, with their colonialist views of taking over the realm, might have thought and acted as if Hawai‘i were their “colony” and did fight over whose it was. But it was Native Hawaiians who ruled. When, in the late twentieth century, assertions of and opposition against Hawaiian sovereignty are voiced, it is to this history that the partisans allude—indeed to this already powerfully mythical time when Native Hawaiians consolidated political, national agency for themselves, among themselves, and by themselves. Nonetheless, outside would-be colonialist influences were certainly strong enough that Hawai‘i even under the monarchy, struggled with such forces. Hawaiian arts such as the mele (poetry) and hula (dances), including mele ma‘i celebrating the genitals of royal ones and other honored persons, were suppressed by Christian missionaries and some of their converts (Elbert and Mahoe 1970, 6). Although genital chants may seem an extreme form of art in our (postmissionary) minds, the genre had not been extreme in pre-Christian Hawai‘i; and the suppression of arts and culture extended to historical chants, for Hawaiian history was pagan history, to be wrested from the convert entering the new life of Christianity.5 Whatever his own strategies of sometimes opposing, sometimes courting the support of Americans in the realm, in the 1870s and 1880s the elected king, David Kalākaua, instituted what became known as a “Hawaiian Renaissance” of native arts and sciences. The fact that there was a recognized “renaissance” clearly suggests that Kalākaua sought through it to supply something he felt lacking but needed for the life of the land. The “reborn” Hawaiian culture emerged in opposition to the European imports and influences in eclectic and sometimes secret ways. Here was an assertion of Hawaiian nationalism even while in principle as well as in practical rule it was the Native Hawaiians themselves who were still in power. The need for the sovereign nation to proclaim a renaissance and a cultural nationhood in Kalākaua’s reign foretold the change that soon followed. His successor, Queen Lili‘uokalani, who has the reputation of being one of the greatest Native Hawaiian poets and songwriters and is still widely known for her lyrics today, was overthrown by American businessmen, backed by U.S. naval power, in January 1893.6 President Grover Cleveland declared this takeover illegal when the businessmen offered the United States the opportunity to annex Hawai‘i immediately. The illegal takeover is the occasion that marks in Hawaiian history the beginning—not the end—of the American colonial period. Immediately after the overthrow of the queen and monarchy, Ellen Wright Prendergast, an attendant of Lili‘uokalani, composed the mele, “Kaulana nā Pua.” Though its words, in the Hawaiian language, were little understood through much of the next century, this song has become one of

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the most familiar-sounding expressions today of protest against colonization (Elbert and Mahoe 1970, 62–4; Sumida 1991, 62–3, 109, 1992, 218–19). This mele was at first considered sacred, not to be accompanied by a hula. It was a document in an underground movement. The very music of the song seems happy (as in the former vice president Dan Quayle’s saluting American Samoans by calling them “happy campers”) to anyone who does not understand its language. Merely hearing the tune, who would suspect “Kaulana nā Pua” of being subversive? Kaulana nā pua a‘o Hawai‘i Kūpa‘a mahope o ka ‘āina Hiki mai ka ‘elele o ka loko ‘ino Palapala ‘ānunu me ka pākaha.

Famous are the children of Hawai‘i Ever loyal to the land When the evil-hearted messenger comes With his greedy document of extortion.7

The song’s statement of protest and its invocation of indigenous, heroic traditions and values springing directly from a precontact history of self-sufficiency of the island culture—an experience centered on the cultivation of the land and of families, the work and the rule of sustaining the life of the land—became “masked” from the ignorant. This already, in about February 1893, was assuredly a colonized Hawai‘i with a poetry and discourse crafted for that new status. This too is the colonial period some of the two hundred thousand indigenous Hawaiians see themselves living in today, as evidenced by sovereignty movements currently under way.8 Simultaneously energizing and confusing arguments over cultural and historical relations in Hawai‘i, however, is the convergence today of the Native Hawaiian renaissance with a “Local” cultural upwelling that includes a large measure of diversely Asian American participation: Whether of indigenous or immigrant descent, most “Locals” of Hawai‘i are quick to note the irony when a tourist refers to the “States” and implies that Hawai‘i is not one. Asian Americans in this Local society also generally assume identification with the national, political, and economic label “American,” as well as their specific ethnicities within Local, heterogeneous culture. Historically, these Asian American peoples were imported under contract, amounting to indentured servitude, to work on the sugar plantations in Hawai‘i. As laborers, and in particular as nonwhite laborers, they were at best promoted to the ranks of subalterns, not colonialists like the sugar planters, missionaries, big capitalists, and military leaders. Today when those who are Asian American Locals—people like myself, third- or fourth-generation descendants of imported laborers—voice ethnically specific and collectively Local identities

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and unity through a recognized body of fiction, poetry, and drama, it appears in a sense that a postcolonial, nationalist movement is under way, under an implicit assumption that we have been liberated (supposedly by American opportunities) from colonialist and class oppression and are in the process of forging a new national identity through politics, economic strides, and the raising of our own voices. But this construct, based as it is on assumptions about immigrant histories and dreams, again leaves out the Native Hawaiian. Further, the idea that the emergence of a Local culture in Hawai‘i is evidence of a kind of nationalism, not primarily Native Hawaiian but heterogeneous, obscures the fact that the Asian American Locals, too, despite their numbers in the population, are still inheritors of a colonial history they have not escaped, a history shaped greatly by nineteenth-century notions of white superiority and therefore white rule. The nation of Hawaii’s peoples is still the United States, where Asian Americans are assuredly not the majority. In Hawaii’s Local literature today there is, however, a language of agency, of self-determination. It is Hawai‘i Creole English, or what Locals popularly call “pidgin.” If there were an emergence of a postcolonial literature of Hawai‘i today, one of its languages would be this pidgin. Here is a sample from Lois-Ann Yamanaka, a poem called “Parts” (that is, body parts): “The Face” Stop muttering under your breath before I pound your face. Want me to punch your face in? You cannot run away from me. Try. I catch you and give you double lickens. Now get your ass in your room and fold all the laundry. Then I’m gonna teach you

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how to iron your father’s shirts. Go. The laundry is on your bed. Hurry up. “The Eye” I found this letter in you panty drawer. Did you write all these evil things? Looks like your handwriting. Like me read this to Joy and her mother? Like me call them up come over for lunch right now? What you mean, no, wait? So you did write it. I cannot believe that so much evil can live in one person. You are a evil child. You are filthy. You are a hypocrite. Stay in your room. Forever. [Sister Stew (1991), 27–28]

If Hawai‘i were a postcolonial site, how apt would Yamanaka’s poem be, with its blunt and nuanced, parodic verbal assaults against the daughter’s

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body and her sexuality? This treatment courses through the mother from a history of being virtually owned, bodily, by the plantation boss and of being suppressed by fears of sinning and looking bad, where an individual’s looks and behavior could have consequences for the entire community if the boss decided so.9 The poem would aptly be postcolonialist, too, because it exposes how we inherit colonialism even when we may think we are and should be free of it, and the poem critiques what it exposes: the pecking order, the downhill course of the sewage ditch, or the abuse of the subordinate runs headlong down the hierarchies exposed in Ota’s Upon Their Shoulders (1951), Lum’s “Primo Doesn’t Take Back Bottles Anymore” (1972) and “Beer Can Hat,” Murayama’s “I’ll Crack Your Head Kotsun” and all throughout his All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) to Yamanaka’s “Parts.” In this lineage Yamanaka’s speaker also inherits an identification with a social class, a labor class. It is an identification which in this case opposes and transcends colonial standards, gendered constructs of how boys and men might talk pidgin, “bad English,” whereas girls and women are supposed to “talk nice” and become schoolteachers, middle-class, haolefied (whitewashed), and accepting of being colonized. Yamanaka’s “pidgin” language is Local identity in one of its many forms, whether in daily life or in the poem, and therefore in its treatments of otherwise widespread themes. The primacy of the voice of one person speaking to others, in Hawaii’s Local literature, is expressed through the poem’s genre: it is a dramatic monologue, a valuable device among Hawaii’s contemporary poets, including Cathy Song, who, writing in so-called standard English, may be said moreover to demonstrate that poetic traditions of Hawai‘i are by no means confined to Hawai‘i Creole. Another language of a postcolonial Hawai‘i, if there were ever to be such a place, would be Native Hawaiian, the prime language of Hawai‘i. Put Hawai‘i Creole and Hawaiian together in the linguistic identity of a hypothetical postcolonial nation, and we have the tongues native to Hawai‘i. If in an instant you could take away all other languages, including English, that native speakers have brought from outside Hawai‘i, then certain Local writers and most of the population would still have their own tongues of Hawai‘i to exercise cultural agency in the literary arts and talking story. The same may not yet be said of Asian American cultures of the American continent. Frank Chin grumbles about the failure thus far of West Coast Asian Americans to create a language that can be sustained and put to every conceivable linguistic use even if the speaking of English, Spanish, Black English, and a variety of Asian tongues were to vanish.10 Beyond the immigrant generation, Asian Americans of the mainland generally write in English. Native Hawaiian and pidgin being quite different matters, in Hawai‘i and elsewhere in the Pacific a similar phenomenon is occurring in

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the emergence of a new growth in “traditional” indigenous literatures, this outgrowth being Pacific Island literatures written by indigenous peoples but in the languages of the colonizers.11 On some of these islands, now nations, we can truly speak of the emergence of a postcolonial literature in English, just as there is a strong Anglophone, postcolonial literature in India. Regarding Chin’s observation about the confinement of Asian American writers to the language that has dominated them, there is something to be learned from African American literature and the arts of subversion or of strategic, ostensible accommodations to domination through artistry in the English language. And as Chin has been insisting for some years now, verbal strategies and the creation of Asian American discourses of agency as resistance can be derived from abundant methods found in “heroic” Chinese and Japanese stories about social, sometimes interethnic, oppression and social justice, as well as from the early history of the Chinese American laborer and adventurer classes. But whereas in Hawai‘i the literary uses of pidgin and native Hawaiian languages may allow a writer to be expressive in what are perceived to be his or her own terms, in virtually monolingual Asian American literature of the continent assertions of cultural identity, I think, tend to be made by way of opposition or resistance that in a sense depends upon, and unavoidably reifies, the racial, cultural, and nationalistic constructs of a perceived “majority” American culture, the adversary when it assumes and asserts domination. Thus, in any number of works we find a central conflict or tension addressed, though in significantly different ways, between what it is to be “Asian” and what it is to be “American,” or what it is to be stereotyped as one or the other or both.12 This occurs, for instance, in works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan, to name only three out of a century-long history of Asian American writers. Some, like Tan, simply assume an intercultural conflict and the opposing sides to be “real.” This is a well-established, highly problematic tradition in continental Asian American literatures. Others, like Chin and Kingston, in their different ways deconstruct the sides, and therefore the conflict, and show them to be profoundly “unreal” yet a virulent basis for racist actions. Still, in Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey, and in Chin’s Donald Duk, the protagonists have to approach a radically different understanding by first exhausting old, ultimately pointless questions about their identities as supposedly being alien, in contrast or opposition to the identities of others by race, culture, and language—pointless in part because, except for immigrants among them, the protagonists do not possess or own any Asian “race,” “culture,” or “language” apart from American orientalist constructs of these concepts, and in part because their questions of ethnic and racial identity are “American,” ones asked in distinctly twentieth-century American contemporary and historical contexts. “Asian” cultural

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elements that immigrants transmit to younger Asian American generations are selectively remembered, reduced to serve the needs and purposes of the immigrant trying to deal with life, security, and the upbringing of Asian American youngsters in a land that lacks the full support of the culture the immigrant has left. Yet both the immigrants and the American-born characters have to deal with the construct of the former as supposedly a fullblown representation of an Asian land, culture, and people. By comparison, in Yamanaka’s “Parts,” the poem’s speaker and daughter have other concerns than cultural identity on their minds, and they have these concerns with no need for self-consciousness about the language they speak and its difference from “standard” English (except that Yamanaka is highly conscious of her linguistic choices in writing the poem). This is to suggest that Asian American literature of the continental United States, too, has been emerging not exactly as a postcolonial phenomenon. It is indeed a “minority” literature in a troubling sense, sometimes and perhaps at its best an oppositional literature in an American culture that “colonizes” Asian Americans within America’s own borders. When Asian American literature is postcolonial, it is about another nation and is written in languages taken from those of the former colonizers. Thus Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War are novels about the Philippines, the setting also for parts of Peter Bacho’s Cebu and of Michele Cruz Skinner’s Balikbayan, after the nation was granted independence from the United States in 1946. N. V. M. Gonzalez’s works (for instance, his short story “The Popcorn Man,” about a Filipino who teaches English composition to American soldiers on an installation resembling the former Clark United States Air Force Base) are “postcolonial,” drenched in references to things, ideas, and terms of a combined four centuries of Spanish and American rule and the author’s consciousness of taking part in the creation of a national literature. A similar observation may be made of Meena Alexander’s novel, Nampally Road, sparked by the rape of a woman by police in a station house in Hyderabad during the Emergency of the 1970s in India. Indeed, about the immigrant’s refusal to see that in America he is no longer in Asia, no longer of a national majority group, George Leong recites a poem with the refrain, “Are you a Chinese? Or are you a Chinaman?”13 A Chinese American speaker (a “Chinaman”) addresses an immigrant who still considers himself “Chinese”: Do you have a flag? Do you have an army? Are you a Chinese? Or are you a Chinaman? Do you have one billion people? Are you a nation? Are you a Chinese? Or are you a Chinaman?

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In other words, the immigrant is now a “Chinaman” like the poem’s speaker, a subject of a nation in which he is not of a majority that matters in ways he might wish. This awareness is seen, in Leong’s poem, to be a necessary first step toward any possibility of the Chinaman’s becoming empowered, not fractured from a meaningful historical identity and not rendered bone by bone into one more soul exploited, an “individual” who emerges from divisiveness rather than a fulfilled selfhood. Some writers seem to me to be most aware that Asian America is not a “nation” and that the nation they are most determined to affect, indeed transform, is the United States, in a vision which includes Asian America, in order that fresh immigrants and nativists of long standing alike might perhaps understand that being “American” ought not be restricted by race. That is, even sometimes-so-called Asian American cultural nationalists seek not sovereignty but recognition of Asian Americans’ historical rights in America. Whether or not it, like a movement for Native Hawaiian sovereignty, can also be called “nationalist,” this continental Asian American drive for recognition of these voices in American literature signifies the emergence of a literature out from under an Anglo-American colonialism. It is a burgeoning literature full of self-consciousness about individual and collective identities, still bearing marks of exploitation by and through inequalities of gender and race, even after class and class differences seem to have ceased to be an issue for now because of a predominance in it of middle-class assumptions and dreams. This would mean that the “nation” assumed in Asian American literature is an ideal of “America”—precisely as in Carlos Bulosan’s classic Filipino American, migrant-labor novel of exile, America Is in the Heart—and it is an “America” where power or potentiality, citizenship, and equality are democratic rights not determined by race, gender, age, and other attributes that are ordinarily outside anyone’s choice. I do not think Asian American literature is alone among “minority” literatures in assuming this cluster of ideals, a yet unrealized postcolonial “nation” to which, with their visions, certain authors of this and other literatures already belong. But this affirmation of “America,” occurring even in works of Asian American literature most critical of acts of the United States, such as John Okada’s No-No Boy, when combined with historical circumstances, also tends to set Asian American literature and communities apart from other “minority” literatures and communities in a way that has been divisive and should not be: among America’s peoples of color, it is mainly Asian Americans who are generally distinguished by their having come to the United States by choosing to subject themselves to American rule and by passing the legacies of this choice down to the American-born generations. In this context, the idea that Asian American literature is emerging as a “postcolonial,” revolutionary or postrevolutionary phenomenon is inconceivable, for given a (mis)reading

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of the evidence, is it not the Asian’s will and nature to be colonized, as the immigrant American by choice, despite the fact that David Henry Hwang tries to destroy this idea of the naturally yielding Asian in his M. Butterfly? All the more, then, to counteract this misreading, we have to understand how the “America” envisioned in some works of Asian American literature is not America as it is, but a utopian “postcolonial America” that may be seen, through fictions, as emerging from an actual, still colonial America. It used to be a prevalent stereotype about Asians in America that the opposite was the case—that Asians came willingly, but only to return home to Asia rich. That stereotype was used to condemn Asian immigrants, settlers, for not truly being committed and responsible to this land and for being unassimilable in any case. Now, however, the settlement of Asians in America and the growing awareness that these peoples are here to stay are sometimes taken as signs that they are sellouts, mimicking Europeans, the other racial group who supposedly followed the myth of the American Dream to these shores. Even while opposing such generalizations, Asian American literature has gone quite far to promote identification with America, or with a better America. And this brings me back to particulars of the beginning of this chapter, to the questions that need to be addressed concerning indigenous peoples, expressly in connection with constructs of Asian American literature. How can the ideas of a “better America” be reconciled with concepts of postcolonial agency and its foundation—as I have been treating it in this instance—upon a liberation from colonization? In the main, whether in Hawai‘i or on the continent, is Asian American literature of the coming decades to support or perhaps improve the nation, the United States, at the expense of others colonized? Occasionally I have received responses to my comments about Asian American and Native Hawaiian relations that isolate these concerns out there in the middle of the Pacific—literally isolated incidents peripheral to Asian American concerns. My point, however, is that these concerns apply throughout America when the question asked of me and my colleagues about postcolonialism stir up questions about the nation or nations implicit or assumed in Asian American and other ethnic literary studies nationwide. The inquiry prompting this discussion of postcolonialism and ethnic literatures brings certain bases and contours of Asian American literature into prominence, and I find myself repeating a question. What liberation from colonialism—for anyone, from whatever sites of oppression—is there when indigenous peoples of these lands are still colonized?

No t e s 1. Conversation with McGregor, October 1992. The original version of this chapter was presented at the annual convention of the American Studies Association,

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Costa Mesa, California, November 1992, in the session titled “American Literary History as a Postcolonial Phenomenon.” For a critique of the ongoing colonization of Hawai‘i by the United States, see Trask 1993. 2. The term “Asian/Pacific American” configures many differing ethnic groups into a political entity, a conceptualized coalition. Political agendas of constituent groups in the category continually merge and diverge, changing the category, so that currently, what two decades ago was envisioned—hopefully—to be an alliance of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders does not hold. My discussion ref lects this divergence and certain comparisons it opens among Native Hawaiian, Hawaii’s Asian American, and continental Asian American literatures. For a treatment of the development of the panethnic concept “Asian American,” see Espiritu 1992. 3. These changes, both distinctive to and resulting from the social and natural environments of American settings (of time, place, history) have often been considered central to defining and promoting America and the United States’ strength and position in the world, under theories and practices of “American exceptionalism” especially in the four decades of the Cold War. The concept of “exceptionalism” in this sense, although not for purposes of promoting the power of the American nation in the world, may be basic to current images of Hawai‘i and of Asian Americans, the former promoted as a special destination and the latter characterized as a model minority. 4. For another case where the category of an Asian American “literature of immigration” is critiqued, see Campomanes (1992), who, against the predominance of this category, contrasts a Filipino American “literature of exile.” Also, Rafael (1993) details some of the colonial cultural and hegemonic strategies the United States employed in taking over the Philippines from which the “old-timers” departed. 5. Hawaiian historical and genealogical chants narrate and record some aspects of culture that pass on the empowering knowledge of descent, which both identifies particular individuals, each standing in unique relation to others, and narrates those relationships tieing individuals, by acts and events, to one another. In the twentieth century, it was a genre of seemingly ahistorical love lyric that selectively came to symbolize Hawai‘i in a tourist’s ears. This is one of the aspects of what I call a suppression of narrative, historical chants. 6. See Lili‘uokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. See also John Dominis Holt’s drama, Kaulana Na Pua (1974), and his historically based long poem, Hanai (1986); and Aldyth Morris’s drama, Lili‘uokalani (1993), for treatments of the life and illegal overthrow of Hawaii’s last monarch. 7. When orally delivering this paper, I presented “Kaulana nā Pua” by first playing some stanzas of Genoa Keawe’s singing of it with her group at the Waimea Music Festival. Her performance, its vocal exuberance, its pitches, instrumentals, tempo, and style (called “chalangalang” in echo of the lively strumming of the ukulele) epitomize the presentation of “Kaulana nā Pua” in the subversive guise of a party song. I next read translated stanzas, one of which I quote here, of lyrics that many in my audience found quite unexpected. 8. The United States Census Bureau recorded 211,014 Native Hawaiians in 1990. The figure includes “pure Hawaiians” and “part Hawaiians” who identified themselves as Hawaiian in the census. In that census the total population of Hawai‘i was 1,108,229.

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  9. In her novel, Ota narrates the plantation owner’s rape of a Japanese housemaid, chosen for her duties and victimization because of her looks (46). Theories and rationalizations of physique and physical abilities in connection with race supported the selection of laborers imported to Hawai‘i and its plantations. 10. Chin’s comments about the value of Hawaii’s pidgin and Creole occur for me in a long-standing conversation with him, speaking with Hawai‘i Creole writers such as Milton Murayama and Darrell H.Y. Lum in mind, going back to 1976. 11. See Hamasaki, whose thesis and literary activities offer materials and analyses related to postcolonial studies of Pacific Island literatures, distinct from immigrant-based approaches. 12. For comparisons that highlight, by contrast, a concern with this dual “Asian American” identity, consider the popular novel, Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, a Japanese woman—that is, a member of the racial and ethnic majority group in her nation. In Kitchen here is no emphasis on matters of racial and ethnic hierarchies or resistance against them. The fact that the characters cook and eat foods of different international derivations does not signify that their identities are fragmented. See, too, Sara Suleri’s autobiography, Meatless Days (1989), for what is simultaneously a high degree of consciousness of constructs of race and ethnicity and a high awareness and questioning of how her multiplicity of identities relates to the postcolonial forging of a new nation, Pakistan. 13. I have never been able to find the poem in print, so I paraphrase it from where I have heard it, on the soundtrack of Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue, a film by Curtis Choy about Chinatown in San Francisco.

Wor k s Ci t e d Alexander, Meena. 1991. Nampally Road. San Francisco: Mercury House. Bacho, Peter. 1991. Cebu. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. Bulosan, Carlos. 1946/1973. America Is in the Heart. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. Campomanes, Oscar V. 1992. “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 49–78. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. Chin, Frank. 1991. Donald Duk. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Choy, Curtis. 1976. Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue. Film. Oakland: Chonk Moonhunter. Elbert, Samuel H., and Noelani Mahoe, eds. 1970. Nā Mele o Hawai‘i Nei: 101 Hawaiian Songs. Honolulu: Univ. Hawai‘i Press. Espiritu, Yen Le. 1992. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. Gonzalez, N.V.M. 1993. “The Popcorn Man.” In The Bread of Salt and Other Stories, 136–50. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. Hagedorn, Jessica. 1990. Dogeaters. New York: Pantheon Books. Hamasaki, Richard. 1989. “Singing in Their Genealogical Trees: The Emergence of Contemporary Hawaiian Poetry in English—Dana Naone Hall, Wayne Kaumuali’i Westlake, Joseph P. Balaz.” M.A. thesis, Univ. of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Holt, John Dominis. 1974. Kaulana Na Pua, Famous Are the Flowers: Queen Liliuokalani and the Throne of Hawaii: A Play in Three Acts. Honolulu: Topgallant Publishing. ———. 1986. Hanai: A Poem for Queen Liliuokalani. Honolulu: Topgallant Publishing. Hwang, David Henry. 1988. M. Butterfly. New York: Penguin.

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Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1976. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf. ———. 1989. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Knopf. Leong, George. 1976. [“Are You a Chinese, or Are You a Chinaman?”] Text from film by Curtis Choy, Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue. Oakland, CA: Chonk Moonhunter. Lili‘uokalani. 1898/1986. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Lum, Darrell H.Y. 1972/1986. “Primo Doesn’t Take Back Bottles Anymore.” Reprinted in The Best of Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly, ed. Eric Chock and Darrell H. Y. Lum, 184–8. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press. ———. 1980/1986. “Beer Can Hat.” Reprinted in The Best of Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly, ed. Eric Chock and Darrell H.Y. Lum, 175–83. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press. Morris, Aldyth. 1993. Lili‘uokalani. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press. Murayama, Milton. 1975/1988. All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press. Okada, John. 1957/1979. No-No Boy. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. Ota, Shelley Ayame Nishimura. 1951. Upon Their Shoulders. New York: Exposition Press. Rafael, Vicente L. 1993. “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Philippines.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 185–218. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Rosca, Ninotchka. 1988. State of War. New York: Simon and Schuster. Prendergast, Helen Wright. 1893/1970. “Kaulana na Pua.” In Nā Mele o Hawai‘i Nei: 101 Hawaiian Songs, ed. Samuel H. Elbert and Noelani Mahoe, 62–4. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press. Skinner, Michelle Cruz. 1988. Balikbayan: A Filipino Homecoming. Honolulu: Bess Press. Song, Cathy. 1983. Picture Bride. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Suleri, Sara. 1989. Meatless Days. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Sumida, Stephen H. 1991. And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. ———. 1992. “Sense of Place, History, and the Concept of the ‘Local’ in Hawaii’s Asian/Pacific Literatures.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 215–37. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam. Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1993. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. 1991. “Parts.” In Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women, ed. Juliet S. Kono and Cathy Song, 26–33. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press. Yoshimoto, Banana. 1988/1994. Kitchen. Trans. Megan Backus. New York: Washington Square Press.

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ike a growing number of contemporary writers, Amy Tan crafts novels that resist facile and definitive classification into any of the conventional fictional genres. That the books are novels is widely acknowledged, although Tan has said that she intended The Joy Luck Club to be a collection of short stories. Readers and critics alike do, however, agree that Tan’s work incorporates or echoes other genres including nonfiction and poetry. In fact, a significant source of the charm and artistry of the three Tan novels is their shape as fictional narratives that embrace elements of biography and autobiography, history and mythology, folk tale and Asian talk-story, personal reminiscence and memoir. Tan’s novels reify and reinterpret traditional genres by casting them in a variety of modes—realistic, comic, tragic, tragicomic, allegorical, fantastic, naturalistic, and heroic—that metamorphose seamlessly into each other in Tan’s signature narrative style. Commentary is juxtaposed with memory, fable with history, pidgin English with California-speak, American culture with Chinese tradition, past with present in a collision of stories and voices and personalities, filtered through the point of view of an Asian American author who lives between worlds, who inhabits that border country known only to those in whose minds and sensibilities cultures clash and battle for dominance. Although Amy Tan’s prose style is distinctively her own, she also owes a literary debt to other writers who, like her, inhabit the

From Amy Tan: A Critical Companion, by E.D. Huntley, pp. 19–40. © 1998 by Greenwood Press.

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border country that shapes and inspires so many minority writers—writers who derive their voices and narrative structures from their experiences in the neighborhoods of America’s diaspora cultures.

A si a n A mer ic a n L i t er at u r e: A D ef in i t ion In 1982, Elaine Kim’s ground-breaking study, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Social Context, essentially brought an entire body of little known literature into the American literary consciousness, and helped Asian American literature gain recognition as a significant body of writing with both a “new tradition” of literary creation and a discernible—and very fluid—canon. In her work, Kim defined Asian American literature as “published creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent” (xi). Although that definition lost its currency as immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and other Asian countries began to make their homes in the United States and to write about their experiences, one crucial element of Kim’s definition still holds true. Asian American literature is the creative work of writers of Asian descent who identify themselves as Americans and who view their own experiences and the world through the dual lenses of their American identities and their ethnic roots. More specifically, Asian American literature “elucidates the social history of Asians in the United States” (xiii). Although, as Kim points out, Asian American literature “shares with most other literature thematic concerns such as love, desire for personal freedom and acceptance, and struggles against oppression and injustice” (xii–xiii), this body of literature also is the product of other distinctive cultural forces. Like African American writing, fiction, poetry, and drama by Asian Americans is shaped by racism—both overt and disguised—and its corollaries, prejudice and discrimination. Moreover, for most Asian American writers, the Old Country and its culture are neither ancient nor buried history but very much alive and integral to the present, either in their own lives or in those of their parents and grandparents. The immigrant experience looms large in the writing of Asian Americans, and with that experience comes questions about marginality and life on the border, as well as explorations of issues of biculturalism and language, and decisions about identity. The A si a n L i t er at u r e Tr a di t ion The history of Asian Americans goes back to the nineteenth century when thousands of men left their families and homes in China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines to seek their fortunes in the United States, a country that the Chinese referred to as gum san or “the Gold Mountain.” Seeking opportunity and possibly wealth, these men found ready work on the railroad, in gold- and silver-mining towns, and in lumber camps in the Western

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United States, industriously setting about making lives for themselves and for the picture brides from China and Japan who eventually traveled to the United States to marry men they had never met. The earliest official immigrant arrivals seem to have been men from Guangdong Province in China, although there exist records of Chinese sailors who stopped briefly in Baltimore in the late eighteenth century. Perhaps because they were first to arrive, the Chinese formed the largest Asian immigrant group, and they became the first Asians to experience institutionalized discrimination when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed by Congress, barring the majority of Chinese from entering the United States. The only exceptions to the ban were businessmen, diplomats, teachers, and students. When the law expired, it was renewed for another decade. Similar laws passed in 1902 and 1904, made the Chinese exclusion permanent, and Chinese who were already in the United States not only were denied citizenship but also were abused, publicly denounced in the press and from the pulpit, vilified, and physically attacked and even killed. Not until 1943 was exclusion legally ended with the passage of the Magnuson Act, which allowed 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States legally each year and gave Chinese the privilege of earning citizenship through naturalization. The older generation that is portrayed in Amy Tan’s novels represents that group of new Chinese immigrants—especially the women who had long been denied entry—who entered the United States after the war in the years immediately following the Magnuson Act. Not surprisingly, Asian immigrants—whose straight black hair and yellow-brown skin made them look different and who spoke languages that had no relation to Indo-European—seemed exotic and thus oddly fascinating to most Americans who were of European ancestry. Consequently, a number of stereotypical Asian characters became fixtures in certain forms of popular entertainment and literature. Racist images—the result of fear, ignorance, and xenophobia—were dominant, disseminated, and encouraged in a culture that feared that the increasing numbers of Chinese laborers, who were willing to work long hours at difficult tasks for low wages, posed a threat to employment opportunities for white men. Many of these fictional Asians were “inscrutable,” humorlessly industrious, humble, patient, and inclined to say “Ah so” in response to nearly any comment or question that they presumably did not understand. The few who differed were aristocratic mandarins whose haughty demeanor and elegant carriage hinted at long acquaintance with a more ceremonious way of life in a mythical Old China. For decades, Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Anna May Wong were the only Asians that many Americans had ever encountered, and their images remained indelibly etched into the American imagination and popular culture until well into the twentieth century.

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Despite the popularity of Asian stock characters on stage and screen and in fiction, literary work by authors of Asian ancestry, while not unknown, was not particularly accessible or available, and much of what was published rapidly went out of print. Before their arrival in the United States, most Asian immigrants had belonged to economic or social classes that, in their home countries, would have provided them with little or no exposure to education, and certainly not to art and poetry, although a few might have learned some rudimentary reading and writing. On their arrival in America, they found employment that required them to labor up to twenty hours each day, often seven days a week, focusing all of their energies on the struggle to earn livelihoods for themselves as well as for their families who remained in China or Japan or Korea. Ignored on the job, and left to socialize among themselves, few Asian immigrants learned much English beyond the few phrases that were essential to basic communication in their jobs. Overworked, underpaid, housed in barely habitable structures in labor camps, deprived of educational opportunities, and widely discriminated against, most Asian immigrants endured bleak and joyless existences that stifled all creative or imaginative impulses. Hence, the dearth of imaginative writing from the earliest Asian Americans. Early immigrant writing—when it existed at all—generally took the form of letters and journals in languages other than English. Creative efforts, which were rare, resulted mainly in unfamiliar poetic genres such as haiku or tanka. In a poignantly significant series of attempts at artistic expression, anonymous Chinese immigrants who were detained at the Angel Island Detention Center after the passage of the Exclusion Act scrawled poetry on the walls, giving vent to their emotions and disappointments (Lim and Ling 5). Although the Exclusion Act was directed at Chinese immigrants, negative Asian stereotypes were applied indiscriminately for decades not only to Chinese but also to Japanese, Korean, and Filipino immigrants. World War II changed those perceptions when international hostilities and American military losses in the Pacific unleashed waves of anti-Japanese propaganda, accompanied by sympathy for China and the Philippines. Because China was suffering the ravages of America’s enemy, the Japanese army, the Chinese in America found themselves suddenly accepted as members of a “model minority” that was praised for loyalty to the United States. In spite of the obstacles that barred the way to an Asian literary tradition in the United States, a few pieces of writing—chiefly memoirs—by Asians did appear as early as the end of the nineteenth century. The authors— mainly Chinese—had come to the United States as students, diplomats, or merchants, and were thus exempt from the Exclusion Act. Among the early books was a series of volumes by Western-educated young men of different countries, including two from China and Korea. These books, which were

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commissioned by the D. Lothrop Publishing Company, focused on elucidating for the benefit of the average American reader the cultural mores and traditional customs of the writers’ native countries. Other autobiographies, written in the 1930s and 1940s, attempted to perform much the same anthropological function—to describe and explain to Western readers the more attractive elements of life in China: dress, food, festivals, sports, rituals and ceremonies, leisure activities, and daily life. Common to all of these personal accounts of life in China was their limited focus on the experiences of a privileged class, the members of which had nothing in common with the hordes of Asian laborers who spent their days patiently enduring their work in America’s railroads, mines, and lumber camps. These early autobiographies and memoirs entranced American readers with descriptions of Chinese houses furnished with silk carpets and decorated with jade and porcelain artifacts, surrounded by gardens burgeoning with exotic blooms, meticulously maintained by happy, smiling servants who existed to make life easy and pleasant for the family who owned the house and land. Among the most widely read of the Asian memoir-writers between the wars were three immigrant Chinese authors whose work is representative of the style of immigrant writing that American readers—and critics and reviewers—found not only acceptable but also immensely fascinating. The most prolific of these writers was Lin Yutang, who churned out scores of essays that are most notable for their gentle self-deprecating humor—at the expense not only of the author but also of his fellow Chinese—and for their genially superficial treatment of cultural issues and questions. In a writing career that spanned about forty years, Lin Yutang claimed that his main purpose was to explain China and her people to Western readers. That he succeeded in reaching his target audience is evident in the popularity of his works, especially My Country and My People (1935), a book that went through four editions. The appeal of Lin’s book for the majority of readers from the 1930s through the 1960s lies in its validation of a popular myth—the stereotype of the gently bred Chinese as naive, unworldly people who desired nothing more than to focus their energies and time on artistic and literary activities, and who submitted docilely to colonial rule because they lacked the motivation to govern themselves. Not surprisingly, more than a few Asian American readers took exception to Lin Yutang’s portraits of China and the Chinese, claiming that Lin’s books privileged a tiny percentage of the Chinese population—the affluent classes—and ignored the reality of the impoverished majority from whose ranks most Chinese immigrants came. With a literary output that was far less voluminous than Lin Yutang’s, Pardee Lowe and Jade Snow Wong nevertheless published highly regarded and extremely well-received memoirs of their experiences as Chinese immigrants growing up in America. Like Lin Yutang’s books, Pardee Lowe’s

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Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945 and 1950) describe an ethnic world in which existing stereotypes are confirmed and sanitized. Both books provided the predominantly white readership of the war years with a picture of Chinese American life that was both intriguing and easy to accept as genuine because it conformed to the mythical China that already existed in the popular American consciousness. Because he had enlisted in the U.S. Army, Lowe was praised for his patriotism and for the message of accommodation and assimilation that he disseminated through his memoirs. As valuable as these works are in the history of Asian writing in the United States, they focus mainly on those immigrants whose antecedents had belonged to the privileged classes, and the prose and images appear dated to the late twentieth-century reader. The world of Lowe and Wong is populated with tea-sipping, poetry-writing aristocrats in beautiful, alien settings that exist only in a world that has receded into memory or survives only in the pages of forgotten volumes on neglected library shelves. After the successes of Lowe and Wong, little by Asian American writers appeared for over two decades. In 1963, however, Virginia Lee’s The House that Tai Ming Built revived the semi-autobiographical strain of immigrant writing popularized by Lowe and Wang. Like her predecessors, Lee portrayed a Chinese culture that did not represent the experience of the majority of Chinese Americans; nevertheless, like those earlier writers, Lee is important in the history of Asian American literary production. In their introduction to the first anthology of Asian American writing, Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas comment on the work of Lowe, Wong, and Lee, which they describe as autobiographical and suggestive of the Chinese culture described in the connoisseurs’ manuals of Chinese jade or oolong tea, and the stereotype of the Chinese immigrant, either withdrawn and totally Chinese, or quietly assimilated and unobtrusively American. (10)

Hsu and Palubinskas also caution against dismissing those early memoirs as irrelevant, pointing out that they have value for the student of Asian American literature. They assert that the three volumes of memoirs have a genuine claim to be considered landmarks in the development of a literary tradition by Asian Americans because “the authors wrote about the Chinese in America as they saw and understood them.” Hsu and Palubinskas go on to issue a challenge: “Other Chinese-American writers, if they have different perceptions, should come forth with their stories” (10). Less than a decade after the publication of Lee’s book, a vocal group of those “other . . . writers” emerged onto the American literary scene. But before they did so, their

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work was anticipated by Louis Chu whose 1961 novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea, first articulated some of the major concerns that would inform the work of later Asian writers. Eat a Bowl of Tea is remarkable for its early treatment of the debilitating effects of racism and the patriarchal culture in Asian American communities. Set in 1947, two years after the War Bride Act of 1945 opened U.S. immigration to Chinese women, the novel examines the conflict between old-world patriarchal immigrant elders and their American-born children, a struggle that Ruth Hsiao describes as involving “emotionally damaged sons and daughters locked in battles of independence with their fathers or with the tradition that gives the fathers power” (54). Louis Chu foregrounds a nascent antipatriarchal movement through a complicated plot that portrays the traditional authoritarian father as a mere parody of the traditional patriarch. Hsiao points out that many consider Chu to be “a herald of the new Asian American sensibility” (153), although she criticizes his novel for suggesting in the end that patriarchy is an incurable condition in bicultural Asian communities and for positing “the birth of a new age patriarchy” (152). Nonetheless, it is clear that Chu does indeed prefigure not only the work of the writer-activists who would follow him in the next decade, but also the even more significant explosion of writing by Asian women that would mark the 1980s and 1990s. The new Asian American writers of the 1970s were neither completely Asian nor definitively Western, but considered themselves to be members of a distinct new culture or set of cultures. Frank Chin, one of the new writers, articulated his position vis-à-vis the dominant landscape into which he was expected to assimilate by explaining the cultural force behind his writing: The sensibility, the kind of sensibility that is neither Chinese of China nor white-American. The sensibility derived from the peculiar experience of a Chinese born in this country some thirty years ago, with all the stigmas attached to his race, but felt by himself alone as an individual human being. (quoted in Hsu and Palubinskas 47)

The “sensibility” of which Chin speaks was shared by his peers, all of whom had grown up in a kind of ethnic limbo, belonging by heritage to a culture and homeland in which they were strangers, yet living and maturing in a culture that persisted in viewing them as Other, as alien and marginal. These writers incorporated their paradoxical condition—they were bicultural yet estranged from both cultures—into their poetry, fiction, and drama, producing a body of work that reflected a new Asian American voice that refused to mythologize ethnic origins or perpetuate stereotypes,

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yet avoided complete assimilation and in fact embraced difference on its own terms. For many of these writers, a crucial initiative of the decade was the attempt to redefine Asian American manhood and to counteract through their published writing what they perceived to have been the progressive cultural and psychological emasculation of the Asian male by the dominant culture. Central to the activity of the 1970s was the work of a group called the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP) whose members—Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Nathan Lee, Benjamin R. Tong, and Shawn Hsu Wong—actively sought publishing venues and performance spaces for the works of Asian American writers, created a collection of materials about those writers, found support for reissuing out-of-print works by the earliest Asian American writers, and sponsored literary conferences that focused on literary texts by Asian Americans. In addition, several valuable anthologies of writing by Asian Americans were published in the 1970s. The three best known of these anthologies are Asian American Authors (1972), edited by Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas; Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), edited by CARP members Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong; and Asian American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974), edited by David Hsin-fu Wand. Although these anthologies made some Asian writing more accessible to larger numbers of readers, Asian American literature had its first significant impact on the popular American consciousness in 1976 when Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior, her rivetingly powerful memoir about growing up Chinese in America. Kingston’s book was wellreceived in literary circles, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction of 1976, and paved the way for the young writers of the next decade to prove conclusively that the Asian American voice had a powerful resonance far beyond Chinatown or Little Tokyo or the neighborhood enclaves of Korean or Filipino immigrants. Unfortunately, Kingston was condemned by some Asian American writers who accused her of trying to “cash in” on the “feminist fad,” of writing only for financial gain by creating “white-pleasing autobiography passing for pop cultural anthropology” (Kim 198). However, Kingston’s detractors, although articulate and vocal, are few—limited mainly to a few male writers of Asian descent who have continued to argue that the tremendous sales and widespread popularity enjoyed by Asian American women writers undermines the masculinity of their male colleagues. Kingston ushered in the 1980s with China Men (1980), winning the American Book Award. During that decade, Asian American writers earned recognition for the excellence and importance of their work. Among poets, Cathy Song won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for Picture

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Bride in 1982, Garrett Hongo was awarded the Lamont Poetry prize of the Academy of American Poets in 1987, and Li-Young Lee was invited to read his poetry on National Public Radio. A new generation of playwrights graced the American stage: Genny Lim’s Island (1985) was featured on National Public Television, and David Henry Hwang entranced Broadway audiences and won several Tony Awards for M. Butterfly in 1988. Into the growing market for and interest in Asian American writing came Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club in 1989. The publication of that novel helped to catapult Asian American fiction into the literary mainstream when it appeared on national bestseller lists and became a featured book-club selection. By the end of the decade, many writers, including David Mura, Jessica Hagedorn, Philip Kan Gotanda, Ping Chong, Gish Jen, and Cynthia Kadohata discovered their work—along with that of Kingston and Tan—in textbook anthologies and on required reading lists for literature courses. Years later, the final pieces of evidence that Asian American writing has entrenched itself in the popular mind are the popular film versions of works by writers as diverse as Tan and Hwang, and memoir-writer Le-Ly Hayslip. Partly because of the volume of their work and certainly because they write about subjects that resonate with so many mainstream readers, Chinese American women writers have been largely but inadvertently responsible for the new and sudden popularity of Asian American writing, a development that is made more startling because Chinese women were an almost invisible minority in American society until the early 1950s. Because most of them were kept out of the United States by laws specifically excluding Chinese women (including those who were married to American-born Chinese men) from immigration quotas, these women were outnumbered by Chinese men by approximately twenty to one. Given those numbers, we should not be surprised at the relatively small number of Chinese women writers in the first half of the twentieth century—in fact, we should be amazed that so many of the significant early Chinese American writers were women.

Chine se A mer ic a n Wome n Wr i t er s The earliest successful Chinese American women authors were the Eurasian sisters, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, daughters of an English artist and his Chinese wife. Although born in England, both Edith and Winnifred emigrated to the United States as adults, and it was as Americans that they began their writing careers. Despite their Caucasian features, the Eaton sisters used Asian pseudonyms: Edith became Sui Sin Far, Cantonese for “Narcissus,” and Winnifred became the faux-Japanese Onoto Watanna. The sisters’ choices are intriguing, particularly because Edith decided to emphasize their Chinese heritage despite the Chinese Exclusion Act and widespread prejudice against the Chinese, while Winnifred, by contrast,

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assumed the more acceptable Japanese identity. During the decades before World War II, the Japanese enjoyed widespread respect in the United States, and Winnifred enhanced the prestige of her assumed identity by claiming that her mother belonged to a noble Japanese family from Nagasaki. The Eaton sisters’ writing paralleled their pseudonymous identities. As Sui Sin Far, Edith wrote in defense of the much maligned Chinese, taking up the fight against racism and injustice, attempting in her short stories to portray Chinese characters sympathetically and without resorting to prevalent stereotypes. Her ironic examinations of American culture are not limited to the plight of the Chinese immigrant; she also focuses attention on prejudice based on gender and class, or on that cultural phenomenon that she exemplified—the individual of mixed heritage who belongs neither to one culture nor to the other. Winnifred’s career was markedly different from that of her sister. Onoto Watanna’s “Japanese novels” were romances set in exotic Orientalized landscapes, featuring delicate, winsome Japanese women and influential powerful men—often white men—to whom the heroine must appeal for help or protection. Unlike Edith who used her pen as a weapon of protest, Winnifred’s writing foregrounded and supported the status quo with its prejudices and cultural assumptions. So popular were Onoto Watanna’s novels that they were translated into several European languages and went through several printings. They were adapted for the stage as well, and Winnifred eventually moved on to a highly successful career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed American readers’ fascination with things Japanese, and created a new acceptance of the Chinese who were suddenly recognized as fellow victims of Japan’s aggression. Several women—immigrants, American-born Chinese, American-raised Chinese—wrote novels and personal accounts about the devastating effects of the war on China, and about the strength and resilience of the Chinese people. Amy Ling points out that much of the war literature has a specifically defined purpose: “demonstration to the United States, a country superior in arms and supplies, that China was a worthy ally” (“Chinese American” 227). Among these writers were the three daughters of Lin Yutang—Adet and Anor, both of whom would have literary careers, and Mei-mei, the youngest and most Americanized. Also beginning their writing careers with personal accounts of the war were Han Suyin, Mai-mai Sze, and Helena Kuo. Although the war pieces received attention from readers who were chiefly concerned with discovering how the war was affecting some of America’s Asian friends, it was Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter that garnered the popularity and wide readership that the other works did not. When the Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, the increase in Chinese emigrating to the United States included significant numbers of women, and, as a result, the number of Chinese American women writers

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increased. Amy Ling and Elaine Kim, among others, have pointed out that despite the growing numbers of writers, Asian Americans’ novels continued for a time to cater to the tastes of the predominantly white readership, looking with polite disfavor on Asian culture and enthusiastically embracing the American lifestyle. There are two interesting exceptions to the tendency among early Asian writers in America to apologize for their ethnic backgrounds while commenting approvingly on Western culture. Han Suyin and Chuang Hua deserve mention for unapologetically examining the precarious balancing act performed by not only individuals who have both Asian and European or American blood but also Asians who are involved in interracial relationships. Herself of mixed blood, Han Suyin is a prolific writer with nearly two dozen titles—written over nearly half a century—in her oeuvre. Central to her most powerful novels are the problematic relationships between couples of different—and often antagonistic—ethnic and cultural backgrounds; and she underscores the tensions in such relationships by setting her novels in inherently contested territory that is unfamiliar to most of her readers. In Han Suyin’s fiction, the cultural clashes involve Eurasian, American, Chinese, English, and Indian characters in settings as geographically diverse as Nepal, China under communism, and Hong Kong. Another writer, Chuang Hua, focuses her experimental novel, Crossings (1968), on life in that border country between cultures. Her protagonist, a Chinese woman who has grown up in England and the United States and spends time in France, falls in love with a European journalist, and their doomed affair is played out against the backdrop of the Korean War, which pits China and America against each other. Formally and structurally, Hua’s novel is a forerunner of Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Amy Tan’s multiple genre approach to storytelling. In Crossings, the line of the narrative is ruptured time and again by autobiographical reminiscences, biographical elements, recounted dreams and nightmares, interior monologues, resulting in what Amy Ling calls “a highly original expression of the Chinese American hyphenated condition” (235). As noted earlier, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior took the American literary establishment as well as the reading public by surprise in 1975. In her text—which has been labeled variously talk-story memoir, autobiography, biography, novel—Kingston rejects the traditional linear fictional narrative structure, privileging instead a polyvocal mosaic of genres and styles that work together by both completing and contradicting each other, thus illustrating through content as well as form the collision between distinct and complex cultures. Writing about Kingston’s work as the beginning of a new tradition in Asian American writing, Marlene Goldman points out that “Kingston’s novel constitutes an alternative system for organizing experience, an activity directly related to the inscription of identity” (225). Kingston

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herself asserts that although Woman Warrior privileges women’s circular narratives based on cultural memory and “old myths,” the work itself is “much more American than Chinese” with characters who are “American people” (179). Indeed, the central theme in all of Kingston’s writing is the attempt to sort out what being Chinese American means through the exploration of her experiences as an American-born child of immigrant parents. By the time Amy Tan published her first novel, Maxine Hong Kingston had already introduced the general reading public to the talk-story narrative style. With her multiperspectival text, Tan was not only working in the traditions of her Chinese heritage and her Western training, but she also was following in the literary footsteps of a significant and powerful Asian American writer who had already begun to mine the rich vein of oral and written literary genres and traditions that exists within America’s immigrant communities.

A m y Ta n ’s Nov e l s As a writer whose background includes Chinese tradition, Western Protestantism, American and Swiss education, experience in business writing, extensive readings in contemporary fiction, but more importantly the hyphenated condition common to all Americans of recent ethnic derivation, Amy Tan shares a number of common concerns and themes with other Asian American writers. Like them, she writes about the liminal identity of the hyphenated American, about the cultural chasms between immigrant parents and their American-born offspring and the linguistic gaps between generations, and finally about the need to discover a usable and recognizable past. But she does not write exclusively about the Asian experience, nor is her style specifically and wholly Asian despite its frequent allusions to traditional Chinese folk genres and its borrowings from the talk-story tradition. Writing in an experimental tradition that includes the works of James Joyce and William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich and Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan constructs novels that explore critical issues by presenting multiple perspectives in parallel and intersecting narratives. Tan’s three novels—The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses—are textual collages, palimpsest narratives, stories that interrupt traditional linear narrative with interpolations of myth and fable, poetry and chant, autobiography and talk-story, dreams, imaginings, and visionary tales. Like Kingston, Tan employs her own brand of Chinese traditional talkstory as a vehicle for exploring the lives of the mothers and daughters at the center of her novels. In an essay about Kingston and the Chinese oral tradition, Linda Ching Sledge provides a useful definition of talk-story: a conservative, communal folk art by and for the common people, performed in the various dialects of diverse ethnic enclaves and

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never intended for the ears of non-Chinese. Because it served to redefine an embattled immigrant culture by providing its members immediate, ceremonial access to ancient lore, talk story retained the structures of Chinese oral wisdom (parables, proverbs, formulaic description, heroic biography, casuistical dialogue) long after other old-country traditions had died. (143)

In Tan’s novels, talk-story is the narrative strategy for those characters whose ties to Chinese tradition remain strong. In their attempts to explain their lives to their daughters, the mothers in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife and Kwan in The Hundred Secret Senses draw on traditional oral forms to shape their stories and to disguise the urgency and seriousness with which they are attempting to transmit to their daughters (or a much younger sister in Kwan’s case) the remnants of a culture that is fading even from their own lives. Evidence of the fragility of that culture lies not only in the jarring intrusions of Americanisms into the Chinese-English patois of the older generation, but more significantly in the fact that the stories of the younger generation are devoid of all but the faintest traces of an old world’s oral literature. Those traces consist mainly of wispy recollections of stories and admonitory maxims heard in childhood and forgotten long since. Talk-story enables women who have been socialized into silence for most of their lives—the Joy Luck mothers, for instance—to reconfigure the events of those lives into acceptable public utterances: painful experiences are recast in the language of folk tale; cautionary reminders become gnomic phrases; real life takes on the contours of myth. More significantly, the act of performing talk-story allows the storyteller to retain a comfortable distance between herself and her subject as well as between herself and her audience. Thus, the storyteller manages in some fashion to maintain the silence to which she is accustomed, as well as to speak out and share with others the important stories that have shaped her into the person that she is. For example Winnie Louie, who has hugged her dark secret to herself for a lifetime, acquires a strategy for unburdening herself of that secret, letting go of the past and finally gaining closure on the most painful period of her long eventful life. Like the majority of American writers of recent immigrant ancestry, Amy Tan has a natural affinity for issues that are central to the lives of hyphenated Americans who must deal daily with several cross-cultural sets of expectations and experiences. In her work, Tan raises questions about the relationship between ethnicity, difference, gender, and identity. She writes about the diaspora culture as well as the many facets of biculturalism: cultural dislocation; the problems and challenges of integrating two cultures; intergenerational struggles within immigrant families; the conflict between acculturation and adherence to an ancestral tradition, and between

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assimilation and parochialism. She writes about the immigrant—and the second-generation American—as the embodiment of contested territory, cultural and political crossings, and questions of personal and national loyalties. Furthermore, Tan explores through her fiction the knotty issues of ethnic identity, more specifically the paradoxical nature of ethnic-American identity and biracial identity. We should note, however, that Amy Tan does not confine herself to interrogations of the lives of ethnic Americans. In truth, although her fictional landscape is the geography of the immigrant her novels explore issues of familiar and universal interest: the common human struggle to establish a distinct identity; the search for roots and family connections; the tensions and bonds between generations, and related to that issue, the problematic yet richly influential relationship between mothers and daughters; the shape of women’s lives in patriarchal cultures; and the need to connect past and present, present and future. Tan also writes about love and loss and redemption, about individuals coming to terms with the facts of their lives, and about the workings of fate in human existence. And in her novels, she celebrates bonding and connections, as well as family ties and friendships. Drawing from traditional Chinese culture as well as contemporary Asian American and Chinatown culture, Amy Tan employs culturally specific figurative language and symbolism to entice her readers into the dual worlds of her novels, inviting them to explore with her the thorny issues that inform and shape her characters’ lives. Through carefully deployed sensory stimuli—details, allusions, aural and visual motifs, image clusters, fragments of myth, linguistic wordplay—Tan alerts her readers to the multiple layers of meaning that reside in her prose. Among the most prevalent symbols, motifs, and archetypes in Tan’s fiction are dreams, food, and clothing—and occupying an important position (albeit not always the center) in each novel is the crone, or wise older woman. Dreams constitute a dominant motif in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, and become a major structural component in The Hundred Secret Senses. In Tan’s novels, dreams are the connections between the conscious life and the unconscious, the bridges between worlds, the gateways to the self, and the representatives of deeply buried fears and personal monsters. In The Joy Luck Club, before she goes to China, June dreams repeatedly of arriving in Shanghai, telling her half-sisters that their mother is dead, and watching them run away from her in grief and anger. Dreams are also messages from the soul: ironic cautions against wishing for too much, or strategies for liberating the self and gaining happiness. As a young wife, Lindo Jong in The Joy Luck Club describes to her credulous in-laws a dream that she claims has revealed to her the inevitable tragedy that must come of her marriage. The terrified in-laws, anxious to protect their son, immediately pay Lindo

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for a divorce, hoping that by doing so, they can avert disaster. In The Hundred Secret Senses, Tan uses dreams to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, even suggesting that dreams represent memories of other lives in other places. Having listened for years to Kwan’s stories in that drowsy period that comes just before true sleep, Olivia can no longer distinguish dream from story. As a child, Olivia “thought everyone remembered dreams as other lives, other selves” (28), and even after she goes to college, the dreams stay with her, indelibly etched into her imagination, shaping her life and her relationships. Because dreams are so important in Tan’s own life, some of her more memorable dreams, as well as those of her close friends, have inevitably been transmuted into fiction in the novels. A friend who dreamed of his own violent death repeatedly just before it became a tragic reality has been reincarnated in The Kitchen God’s Wife as Gan, a young pilot who dreams about his own impending demise. Old Mr. Chou, a malevolent guardian of the dream world and the central figure in Amy Tan’s childhood nightmares and fears, appears in The Joy Luck Club in Rose Hsu Jordan’s recollections of dreams that frightened her so badly when she was a child that she tried hard not to fall asleep. Food in Tan’s three novels performs two basic functions: the realistic and the narrative. Through the realistic function, references to food situate the novel in a specific historical or seasonal time, or in an identifiable geographical or physical location. Tan, in The Hundred Secret Senses, neatly evokes an early morning market in Guilin by describing baskets of citrus fruit, dried beans, teas, chilis, food vendors frying pancakes in hot oil, live poultry in cages. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, accounts of the lavish war-time meals prepared by Weili for her husband and his friends ironically call attention to the food shortages and starvation elsewhere in war-torn China. References to food also serve as narrative strategies. Celebratory feasts and special dinners bring characters together or introduce new characters, and they even create conflict or exacerbate existing tensions. The Joy Luck Club opens with the club members’ first dinner together after the death of Suyuan Woo. At the meal, Suyuan’s daughter June is introduced to the club as her mother’s replacement and to readers as the central figure in the novel’s framing narratives. After the meal, the aging club members drop a bombshell: they want June to go to China at their expense to find the half-sisters whom she has never met. The rest of the novel examines not only the motivations and hopes that have led the Joy Luck aunties to make this unusual request but also the emotions and insecurities that might lead June—or any of the other daughters—to refuse to go to China. Food also reveals a character’s state of mind. Visiting Olivia after she and Simon have agreed to a divorce, Kwan is flummoxed by the emptiness of Olivia’s refrigerator which contains only beer, pickles and other condiments, but no bread or

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meat or milk. The state of the refrigerator suggests that Olivia no longer cooks, and in fact has stopped having regular meals—quite possibly because she does not want to face the prospect of eating alone. Clothing in Tan’s novels has two major functions: to signify cultural confusions and collisions, and to signal concealment, subterfuge, or the performance of a feigned or manufactured identity. Characters who are unable to integrate their two cultures or who are experiencing some form of cultural dislocation tend to be recognizable in Tan’s novels by the way they dress. Suyuan Woo arrives in the United States with no luggage save one trunk full of fancy silk dresses that are completely inappropriate to her new life, and she must resort to wearing one of only two much-too-large hand-medown Western dresses. A photograph of Ying-ying St. Clair taken when she was released from Angel Island Immigration Station shows an Asian woman wearing a traditional ankle-length Chinese dress, oddly paired with a Westernized jacket constructed with padded shoulders, wide lapels, and large cloth buttons. The elements of Ying-ying’s costume clash, East against West, providing a visual representation of the conflict in Ying-ying’s own mind when she realizes that her husband has given her an American name and a new birth date. After years in America, Kwan still dresses like an immigrant. Annual family Christmas photographs show Kwan wearing bright summer clothes. “Everything about her is loud and clashing,” Olivia remarks, adding that Kwan has a penchant for peculiar color combinations (Secret Senses 20). More complex are the instances in which a character dresses to perform a false identity. Traveling with her mother to live in Tientsin with her mother’s protector, An-mei is startled one morning to find her mother dressed elaborately in Western clothing. An-mei, too, is hastily bundled into Western garb—a much-too-large ruffled white dress that resembles nothing she has ever worn. She later finds out that Wu Tsing, who owns the house where they will live, has a taste for imported luxuries “because foreigners had made him rich” (Joy Luck 223), and guesses eventually that her mother must wear the Western clothes to make Wu Tsing happy; by so doing, she will be able to keep her economic security. Jack Yee, likewise, has economic reasons for his masquerade—the overcoat that he finds, and wears as his own, contains money and immigration documents that enable him to travel to the United States. An-mei’s mother publicly performs the role and wears the costume of the fashionable young third wife (and wears her Chinese widow’s weeds in the privacy of her rooms) to ensure a secure financial future for her daughter; Jack, on the other hand, abandons his pregnant wife and infant daughter in China when he leaves to seek his fortune—and he is condemned to live the rest of his life under an assumed name. At the emotional center of Amy Tan’s novels is the archetypal older woman—the Crone or the Great Mother, as she sometimes is called—who

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embodies the history of a family or a people, and holds within herself the ancient wisdom and speech of her community. In myth and religion, as in folklore and popular culture, the Great Mother represents growth and fertility and nurturance, even as she also dominates and overwhelms, possesses and devours. The Joy Luck mothers have borne daughters, and invested in them all of the hopes and dreams that have propelled the older generation across an ocean to America. To give those daughters the best that the New World can offer, the mothers have sacrificed their youth and their homeland. And yet, the daughters see in their mothers not nurturing angels, only stern disciplinarians, domineering and possessive women who refuse to relinquish any maternal control although the daughters are adults with their own homes. Like the Joy Luck daughters, Pearl in The Kitchen God’s Wife resents her mother’s power over her and feels overwhelmed by her mother, despite the fact that for years they have lived some distance apart. Even The Hundred Secret Senses, in which the only mother is flighty Louise Laguni, has a Crone figure in Li Bin-bin, the aunt who raised Kwan after her mother died in childbirth. Tan’s Crones have had enormous influence on the women whom they have raised to adulthood, nurturing on the one hand and possessing on the other, encouraging and criticizing, giving love and withholding attention. The Joy Luck daughters and Kwan, now grown women, still carry in their psyches the rejections and hurts inflicted on them—they believe—by the women who dominated them as children. Despite her good life in America, Kwan has always resented the fact that Li Bin-bin sent her away from China without protest or regret; and Kwan is impelled to visit China to show Li Bin-bin that she has prospered. Significantly, the section of The Joy Luck Club in which daughters and mothers achieve the beginnings of reconciliation is called “Queen Mother of the Western Skies.” The title has enormous significance, suggesting as it does that the daughters no longer view their mothers as gorgons or harpies or devouring goddesses but rather as that most exalted of the Great Mother’s personas, the queen of heaven. The fictional landscape that is frequently referred to as “Amy Tan country” covers tremendous geographical territory over the span of decades and—in her third book—even centuries. In this landscape are played out the oppositions between East and West, the conflict between generations within a family, the clash between past and present. Tan’s American locations exist within finite boundaries, in small sections of Oakland and San Francisco that, despite their narrow borders, encompass within them a multitude of cultures, ethnicities, and identities. Constantly threatened by encroaching Americanization embodied in the younger generation of inhabitants, these landscapes are connected with, yet different from, ancestral locations in a distant homeland. The place of origin is always China, in fact, a variety of Chinas: a country torn by the nineteenth-century T’ai Ping Rebellion, a nation ravaged by the

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Japanese army, a feudally stratified society, a gracious and privileged existence behind walls, or a culture uneasily embracing European goods while striving to maintain a Chinese way of life. But Amy Tan country also is a landscape of the heart and the mind, and in Tan’s novels the interior setting is as important as the physical locations of the novel’s major events. Tan sets her novels within the circle of the Chinese American family and inside the minds and psyches of the family members; and she takes her readers into pre-Communist Chinese society in which the aristocratic family is the visible evidence of unwritten rules that require absolute filial piety, that sanction hierarchies based on gender and class, that condone concubinage and the virtual enslavement of women within arranged marriages, and that stress above everything else the importance of saving face rather than self. The interior landscapes are connected, for in Old China lie the seeds of the conflicts that threaten to rend the fragile bonds holding the immigrant family together; and only when the second generation recognizes and understands the ancestral landscape can the generational tensions be dissipated and replaced with genuine hope for a future that includes the family’s entire heritage.

A m y Ta n ’s Nov e l s a n d t he A si a n A mer ic a n L i t er a ry Ca non Despite frequently being labelled an Asian American writer, Tan contends that Asian American issues—particularly Chinese American life—are not the primary driving force behind her writing. “I don’t see myself writing about culture and the immigrant experience,” she argues. “That’s just part of the tapestry. What my books are about is relationships and family. I’ve had women come up to me and say they’ve felt the same way about their mothers, and they weren’t immigrants” (Schleier 3). During a public lecture at Barnard College in 1994, Tan told her audience of over a thousand listeners that the work of minority writers should not be labelled as ethnic literature because such labels prompt readers and critics to focus on the work solely as the manifestation of cultural or historical values or specific ethnic qualities. Tan suggested that literary works by minority writers be evaluated as literature rather than as cultural record (“Tan Argues Against Ethnic Literary Label”). Tan has spoken out elsewhere against the practice of ethnic labelling, maintaining that although Chinese culture forms the background and provides the settings for her novels, it is not necessarily what she writes about. After she published The Hundred Secret Senses, Tan was once again questioned about her popularity as well as her possible identity as a role model for Asian Americans. In her response, she reiterated her opinion that ethnic writing should not be confined by its writers’ geographical backgrounds:

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Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. Someone who writes fiction is not necessarily writing a depiction of any generalized group, they’re writing a very specific story. There’s also a danger in balkanizing literature, as if it should be read as sociology, or politics, or that it should answer questions like “What does The Hundred Secret Senses (boldface in original) have to teach us about Chinese culture?” As opposed to treating it as literature—as a story, language, memory. (“The Spirit Within”)

Protest though she will, the inescapable fact is that although Tan’s novels are indeed about universal concerns and commonly recognized themes, about relationships and familial bonds and self and identity, they also are about the members of an ethnic minority that has over a century or more developed a distinctive diaspora culture that exists within the larger framework of cultures that is known as the United States. Tan’s fiction is ethnic in the sense that it is the product of the imagination of an author who is a second-generation Chinese American, a writer who is interested in and well-informed about the cultural, geographical, and historical borders of her life and that of her immigrant parents. In giving a voice to the immigrant community, Tan speaks for and to that community, reflecting its traditions and cultural structures, and articulating its values and its concerns. Ultimately, we must say that Tan is an American novelist, and that the immigrant culture about which she writes is an important pattern in the great tapestry that is the United States, just as her novels are a strand in the web of twentieth-century American fiction. The fact that The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses have become popular bestsellers suggests that Tan’s fiction resonates for readers of all backgrounds; the proliferation of scholarly examinations of the novels points to the literary and cultural value of Tan’s work. Tan’s writing career still is relatively new, and for that reason, a definitive assessment of her contribution to American literature is difficult to accomplish; however, if the number of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, professional journal articles, and book chapters written about The Joy Luck Club and even The Kitchen God’s Wife is any gauge of literary merit, then Tan already has earned herself a berth in the canon of contemporary American literature. And certainly, The Joy Luck Club has become a staple of literature courses as well as conference papers and panel discussions. Tan’s novels have proven both their literary staying power as well as their broad appeal to a wide readership, and it seems fair to predict that Tan will have a place in American literary history, not as an ethnic writer, but as an American writer who illuminates brilliantly and sensitively a distinctive and colorful aspect of the American experience.

AMY LING

Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition Behind Maxine Hong Kingston

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riting is an act of self-assertion, self-revelation, and self-preservation. One writes out of a delight in one’s storytelling powers, out of a need to reveal and explain oneself, or from the desire to record and preserve experience. However, for women brought up in the old Chinese tradition that for eighteen hundred years codified their obedience and submission to the men in their lives—father, husband, son—a tradition that stressed female chastity, modesty, and restraint; that broke girls’ toes and bound their feet as an ideal of beauty; that sold daughters into slavery in times of hardship; that encouraged and honored widow suicides—any writing at all was unusual, even an act of rebellion. Working-class women did not have the education or leisure, and upper-class women were taught that writing was “an unwomanly occupation, destructive of one’s moral character, like acting” (Han Suyin, Destination 8; 1969). Furthermore, since it was the Chinese custom to leave the women at home when the men first immigrated, temporarily they thought, to the Gold Mountain to make their fortunes, the number of Chinese women in America was small. In 1852, for example, of the 11,794 Chinese in California, only 7 were women, and most of these were prostitutes. By the 1880s the ratio had risen to 1 woman for every 20 men (Hirata 226–28). Moreover, from 1924 to 1930, a law specifically prohibited Chinese women, including wives From Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, pp. 135–158. © 1999 by Oxford University Press.

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of American-born Chinese, from immigrating to this country. In 1930, the act was revised, and, for the next ten years, an average of 60 Chinese women entered the United States each year. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943, and the numbers of Chinese women in the United States did not approach equality with Chinese men until 1954. Thus it is not surprising that we have so little writing by Chinese American women; it is notable that we have so much. With the exception of Maxine Hong Kingston, most scholars of American literature are at a loss to name Chinese American women writers. Yet Kingston is not an isolated Athena (or Hua Mulan) springing full grown from Zeus’s (or Buddha’s) forehead. A line of Chinese American women writers dating back nearly a century preceded her. My term Chinese American is broadly inclusive, embracing people of full or half Chinese ancestry; American-born or naturalized immigrants; citizens and sojourners, who have published in the United States. Obviously, books written in Chinese by United States residents are also Chinese American, but since the Chinese language is accessible to so few Americans, this study will be limited to works in English and specifically to full-length works of prose. My definition will be stretched to include international figures like Han Suyin, now residing in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Lin Tai-yi, who lived in Hong Kong for many years, who may not consider themselves American and, in the case of the former, who may not even have lived any appreciable length of time in the United States. However, since they write in English and since their books are regularly published in this country, they certainly are addressing an American audience, and their voices, particularly Han Suyin’s, have been heard here and have had an impact. Finally, as Vladimir Nabokov is considered “American” enough to be included in American literature anthologies, so Han Suyin and Lin Tai-yi are included here. Using this definition, we find that the majority of Chinese American works are by immigrants and sojourners, daughters of diplomats and scholars, and those who have had contact with the West through missionaries or mission schools. For the immigrant, the very act of choosing to write in English, a second language, and thereby addressing a predominantly Caucasian audience is significant and colors the purpose and nature of the work. Though generalizations are always riddled with exceptions, we may say that immigrant and sojourner Chinese American writers, like Helena Kuo and Lin Tai-yi, seek primarily to explain and justify China and Chinese ways to the Western world. As their sensibilities were shaped in their homeland, they have what seems a stable, single center. Their upbringing, as Francis Hsu pointed out in his comparative study Americans and Chinese, gives them a strong group orientation, a concern for the good of the whole. Transplanted after their formative years, they see their role in the West as interpreters and

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ambassadors of good will and understanding for China; to borrow David Riesman’s term, they are “other-directed.” American-born Chinese American writers, like Kingston, however, tend to be more individualistic and to have an inward focus. Because they have grown up as a racial minority, imbibing the customs of two cultures, their centers are not stable and single. Their consciousness, as W. E. B. DuBois pointed out for African Americans, is double; their vision bifocal and fluctuating. Therefore, they look inward with an urgency to comprehend and balance the bicultural clashes they have known and must reconcile. That they write and publish is of course indicative of an awareness of an external world and a desire to communicate, but their initial impetus is primarily introspective. Their purpose is to explain themselves to themselves. Eurasians and Amerasians may be said to combine the characteristics of immigrants and American-born Chinese Americans. They may, as in the case of Han Suyin and Edith Eaton, identify so strongly with the Chinese side of their ancestry that they have all the fervor, and sometimes more, of the Chinese-formed immigrant instructing and explaining her homeland to outsiders. And yet, at times, like the American-born Chinese American, they also look within and express the conflicts of the two cultures, in their cases particularly poignant, when warring factions are represented by the two heritages that are their own. Apart from the sociological and psychological effects of birth and upbringing on the sense of self, and purpose in writing in relation to self or other, the highly diverse fifteen writers in this study may be roughly placed into three thematic or formal categories: delight in storytelling often mingled with nostalgia, protest against racial and sexual injustice, and experiment in language or structure. Many of the writers, depending on the time in their lives and on the individual work in question, move from one category to another, and often even a single work crosses categorical boundaries. II Chinese American literary history begins with two Eurasian sisters who responded to racism in divergent ways in their writing. Because they created paradigms followed by their successors, we shall examine them in some detail. Edith (1865–1914) and Winnifred (1875–1954) Eaton were two of fourteen surviving children born to an English landscape painter, Edward Eaton, and his Chinese wife, Grace Trefusis. The Eatons immigrated from England to America, living first in the United States and then settling in Montreal. Both sisters, as adults, moved to the United States—Edith lived briefly in the Midwest and for more than ten years in San Francisco and Seattle; Winnifred, in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

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Though initially shocked by the first Chinese workers she saw on her arrival in the United States, “uncouth specimens of their race, drest in working blouses and pantaloons with queues hanging down their backs” (“Leaves” 126), Edith Eaton later identified strongly with her mother’s people, assumed a Cantonese pen name, Sui Sin Far (Narcissus), and wrote short stories and articles “to fight their battles in the papers” (“Leaves” 128). At that time the Chinese had many battles to fight, for throughout the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, anti-Chinese sentiment raced across the United States. Imported by the thousands for the construction of the railroads, Chinese workers remaining here were seen as a threat to white labor and became targets of mass vilification campaigns, physical abuse, and even murder. From 1882 until 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited United States entry to all Chinese except teachers, students, merchants, and diplomats. Japan, by contrast—having won a war against China in 1895 and against Russia in 1904–05, and with few nationals in the United States to be a threat—was highly respected. A dialogue recounted by Edith Eaton in her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” demonstrates clearly the contrasting attitudes toward Chinese and Japanese in the United States at the turn of the century: “Somehow or other . . . I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like ourselves.” [Mr. K., her new employer] “A Chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger.” [the town clerk] “Now the Japanese are different altogether. There is something bright and likeable about those men.” [Mr. K.] (129)

Though her facial features did not betray her racial background, Edith’s response to this conversation was the courageous one of asserting her Chinese ethnicity at the expense of her job with Mr. K. Winnifred, perhaps reasoning that few could tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese, decided to be the favored “Oriental.” Exploiting the prejudices of her day, she invented a Japanese pen name, Onoto Watanna, claimed a Japanese noblewoman for a mother and Nagasaki for a birthplace, and concocted tender romances set in Japan coupling charming Japanese or Eurasian heroines with American or English heroes. Winnifred’s works were highly successful, exquisitely published with full-color illustrations by real Japanese artists, the text printed on decorated paper. They went through repeated printings, were translated into European languages, and were adapted for the stage. Winnifred went on to an exclusive contract with Hearst Publications and later became scriptwriter and editor for Universal Studios and MGM before retiring to an elegant home in Calgary, Alberta.

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Assertion of her Chinese ethnicity was not easy for Edith Eaton, for initially the Chinese themselves did not recognize her as one of their own and were almost as ignorant and rude as her brief employer, Mr. K.: . . . save for a few phrases, I am unacquainted with my mother tongue. How, then, can I expect these people to accept me as their own countrywoman? The Americanized Chinamen actually laugh in my face when I tell them that I am one of their race. (“Leaves” 131)

Nonetheless, after a lifetime of stories and articles in defense of the Chinese, published in the leading magazines of the time, Sui Sin Far received the recognition and appreciation of the Chinese community in the form of an engraved memorial stone erected on her tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Montreal. Edith Eaton’s collected stories, published under the title Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), are divided into tales for adults and those for children. They are simply told. Some are marked by a sentiment fashionable in her day. Others introduce themes and perspectives new to American literature. The following passage from the title story gives a sample of the irony Eaton employs in the cause of sexual and racial protest. Lively, independent Mrs. Spring Fragrance, on a visit to San Francisco, writes a letter in Chinese-flavored English to her husband in Seattle, about a lecture a Caucasian woman had taken her to, entitled “America the Protector of China”: It was most exhilarating, and the effect of so much expression of benevolence leads me to beg of you to forget to remember that the barber charges you one dollar for a shave while he humbly submits to the American man a bill of fifteen cents. And murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this country, is detained under the rooftree of this great Government instead of under your own humble roof. Console him with the reflection that he is protected under the wing of the Eagle, the Emblem of Liberty. What is the loss of ten hundred years or ten thousand times ten dollars compared with the happiness of knowing oneself so securely sheltered? All of this I have learned from Mrs. Samuel Smith, who is as brilliant and great of mind as one of your own superior sex. (8–9)

In Edith Eaton’s stories the Chinese in America are presented sympathetically, not as one-dimensional heathens but as multidimensional humans, capable of suffering pain and of inflicting it, of living and being lovable, of being loyal as well as deceiving. Compared with most of the

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contemporaneous writing about Chinese by white authors, analyzed and discussed comprehensively by William Wu in The Yellow Peril (1982), or the writing by Christian missionaries, as represented by The Lady of the Lily Feet, by Helen Clark (1900), stressing the sensational, “heathenish” Chinese practices, Edith Eaton’s stories give a balanced view, attempting to portray psychologically realistic conditions. She is most successful in presenting the inner condition of the Eurasian in a society hostile to one part of her heritage. In “Its Wavering Image,” and particularly in “Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” she examines the interracial anguish she personally knew. Though the white wife of a Chinese is despised by society for her marriage, she ignores others’ opinions until the birth of her son: . . . as he stands between his father and myself, like yet unlike us both, so will he stand in after years between his father’s and his mother’s people. And if there is no kindliness nor understanding between them, what will my boy’s fate be? (132)

Edith Eaton compared her own Eurasian identity with bearing a cross and hoped that by giving her right hand to the Occidentals and her left hand to the Orientals, she herself, “the insignificant connecting link,” would not be “utterly” destroyed (“Leaves” 132). One has the impression that she felt the anti-Chinese sentiment of her day so strongly and so personally that in a sense (dying at forty-nine, unmarried) she was destroyed early by the strain of attempting to be a bridge. Winnifred Eaton, in her “Japanese” novels, flourished. With her first book, Miss Numé of Japan, she discovered a formula that worked and used it in romance after romance filled with such exotic elements as showers of cherry blossoms, moonlit assignations in bamboo groves, childlike women in colorful kimonos, fragile shoji screens. The formula includes the following elements: the work is short and easily read in one sitting; the setting is exotic; the potential lovers are introduced, then estranged through an initial obstacle (a difference in class, religion, or party, a previous engagement, opposing families); that obstacle is overcome, only to be followed by another one (war, meddling third parties, misunderstanding, duty elsewhere); during the prolonged separation the lovers each suffer mental anguish or physical hardship and illness; finally, by chance or fate or the kind offices of a friend, the lovers are reunited. Winnifred Eaton’s women are nearly always in an inferior, powerless position: social outcasts (A Japanese Nightingale, The Wooing of Wisteria), orphans (Sunny-San and The Heart of Hyacinth), an unwanted stepdaughter (Love of Azalea), a blind, homeless wood sprite (Tama), a geisha in bondage (The Honorable Miss Moonlight). Her men, in clear contrast, are invariably in positions

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of power and influence: princes, ministers, architects, and professors. The plot, reiterated in book after book, of the helpless, childlike, charming Japanese female looking up to the powerful white male, could not but appeal to the white audience’s sense of superiority and generosity, supporting as it did the prevailing stereotypes and prejudices. However—to give credit where it is due—despite their powerless positions, her heroines are also vivid, witty, spirited. Their seductive powers are quite real, as are Winnifred Eaton’s storytelling powers. Though the plots may be a touch melodramatic or may hinge on a coincidence, they are nearly always engrossing, appealing; there is a certain magic that draws the reader into their spell of delicate emotions, of poignant twists and turns. Winnifred Eaton is particularly skilled at depicting tremulous, protractedly unconsummated virgin love. Even as sophisticated a reader as William Dean Howells praised A Japanese Nightingale in the North American Review: “There is a quite indescribable freshness in the art of this pretty novelette . . . which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native to the best art everywhere.” In an extraliterary way, he was particularly taken with the heroine: “Yuki herself is of a surpassing lovableness. Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girl could, I should think, keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana’s [sic] book from going out and marrying Japanese girls” (881). Even Japanese readers, though recognizing that Winnifred Eaton was not a writer of the first magnitude, nonetheless praised her work and found it worthy of study alongside the books of Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti for playing “an important role in introducing things Japanese to the American public.” They ranked her even higher than Hearn and Loti in that “her descriptions of human feelings are more delicate than those of both famous writers” (Swann and Takeda 98). If the Japanese themselves found that their culture was “properly introduced to the West” through Winnifred Eaton’s books, her credibility and accomplishment were even further enhanced. The paradigms presented by the Eaton sisters are what Shirley Lim in a talk at the 1982 MLA Annual Convention called “exotics” and “existentials.” The former, “other-directed,” like Winnifred Eaton, are keenly aware of the economic, political, and social climate around them and respond by producing work that conforms to or upholds prevalent stereotypes. The latter, “inner-directed,” like Edith Eaton, are more concerned with definition of self and exploration of being. The other-directed may perpetuate untruths in an effort to preserve physical well-being and achieve social approval, while the inner-directed seek to clarify truths in an attempt to maintain psychological health. Throughout her career, Edith Eaton used her pen to protest injustice and prejudice, whether racial or sexual. In addition to fighting battles for the Chinese, she also fought for women, particularly working-class women. Her

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feminism comes through in a number of stories. In the ironically titled “The Inferior Woman” she shows a woman earning her own living to be superior to one whose family has wealth and status. In “The Heart’s Desire,” nothing—fancy foods, clothes, doting father, mother, brother—can make a princess happy but the friendship of a poor girl. Winnifred’s writing was more a barometer of the status quo than a protest against it. Her storytelling powers shone through her ethnic camouflage, making her a successful professional writer. She evaded thorny issues and never dealt with her own ethnicity in her books, except for Chinese cooks, minor characters on the Alberta ranches of her last two novels. However, in one of the last novels, Cattle, she abandoned the romantic mode for a naturalist one and voiced a feminist protest. Orphaned at fifteen, Nettie Day is purchased, along with her parents’ furniture, by Bull Langdon, a ruthless cattle baron, who later rapes her and inadvertently kills their child. Another woman helps Nettie stand up to Bull and eventually marry the man she loves. Though Winnifred Eaton did not write of bicultural conflicts, her career and the contortions and distortions she went through to become acceptable—hence able to make a living—testify to the existence of such conflicts. At age forty she published, anonymously, an autobiographical work, Me, in which, to some extent, she clears her conscience. Although A Japanese Nightingale has been in lights on Broadway, she was clearsighted enough to realize how far she was from her youthful dreams: What then I ardently believed to be the divine sparks of genius, I now perceived to be nothing but a mediocre talent that could never carry me far. My success was founded upon a cheap and popular device, and that jumble of sentimental moonshine that they called my play seemed to me the pathetic stamp of my inefficiency. Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage. (153–54)

III Shortly before and particularly after Pearl Harbor, American opinion of the Chinese and Japanese underwent an about-face. The Japanese were now the enemy; the long-suffering Chinese—who had lost Formosa and Korea to Japan in 1895, Manchuria in 1905, Beijing and all the coastal cities by 1938—became a friend and ally. Books by American-born and Chineseborn Chinese Americans suddenly mushroomed. The former were encouraged to write by an American public eager to distinguish friend from foe; the latter were impelled by personal experiences of the horrors of war. Our Family, by Adet and Anor Lin, and Dawn over Chungking, by Adet, Anor, and Meimei Lin; Destination Chungking, by Han Suyin; Flame from the Rock,

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by Adet Lin (under the pseudonym Tan Yun); War Tide, by Anor Lin (under the pseudonym Lin Tai-yi); I’ve Come a Long Way, Peach Path, and Westward to Chungking, by Helena Kuo; Fifth Chinese Daughter, by Jade Snow Wong; and Echo of a Cry, by Mai-mai Sze—all appeared within a few years of each other. Though published years later, Janet Lim’s Sold for Silver and Anna Chennault’s A Thousand Springs and Education of Anna are primarily concerned with the same period. The novels and autobiographies by the Chinese-born writers are moving accounts of women’s firsthand experience of war. They describe the refugees waiting day and night outdoors for trains to take them from threatened cities; boats so crammed that people perished in the crush or were drowned trying to get aboard; the devastation of Japanese incendiary bombs flattening buildings, creating giant craters and walls of flame, leaving bloody corpses and charred bones. But these books are filled as well with a glowing nationalism, with a deep pride in China’s spiritual resistance, its patient, persistent rebuilding, its survival and endurance. Dawn over Chungking is an unusual book because of its authors’ ages: Adet was seventeen, Anor fourteen, and Meimei ten. The three are daughters of Lin Yutang, well-known novelist, essayist, and explainer of China to the West. Their book describes a return visit to China after a four-year stay in the United States. Through their individual chapters, we see that Meimei is the most Americanized, for she misses American foods; Anor has the strongest sense of humor, for when the bombs destroy their house, she finds her checkers, which the rats had stolen, and concludes impishly that “the Japs were not only trying to gain our love by bombing us, but trying very hard to help us kill rats too!” (120); Adet is the most romantic, ardently patriotic and Chinese. Despite the horrifying sights of rotting corpses, burning buildings, cratered streets, air raids that kept them underground six hours at a stretch, Adet sees the war as a leveler, pulling rich and poor together for a common cause, and she is moved by the beauty of that bond. Dawn over Chungking has the poignant appeal, though not the tragic outcome, of The Diary of Anne Frank, for it too is an account of tender, idealistic youth confronted with the most brutal human behavior yet still believing in humanity’s inherent goodness and still nurturing hope for the future. The theme of wartime love pervades both Destination Chungking and Flame from the Rock. The first is a beautifully written, fictionalized autobiography recounting the relationship between Han Suyin, a Chinese-Belgian Eurasian originally named Rosalie Chou, and her first husband, Tang Pao-huang, an officer in the Kuomintang army. As children they played together in Beijing; as young adults Pao refuses an arranged marriage with Suyin sight unseen; as Chinese students in London, ironically, they meet and fall in love; as patriots they return to China; despite the interruption of an air raid, Suyin and Pao are

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married by a missionary in Hankow; despite a yearlong separation (after only two weeks of marriage) while he serves at the front and she works in a hospital, they are finally able to set up housekeeping—only to have their house leveled by a bomb. Ostensibly a love story between a man and a woman, Destination Chungking is actually about the love of one’s country. Though Han Suyin, in a foreword to the 1953 edition, acknowledged an insecurity about her English, a third language for her, Destination Chungking, her first book, reads fluently and well. Its language is vivid and its details are sharp, giving promise of the brilliant and prolific writing career that Han Suyin has since fulfilled, relinquishing a medical career to do so. Han Suyin, like Edith Eaton, identifies most strongly with her Chinese half. Destination Chungking stresses the humor of the Chinese, their resilience, their courage, and their staying power. Adet Lin’s Flame from the Rock, in contrast, focuses on the romantic and tragic. In this novel, lively young Kuanpo Shen, niece of a professor, is wounded by a bomb and receives a lifesaving blood transfusion from a taciturn soldier. Though her family disapproves because of his peasant background, the young people are drawn to each other. He is killed in battle, however, and she eventually dies of grief. This work may be read as Adet Lin’s disavowal of her professor father’s retreat from the war to the safety of the United States, for the uncle’s snobbery is presented in a highly unfavorable light, and the soldier, for his dogged strength and ultimate sacrifice, is shown as worthy of admiration and love. Skillfully written, Flame from the Rock seems much influenced by traditional Chinese novels in being unabashedly romantic; yet its assertion of the importance of an ordinary peasant soldier is extremely modern. War Tide, by Lin Tai-yi (Anor Lin), and Westward to Chungking, by Helena Kuo, are both novels about the effects of war on family. Kuo’s book focuses on the father, Lee Tien-men, the head of a multigenerational family, who not only gives away the stock of his shop so that it will not fall into Japanese hands but who also gives his five children to the war effort. With the help of an American friend, Sam Hupper, Lee Tien-men retreats inland from Soochow to a small mountain village near Chungking, where he helps the villagers build air-raid shelters and grows tomatoes. Though a few breaks in the narrative mar the novel’s coherence, the variety of character and incident creates an interesting and vivid panorama. Multiply these people several million times, Kuo implies, and you will have a picture of China at war, of the heroism of ordinary men and women. In War Tide, a fuller, richer book, Anor Lin, initiating her pen name Lin Tai-yi, displays her precocious talent and a vigorous, original mind, which would later produce four more novels. This book is peopled with a variety of believable characters but centers on the capable eighteen-year-old daughter. The dialogue is often witty and convincing, the inventive incidents organized

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around the principle of yin–yang, counterbalancing opposite forces: good fortune follows hard upon disaster, birth upon death, beauty upon ugliness. Although war deprives the Tai family of their livelihood, their home beside the beautiful West Lake, and their father’s life, they remain undaunted. Lo-Yin has discovered inner resources strong enough to sustain her extended family. The most remarkable element in War Tide is the experimental quality of its language. At moments of crisis, the writing becomes heightened, almost surreal, exaggerated, sometimes horrifying, a literary counterpart to expressionistic painting. Here, for example, suggesting the misanthropy of a Bosch canvas, is Lin Tai-yi’s description of the Japanese invaders of Hangchow: They hobbled their way like monkeys hopping among trees, and their long, hairy hands were claws, and they let out monstrous sizzlings or shrieks; they opened their mouths wide and let out shrieks into the open purple winter air, shrieks into the white sky, and their bloody claws scratched over everything they saw, and their eyes were lit by some evil green fire, evil, bitter fire. They scratched the winter sky and broke it like a crust, and from behind the sky rain had poured—black rain, blacker than blood, and the sky was bleeding. . . . When the devils were tired of scratching . . . they sought something warm, something warm and human because they were so afraid, and they sought and found the sight and touch of warm, pale, soft female flesh, and their dirty claws tore the flesh apart, screeching as they did—and the warmth in the flesh had gone with the tearing, and that was how they went. . . . And the city lay rotting, red, wasted, smelling and burning, and on the streets hungry devils and stray dogs hunted; the devils sought among both living and dead to shame them, but the dogs sought for a bone to gnaw from the dead only. (96–97)

The insistent repetition of “shrieks,” “fire,” “something warm,” and “devils,” the harsh animal imagery, the devastating final indictment, in which dogs are portrayed as superior to humans—this is powerful writing at any time, but extraordinary for a seventeen-year-old. In these war books, we find an ulterior purpose: demonstration to the United States, a country superior in arms and supplies, that China was a worthy ally. The character of the adventurer Sam Hupper is an embodiment of United States aid to China as well as a winsome addition to make more palatable to Americans a tale of Chinese suffering. Lin Tai-yi, however, did not sugarcoat her material for her audience. With boldness and sarcasm, she attacks Americans for supplying Japan with materials used to bomb China and protests racism and greed in scathing terms:

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“I’ll tell you why I look sad, Mother!” Lo-Yin said. “Wipe the dust off your skin, for did you ever hear of the inferior yellow race, or white superiority, or race prejudice, or empire or trade relations or petty politics, Mother? Did you know of oil? Don’t you know oil makes good trade, good profit? Ha! Ha, weak China, polite China, bully the four hundred million people, for they have no feelings, their skins are yellow, how can they feel the difference between life and death, or love of mother and son? Scrap iron, Mother, iron waste, iron—they can be burned into profit. Profit, Mother, profit—don’t you know that’s the most important thing in the world. . . . Don’t you know, Mother, that the white man rules and governs by divine right? Heaven sent the Japs to us, but they forgot white men must make a profit. . . . Burn, burn! . . . Chinese blood is yellow, it is not red. Oh no! But it is good enough to sacrifice to fill the bellies of the red-blooded with gold and silver! So sing out the praises of democracy and equality, but who will pay for all these lives and this torture?” (War Tide 121)

With the fervor of Edith Eaton defending her Chinese heritage, with the bitterness of disillusioned idealism and the outspokenness of youth, Lin Taiyi lashes out against injustice. It is to white America’s credit that such words were printed in this country. More popular by far, however, was homegrown “exotic” Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, for as Elaine Kim points out in her groundbreaking study Asian American Literature: “Bitterness against Asian cultures and values, and Asian American values and life styles, were far better tolerated by publishers and a predominantly white readership, which has been traditionally more receptive to expressions of self-contempt and self-negation on the part of members of racial minority people than to criticism of problems in American society” (59). Resentment of the Asian American community and low self-esteem among its members are very much part of Fifth Chinese Daughter, though the surface message, at least by the end of the book, seems to be pride in accomplishment and reconciliation with the author’s past. In its day the work was a best-seller, and, under the auspices of the State Department, it was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Thai, German, Urdu, Burmese, and Indonesian (Chun-Hoon 125) and Jade Snow Wong was sent to Asia as a cultural ambassador. A documentary film was made about her as late as 1976, and, until the appearance of Kingston, Jade Snow Wong was the best-known Chinese American spokeswoman. Yet for contemporary readers the book is a stilted, emotionally strangled work, recounting rather spiritlessly and totally without humor Wong’s strict, traditional upbringing in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and her efforts to achieve self-determination. Overt

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expressions of resentment and anger are stifled but seethe under the surface of her girlhood memories of unjust parental punishment. As she mingles more with the mainstream community, Wong takes pride in her Chinese background, mainly by cooking Chinese dinners for friends and the dean with whom she lives as a servant. Having learned humility, as Kim points out, she seems unaware of the abnegation of coupling herself with her employer’s pets: “All who lived in that home, including a pair of cocker spaniels named Pupuli and Papaia, a black cat named Bessie and Jade Snow, were recipients of the dean’s kindness and consideration” (156). The book emphasizes the hurdles that her family set up on her road to self-fulfillment and downplays those erected by the larger society. Thus Wong’s success may be attributable in large part to the same characteristics that made Winnifred Eaton’s romances so popular: she caters to the stereotypes and myths of the majority about itself. Fifth Chinese Daughter is an ethnic Horatio Alger story bearing witness to the achievement of the American dream, in which even the poorest and most unlikely (that is nonwhite) Cinderella may find her way to the palace of the prince—in this case, gain recognition from the mainstream world by setting up a pottery business in Chinatown in San Francisco. Contrary to Lowell Chun-Hoon’s conclusion that Wong reconciled the conflicts between the Chinese values of her parents and the values of the larger society around her, it is actually her parents who come to accept “their peculiar fifth daughter” and admire her success in making a living through her ceramic business. At the end of the book, only Caucasians flock to see her work; “the Chinese did not come to buy one piece from her.” Jade Snow Wong is as much a curiosity in Chinatown as she was at Mills College. In the introduction to her second book, No Chinese Stranger, she admits to feeling more at home in the People’s Republic than she ever felt in the land of her birth: During four weeks of travel in a land physically new to me, it was remarkable how very much I felt at home. Because of a radiance which enveloped me as I moved among the Chinese in the People’s Republic of China, I discovered my comfortable bonds as one of them. Yet when I walk two familiar blocks between home and studio, in the freedom of the U.S., I am conscious of being a minority in a “white” or Western world. (xii)

Though she testified abroad that racism was no barrier to individual accomplishment in the United States, American intolerance of the Chinese caused Wong to feel a divided loyalty and a split sense of self-awareness. Autobiographical works of this period that did not cater to stereotypes were neglected, despite the fact that some are livelier and better written.

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Perhaps because the authors were born abroad, the American audience found their experiences too foreign for popular consumption. At the same time, however, Janet Lim’s Sold for Silver appealed to Americans precisely because of the sensational aspects of her life story. Abandoned at age eight by her mother, sold for $250 to a wealthy Singapore family, Lim had to defend herself against the sexual advances of her master. Rescued by Anglican missionaries, educated and trained as a nurse, she was later shipwrecked and imprisoned by Japanese soldiers. The most striking characteristic of the book is the matterof-fact manner in which the most repellent events are narrated. More substantial is the work of Helena Kuo, a journalist, feminist, and self-appointed cultural ambassador from China, as she put it, “a fragment of old China come West.” She was an embodiment of the new Chinese woman, a result of the Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the three-hundred-yearold Manchu dynasty, stopped footbinding, gave women the vote and equal education with men, and turned China’s face toward Western progress. Kuo’s first book, Peach Path, commissioned by Methuen, announces its feminist stance from the outset: This is a woman’s book, written by a woman for women. To misquote St. Paul, and thus take revenge on the numerous well-meaning but unworthy translators of Confucius, when I became a woman I thought as a woman, I spoke as a woman, and I understand as a woman. So I write as a woman. (1)

The book is an uneven collage introducing to British and American readers the stories, legends, and maxims of old China—including the legend of Fa Mulan, the woman warrior who provides the central image of Kingston’s book—as well as prescriptions for happiness from a young woman, sometimes preachy, sometimes whimsical and humorous, always confident and outspoken. Kuo’s autobiography, I’ve Come a Long Way, is the story of an independent woman whose combination of good looks, fortunate contacts, personal integrity, and ingenuity did indeed bring her a long way, from war-torn China to a visit with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House. Like Edith Eaton, Kuo used her skills and patriotic fervor to lecture on China’s behalf, to write newspaper and magazine articles making the Chinese less strange to Westerners. Though her sensibilities were completely formed in China, Kuo confessed, after a few years in the United States, to an internal split: I live now in a happy if sometimes puzzling state of divided mind: the old Chinese mind and the new mind of the West. I am educated and progressive to the point of being aggressive, but always with me is my happy heritage of Chinese civilization which

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gives me a heaven-sent balance, and I believe I shall never be wholly westernized, even if sometimes I seem to be walking on the edge of a dangerous chasm. (4)

Since 1939, the United States has been her home; her occasional writing is devoted to books and articles about the work of her husband, the painter Dong Kingman. By far the most introspective autobiography, delightfully illustrated by the author, is Echo of a Cry by Mai-mai Sze. Daughter of Alfred Sze, who was China’s “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James” (16) and a 1902 graduate of Cornell, Sze recounts with humor her Anglicization as a young child, her summer with a religious Quaker family who punished any misbehavior or accident by forcing her to put her pennies into the China Inland Mission box decorated with a picture of a Chinese girl who looked like her. For high school and college, Sze came to the United States. At Wellesley College she encounters racism when white girls refuse to sit next to a black student at a lunch counter. After a conversation with the young black woman, Sze realizes that “we’re cause people whether we like it or not” (165). While visiting France she is regarded as a Chinese, but when she visits China finds herself awkward and un-Chinese. Although one of the most privileged of the authors, Sze acknowledges “a funny mixed feeling of being given so much, yet feeling I’ve lost something” (164). The fragmentation of self resulting from the multiple “reshufflings,” as she calls them, leads her to conclude poignantly: Fervently we have wanted to belong somewhere at the same time that we have often wanted to run away. We reached out for something, and when by chance we grasped it, we often found that it wasn’t what we wanted at all. There is one part of us that is always lost and searching. It is an echo of a cry that was a longing for warmth and safety. And through our adolescent fantasies, and however our adult reasoning may disguise it, the search continues. (202)

As though in belated reaction to the Holocaust, Sze published Silent Children, the haunting allegory of a band of homeless children, orphaned by war, eking out a living by stealing. A surreal dimness permeates this book, set in an unnamed land, whose characters bear the unrecognizable names, Cruzz, Jolo, Worro, Toor, Lal. One of the boys steals a large trunk that contains not food but velvet gowns, lace parasols, and gold coins. Around the bonfire of their muddy camp, the half-starved children dress up and parade in a grotesque mockery of worldly splendor. Adult strangers intrude, and their greed and ineptness lead to several deaths and to the eventual scattering of the band

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of children. Sze is protesting the dehumanizing effects of war on the most innocent and powerless of society. IV With the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1943, the number of Chinese in America increased and, consequently, the number of Chinese American women writers. Yet, the literary scene through the next three decades was dominated by immigrant Chinese writers, and the traditions continued: explanation of China to the West; protest against discrimination; storytelling and experimentation. Beijing-born Hazel Lin, who was one-quarter French, came to the United States to study medicine in 1939 and lived here until her death. She juggled a dual career, a primary one as obstetrician-gynecologist and a secondary one as writer. She wrote four novels, all nostalgically set in China. Her best work, The Physicians, set in Beijing, recounts a young woman’s determination to study Western medicine; eventually she wins the approval of her grandfather, who practices Chinese medicine. The Moon Vow is a somewhat sensational story of a young woman who cannot consummate her marriage because of a vow of celibacy to a secret lesbian society. In House of Orchids a young girl from a destitute family is sold into prostitution and falls in love with a student from a respectable family. Another novel, Rachel Weeping for Her Children, Uncomforted, tells of a Chinese medical student who has an affair with a much older American surgeon-missionary. Dreams, nightmares, and fears are interwoven into the narrative in an experimental fashion, but the book is overwritten in places and underdeveloped as a whole. Weeping May Tarry is a brief, moving diary of Lin’s battle with cancer. She died of a sudden stroke at age 73 in 1986. Anor Lin, author of War Tide, lived extensively in the United States in her youth, as noted, was for many years a resident of Hong Kong, and has recently moved to the Washington, D.C., area. Her later novels deal with serious, complex themes. The Golden Coin pits faith against cynicism in the intriguing story of a mismatched couple: a coldly scheming biology professor and an illiterate girl from the Shanghai slums. Although the author seems to sympathize with the heroine’s faith in miracles, her joie de vivre, and capacity to love, Lin Taiyi shows how misplaced such faith is and how it is ultimately destroyed. The Eavesdropper explores the tension between passivity and activity; the central character, a Chinese writer, moves back and forth between the United States and China, unattached to either world but in love with his older brother’s tubercular wife. Class conflicts are dramatized in The Lilacs Overgrow and, in Kampoon Street, the effects of poverty. Though Lin Tai-yi does not discuss social issues directly, the Chinese political scene serves as the background for all the

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novels, and the events in the foreground parallel contemporaneous historical struggles in China. In The Lilacs Overgrow, for example, the marriages of the two nieces of a Nationalist Chinese official may represent the two forces that struggled for control of the country; the work, indeed, may well be a veiled criticism of both Nationalist and Communist excesses. One niece marries a wealthy man who turns out to be spoiled and spineless; the other weds a Communist, who is portrayed at first sympathetically and later as a fanatic. Kampoon Street, which has been translated and published in Brazil, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and China, seems to indicate a leftward shift in the author’s politics. The work suggests that not only opportunities but even morality can be severely limited by poverty. In these novels, particularly in Kampoon Street, Lin Tai-yi continues the expressionist strain she used to good purpose in War Tide. Here we find a character called Female One, who has a “frog-like face,” and “holes . . . which served as eyes . . . so deep they were like tunnels” (98) and who does not know who she is because she has no identity card. Lin Tai-yi is a highly skilled writer, intelligent and observant, sympathetic as well as humorous, poetic as well as pointed, and deserving of much wider recognition. V By far the most versatile explainer of China to the West is Han Suyin, whose Destination Chungking is discussed above. Autobiographer, biographer, novelist, political analyst, chronicler and traveloguer, and medical doctor as well, she vies with Winnifred Eaton in being the most productive woman writer of Chinese ancestry with nearly twenty titles to her name. She received her higher education in Belgium and England, practiced medicine in Hong Kong and Singapore, and has lectured frequently in the United States. Han Suyin is most widely known for A Many-Splendored Thing because of the popular movie based on her novel, and most controversial for her strong support for Mao Ze-dong and the Communist revolution, fully documented in The Morning Deluge and Wind in the Tower, almost a hagiography. Han Suyin’s best work is The Crippled Tree, the first book of her four-volume autobiography. Like Kingston’s Woman Warrior, this work is a mixed genre, combining history (in this case, China’s from 1885 to 1928), reconstructed family history, and Han Suyin’s personal memories presented in a novelistic mode. Often poetic and deeply felt, it recounts her parents’ storybook courtship in Belgium and disillusioned marriage in China, intertwined with and paralleled by the history of a feudal, weak China, represented as a woman struggling to free herself from the economic stranglehold of imperialistic (male) Western powers. Also like The Woman Warrior,

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on a personal level, The Crippled Tree is a working out of a painful relationship, from initial rejection by the mother through resentment, anguish, and finally understanding by the daughter. The other volumes of the autobiography, A Mortal Flower, Birdless Summer, and My House Has Two Doors, seem gradually to lose power. In its attitudes toward the Chinese, white society has apparently changed little since the time of the Eaton sisters; in a 1982 newspaper interview, Han Suyin made the following remark: As a Eurasian, I was always fighting. I am still fighting race prejudice today. I was told by people in the sphere of my young life that I was only good enough to be a prostitute. This situation made me strong. It was either show strength or go under. . . . A very important Swiss surgeon once said to me, “All Eurasians are degenerate, syphilitic.” I said: “Me, degenerate? Me?” He said that I am the exception. When he was speaking these words, he was hitting the table with his thumb. I told him: “It is not necessary to hit the table.” That got him! I was commenting on his bad manners. (Christy)

Han Suyin is more a citizen of the world than of any single nation. Her nonfiction works passionately depict China in English, a language she loves and calls “that rich and inexhaustible treasure of moods and music, feeling and thought, endless ambrosia, a firm enchantment, lifelong” (Wakeman 613). In her novels, the couples are often interracial: the doomed lovers in A ManySplendored Thing, set in Hong Kong, are a Eurasian doctor, a widow, and a married English journalist; a happy ending is allowed an Englishwoman, a writer, and a dark-skinned Indian engineer in The Mountain Is Young, set in Nepal. Communist China is the setting of Till Morning Comes, in which a Texan journalist, daughter of a millionaire, marries a patriotic Chinese doctor, who is ultimately destroyed by his countrymen. In this novel, Han Suyin again interweaves a moving story of individuals trapped by historical and political forces over which they have no control. She manages to present the Communist revolution sympathetically and yet be critical of the excesses of the cultural revolution and of political fanaticism. China has few advocates more eloquent or passionate than Han Suyin. As a novelist, at her best, she creates engrossing characters whose passions and agonies are deeply moving. VI Two Chinese American women novelists born in the United States and educated here are Virginia Lee and Diana Chang. Lee’s House That Tai

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Ming Built emphasizes the favorable aspects of the Chinese as a superior ancient culture, symbolized by exquisite artifacts, while gently protesting racial discrimination. Bo Lin, a third-generation Chinese American brought up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, falls in love with Scott Hayes; however, the miscegenation laws of California, enforced in the early 1940s, the time of this story—and on the books until 1967 (Kim 97)— forbade marriages between Asians and Caucasians. Scott dies at the front in Europe. With two exceptions, Diana Chang’s books have nothing to do with Chinese or Chinese Americans. Her first work, Frontiers of Love, a rich, full novel set in Shanghai at the close of World War II, is the story of three young Eurasians, representing the spectrum of possibilities in the struggle to determine their identities. At one end of the spectrum is Mimi Lambert, who rejects the Asian part of herself, chooses a Caucasian lover, and, when he refuses to marry her, throws herself at any American who can offer what she thinks of as a lifeline: passage out of China. At the other end is Feng Huang, who rejects the European in him and joins the Communists, becoming so committed to their cause that he rationalizes the murder of his fiancee’s cousin, in which he inadvertently takes part, as an unfortunate means to a desirable end. In the middle position is Sylvia Chen, who, after much agonizing, realizes that she is “an entity composed of both her parents, but ready to act and not merely react, for one individual—herself ” (237). Chang, who is three-quarters Chinese and one-quarter Irish but by upbringing an American, also acts for herself instead of reacting and goes her own way in her other novels. Chang chooses in her later books to focus on modern varieties of love: love after divorce, in A Woman of Thirty; love for an unborn child, even if it is the result of rape, in A Passion for Life ; interracial love between a Caucasian Peace Corps volunteer and a Chinese Communist dancer, in the minor, farcical The Only Game in Town; love as a manifestation of neurosis, in the clever Eye to Eye, in which a married white Protestant artist falls in love with a Jewish writer and seeks the help of a psychiatrist; extramarital love between an older woman and a younger man, in A Perfect Love. She writes with great skill of Ivy League graduates, artists, writers, publishers, who inhabit the world of New York City, Long Island, Massachusetts. Her characters tend to be blue-eyed Anglo-Saxons; the outsiders are Jews. “Fitness, in evolutionary biology,” says the biologist Lewis Thomas, “means fitting in with the rest of life. If a species is good at this, it tends to survive” (32). Like Winnifred Eaton, Diana Chang is conscious of her audience and wants to fit in, to survive; she “subsumes aspects of her background in the interests of other truths” (qtd. in Ling, “Writer” 79), truths she believes will have a broader appeal in the society in which she lives.

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A work that incorporates all aspects of its author’s background and blends them in a highly sophisticated way is Crossings, by Chuang Hua. In theme and style a forerunner of Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Crossings is an experimental novel that requires and rewards the reader’s closest concentration. The narrative thread traces the growth and decline of a love affair between a Chinese American woman and a European journalist, but the story is constantly interrupted by memories of childhood and family, by dreams, nightmares, images arresting and resonant. Fourth Jane is the middle child of seven in a well-to-do family that transplanted her, when a child, from China to England and then to the United States. Jane herself, as an adult, spends time in Paris but makes return visits to New York. In all, there are seven crossings of the ocean and four cultural adjustments; as in Echo of a Cry, though these travels may be enriching, they increase the protagonist’s sense of fragmentation and her difficulty in determining her identity. As The Woman Warrior is infused by the tension between the narrator and her mother, Crossings is dominated by the presence of the father, a surgeon in China, a stockbroker in New York, a strong man who is as tyrannical as he is loving. Central to the book is the anguish Jane experiences when, for her own psychological well-being, she must take a stand against him; her pain is intense when she remembers the joy he gave to her childhood. Magnifying the familial tension is the conflict between her two countries—China and America—during the Korean War: I saw with dread my two lives ebbing. Each additional day of estrangement increased the difficulty of eventual reconciliation, knowing the inflexibility of Chinese pride. In that paralysis I lived in no man’s land, having also lost America since the loss of one entailed the loss of the other. Moments I thought of giving up one for the other, I had such longings to make a rumble in the silence. But both parts equally strong canceled out choice. (122)

Crossings abounds with images interwoven throughout the text, intricately echoing and reechoing one another. Some obviously advance the action, while others that at first seem to arrest the action also, on closer inspection, inform the narration. An example of the second type occurs in the middle of a conversation between the journalist and Jane on his initial visit to her apartment. He speaks first: Writers belong in the kitchen. Cooking is an essential part of their imaginative environment. Oh. You can put in the steak now.

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A bird plunged like dead weight ten stories from the roof. Two stories from the pavement, with a single flap of wings, it skimmed above the quivering treetops and took off in a sweeping spiral till it disappeared behind the rooftops. We can eat now. (24)

In the midst of preparations of an intimate meal, the bird falling “like dead weight” for eight stories is jarring. Then we realize that it is a willful fall, for the bird has wings it prefers not to use until the last minute, when it swoops up and takes off in a display of its flying prowess. Jane is like the bird, falling into a dead-end affair with a married man, trusting that her strength will enable her, when she so decides, to escape relatively unscathed. Chuang Hua is not afraid to see all sides of life, and, like Lin Tai-yi, she does not shrink from horrifying images; “And in the spring bloated corpses flowed in the current of the yellow river, bobbing among torn roots and bits of watermelon rinds gnawed to the skin” (48). These corpses float past the sugarcane plot where Jane’s Chinese nurse cuts the reddest and sweetest stalks for the children. The juxtaposition of negative and positive images recurs often in Crossings and indicates a worldview that unflinchingly encompasses both good and bad. By coercing opposite-tending fragments into a whole, Chuang Hua creates an artistic coherence. In Crossings, Chuang Hua has created a highly original expression of the Chinese American hyphenated condition. She has explored her past and made it central, plumbed the depths of her ethnic confusion, mixed memory with fantasy, with reality, with matter-of-fact detail, stretched the language of the novel in the direction of poetry, fragmented the narrative for a kaleidoscopic effect—in short, written what may well be a small masterpiece. VII Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior was deservedly recognized for its boldness, power, and beauty, its fullness of voice in expressing the hyphenated condition, but this work did not spring full blown from the empyrean. Most of the writers we have examined, despite the Chinese tradition of repression of women, were also outspoken and individualistic. Nearly all their works have been ignored—in many cases, as I hope to have shown, undeservedly so. Looking back, we find that the works that received accolades in their time—Winnifred Eaton’s romantic confections, Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography—reflected more their audience and its taste than the quality of the books themselves. The frail Japanese or Eurasian heroines romantically involved with dominant Caucasian men

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in high positions, the Chinese American success story at a time when the United States was at war with Japan, satisfied a public that sought to confirm its own myths, in stories about its superiority, generosity, and openness. It was not particularly interested in learning about the Chinese themselves or in dispelling stereotypes. In fact, to a large extent, it still finds them “inscrutable.” In “Cultural Mis-Readings by American Reviewers,” Kingston expresses her frustration that two-thirds of the critics who praised her book could not see beyond their own stereotyped thinking; she cites examples of the painful “exotic-inscrutable-mysterious-oriental reviewing.” Here is one example, from the Chattanooga News-Free Press: At her most obscure, though, as when telling about her dream of becoming a fabled “woman warrior” the author becomes as inscrutable as the East always seems to the West. In fact, this book seems to reinforce the feeling that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” or at any rate it will probably take more than one generation away from China. (63)

The inscrutableness, it seems to Kingston and to me, is in the eyes of the beholder, and the unbridgeable gulf as well. Chinese Americans have been explaining themselves for nearly a century, but their voices are either ignored or misunderstood. A major theme in Kingston’s Woman Warrior is the importance of articulateness. Finding one’s voice and telling one’s stories represents power, just as having one’s stories buried is powerlessness. From the first episode, “No Name Woman,” in which Kingston disobeys her mother’s injunction and tells the story of the prodigal aunt whom she calls her “forerunner,” through the accounts of her own childhood (her belief that her mother had cut her frenum, her silence in Caucasian school, her terrible bullying of a Chinese American classmate in an effort to make her speak—an act of selfhatred) to the last episode, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” Kingston elaborates on this theme. Instead of the confusion and humiliation about her Chinese background that she felt as a child, she now finds, in the stories and customs that set her apart from her Caucasian classmates, her heritage and treasure, her strength and identity. Kingston’s work combines the traits of the Chinese American writers who preceded her—protest, storytelling, nostalgia, and experimentation. The effect is one of surprising power and startling beauty. Despite the tradition of repression and devaluation—as Kingston’s mother put it, “It’s better to feed geese than girls”—Chinese American women

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writers have demonstrated their talents, have expressed their concerns and their creativity, and have contributed to American literature. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has the opportunity to become acquainted with the peoples of the world within its own borders and in its own language. In their books, the immigrants and their children are speaking, singing. Together they make up the great American chorus, and it is our special privilege, as teachers and students of literature, to listen.

VIET THANH NGUYEN

Queer Bodies and Subaltern Spectators: Guerrilla Theater, Hollywood Melodrama, and the Filipino (American) Novel

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hile the United States has sometimes dealt with its own traumatic past through rendering it highly visible, it has also often dealt with the past through rendering it invisible. The involvement of the United States with the Philippines is one of those critical moments of invisibility where the history of the involvement has been erased from the American consciousness, because it would pose a threat to the equilibrium of an American national identity based on the idea of democratic exceptionalism. In such a situation, the task of American-based writers who seek to address the Philippines or its fraught history with the United States is a difficult one. Whereas writers like Hayslip may speak through the established role of the victim and be guaranteed an audience, writers such as Jessica Hagedorn and Ninotchka Rosca who publish in the United States must first create the awareness of the Philippines, not to mention the awareness of the history of the United States and the Philippines, for their primarily American audiences. In so doing, they become, of course, ethnic entrepreneurs; like Frank Chin’s efforts in the early 1970s to bring Asian American literature to American consciousness, Rosca and Hagedorn’s works are both examples of U.S.-based Filipino literature and attempts to create the consciousness of such literature in the American political environment and literary market. In order to gain a foothold in that market, both writers address one of the

From Race & Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, pp. 125–141. © 2002 by Oxford University Press.

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few times of Filipino history that American audiences may be aware of, the period of martial law under Ferdinand Marcos (1972–1986). While their textual strategies differ greatly in addressing this period, what is common in both Hagedorn’s and Rosca’s works is a focus upon the anti-dictatorial revolution in the Philippines. What is also common is the central role that transvestites and homosexuals play in both authors’ versions of the revolution. The queer body arises in the work of these writers because it allows them to address two related historical situations—the relationship of the Philippines to the United States and the relationship of the dominated to the dominating in the Philippines. In these situations, the queer subject’s status as social outsider becomes metaphorical for the Philippines as the forgotten nation in American memory and metaphorical for the dominated within the Philippines itself. To a great extent, the relationship of class domination in the Philippines, which finds its origins in Spanish colonialism, was encouraged and perpetuated by U.S. colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century and U.S. neocolonialism after World War II. Therefore, the queer subject, in addition to representing the historical amnesia of one situation and the domination of another, links the two as well. Finally, the authors, by placing the queer body at the center of the anti-dictatorial movement, transform that movement into a sexual revolution that displaces the importance of heterosexual identity and marriage found in many constructions of nationalist revolution, such as Bulosan’s. In all three of these senses—amnesia, domination, and sexual revolution—the queer body serves as an ideal postcolonial subject that demonstrates the ways by which legacies of the colonial era can be critiqued and overthrown. Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters represents the neocolonial Philippines by being relentlessly contemporary in its structure and concerns, featuring a postmodern use of fragmented time lines, multiple narrators, and an obsession with popular culture and spectacles, especially those made in Hollywood or following in its fashion. The novel’s queer subject, Joey, is a male prostitute who services Western tourists and is, in that sense, a “modern,” Western-oriented version of the gay man. Dogeaters is therefore concerned not only with modes of desire and sexuality but also with the actual existence, visibility, and acknowledgment of the queer body through which these desires play. The novel’s flexible strategy, which enables it to appeal to American audiences, is to center on the spectacle and the commodity, two things that American audiences may easily associate with the Marcos-era Philippines and the excess associated with it, such as Imelda Marcos’s legendary collection of shoes. At the same time, such a strategy, which delights also in a postmodern use of form that fits the novel’s exploitation of spectacle and commodity, may participate in postmodernism’s tendency to avoid historical complexity and depth. Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War, in contrast, is relentlessly historical,

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examining the history of two families, the Banyagas and the Villaverdes, that find their common roots in Spanish colonization dating back four centuries. The novel also features a play with queer sexuality in its use of transvestites, who move from being spectacular objects for lust and derision to being revolutionary actors in a “guerrilla theater” of their own making. It is the oppressive government’s soldiers, who are in hot pursuit of the transvestites, that become their unwitting spectators. While Joey’s sexuality is “out” and visible in ways that are amenable to Western versions of queer sexuality, the transvestites are models of “native” sexuality who are comfortable with being invisible in a certain fashion, exploiting conventional expectations of their “nature.” The Filipino queer subject as embodied in the transvestite is not equivalent to a modern, Western conception of a queer subject that often sees itself as the normative or universal model for gay liberation. Martin Manalansan argues that this Western conception based upon “outing” and visibility can be used to suppress the manifestation of other, non-Western types of queer practices as “unliberated” (“In the Shadows of Stonewall” 486). State of War’s flexible strategy consists of exploiting and rejecting this Western queer discourse that features the closetas-oppression and visibility-as-liberation. The novel’s complexity, both historically and culturally (in regard to sexuality), may have made it less appealing to American audiences than the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Dogeaters. Dogeaters’ treatment of queer sexuality, for example, represents it as simply another aspect of the deracinated, neocolonized present, recognizable to Western sex tourists and Western readers in the postmodern, postcolonial moment. In this moment, sexuality like everything else is a commodity, and commodities in their spectacular state are both the objects of desire for the inhabitants of Manila and the signs of their oppression. The postcolonial state in Hagedorn’s novel both aestheticizes the commodity and fetishizes it, suppressing the acknowledgment of the relations of production that make the commodity both possible in its existence and impossible in its attainment for the majority of the people. The ultimate act of commodification in Hagedorn’s Manila becomes the selling of one’s own body in the sex trades of homosexual and heterosexual prostitution and pornography and in the more naturalized and socially acceptable versions of the sex trade found in political marriage and cinematic spectacle. It is not just Filipinos who participate in such sex trade, however; Dogeaters does not hesitate to demonstrate Western queer participation in a contemporary kind of imperialism, namely, sex tourism. Even as both novels criticize the discourse of Western queer sexuality in different ways, they are also informed by that discourse. As the queer body in the West has become a political body that enables positive forms of agency for gays and lesbians, it has transformed the possibilities of using the queer

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body culturally. In earlier cases of Asian American literature, for example, the presence of queers, or others who did not meet heterosexual expectations, often inspired revulsion or confusion. The emergence of gays and lesbians into the political and public spheres after 1968 parallels the emergence of self-identified Asian Americans, and in Dogeaters and State of War we see the convergence between these two identity formations in a new kind of queer critical practice. In these novels, the convergence leads to the argument that the queer body politic is not only about queer sexuality—its marginal status can also be used to signify something “queer” behind the facades of official narratives that concern state and nation. In the context of the Philippines, the queer body introduces a “nonheteronormative” element into the nationalist, heterosexist romance that is often used by the anticolonial struggle and which may eventually become embodied in the postcolonial state’s self-representation. In the context of the United States, the queer body metaphorically “queers” the claims of the United States that it is a democratically exceptional state that has never engaged in the politics of imperialism, attempting then to destabilize the equilibrium of American national identity. In both cases, the queer body is used by the authors not simply because of an easy exchangeability between the verb “queer” and queer identity but also because the queer subject historically has occupied a position of invisibility and marginalization within both Filipino and American cultures and hence serves as a model for such invisibility and marginalization in other contexts.

C ol on i a l ism, t he Nat ion, a n d Se x ua l i t y Placing an emphasis upon the queer body as a way to address colonialism is appropriate, considering how, as bell hooks has phrased it, “sexuality has always provided gendered metaphors for colonization” (57). What hooks doesn’t mention is that sexuality also provides gendered metaphors for decolonization. A nationalist revolution seeks to cast its language in the terms of a familial and heterosexual romance; this is the logical inversion of the colonizer’s use of heterosexuality and romance to justify colonialism, summarized in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s phrase “white men are saving brown women from brown men” (92). In the anticolonialist articulation, the heterosexual romance of revolution might be “brown men are saving brown women from white men.” Homosexuality is little better than a sickness in this heterosexual romance and must be suppressed as a sign of perversion. Feminist discourse from both the First and Third Worlds has been able to intervene in the uncritical usage of these gendered metaphors. Cynthia Enloe argues effectively that although women have been significant agents in anticolonial resistance, they have existed in anticolonial discourse only as passive objects for contention and protection. This gendered discourse over colonization has, according to Enloe, accepted the terms of patriarchal

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politics, which delegates the public realm of state politics to men and the private realm of domestic culture—the protected object of nationalist rhetoric—to women. According to Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Filipinos have internalized those same gendered perceptions in their national self-imaging and in their desires in constructing a modern nation, so that “the excessive and fluid sexuality attributed to women as well as to colonial bodies is housed and contained in a feminized national body that hence becomes the jurisdiction of a masculine nation-state” (170). Tadiar goes on to argue that this gendered stability becomes undone at the global level because the Philippines as nation and state is regarded there as a source of feminized global labor. Vicente Rafael has focused on this divided image of nation-as-feminine/state-as-masculine in order to show how, in nationalist Tagalog dramas at the turn of the century, men and women did not automatically fall into this model because of the absence of patriarchal figures and the foregrounded figure of the motherland. “Gender in these plays does not come across as a series of fixed and natural categories, but as a set of negotiable positions in the articulation of nationhood” (214). Of course, part of the reason for this, as Rafael notes, is the absence of a Filipino state during the period in which the plays were produced (1903–1905). Rafael also writes: “What makes these plays significant is that by imaging the nation as woman, they also project a notion of the nation as distinct from the state” (214). Considering that the state was cast in masculine terms, what this suggests to us is how the revolutionary Filipino state-to-be under Emilio Aguinaldo must have been “feminized” by its defeat at the hands of the United States, at least in the rhetorical configuration of colonialism. Rafael calls the gendered competition among nation-states a “homosocial affair” (211); from this we can surmise that the defeat of one’s opponent in colonial war must mean that the opponent has become feminized in allowing his nation (the female body he protects) to be “penetrated.” This rhetorical split allows the homosocial competition to continue without worries of anyone assuming a homoerotic position, despite the fact that the defeated state is inevitably part of the feminized body anyway. It is this vacillation of identity, this insecurity that arises from unstable gendered identities, that is the concern of both State of War and Dogeaters. Through the queer body politic, they demonstrate this instability and its implications for sexual and national identities.

The Nov e l a s G u er r il l a The at er The title of State of War refers to the condition of war, the existence of a martial state—a state of military dictatorship during the Marcos years— and finally the Philippines under martial law through colonialism for most of its history. The novel is an allegory of the Marcos dictatorship, but it is

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also a historical novel that traces the impact of colonization upon Filipino identity. This identity is a product of a hybridization that takes place over 350 years of Spanish rule and an additional 50 years of U.S. rule. The main characters—Eliza, Anna, and Adrian—are in a quest for their own identities, which become symbolic of the national identity. Their search for a total identity, however, will be a futile one, since the totality of the racial and cultural hybridization that comprises Filipino history and identity is beyond the grasp of any one individual. These characters will confront a dictatorship that is also interested in controlling the meaning of the historical past and the present, through language and its deployment in propaganda. The revolutionary struggle against the dictatorship is then as much a battle for the representation of history and the past as it is for the state. State of War not only depicts this struggle over representation but also enacts that struggle itself through its charting of the complex family histories of the main characters and their two families, the Banyagas and the Villaverdes, through the period of Spanish colonization until the present. The state of war, as Anna describes it, is an “elusive, almost illusory war that was everywhere and yet nowhere” (Rosca 20). Both camouflage and guerrilla warfare as military practices remind the reader how important disguise and elusiveness are to both this state of war and what they signify at their metaphorical level—the contestation over the manipulation of appearances and meaning that contribute to the rule of society. It is the struggle over language and its ability to represent nothing less than “reality”—both the present and the past—that is the discursive corollary to the struggle between the state and the revolution. The elusive nature of language is analogous to the elusive nature of guerrilla war and guerrillas, whose evasiveness is signaled by their camouflage. In the novel, the most notable use of camouflage is by transvestite guerrillas, whose transvestism masks their revolutionary intentions—signaling that this is a sexual revolution in addition to being an antistate revolution. The queer body politic of the guerrillas is aimed at unsettling both the state and the heterosexual mores that it uses to represent itself. The transvestites and the government soldiers confront each other on the island of K— during a festival in honor of the Commander (the allegorical figure for Marcos). One might not think of associating soldiers and transvestites together, but in fact the soldiers actively pursue the transvestites (49, 144). The acceptability of this situation springs from both the local tradition of Filipino queer practices and the wider implications of the transvestite, who is, as Marjorie Garber argues, “the space of desire” (75). This local tradition of Filipino queer practices is very different from the Western homosexual tradition and provides the basis for the strategic nature of their transvestism as potentially revolutionary

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rather than simply escapist, which is how Eliza mistakenly perceives it when she describes the transvestites in this fashion: “In such a disguise . . . man-woman, woman-man, one could live safely in illusions and avoid all confrontations” (15). In the Philippines, queer practices, meaning the broad range of sexual activities and behaviors that may not be considered normatively heterosexual, are rhetorically framed as an accepted part of life. The Tagalog and Cebuano terms that most closely approximate the Western terms “homosexual” and “queer,” bakla and bayot, respectively, are focused more on the gendered behavior of the person specified rather than just, or only, their sexual object-choice. It is not that the bakla’s and bayot’s sexual object-choice isn’t important. As we shall see in more detail later, their object-choice must be consistent with their gendered behavior; that is, a bakla, if he chooses a partner, should choose a masculine-gendered man. But the term bakla itself is not necessarily associated with sexual activity, as “gay” and “homosexual” in Western societies usually are; rather, bakla as a category has room for transvestism, effeminacy, and homosexual object-choice. In that sense, it is closest to the term “queer,” which describes a variety of sexual practices, behaviors, and identifications. While the studies of American sex researchers such as Donn V. Hart and Frederick L. Whitam and Robin M. Mathey have concluded that bakla are accepted and tolerated in Philippine society, Martin Manalansan comes to a different conclusion when he argues that the acceptance is still dependent upon a rigid categorization of bakla identity. While bakla are not publicly condemned as gays are in the United States, they do face social circumscription and fulfill certain expected roles. This circumscription is due to how they are perceived, because as Manalansan argues, “[The bakla] possesses what is called the ‘female heart’ (pusong babae). This idiom encapsulates what is perhaps the core of the social construction of the bakla, that of the male body with a female heart. . . . Thus unlike his American counterparts, the bakla’s predilections are seen to be focused on the straight male population” (“Speaking of AIDS” 199–200). Their social circumscription arises from the fact that bakla is not a term associated with a political identity like “gay male” but a social category with limited options for agency, which in the popular imagination are in the realms of sex, beautification, and aesthetic creation. Bakla are seen as being especially prominent in careers associated with the arts or beauty: the movies, dance, fashion design, hairdressing, and so on. Whitam points out how Imelda Marcos employed prominent fashion designers who were well-known bakla; the point to be made here is the public association of bakla with the creation of appearances and artificiality, even at the highest level of society and power. This association is due not to any innate or socially bred talents for the entertainment and beauty industry that bakla may be seen as possessing collectively, but the

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conception of a bakla as being not what he appears to be: he is a man who is a woman. The circumscription of this identity, the limits of tolerance for this “third sex,” can be seen with the existence of the masculine bakla, “the cassowary (anomalous category) in the Philippine taxonomy of sexual behavior. . . . It is not true that the Filipino public is disinterested with the masculine bakla. There is no social discourse by which to discuss these kinds of ‘men.’ These bakla are met either with puzzlement or suspicion” (“Speaking of AIDS” 198). In other words, a man who looks like a man and acts like a man and also prefers men is someone who confuses the heterosexual object-choice dichotomy in Filipino popular perceptions of sexual behavior. The so-called third sex option to describe bakla actually is not a third sex in terms of being able to imagine a distinction between gendered behavior and sexual object-choice. One of the other potential ways by which bakla undermine the social and sexual categories that they find themselves in is through mimicry. Even in the early moments of U.S. colonialism, American observers noted the Filipino capacity for mimicry. Maj. Frank S. Bourns of the U.S. colonial army declares: “They are natural imitators; it is a racial characteristic” (quoted in Rafael 198). But even if this characteristic of Filipino imitation were true, imitation is not in itself a negative trait, as Fenella Cannel argues in a study of bakla in Bicol and their imitative performances of American culture. These performances both appropriate some of the symbolic capital associated with possessing American culture, in terms either of goods or style, and acknowledge the impossibility of owning that culture in rural Bicol. As the writings of Homi Bhabha and Sui Sin Far . . . have shown us, however, mimicry itself, even in its colonial pejorative use, can have a subversive effect upon colonial authority. What the mimic shows to the colonizer is the inevitably partial nature of identity. For colonizers, the paradox is the fact that Filipinos are perceived as essentially imitative—there is no “identity” as such there. The Filipino transvestite, then, is a mimic among mimics, an imitator par excellence, which can have an unsettling effect upon notions of gender identity itself. According to Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), when the transvestite has the power to present appearance as identity and to show that identity is only appearance, as when a man can pass as a woman, s/he effectively destroys the boundaries between man and woman. State of War demonstrates that the queer subject can disrupt in this and other ways as well, threatening also the heterosexual order and the state’s representation of itself as a product of anticolonial heterosexual romance. When the revolutionaries start their attack upon the Commander’s soldiers in the plaza at K—, the transvestites lift their skirts to reveal shotguns. The illusion of the bakla as being “only” a woman is ripped away with the appearance of the hidden shotgun, and a government soldier describes the scene with a combination of fear and hilarity. The soldier realizes that the bakla is, in effect, “really” a man because s/he has intruded him/herself into the heterosexual, homophobic discourse of state and

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revolutionary politics—this is a cause for fear. It is cause for hilarity because, as Mary Ann Doane says, “Male transvestism is an occasion for laughter . . . it’s understandable why women would want to be men but not vice versa” (48). There is another way to imagine this spectacle as a subversive act, however, by focusing on its nature as theatrical. The conventional theatrical presentation of bakla transvestism is in the form of popular cross-dressing pageants, as well as in film depictions and in everyday cross-dressing. As Manalansan notes, “The spectacle of the cross-dressed bakla has been woven into the social fabric” (“Speaking of AIDS” 198). The bakla as transvestite self-consciously performs for the sake of an audience, whether it happens to be in a theater or on the street: the spectacle accommodates homosexuality even as it makes it an object of societywide amusement. What happens on the island of K—, however, is that the transvestites are performing a political theater that operates at a level of ironic mimicry that only they recognize. Their performance approximates Augusto Beal’s conception of an invisible theater, which “consists of the presentation of a scene in an environment other than the theater. . . . The people who witness the scene are those who are there by chance. During the spectacle, these people must not have the slightest idea that it is a ‘spectacle,’ for this would make them ‘spectators’ ” (143–44). It is precisely because transvestites are regarded as an acceptable “third sex” in Philippine society that they are able to achieve a completely different effect from the transvestites in Western society as theorized by Butler. At the festival, the transvestites appropriate their own spectacle, making the soldiers the unknowing participants in another spectacle altogether, in which the soldiers themselves are the unwitting performers in a revolutionary theater. Although guerrilla theater already has a different meaning, one might say that this is truly guerrilla theater, since in guerrilla warfare it is always the conventional soldier who is the unknowing spectator in a drama not of his own making. The transvestites thus effectively answer the problem of how to stage a spectacle when one is already a spectacle—already “out of the closet”—and they do it by exploiting the illusion that there is nothing under their skirts, that they are nothing but imitators. Here the transvestites, like any good trickster, turn their perceived limitations into literal weapons of the weak: in short, behind the spectacle and the imitation there is the potential of actual threat. In the domestic queer practices of the Philippines, the transvestites find the resources to stage a sexual and political revolution that is not dependent upon Western models of queer liberation.

The Nov e l a s Hol ly wo od M e l odr a m a This unconventional and unique approach to antiauthoritarian resistance found in State of War may be compared with the approach in Dogeaters, which is also based on the acceptance and exploitation of the spectacular. These features of the spectacle are integral to the very nature of the commodities

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that rule the Philippines in Hagedorn’s novel. Hagedorn’s postmodern vision of the Philippines is one in which everything and everyone is either for sale or in the circuit of the production and consumption of commodities. In Dogeaters, the problematic of commodification and sexuality finds its center in the world of film and its various locations of expression: the movie theater, the film industry, the star cults, the entire “intertextual” apparatus in which the moviegoer is inserted and from which the moviegoer as spectator derives meaning from particular films and stars. The world of film, with its dependency on the “ideology of the spectacle and spectacular,” as Thomas Elsaesser calls it (78), is but the most explicit manifestation of an entire society that feeds upon that ideology. The ideology of the spectacle and the spectacular is designed to market the commodity, enforce its mysteriousness (i.e., fetishize it, obscure the social relations that brought it into existence), and to the greatest extent possible persuade its audience that the commodity-as-spectacle can guarantee happiness. Hagedorn’s Dogeaters addresses the ideology of the spectacle in both form and content, through a complex adaptation and parody of the Hollywood melodrama. The melodrama, with its emphasis on bourgeois life, romantic love, compulsory heterosexuality, emotional extremism, coincidences and contradictions, Manichean moral oppositions, forced happy endings, and commodity fetishism, is an appropriate genre in which to address the pretensions, pitfalls, and real dangers of the Filipino elite and middle class. In addition, the melodrama, with its focus on female “problems,” female stars, and female audiences, was the genre that made most explicit the connection between cinematic spectacle and the marketing of commodities. In other words, the female star of the Hollywood melodrama presented a particular vision of what woman should be, in terms of appearance, dress, and behavior, all of which were aided by the use of various purchasable items: makeup, clothing, hairstyles, and so on. Melodrama therefore made explicit the relationship between film as an industry and the commodity as the basis for an entire mode of production. It did this through its use of film to market the image of the star, with all her attendant and necessary trappings, as a commodity package to an audience that was there to consume not only the film as narrative but also the film as marketing pitch. Dogeaters alludes to Hollywood melodrama from the beginning, when we are introduced to Rio and Pucha as they watch Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, in 1956. By the next chapter, the narrative has shifted gears to a time period that we understand to be in the 1980s. At the center of this contemporary narrative is Joey Sands, a homosexual prostitute and orphan who is the offspring of a Filipina prostitute and a black GI. As Mark Chiang argues, we can understand Joey’s narrative to be the story told by Rio; we can even imagine Joey’s story as a film, considering that Rio’s primary childhood

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ambition was to be a filmmaker (“All That History Allows”). The fact that the novel opens with Rio as a rapt spectator of one of the greatest Hollywood melodramas then serves as a clue that we should read the events of the internal narrative that feature Joey as melodrama. Melodrama is part of the historical period and style known as classical (Hollywood) cinema and shares most of the basic narrative and stylistic features of that cinema, including a dependence upon a certain kind of spectator and a plot of heterosexual romance with (delayed) consummation. Dogeaters demonstrates not only that melodramatic spectacle is tied to the marketing of the commodity but also that heterosexual romance is a part of this spectacle; subsequently, the novel appropriately places queer sexuality at the center of the revolution, a move that undermines the heterosexual romance that is an integral part of the cinematic spectacle to which Filipino audiences are subjected. The fact that the Filipino society of Dogeaters as a whole is a “society of the spectacle,” to borrow Guy Debord’s term, means that the novel’s gesture against a certain kind of consuming spectatorship has a wider political relevance. In purely cinematic terms, Dogeaters’s use of melodrama to address the problems of spectacle and spectatorship is appropriate because melodrama has critically complicated the most dominant theoretical approach to spectatorship, which is one based on psychoanalytic feminism. This approach is typified by Laura Mulvey’s immensely influential and controversial 1975 article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which argued that the spectator’s gaze was inherently masculine and directed at the feminine object of desire on the screen. As numerous critics subsequent to Mulvey have argued, the female spectator is left in an impossible position. Mulvey’s analysis, predicated as it is on the operations of classic cinema, is challenged by melodrama because of the fact that melodrama is marketed primarily toward female audiences and features female characters. This well-noted fact that concerns melodrama specifically is supplemented by Jackie Stacey’s general claim that “historically, it has been the female spectator who has been of most interest to the cinema and other related industries” (85). It is not an accident, therefore, that most of the characters in Dogeaters are women, as Rachel Lee points out (81, 147). Even Joey, the primary male character, is feminized, much in the same way that Rock Hudson’s character of Ron Kirby in All That Heaven Allows is feminized through being the object of the camera and the female characters’ gaze. Most important, melodrama as Hagedorn has staged it in the Philippines raises questions about how ethnicity, culture, and class, in addition to gender, problematize Mulvey’s idealized and unitary model of spectatorship. Even in the first chapter, Dogeaters self-consciously stages the problem of defining the spectator as a unitary being, in its contrast of Rio’s and Pucha’s reactions to Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. Rio identifies with Wyman; Pucha identifies with the masculine gaze that Mulvey proposes and

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bemoans the Hudson character’s choice of Wyman, whom even Rio describes as having a “soft putty face” (Hagedorn 3). Later, outside of the theater, Pucha takes pleasure in being ogled by a group of boys; Rio is disgusted by Pucha’s acquiescence to her own objectification, recognizing implicitly Pucha’s “impossible position” in both being the object of the masculine gaze and identifying with that gaze. Hagedorn’s novel therefore establishes the initial premise that the spectator is always multiply situated. However, the heterogeneous spectator in the Philippines is also always in a subaltern position in her relationship to Hollywood cinema and the global capitalism that it represents. This echoes Tadiar’s argument that the Philippines vis-à-vis global capital is always in a feminized position, regardless of differences internal to the Philippines itself. The subaltern spectator, by virtue of this gendered position, becomes in many ways an ideal Hollywood consumer due to material differences between metropolitan Hollywood and (neo)colonial Philippines. These material differences center on Hollywood’s status as a primary factor in the export of U.S. commodities and consumerist attitudes and as a primary technical site of ideological interpellation. As Stacey argues, In the same way that women are both subjects and objects of relations of looking, they can also be seen as both products and consumers of commodity exchange. . . . The work of femininity, then, requires the consumption of commodities. However, it not only involves consumption, both of images and of products, but also the negotiations of a feminine identity in a culture where women are both subjects and objects of commodity exchange. (8–9)

As a formula, this statement can apply equally well to Filipino women. Hagedorn illustrates this with the opening chapter, wherein she also makes explicit the essentially middle-class, interiorized nature of melodrama and the reliance upon heterosexual romance. In this opening chapter, Rio and Pucha watch the unlikely and socially condemned romance of lower-class Ron (Rock Hudson) and upper-class Carey (Jane Wyman) unfold. Their romance is a “miscegenation between classes” (Stern 120), which is set in two contrasting environments, Carey’s life in her middle-class home and Ron’s Walden-like existence in a mill that borders on a pond. Eventually, Carey succumbs to social pressure from friends and children and gives up Ron, only to find that the children for whom she has sacrificed herself have already started drifting away. Yet she cannot bring herself to return to Ron. Suddenly an accident befalls Ron: he falls from a cliff, and Carey is summoned to his bedside, where she swears to take care of the now-helpless Ron. The run-down mill in which Ron lives has been transformed during

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the course of the film by Ron into a gorgeous, lush rural parody of Thoreau’s spare hut, in anticipation of his marriage to Carey. Ron and Carey are thus reunited in another version of the middle-class house that Carey has fled, and Carey has left one patriarchal bind (her socially stratified widowhood) to enter another as wife and caretaker. This film, remarkable as all of Sirk’s major melodramas are for their combination of standard melodramatic formula with exposure of bourgeois contradictions, serves as a historical, thematic, and plot touchstone for Dogeaters. On a historical level, Dogeaters’ use of the film ironically exploits the figure of Rock Hudson, a male sex symbol who was secretly homosexual. The heterosexual masculinity he modeled for audiences was therefore a performance, although no less real to these audiences for being so. In the Philippine movie industry of the 1980s that Dogeaters depicts, the performance of heterosexual masculinity by gay men continues in the figures of the movie stars Nestor Norales and Tito Alvarez. They project images of both heterosexuality and cultural normality through their films, yet in their personal lives they are not only gay but also participants in the literally murderous intrigues and gossip of the political elites, who know their closeted secret. Behind the pristine and heterosexual images produced by the Filipino film industry, therefore, there is a sordid life that connects the secret sexuality of the movie stars with the corruption of those in control of the film industry in particular and the Filipino political economy in general. Dogeaters depicts the Philippines of the 1980s as a melodramatic world where a huge cast of characters, good and evil, are shown to be connected in a convoluted plot that centers on the systemic relations among money, sex, film, and the marketing of commodities. The novel in a sense “outs” this world, making clear what the fetishism of the commodity makes mysterious and what the cinematic image helps to obscure: the social relations between human beings, as they are mediated by the commodity. Thematically, Dogeaters is deeply concerned with this world of the commodity and its obfuscation to consumers, and through the use of literally confining spaces the novel demonstrates the confining nature of consciousnesses obsessed by commodities. All That Heaven Allows becomes important again when Dogeaters refers to the film’s use of an interior/exterior contrast, between lush middle-class interiors and the healthy outdoors, as symbolic of the bourgeois life and its bohemian counterpart. As Elsaesser has argued, the closed domestic arena of the melodrama, especially in contrast to the open space of the American western, leads to a vastly different set of choices and range of action for a film’s characters. In the closed space, there is an “intensified symbolisation of everyday actions” (79) and a focus upon and fetishization of household commodities in which most of the story takes place. Likewise in Dogeaters, there is an intense focus on interior spaces, their

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sensual experience, and the claustrophobic presence of commodities: in the movie theater, in darkened bedrooms, in country clubs, in mansions, in torture chambers. The crucial revolutionary movement for key characters is chronicled as both an awakening from the induced sleep (literal or otherwise) of the movie theater and the female bedroom and the movement from confined spaces to open ones. Joey, for example, witnesses the government-sanctioned murder of opposition leader Senator Avila at the entryway to a posh hotel and must escape to the mountains with the revolutionaries he stumbles into. Daisy Avila, former beauty queen who spends much of the novel weeping and sleeping in her bedroom, finally awakens and joins the same revolutionaries in the mountains. The crucial chapter of their revolutionary awareness is titled “Terrain,” echoing Elsaesser’s suggestion that in the open terrain of the western and in the revolutionary epic characters can find a range of exteriorized choices. They can, in short, enter into the open, public sphere and contend with the state, versus the private life of the family and the fetishized commodity. Even more crucial than this movement from interior to exterior is another theme-and-plot touchstone that Dogeaters finds in All That Heaven Allows, the heterosexual romance, which is a feature of classical cinema in general and melodrama in particular. As David Bordwell summarizes the issue, “unmotivated or inadequate plot resolutions” lead to the “importance of the plot line involving heterosexual romance,” which resolves the problem that arises around the fact that the “classical ending is not all that structurally decisive, being a more or less arbitrary readjustment of that world knocked awry in the previous eighty minutes” (“Classical Hollywood Cinema” 21). In Dogeaters, the Ron/Carey relationship is alluded to in the relationship between Joey and Daisy Avila. Joey and Daisy are almost engaged in a “miscegenation between classes” (Stern 120), in terms both of their economic status and their racial status: Daisy is a light-skinned beauty queen, daughter of the elites, and Joey is a mestizo prostitute. Like Ron and Carey, they also fit into the divisions of younger man/older woman and social outcast/social insider. Joey and Daisy’s transgression is not sexual but instead political, as two socially diametrical characters joined in the cause of revolution. While in All That Heaven Allows the heroine is returned to the bourgeois home made for her by the hero, in Dogeaters both hero and heroine break out into the open, the terrain of the jungle where the revolution is being plotted. The novel states that “they are together all the time. She teaches him how to use a gun” (233). The revolutionary romance of the man and the woman fleeing together to join the mission of overthrow and construction becomes subverted here through the presence of Joey’s homosexuality and Daisy’s single status. Joey’s homosexuality and Daisy’s single status become politically significant because of their insertion into the phallic, heterosexist romance of nationalist revolution, in

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which the successful revolution becomes a marriage between the liberated nation and state. Dogeaters’ vision of revolution undercuts both the heterosexual melodrama of Filipino society, which finds a reflection of itself in classical cinema, and the heterosexual themes of classic revolution, which extend into the formation of a postcolonial state. M. Jacqui Alexander suggests that in the postcolonial state homosexuality and other forms of “nonheteronormative” sexuality are considered improper: Heterosexuality promotes order while homosexuality, its antithesis, promotes chaos or the very dissolution of the natural. What is suggested is that some interest might intervene to establish order out of chaos. The state is one such interest, which rules by normalizing chaotic relations, and in this instance does so through a set of narrowly crafted notions of morality that informs its gestures. The significance here is that it sets the stage for . . . repressive state rule. (141)

Joey’s insertion into the revolution is therefore troubling to this conception of the state in two senses, as something that “perverts” the nationalist romance and as something that might be necessary for purging upon the successful completion of the revolution. By ending Joey’s narrative with his revolutionary conversion, Hagedorn endorses the first option and suspends the second option, thereby presenting the possibility of political revolution as a sexual revolution also.

Q u e er ing t he Nat ion Both Dogeaters and State of War recognize that struggles for the state usually depend upon narratives of heterosexual romance to represent themselves. In both novels, there is a clear recognition that the antistate revolution is a necessity, but both novels also seize upon the chance to rewrite that revolution’s narrative as well, staging, in effect, a sexual revolution. At the same time, both novels are troubled by the knowledge that revolutions usually depend also upon narratives that are as total as the ones used by the states to which they are opposed. As a result, both novels are undercut by varying degrees of ambivalence toward conclusive narrative of any sorts, including their own. Caroline S. Hau and Nerissa Balce-Cortes both note the metafictional quality of Dogeaters, the way in which the veracity of Rio’s story about Joey is placed into doubt by the penultimate chapter, titled “Pucha,” in which the muchmaligned Pucha finally gets her say, stating that Rio’s facts are greatly awry. Even Rio herself is shown ironically in her last chapter, imagining herself and her brother Raul as “nocturnal moths . . . drawn to the same silent tableau: a

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mysterious light. . . . We flap and beat our wings in our futile attempt to reach what surely must be heaven” (247). Obviously, Rio is not aware that “heaven” in this metaphor is also death for the moth. With its use of metafiction and other postmodern techniques Dogeaters creates a narrative about the spectacle and the commodity that is appealing to American audiences reared on those techniques and who may associate the Philippines with the spectacular consumption of commodities. At the same time, the novel’s flexible strategy of using postmodern techniques to speak to an American audience simultaneously limits its ability to narrate with the certainty about future possibility that is fundamental to revolution. In contrast, State of War integrates the ambiguity of its transvestites’ identities with this necessary certainty. The transvestites are initially a symbol of illusion and passing, but this is destroyed by the revelation of the shotguns hidden under their skirts; this revelation demonstrates that the revolution, even as it exploits ambiguity, must fall back on the hard certainty of armed confrontation. This armed confrontation is necessary if the revolution is to destroy the illusions created by the government. In this regard, the revolution’s most outstanding achievement before the battle at the festival takes place when the revolutionaries explode a warehouse full of dead government soldiers. The state’s attempt to hide away the bodies of its own soldiers—the material testimony to an illusory war—is forced into the open by the revolutionaries, who send body parts flying all over the city. The explosion sends “limbs, heads, torsos zooming like torpedoes through the air . . . to skid along tables, demolishing the dinners of the unwary; to settle on sofas among the living who were watching television; to snuggle on the bedsheets, disturbing lovers . . .” (Rosca 113). The war between the neocolonial state and the revolutionary forces is waged around illusions, around propaganda and guerrilla warfare, but the necessity for certainty in order to stage action is embodied in these dead bodies and the phallic shotguns of the transvestites. While the representation of the transvestites forms the novel’s flexible strategy, which exploits Western notions of queer visibility as political resistance, the dead bodies represent the novel’s commitment to making readers confront the gruesome consequences of dictatorship. The certainty of action that is called for by the revolutionaries’ exploitation of the dead bodies is offset by the recognition that the war for meaning—the war over representation—is inherently contradictory in its attempt to assert control over that which is subject to interpretation. Characters like Adrian seek to grasp all of history, to know the totality of their own family line or even themselves. Their desire will be forever frustrated. The conclusion of the novel, then, is telling. Anna reunites the bastardized family lines of the two main families featured in the novel, the Banyagas and the Villaverdes, in the figure of her son Ismael Villaverde Banyaga. This naming of her son

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gestures at that hope for unity and the wholeness of a circle as the Banyagas and the Villaverdes, the two bastard lines of an unnamed Spanish friar, are reunited. This unification is undercut by the fact that Ismael is fated to become a storyteller, who “would remember, his name being a history unto itself ” (Rosca 382). Storytelling and the narration of history will always be gestures of desire. The revolution must seek out the certainty of representation in order to make possible the act of revolution, even as it is aware that representation is a matter of interpretation, as the dictatorial use of propaganda on the part of the Commander and his cronies make clear. The revolution, in other words, must attempt to grasp or project totalizing meaning even as it remembers who else seeks totalizing meaning and representation. Besides the dictatorial regime of the martial-law Philippines, another one of those totalizing agents of history is the United States itself. The United States has constructed a nationalist romance about itself, one of the components being its exceptional nature as a nonimperial, pro-democratic society. To expose U.S. involvement in the Philippines is, metaphorically, to queer this nationalist romance. This process of queering the American romance has implications for Americans, obviously, but also for Filipinos in the United States and Asian Americans as a whole. What has been forgotten in the national romance is the presence of the Filipinos within the United States itself and the fact that a colonial war was fought over the Philippines. E. San Juan Jr. laments how Filipinos, soon to become the largest component of the Asian American population, are nevertheless one of its most silent constituencies: “We are here, but somehow it’s still a secret” (Racial Formations/Critical Transformations 117). The foregrounding of the Filipino presence in both the United States and its history has the potential for three dramatic consequences, according to Oscar Campomanes and San Juan. The first is its impact on the self-representation of the United States as a democratically exceptional nation that is somehow removed from the era of colonialism. The historical difficulty for Americans in remembering the extent and nature of American involvement in the Philippines has everything to do with how “un-American” certain colonial policies were. This also has ramifications for Asian Americans, who oftentimes participate in and agree with American nationalism and are therefore subject to the same historical amnesia. Campomanes argues that the literature of Filipinos in the United States can be understood as diametrically opposed to the assimilationist, nationalist narrative that typically undergirds most Asian immigrant literatures and their reception by Asian American literary critics (“Filipinos in the United States”). The assimilation narrative is fundamental to the vision of Americanization and cultural pluralism that is at the heart of most (Asian) American histories, literary and otherwise. The alternative model Campomanes proposes is that of the exile, who occupies a

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place of “displacement, suspension, and perspective” in a land with which he or she has an ambivalent relationship (“Filipinos in the United States” 51). The second consequence is for Filipinos, both in the Philippines and in the United States. While many Filipinos may remember the military and economic imperialists of the United States, they may overlook the more longlasting, more damaging effects of U.S. intervention. These include the legacy of colonial education, the U.S. support for Marcos, and the mental colonization of Filipinos by U.S. cultural imperialism. The pervasiveness of the contemporary U.S. presence in the Philippines leads Campomanes to argue that “Americanization for Filipinos does not so much as commence at the point of arrival in American soil as it does from the point of departure itself ” (“Afterword” 147). This continuity of experience for Filipinos, from their time in the homeland to their immigration and settlement in the United States, signifies the arbitrary and provisional nature of the national boundary that separates the United States and the Philippines. As San Juan puts it, Filipinos “have challenged the asymmetrical cartography of metropolis and colony, core and periphery” (“In Search of Filipino Writing” 214). The third consequence of bringing Filipinos and the Philippines into American history follows upon this recognition of an arbitrary national boundary. This boundary does not prevent the possibility of the diasporic Filipino returning home to a place from which he or she can never be completely severed. This return is in its less important sense a physical one, although the capacity of (certain groups of ) people to traverse the globe almost at will is a fundamental feature of the world system, what Arjun Appadurai calls the “ethnoscape” of population flow and what James Clifford calls “traveling cultures.” More crucial to the historical representation of Filipinos is the discursive return engaged in by writers and thinkers of all disciplines. In Hagedorn’s and Rosca’s novels, the return to the homeland is not the return to paradise, utopia, or precolonial purity. Instead, it is a return to a place damaged irrevocably by the legacies of a colonialism and anticolonialism narrated through images of heterosexual romance and conflict. These legacies endure in the postcolonial regime of dictatorship, which uses the language of an abusive love for its citizens. In these novels, we can read the signs of that abuse in the bodies of the tortured and in the bodies of transvestites and homosexuals who defy the disciplinary rule of a dictatorial regime.

MICHELE JANET TE

Vietnamese American Literature in English, 1963–1994

F

ortunately, it now goes without saying that in order to understand America’s involvement with Viet Nam, and/or Vietnamese American culture, it is crucial that we listen to Vietnamese and Vietnamese American voices themselves. However, in practice, many who teach and research in this field have found obstacles to working with Vietnamese American literature, not least of which is the simple lack of knowledge about what is available. Since 1963, over 100 volumes of literature in English have been published by Vietnamese American authors, a figure that may surprise even scholars in the field. 2 I hope here to offer a map of the first generation of Vietnamese American literature in English, from the period of 1963–1994, that will encourage further research and teaching in this area. Rather than offering bibliographic annotations or summaries of each work, I will delineate common themes and techniques. I also suggest that obstacles to this literature becoming well known have had an ideological as well as practical edge, in that these narratives by Vietnamese Americans were not heard because they were not useful to either the American left or right in the years that followed the war in Viet Nam. In defining Vietnamese American literature, I have taken as parameters two guidelines, one regarding the ethnicity of the authors, the other regarding the genre or form of the writing. By using the term “Vietnamese AmeriFrom Amerasia Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 2003, pp. 267–286. © 2003 by Amerasia Journal.

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can,” I refer to a shared ethnic heritage. These authors relate to Viet Nam as the land from which they or their parents came to the U.S. In relying on this commonality, I acknowledge the influential geo-political and cultural position from which this writing springs. I discuss poetry and novels, as well as memoirs, historical narratives, and essays. I have also included criticism and history that is written by Vietnamese American authors and that deals directly with Viet Nam or the relationship between Viet Nam and America.3 Published writings before 1995 were almost exclusively based in authorial biography, and nearly all are poems or prose memoirs. However, the memoir by the non-writer is vanishing. In its place is work by a generation of writers who see themselves as wordsmiths first, members of a particular identity group second. The last seven years have seen a blossoming of Vietnamese American literature in English that I believe will come into full flower in the next decade or so. At this moment, while we are still in the midst of transition, it seems important to acknowledge the foundational generation that preceded it. One striking aspect of this foundational group is its internal diversity in politics and ideology. These authors emigrated to the U.S. from the southern region of Viet Nam; even those who were born in the North emigrated first to the South and then to the U.S.4 However, these writers do not necessarily share political, class, religious, or social values. Rather, the literature reveals an uncategorizable multiplicity of political and ideological views. There are voices of leaders and soldiers of the Republic of Viet Nam, but these are often critical of both Vietnamese politics and of the United States (e.g., Nguyen Cao Ky, Tran Van Don, Cao Van Vien, Bui Diem). And there are writers who fought in Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies, or led the political fight against the U.S. through the National Liberation Front, but who became disillusioned with communism (e.g., Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, Le Ly Hayslip, Truong Nhu Tang). There are writers who watched “the Vietnam War” from America, as students or diplomats here (e.g., Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, Tran Van Dinh, Nguyen Thai, Ngô Vinh Long). Some writers are critical of both the North and South governments, yet are pro-American (e.g., Le Ly Hayslip, Linda B.); some are sympathetic to the communist cause (e.g., Ngô Vinh Long, Le Anh Tu, David Truong); some opposed French colonization but befriended the American military (e.g., Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai and Nguyen Thị Thu-Lâm); and some never mention their political allegiance, focusing on the more general destructiveness of war (e.g., Trần Khánh Tuyết, Huynh Quang Nhuong, Kim-Lan Tran). Breaking even the truism that the Vietnamese were united in detesting French colonization, there are writers who saw the anti-French Viet Minh as the enemy (e.g. Tam). The one common factor is that this is literature with a mission. These are tales and poems and memoirs that seek to educate more than to entertain.

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They are neither timeless nor escapist, but tied to the promotion of a specific cause, whether that be Christian proselytizing, advocacy for the blind, calling to arms against corruption in Viet Nam, educating about Vietnamese culture, healing the wounds of war, or setting the record straight for posterity. In some ways this literature is like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, trying to make everyone hear its tale.

Be gin n ing s The earliest Vietnamese American publications in English might most properly be considered sojourner writings rather than immigrant literature. While Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai and Tran Van Dinh did eventually settle permanently in the U.S., when they published in the mid-1960s, they wrote as visitors.5 Yet these early works are crucial to our understanding of Vietnamese American literature. Mai’s personal essay, “Electioneering Vietnamese Style” (1963), uses her unsuccessful bid for office to illustrate election corruption under President Diem. Dinh’s novel, No Passenger on the River (1965), fictionalizes his involvement in an unsuccessful coup against Diem’s regime. In theme, mode, and purpose, they forecast the major characteristics of Vietnamese American writings of the next thirty-odd years. They both are based in memoir, offer strident political critiques of Viet Nam’s government, and seek to change America’s views, thus hoping to change America’s behavior. Both Dinh and Mai also complicate the memoir genre, even as they participate in it. Although based in his own coup attempt, Dinh’s work is in fact a novel, not a memoir—two of the most striking fictionalizations are that in the novel, his failed 1960 coup is transposed onto the 1963 coup which did in fact unseat (and assassinate) Diem, and that the novel concludes with the protagonist’s death (whereas of course Dinh himself lived).6 Mai, too, complicates the issue of authenticity: her publication about “my entree into South Vietnamese politics” turns out to have been ghost written by her husband, according to her own subsequent memoir, The Rubber Tree.7 Mai’s work, while appearing more straightforwardly autobiographical than Dinh’s, thus troubles claims of authenticity by introducing questions of influence, alteration, and appropriation. These issues recur in later works. When Wendy Larsen arranged Tran Thi Nga’s tape-recorded reminiscences into written poems in Shallow Graves (1986), several critics accused her of cultural imperialism, and yet many of the poems that appear in Nga’s voice are directly and wryly critical of such imperialism. So the text as a whole may be staging or exposing the imbalance of power between Larsen and Nga, rather than blithely repeating it.8 Similar questions have been raised about the influence of ghostwriters and publishers on the most famous Vietnamese American text, Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989). After talking with

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Hayslip, Renny Christopher included in her analysis of this memoir the claim that Hayslip’s publishers cut a third of the text before agreeing to publish it.9 Christopher suggests that among the elements the publishers found too “repetitious” were Le Ly’s rapes. The publishing editor, however, says that editorial suggestions were more prosaic and involved cutting long descriptions of plane travel. She did not urge the erasure of any major elements, since it would go against her own feminist politics to erase another woman’s traumatic experience. The editor suggests that any such changes may have been made before she ever saw the manuscript.10 To further complicate matters, Hayslip herself has since insisted that the published text is entirely accurate.11 Throughout its history, Vietnamese American literature has complicated its own authenticity, even as it has also often insisted on the veracity of its accounts. Given that Tran Van Dinh and Nguyễn Thị Thu-Lâm prefigure such preoccupations as well as chronologically preceding everything else, it is tempting to see them as founding figures—even to imagine them as like the legendary Vietnamese Au Co and the Dragon King, progenitors of a national family of writers. If we were to follow such a fanciful metaphor, we might note that as the children of Au Co and the Dragon King divided into mountain and sea-side dwellers, Vietnamese American literature largely divides into tales of witness, tales of education, and tales of life in America. Some works cross the boundaries of such classification—most famously Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, whose structure is an oscillation between recollections of her life in Viet Nam with the “present” narrative of life in America. I offer these classifications as a useful but rough-cut schema.12

Ta l e s of Wi t n e ss I have chosen to call the largest of these groups “tales of witness” rather than memoirs or exile narratives. Nearly all are written in autobiographical first-person narration, and even the novels are based in their author’s biography. Yet despite this reliance on personal experience, these works are not essentially about their authors. The language of witnessing seems best to capture the attention in these works to what the narrator saw surrounding him or herself. Even former Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, whose style one might find a tad arrogant, uses his life as a means to describe historical events rather than seeing his biography as the end in itself. He, like the other authors, tends to use the personal to justify, explicate, or condemn the political. I have also avoided the language of exile because it seems to me to over-emphasize the position of cut-off. While I agree with Christopher that these works are often heavily concerned with the land left behind, there is a sense of movement and connection in them that seems not exactly exilic. Some of these writers, like Dinh and Hayslip, tell stories

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of going back and forth between Viet Nam and the United States. Others may not maintain such physical connections to both nations, but in their general address to the mainstream American audience rather than (or in addition to) fellow Vietnamese expatriates, there is a multicultural rather than exilic perspective. The work of critic Qui-Phiet Tran has been crucial in drawing this distinction. His descriptions of Vietnamese American Literature written in Vietnamese reveal a body of work that is thematically and stylistically different from what is happening in English. According to him, the literature in Vietnamese is filled with “wrath and anger,” offering nostalgic recreations of a lost homeland, bitter complaints against workaholic American culture, and impassioned testimony of post-war Viet Nam as a dehumanizing wasteland.13 In contrast, English-language literature is characterized by patience and tact. Even when, as with former Ambassador Bui Diem, the author is explicitly denouncing American bossiness and insensitivity, this message is delivered in measured tones which seem to cling to the belief that if only things could just be explained properly to Americans, surely those Americans would listen, learn, and alter. In these memoirs there is almost no condemnation of America. Where there is criticism, it is nearly always accompanied by even greater self-criticism. English-language literature offers a critically nostalgic vision of the pre-Communist homeland, a more tempered testimony about Communist rule, and a more enthusiastic embrace of the new American home. It seems predictable that those who choose to write in English would be more positively identified with the United States. The very guilt which Tran describes as pervading much Vietnamese American literature in Vietnamese (guilt over being the “lucky” ones who escaped to America) might well incline authors to vent frustration within the Vietnamese community rather than incurring further guilt by expressing ingratitude toward those who, as Tran puts it, “granted them asylum.”14 What may be more surprising is that given the greater endorsement of American culture, ideology, and behavior, and given the easier accessibility of these writings for the majority of Americans, this literature has nonetheless remained practically unknown. This is not to say that there is no condemnation anywhere in these texts. Vietnamese politics is repeatedly skewered, eviscerated, and denounced. This happens in equal measure with the two most hated regimes: that of Diem and that of the Communists. In between these two eras, writers speak more of chaos than of outrage. Indeed, the desire to bring order to a chaotic history characterizes both the content and the method of a large sub-group of these tales of witness. In the wake of the “fall” of South Viet Nam, many of the nation’s former leaders published accounts of political intrigues, ambitions, and frustrations of the post-Diem period. Written by high-ranking, influential men, the narratives

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offer themselves as guides through the political confusion, and in the process often champion the author/protagonist’s (usually thwarted) political vision as that which would have brought logic and success to their government. They create a retrospective arrangement of the history that recompenses the frustration of having their offered arrangements ignored at the time. Like many U.S. veteran tales, several writers blame the American government. But they blame that government for different things. Rather than expressing resentment at being constrained, Vietnamese veteran politicians like Bui Diem bristle with frustration at being made into dependents; at America’s lack of comprehension about Vietnamese culture, history, and politics; and at being excluded from all real decisions about the waging of the war. The frustration of the political accounts becomes bitter disillusionment in another group of witness tales: re-education camp narratives. In these accounts of reunified Viet Nam as a police state, authors such as Doan Van Toai and Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn chart their beginnings in political neutrality (or even in criticism of the South Vietnamese government) and express their dismay at finding themselves subsequently considered enemies of the communist state. These accounts tend to be written by men and present the camps as largely inhabited by men. Nguyen Mai’s novel God’s Will offers an exception here—both in its portrayal of a young woman imprisoned and in being written by a woman. Rather than describing the machinations and intrigues of South Vietnamese high politics, or the utter disempowerment of being imprisoned by the new Vietnamese state, the third group of witness tales focuses on civilian life. These narratives, primarily written by women, tend to encompass many decades (and thus many political regimes). They describe consequences rather than motives of political shifts, in the process describing familial and economic forces at least as powerful as military or political ones. In these texts there is less idealism about Vietnamese society than in the men’s, but also more description of being able to survive within the social system. Many describe the women’s economic projects—often taking what advantage they can of the American military presence by doing business with the PX and eventually buying their way out of the country. These narratives are less sentimental about romantic love than the men’s, even as they spend more time discussing their romantic and familial relationships. While some, like Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, recount misadventures with American GIs, others, like Nguyen Thi Tuyet-Mai’s The Rubber Tree, reveal equal misgivings about traditional Vietnamese marriages.

Ta l e s of Educ at ion One sentiment that echoes throughout these works, especially those by politicians, is that Americans knew next to nothing about Viet Nam.

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A significant portion of Vietnamese American writing seeks to address precisely this issue. Pedagogical essays seek to inform an American readership about “The Poetic Tradition of Vietnam,” life Before the Revolution, “Vietnamese Humor About Americans,” “Popular Culture and High Culture in Vietnamese History,” “The Tradition of Pacifism and Humanism in Vietnamese Literature,” the significance of Vietnamese epic heroines to wartime psychology, and more.15 In different ways, both Nguyen Thai and Doan Van Toai try to make Americans actually see the Vietnamese people. Writing seven years after the Americans left Viet Nam, Toai gathers stories of individuals from the many sides of the war, attempting to show Americans a more lifelike portrait of those once called “the enemy.” Thai wrote before American troops were sent to Viet Nam, but, like Toai, Thai tries to make Americans see a Vietnamese perspective. He rhetorically turns the tables of political sophistication as he ponders American political gullibility and naïveté in the face of Vietnamese politics: “What puzzles U.S. Vietnamese is that so many Americans have been taken in by Diem’s bluff.”16 Historians Ngô Vinh Long and Hue-Tam Ho Tai have offered lucid accounts of French Colonial Viet Nam and the various resistance movements that appeared early in the twentieth century, as well as developments involving Americans later in the century.17 Other literature seeks to preserve Vietnamese culture for future generations. In their tales for children, Duong Van Quyen and Kim-Lan Tran seek to pass on traditional Vietnamese beliefs and legends, both to help non-Vietnamese Americans understand members of this new wave of immigrants, and to ensure that Vietnamese American children maintain their linguistic and cultural ties to Viet Nam. Similarly, Trần Khánh Tuyết and Huynh Quang Nhuong write children’s stories in order to keep alive details of everyday Vietnamese life, from a lunch of “crabs . . . roasted with salt, hot pepper and lemon grass” to riding on the family waterbuffalo to raid an “otters’ party” and steal all their fish.18 For Nhuong, this project is deliberately nostalgic, to memorialize “The Land I Lost” because of the war. The war itself is not described by Nhuong, but enters only in the final chapter to destroy the world depicted by the rest of the book. This disruption by war is the starting point for Tuyết’s book, which follows a wounded young girl to San Francisco for treatment after a bombing raid. Both Quyen’s and Tuyết’s books were co-written with native English speakers. Theirs and Tran’s were published explicitly for use in multicultural education: Tran’s as part of a series on multicultural holidays; Tuyết’s for a bilingual, bicultural series for elementary schools; and Quyen’s accompanied by an “instruction guide” for teachers and multilingual translators. Bilingualism is encouraged for adults as well, in Thomas XT Nguyen’s book of poetry, Feeling Vietnamese.19 In addition to encouraging Vietnamese

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American children to keep up their Vietnamese, the book seeks to “introduce the English-speaking reader” to Vietnamese verse forms such as the luc-bát and thất-ngôn bát-cú. It manages quite delightfully to render the familiar strange in a poem that transliterates English back into Vietnamese phonemes, resulting in a pastiche of non-sequiturs in both languages: “Lét gô do-rinh sâm bia! / Bái bai in lít, ô kề eo cam!” (in the Vietnamese poem). (“Let us go drink some beer! / Bye bye English, OK welcome!” [in the English poem]; “Thôi cho tôi mấy lon bia, / Anh văn tạm dẹp, uống bia chịu liền” [in footnote to the Vietnamese poem].)20 Trinh Thi Minh-Ha puts a twist on the educational goal. In her two works that specifically address Viet Nam, Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989) and Woman/Native/Other (1989), Trinh shares with these other writers the desire to make her audience think. But where other writers offer clarity, Trinh explicitly aims to confound, unsettling what we think we already know, leaving us with questions and instability rather than providing straightforward information. In her familiarity and fluency with postcolonial and postmodern discourses (not to mention her influences on these theoretical schools), she anticipates the generation of writing to appear after 1995.

Ta l e s of L if e in A mer ic a The Reagan Era was one in which mainstream America reveled in capitalism. Vietnamese American literature reflects the shift from social protest and hippies to conspicuous consumption and yuppies. While war memoirs and cultural explication continued, a new thread appeared in the tapestry of these writings: the capitalist success story. These stories often begin in Viet Nam but are primarily devoted to the American side of the tale. For John Leba, the story is strictly commercial, as demonstrated in his Vietnamese Entrepreneurs in the USA: The First Decade. 21 The book chronicles several rags to riches tales, as well as analyzing some less successful stories, but in all, he reiterates the American creed of economic reward for creativity and hard work. Hayslip’s second book similarly narrates her growing financial success, contrasting it with a series of disastrous romantic encounters. She reconciles her emotional and financial lives by abandoning the unreliability of men in order to focus on a maternal form of capitalism, in which profits from her businesses and books fund her philanthropy in Viet Nam. Both literally in her biological family (her father is dead, she remains unmarried and devoted to her sons) and figuratively (she devotes profits from her book sales and restaurant career to the creation of “Mother Love” clinics in Viet Nam), she creates capitalist, but non-patriarchal structures. 22 Other authors combine the tale of financial success with some sort of spiritual or humanistic purpose. Mai Holter and Nguyen Van Vu tell their

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immigration stories primarily as conversion tales, finding their way to America through Christian churches. Their adoptions of Christianity and of American citizenship are tightly interconnected. Both books are driven as much by the need to bear testimony to their faith as to recount their experiences of war or immigration. Anna Kim-Lan McCauley and Huong Giang Nguyen, too, use their histories of war and migration primarily as a means to another end: social activism. McCauley’s memoir serves as a plea for greater sensitivity toward and integration of blind people into mainstream American culture. Although McCauley disclaims having been influenced by other American Civil Rights movements, her book is in many ways more a civil rights book than an immigrant, exile, or war narrative.23 Huong Giang Nguyen’s essay is an affirmation of feminist, lesbian identity politics, reflecting the political movements of the 1980s. While the majority of these works paint America as a place of wealth, liberty, and Christianity, they also explore contradictions and complications of American society. Even as they celebrate free enterprise, they also reveal racism and other obstacles within the American capitalist system. Nguyen Van Vu, for example, refuses governmental support, chastises Americans who are too lazy to make ends meet, and expresses unironic gratitude for the opportunity to work several jobs, rather than resenting the necessity of piling one low-paying job on top of another: “I have become a ‘moonlighter’ like many other Americans. This is another advantage of the free-enterprise system.”24 But critique seeps in, nonetheless: “Even when a house, part of your food, and your utilities are furnished, it is still difficult to save money when you have a family of nine and your pay averages less than $3.50 per hour.”25 And while Holter is a believer and Hayslip a skeptic, both describe American fundamentalist Christianity in ways that reveal its fundamental sexism.

C on t e x t s Much of this literature bears the traces of finding it hard to be heard. Much is self-published or published through vanity presses. Evincing their anxiety, some authors include form letters of endorsement and thanks they receive after sending gift copies of their work to the U.S. President and other high politicians. 26 Renny Christopher has charged us to be aware of the racism that pervades our views of the war and of Viet Nam. She sees in that racism the reason for neglect of this literature: “academic inquiry into Vietnamese American culture is marginalized by Euro-American ethnocentricity.”27 John Schafer suggests that these omissions have had more to do with practical difficulties of access: “not knowing Vietnamese, not knowing what is available in English, not being able to get copies of what you do know exists.”28 Ideological and practical obstacles may well

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both contribute to the obscurity of this literature. This is, in fact, literature that is hard to find, and easy to write off—much of it is politically strident or stylistically awkward. But I suggest that neither thwarted goodwill nor blithe racism fully accounts for its oversight. To understand the general obscurity of this literature, we need to ask for whom these stories might be useful, and consider why they have not been found useful in the last thirty years. Asking ourselves such questions gets at the complexity of the position of Vietnamese American literature. Whereas the watershed moment for Viet Nam war narratives by nonVietnamese Americans was the creation of the memorial wall in DC—its visibility allowing the war to reemerge in public discourse—the important historical turning points for Vietnamese American literature have been more internationally eventful. The first was 1975, when the literature moved from criticism of South Vietnam and attempts to influence America to retrospective explanations by South Vietnamese politicians. This shift seems relatively straightforward; it reflects the wave of immigrants who arrived in 1975: the South Vietnamese political, military, and economic elite. These works, often published through military institutions, participate in the military postmortem of the lost war. The second shift occurred in 1989, when the focus shifts to civilian life, and the field becomes dominated by women writers. This shift seems less clearly explicable. If Viet Nam becomes available for general American discussion in 1982, why the six-year delay? Why the increase in women’s texts, and texts that describe daily life? I suggest that this literature has remained out of view because it challenges the legitimacy of one claim shared by both the left and the right: victimhood. The Vietnam War is famous for being the war America lost. But more relevant here, it is a war understood as having no winner. Without winners, there are only victims. As Katherine Kinney has recently shown, America tends to see this war as one in which we fought ourselves, not the Vietnamese.29 (We are thus our own victims, and the Vietnamese vanish entirely.) Indeed, the social rehabilitation of the figure of the Vietnam Vet has come largely through understanding the soldier/vet as victim of the war. Even efforts of reconciliation by American veterans often begin from the guilt of what the American military did to Viet Nam (so even if the Vietnamese did win, they are still victims). Vietnamese American literature muddies this picture. If what was lost in the war was innocent faith in the American right, it is embarrassing to face the insistent belief in the American Dream that is present in much of this literature. If American forces are the primary victims, it is awkward to listen to the accusations of betrayal from South Vietnamese soldiers. And if the war was really all about America, then accounts that center on Vietnamese experience are phenomenological impossibilities.

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While Viet Nam could again be discussed after 1982, “Vietnam” thus meant not just “war,” but “the war America lost.” So long as this was the case, “Vietnamese America” remained a contradiction in terms, a cultural impossibility, and as such, unheard. In 1989, however, the cold war ended. The falling of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union signified that America had won. I suggest that it is this renewed sense of victory that allowed America to shift from the embargo against Viet Nam and the erasure of the Vietnamese Americans to a perversely more generous acknowledgment. Renny Christopher eloquently quipped in 1995 that “the United States lost the shooting war, but so far it is winning [the] meta-war.”30 I would amend this slightly, and, at the expense of pithy eloquence, say that America lost the hot war, and was a bad loser, and having lost, reduced a nation to the sign of its own loss. But having won the cold war, America became a rather better winner, and thus could see Viet Nam as a nation (with whom we might even trade) and a people. This last idea seems to me to suggest why the surge in civilian narratives: Viet Nam became a place with Vietnamese people, not just a place where Americans died. Here we have also part of the explanation for why, then, we would also see more women. Le Ly Hayslip’s own prominence here stands as a good illustration. Looking on the progressive side, an early and staunch supporter of Hayslip’s books was her feminist editor, who heavily promoted the work of this unknown woman writer (and who herself had enough professional clout to do so). Hayslip’s books have also been taught in many college classes—this phenomenon itself partly a response to complex pressures to increase the multiculturalism of course syllabi. But there is also a regressive undercurrent to Hayslip’s fame. Her cultural visibility is largely due to the fact that Oliver Stone adopted her books as the basis for the last film in his Vietnam trilogy. Without denying him the credit of making the first Hollywood Vietnam film from a Vietnamese perspective, I think we can also see his film as participating in a prevalent American racism manifested through sexism (the only visible Viet Nam is a feminine Viet Nam). As many critics have pointed out, when America sees Asia, it always sees a woman. Thus, following Susan Jefford’s arguments about the remasculinization of America in the wake of the Vietnam War, it is an America again secure in its patriarchal prowess in 1989 which can chivalrically acknowledge the lady Viet Nam. As America determinedly celebrates round two of the war that was supposed to “kick the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,”31 it seems that Viet Nam is again in danger of vanishing from the American cultural psyche, or of being granted presence only insofar as it moves away from being associated with the war America lost. It is thus important to acknowledge and investigate this early Vietnamese American literature, a literature that is still powerfully engaged with its war-inflected historical context.

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Selected Chronological Bibliography of English-Language Vietnamese American Literature32 Tales of Witness

Fir s t P er s on Pol i t ic a l Ac c ou n t s Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai. “Electioneering: Vietnamese Style.” The Asian Survey 11:9 (November 1962): 11–18. Nguyen Thai. “A Vietnamese Speaks Out.” The New Republic ( June 8, 1963): 14–17. Tran Van Dinh. No Passenger on the River. New York: Vantage, 1965. Phu Ton That. “The Hamlet Program: A Tool for Nation-Building in South Vietnam” (Ph. D. diss., University of Denver, 1969). Ngô Vính Long. “The Post-War Reconstruction of South Vietnam.” Bridge (October/November 1975): 33–37. Nguyen Cao Ky. Twenty Years and Twenty Days. New York: Stein and Day, 1976. Hosmer, Stephen T., ed. The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders: Prepared for the Office of Secretary of Defense, Office of Historian. Santa Monica: Rand, 1978. Tran Van Don. Our Endless War: Inside Vietnam. San Rafael: Presidio Press, 1978. Tran Van Dinh. Blue Dragon, White Tiger: A Tet Story. Philadelphia: TriAm Press, 1983. Vien, Cao Van. The Final Collapse. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1983. Vu Van Chong (Tam). Vietnam’s War 1940–1975. Lawrenceville, Virginia: Brunswick, 1983. Troung Nhu Tang with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. A Vietcong Memoir. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985. Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff. The Vietnamese Gulag. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Lam Quang Thi. Autopsy: The Death of South Vietnam. Phoenix: Sphinx Publishing, 1986. Bui Diem with David Chanoff. In the Jaws of History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Ngô Vính Long. “Post-Paris Agreement Struggles and the Fall of Saigon.” In Mark Bradley, et al. The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.

R e-e duc at ion Ca mp Na r r at i v e s Nguyen Long with Harry H. Kendall. After Saigon Fell: Daily Life Under the Vietnamese Communists. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press, 1981. Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn with E. E. Richie. The Will of Heaven: A Story of One Vietnamese and the End of His World. New York: Dutton, 1982. Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff. The Vietnamese Gulag. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Tran Tri Vu. Lost Years: My 1,632 Days in Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988.

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Ci v il i a n Ac c ou n t s McCauley, Anna Kim-Lan. Miles From Home. Wakefield, Massachusetts: AKLM Publications, 1984. Larson, Wendy Wilder and Tran Thi Nga. Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1986. Nguyễn Thị Thu-Lâm, with Edith Kreisler and Sandra Christenson. Fallen Leaves: Memories of a Vietnamese Woman from 1940 to 1975. New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and Boston: William Joiner Center, 1989. Hayslip, Le Ly with Jay Wurts. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey From War to Peace. New York: Penguin, 1989. B., Linda (Nguyen Thi Loan). Edge of Survival. Charleston, South Carolina: Ashley Publishing, 1993. Hayslip, Le Ly, with James Hayslip. Child of War, Woman of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Holter, Mai. While I am Here. Davenport, Iowa: Midland Press, 1993. Nguyen, Mai. God’s Will. San Jose: Papyrus, 1993. Hùynh, Jade Ngọc Quang. South Wind Changing. St. Paul, Minnesota: Greywolf Press, 1994. Nguyễn Quí Dúc. Where the Ashes Are. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994. Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai. The Rubber Tree: Memoir of a Vietnamese Woman Who Was an AntiFrench Guerrilla, a Publisher and a Peace Activist. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1994.

Tales of Education

D i dac t ic Tran Van Dinh. “Astounding Captured Document Reveals Mind of Enemy.” The Washingtonian (April 1968): 40–47, 66–70. ———. “How to Win a Cold War and Die Laughing.” The Washingtonian (October 1968): 70–71, 96–98. ———. “Black Power in Vietnam.” The Washingtonian (February 1969): 41–42, 61–62. ———. “A Vietnamese Takes Encouragement from the Nixon Inaugural Address—and Offers Some of His Own.” The Christian Century (March 5, 1969): 313–314. ———. “The Other Side of the Table.” The Washington Monthly ( January 1970): 74–80. ———. “Catholics in Vietnam.” Worldview (November 1972): 35–40. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích. “The Poetic Tradition of Viet Nam.” Some Aspects of Vietnamese Culture: Four Lectures by Nguyen Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen Ngoc Bich, William Negherbon, and Vo Dinh. Carbondale, Illinois: Center for Vietnamese Studies, Southern Illinois, 1972. Nguyễn Dình Hòa. “Vietnamese Language and Literature.” Some Aspects of Vietnamese Culture: Four Lectures by Nguyen Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen Ngoc Bich, William Negherbon, and Vo Dinh. Carbondale, Illinois: Center for Vietnamese Studies, Southern Illinois, 1972. Võ-Dình. “Views of a Vietnamese Artist.” Some Aspects of Vietnamese Culture. Carbondale, Illinois: Center for Vietnamese Studies, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1972.

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Ngô Vính Long. Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973. Truong, David. “Letter from Washington.” Bridge (October/November 1975): 74. Le Anh Tu. “The Vietnam Evacuees . . . What Now?” Bridge (October/November 1975): 75–80. Ngô Vính Long. “The Last Days of America in Vietnam.” Bridge (October/November 1975): 23–32. Duong Van Quyen, with Jewell Coburn. Beyond the East Wind: Legends and Folktales of Vietnam. Thousand Oaks, California: Burn, Hart, and Co, 1976. Tran Van Dinh. “Ho Chi Minh as Communicator.” Journal of Communication 26:4 (1976): 142–147. Nguyễn Duong and Hugh Morgan. “Jokes on U.S.: Vietnamese Humor about Americans.” American Humor: An Interdisciplinary Newsletter 6:2 (1979): 1–9. Hue-Tam Ho Tai. Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. ———. “Religion in Vietnam: A World of Gods and Spirits.” Vietnam: Essays on History, Culture, and Society. New York: The Asia Society, 1985. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích. “The Power and Relevance of Vietnamese Myths.” Vietnam: Essays on History, Culture, and Society. New York: The Asia Society, 1985. ———. “Vietnamese Poetry: The Classical Tradition.” Vietnam: Essays on History, Culture, and Society. New York: The Asia Society, 1985. Nguyén Dình Hòa. “Traditions of Pacifism and Humanism in Vietnamese Literature.” World Literature Today 60 (Winter 1986): 60–63. Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter. The Palace File. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Trinh Thi Minh-Ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Trinh Thi Minh-Ha. Surname Viet, Given Name Nam. New York: Women Make Movies, 1989. Ngô Vính Long. “Vietnam.” In Ngô Vính Long, Douglas Allen, eds. Coming to Terms. Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1991. ———. “Postwar Vietnam: Political Economy.” In Ngô Vính Long, Douglas Allen, eds. Coming to Terms. Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1991. Luong, Hy V. Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925– 1988. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992. Nguyen-Vo, Thu-Huong. Khmer–Viet Relations and the Third Indochina Conflict. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1992. Trần Quốc Vuọng. “Popular Culture and High Culture in Vietnamese History.” Crossroads 7:2 (1992): 5–37. Hue-Tam Ho Tai. Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

P r e servat iona l Trần Khánh Tuyết. The Little Weaver of Thai-Yen Village. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1977. Huynh Quang Nhuong. The Land I Lost: Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

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Nguyen, Thomas XT. Feeling Vietnamese: Bilingual Poems and Songs. Inglewood, California: Thomas XT Nguyen, 1987. Tran Van Dinh. “Hue: My City, Myself.” National Geographic (November 1989): 595–602. Bergevin, Hue-Thanh. “Uncle Vy.” Porter Gulch Review (Spring–Summer 1991): 38–40. Tran, Kim-Lan. Tết, the New Year. Cleveland: Modern Curriculum Press, 1992. Tran, Barbara. “Love and Rice.” Antioch Review 51:1 (1993): 91.

Tales of Life in America

Tran Van Dinh. “Memory of Autumn.” Worldview (October 1974): 54–55. Tran Van Dinh. “Buddhist-Taoist View of Television I.” World Buddhism 24:9 (April 1976): 233–235. ———. “Buddhist-Taoist View of Television II.” World Buddhism 24:10 (May 1976): 267– 269. Nguyen Van Vu with Bob Pittman. At Home in America. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1979. McCauley, Anna Kim-Lan. Miles From Home. Wakefield, Massachusetts: AKLM Publications, 1984. Leba, John (Le Ba Kong). The Vietnamese Entrepreneurs in the USA: The First Decade. Houston: Zieleks, 1985. Nguyen, Huong Giang. “A Vietnamese Lesbian Speaks.” IKON 9 (2nd Series) (1988): 60–63. Phan Tam Thanh. How Western Culture Has Affected the Vietnamese People Who Have Resettled in America. Texas: T.T. Phan, 1988. Tran, Qui Phiet. “Exiles in the Land of the Free: Vietnamese Artists and Writers in America, 1975 to the Present.” JASAT (Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas) 20 (October 1989): 101–110. Revised as “From Isolation to Integration: Vietnamese Americans in Tran Dieu Hang’s Fiction.” Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Amy Ling, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Hiep, Tran-Thieu. “Freedom in the Soul of an Immigrant.” Reflex 3:5 (1989): 15. Gordon, Elizabeth. “On the Other Side of the War.” In Home to Stay: Asian American Women’s Fiction. Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac, eds. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1990. Le, Phi-Oanh. “Palace Walls.” Amerasia Journal 17:2 (1991): 27–35. Truong, Monique. “Kelly.” Amerasia Journal 17:2 (1991): 41–48. Ho, Khanh. “Bittermelons.” Amerasia Journal 19:3 (1993): 151–153. Nguyen, Mai. God’s Will. Papyrus, 1993.

Oral Histories

Sully, Francoise, comp. We, The Vietnamese: Voices from Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1971. Montero, David. Vietnamese Americans: Patterns of Resettlement and Socioeconomic Adaptation in the United States. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979. Santoli, Al, ed. To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians. New York: Dutton, 1985. Chanoff, David and Doan Van Toai. Portrait of the Enemy. New York: Random House, 1986. Higgins, James. Southeast Asians: A New Beginning in Lowell. Lowell, Massachusetts: Mill Town Graphics, 1986. Freeman, James M. Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

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Nhiem-Nguyen-Hong, Lucy, and Joel M. Halpern, eds. The Far East Comes Near: Autobiographical Accounts of Southeast Asian Students in America. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Scott, Joanna C. Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1989. Engelmann, Larry. Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Howard, Katsuyo K., comp. Passages: An Anthology of the Southeast Asian Refugee Experience. Fresno: California State University, Southeast Asian Services, 1990. Tenhula, John. Voices from Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991.

No t e s 1. A word about nomenclature: Vietnamese names are written in the opposite order from American names: Tran Van Dinh’s surname is Tran. But because there is a greater variety of given names than surnames in Viet Nam, the custom in Vietnamese literary criticism is to refer to authors by their given names (which appear last). In this essay, I follow the Vietnamese custom (referring to the authors by their given names) when they have published their names in the Vietnamese order (e.g. Tran Van Dinh) and the American custom (referring to the authors by their surnames) when they have claimed the American order for their authorship (e.g. Le Ly Hayslip). (Trinh Minh-Ha is an exception to this practice, as she is already familiar in American academia, where she is referred to by her surname Trinh.) In addition, I have provided diacritical marks on names and titles in cases in which they were available in publications. 2. For cogent and erudite analyses of many of these works, especially those related to exile or to the war, see Renny Christopher, The Viet Nam War/The American War (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); John Schafer, Vietnamese Perspectives on the War in Vietnam: An Annotated Bibliography of Works in English (New Haven: Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1997); and Monique Truong, “Vietnamese American Literature,” in King-kok Cheung, ed., An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Christopher offers detailed readings of seven “exile narratives.” Schafer also addresses this literature mostly in the context of exile, but includes some politicians’ memoirs in his section on historical accounts and memoirs. Truong addresses oral histories as well as poetry and analyzes the editorial shaping that Vietnamese voices received in these publications, before discussing three singleauthored. texts. Truong also rightly points out the limited nature of working only with English language texts. For discussions of Vietnamese American literature in Vietnamese, see Truong’s article, as well as Qui-Phiet Tran, “Exiles in the Land of the Free: Vietnamese Artists and Writers in America, 1975 to the Present,” JASAT ( Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas) 20 (October 1989), 101–110 (revised as “From Isolation to Integration: Vietnamese Americans in Tran Dieu Hang’s Fiction,” in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Amy Ling, eds., Reading the Literatures of Asian America [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992]); and Nguyen Hung Quoc, “The Vietnamese Literature in Exile,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5 (1992), 24–34.

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  3. Vietnamese Americans have contributed to many other cultural and academic fields, but for the purposes of this essay, I have excluded things like scientific dissertations, Vietnamese-English lexicons, mainstream journalism, and historical books and essays unless about America and/or Viet Nam. While I have included literary criticism when it seemed directly relevant, I have excluded such articles as Nguyen Thanh Bich’s examination of Sylvia Plath and Qui-Phiet Tran’s analysis of Faulkner from this essay.   4. Nguyễn Thị Thu-Lâm and her sister Nguyen Thi Tuyet-Mai, Tam, Anna Kim-Lan McCauley, and Linda B. all moved from North to South. All are Catholic; the latter three moved as part of the Catholic exodus of 1954. Nguyen Cao Ky was also a native Northerner, but moved south when the Geneva Accords divided the nation. Le Ly Hayslip, Tran Van Dinh, and Huynh Quang Nhuong come from villages and cities in central Vietnam, but south of the 17th parallel.   5. Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, “Electioneering, Vietnamese Style,” The Asian Survey 2:9 (November 1962), 11–18; and Tran Van Dinh, “Going to Orlando—or, Reunion at Tet,” New York Times (January 23, 1982).   6. Dinh’s work is generically anomalous—aside from his own second novel (also autobiographical) in 1983, there will not be another Vietnamese American novel in English until Mai Nguyen’s 1993 publication of God’s Will (Papyrus). Note: this Mai Nguyen is not the same person as Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai.   7. Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, The Rubber Tree: Memoir of a Vietnamese Woman Who Was an Anti-French Guerrilla, a Publisher and a Peace Activist (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1994), 196. This ghost writing is not because Mai lacks English fluency. She and her husband are both from Vietnam, but both became fluent in English in the 1960s and met while they were then studying in the U.S.   8. For example, see Vince Gotera, “Friend and Foe: De-Collaborating Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga’s Shallow Grave,” Journal of American Culture 16:3 (Fall 1993), 63–70. For a partial defense of Larsen, see Michele Janette, “Tran Thi Nga,” in Guiyou Huang, ed., Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), 255–257.   9. Christopher, The Viet Nam War/The American War. 10. Personal interviews, March 2000 and November 2001. 11. Personal interview, March 2000. 12. In the selected bibliography which concludes this essay, I have cross-listed works where it seemed crucial, but have primarily avoided this in order to indicate the text’s primary focus. 13, Qui-Phiet Tran, 107. 14. Ibid., 109. 15. See Selected Chronological Bibliography in this article, under “Tales of Education: Didactic” for complete citations. 16. Nguyen Thai, “A Vietnamese Speaks Out,” The New Republic (June 8, 1963), 14. 17. See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ngô Vễnh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973); Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Millenarianism and peasant politics in Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Ngô Vính Long, “Vietnam,” in Ngô Vính Long, Douglas Allen, eds., Coming to Terms (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1991).

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18. Trần Khánh Tuyết, The Little Weaver of Thai-Yen Village (San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1977); and Huynh Quang Nhuong, The Land I Lost: Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 19. Thomas XT Nguyen, Feeling Vietnamese: Bilingual Poems and Songs (Inglewood, California: Thomas XT Nguyen, 1987). 20. Thomas Nguyen, 41, 43. 21. John Leba (Le Ba Kong), The Vietnamese Entrepreneurs in the USA: The First Decade (Houston: Zieleks, 1985). 22. Leslie Bow reads the maternal rhetoric as a way of rendering her capitalism palatable. See “Le Ly Hayslip’s Bad (Girl) Karma: Sexuality, National Allegory, and the Politics of Neutrality,” Prose Studies 17:1 (1994), 141–160. 23. Personal interview, November 2000. 24. Nguyen Van Vu, with Bob Pittman, At Home in America (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1979), 66. 25. Ibid., 75. 26. See Thomas XT Nguyen, Tran Van Don. 27. Christopher, 28. 28. Schafer, 2. 29. Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 30. Christopher, 4. 31. President George Bush (Sr) declared in March 1991, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome forever!” Quoted in Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992), 385–386. 32. See Note 3 for an explanation on how authors’ names are listed in the bibliography.

E leanor T y a n d D onald C . G oellnicht

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Be yon d Hy phe nat e d I de n t i t ie s n recent years, there have been a number of attempts to redefine and stretch the parameters of Asian American studies and the term “Asian American” itself (see S. Wong, “Denationalization”; Lowe, “Heterogeneity”). Scholars and critics recognize that “Asian American,” though a useful designation coined for the political coalition of different ethnic Asian communities in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, no longer has the same resonance as it did even as recently as a decade ago. In 1992, in their introduction to Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling saw Asian Americans as a group with similar experiences. Lim and Ling write: “once inside the borders of the United States, different Asian nationals share common experiences of immigration, discrimination, acculturation, conflict, and generational strains. Their originating cultures set them apart from the dominant Euro-American ones and become the basis for a sense of community both with each other and with other peoples of color” (4). Though this observation is still largely applicable to many members of the Asian American community, scholars are less likely today to make such emphatic statements about “common experiences,” recognizing the diversity of identities covered by the umbrella term “Asian American.” In her essay “Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies,” King-Kok Cheung remarks: From Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, edited by Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht, pp. 1–14. © 2004 by Indiana University Press.

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A significant switch in emphasis has . . . occurred in Asian American literary studies. Whereas identity politics—with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity—governed earlier theoretical and critical formulations, the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora. The shift has been from seeking to “claim America” to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America; from centering on race and on masculinity to revolving around the multiple axes of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; from being concerned primarily with social history and communal responsibility to being caught in the quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism. (Cheung 1)

Germane to Cheung’s exploration of the current field of Asian American literary studies is the question of who and what subjects congregate under the term “Asian American,” a term that Shirley Lim, in her essay “Assaying the Gold: Or, Contesting the Ground of Asian American Literature,” acknowledges as “already collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions” (162) and that Susan Koshy has viewed quite simply as a “fiction.” There is no doubt that this label has been a conflicted one for some groups of Asian Americans, such as South Asians and Filipinos, who have at times felt left out of its reach; it is also true that the label has never extended its reach to include Arab Americans of West Asian (or “Near Eastern” or “Middle Eastern”) origin. It has been a particularly vexed term, too, for Canadians of Asian origins who are supposed to be included in a category that seems to negate our political and national differences and that performs a colonizing embrace of Asian Canadian cultures. If a pan-Asian designation is to be used at all—and we strongly believe that there are still strategic advantages to be gained by such coalition building and common identification—we propose that “Asian North American” is a more useful umbrella term because Asian subjects who reside in the United States and in Canada face many of the same issues regarding identity, multiple cultural allegiances, marginalization vis-à-vis mainstream society, historical exclusion, and postcolonial and/or diasporic and/or transnational subjectivity. “Asian North American” should be employed, however, with the proviso that both the national differences between the U.S. and Canada and the significant heterogeneity within the purview of the term are acknowledged and explored. Along with extending the national boundaries of the term “Asian American,” we examine the ways in which Asian North American subjectivities are multiply constituted not only through Asian and Euro-American ideologies and traditions, media, education, and culture, but also through Asian North American peoples’ daily interactions with other communities in North America, including African North Americans, Latinos, Hispanics, Native

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North Americans, and Pacific Islanders. The essays collected here study the ongoing efforts of Asian North Americans to negotiate identities that go beyond the hyphen of Asia and America, Asia and Canada, the state of being “between worlds” according to Amy Ling. What these essays emphasize are the complexities, the struggles and layering of various facets of one’s identity, which are shaped by the history and the politics of one’s imaginary and adopted homeland(s), as well as the importance of memory, myth, and art in the construction of self. By revealing different communities and allegiances not simply based on nation, religion, or ethnicity, they contest easy notions of equating ethnic identity with originary culture. Going beyond the hyphenated identities suggested by the term “Asian American” entails a reexamination, a redefinition, and a serious effort at reimagining what forces and influences shape and constitute the subjects who identify themselves as belonging under the broad reach of “Asian North American.” As Asian North American communities expand and become more heterogeneous, the task of understanding the multiple intersections of power, representation, and subjectivity becomes crucial in the increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, and multiply-oriented societies of Canada and the U.S. The problem of how to define Asian North American identity or subjectivity has engendered much discussion and debate over the last thirty years. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the publication and presentation of numerous stories, poems, plays, and theoretical essays about what it means and feels like for a person with Asian origins to live and work in North America.1 More often than not, Asian Americans and Asian Canadians who write about themselves grapple with the question of who they are, from whose perspective they view their lives, and from which position they are speaking. These literary works, films, videos, and other artistic creations produced by Asian North Americans have raised important issues—about centers and margins, about representation, about origins, history, and memory, about nationality and transnationality, about race and ethnicity, about gender and sexuality in contemporary society. At the same time, at almost every level of creative endeavor—production, marketing, reception, and consumption—we are made aware and reminded that these works are different from texts that are not marked as ethnic, Asian American, or Asian Canadian, or as originating from a minority position. Despite postmodern notions of anti-essentialism, we are still frequently caught in discussions about origins, differences, and authenticity. Critics and scholars who work with texts by American and Canadian authors of Asian origins constantly struggle with ways to articulate the particularities of the identities of the writers being studied—whether these differences are based on biological or genotypical factors (a “trace of race” we still seem incapable of escaping despite our sophisticated theorizing of “race”

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as nonbiological or nonessential), or on traditions and culture, or on a sense of oppression because of historical structural inequities. Asian North Americans are cautious of generalizations, Orientalizations, and essentialisms, yet in many ways, that sense of not being quite like the dominant, white majority, as a direct or indirect result of structural inequities imbedded in laws regarding immigration, citizenship, and labor, plays a large role in defining who Asian North Americans are. Consequently, our thoughts about exactly what constitutes the Asian American or Asian Canadian subject and how to adequately represent that subject have been informed and framed by discourses from many fields such as politics, labor, law, and immigration. Because a large number of Asian North Americans have experienced displacement and dislocation, we have found it useful to borrow from postmodern theories of the subject, as well as from feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories. We are informed by globalization and diaspora theories with their views of the shifting boundaries of the international, the national, and the transnational. As literary and cultural critics, we borrow from and reformulate paradigms by which one can examine the ontological status and the representations of Asian American and Asian Canadian.

H is t or ic a l O v erv ie w One common element that runs through articulations of Asian American and Asian Canadian subjectivity over the years is the sense of “otherness.” A number of critics have framed this sense of not being part of the dominant white culture in different ways. David Palumbo-Liu points out that the “cultural authority of the Other” is “part of the political unconscious of minority subjects” (“Minority Self as Other,” 79). Various scholars and writers have noted and articulated the effects of this sense of physical, social, historical, and psychic otherness. As early as 1973, Frank Chin and company recognized that Asian Americans have “evolved cultures and sensibilities distinctly not Chinese or Japanese and distinctly not white American” (Aiiieeeee! xi). According to them, otherness results from one’s “Chinese or Japanese birth,” which “is enough to distinguish you from being American-born, in spite of the fact that you may have no actual memories of life in Asia” (xiii). In his Introduction to Aiiieeeee! that (in)famous manifesto, Chin distinguished between “real” Asian Americans, whom he defined as those born in the U.S., and Asian immigrants to America. As problematic as this distinction was, it constituted his way of establishing boundaries, of constructing a subject position by making another group (Asian immigrants) into a new kind of Other against which he could define Asian Americans. Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic, The Woman Warrior, has also been viewed—and not just by Chin and company, but by more recent critics as well—as guilty of certain forms of Orientalism, an understandable condition given the pressing

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need to “claim America” at the time she was writing, in the context of the civil rights movement. As David Leiwei Li has observed, it was Kingston’s “deliberate accommodation, adaptation, and appropriation of the familiar orientalist geopolitical imagination” that enabled The Woman Warrior’s entry into public culture (46). Kingston’s book gave “Asian America . . . an official literary visibility” and subsequently engendered the “definitional struggle” for the significance of “Asian America” (45). In 1982, Elaine Kim’s pioneering study of Asian American literature examined the “creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent” (Asian American Literature, xi). For Kim, the shift from the term “Oriental” to “Asian American” made these American identities “more precise” and “more objective” (xii). She was attempting to unite Asian American voices, in the hopes that “unity helps us function effectively in organizations and programs across the country” (xiii), although her attempt at “unity” simultaneously excluded South and most Southeast Asian Americans. As Kim’s comments suggest, her examination was based on the particularities of Asian American “experience” (xviii). Just as the proponents of women’s studies and African American studies argued at this time, Kim was attempting to give voices to those who had hitherto been silenced, to allow Asian Americans “self-expression” (xv) in order to counter existing stereotypes that circulated in the dominant culture. Kim’s critical study gave academic legitimacy to a long struggle, led by writers like the Aiiieeeee! collective and Kingston, to give voice to Asian North Americans in the wake of a long history of the exclusion of most Asian ethnic groups and the internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians. Kim’s views articulated the political impetus evident at the beginning of Asian American studies in the United States in the early 1970s. Yen Le Espiritu has noted that the Asian American panethnic coalition “is not only an efficacious organizational strategy but also a response to the institutionally relevant ethnic categories in the political system” (10). Despite the dominant culture’s political system’s being allowed to influence the categories, however, what was then established through the field of Asian American studies was not simply a body of knowledge, theoretical paradigms, and literature, but also particular kinds of ethnic American identities and political alliances that brought together Asian American scholars and students with members of the wider community. The movement was initially dominated by English-speaking American-born students of Chinese and Japanese descent. At times the approach was quite anti-immigrant, especially from Chin and company, and there was a concerted effort to distinguish Asian American studies from Asian studies as part of the strategy of “claiming America.” However, the coalition has developed and has grouped together Asians who were immigrants with those born in North America, well-to-do and established with refugees, domestic and factory

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workers with professionals, previously colonized Filipinos and Indonesians with Japanese, Japanese Canadians with Japanese Americans, English-only speakers with speakers of Asian languages. Differences in many ways were deliberately obscured and obfuscated in order to highlight the unifying sense of exclusion, marginalization, and otherness from the mainstream that Asians in America felt. Boundaries that may have existed in East and Southeast Asia because of historical events or in the context of rigid hierarchical religious, class/caste, and family structures were downplayed in order to establish the Asian American panethnic subject position. Historically much had changed in the intervening years between Chin’s anthology and Kim’s critical study. After 1965 in the U.S. and 1967 in Canada, with the relaxation of immigration laws, there was an influx of immigrants, most notably from the Philippines, China, Korea, and India, and later from Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia (see Takaki, Strangers, ch. 11, Peter Li 94–95). It has become more problematic to make distinctions between the more recently arrived immigrants from Asia and those native-born Americans of Asian origins, as Chin wanted to do. By 1992, in her foreword to Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Elaine Kim noted that “As the world has changed, so have our conceptions of Asian American identity. The lines between Asian and Asian American, so important in identity formation in earlier times, are increasingly being blurred” (xiii). By then, as Lim and Ling noted in their introduction, “Scholars of Asian American literature have been raising important questions—concerning immigration history, assimilation and acculturation, the model minority status, stereotypes, gender conflicts, the relations between Asian American and other ethnic texts” (3). This collection of essays continues the discussion started by these and other writers who no longer see Asian North American identity simply as revolving around conflicts between Asian and American, or between dominant and minority ethnic cultures. Instead, Asian North American subjectivities are forged upon numerous interstices involving variables such as economic and social status, religious affiliation, physical ability, gender and sexuality, degree of linguistic competence, and acceptance and integration into Western capitalist and consumer culture. In Canada, the Asian Canadian panethnic coalition has received less institutional support and has been slower to expand. As Donald Goellnicht has explained in his essay “A Long Labour,” there were a number of historical and institutional reasons for the protracted birth of Asian Canadian literature and identity.2 Although there were some efforts to establish a sense of an Asian Canadian identity, for example, in the work of the Asianadian, which announced itself as “An Asian Canadian Magazine,” first published in Toronto in 1978, the field of Asian Canadian literature has burgeoned only in the 1990s. In an editorial for the Asianadian in 1980 Sean Gunn and

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Paul Yee explained that “Asian-Canadian consciousness took root in the early 1970’s in Vancouver. Members of the Chinese and Japanese minorities became politically aware that they shared a common psychological and historical experience, both past and present. Asian-Canadian writing is the expression of that awareness” (2). However, some twenty years later, there was no equivalent of Asian American studies in Canadian universities. Canadians of Asian origins often identify themselves as Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, or more recently, Sri Lankan Canadians, or Filipino Canadians, rather than as Asian Canadians. In scholarly works, the texts of Asian Canadians have been studied by Canadianists and postcolonialists rather than by Asian Canadian critics. In “Canadian literary institutions—publishers and universities in particular,” writing by immigrant Canadians of South Asian origin, such as Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, M. G. Vassanji, Bharati Mukherjee, and Cyril Dabydeen, was classified as “Commonwealth literature, a term that gave way in the late 1980s to postcolonial literature” (Goellnicht 15). This classification has meant “that East and Southeast Asian Canadian literature has been left relatively isolated, thus rendering the already small field of Asian Canadian literature smaller, more divided” (Goellnicht 16). In recent years, there has been greater effort by writers and activists to work together as “Asian Canadians.”3 In his essay “Altered States,” Roy Miki speculates that “large-scale demographic shifts of ‘Asian Canadians’ since the late 1960s” have created a sense of psychic “alien-nation” in Canada (51), where the majority population feels alienated because they will no longer be the majority by 2050, and those who were once considered “aliens,” both legal and illegal, now constitute a large part of the nation. In answer to this sense of displacement, Miki advocates “social positioning modelled on migratory intersections rather than centralist settlement” (52). Instead of seeing Asian Canadians as different from a white majority, Miki proposes “a rethinking of ‘nation’ as a complex of heterogeneous global/local formations, constituted not solely as enclaves of identification but more generatively as the instance of negotiations across and within temporalities and boundaries” (54). For example, the term “Asian Canadian” includes Asian Quebecois writers such as Ying Chen, who immigrated to Montreal from Shanghai in 1989 and writes in French. Though Ying Chen’s first two novels, La Mémoire de l’eau and Les Lettres chinoises, are rooted in her Chinese experience and immigration, her later novels, Immobile, Ingratitude, and Le Champ dans la mer are almost entirely stripped of temporal and geographical markers. Written in rhythmic poetic prose, these later novels dwell on the tortured psyche of the protagonist, who is often haunted by memory, death, and longing for the mother. While some of these motifs are present in works by other Asian Canadians and Asian Americans, Ying Chen’s ethereal, surrealistic, and intensely metaphoric style

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challenges some of our assumptions about “national” literature and ethnic writing. Such recent literary productions and the many efforts to reenvision collectivities, to criticize, and to highlight identificatory processes contribute to a new and shifting notion of the Asian Canadian. In America, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sense of otherness was frequently conceptualized as the space “between worlds.” Between Worlds served as the title of Amy Ling’s examination of women writers of Chinese ancestry, as well as a collection of plays by Asian Americans edited by Misha Berson. In both these books, what is stressed is the vantage point of those “between countries of origin and adopted homelands” (Berson ix). Berson uses this as a metaphorical space, extending it to “between marriage and divorce, between life and death, between war and peace” (ix), while for Amy Ling, between worlds denotes the position of one caught between the cultures of China and America, in “the struggle for personal balance that is the experience of every American of dual racial and cultural heritage” (xi). For Ling, the writers in her study were all “conscious of their difference in a white society,” and the ways “each author has reacted to this consciousness of difference, to the between-world condition” (xv) was the unifying theme of the book. The “between worlds” image served as a starting point for many of the discussions of being marginal that ensued. Since the early 1990s, however, there has been a shift in the way critics have approached the question of Asian American identity. Lisa Lowe’s groundbreaking essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” theorizes the issue of identity from a Marxist historicist position. The essay argues that “what is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity” (27). Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and of Gayatri Spivak, Lowe acknowledges the importance of “identity politics”—what, following Spivak, she calls “strategic essentialism”—for providing “a concept of political unity that enables diverse Asian groups to understand our unequal circumstances and histories as being related” and thus to battle “institutions and apparatuses that exclude and marginalize us” (30). She also warns, however, that “essentializing Asian American identity and suppressing our differences—of national origin, generation, gender, party, class—risks particular dangers: . . . it inadvertently supports the racist discourse that constructs Asians as a homogeneous group, that implies we are ‘all alike’ and conform to ‘types’ ” (30). Rejecting both nationalist/nativist and assimilationist models of Asian American subjectivity, Lowe champions instead “interventions that refuse static or binary conceptions of ethnicity, replacing notions of identity with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from ethnic ‘essence’ to cultural hybridity” (33). Lowe’s terms of “heterogeneity and multiplicity” have been used and bandied about by many scholars recently, so much so that Susan Koshy has

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become worried that “formulaic invocations of ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘plural identities,’ or ‘border-crossing’ are used promiscuously without any effort to link them to the material, cultural, or historical specificities of the various Asian American experiences” (“Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 468). Nevertheless, Lowe’s suggestion that “we might conceive of the making and practice of Asian American culture as nomadic, unsettled, taking place in the travel between cultural sites and in the multivocality of heterogeneous and conflicting positions” (“Heterogeneity,” 39) has been profoundly influential in turning critical attention to the diasporic nature of Asian American subjectivity. This turn to the diasporic model has not gone uncontested, however, nor has it replaced attention to national and local community issues (although what constitutes a “community” is variably defined). Sau-ling C. Wong has proposed the term “denationalization” to describe the three major changes to the field of Asian American studies: the easing of “cultural nationalist” concerns which has made possible “a complication of identity politics . . . , as well as opened up other axes of organization and mobilization including class, gender and sexuality” (“Denationalization,” 428); a “relaxation of the distinction between what is Asian American and what is ‘Asian,’ and between Asian American studies and Asian studies” (429); and a “diasporic perspective” in contrast to a “domestic perspective” (428).4 Wong herself critiques this move toward “denationalization,” pointing out that it suggests an erroneous “developmental” and celebratory narrative for Asian American studies—from “claiming America” to transnationalism or globalization—a narrative that fails to adequately historicize global movements, and that often suffers from “decontextualization” and class bias. For her part, Aihwa Ong has coined the term “flexible citizenship” to refer to “the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (6). Ong’s account of the way Asians, particularly Chinese businessmen, respond to transnationalism and globalization is rather optimistic and decidedly class-based; it does not account for the Asian subjects in North America who do not have the mobility, wealth, and right to select “different sites for investments, work, and family relocation” (112). In reaction to an optimistic model of diasporic subjectivity, many Asian American cultural critics have called for a return to the early “roots” of Asian American studies by turning away from abstract, academic theory—which they see as empowering already-privileged academics in ivory towers—and re-establishing strong connections to community activism and to the goals of “social transformation” (Hune 37). We should not forget, however, that there was at the outset of Asian American activism a strong sense of global or transnational solidarity with oppressed peoples of the “Third World,” evident in such movements as the anti–Vietnam War struggles, in the use of “internal colonialism” as an

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explanatory model, and in the powerful influence of liberation theorists such as Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral (Umemoto 10). The project of “claiming America” was never restrictively “national,” but always had an international dimension. The influence of diasporic and globalization studies has remained strong, but it has emerged in many recent studies as more salutary, less optimistic about transnational subjectivity. A more rigorously historicized approach to transpacific transfers and exchanges of capital, goods, and labor and to the effects of these transfers and exchanges on cultural formations and human subjects is evident in Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, which explores the ways in which, “[i]n the last century and a half, the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally” (4); in Rachel Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, which seeks “to comprehend the changing terrains of Asian American gender critique with its new sources in theories of subaltern womanhood and the gendering of international labor” (11); and especially in David PalumboLiu’s monumental Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, which asks, among other questions, “how does the history of Asian America demonstrate the centrality of Asia to the imagining of modern America?” (2). What these publications bear witness to is the way Asian American studies have moved beyond the boundaries of the national to problematize that term “Asian American” yet again. This problematizing of “Asian American” is not always strictly an expansive gesture toward the global, however; equally compelling work has been done recently on the interior of the Asian American psyche. Two powerful examples of the sophisticated and productive linking of Asian American studies, gender/queer studies, and critical race studies with psychoanalytic theory are David Eng’s Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America and Anne An-lin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. While maintaining a profound sense of the sociopolitical contexts and implications of the cultural texts they examine, Eng and Cheng employ psychoanalytic theory to probe the psychic and material lives of individuals, groups, and the American nation. Eng’s book “analyzes the various ways in which the Asian American male is both materially and psychically feminized within the context of a larger U.S. cultural imaginary” (2), while Cheng’s, drawing on theories of mourning and melancholia, investigates the complex processes of individual and community “transformation from grief to grievance, from suffering [racial] injury to speaking out against that injury” (3). Like the communities, the literary texts, and the cultural productions they examine, Asian North American theoretical and critical studies today are more plural and heterogeneous than ever before. We agree with

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King-Kok Cheung that “the field of Asian American literary[/cultural] studies can certainly afford to incorporate these divergent perspectives” (9), each of which brings a different dimension to the study of Asian North American subjectivities. As David Palumbo-Liu wisely points out, Asian America is always in process; the twenty-first century will undoubtedly present yet another set of manifestations that press the particularity of race against the universalities of the modern state. The subjectivities produced within such a context will, no doubt, continue to try borders and revise interiors, and in so doing leave a particular impress upon history. (Asian/American, 393)

The essays in this volume participate in the first tentative stages of mapping some of those subjectivities.

En v ision ing Possibil i t ie s be yon d t he Hy phe n This collection of essays explores alternative, sometimes inventive ways in which Asians in North America have constituted and represent themselves as subjects in literature and culture. We attempt to look at the question of identity by examining how interstices in discourses on race, ethnicity, gender, community, and history, in both national and global contexts, allow for the emergence of new subjectivities. These subject positions reflect the heterogeneity and transnationality of Asians who now reside in North America. The essays examine alliances and differences among Asian Americans, as well as between Asian Americans and other ethnic groups; study ways in which writers experiment with form and narrative in order to interrogate the process of self-representation; and look at strategies used to contest or escape the identities imposed on Asian Americans by history, by the media, by high and low culture, by political and legal discourse. The authors are all concerned with ways Asian North American subjects have undergone significant transformations in recent years. It is not simply that many Asians are no longer identifying themselves with their ethnic and racial groups in opposition to dominant culture. The change has come about because at times, historical circumstances have pressed Asian North Americans to create alternative spaces from which to speak and to imagine in order to survive. Asian North Americans have developed new ways of perceiving and thinking about themselves, and along with new representations, new social psyches have emerged. We begin our collection with essays which discuss issues of racial hybridity, interracial relations, and cross-cultural representations. Jeffrey Santa Ana posits a theory of “affect-identity,” a historically grounded indigenization of affective bonds between Asian Americans in order to resist the erasure of

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racial and ethnic difference brought about by postmodernism, consumerism, and capitalism. Santa Ana argues that a plurality of feelings is necessary for Asian American subjectivity, yet in our global consumer culture, racial and ethnic differences have been taken out of material and historical context, often becoming fetishized for their ability to sell products. Diversity has degenerated into sameness and irrelevance. Using the example of Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Santa Ana demonstrates how consumption-based assimilation has had a detrimental effect on the lives of minorities who reject non-commodifiable affect, leading to the repression of diverse identity formations. Approaching the issue of racial identification from another angle, LeiLani Nishime examines one form of popular culture to look at the position of Asians in the racial configuration of an America traditionally figured as black and white. Nishime compares the film Rush Hour, in which Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker play an Asian and an African American pair of cops, to other Hollywood buddy cop films in order to show how this film intervenes in a traditionally racialized genre. Rush Hour, Nishime contends, disrupts Hollywood’s usual racial hierarchy. It highlights potential alliances of Asian and African Americans based on shared oppressions, and makes transparent the power relations obscured in black and white buddy films. Moreover, the movie offers the radical suggestion that African American culture is American culture, and explores the possibility of Asian Americans forming their subjectivity through interactions with African American as well as Euro-American culture. At the same time, though, the movie forecloses on some of the very possibilities for Black-Asian interracial connections it opens up. Asian American writers often have to balance their need to politicize their history with their desire to conform to the dominant culture’s perception of them as good and typical Americans. According to Patricia Chu, one way for Asian American women writers to create fiction that both resonates with readers and renders the specifics of the Asian American immigrant experience is through the subgenre of mother–daughter narratives, as exemplified by Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. In Chu’s reading, Nora Keller’s Comfort Woman follows one of these mother–daughter romance formulas, yet it avoids sentimentality by not separating the mother’s exotic and sacrificial life from the daughter’s more “normal” American one. Keller continually evokes the trauma of the past—the sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II by the Japanese in their military camps—and yet emphasizes the mutually constitutive nature of the mother–daughter relationship. For Chu, Jessica Benjamin’s model of intersubjective relations assists in understanding Keller’s representation of Akiko, the protagonist who has to affirm her subjectivity when the usual patriarchal and imperialist structures of colonization have betrayed her.

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The next three essays examine the relationship between form, self-representation, and Asian American subjectivity. Jeannie Chiu contends that contemporary poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim use experimental poetry to defamiliarize and complicate representations of individual psychology, autobiographical experience, perception, remembering, and cultural translation. Through poetic forms such as ellipses, linguistic fragmentation, and surreal simile, both poets challenge not only essentialist notions of ethnic and racial identity, but also the transcendent “I” of conventional lyric poetry. Chiu’s essay carefully situates both poets within the conventions of contemporary American poetry and in the specific sociohistorical contexts of their immigrant communities, revealing the ways in which they articulate the complexities of global migration. Josephine Lee’s essay looks at a facet of Asian American experience that is often neglected or overlooked by scholars. Lee examines the complex representations of Korean adoptees growing up in rural areas in Minnesota. From the 1960s to 1990, South Korea was the most important source for foreign children adopted in the United States. The adoption of these Korean babies and children, which peaked in the 1980s in the U.S., has created a generation of Asian Americans whose relationship to nation, to originary culture, and to family is vastly different from that of first- or second-generation Asian Americans who grow up within Asian American homes and families. Lee’s essay studies two plays by Theatre Mu and outlines the ways these plays interrogate our culture’s assumptions about racial identification, assimilation, and white Christian conservatism through myth, dance, and fantasy. Her study of this local alternative theater group fills a significant gap in Asian American cultural studies. Rocío Davis’s essay explores the way Sara Suleri inscribes her subjectivity in a memoir in the cycle form that emphasizes breaks, beginnings, and the episodic structuring of lives and selves. Readers are invited to find the whole meaning from the fragments of the lives retained in the memory and on the page. According to Davis, the story cycle reflects the narrator’s process of memory as nonlineal, associative, fragmented, and incomplete, making structure and content mutually reinforcing. The text does not merely tell an autobiographic tale, but represents a racialized and gendered consciousness as it interrogates other identities and locates them within a complex emergent self. Stories of other women are foregrounded; autobiography becomes biography, as stories of the community, friends, and families intertwine with stories of the self. These stories suggest the possibility of alternative identities formed from the experience of diaspora, the movement across borders or the living in borderlands, and alternative histories. Finally, our collection concludes with three essays that question existing demarcations of the Asian North American subject. Caroline Rody’s essay

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examines identities that cross not only racial boundaries, but also national and cultural spaces. Rody looks at Karen Tei Yamashita’s third novel, Tropic of Orange, as a kind of “border text” because it engages with and opens up questions of the U.S. and Mexican border to Asian American people. Asian American and Latin American, Yamashita writes fiction that critiques and challenges conventional understandings of ethnicity and nation. According to Rody, Tropic of Orange defies generic boundaries by employing postmodern satire, magic realism, Los Angeles disaster novel, U.S. novel, and Mexican novel. Written in a playful and surrealist fashion, it depicts a visionary multicultural sublime and explores the ways identities are constituted by global forces, even as it pays attention to the particular energies and tensions that drive the global metropolis of Los Angeles. Asian North Americans have also used visual media, as well as words, as powerful counter-texts. Karlyn Koh’s essay muses on theoretical origins, on the invention of the Asian Canadian subject through visual arts. Koh notes that communities emerge between exclusion and inclusion, not as a place but as a spacing of finite figures crossing, shattering the mirror that grounds the community as that of the shared or same experience. Using the project Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, an exhibition of works by twenty-five Asian Canadian artists curated by Paul Wong in 1990–1991 as a point of departure, Koh reflects not on the hyphenated space between “Asian” and “Canadian,” but on the rhythm of Asian Canadian sensibility. The works that seem to define the Asian Canadian subject provide more questions than they do answers. Koh outlines the difficulty of harking back to origins, and problematizes terms such as “we Chinese Canadians” as responses, not the narcissistic claim of self-knowledge. Malini Johar Schueller challenges the efficacy of studying Asian American culture simply through national boundaries and makes a case for the importance of viewing these cultural productions within the context of the postcolonial and transnational. Like Koh, she critiques a number of assumptions underlying our understanding of Asian America and of America itself. Using the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi, Schueller illustrates the way notions of Chineseness and America are destabilized and rendered ironic through juxtaposition and parody. All the essays shift the frame of contemporary discussions about the location and the constitution of the Asian North American subject. The volume opens up different spaces and possibilities for self-actualization by attending to forms of representation, to innovative interventions, to cross-cultural and interracial alliances between minoritized subjects within and outside of North America. Collectively, the essays in this volume reposition current ways of articulating and understanding Asian North American subjectivity.

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No t e s 1. For recent bibliographies of Asian American writing, see Cheung 367–408 and Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida (2001). 2. Goellnicht’s essay is about the birth of Asian Canadian literature, but the analysis applies equally well to the formation of the Asian Canadian subject. Goellnicht argues that “for a racial minority literature . . . to emerge with a clear identity there needs to be a strong accompanying and reciprocal national political-social movement focussed on identity politics or the politics of difference” (3). Compared to the United States, Asian Canadians remained a small percentage (about 1%) of the total population in the 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas there was an anti–Vietnam War movement that “catalysed the development of an Asian American identity” (Wei as quoted by Goellnicht 7) in the U.S., Canada in that period was considered “a liberal democracy, not an imperial power, a country that had adopted progressive social welfare policies such as universal medical insurance and a universal pension plan” (7). In addition, “radicalism in Canada was centred primarily on the push for independence for Quebec” and “French Canadians were seen as the persecuted or privileged minority” (8). 3. The activities of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, under the leadership of Jim Wong-Chu, and the publication of Rice Paper, under Madeleine Thien, have provided support and a venue for emerging and published writers in Canada. In the winter of 1999, an issue of Canadian Literature was devoted to “Asian Canadian Writing,” under the editorship of Glenn Deer. The issue contains essays about or by writers such as Wayson Choy, Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, Fred Wah, Sally Ito, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, Sky Lee, and others. West Coast Line, edited for a number of years by Roy Miki, has been featuring essays on Asian Canadian writers and often has issues devoted to aspects of Asian or South Asian writing. 4. Koshy finds Wong’s term “denationalization” problematic for several reasons. She notes that it is widely used in “neoimperialist theory, where it refers to the indigenous elites who collaborate with transnational corporate interests” (“Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 489). She also sees Wong creating a false opposition between domestic and diasporic perspectives, whereas, among other things, Koshy would like to see Asian Americans “defined by issue-based strategic alliances with other groups as a way of responding to the political complexities of the nineties” (490).

C H EN G LO K C H UA

Asian Americans Imagining Burma: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango

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urma as a location of the fictive imagination has played a notably important role in two recent novels, Burmese American Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango (1993) and Korean American Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (2000). Although Lee imagines a Burma of the past (during the Japanese Occupation of the 1940s) and Law-Yone projects a Burma of the future (as the fictional state of “Daya”), they both imagine it as a land of extremes, the extreme being a location beyond measure (to echo a concept of Homi Bhabha’s). In Lee, Burma represents the geographical and cultural extreme of Japanese imperialism; in Law-Yone, the sociopolitical excess of state-sponsored military coercion. Burma is such an extreme that it is almost beyond the remembering for Lee’s narrator-protagonist who nearly burns down his prized American home inadvertently when the memories of his Burmese days return to him. And the Burmese military dictatorship is so extreme that it is beyond the usual mimetic telling for Law-Yone who sets her novel in a nonexistent dystopia in order to censure its continuing existence. This experience of extremism acts as a catalyst for the revelation of a profound human truth in each work—in Lee’s, the road through Burma leads to the truth about an individual human psyche (his protagonist’s) while in Law-Yone’s, the road back to Burma leads to the truth about a human society and polity (the protagonist’s originary land). From Asian American Literary Studies, edited by Guiyou Huang, pp. 64–76. © 2005 by Edinburgh University Press.

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In Lee’s complexly crafted A Gesture Life, his Burma is compared and contrasted with three other cultural locations. Lee’s narrator and protagonist is an aging Japanese American nicknamed “Doc” Hata who is making a retrospective evaluation of his life that has been materially successful but emotionally bankrupt and impotent. Hata’s retrospective focuses on two pairs of symmetrically parallel but culturally contrasting locations, a North American pair in the present of the novel and a Southeast Asian pair of the past. The two present American locations are the upper-class town of Bedley Run and the contrasting working-class town of Ebbington. The two past Southeast Asian locations are Singapore during 1942 and Burma during 1944 when Hata had served as a medic in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. In addition, the essential qualities of each of these locations is emblematized by a house—Hata’s high-end residence in Bedley Run, his runaway daughter’s drug house in Ebbington, the Japanese officers’ clubhouse in Singapore, and the comfort women’s cubicles in Burma. The culture of Bedley Run is that of an upper-class American community of orderliness and civility. Bedley Run’s homes are well maintained, their grounds are manicured, and the businesses are prosperous. It is even “a picturesque town” (1). In Bedley Run, the narrator-protagonist “Doc” Hata (which is what everyone calls him though he makes it no secret that he is a pharmacist and not a doctor) has built up a thriving medical supplies store, and his residence is a prime piece of real estate: “My house isn’t the grandest in town, but it’s generally known that . . . [it] is one of the special properties” (16). He is a model of the Asian American success story and a pillar of his community. But behind the façade of his success lies the failure of Doc Hata’s intimate emotional life—he fails to make a commitment to his lover, the attractive widow of a doctor living next door, and he fails to maintain a connection with his adopted Korean daughter who runs away from home to live in a drug house in nearby Ebbington. Ebbington’s culture is that of a town in decay, and it forms a contrast to robust Bedley Run. Ebbington’s businesses are failing, its streets ugly with trash, its neighborhoods deteriorating, and its inhabitants teetering on the brink of drugs and welfare: “Ebbington is . . . a working-class suburb of drab, unadorned homes and small motel-style apartment complexes. . . . There are what seems a disproportionately high number of auto garages and beauty salons and churches and bars, all half-failed and dilapidating in their own fashion” (65). One evening Hata seeks out his adopted runaway teenage daughter, Sunny, in Ebbington. He traces her to a drug house there only to see her engaging in consensual oral sex with a black man with a police record (112–16). Ebbington, then, in contrast to Bedley Run, is a culture of disorderliness and depravity. These two North American locations have their counterparts in Southeast Asia. Singapore in 1942, as experienced by Lieutenant Hata, is an orderly

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and well controlled garrison of the Japanese Empire. Here Lieutenant Hata feels a sense of camaraderie and wellbeing, and he spends his leisure hours in the officers’ club—“a grand house which was once a prominent British family’s residence, . . . a yellow two-stor[e]y colonial structure with a double veranda and white columns” (105). In Singapore, the Japanese Empire of the Rising Sun seeks to inherit the culture of the British Empire on which the sun supposedly would never set. Lee has said in an interview that his initial impulse in writing this novel was to depict the lot of the Korean “comfort women” who were pressed into servicing the Japanese Army (Garner 6). It is in Singapore that Lieutenant Hata notices the presence of these comfort women for the first time, but he has been propagandized into thinking of them as “volunteers” (163), even though one of them leaps to her death from a window (107). And he has no contact with them, confining his sexual patronage to an unexciting middle-aged Japanese prostitute whom he respectfully addresses as Madam Itsuda (111). The culture of orderliness and wellbeing that Hata remembers experiencing in the Singapore of 1942 is radically changed to one of malaise and perversion when the location of his recollections shifts to the Burma of 1944. Geographically, Burma is at the extreme edge of the Japanese Empire, “the most far-flung sector of the occupied territory” (170). Culturally, it is also the rawest and most remote outpost of Japanese civility. In Burma, Hata’s unit is isolated and encamped in the middle of the jungle, surrounded by a hostile Burmese population and waiting for the inevitable coup de grâce from the Allied forces amassing around them. The Japanese Colonel is an isolated eccentric who bares his body to mosquitoes daily “as a way of bleeding himself ” (171). Lt. Hata’s superior officer Captain Ono is a skilled but ruthlessly sadistic surgeon who experiments horrifyingly with open-heart massage on a living Burmese subject (76). The men are sex starved, and one corporal is a sex-crazed collector of pornography (155–57). Into this degraded situation comes a troupe of five Korean comfort women, and Hata is charged with keeping them healthy for servicing the troops. Through his closer contact with them, he now realizes that they are not volunteers but abductees and sex slaves. Just as the drug house in Ebbington emblematizes the culture of decadence in Ebbington, so the comfort house epitomizes the culture of dehumanization in this Japanese encampment in Burma. Lee describes it with chilling precision and symbolism: There were five compartments, . . . one for each of the girls; these were tiny windowless rooms, no more than the space of one and a half tatami mats, not even wide enough for a tall man to lie across without bending his knees. In the middle of each space was a wide

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plank . . . meant for lying down on, with one’s feet as anchors on either side. At the other end, where the shoulders would be, the plank was widest, and then it narrowed again for the head, so that its shape was like the lid of a coffin. This is how they would receive the men. (179)

Unlike the other Japanese military personnel, Hata is really an ethnic Korean (Korea having been annexed into the Japanese Empire after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905–6), and he can speak to the Korean comfort women in secret and in their forbidden native language.1 He is attracted to and falls in love with one of these women named Kkutaeh who reciprocates his feelings. Captain Ono, however, has reserved Kkutaeh for some mysterious personal experiment and isolates her in the camp infirmary under the supervision of Hata. Hata enters into a passionate sexual relationship with Kkutaeh, and one of their intense encounters is depicted through the house imagery that is so effectively recurrent in Lee’s novel: She did not hold me but she did not push me away. I never meant for this but I could no longer balk, or control myself, and then something inside her collapsed, snapped clean, giving way like some storm-sieged roof, and then I descended upon her, and I searched her, every lighted and darkened corner, and every room. (295)

Hata gets into a fight with Captain Ono over Kkutaeh, and when Ono threatens to shoot Hata, Kkutaeh kills the captain by severing his carotid artery with a scalpel (298). She then begs Hata to shoot her and end her miserable existence. In an enormous failure of nerve and an equally immense denial of reality (for Hata plans a life together with Kkutaeh after the War), he cannot bring himself to do it. Kkutaeh therefore forces the issue by empowering herself and attacking her arresting officer who turns her over to the tender mercies of a gang of twenty-five men. They take their pleasure of her and eventually dismember and hack up her body in a frenzy of extreme cruelty. Hata does not witness the extremes to which Kkutaeh is subjected, but he watches her executioners returning from their deed: “The men. . . . Some were half-dressed, shirtless, trouserless, half-hopping to pull on boots. They were generally quiet. The quiet after great celebration. They were flecked with blood, and muddy dirt. . . . One with his forearms as if dipped in crimson . . .” (304). To Hata is left the medic’s task of picking up the pieces of human remains and to discover the fetus that Kkutaeh was carrying (305). (This memory returns to haunt him, of course, when he has to assist in his adopted Korean daughter’s late-term abortion [282–83].)

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Burma, then, is the traumatic Asian location that lies behind the appearance of Hata’s apparently fulfilled dream of American success and assimilation. And it utterly poisons his model American lifestyle of privilege, country clubs, a desirable lover, and a high-achieving adopted Korean daughter. So insidious is its effect that, when he is burning some papers and memorabilia of his Burmese days, Hata sets fire to his prize home in a Freudian accident that almost destroys himself and the façade of successful respectability that he has so carefully cultivated in his pristine American location (34–35). Whereas Korean American Chang-rae Lee imagines a Burma of the past that plays an essential role in his novel, the Burmese American Wendy Law-Yone projects a Burma of the future for her novel Irrawaddy Tango. In this novel Law-Yone imagines Burma as a dystopia that she ironically names Daya which its tourist guidebooks explain to mean “The Land of Compassion,” but which, Law-Yone’s narrator points out, may also mean “wound” (9). In her experimental narrative method, Law-Yone uses a hybridizing “bricolage”2 to construct her protagonist and her dystopian state and thereby deconstruct contemporary Burmese politics.3 The hybridizing elements are sometimes drawn from contrasting Asian and Western cultural locations (for example, obviously in the novel’s title the name of the protagonist/narrator herself—a hybridizing of an Asian space and a Western tempo). Most fundamentally for the novel, however, the originary locations of the hybrid elements are either in the First World or in the Third World. The bricolage by which Law-Yone unified a mosaic out of these disparate elements is especially apparent in the construction and evolution of the protagonist-narrator Irrawaddy Tango, the construction of whose character is also a bildungs process that passes through three stages. First, there is an awakening to ego and self-interest, second, an awakening to alterity and the interest of others, and third, an awakening to self-empowerment for altruistic ends. The whole evolutionary process is a bricolage that hybridizes First-World and ThirdWorld history and myth. Each evolving phase of Tango’s identity can be seen as a hypertext behind which can be glimpsed a hypotext of female subjectivity located in First-World or Third-World culture. Thus Tango’s bildung begins with a Third-World phase, drawing upon the history and the myth of Eva Peron of Argentina. In this Cinderella-like phase, the humble small-town girl succeeds in the big city and becomes a mighty dictator’s wife. Next, Law-Yone takes her protagonist through a First-World phase, drawing upon the history and myth of quintessential North American Patty Hearst (the granddaughter of “Citizen Kane,” no less!). In this Maid Marian–Robin Hood phase, a wealthy woman socialite is kidnapped by guerrillas and then is persuaded to bond with, sleep with, fight for, and speak for her abductors. Third, Tango matures into a

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Third-World spider woman phase (as depicted in Native American orature as well as the work of Argentine bricoleur Manuel Puig); in this phase a female empowers herself sexually, mates, and demolishes her mate. Through these phases of subjectivity, Tango’s character moves and develops, like the Argentine dance itself, full of exhilarating dips and lifts of fortune, dizzying turns and reversals of plot, in movements charged with a sinister sense of power and unsated sensuality, all performed by a character cool to the point of superciliousness. In using this method of constructing and narrating her Asian American woman protagonist, Law-Yone seems to be working like a bricoleuse, entering easily into the semiotic locations of Third-World and First-World culture and appropriating for her creation the shards of female subjectivity to be found there. The novel actually opens in medias res, near the spider-woman phase with its atmosphere of prison, torture, and sexuality. In it, Tango returns to her native Third-World location of Daya (Law-Yone’s fictionalized Burma) as some sort of high-profile political prisoner after twenty-five years’ domicile in the First World of the United States. The details of Daya/Burma are vividly and strategically evoked: the garish airport frescoes mythologizing the dystopian nation’s history in which Tango reads a cruel and bloody national character, Tango’s journey blindfolded through the sounds of a tropical night, the dreary particulars of her cell, the mind-boggling bureaucracy that requires Tango to sign a receipt for her body’s being in captivity (17). Once the reader’s interest is engaged by this initial situation, the first-person narrative flashes back to the antecedent formative stages of Tango’s career. The details of Tango’s girlhood and adolescence resemble the ThirdWorld history and myth of Evita Peron of Argentina. As V. S. Naipaul for one has made known (in his Return of Eva Peron), Maria Eva Duarte was born and grew up in the small pampa town of Toldos in Argentina. Her mother ran a boarding house, and when Evita was fifteen years old, she left her humble origins to sleep her way to a fairytale-like fame and fortune in Buenos Aires, her Big Apple (to use Andrew Lloyd Webber’s phrase). Evita’s is veritably a Latin American and naughtier enactment of the Cinderella story (which is, after all, Chinese in origin). Tango is likewise born and grows up in the small town of Irrawaddy whose Asian particularities Law-Yone delineates with vividness. The river boats with their cargoes of rice and elephants, the gibbon tethered to the Indian dry-goods store, the playmate with the soft spot in her head, the neighbor boy who produces his “pet worm” kept in his pants for Tango to fondle (62), all these become palpable presences in LawYone’s pages of crisp descriptive writing. Against this backdrop is Tango’s subjectivity formed. She emerges as an oddly Westernized and individualistic, even egocentric, subject while located in an Asian and Buddhist culture of self-denial and transcendence. Her father had first nicknamed her Mew

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because, as he explains, “You acted like a cat. No love for anyone but yourself ” (21). This egocentricity is confirmed by Tango herself: “From time to time I felt a hardening inside, around the very spot warmed supposedly by love and goodwill . . .” (21). It is this egocentricity that allows Tango to mock her father’s imperfect English and her mother’s poor taste in music. After a particularly stormy confrontation with the teenage Tango, her mother decides to transcend the material world and retreat to a Buddhist nunnery. By contrast, Tango decides to embrace the material world and use her physical talents to rise from her humble origins. For Tango’s developing interests and talents have channeled themselves towards dancing the tango. Tango’s dance instructor and partner is nicknamed Carlos, a local product of Portuguese descent and an erstwhile student in Argentina of the tango king, Carlos Gardel. Tango develops a passion for this Argentine dance which, unlike Burmese dance forms, allows her to be and to assert herself. “A dance that allowed me to stand up straight and tall, it didn’t oblige me to crouch as if my back had just been broken. I wasn’t pulled by invisible strings—I was guided and wooed by a partner who strode and leapt as one with me. A partner from whom I could swivel or twist away in seeming pique but could still trust to sweep me off my feet” (76). Tango and Carlos enter a national talent competition where they are standouts even though the prize goes to a politically correct indigenous dance. But Tango attracts the attention of a be-medaled Colonel, who marries her, just as Evita married Juan Peron when he was a Colonel. Not long afterwards, Tango’s husband becomes General Supremo, and then military dictator of Daya with Tango as his first lady. With her marriage, Tango becomes a socialite with the appurtenances and appearance of comfort, power, and prestige. Tango soon discovers, however, that existence at the pinnacle of her material world leaves something to be desired. Her public life of languid days of poolside preening and glittering nights of diplomatic balls soon becomes boring. Her private life with Supremo is a dysfunctional existence of mental and physical abuse in which she must obey Supremo’s every wish, even pet a crocodile at his command (109–10), and where she must fan the fading embers of his virility oddly enough by urinating on their bedroom floor (93). Supremo’s near impotence again parallels the rumored impotence of Juan Peron, and Tango’s duties of sexual arousal parallel Eva Peron’s “reputed skill in fellatio” (as Naipaul puts it—107). It is clear, then, that in this phase of character construction where Tango first awakens to self awareness and attains the goals set by her self-interest, her trajectory mirrors that of the legendary and historical figure of Third-World Argentina’s Eva Peron. There is a sudden tango-like reversal of plot direction when, at the apogee of Tango’s socialite and material ascendancy, she is kidnapped by a band of hill-tribe guerrillas (117). Unlikely as it may seem, this kidnapping begins

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the second phase of Tango’s subject formation—an awakening to alterity. And for this phase, Law-Yone appears to be mirroring the subjectivity of her protagonist with the First-World history and legend of the kidnapping of American socialite Patty Hearst in the 1970s. In the case of Tango, she is captured by a band of dissident guerrillas and held for ransom and as a bargaining chip for the release of three imprisoned guerrilla leaders. The guerrillas call themselves the Jesu Liberation Army (the JLA). When the ransom is not paid and the prisoners not exchanged, Tango is held captive for more than a year, sharing the deprivation, fear, and fatigue of the fugitive guerrilla life and interacting with her captors. During this time, Boyan, the guerrilla leader, is attracted to Tango and becomes her sexual partner, a situation to which Tango reacts ambivalently. After Boyan is killed in a firefight with security forces, Tango begins to play a more substantial role in the guerrilla movement and becomes their spokesperson and media image. At this point, Tango evolves from her egoistic subjectivity towards one that is capable of sympathizing with others: “I began to understand . . . the nature of freedom. . . . When you are part of a purpose bigger than your single life, you feel free in a different way” (155–6). Subsequently, Tango is captured by the security forces, branded as a traitress by the state and her uncaring husband, charged with treason, jailed, and exquisitely tortured in a game of Russian roulette played with a revolver inserted in her vagina (178–9). Eventually, Tango is freed from prison by an American humanitarian worker belonging to a group called INRI ( Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum—Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).4 The hypotext for this Asian sequence of events is the First-World kidnapping, trial, and pardon of Patricia Hearst during the 1970s. The story of Patty Hearst was a media frenzy in its time, almost equivalent in impact to the O. J. Simpson trial or the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the 1990s. It was widely reported (making the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines) and analyzed in more than half a dozen books written by journalists (for example, Shana Alexander’s Anyone’s Daughter), by academics (Christopher Castiglia’s Bound and Determined), by Patty Hearst herself (Every Secret Thing), and by her lover (Steven Weed’s My Search for Patty Hearst). Patty Hearst, like Irrawaddy Tango at the time of her abduction, was a woman of wealth and privileged social position. She was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon immortalized as Citizen Kane by Orson Welles’s film. (Patty Hearst herself became the title subject of a film directed by Paul Schrader.) In September 1975, while a student at Berkeley, Patty Hearst was abducted and held for ransom by a group of guerrillas just as Tango would be. The guerrillas called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army—the SLA (an acronym that is noticeably similar to that of Tango’s captors, the JLA, the Jesu Liberation Army). The SLA held Patty for

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ransom and for exchange of two jailed members, a circumstance that would be mirrored in Tango’s kidnapping. The SLA subjected Patty to months of classic thought reform through debilitation, dread, and dependency, and, as would Tango, she became romantically involved with one of her captors, Willie Wolfe (aka “Cujo”). Like Tango, Patty began to sympathize with her captors and joined them, taking the nom de guerre of “Tanya,” after one of Che Guevara’s companions. She participated in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, with the bank cameras recording her brandishing a gun. In Sacramento, after the Crocker Bank was robbed, Patty was seen driving the getaway car. Eventually, after a SWAT team shootout in which two SLA leaders (including Willie Wolfe) were killed, and after several car bombings, Patty and an Asian American comrade Wendy Yoshimura were arrested. After a trial and much tribulation which whittled her weight down to eighty-seven pounds at trial’s end (Hearst 372), Patty, as Tango was to be, is sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. Finally, just as Tango would be freed by a Christian liberator, Patty was pardoned—after serving six months—by President Carter, one of the most actively Christian of American presidents. Considering the similar social positioning of Tango and Patty, the circumstances of their abduction, their conversion from being captives to becoming collaborators, from being victims to becoming participants, and their eventual arrest by the police, their conviction, and their release, one may reasonably conclude that the history and legend of the First-World American woman is the hypotext for Wendy Law-Yone’s fictional character during this phase of the bildung of her subjectivity. The third and final phase of Tango’s evolving subjectivity concludes with her self-empowerment for the good of others. In this phase, Law-Yone uses a Third-World archetype as her hypotext for the climactic end of her novel. The mythic material originates in Native American orature and has been popularized in The Kiss of the Spider Woman, by that master bricoleur, the Argentine Manuel Puig.5 In Puig, the spider woman is a symbol of female fecundity and fatality, of creativity and destructiveness: for the female spider mates with the male and then destroys it. Precisely this pattern of events, of mating and killing, structures the closing sequence of Irrawaddy Tango. After her liberation from Daya, Tango becomes an Asian immigrant in America where the American Dream constantly eludes her. She is unhappy in her marriage to her American liberator, becomes embroiled in meaningless serial promiscuities, and drifts into a state of anomie. However, an opportunity to play an important role in the politics of her originary country presents itself. She is invited to return to Daya, where the Dayan astrologers have foreseen the coming end of their dictator’s power, but they feel that his downfall may be forestalled by a reconciliation between him and “the first woman sanctioned to receive his life milk” (262). Tango agrees

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to cooperate and returns to Daya. (The moment of her return is the opening chapter of the novel.) Once back, Tango is kept as a VIP prisoner until the propitious hour for attempted reconciliation arrives. The ensuing episode, which concludes the novel, is a graphic piece of erotic writing6 detailing Tango’s heroic powers of sexual resuscitation as she brings her desiccated former husband to consummation. Then the novel ends with Tango’s supreme act of self-empowerment and self-creation. As her mate lapses into a post-coital slumber, Tango uses duct tape to enclose him in their sheets, creating an insect-like “cocoon” (283). She then bludgeons him to death, and in so doing, frees a nation from its loathsome dictator. In the configuration of the events of this finale and of the antecedent kidnapping, it seems clear that Law-Yone was engaged in writing a witty, tongue-in-cheek work of bricolage which depends upon American hypotexts to construct her narrative of her protagonist’s return to Asia. In these three phases of her protagonist’s evolving subjectivity—from egocentricity, to alterity, to altruistic self-empowerment—Law-Yone has employed a witty bricolage that hybridizes elements of First-World and ThirdWorld history and mythology into a mordant condemnation of contemporary Burma and a thinly veiled call to action. In sum, both of these Asian American novelists, Lee and Law-Yone, whose sensibilities and personal histories have derived from cultural locations both Asian and American, both Third World and First World, have imagined a Burma that plays a crucial role in their works. Chang-rae Lee has constructed the site of his imagined Burma of the past through the memories of the Korean comfort women whom he interviewed and studied in his native Korea. Law-Yone created her imagined “Daya” by using a bricolage of cultural artifacts drawn from the First World and the Third World as well as her own memories of her early life in Burma as the daughter of Edward Law-Yone, the editor of Burma’s best-known English-language newspaper who became a political prisoner and then an exile first in Thailand and eventually in America (Yoo and Ho 283). Lee’s purpose leans towards the psychological, and he examines the façade and interior of his protagonist’s psyche through the apt symbolism of houses placed in contrasting Asian and American cultural locations. Law-Yone’s purpose tends towards the sociopolitical, and she condemns and deconstructs an extreme tyranny by constructing out of Third World and First World cultural objects an intricate bildungsroman of an empowered female political assassin. In both works, Burma is used to represent an extreme in disorder and inhumanity, an area of extreme darkness in the uneasy heart of Southeast Asia. In these Asian American works, then, Burma represents a past of which the world should promise “Never again,” and a future to which the present must say “Never ever.”7

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No t e s 1. In his memoir about his mother’s death, “The Faintest Echo of Our Language,” Lee has written feelingly about the antipathy of some Koreans towards Japanese—views that are, to be sure, not shared by all Koreans: My mother often showed open enmity for the Japanese, her face seeming to ash over when she spoke of her memories, that picture of the platoon of lean-faced soldiers burning [Korean-language] books and scrolls in the center of the village still aglow in my head . . . and how they tried to erase what was Korean by criminalizing the home language and history by shipping slave labor, draftees, and young Korean women back to Japan and its other Pacific colonies. How they taught her to speak in Japanese. And as she would speak of her childhood, of the pretty, stern-lipped girl . . . who could only whisper to her sisters in the midnight safety of their house the Korean words folding inside her all day like mortal secrets, I felt the same burning, troubling lode of utter pride and utter shame still jabbing at the sweet belly of her life, that awful gem, about who she was and where her mother tongue and her land had gone. (31) 2. To use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term describing a mosaic-like approach to creativity that he describes in his Savage Mind, 16–33. 3. Leslie Bow’s Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion, 137–53, provides a lucid account of the Burmese politics underlying Law-Yone’s novel. See also her interview of Law-Yone in MELUS, Winter 2002. 4. The letters “INRI” are initials for the Latin title that Pontius Pilate had written over the head of Jesus Christ on the cross (John 19:19). The words were “Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm.” Latin uses “I” instead of the English “J,” and “V” instead of “U” (i.e. Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum). The English translation is “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 5. For a discussion of Puig’s bricolage, see Lavers’s Pop Culture into Art. 6. Law-Yone’s short story “Drought” is included in the anthology of erotica Slow Hand, edited by Michele Slung. 7. This article is dedicated to the memory of its author’s father, Chua Yew Cheng, teacher and soldier, who died in a prisoner-of-war camp in Southeast Asia.

G U I YO U H UA N G

Long a Mystery and Forever a Memory: God vs. Goddess in the Ethnic Novel

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my Tan’s first two novels, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, both deploy feminist/women’s concerns against a cross-cultural combination of religious, historical, and family backgrounds. A cursory comparison of what is in the two books with actual events that happened in Tan’s family would reveal some parallels.1 While Joy Luck has been widely noted, Kitchen God, the central concern of my inquiry here, has not been a critical focus of studies. However, this is a feminist text that, in Lisa Lowe’s words, “multiplies the sites of cultural conflict, positing a number of struggles—familial and extrafamilial—as well as resolutions, without privileging the singularity or centrality of one” (35). The novel zooms in on women’s issues by exploring their relationships to males— often husbands, and male divinities—while depicting an assiduous quest for a female divinity that represents the female subjectivity. The images of God and goddess command a controlling presence in the book and will be analyzed through examining Tan’s use of divine metaphors to critique Chinese patriarchy. In this chapter, God is understood as the one Supreme Being that created and rules the universe, as well as in the Christian scientific sense of Him as the Supreme Being understood as Life, Love, Mind, Soul, Spirit, and Principle. This is the God that Pearl’s Chinese American father Jimmie From Asian American Literary Studies, edited by Guiyou Huang, pp. 132–151. © 2005 by Edinburgh University Press.

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Louie praised and worshipped as a minister. The lower-case god is defined in two ways, first as a male deity presiding over some portion of worldly affairs, in the case of Tan’s novel, Kitchen God, who is charged by the Jade Emperor to specifically watch over human behaviors; second, as a deified person, and in this particular case, Confucius, the Chinese educator and philosopher who is beyond any doubt the most deified figure in Chinese history. Finally, goddess refers to a female god or deity, and in the case of Kitchen God she is the divinity that the narrator invents to displace and replace Kitchen God and that represents the successful conclusion of her search for a goddess with whom she can identify.2 This chapter takes as pre-texts Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. In chapter four of the latter novel the narrator Miles Coverdale describes Priscilla’s worshipful look at her half-sister Zenobia when Priscilla first arrives at Blithedale under Hollingsworth’s guidance. Coverdale observes, “she evidently saw nothing else in the room save that bright, fair, rosy, beautiful woman [Zenobia]. It was the strangest look I ever witnessed; long a mystery to me, and forever a memory” (57). The adaptation from Hawthorne is meaningful because, like The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance, Kitchen God is a novel about mysteries and secrets that emotionally separate the mother and her daughter, and a novel in which memory provides the base material about the mother’s past life in China that persistently and hauntingly affects her life in America. Furthermore, Tan herself and her two principal characters evoke Hawthorne and his major characters in The Scarlet Letter—Tan’s father died early, as did Hawthorne’s, just like Arthur Dimmesdale, Pearl’s father, who was survived by Hester and Pearl. Another noteworthy—perhaps not accidental—similarity between Hawthorne and Tan is the shared name—Pearl—of the respective daughter in The Scarlet Letter and Kitchen God. Even more interestingly, both Pearls’s fathers are ministers—servants and messengers of God—a fact that implies redemptive qualities that are meant to fulfill the role of rescuers. Unlike Joy Luck where half the narratives focus on China and Chinese-born mothers and half on America and American-born daughters, Kitchen God deals almost exclusively with the traumatic past of one Chinese mother. The mother does not merely intend to educate her daughter about her Chinese past; she wants to establish stronger bonds with her daughter and create a deeper understanding by letting Pearl into her secret past, a past that she has hitherto neither been able nor willing to confront herself because it is so entangled with shame and fear that she is afraid Pearl would not only fail to understand, but would think of her as a terrible mother, the last thing that she wants to be perceived as by Pearl. Winnie’s exhaustive narrative is thus a carefully calculated effort to enable Pearl to know the more private and historical side of her as a mother, and her long narration of a chain of

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related events is tantamount to a necessary psychological preparation for the long-awaited disclosure of an important, well-kept secret. As the novel may not be familiar to all readers, a brief summary of its stories is in order. Before she emigrated from China to America, Winnie (then called Weiwei) had an abusive marriage with Wen Fu, by whom she had three children, none of whom survived because of war-related circumstances and human factors. Wen Fu was a rapist, an adulterer, a wife-batterer, and an arrogant minor officer in the Chinese air force in World War II, then trained by U.S. air force officers led by the later famous general Claire Chennault. During the Sino-Japanese war years, Winnie maintained a strained friendship with Hulan (later Americanized as Helen), the wife of a higher officer, Jiaguo. Helen and her Auntie Du were witnesses of Wen Fu’s domestic violence and sexual abuses as well as of Winnie’s submissive, bitter suffering. Therefore they were privy to Winnie’s secrets and painful past. While a few secrets are deployed throughout the narrative, the worst is that which Winnie tried to hide from her daughter Pearl that her real father was Wen Fu who raped Winnie right after their divorce and before she journeyed to America to join her new husband, Jimmy Louie, a former member of the U.S. air force stationed in Kunming and now back in the U.S. working as a minister. Pearl was born and raised in America and is experiencing great emotional difficulty accepting the death of her American father. Pearl, however, has a secret of her own: she has developed multiple sclerosis. She does not want her mother to know but has told Aunt Helen, who therefore holds the keys to both Winnie’s and Pearl’s secrets. For better or worse, Helen’s knowledge of the secrets allows her to manipulate her relationship with Winnie. On the other hand, due to her age and a desire to disclose the secrets by herself rather than through Helen, Winnie decides to reveal her secret to Pearl, who finally also tells her mother about her own disease. Mother and daughter together confront their respective pasts and, thanks to this sharing, come to grips with the present, in which Jimmy Louie just died. The novel’s title, The Kitchen God’s Wife, finds its origin in a story Winnie tells her grandchildren in chapter two, “Grand Auntie Du’s Funeral,” which provides an initial thematic insight into the world of its characters. The Kitchen God used to be a lucky farmer, Zhang, who married a hardworking, kind-hearted woman, Guo, but who later turned into a philanderer and squanderer. Zhang even brought home a woman who chased his wife out of her own house. When he had squandered all his money and been deserted by the woman, Zhang turned a beggar. Later, however, the man chanced upon his wife again and, pricked by a guilty conscience, jumped into the kitchen fireplace and was burned into ashes despite her efforts to rescue him. When his ashes flew into heaven, the Jade Emperor made him Kitchen God for having the courage to admit his wrong-doing and charged him to watch

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over everyone’s behavior. This grandmother story, told early on in the novel, structurally frames all the subsequent stories, thematically holds the book together, and forecasts the horrible stories of Wen Fu, who, as the novel no doubt implies, himself is a bad kitchen god. Put differently, farmer Zhang’s mistreatment of his wife epitomizes Wen Fu’s misogynistic conduct toward Winnie. Compared with Wen Fu, Zhang even appears to be the moral superior, for he at least feels shame in the end and expresses remorse about his sexual misconduct. Winnie, on the other hand, is none other than a Kitchen God’s wife, abused and oppressed by a husband who wielded unlimited power over her, other women, and certain helpless people. The bad fate of being a Kitchen God’s wife is reversed only after Winnie lands in America and marries her Chinese American husband, who believes in the God of Christianity, not a pagan god like Kitchen God. The images of god and goddess henceforth become dominant symbols of significance in the book. The story of the Kitchen God is occasioned by the death of Auntie Du, who in her will left presents to people she had loved. One present, an altar that has the picture of a man inside, is left to Pearl. “The man is rather large and is seated in regal splendor, holding a quill in one hand, a tablet in the other. He has two long whiskers, shaped like smooth, tapered whips” (87). This regal figure—equipped with emblems of power and prestige: a quill and a tablet—is Kitchen God, who had been Auntie Du’s good-luck god. However, he is not Winnie’s idol. After hearing Winnie’s story of Kitchen God, Pearl’s husband Phil remarks on the god’s Santa Claus resemblance, which provokes Winnie’s outburst of contempt and anger: “He is not Santa Claus. More like a spy—FBI agent, CIA, Mafia, worse than IRS, that kind of person!” (91). Such comparative and derogative judgments of Kitchen God clearly reflect Winnie’s views of him as an abusive, intrusive, and destructive agency, and are based on her personal experiences of the cruelty and violence emblematized in the image of the male figure in the altar. Winnie obviously has Wen Fu, her first husband, in mind when she unleashes her anger at both crime organizations like the Mafia and government agencies like the IRS, suggesting that Wen Fu is worse than any or all of them. In de–Santa Clausing him and calling him a person, not a god, Winnie strips the figure of all his endowed godly qualities, thus reducing him to the level of a despicable human being. The character of Wen Fu seems like one born with innate depravity. Like farmer Zhang he was not justly punished by higher authorities represented by the Jade Emperor who instead despotically made him a god rather than condemning him for justice’s sake. In his male-dominated society, Wen Fu benefited from the protection of the existing patriarchal system, where no one had ever passed a judgment on his moral character and conducts until Jimmy Louie made his appearance at a party. The casual encounter of a Chinese man and a Chinese American man sets the stage on which moral values

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and personal characters are compared and contrasted, the outcome of which in the long run helps Winnie to make the choice of one over another as her lifelong partner.3 At this social gathering Jimmy Louie was surrounded by Chinese women and men asking him to give them suitable English names. Thus Weiwei became Winnie, a name that implies win or victory. Wen Fu wanted something special (as he believed himself to be) for his English name, and so he was named Judas, only to find out later that he was insulted by Jimmy who was, ironically, to replace him as Winnie’s husband years later. On the other hand, this naming act reveals Jimmy’s foresight into the evil side of Wen Fu characterized by betrayal, embodied in the name Judas. Kitchen God intertwines family history and national history lived in a Confucian society torn by war and stricken by poverty. While the narrator relentlessly exposes the evil character of Wen Fu and praises only two men, Helen’s first husband Jiaguo and Winnie’s second husband Jimmy, the novel, like Joy Luck, focuses almost exclusively on women—their lives, hopes, hardships, and turns of fortune alongside societal and political tidings, with Wen Fu as their antagonist. Wen Fu was literally a god in his household, positioned as unchallengeable and exercising control over Winnie’s person and over their financial matters. Winnie’s dowry money, for example, given to her by her father and now intended for use for “taonan,”4 was seized by Wen Fu who squandered it on perverse pleasures, such as purchasing an old car and crashing it while driving around with a woman. Wen Fu’s sexual and physical abuse traumatized Winnie and directly contributed to her silence about her painful past. Winnie’s experience of “taonan” is depicted vis-à-vis Japanese atrocities perpetrated during the war; thus Wen Fu’s violence and Japanese war crimes are presented such that they become parallel targets of Winnie’s critique. While the Japanese are portrayed as invaders of Chinese territory and murderers of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the Americans are presented as trustworthy allies of the Chinese and are therefore marked for praise, of whom Jimmy makes just one example. Similarly, while Winnie’s Chinese husband is depicted as a monster, her American husband is characterized as a rescuing angel who embodies peace, justice, and love. While China was war-torn and famine-plagued, crowded with “taonan” people— citizens turned into refugees on their own land—America, by contrast, was the land of hope and prosperity where war was conspicuously absent; hence a desired destination of diasporic relocation for war victims like Winnie and Helen. The eulogistic representations of America and critical portrayals of China led some Asian American critics to question the Orientalist overtones in the works of Tan, fueling the debate among Asian Americans between nationalism and feminism. While Kingston bears the brunt of these criticisms, Tan has not been spared. In an essay provocatively titled “This Is Not

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an Autobiography,” Frank Chin voices his anger at several Chinese American writers who, he believes, orientalize China, Chinese, and Chinese Americans: “All characterize Chinese history and culture in terms of Christian stereotype and tell of the same Cinderella story of rescue from the perverse, unnatural, and cruel Chinese into the one true universe” (110). “The true universe” is presumably America. And although Chin was yet to include Tan in this group in several other essays he published years later, this criticism already anticipated her who, in Kitchen God, presents nothing less than a Chinese “Cinderella story of rescue”: Winnie was not only named (and was therefore given a new identity) but was literally rescued by Jimmy Louie from the evil claws of “the perverse, the unnatural, and cruel Chinese” Wen Fu. Kingston and Tan seem to have followed different cultural and literary traditions from Chin and his Aiiieeeee! colleagues, who enthusiastically study, appropriate, and disseminate what Chin calls “the heroic tradition” rooted in classic Chinese and Japanese literature, in opposition to the so-called tradition of the Christian autobiography that usually adopts the confessional firstperson singular in narration. On the other hand, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong finds an anti-Orientalist strain in both Kitchen God and Joy Luck. As she argues, Tan, while consciously and/or unconsciously orientalizing the mother and China, offers “occasional anti-Orientalist statements made by the characters” (181). These anti-Orientalist statements constitute a device to attract readers: Specifically, for the feminist audience, the Chinese American mother/daughter dyad in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife allegorizes a Third World/First World encounter that allows mainstream American feminism to construct itself in a flattering, because depoliticized, manner—an outcome unlikely to be delivered by mother–daughter stories penned by writers from Euro-American traditions. (181)

In Kitchen God Winnie’s entire narrative builds up to a story of liberation of one particular woman—herself. And as her American name foretells, she would emerge from her ordeals triumphant as a victor. Her former husband even dies before her, which literally sets her free and makes her a real survivor. In the story of Kitchen God, Zhang’s wife tries to rescue her fallen husband from being burnt (suggestive of a hellish punishment), but in her own life situation Winnie wished many times that Wen Fu was dead so that she would achieve freedom from his abusive control. But Wen Fu entertained no thought of letting her go because, like Leonce Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, he never doubted for a moment that he had proprietary rights over his wife because he was a man, or the man. This ownership, not

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partnership, dominates their relationship. The patrilinear system, informed and supported by the Confucian doctrine that stipulates that the husband is the head of the wife, endows the man with power over the woman. Even the Buddhist God, the Jade Emperor, is partial towards men because of his indifference to women’s predicament of victimization. So the root of the problem, for both farmer Zhang’s wife and Winnie, is not Kitchen God, who, according to Winnie’s definition, “was not too important. Not like Buddha, not like Kwan Yin, goddess of mercy—not that high level, not even the same level as the Money God. Maybe he was like a store manager, important, but still many, many bosses above him” (87). Unimportant as he may be, Kitchen God was charged to watch over all families’ behavior and report his observations to the Jade Emperor who would then deal out rewards and punishments accordingly. So from his inception as Kitchen God, he was appointed to a political office and was revered by people like Auntie Du. Winnie, on the other hand, realizing Wen Fu’s similarities to Kitchen God, lost all respect for the god; this loss in turn creates a spiritual void that needs filling. Like Edna Pontellier, Winnie did not have a mother to raise her and after her marriage, she was taught by her mother-in-law “how to be a good wife” and “how to be dutiful to a terrible person” (291). The absence of the mother in literature, from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, from Chopin’s The Awakening to Morrison’s Bluest Eye and now Tan’s Kitchen God, seems to be a persistent subplot. The mother’s absence is in and of itself a poignant commentary on women’s plight in general where they are often victimized in forms ranging from marginalization to madness to disappearance or death. Interestingly enough, in all the above-mentioned works, the fathers survive the mothers. King Lear is left with three daughters and struggles to rule his kingdom and maintain his fatherly and kingly authority. In A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer’s father died later than his wife and Torvald Helmer makes no bones about laying the blame of what he perceives to be his wife’s irresponsibility on her dead mother, not the father. In The Awakening, Edna’s father unwittingly coerced his wife into an early grave without even knowing it, and ironically, he coached his sonin-law Leonce to be strict with his wife, suggesting the use of force on his own daughter if necessary. In his father-in-law’s opinion, Leonce lacked the manhood to exercise male authority, and that manhood is sustained by an ability and willingness to resort to force. As Viet Thanh Nguyen’s critique of Gus Lee’s China Boy indicates, a young man’s successful completion of a struggle to establish manhood “culminates in the assumption of patriarchy itself, meaning the establishment of one’s own authority recognized by the state” (246). Ironically, Leonce never seemed to be able to establish such a

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coercive manhood and assumed a weak patriarchal role despite his desire to control his wife under his roof. Like Ibsen’s play and Chopin’s novel, Kitchen God looks into intergenerational relationships to examine the effects of such connections. Winnie’s situation, for example, is linked to her mother, who committed an unforgivable act and became a family disgrace that only death seems able to dissolve. Born into a rich family and influenced by Western, modern thought, Winnie’s mother did not bind her feet, a fact that in itself violated the gender code of her era. Judging by the time of the narrated events, Winnie’s mother was born in the late nineteenth century and went to a missionary school in 1897 in Shanghai. That she attended school suggests that she grew up in an enlightened family and must have been one of the few highly privileged women of the time. According to Tani Barlow in “Theorizing Woman,” “A rash of masculinist interest in the universal sign of woman had surfaced as early as the 1830s”; by the 1860s interest in the male/female relations in Western countries also developed; and by the late 1890s—the decade when Winnie’s mother attended a missionary school—there appeared “antifoot-binding and profemale academy arguments” (138), which necessarily provided stimulus for women who sought new modes of life and desired new roles to play other than within the parameters of the kitchen and the bedroom. The last decade of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of feminist awakening for women like Winnie’s mother, though the number of awakened women was rather limited. In the beginning years of the twentieth century, however, it would still be rare for a woman not to bind her feet. Women like Winnie’s mother were generally called “new women”; or in Winnie’s own words, a “modern girl” (167); or in the language of the revolutionaries—communists and nationalists alike—a liberated woman. Barlow’s review of the Chinese feminist movement explains how Chinese women in general have been treated and classified according to their age and changing roles from the late Qing dynasty to the post-Mao era. The different terms designating women in Chinese are quite revealing about their social, political, and marital status. For example, funü is the most common term for women, though as Barlow points out, it is a term greatly politicized by the government as a statist concept. Fu literally means wife; nü, daughter or girl; and mu, mother; nüren, as opposed to nanren, is a more sexually connotative term meaning woman or female. Winnie performed all of these roles in the life of a female: from a nü (daughter) to a fu (wife) and then to a mu (mother)—a full cycle of a traditional woman’s evolving roles, all of which confirm her sexual identity as a nüren (female), as opposed to nanren, a male. So did Winnie’s mother, the liberated woman who refused to bind her feet, which places her squarely in the category of rebellious/liberated women with pro-Western and anti-Confucian strains of thinking.

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This labeling of her entails two different interpretations of women’s role in early twentieth-century China: the traditional woman and the new woman.5 The new woman, by entering the public domain, distinguished herself from women en masse who were confined to their feminine roles in the private domain (usually the home) and who continued to perform functions stipulated for them by males, while walking falteringly on tiny bound feet, a deformed symbol and signifier of traditional womanhood. The new woman started to dress in Western-style clothing that obviously was already a provocative dressing code in the eyes of traditionalists. Apart from refusing to bind her feet, the new woman went to school, while a school education had been almost exclusively a male privilege in pre–twentieth-century China. Many of these modern women turned out to be family rebels or joined the revolutionary ranks, as Little Yu’s mother and Peanut did in Kitchen God. In their rebellion they emulated historical Chinese heroines as role models, a feminist theme of women’s liberation that has been explored extensively in China’s proletarian literature since the 1930s. Hua Mulan, a millennia-old folkloric character who has been utilized by feminists and communists alike and who is the prototype for Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, is again a case in point. The highly influential Chinese ballet drama first staged in the 1950s, The Red Army of Women, narrates the heroic story of women joining the Red Army in the 1920–30s when oppression of women was unbearably rampant.6 Women joining the Red Army is a reified instance of rebellion partly inspired by Hua Mulan’s heroics, but it represents a consciousness of selfdetermination in regard to their rights as women. To simply leave home or join the revolutionary ranks is the first step taken toward independence and liberation. Nora Helmer and Edna Pontellier both depart from their husbands’ home and control, in late nineteenth-century Norway and America respectively. Winnie’s mother, apparently a liberated, new woman, turned a rebel against her family and sought “free love” outside her arranged marriage. She appreciated her own looks—she narcissistically looked in a mirror every night—as a way of projecting or maintaining confidence and reaffirming her self-identity. This narcissistic act seems to emphasize her self-worth as a person and a woman. And yet the value of her womanhood was severely compromised by being forced to become the second wife of a rich merchant; she was even called “Double Second” because the merchant’s original second wife had committed suicide and he married Winnie’s mother to replace her. This demeaning vocative, much like the red letter A on Hester Prynne’s chest, serves as a stigma that at best partially evokes the past of its bearer and is intended to shape the public’s perception of the stigmatized, which in turn contributes to the consolidation of patriarchal control of the woman, who was doubly discriminated against because of her dual, and now dubious, identity.

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This dual identity, like double chains on a prisoner, deprives Winnie’s mother of her freedom and compels her to seek happiness and personal gratification from a man whom she had loved before her marriage to the merchant. Her mother’s mysterious disappearance occasioned Winnie’s relocation to Tsungming Island, where, Old Aunt told her, her mother had been buried. However, while there was a burial, the family did not hold funeral services for her, which suggests that the family withheld respect and recognition for her most likely due to her moral and sexual transgressions that, in their perception, disgraced the family, exactly like the fate of No Name Woman in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Old Aunt thus by necessity became a surrogate mother to Winnie and inculcated into the young girl her own pristine understanding of a female’s role in the home and in society at large, insisting that women should not be educated in schools, but rather by older women as to how to behave properly, and in a womanly way. In pre–twentieth-century Chinese history, there were two fundamentally different types of education—education of males (and only the elite few) in the school sense, geared toward a public career outside the home, and “education” of females for use within the domestic sphere. As Tani Barlow’s critique of the eighteenth-century Chinese scholar Chen Hongmou indicates, “Chen Hongmou sought to educate women in order to produce more xiannü or virtuous ‘women’ and thereby enhance the jia [home], that is all. Learning to act virtuously is coterminous with acting ‘like a woman’ in Chen Hongmou’s view” (136). This so-called education of women is more properly an indoctrination of male chauvinistic, male-defined conduct code for women, a kind of training in deportment that has nothing to do with the acquisition of literacy but everything to do with practical knowledge, personal conducts, and social etiquette. The fact that almost all women in Chen’s time had bound feet undergirds the theory Chen championed: working inside and around the house, a woman is not supposed or allowed to travel far beyond the boundaries of the home, which often constitutes the immovable center of her world; and anything she does will be measured and evaluated against her level of performance at home as daughter, as wife, and finally, as mother. Old Aunt’s philosophy and principles of life were informed and dictated by nothing save the Confucian doctrine that women are virtuous when they are devoid of literacy and talents,7 which problematically contradicts Confucius’s own insistence that “In instruction there is no separation into categories” (you jiao wu lei) (137).8 Confucius’s emphasis on self-perfection through education has been applauded universally, especially in East Asian countries, and more generally in other parts of the world. But only a minority of Chinese historically have been willing to fault the ancient thinker on his extremely prejudiced views on women. Confucius’s well-known motto— instructing without separating categories—regardless of its high-sounding

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rhetoric, clearly does not include women, so “no separation” truly only applied to males. On one occasion, the world-famous educator, talking about compensation for his teaching, says, “I have never denied instruction to anyone who, of his own accord, has given me so much as a bundle of dried meat as a present” (86). Either because no woman had offered dried meat to him in exchange for his instruction, or Confucius refused to grant women this boon, he was not recorded to have had any female students in his influential teaching career. His anti-woman, if not misogynistic, strain of thinking and practice has bequeathed a 2,500-year-long legacy to China and the world, a glaring fact demonstrable in late twentieth-century Asian American writing in the U.S.—a country that may well be the least influenced by Confucianism due to its historico-geographical distance from China and, more importantly, to a democratic system that has overall effectively resisted any despotic system characterized by Confucian advocacy of patriarchal rule. This legacy lives on in the thinking of Old Aunt, who blames Winnie’s mother’s deviation on Western-style education. As she lectures Winnie about her mother: “Her education was the cause,” Old Aunt would say. “They put Western thoughts into a Chinese mind, causing everything to ferment. It is the same way eating foreign food—upset stomach, upset mind. The foreign teachers want to overturn all order in the world. Confucius is bad, Jesus is good! Girls can be teachers, girls do not have to marry. For what purpose do they teach this? Upsidedown thinking!—that’s what got her into trouble.” (171)

Thus Confucian teaching helped erect a formidable wall of resistance against invasion of new thought, foreign or not. Old Aunt accepts Confucian teaching without questioning its gendered biases and uncritically holds Westernstyle education accountable for Winnie’s mother’s moral downfall and demise. In a way she is right because education empowered Winnie’s mother and enabled her to rid herself of ignorance and realize her unhappy predicament, and this realization steered her life in a direction that uneducated, ignorant/illiterate women would probably not take. Winnie, conversely, traces the root of her mother’s problems to Confucius, not her western-style education: “Her daughter could take care of her into her old age. That’s what Confucius would have said. I don’t know why everyone always thought Confucius was so good, so wise. He made everyone look down on someone else, women were the worst!” (173; emphasis added). This anti-Confucian articulation, through the mouth of a Chinese American woman in her seventies, indirectly affirms the value of Western education and the urgency of women’s liberation. It has seldom been disputed that Con-

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fucius’s emphasis on social and familial hierarchy lends an expedient philosophical rationale to advocates of social order and governmental/patriarchal authority, where government and patriarchy are complicitous and reinforce each other. When citizens/subjects of a state are properly stationed in their prescribed positions determined by the amount of power they have, hierarchy becomes inevitable, which in turn lends theory and facilitates practice for the ease of family and state governance. In his at once famous and notorious answer to Duke Ching of Ch’i’s question about government, Confucius says: “Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son” (114). Blatant is the omission of women in this biased political discourse regarding state and family governance; conspicuous, too, is the absence of women in his vision for an ideal state;9 and unequivocal is his advocacy of hierarchy for the expediency of running family and state affairs. In this hierarchy men and senior members perch on the top rungs of the social ladder while women and children occupy the lowest rungs. In this tightly structured social fixture, any attempt to violate the hierarchical order is perceived as transgressive and is therefore punishable. Winnie’s mother was supposed to stay obediently in her feminine, wifely, and motherly roles, despite pressures from all sides caused by four wives vying for the attention of one husband whom she did not love. But when she chose the dangerous path of rebellion—a transgressive affront that defied the hierarchical order that represented and favored male authority—familial and social ostracization became inevitable. The story performed in the ballet drama The Red Army of Women took place around the time Winnie grew up in the 1930s, when women started to question the subordinate position they were in. The cause of women’s marginalization and subordination was not merely the high-handed rule of men over them, but also the end result of women’s own acquiescence, as Old Aunt’s criticism of Winnie’s mother quoted earlier suggests. The way Winnie was brought up—“I did not know I was supposed to be angry. This was China. A woman had no right to be angry” (285)—is illuminating. Despite the oversimplification of the issue implicit in this statement, Winnie shows her daughter Pearl how a woman, especially a young wife, has to be silent in order to fit the bill of an obedient, good wife, and to fulfill the expectations of housekeeping and child-bearing responsibilities while remaining useful to parents-in-law and sexually available to the husband. The powerlessness of women is evident in the fact that there is no legal way wives can stop men from taking in other women as concubines or mistresses. Kitchen God portrays men’s privileges to emphasize the hardships of women, complicated by war, and worse yet, by the oppressive institution of patriarchy. For example, on their perilous journey to Kunming, fatigue and malnutrition affected Winnie’s pregnancy and resulted in a stillbirth. But sig-

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nificantly, Winnie made it a point to look at her dead child and gave her a meaningful name: “Mochou, Sorrowfree, because she had never known even one sorrow” (428). The naming is significant because it is a self-consoling act on the part of Winnie in that Mochou, now dead, would not have to grow up suffering and abused as did Winnie herself; it is also important because it initiates a creative process of a search for a goddess, and counteracts the pulling down of Kitchen God, who represents males and invokes the suffering of women. The name also serves as the title of the last chapter of the novel, where Winnie resumes her narrative after Pearl’s interruption to describe Bao-Bao’s wedding in chapter twenty-five, which, like the first two chapters, is narrated by Pearl. These special chapters all perform symbolic and structural functions that provide a narrative frame that lends centripetal force to the contents of the book: the two opening chapters focus on gods, males, and destructive images such as death; the closing chapters accomplish the very opposite: one deals with a happy, productive occasion—Bao-Bao’s wedding—and the other, “Sorrowfree,” focuses on the construction of a female, not a male, identity. In “Bao-Bao’s Wedding” Winnie’s big secret eventually comes out and Pearl finally realizes that her biological father was not the good-hearted minister Jimmy Louie, but the heartless rapist Wen Fu. Winnie’s fear has not been so much the exposure of the secret itself as the concern that her daughter would develop her biological father’s bad characteristics. Winnie comments on the development of a child’s character: “Of course, every baby is born with yin and yang. The yin comes from the woman. The yang comes from the man. When you were born I tried to see whose yang you had. I tried to see your daddy. I would say, Look, she has Jimmy Louie’s smile. I tried to forget everything else. But inside my heart I saw something else.” . . . “You looked like Mochou. You looked like Yiku. You looked like Danru, Danru especially. All of them together.” (709)

Yiku and Danru, Winnie’s second and third child by Wen Fu, both died in childhood. Their names, like Mochou’s, are symbolic and harbor Winnie’s painful memories. While Yiku was being born in the hospital, her father Wen Fu was raping their servant girl at home. Winnie’s name for Yiku, “pleasure over bitterness” (455–6), may either sarcastically refer to Wen Fu’s lustful pleasure with other women over her own suffering, or express her wish that her daughter would grow up happy, unaware that she would die before even reaching adulthood. Wen Fu’s indifference toward the birth or death of Yiku, his daughter, contrasts starkly with his tenderness toward Danru, a son; in fact, he trea-

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sured him because he was a male descendant of his: a son would carry on his family’s name, insuring the continuity of the male side of the family clan and fulfilling a Confucian expectation of filial piety by giving his family a male offspring. Winnie on the other hand again took up the role of a namer10 and named the son with Taoistic resignation and indifference—Danru: “nonchalance” (474). The birth of Danru was followed by the arrival of Min, the reallife counterpart of the woman farmer Zhang brought home before he was made Kitchen God. The son, whom his mother wanted to protect—perhaps superstitiously—with a symbolic name, survived infancy but was killed in an epidemic carried by rats caused by chemicals left by the Japanese during the eight-year-long war, precisely the number of years Winnie’s marriage with Wen Fu lasted. The 1945 ending of the Sino-Japanese war coincided with the de facto dissolution of their ill-matched marriage. Their married life was therefore implicitly likened to a long, devastating war. As the war ends and the marriage dissolves, the novel draws to a close and the narrative returns full circle to its point of departure: accepting an invitation to Bao-Bao’s wedding in chapter one, and attending it in chapter twenty-five; in between are the historical events that lead up to the formation of family secrets that require disclosure called for by the narrative closure. But Pearl’s revelation of her MS is not the final disclosure of all secrets,11 for Helen has one of her own to share, that is, she does not have a brain tumor: the tumor has been her own fabrication prompted by her declining health. Since Helen is privy to both Winnie’s and Pearl’s secrets, her possible death would mean taking those secrets to the grave, and yet she does not want to die and forget to thank Winnie for her friendship. Because of the sharing of secrets, mother and daughter are brought closer, for which Helen attempts to claim credit. But she wants to perfect her accomplishment with a new secret: she tells Pearl that curing her brain tumor was the original reason that they were planning a trip to China where she would be treated, but now that she is sure she has no tumor she wants to keep Winnie from knowing the real reason for the planned trip so that they can still go and pretend that the magic spring in China cured her—the same medicine that, according to Helen, can cure Pearl of her MS. The trip to China will therefore benefit all three women both psychologically and therapeutically, accompanied by a firm belief that a return to the root (the homeland) of the problems would help solve them as well. The sentimental ending of Kitchen God is reminiscent of Joy Luck, where the daughter Jing-mei takes an emotional trip to China on behalf of her late mother. Kitchen God does not dispatch such a trip but offers instead a detailed itinerary of one. Apparently the trip to China will be just for Pearl’s MS, but it will also be a trip with a goodwill mission to further cement their friendship and female bonding. This part of the novel is the least

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Orientalistic, even Occidentalistic: regardless of what medical research may say, Pearl’s MS cannot be efficaciously treated with Western medicine—implying a lack of trust in it—and even though Chinese traditional medicine is legally listed as a last alternative, it is a welcome solution, deeply rooted in belief, to Winnie and Helen, two elderly Chinese women who grew up believing in the healing power of Chinese herbs. In their hearts, Pearl’s MS is curable only in China, where the roots of their problems are, as well as the roots of their ethnic identity. The framing events of the novel—Auntie Du’s death and funeral, BaoBao’s wedding, and the sharing of secrets—now help frame the messages, feminist, anti-Confucianist, and reconciliatory. The friendship of Winnie and Helen is strengthened, and the mother–daughter bond between Winnie and Pearl is renewed and deepened. This happy and celebratory atmosphere wafts into the final chapter, “Sorrowfree”—named for Mochou—which represents the turning over of a new leaf and focally describes the naming of a new identity. “Sorrowfree” again utilizes Winnie as narrator. The daughter begins the story and the mother ends it. Such a collaborative narrative tactic not only simulates the inseparability of mother and daughter but also reaffirms the importance of relationships. Helen, on the other hand, seems to have finally matured and gained self-knowledge in her advanced years. Wen Fu dies around the time of Auntie Du’s death, suggesting the end of an abusive era and the dawning of a new one, and symbolically marking the death of Kitchen God, with whom he has shared one evil identity, as well as the beginning of real freedom for Winnie. When Winnie realizes the marathon she has been running to achieve freedom and happiness is undoubtedly coming to an end, and after learning of her daughter’s MS, she is angry and sad and finally takes action: And then I saw that picture of Kitchen God, watching me, smiling, so happy to see me unhappy. I took his picture out of the frame. I put it over my stove. “You go see Wen Fu! You go to hell down below!” I watched his smiling face being eaten up by the fire. . . . But then I listened again. And I knew: This was not Wen Fu’s ghost. This was like a bingo blackout. This was like a Reno jackpot. This was Kitchen God’s wife, shouting, Yes! Yes! Yes! (734)

This iconoclastic act occurs in one of the most revealing passages of the novel. One may recall how farmer Zhang betrayed his wife and became Kitchen God by the decree of the Jade Emperor. Winnie’s first husband embodies, in flesh and blood, the cruelty and depth of evil, and now she realizes the only way to get even with him is to destroy Kitchen God by purging Wen Fu of her life as well as of her memory. She subverts her earlier

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story of farmer Zhang in which he ascended and was made a god, and exacts her revenge by burning Kitchen God in effigy and telling him to join Wen Fu. This is the point where Wen Fu and Kitchen God merge into one and are punished as one, and where Kitchen God’s wife separates herself from her husband to create her own identity. The destruction of old, bad, male gods calls for the creation of new types of divinities. As the principal victim characters are all women oppressed by men and gods, Winnie finally decides that she needs a goddess—a divinity of her own sex—to represent herself and her daughter. Therefore on a shopping trip she buys a porcelain statue that is special and represents women. Kitchen God both opens and closes its narrative with the image of a store, a place for transactions and change. In the store that sells statues, Winnie finds all kinds of statues but none that she wants for Pearl. She wants a goddess that nobody knows, so she ends up buying a “mistake”—a nice statue on the bottom of whose chair the factory forgot to write down a name. This oversight on the part of the factory conveniently—and perhaps intentionally on the part of the novelist—provides an opportunity to Winnie who, for the fifth time in her life, exercises the power of naming. This opportunity and the power attendant on it hold a great deal of political significance for her. While the statue is a present meant for Pearl, Winnie’s description of it seems a proper commentary on her own newfound self. “Look at her hair, how black it is, no worries. Although maybe she used to worry. I heard she once had many hardships in her life. So maybe her hair is dyed” (737). This description seems to have sprung from a newly obtained peace of mind and psychological freedom made possible by the death of Wen Fu; it also invokes Mochou who never had a life and whom Winnie is determined to remember in her own way—by naming the porcelain statue Lady Sorrowfree. In this act of naming, Winnie achieves the power of a Jade Emperor while displacing him with a female identity, a goddess who understands English and who listens and washes away sad things with her tears. The statue is thus uniquely Chinese American and represents a Chinese American female subjectivity. All her life, Winnie has been subjected to the despotic commands of men—father and husband—and has had limited freedom as a woman. To undo the victimization and become a victor, to alleviate the pain she has suffered, Winnie fights her past by investing in the present. Instead of burning down the house as Bertha Rochester did in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or drowning herself in the sea as Edna Pontellier did in Chopin’s The Awakening, or drowning herself in the family well as No Name Woman did in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, or walking out on her husband as Nora Helmer did in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Winnie, like Hester in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, is resolved to succeed in raising Pearl, also Wen Fu’s biological daughter, to be entirely her own, by assuming the role of a namer and creator of goddess. The novelist, on the other

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hand, in this explicitly feminist, anti-sexist work, indicts Wen Fu and Kitchen God, while taking jabs at Confucius and the male hegemony. Confucius’s contributions—in education, morality, ethics, government, law, and philosophy—are towering, but his overt sexist discrimination against women is subjected to vigorous critique in Tan’s novel, where power differentials between men and women are scrutinized. In men’s mistreatment of women Confucius has played a conspicuously powerful role. So, subverting texts such as King Lear (Lear), The Awakening (Edna’s father), and A Doll’s House (Nora’s father) where the man survives the wife, Tan’s Kitchen God has the wife survive the husband and endows her with creative power so she indeed becomes a winner in the end. And Tan, in having a woman pull down Kitchen God, also incriminates Confucius, one of Chinese culture’s greatest gods.

No t e s 1. See Tan’s “Lost Lives of Women.” 2. In defining God, god, and goddess, I referred to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996) for their basic denotations and connotations. The dictionary provides seven meanings of God as a noun: 1. the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe; 2. the Supreme Being considered with reference to a particular attribute: the God of Islam; 3. (l.c.) one of several deities, esp. a male deity, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs; 4. (often l.c.) a supreme being according to some particular conception: the god of mercy; 5. Christian Science. The Supreme Being, understood as Life, Truth, Love, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle; 6. (l.c.) an image of a deity; an idol; 7. (l.c.) any deified person or object (817). Three fundamental meanings are given for goddess: 1. a female god or deity; 2. a woman of extraordinary beauty and charm; 3. a greatly admired or adored woman (818). 3. Winnie’s marriage to Wen Fu was arranged and therefore she did not choose her own husband. Her acquaintance with Jimmy Louie affords her an opportunity to love and eventually marry him. 4. “Taonan,” used as an adjective by Tan, is a verbal phrase in Chinese. “Tao” literally means escape or avoid, and “nan” refers to disasters, ordeals, and hardships, especially war and famine. In Kitchen God, “taonan” refers to desperate efforts to avoid the war by escaping to safer, more affluent places. 5. “New woman”, “modern woman”, and “liberated woman” are often interchangeable synonyms. 6. The theme song of the drama, also very popular for a half century, opens with these lines: “March on, march on! Heavy is soldiers’ onus and deep is women’s suffering. Just as there was Hua Mulan in ancient times, there is an army of women today.” The song became common knowledge and remains familiar to many today. 7. This notion is occasionally still echoed axiomatically on the lips of some twentieth-century men: “Virtuous is the woman who has no talent” (nuzi wucai bian shi de). 8. Lau’s translation. An alternative translation could read, “I do not distinguish between the kinds of people I teach.”

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  9. Another example of Confucius’s extreme bias against women is a comment he made in response to King Wu’s statement that he had ten “capable officials”: “With a woman amongst them, there were, in fact, only nine” (95). Confucius denied that a woman can be a capable official so he unapologetically discounted her. 10. It should be noted that Wen Fu as father of four children named none of them while Winnie gave each of them a name, indicating that she has the power of naming. 11. Three major secrets can be found in the novel: Winnie’s secret from Pearl that Wen Fu is Pearl’s biological father; Pearl’s secret from her mother that she has MS; and Helen’s secret from Winnie that she does not actually have a brain tumor.

Wor k s Ci t e d Barlow, Tani. “Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating [Chinese Women, Chinese State, Chinese Family].” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 132–60. Chin, Frank. “This Is Not an Autobiography.” Genre 18 (Summer 1985): 109–30. Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Avon Books, 1972. Confucius. The Analects. Trans. D. C. Lau. London: Penguin Books, 1979. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Ed. William E. Cain. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. The Riverside Anthology of Literature, 2nd ed. Ed. Douglas Hunt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. 1197–1261. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.” Diaspora 1.1 (Spring 1991): 24–44. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, 1972. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The Remasculization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel.” American Literary History 12.1–2 (Spring 2000): 130–57. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God’s Wife. Thorndike, ME: Thorndike Press, 1991. Tan, Amy. “Lost Lives of Women.” Life (April 1991): 90–91. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “ ‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon.” The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 174–210.

J E F F R E Y F. L . PA r T R I D G E

Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in the Novels of Gish Jen

If there is one thing I hope readers come away with, it’s to see Asian Americans as “us” rather than “other.” —Gish Jen

T

Ch a l l e nging Et hn ic i t y he literary Chinatown described in this book is fundamentally a “ghettoizing” phenomenon. The reader’s assumption that the ethnic author speaks for the Chinese community forces Chinese American literature into a minor role with a specialized and limited vision. . . . The experience of reading a text like American Knees can change the perspective of readers by bringing them into the experience of being Asian American. In this chapter, I examine another formidable opponent of the literary Chinatown horizon: namely, the notion of cultural hybridity. Below, I discuss Gish Jen’s first two novels, Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land, in order to discover the ways in which her exploration of cultural hybridity re-fashions ethnicity as a dynamic field of intersections and permeations that serves to dissolve the literary Chinatown’s us/them dichotomy. To put this discussion of Jen’s work into perspective, a brief discussion of cultural hybridity, including critical objections to the model, is needed in order to highlight Jen’s challenge to the literary Chinatown horizon.

From Beyond Literary Chinatown, by Jeffrey F.L. Partridge, pp. 165–190. © 2007 by the University of Washington Press.

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Cu lt ur a l Hy br i di t y “The very concepts of homogenous national cultures,” writes Homi Bhabha, “the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities—as the ground of cultural comparativism—are in a profound process of redefinition” (5). Cultural hybridity, as Bhabha and others assert, is a concept at the forefront of this “redefinition.” The theory of cultural hybridity is an attempt to conceptualize the identity of a person or a group in terms that recognize the existence of cultural differences as well as the roles of invention and agency in the articulation of those differences. In Bhabha’s view, hybridity is marked by the “in-betweenness,” the “interstitiality,” caused by the continuous negotiation between the foreign and the familiar. In this way the process of identity formation is ongoing. There is no pre-defined whole into which an individual consciousness is growing; indeed, the very concept of culture is re-defined as a fluid, dynamic process of change and creolization, rather than a homogenizing whole. As with the Derridean distinction in the word “différance,” in the cultural hybridity model, individuals and communities differ (i.e., are marked as different) from one another, while at the same time their own meaning, definition, or identity is deferred (i.e., put off, postponed) indefinitely. Even the definitions of self or culture on which individuals and groups may agree are reconstituted by this view as emerging through the social and political moment, rather than as statements of organic quality or essence. Thus, the theory of cultural hybridity radically transforms the commonly held notion of culture as a “complex whole” (as defined by E. B. Tylor in his influential Primitive Culture [1958], qtd. in Wicker 31) by contesting its belief in a tangible, even pre-existent, cultural essence. In the words of Alberto Melucci, “the identity of a self becomes [in the hybridity formulation] more of a field than an essence: not a metaphysical reality but a dynamic system defined by recognizable opportunities and constraints” (64). By freeing the individual from the idea of culture’s conforming forces, hybridity theory introduces an element of individual and group choice in the expression of identity. According to Melucci, If identity is no longer an essential nucleus or a metaphysical continuity, definition of its borders and maintenance of its continuity are entrusted to our capacity to respond—that is, to our ability to recognize and choose among the opportunities and constraints present in the field of relations that constitute us at any given moment. (65)

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This idea that identity can be shaped by the individual’s ability to “recognize and choose among . . . opportunities and constraints” liberates the individual from ascribed identity and initiates a democratized process of self-identity. The theory of cultural hybridity seeks to eradicate hegemonic structure by subverting the general notion of culture as a static, primal, totalizing force and replacing it with a more historically viable model in which all cultures are characterized by “internal variation, diachronicity and transitions” (Wicker 37) and an adjacent process of democratization. This coincides with the position taken by Lisa Lowe in “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.” For Lowe, the impression of Asian American literature as fixated upon a nativist/assimilationist dialectic “essentializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among Asians” (26). Furthermore, Lowe claims that by accepting an essentialist version of “Asian American identity,” one remains trapped within the binary logic of hegemonic politics: In accepting the binary terms (“white” and “non-white,” or “majority” and “minority”) that structure institutional policies about ethnicity, we forget that these binary schemas are not neutral descriptions. Binary constructions of difference use a logic that prioritizes the first term and subordinates the second. (31)

Lowe prefers to represent Asian Americans as a heterogenous people, varying “across racial and ethnic, gender, sexuality, and class lines” (31). In terms of cultural texts and their interpretation, Lowe privileges a hybridic view which “refuse[s] static or binary conceptions of ethnicity, replacing notions of identity with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from ethnic ‘essence’ to cultural hybridity” (33). Some Asian American scholars, however, object to the re-definition of Asian American culture as hybrid. For example, in her response to Lowe’s argument Sau-ling Cynthia Wong raises a number of salient points that serve to question the unqualified acceptance of the hybridity model in Asian American studies. “Theoretically,” she writes, “I could ascribe a great deal of power to interstitiality and subjectivity-shuttling . . . ; in practical political terms, however, I can’t see how an interstitial, shuttling exercise of power is done” (“Denationalization” 19). Cultural hybridity may be a more accurate description of actual cultural transformations in a world increasingly typified by globalization, diaspora, and transnational flows of culture and capital, yet culture articulated as hybrid within the everyday reality of the nation-state may render disadvantaged groups politically impotent. Wong’s concern is that

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if Asian American cultural criticism abandons its efforts toward establishing the Asian American voice in American culture and politics for a model of fluidity and interstitiality, then “certain segments of the Asian American population may be left without a viable discursive space” (19). Other objections to the hybridity model center on its tainted linguistic genealogy, its literal botanic reference to the mixing of two essences, and its euphoric and utopian promise to eradicate essentialism. Anne Anlin Cheng, for instance, asks whether the hybridity model sets up a false dichotomy between hybridity and essentialism, as though the former cures the latter, as though differences of class, gender, and nationality eliminate essentialist positions when clearly those different positions are themselves each effecting their own brands of allegiances, each demanding ‘an’ identity. (26)

Vijay Prashad claims that the problem with the hybridity metaphor is that its literal definition “retains within it ideas of purity and origins (two things melded together)” (“Bruce Lee” 54). Added to this is the problem of hybridity’s historic origins in the racial theories of the Victorian era. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Robert J. C. Young cautions against an uninformed acceptance of the language of hybridity in today’s Cultural Studies, a language he claims utilizes “the vocabulary of the Victorian extreme right” (10). Hybridity found its earliest and most prominent articulations in the racialized debates of nineteenth-century colonialism. Hybridity, the biological mixing of the races, was portrayed as a threat to the white colonialist’s mandate and responsibility as the superior race to rule the world. The dissemination of the white man’s seed among the inferior races would lead to the disintegration of civilization, an idea that was most poignantly expressed in the trope of the hybrid’s supposed sexual impotency. Young is therefore reticent to attribute an enlightened status to modern hybridity theory. “There is an historical stemma,” he says, “between the cultural concepts of our own day and those of the past from which we tend to assume that we have distanced ourselves” (27). For some Asian American critics, postmodern concepts of identity such as cultural hybridity are useful in opposing essentialized notions of ethnic subjectivity, but they also introduce a problematic for a raced subject. Traise Yamamoto writes, “for subjects marked by race, or by gender and race, fragmentation is very often the condition in which they already find themselves by simple virtue of being situated in a culture that does not grant them subjecthood, or grants them only contingent subjectivity” (75). The problem then, as Yamamoto states it, is that postmodern subjectivity seeks to destabilize that which has never been stable. Cultural hybridity may thus rightly deconstruct

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Euro-American expectations of an Asian essence, but it may offer little assistance to Asian American individuals who feel they have never attained “wholeness” in U.S. culture. David Palumbo-Liu shows similar caution: While appreciating the ways that postmodern and postcolonial criticism can break up outmoded perspectives on literary studies in order to comment upon ethnic literatures, Asian-American literary and cultural criticism must recognize as well the historical and theoretical differences that complicate such literatures if it is to better understand its own location within contemporary cultural politics. (“Ethnic as ‘Post-’ ” 167)

Cultural hybridity therefore has its limitations. On the whole, however, many theorists today argue that cultural hybridity is a positive formulation, a “radical inversion” of racist constructs (Papastergiadis 257). Even Young does not wish to suggest that hybridity is regressive or ineffective as a cultural theory, but he does caution that we not assume an inherent superiority of modern hybridity theory over nineteenth-century dialectical thinking: as he argues, “the interval that we assert between ourselves and the past may be much less than we think” (28). In her objection to Lisa Lowe’s argument for the cultural hybridity model, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong explores the possibility of applying the concept to Asian American identity politics and at the same time overcoming its political impotency by articulating culture as a conscious negotiation between natural flux and intentional stasis: that is, as shifting between modes of change and modes of internally defined essentialism. In a similar move, which I will explicate toward the end of this chapter, Pnina Werbner makes a cogent argument for a crucial distinction between “modes of objectification” and “modes of reification.” I will return to these issues later in the chapter, and in the conclusion I will take into consideration Prashad’s suggestion that we abandon the term “hybridity” altogether, replacing it with polyculturalism, a word that signifies multiple rather than binary mixing. One contemporary Chinese American writer who clearly engages with these postmodern articulations of ethnicity is Gish Jen. Her commitment to the cultural hybridity model (although she may not use the precise term) can be seen in her works, but also in what she says about her writing and the impact she hopes it will achieve. For example, in reply to a question about what she hopes readers would learn from Mona in the Promised Land, Jen writes, I hope that they will understand that ethnicity is a very complicated thing, not a stable, unified thing. Right now many people hold the view that if you’re a Chinese American, that is far and away the

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most important fact about you. That is what you were born and will be forever. To try to make yourself something else is being false to your true self. I think that’s entirely wrong. I think that all the groups in America have rubbed off on each other, and that no group is pure. There is really no such thing as one who is purely Chinese American or anything else. If you look at what it means to be Chinese American today, for instance, I think you’ll find that a lot of our ideas about group identity have been borrowed straight from Jewish and black people. To imagine that being just one thing is the be-all-and-end-all truth about yourself is pretty naïve. (qtd. in Partridge 230)

In her novels, Jen presents a radical and provocative formulation of ethnicity. In terms of the literary Chinatown, I argue that Jen’s articulation of cultural hybridity profoundly disrupts the ghettoization of Chinese American literature. I will begin with a discussion of linguistic and cultural hybridity in her first novel, and then present a more lengthy discussion of cultural hybridity in her second, and I will make observations about her third novel in the conclusion.

T y p i c a l A m e r i c a n a n d Ba k h t in i a n Hy br i di t y Gish Jen’s first novel, as its title suggests, interrogates the notion of what it means to be typically American. For Ralph, Helen, and Theresa Chang, “typical American” is a buzz word they use for the things Americans do: “Typical American no-good,” Ralph would say; Theresa, “Typical American don’t-know-how-to-get-along”; and Helen, wistfully, “typical American just-want-to-be-the-center-of-things.” They were sure, of course, that they wouldn’t “become wild” here in America, where there was “no one to control them.” Yet they were more sure still as they shook their heads over a clerk who short-changed them (“typical American no-morals!”). Over a neighbor who snapped his key in his door lock (“typical American use-brute-force!”). Or what about that other neighbor’s kid, who claimed the opposite of a Democrat to be a pelican? (“Peckin?” said Ralph. “A kind of bird,” explained Theresa; then he laughed too. “Typical American just-dumb!”). (67)

“Typical American” is thus Ralph, Helen, and Theresa’s name for what they consider to be foreign, a designation that distances them from all that they dislike about Americans, as well as all that they do not understand. As this passage indicates, their aggressively xenophobic posture masks their fears of

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becoming “wild,” becoming wild being a version of “going native.” In other words, behind the rhetoric here is an anxiety of enculturation. “Typical American,” as a buzzword and as the title of the novel, becomes increasingly ironic as the story of the Changs develops. One irony, of course, is the fact that the deepest fears of Ralph, Helen, and Theresa are slowly materializing: they are increasingly becoming “typical Americans.” However, the deeper irony of “typical American” lies in its function as a definition for Americanness, an irony that I would argue is central to the entire novel. The Americanness of the story is emphasized in the very first line of the novel: “it’s an American story” (3). Yet what is first described is young Ralph’s journey by ship from China to America. He is obviously not American, but, we are told, this is an American story. In light of the “Americanization” of Ralph, which seems to be the subject of the story, it would appear that the irony here is that Ralph, who was once a typical Chinese, becomes through the process of assimilation a typical American. As such, the title would speak not about being typically American, but about becoming typically American. Yet by the end of the novel, it is clear that the story is not simply about the assimilation of Ralph and the others. “Becoming American” is a phrase that rests secure in the idea of the signifier “American.” That is, the phrase suggests a given knowledge or understanding of what “American” is. This notion of “American” is thrown into doubt, most notably by Ralph’s epiphany that “America is no America” (296). Ralph’s admission that “America is no America” (296) undermines a reading of Typical American as simply a story of integration and assimilation. Ralph’s epiphany questions, rather, the whole notion of Americanness. “America is no America” is a sentence that negates America. At first glance, this phrase seems to suggest that the accepted definition of America does not actually or adequately define America, as recognized in a phrase like “he is no gentleman,” or “she is no Christian.” In these examples, the subject of the sentence is described as not living up to the standards that the speaker expects these terms to describe. But to say “he is not a gentleman” does not change the meaning of “he is no gentleman” in the same way that “she is not a Christian” changes the meaning of “she is no Christian.” The man can be judged according to a definition of “gentleman” whether or not he professes to be one; therefore, replacing “no” with “not” still suggests that the man does not live up to a certain standard. In the latter case, however, replacing “no” with “not” incurs an ontological change. “She is not a Christian” means she does not live up to the standards of Christianity only if she professes to be a Christian. Otherwise, the sentence simply means she does not profess to be a Christian. What, then, does it mean to say that America is no America? Is America something other than Ralph believed it to be, or is it something

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other than it pretends to be? If America is not America, then what is it? Is it nothing? Is it something not yet defined? My argument is that “typical American” in this novel is, in its most profound sense, a description of people like Ralph, Helen, and Theresa—people who are struggling to define themselves in, and with regard to, America; people who are becoming, changing, and existing in an “in-between space” (as Bhabha calls it). Jen begins through this novel to define “American” as essentially hybridic and interstitial (as defined by deferral, in the Derridean sense mentioned earlier), and this is a definition that culminates in the cultural-hybrid Mona in her second novel. According to David Leiwei Li, Jen “posit[s] a new relation to the dominant culture and . . . create[s] a fiction beyond the negative embodiments of race and ethnicity” (Imagining 102, emphasis added). In one sense, by presenting a Chinese American family as typically American, the novel places the Chinese American immigrant experience within the bounds of American identity. This sensibility aligns it with the Asian American project of “claiming America,” . . . While the Chinese are often regarded as foreign and unassimilable, and therefore un-American, the novel shows that it is not assimilation to the American way that defines Americanness; what makes Chinese Americans bona fide Americans, rather, is their experience as immigrants. The hybridized consciousness which results from the experience of immigration is therefore what is typically American. My approach to the hybridity in the novel centers on the Bakhtinian notion of stylized hybridity in character speech. This will be useful in revealing some of the ways Typical American destabilizes assumptions of cultural loss and assimilation. Moreover, it will help to show that the process of hybridity at least for Ralph, Helen, and Theresa Chang, began long before coming to America. Hybridity enters the novel in the Bakhtinian double-voiced discourse of the protagonists. According to Bakhtin, In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. (345)

In this way, the dispersion of one’s consciousness and the formulation of hybrid identities are constructed not as diffusion and loss, but as the very seeds of “creativity and productiveness.” Hybridity is reformulated by Bakhtin as accumulation, as gain, as awakening. The negative assumptions of dispersion are thereby replaced with a positive formulation of growth and

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change; furthermore, as Bakhtin reduces this hybridic construction to the individual consciousness, the concept of hybridity is naturalized as a common, universal human process. In Typical American, Gish Jen represents identity formation in this Bakhtinian manner. The influence of the self-made man Grover Ding on Ralph Chang is one example. The first encounter between them shows Grover Ding’s language of self-actualization and positive thinking (or “imagineering”) being internalized by Ralph: “Keep your eyes open,” [Grover said]. “Eyes open,” [Ralph said]. “Keep your ears open.” “Ears open.” “Know who you’re dealing with.” “Know who I’m deal with.” (108)

Here we see a bicultural dialogue between Ralph’s current way of thinking, produced by his upbringing in China, and the thinking of the capitalist businessman, or, to borrow Li’s terms, between the “precapitalist mode of production, in which kinship relations play a major role, and . . . a capitalist mode of production, in which market relations dominate all forms of human exchange” (Imagining 104). In his conversation with Grover, Ralph internalizes the cultural logic of the capitalist businessman in a complex pattern typified by Bakhtin’s notion of the “internally dialogized hybrid” (361). On the simplest level, Ralph internalizes the foreign by mimicry and repetition. “Eyes open,” “Ears open”: these phrases repeat the essence of Grover’s sentences in Grover’s words. In the sentence, “Know who I’m deal with,” however, we witness a deeper form of hybridization. By shifting the personal pronoun from “you” to “I”, Ralph transposes the sense of Grover’s language onto his own consciousness. The meaning of Grover’s words is thereby occupied by Ralph’s consciousness and forced to become Ralph’s own. Finally, the alterity of Grover’s language is marked within Ralph’s own speech by its broken English. In a real sense, therefore, it is both his and not his. Bakhtin describes the “internally persuasive” ideological discourse of someone else as being of “decisive significance in the evolution of an individual consciousness: consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it” (345). It is thus the contact and struggle between these two languages, and their subsequent internal hybridization, which reveal the “evolution” of Ralph’s consciousness. Another example in Typical American is Helen’s hybridization of real estate jargon and her own language. As the Changs’ household income

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increases, the possibility of buying an American dream-home captures Helen’s imagination. Through the help of a Chinese realtor friend named Janice, Helen begins to immerse herself in the house-hunting scene: newspaper ads, open houses, drives through neighborhoods. Jen marks the foreignness of real estate language to Helen’s language by italicizing Chinese in her speech and leaving English words in regular font. Here Helen is speaking to her sister-in-law Theresa: “Today Janice took me to this house with a winding walkway. Really darling! However, it was very overpriced, they’re going to have trouble selling it for anything near what they’re asking. And yesterday I saw a breakfast nook with beautiful built-in benches” (152). As with Ralph’s internalization of capitalist business-speak, there are several dimensions to Helen’s hybridized language. For one, Helen is adopting not only real estate jargon (“winding walkway,” “breakfast nook,” “built-in benches”) which one would glean from advertisements, but also a language that connotes an attitude toward the property described. She may have adopted the use of “darling” and “beautiful” as descriptors of property from real estate advertisements, but the word “overpriced” must originate from a different source, one that is capable of making such a negative judgment. Most likely, this word belongs to her realtor friend Janice. Thus, both real estate jargon and the opinion of another toward possible purchases are hybridized within Helen’s language. Jen’s hybridic stylization of English and Chinese within Helen’s speech reveals graphically the coexistence of two seemingly incompatible languages within one language, one that we recognize as Helen’s native Chinese and the other as her adopted American English. Bakhtin argues that in “intentional semantic hybrids” such as this, “two points of view are not mixed, but set against each other dialogically” (360). Indeed, in the above segment, Helen’s native language is, like Ralph’s broken English and business jargon, set against real estate jargon. They are dialogic in the sense that each “unmasks,” to use Bakhtin’s terminology, the foreignness of the other. The result is parody, an “ironization” of each other, which is a clear source of humor in these segments but is also a vivid “image of a language” (361) in the process of hybridization. In Bakhtin’s summary to his discussion on discourse in the novel, he states: In a word, the novelistic plot serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds. What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system. There takes place within the novel an ideological translation of another’s language, and an overcoming of its otherness—an otherness that is only contingent, external, illusory. (365)

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Since the struggle between ideological structures reveals a process of “translation,” of “overcoming . . . otherness,” it may be said that the foreignness of business-speak and real estate-speak are unmasked by Helen’s Chinese and Ralph’s broken English. Clearly, then, the linguistic hybridity of Typical American reveals a deeper tension, a conflict that is ideological, moral, and aesthetic. The tension for the Changs is one of in-betweenness, of interstitiality. The mistake often made in reading this “clash of two cultures” is to assume that living in-between is predicated upon the stasis of the two extremes, that is, that Chinese culture and American culture are fixed and whole, and hybridity describes the melding of the two essences (Prashad, “Bruce Lee” 54). Typical American rightly complicates this view of cultural hybridity by revealing that the Changs’ process of hybridity began long before they came to America. Growing up wealthy in Shanghai, they were influenced by music, dress, lifestyle, and ideas in their everyday lives and in their education that can be deemed Western. This they sometimes forget as they recollect their past. For example, when Theresa remarks that in buying a car Ralph was becoming Americanized, Ralph responds, “What’s so American? We had a car, growing up. Don’t you remember?” (128, italics in original to denote Chinese speech). This is the problem with which Helen grapples when she considers the possibility of losing Theresa after the car accident: “She had considered the great divide of her self ’s time to be coming to America. . . . But she was mistaken. That was not the divide at all” (288). It is all too easy, when looking at the life of an immigrant, to assume that there is a great divide between the life in the old country and the life in the new. In fact, the ongoing re-conceptualizing of identity knows no such boundaries. The Changs’ lifestyle in Shanghai reveals another significant disruption of reader expectations. While one might expect culture to be this novel’s preoccupation, I would argue that social class is the greatest marker of difference. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s necessity versus extravagance thesis is again useful. Wong shows that the immigrant is conditioned by experience to be a creature of necessity (eating all types of food and all parts of animals; saving money to the point of miserliness), while the second generation is prone to extravagance (being more particular about food and preferring sweets; spending money on leisure and beauty). But Ralph, Theresa, and Helen all come from well-to-do families. In China, they owned a car, had servants, and enjoyed position in society by virtue of their family history. Helen is the most striking example because she was sickly as a child and was accustomed to being pampered. In America, she is forced to live on a small income and to learn to cook and take care of herself and Ralph (whom she married soon after immigrating). She even learns to fix

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a broken furnace in the basement of their dilapidated apartment building. The astounding monetary risks Ralph takes are likewise more related to his former and current social class than they are to essential differences in Chinese and American cultures. His determination to make money is less a mindless capitulation to American cultural norms than a desperate attempt to re-gain the social position he lost when fleeing China before the communist takeover. His motivation for making money is the realization that social standing in America depends on money. Nonetheless, it is tempting to fix Typical American in a bicultural formulation, one that pits the Changs’ “native Chinese mentality” against “typical American” ways in a nativist/assimilationist dichotomy. This perception seems justified in several aspects of the novel’s plot that suggest Ralph, Helen, and Theresa are sliding helplessly into the American way. For example, through the influence of Grover Ding, Ralph gives up his hard-fought-for tenured professorship in engineering to seek his fortune in the fried chicken business, the kind of risk he realizes he never would have considered in his old life. His quintessentially Chinese motto “make sure” slowly changes to “make money.” His aspirations of bringing honor to his family soon turn to greed. His aphorisms of virtue that top his list of resolves à la Jimmy Gatz drafted during his journey to America, are eventually supplanted by the “wha-ingg!” of the cash register and aphorisms gleaned from powerand-success books like “A man is only as big as his dream” (220) and “What you can conceive, you can achieve” (198). It appears, therefore, that Ralph is being “Americanized” in a negative sense—that all the greed and materialism of American capitalism are seducing a pure and innocent Chinese native. Ralph has, in Li’s phrase, “embraced possessive individualism in its most materialistic form” (Imagining 104), Ralph’s embrace of a materialist American dream, while coming upon him with the force of hypnosis and cultic devotion, is in fact a survivalist response to a new and threatening environment. Ralph comes to the realization that relationships (the important Chinese concept of guan xi) and who you are in society are not the pillars of social standing as they were in China; for a non-white in America it is money that determines position. “Money,” says the changed Ralph. “In this country, you have money, you can do anything. You have no money, you are nobody. You are Chinaman! Is that simple” (199). Even Theresa, who is critical of her brother’s cold capitalism, has to admit that “to be non-white in [American] society was indeed to need education, accomplishment—some source of dignity. A white person was by definition somebody” (200). Thus, Ralph’s “assimilation” is complicated by the presence of racism and the desire—the challenge—not simply to survive, but to overcome. As much as Ralph is blinded by his own greed, he is driven by the challenge to his own personhood presented by this new environment.

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Similarly, Theresa and Helen seem to be presented in the nativist/assimilationist dialectic as they fall prey to a different sort of seduction. First it comes to light that their fellow immigrant friend Old Chao is cheating on his wife. When Ralph tells Helen this, she exclaims, “impossible . . . Chinese people don’t do such things” (168). They learn later that the woman with whom Old Chao is having an affair is their very own Theresa. As if this is not enough to undermine her indignation, Helen herself later falls into a brief, but devastating, fling with Grover Ding. The assertion that “Chinese people don’t do such things” may seem to reinforce the notion of the seductive slide from Chinese innocence to American adulteration. Yet this would be so only if we believe Helen’s assertion. Not only does our critical suspicion of any definitive, totalizing construction of culture lead us to read the statement, “Chinese people don’t do such things,” with caution, but the fact that the four people involved in these extramarital affairs are Chinese suggests that the statement is highly ironic. In fact, Helen’s statement points to her own ignorance of what Chinese people actually do and serves to mask her own desire to be different than, and hence better than, the “typical American.” The nativist/assimilationist dialectic, into which the seductions of Ralph, Helen, and Theresa seem to fall, is most clearly frustrated by the novel’s conclusion. As the death of Theresa and of their own relationship looms before them, Ralph and Helen are confronted with the constructedness of their America: “Was death possible in this bright country? It was, they knew. Of course. And yet they began to realize that in the fiber of their beings they had almost believed it a thing they had left behind, like rickshaws” (286). In a final epiphany, to which I alluded at the beginning of this section, Ralph comes to see through his self-deception: “What escape was possible?” he thinks. It seemed to him at that moment . . . that a man was as doomed here as he was in China. Kan bu jian. Ting bu jian. He could not always see, could not always hear. He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America. (296)

What Ralph discovers in the end is that there is no typical America, nor, for that matter, is there a typical China. Both are products of imagination. In this, the irony of the novel’s title is exposed. Ultimately, Typical American is not about becoming typical Americans, but realizing that typical America does not exist. Ralph’s epiphany frustrates the expectation of assimilationist thinking: both the loss of one culture and the gain of another are confused by an uncertainty of any bottom-line definition of those cultures.

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Typical American is, of course, a novel about Chinese immigrants and their experience of adjustment to America. To suggest that the novel is not about Chinese culture and American culture and how a Chinese American makes sense of the two would be to ignore the basic premise of the book. However, what I have attempted to show through my reading of Typical American is that Chinese American identity is not, as is often readily assumed, a synthesis of two monolithic cultures, nor is it a total submission to one or another monolithic culture. Chinese American identity, as suggested in this novel, is a dynamic process of cultural hybridity that is ongoing and riddled with remembrance, invention, and imagination. In Jen’s second novel the individualization of identity formation reaches a fuller articulation, as is discussed in what follows.

Cu lt ur a l Hy br i di t y in M o n a i n t h e P r o m i s e d L a n d “Dispersion leads in turn to accumulation.” This quote from the I Ching: The Book of Changes, one of four epigraphs on cultural change at the beginning of Gish Jen’s second novel, displaces the connotation of dispersion leading to dissolution or loss and reinvests it with a positive connotation of gain, as signified by the word “accumulation.” Applied to global migration and diasporic peoples, this inverted view of dispersion shifts the critical focus from cultural loss and assimilation to a process of supplement. This paradigm shift parallels the critical transformations witnessed in recent years in Asian American cultural scholarship, as well as in the wider field of Cultural Studies. . . . It is here, at what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has described as “a theoretical crossroads” (“Denationalization”), that Mona in the Promised Land is significantly situated not only within the growing body of Chinese American literature, but in American literature. As the I Ching quote suggests, Mona in the Promised Land is about the process of transformation. This may not be surprising, since readers generally perceive Chinese American works as primarily concerned with the transformative tensions and conflicts of assimilation. However, the transformations of Promised Land depart from these expectations in a variety of ways which challenge and subvert common perceptions of ethnic and American identities, since Jen problematizes the notion of assimilation through a vision of cultural hybridity which valorizes change, choice, and cross-ethnic creolization in the culturally turbulent 1960s. Mona, whose surname Chang is one letter shy of the word change, becomes the prototypical subject of hybridity in Mona in the Promised Land when she converts to Judaism and becomes known among her temple-friends as “Changowitz.” As with the Bakhtinian model established in Jen’s first novel, Mona’s hybridized consciousness is marked by speech; often Jewish words and Yiddish grammar are allowed to seep into the narrative voice as it closely

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parallels Mona’s consciousness: “A lot she knows already. All about the holidays, for example, and what is a mitzvah—namely a good deed. Also what is rachmones, namely a type of mercy” (35). The reversal of object before subject in the first sentence, “A lot she knows already” rather than “She knows a lot already,” as well as the displacement of the idiomatic American grammatical construction “what a mitzvah is” rather than the Yiddish “what is a mitzvah,” expose a hybridized discourse: coexistent within Mona’s internal monologue is a dialogic encounter between American and Jewish languages or ideologies. The recognition that this dialogic hybridization is taking place in a Chinese American reminds us that three cultural vantage points are intersecting here ( Jewish, Chinese, and American), producing what may be described as a multicultural hybridity (or, when we consider that these three are not monolithic cultures in themselves, we might define them as polycultural). This sort of hybridity, as witnessed earlier in our discussion of Typical American’s hybridized speech, is the fundamental producer of individual consciousness. According to Bakhtin, the hybridized, “internally persuasive word” in our everyday consciousness is the impetus for the awakening of “new and independent words” (345). Viewed in this way, the dispersion of Mona’s consciousness and the formulation of hybrid identities are constructed not as diffusion and loss, but as the springboard of creativity and productiveness. Although the result of hybridity in both novels is similar (the formation of independent consciousness), the differences between their bicultural and polycultural formations are worth exploring. The bicultural linguistic hybridity of Typical American is highly contentious and confrontative. As discussed previously, the languages of Ralph and Helen, characterized by the naïvete of their cultural assumptions, both unmask and ironize the foreign languages they encounter, while they, in turn, are unmasked and ironized by those foreign languages. The confrontation of these languages results in a mutual parodization that is never overcome in the novel. In contrast, the linguistic hybridity of Promised Land is polycultural, a term that I will explore more fully in the conclusion. This polycultural hybridity de-centers the expected clash of Chinese and American culture by introducing not just Judaism as an identity-shaper, but myriad influences: religion, philosophy, circumstance, Japan, African Americans, puberty, popularity, and the social and political climate of the 1960s play significant roles in the novel and create an arena of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. In Promised Land, linguistic hybridity is not constructed as antagonistic but as accommodating and inclusive. The most striking example of this is Ralph’s phrase in the epilogue, “Some things just be’s that way” (301). In the hybridization of the black idiom and grammar with Ralph’s language, a phrase which is attributed to his black manager, Moses, Ralph’s acceptance of black people as worthy of responsible positions in his restaurant is reinforced.

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The hybridity of Ralph’s statement reflects the genuineness of his attitudinal change. Therefore, as with Mona’s acceptance of Jewishness into her own way of thinking, hybrid speech becomes an emblem of inclusion and dialogic cohabitation rather than conflict, parody, and irony. Within the heteroglossia of Promised Land, the myriad transmutations and hybridizations of Chinese Americans and non-Chinese Americans alike serve to displace the primacy of Chinese American identity in the novel, refocusing instead on the subject of American identity. In Mona’s case, becoming American means the possibility of becoming Jewish (though, as I will show below, she assumes this position prior to real experience of U.S. racial hierarchies). For her sister Callie, becoming American means the possibility of becoming more Chinese than their parents ever were: she learns standard Mandarin, practices qi gong, wears peasant jackets and cloth slippers, cooks “authentic” Chinese dishes in “authentic” ways (unlike their mother Helen who prepares Peking duck by soaking the bird overnight in Pepsi Cola). For Aunt Theresa, who immigrated to America with Mona’s parents and put herself through medical school, becoming American means the possibility of becoming a hippie: she lives in California where she “strolls around on the beach with Uncle Henry all day—rumor has it, in a two-piece bathing suit and sometimes less, and without having gotten married, either” (28), and her attire is directly described as “hippie” (242). Mona’s boyfriend, Seth, describes himself as an “authentic inauthentic Jew . . . in the process of becoming an inauthentic inauthentic Jew” (112); he lives in a teepee in his backyard, tries to turn black and then Japanese, and eventually marries Mona and turns Chinese. Barbara Gugelstein is a practicing Jew who undergoes a nose job to alter her Jewish looks because her mother wants the family to identify less with other Jews. Alfred, the black cook at the Changs’ pancake house, fosters a mistrust of white people and ridicules Jews, but in the end he marries Barbara Gugelstein’s cousin Evie and changes from a self-absorbed victim to a dedicated social activist. What characterizes Americanness in the novel is not what one becomes, but the very act of becoming. In other words, “becoming,” the novel suggests, is the hallmark of being American. Each self in the heteroglossia of Gish Jen’s America is, to borrow Alberto Melucci’s description quoted earlier, “more of a field than an essence . . . a dynamic system defined by recognizable opportunities and constraints” (64). However, Jen does not offer this view in a simplistic vacuum, sealed off from the racialized forces of society at large. In her youthful emphasis on the “opportunities” rather than the “constraints,” Mona presents this simplistic definition: “American means being whatever you want” (49). But the events of the novel, primarily the breakup of Camp Gugelstein, reveal Mona’s hopeful statement about America to be nothing short of naive. What Mona has not learned at this point, but will later learn

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through her friendship with Alfred, is how persistent and pervasive racialized categories are in American society. In their description of the dynamics that allow this continued insistence on race and racial hierarchy in the U.S., Omi and Winant make a distinction between micro-level social relations and macro-level social relations. At the micro-level “race is a matter of individuality, or the formation of identity,” whereas at the macro-level “race is a matter of collectivity, of the formation of social structures: economic, political and cultural/ideological” (66–67). In Omi and Winant’s view, “the racial order is organized and enforced by the continuity and reciprocity between these two ‘levels’ of social relations” (67). Mona’s concept that “American means being whatever you want” is naive because it assumes micro-level social relations trump macro-level social relations. It assumes, in other words, that individual identity formation is selfdetermined and works independently from the rest of society. Mona’s childish philosophy is the “American dream” in its most uncritical and unrealistic manifestation. However, Mona does learn her lesson. Her attempts to help Alfred, while hiding her actions from adults and neighbors, reveal her budding awareness that promoting color-blind social relations puts one at odds with the rest of society. Her visit to the Rhode Island resort where her sister is working for the summer opens her eyes to her own place as a Chinese American in the social hierarchy of the United States. Most significantly, the break up of the color-blind experiment called “Camp Gugelstein” shakes her world to the core and teaches her that a trite statement like “American means being whatever you want” is no match for the ubiquity of racialized thinking in the United States. The novel does show, however, that while Mona’s early formulation of the American dream is unrealistic and impotent, her continued belief in the power of individual choice and the ideal of racial equality allows her in the end to come to a more mature and viable expression of this idea.

Cross-Et hn ic Cr e ol i z at ion: Ca mp G uge l s t e in Jen most distinctly renders a multi- or poly-cultural hybridity in the “Camp Gugelstein” segment of the novel. Mona and her Jewish American friends Seth Mandel and Barbara Gugelstein decide to promote minority solidarity by inviting Alfred, the African American cook at the Changs’ pancake house, to stay in Barbara’s home, which she and her cousin Evie occupy alone while Barbara’s parents are away for the summer. Afraid that Evie will inform Barbara’s parents that she is harboring a black man in their house, Barbara, Mona, and Seth arrange for Alfred to sneak into the house via a tunnel to the basement (dubbed “the underground railway”) and to take up a quiet residence in the empty servant’s quarters.

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The irony of their brand of social action is soon exposed. The three friends are willing to act on behalf of another minority to the point of inconvenience, but not to the point of endangering their own privileged position. Their inability to show Alfred hospitality as an equal exposes a serious impediment to panethnic alliances: while Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, and African Americans may share a common position as minorities in a hegemonic political and social environment, their minority status is not equally conceived. Alfred even goes to the extent of lumping Mona, Seth, and Barbara together under the signifier “white” (and “Christian,” taking into account the reference below to Christmas rather than Hanukkah). He says to them, You white folk look at the calendar, and at the end of the year comes Christmastime, and at the beginning of the year comes a whole new year, maybe the year you pack your white ass off to college, maybe the year you go off traveling somewhere nice. Me, I look at that calendar, and at the end of the year there’s flapjacks, and at the beginning of the year there’s flapjacks, and when I die, man, they’re going to cover me with flapjacks, and put the butter and the syrup on top. (154)

Thus, from Alfred’s perspective, Jewish and Chinese Americans may be much closer to the white majority position than blacks. Alfred defines their “whiteness” according to their social position and economic empowerment, not merely by the color of their skin. “Whiteness,” as Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts in her book, Performing Whiteness, “does not exist at the biological level. It is a cultural construct” (2). The culturally constructed line drawn between Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans is, from Alfred’s perspective, completely erased. This perception is reinforced in the novel by the apparent ease with which Mona is able to identify with Jewish Americans in contrast to her perception that one cannot become black (118). The point of Promised Land—its central joke—is that Mona becomes Jewish. She does not simply identify with Jews or recognize similarities—she switches, converts, turns. In terms of the physical or blood heritage associated with race, Mona’s switch would be an impossibility, as Alfred has in mind when he denies Mona’s Jewishness on account of her not “growing” a nose (137). In contrast, Mona insists to her parents that she can become Jewish because it is a religion, but she and her family cannot become black because it is a race. This seems to confuse physical and cultural constructs of both Jewishness and blackness: Mona sees Jewishness only as a belief, while blackness is determined by physical features and skin color. One wonders, therefore, whether within Mona’s logic is an aesthetic preference for Jewishness over blackness. Perhaps what makes Mona’s conversion acceptable, to her and

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eventually to her parents, is the perception that she is moving forward, from what in the 1960s was not yet considered a “model minority” to what was at least considered a “better” minority, a move which brings her one step closer to whiteness. This problematic, which is implicit in Mona’s characterization, is explicit in the character of Helen, Mona’s mother. Helen fears turning black, by which she means being perceived as socially and economically on par with blacks. When an African American social activist asks her to sign a petition on creating a subsidized family-planning clinic, Helen is insulted at the woman’s implication that Chinese Americans would be united with African Americans in what the woman calls a “common cause.” “We live in Scarshill,” says Helen. “You should see our tax bracket” (119). Helen clearly perceives the racial category “black” as a social and economic position and believes her social status to be markedly higher than that of blacks because of her own economic position. “We are not Negroes,” she says to Mona. “You hear me? Why should we work so hard—so people can talk to us about birth control for free” (119). In relation to this issue as a barrier to cross-ethnic solidarity, Vijay Prashad asks, “since blackness is reviled in the United States, why would an immigrant, of whatever skin color, want to associate with those who are racially oppressed, particularly when the transit into the United States promises the dream of gold and glory?” Prashad goes on to explain, the immigrant seeks a form of vertical assimilation, to climb from the lowest, darkest echelon on the stepladder of tyranny into the bright whiteness. In U.S. history the Irish, Italians, Jews, and—in small steps with some hesitations on the part of white America— Asians and Latinos have all tried to barter their varied cultural worlds for the privileges of whiteness. (Everybody x)

Despite sharing with African Americans a politically minor position in society, Mona and her friends—mainly because they do not comprehend Alfred’s experience of being “reviled”—are unable to breach the line drawn between them and Alfred. Instead, the line is breached for them: returning to Barbara Gugelstein’s house one day, they find Alfred and his African American friends partying in the living room with Evie sitting on Alfred’s lap. This marks the birth of Camp Gugelstein, an experiment in cross-ethnic integration and solidarity. Every evening for the rest of the summer, Luther the Race Man, Big Benson, Ray, Professor Estimator, Alfred and Evie, and Seth, Barbara, and Mona hang out together at the Gugelstein mansion. They smoke dope, drink, talk, dance, practice yoga, sit cross-legged in a circle, and rap heart-to-heart. They listen to Soul Train, dance the funky chicken and play mah-jongg, chess, and

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Chinese checkers. Camp Gugelstein becomes for each of them a symbol of interracial communication and alliance. In Professor Estimator’s opinion, “Agape, meaning love of all humanity . . . redemptive love is still alive here, at Camp Gugelstein, but he thinks elsewhere it is on the wane” (201). The culture of agape in Camp Gugelstein allows the participants to engage in a dialogic interplay of various social languages and ideologies: these include Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberation theology, Malcolm X’s black power, materialism, humanism and free will, Protestantism, Judaism, integration versus Jim Crow separatism, and transcendental meditation. From this multiplicity is born a rich polycultural hybridity where difference is embraced and the common bond of humanity is extolled. This is represented in Mona’s experience while touching hands during yoga: “There are warm palms and cool palms, firm grips, loose; and attached to them such an amazing array of humanity” (202). Hybridity in this episode is not merely emotional or ideological; Jen’s description of the African Americans as ranging in skin color from “gingerbread” and “cream” to “papaya” and “the color of old iron” (197–98) suggests a complex biological hybridization which is altogether ignored in the term “black.” “Black” is thus revealed as an inaccurate description of physical difference, and shown, rather, to be a signifier of difference in racialized constructions that refuse hybridity. Alfred says to Mona, “White is white, man. Everything else is black. Half and half is black” (155). In the context of their discussion, Alfred is clearly not expressing solidarity with Chinese Americans; rather, he is articulating the way racist constructions of race tend to homogenize what is actually diverse. Similarly, the “paper-bag” color of another African American character is explained in this way: “if she were a cabinet door or a shade of hair dye, people would have a name for her exact shade. But as she is only a person, she is called black” (170). Again, the description of difference is not a physical reality but an ideological construction, a way of conceptualizing the foreign in a way that marks and retains its alterity. The fact that the various shades of color represented in these characters is the result of biological hybridizations that include white blood is ignored by the generic term “black.” On the other hand, the same label that the majority uses as a distancing mechanism can become the marker of solidarity for the minority group. Stuart Hall makes this observation in relation to the term “black.” In the 1960s, says Hall, “black” was divested of its racist connotations when black people, regardless of color shade and national origin, adopted it as a unifying description that defined their community. The term “black” as a signifier of solidarity and community is what connects Alfred and his African American friends despite their various skin colors, class backgrounds, opinions, and education levels. Thus, while on the one hand “black” is an unfair homogenization of

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a diverse community, it is paradoxically the same term that unifies African Americans and provides the basis for political and social action. In fact, it is in this ethnic and racial unification that multiculturalism came under attack in the 1990s. While racial tension exposed by such events as the O. J. Simpson trial and the Rodney King beating (and more recently by Hurricane Katrina) reveals that there is a great need for increased interracial and interethnic communication in American society today, multiculturalism, its critics assert, seems to be dividing and reifying ethnic groups into privatized, parochial enclaves. The demise of Camp Gugelstein can be seen as reinforcing this criticism, but the moral vision of the novel does not end with the failure of Camp Gugelstein. Camp Gugelstein, the utopian, “house with no walls” experiment (208), splinters and dissolves as quickly as it had formed. When Barbara finds an expensive flask missing, she, Mona, and Seth question their guests, and the three accusers are then accused of racism. In an expression of black solidarity, all the African Americans, including Alfred, leave in outrage. The lines between ethnic groups, which seemed to have disappeared under the Camp Gugelstein banner, reappear with a vengeance. The failure of Camp Gugelstein illustrates the precariousness of panethnic efforts and the tenacity of racist attitudes. The assumption behind Mona, Barbara, and Seth’s accusation is racist: in the face of a crime, it is the black man who is immediately suspected of committing it. However, while clearly exposing the latent racism beneath Camp Gugelstein’s veneer, the novel is strangely silent about the expression of black solidarity and the role it plays in the closure of dialogue. Mona, Seth, and Barbara express an acute sense of angst and guilt over their actions, but they never question whether the black walkout was justifiable. They assume, apparently, that their own expression of racism, unintended as it was, provided a sufficient defense for the black group’s reaction. In this, Promised Land may be seen as excusing a gross overreaction by the black members of Camp Gugelstein and placing the blame on the three non-black members who were, despite flaws, acting as “allies” in the black struggle for liberation. Black separatism is thus exonerated and white guilt preserved. This patronizing representation of the black man as a simple “victim” widens the gap between the black and non-black characters, thereby reinforcing Alfred’s view that Mona, Seth, and Barbara are white in comparison to blacks. To extend this reading, we could argue that Camp Gugelstein, the utopian ideal, may be less a literary experiment in panethnicity, than a fantasy for a market motivated by the dynamics of white guilt. Nevertheless, viewed from the notion of cultural hybridity, the panethnic vision of Camp Gugelstein is not entirely lost. In fact, we might see it as the impetus for the deeper transformations in the lives of its participants. As discussed previously, Omi and Winant argue that the “racial order is orga-

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nized and enforced by the continuity and reciprocity between” the micro-level and macro-level social relations. But the micro-level experiments of individual identity formation in Camp Gugelstein eventually work to challenge and subvert the macro-level social relations signified by racial relations in Ralph’s restaurant and the underlying social pressures that force Mona, Seth, and Barbara to hide Alfred in the Gugelstein home. Applying Omi and Winant’s argument, and using the terminology they borrow from Gramsci, we might consider the Camp Gugelstein gathering a “war of maneuver,” which describes “a situation in which subordinate groups seek to preserve and extend a definite territory, to ward off violent assault, and to develop an internal society as an alternative to the repressive social system they confront” (74). The breakup of Camp Gugelstein forces the members of the group who are truly committed to the cause into a direct political struggle with the racialized hierarchies of society, an oppositional program Gramsci calls a “war of position.” The contact between these individuals of different ethnic backgrounds was not, the novel attests, without its impact. For Mona and Seth the breakup of Camp Gugelstein marks a coming of age in their own development, one that ultimately makes them more dedicated to the cause of interracial dialogue and social action (see 207, for example). Moreover, when they visit Alfred to apologize for the flask incident, there is a real sense of solidarity and friendship between them, a feeling of healing and restoration that suggests barriers have indeed been broken down (290–92). This sense of growth and change is confirmed in the reuniting of Alfred and Evie, who eventually marry and have three babies—hybrids in the flesh—and become staunch activists for social change, “Mr. and Mrs. Community Organization” (297).

Cu lt ur a l Hy br i di t y : Mona’s Choice Camp Gugelstein’s panethnic interaction and its resultant cultural hybridity reflect a significant new emphasis in Chinese American literature. The cultural hybridity of Promised Land subverts the literary Chinatown by displacing notions of ethnic essence and cultural stasis. The novel suggests that Chinese American ethnicity is not forged through the clash of two monolithic cultures, but, as Bakhtin theorizes regarding all consciousness, is continually evolving in a heteroglot multiplicity of social voices and their interrelationships. Furthermore, Promised Land significantly de-privatizes the Chinese American novel by re-viewing American identity, not just one ethnic group’s identity, as an individualized process characterized by the “internal variation” of hybridity (Wicker 37). This, I suggest, moves beyond “claiming America” to an important process of “transforming America.” Gish Jen’s goal is, in her words, to push “the limits and expand . . . the notion of America’s view of itself . . . to create a new notion of what it means

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to be American” (qtd. in Snell 58–59). But Promised Land ’s “new notion” of America, if we are to accept my reading of cultural hybridity’s triumph over separatism, does in fact present serious problems for multiculturalists. Although we might see the failure of Camp Gugelstein as the necessary impetus for a “war of position,” we should also note that the “positions” taken in the post–Camp Gugelstein phase are almost entirely individual positions. The group that comprised Camp Gugelstein never reunites. One difficulty here is that an articulation of cultural identity as amorphous and fluid is a weak foundation for group solidarity. In the political realities of representational government, a system that necessitates a unified articulation of need, hybrid, fluid, and individualized identities seem powerless and pointless. Indeed, the epilogue to Promised Land, which describes the radically different identities achieved by various characters, seems doomed to fail in precisely this area. The only characteristic that unites the disparate identities at the end of the novel is the experience of transformation itself. How, one might rightly ask, can economically disadvantaged individuals and oppressed groups make themselves heard as political constituents when all that unites them is an experience of fluidity and change? The political sterility of the cultural hybridity model inferred in these objections lies in cultural hybridity’s inability as a postmodern theory to accommodate cultural objectification. According to some articulations of postmodernism, all forms of essentialization are to be questioned and condemned. In a kind of twisted logic, as Pnina Werbner explains, “citizenship rights and multiculturalist agendas are as much dependent on collective objectification as are racist murders and ethnic cleansing.” However, she continues, “it is critical to establish clearly the difference between modes of objectification and modes of reification” (229). “Reification is representation which distorts and silences” in order to manipulate those of another racial or ethnic community. The violence enacted upon that community is situated fundamentally in the power to name, to define, to essentialize from a position outside that group. Thus, the assumption that a black man stole the flask in Camp Gugelstein stems from a racialized, essentialist definition—a reification—of blacks. However, the kind of essentializing Werbner points to, and what E. San Juan Jr. in a similar context calls “a positional articulation of identity and difference” (150), is an “objectification” that is rightfully performed by a person of ethnicity as a means of social and political identification, as, for example, in the term “black” discussed above—and, significantly, in the naming of the short-lived panethnic community “Camp Gugelstein.” “In their performative rhetoric,” Werbner says, people of ethnicity “essentialize their imagined communities in order to mobilise for action. . . . In this regard, the politics of ethnicity are a positive politics: they serve to construct moral and aesthetic communities imaginatively” (230). The difference here is that the objectifica-

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tion of the ethnic community is established by the power to name itself rather than the powerlessness necessary to being named. I agree with Werbner’s argument, but I would also argue that internal objectification introduces its own difficulties. Indeed, my critique of Camp Gugelstein’s breakup implies that a group’s freedom in defining itself does not guarantee racial harmony and fairness. The African American group’s objectification of itself in the breakup of Camp Gugelstein did not happen in a vacuum but performed a kind of violence on the community which all of them—African American, Jewish American, and Chinese American—were trying to build. Thus, in an adjustment to Werbner’s thesis, I would suggest that within the right of an ethnic community to name and define itself is a responsibility to anticipate and preserve alliances with other communities. In Promised Land, it is the panethnic interaction and its resultant cultural hybridity produced through the Camp Gugelstein experience, not Camp Gugelstein itself, that provide a provocative re-visioning of race and ethnicity. The linkages forged between these otherwise distinct cultural groups is an example of what Vijay Prashad calls polyculturalism. As with hybridity theory, polyculturalism questions our culture’s insistent belief in primordial, static, and pure cultures, but it furthermore seeks to actively engage oppressed peoples and white “allies” in actively forging antiracist communities. Although it falls short of a true “war of position,” Camp Gugelstein’s radical and active cultural hybridity—its polycultural experiment—emerges as a “new notion of America,” and Mona might be seen as its poster girl. In the final pages of the novel, Mona discusses with Aunt Theresa the possibility of changing her name when she marries Seth Mandel: “To Mandel?” says Theresa, surprised. “No more women’s lib?” “No, no. To Changowitz,” says Mona. “I was thinking that Seth would change his name too.” (303)

In choosing the name Changowitz, Mona asserts the power to name herself, to define who she is, a name that was established early in the novel as a marker of hybridity. In suggesting that Seth change his name as well, Mona is establishing a community signified by the hybrid name Changowitz. In other words, by the end of the novel, Mona chooses polyculturalism.

Chronology

1887

When I Was a Boy in China, autobiography by Lee Yan Phou.

1897

Buddha, a Drama in Twelve Scenes, by Sadakichi Hartmann.

1901

A Japanese Nightingale, novel by Onoto Watanna.

1907

The Diary of Delia, novel by Onoto Watanna

1909

My Life in China and America, by Yung Wing.

1910

Tama, novel by Onoto Watanna.

1912

Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far.

1915

Me, A Book of Remembrance, by Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton.

1923

Tanka: Poems in Exile, by Jun Fujita.

1925

A Daughter of the Samurai, by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto.

1926

The Bandit Prince, novel by Sessue Kintaro Hayakawa.

1927

Passport to Immortality, essays by Sadakichi Hartmann.

1929

The Hanging on Union Square, novel by H.T. Tsiang.

1930

Hidden Flame, poems by Bunichi Kagawa.

1931

The Grass Roof, novel by Younghill Kang.

193

194

Chronology

1937

And China Has Hands, by H.T. Tsiang.



East Goes West, by Younghill Kang.

1937–55

College Plays, by Ling-Ai Li, Wai Chee Chun, and Charlotte Lum.

1942

Chorus for America, poems by Carlos Bulosan.

1942–45

Various poems in Trek, by Toyo Suyemoto.

1943

Fathers and Glorious Descendant, biography by Pardee Lowe.



The Voice of Bataan, poems by Carlos Bulosan.



“The Travelers,” by Toshio Mori.

1944

The Laughter of My Father, stories by Carlos Bulosan.

1945

Fifth Chinese Daughter, by Jade Snow Wong.

1946

America Is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan.

1947

“Unfinished Message,” by Toshio Mori.

1949

Yokohama, California, by Toshio Mori.



Poems, by Jose Garcia Villa.

1953

Nisei Daughter, by Monica Itoi Sone.

1954

Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories, by N.V.M. Gonzalez.



September Monkey, novel by Induk Pahk.

1955

The Diplomat and Other Poems, by Dominador I. Ilio.



You Lovely People, stories by Bienvenido Santos.

1956

A Season of Grace: a Novel, by N.V.M. Gonzalez

1957

No-No Boy, by John Okada.



The Full Circle, novel by Yoshiko Uchida.



Flower Dream Song, novel by Chin Yang Lee.

1958

La Via: A Spiritual Journey, poems by Ricaredo Demetillo.



“Bread of Salt,” by N.V.M. Gonzalez.

1959

All I Asking For Is My Body, novel by Milton Murayama.



The Flaming Lyre, poems by Amador T. Daguio.

Chronology

195



The Bamboo Dancers: a Novel, by N.V.M. Gonzalez.



Moons of Korea, novel by Kim Yong Ik.



“The Long Journey and the Short Ride,” by Toshio Mori.

1960

Love Songs and Other Poems, by Oscar de Zuniga.



Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile, by Carlos Bulosan.

1961

Eat a Bowl of Tea, novel by Louis Chu.

1962

The Arid Year, poems by Oscar de Zuniga.

1963

A Stun of Jewels, poems by Carlos A. Angeles.



The House That Tai Ming Built, novel by Virginia Lee.

1964

The Peninsulars, novel by Linda Ty-Casper.



The Martyred, by Richard E. Kim.

1965

The Volcano and Villa Magdalena, novels by Bienvenido N. Santos.



Lucky Come Hawaii, novel by Jon Shirota.

1966

Takao and Grandfather’s Sword, juvenile fiction by Yoshiko Uchida.

1967

The Day the Dancers Came: Selected Prose Works, by Bienvenido N. Santos.

1968

Crossings, novel by Chuang Hua.



The Innocent, by Richard E. Kim.

1970

Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, by Buwei Yang Chao.



Last Names, novel by Richard Kim.

1971

The Shoes from Yang San Valley, novel by Kim Yong Ik.



Journey to Topaz, biography by Yoshiko Uchida.

1972

Pineapple White, novel by Jon Shirota.

1973

Farewell to Manzanar, novel by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston.



Bataan Harvest: War Poems, by Amador T. Daguilo.



We Do Not Work Alone: The Thoughts of Kanjiro Kawai, biography by Yoshiko Uchida.

196

Chronology

1974

Eye to Eye, stories by Diana Chang.



Chickencoop Chinaman, play by Frank Chin.



A Choice of Dreams, poems by Joy Kogawa.

1975

Dragonwings, novel by Laurence Yep.



Dangerous Music, poems by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn.



The Sandalwood Mountains: Readings and Stories of the Early Chinese in Hawaii, by Tin-Yuke Char.

1976

Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada.



The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, biography by Maxine Hong Kingston.

1977

Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park: Poems, by Nellie Wong.



Jericho Road, novel by Joy Kogawa.

1978

Women From Hiroshima, novel by Toshio Mori.



The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99: Poetry, by Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, and Lawson Fusao Inada.



The Philippines Is in the Heart: A Collection of Stories, by Carlos Bulosan.

1979

His Native Coast, A Novel, by Edith L.Tiempo,



Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories, by Bienvenido N. Santos.



The Three-Cornered Sun, novel by Linda Ty-Casper.

1980

China Men, biography by Maxine Hong Kingston.

1981

Obasan, novel by Joy Kogawa.

1982

Dictee, novel by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.



The Horizon is Definitely Speaking, poems by Diana Chang.



Yellow Light, poems by Garrett Hongo.



Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family, personal narrative by Yoshiko Uchida.



The Praying Man, novel by Bienvenido N. Santo.

1983

Blue Dragon, White Tiger: A Tet Story, novel by Tran Van Dinh.



Corpse and Mirror, poems by John Yau.



Distance in Time, novel by Bienvenido N. Santos.

Chronology

197



Picture Bride, poems by Cathy Song.

1984

Memories of Our Paik Family’s Life in the New World, biography by Mary Paik Lee.



Barter in Panay: An Epic, by Ricaredo Demetillo.



The Wedding Shoes, novel by Kim Yong Ik.



Death of Long Steam Lady, poems by Nellie Wong.

1985

Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life, by Hisaye Yamamoto.

1986

Wings of Stone, novel by Linda Ty-Casper.



Clay Walls, by Ronyoung Kim.

1987

Dwarf Bamboo, poems by Marilyn Chin.



Picture Bride, novel by Yoshiko Uchida.



What the Hell For You Left Your Heart in San Francisco, novel by Bienvenido N.Santos.



Ten Thousand Seeds, novel by Linda Ty-Casper.

1988

Chickencoop Chinaman/The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays, by Frank Chin.



State of War, novel by Ninotchka Rosca.



Balikbayan: A Filipino Homecoming, stories by Michele Cruz Skinner.



Woman With Horns Manguerra-Brainard.



Nostalgia, poems by Genny Lim.



Desert Run: Poems and Other Stories, by Mitsuye Yamada.

1989

Sushi and Sourdough, novel by Tooru J. Kanazawa.



When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, novel by Le Ly Hayslip.



Fallen Leaves, novel by Nguyen Thi-Lam.



The Joy Luck Club, novel by Amy Tan.



Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, novel by Maxine Hong Kingston.

1990

The City in Which I Love You, poems by Li-Young Lee.

and

Other

Stories,

by

Cecelia

198

Chronology



Dogeaters, novel by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn.



Power of Money and Other Stories, by Carlos Bulosan.



Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, biography by Mary Paik Lee.

1991

“Talking to the Dead,” short story by Sylvia A. Watanabe.



Cebu, stories by Peter Bacho.



Now You Are Still, and Other Poems, by Carlos Bulosan



Paper Angels and Bitter Cane: Two Plays, by Genny Lim.



The Invisible Thread, autobiography by Yoshiko Uchida.



The Kitchen God’s Wife, novel by Amy Tan.

1992

The Alien Corn, novel by Edith L. Tiempo.

1993

Shizuko’s Daughter, novel by Kyoko Mori.



Guerrilla Memoirs, novel by Dominador I. Ilio.



A Bruise of Ashes: Collected Poems, 1940–1992, by Carlos A. Angeles.



The Bread of Salt and Other Stories, by N.V.M. Gonzalez.



The Frontiers of Love: a Novel, by Diana Chang.

1994

Visions of a Daughter, Foretold: Four Poems (1980–1993), by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn.



Five Years on a Rock, novel by Milton Murayama.



Postscript to a Saintly Life, autobiography by Bienvenido N. Santos.

1995

Transient: Stories 1977–1994, by Connie Jan Maraan.



One, Tilting Leaves: a Novel, by Edith L. Tiempo.



The Dream of Water and One Bird, novels by Kyoko Mori.



Native Speaker, novel by Chang-rae Lee.



The Hundred Secret Senses, novel by Amy Tan.



The Cry and the Dedication, by Carlos Bulosan (written 1955).

1996

The Fruit ’n Food, novel by Leonard Chang.



Memories of My Ghost Brother, novel by Heinz Insu Fenkl.

Chronology

199



The Gangster of Love, novel by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn.



Wild Meat and the Billy Burgers, novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

1997

Monkey Bridge: A Novel, novel by Lan Cao.



Drawing the Line: Poems, by Lawson Fusao Inada.



Comfort Woman, novel by Nora Okja Keller.



Stolen Moments, poems by Nellie Wong.



Blu’s Hanging, novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

1998

Dispatches from the Cold, novel by Leonard Chang.



The Foreign Student, novel by Susan Choi.



All I Asking for is My Body, novel by Milton Murayama.



Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, poetry anthology edited by



Barbara Tran, Monique T.D. Truong and Luu Truong Khoi.

1999

A Gesture Life, novel by Chang-rae Lee.



Heads by Harry, novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.



Interpreter of Maladies, stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.

2000

Secret Asian Man, poems by Nick Carbo.



Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, poems by Eugene Gloria.



Dress Like a Boy, novel by Quentin Lee.

The Brothers Murata, by Toshio Mori (written in 1944).



Name Me Nobody, novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.



Over the Shoulder: A Novel of Intrigue, novel by Leonard Chang.



Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, by Luis H. Fancia.



The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood, by Kien Nguyen.



Fixer Chao, novel by Han Ong.



Colors of the Mountain, novel by Da Chen.



An American Sin, novel by Frederick Su.

2002

Fox Girl, novel by Nora Keller.

200

Chronology



Father of the Four Passages, novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

2003

American Woman, novel by Susan Choi.



The Namesake, novel by Jhumpa Lahiri.



The Opposite of Fate, essays by Amy Tan.



The Book of Salt, novel by Monique Truong.

2004

Aloft, novel by Chang-rae Lee.



World Famous Love Acts, novel by Brian Leung.



The Disinherited, novel by Han Ong.

2005

A Long Stay in a Distant Land, novel by Chieh Chieng.



Saving Fish from Drowning, novel by Amy Tan.

2006

Behold the Many, novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

2007

The Brothers, novel by Da Chen.

2008

Unaccustomed Earth, stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.



The Boat, stories by Nam Le.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. KETU H. KATRAK is a professor and director of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine. She was co-editor of a special issue of The Massachusetts Review—“Desh-Videsh: South Asian Expatriate Writing and Art.” Her essays have appeared in critical collections, in Modern Fiction Studies and College Literature. STEPHEN H. SUMIDA is associated with bringing the cultural and literary achievements of Hawaii to widespread attention. He is the author of And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i (1991) and co-author of Asian American Literature of Hawaii: An Annotated Bibliography (1979). 201

202

Contributors

E.D. HUNTLEY is professor of English and associate dean of graduate studies at Appalachian State University. She is also interested in Native American drama. AMY LING is a Beijing native who came to the United States at age six. She has taught literature and writing in Taiwan and several places in the United States. VIET THANH NGUYEN is a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. In 2002 he published Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. MICHELE JANETTE specializes in Vietnamese American literature and film. She teaches English at Kansas State University. ELEANOR TY is professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She has written essays about Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, and Miss Saigon. In 2003 she published The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. DONALD C. GOELLNICHT is professor of English and chairman of the English department at McMaster University. He has written articles on Asian American literature, culture, and theory; on the origins of Asian Canadian literature; and on writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee, and Fae Myenne Ng. He is the author of The Poet Physician: Keats and Medical Science (1984). CHENG LOK CHUA is a native of Singapore. He is currently teaching as a professor of English at the University of California at Fresno. His articles have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, MELUS, Ethnic Groups, Modern Language Quarterly, and Symposium. He is the co-editor of Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (2000). GUIYOU HUANG is professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He is the author of The Columbia Guide to Asian American Literature (2005) and editor of Asian American Autobiographers (2001), Asian American Poets (2002), and Asian American Short Story Writers (2003). JEFFREY F.L. PARTRIDGE taught Asian American literature at Central Connecticut State University, the University of Connecticut, and the National University of Singapore. He is the coordinator of the program in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Capital Community College in Hartford, Connecticut.

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Michele Janette, “Vietnamese American Literature in English, 1963–1994.” From Amerasia Journal, vol. 29, no. 1. © 2003 by Amerasia Journal. Reprinted with permission. Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht, “Introduction” from Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, pp. 1–14. © 2004 by and reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. Cheng Lok Chua, “Asian Americans Imagining Burma: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango.” From Asian American Literary Studies, edited by Guiyou Huang. © 2005 by Edinburgh University Press, www.euppublishing.com Guiyou Huang, “Long a Mystery and Forever a Memory: God vs. Goddess in the Ethnic Novel.” From Asian American Literary Studies, edited by Guiyou Huang. © 2005 by Edinburgh University Press, www.euppublishing.com Jeffrey F.L. Patrtidge, “Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in the Novels of Gish Jen.” From Beyond Literary Chinatown. © 2007 by and reprinted by permission of the University of Washington Press.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will find the information cited above.

Index African-American literature, 36 African Americans, 185–189, 191–192 Agha Shahid Ali, 16–18, 20 Aiiieeeee! (Chin), 126 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 101 Alexander, Meena, 5, 9, 14, 18–23, 37 Ali, Agha Shahid, 5 Alien Land Act, 7 All That Heaven Allows (film), 96–100 Amerasians, 65 America. See also United States ideal of, 38–39 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan), 38 American culture, 24, 26, 30, 52, 104, 107 American exceptionalism, 40n3, 87, 103 American identity, 184–185 Americanness, 174–182, 184–185 The Americas of Asian American Literature (Lee), 132 amnesia, 88 ancestral tradition, ambivalence toward, 1–3 anthologies, 50 anticolonialism, 104 antiessentialism, 125 Asian-American identities blurred, 128 diversity of, 123–126, 171 shifts in thinking about, 130–133

211

Asian-American literature, 36–39 defined, 44 postcolonial, 36–39 Tan and, 60–61 tradition of, 44–51 Asian-American manhood, 50 Asian-American studies, 127–128, 132–133 Asian-American subjectivities, 134–135 Asian-American writers, 9–12. See also specific writers Asian Americans, history of, 44–45 Asian-Canadian Writer’s Workshop, 137n3 Asian Canadians, 6, 23, 124, 125, 126, 128–130, 136, 137n2 Asian Exclusion League, 7 Asian family heritage, ambivalence toward, 1–3 Asian immigrants, 44–46, 51–52, 66, 78, 83–84 Asian literature tradition, 44–51 Asian North American identities, 123–137 examination of, 133–136 historical overview, 126–133 reexamination of, 123–126 Asian stereotypes, 45–46, 83–84 Asianadian, 14, 128–129 Asian/American (Palumbo-Liu), 132

212 Asian/Pacific American literature, 29–42 assimilation, 55–56, 103, 176, 182 Au Co, 108 authenticity, 107–108 autobiographies, 46–47, 75–76, 106 The Awakening (Chopin), 157, 166, 167 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 176–177 Bakhtinian hybridity, 174–182 bakla, 93–95 Bannerjee, Himani, 12 Barlow, Tani, 158, 160 Beal, Augusto, 95 Benjamin, Jessica, 134 Berson, Misha, 130 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 135 Between Worlds (Ling), 130 Bhabha, Homi, 170 Bhattacharjee, Annaya, 22–23 biculturalism, 55–56 bilingualism, 111–112 Birbalsingh, Frank, 13 blackness, 185–189, 191 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 152 Bloom, Harold, 1–3 bodies female, 20 queer, 88–91 Bordwell, David, 100 British colonization, 6–7 broken identities, 23–26 Brontë, Charlotte, 166 Bulosan, Carlos, 38 Burma, 139–149 Butler, Judith, 94 Cabral, Amilcar, 132 Camp Gugelstein, 185–190, 191–192 Campomanes, Oscar, 103–104 Canada, 6, 23, 124, 128–130

Index

Cannel, Fenella, 94 capitalism, 112–113, 134, 177, 180 Cattle (Eaton), 70 Chang, Diana, 81 Chen, Ying, 129–130 Cheng, Anne An-lin, 132, 172 Chennault, Anna, 71 Cheung, King-Kok, 123–124, 133 Chi, Tseng Kwong, 136 “Chicago Zen” (Ramanujan), 11 Chin, Frank, 35, 36, 49–50, 87, 126, 156 China, 59–60, 80 China Men (Kingston), 50 Chinese-American identity, 182, 184 Chinese-American women writers, 51–54, 63–85. See also specific writers Chinese businessmen, 131 Chinese Exclusion Act, 45, 46, 51, 52, 64, 66, 78 Chinese immigrants discrimination against, 44–45, 66 memoirs of, 46–48 stereotypes of, 45–46, 83–84 views of, after WWII, 46, 52, 70–71 Chinese women, 49, 51, 63–64, 158–163 Chiu, Jeannie, 135 Chopin, Kate, 157, 166, 167 Christian autobiography, 156 Christianity, 113, 175 Christopher, Renny, 108, 113, 115 Chu, Louis, 49 Chu, Patricia, 134 Chua, Cheng Lok, 139 Clark, Helen, 68 class domination, 88 classical cinema, 97–98, 100 clothing, 58 cold war, 115 colonialism, 6–7, 29–32, 35, 38, 88, 90–91, 104

Index

213

Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP), 50 Comfort Woman (Keller), 134 commodification, 96, 98, 99, 102 communist China, 80 Confucius, 152, 160–162, 166–167 consumerism, 134 Cook, James, 30 Cowasjee, Saros, 12–13 Creole English, 33 The Crippled Tree (Suyin), 79–80 cross-cultural representations, 133– 134 Crossings (Hua), 53, 82–83 Crusz, Rienzi, 13 cultural hybridity, 169–192 Bakhtinian, 174–182 concept of, 170–174 in Mona in the Promised Land, 182–192 objections to, 171–172 cultural identity, 22, 36, 170–171 cultural imperialism, 104, 107 cultural loss, 176 cultural preservation, 22–23 culture, 170–171 American, 24, 26, 30, 104, 107 diaspora, 55–56, 131

Doane, Mary Ann, 95 Dogeaters (Hagedorn), 88–90, 95–102 A Doll’s House (Ibsen), 157, 166, 167 domination, 88 Dragon King, 108 dreams, 56–57 Du Bois, W.E.B., 65

D. Lothrop Publishing Company, 47 Dabydeen, Cyril, 13 “The Dacca Gauze” (Agha), 17 Darkness (Mukherjee), 25 Davis, Rocío, 135 Dawn over Chungking (Lin), 71 denationalization, 131, 137n4 Destination Chungking (Suying), 71–72 diaspora culture, 55–56, 131 Diem, Bui, 108, 110 dislocation, 14, 17, 58 dispersion, 182 divine metaphors, 151–168

family history, 20 Fanon, Frantz, 132 Far, Sui Sin. See Eaton, Edith Feeling Vietnamese (Nguyen), 111– 112 female body, 20 female identity, 24–25 female sexuality, 91 feminism, 70, 97, 155, 158 feminization, 90–91 Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong), 52, 74–75 Filipino history, 87–89 Filipino identity, 90–92

East Africa, 6 Eat a Bowl of Tea (Chu), 49 Eaton, Edith, 51–52, 65–70 Eaton, Winnifred, 51–52, 65–70 The Eavesdropper (Lin), 78 Echo of a Cry (Sze), 77 Elsaesser, Thomas, 96 Eng, David, 132 English language, 6, 8, 10, 30 Enlow, Cynthia, 90 ethnic identities, 14–18, 56 ethnic literature, 60 ethnicity, 21–23, 169, 174 ethnocentrism, 113 Eurasians, 65, 66, 68, 80 exceptionalism, 40n3, 87, 103 exile, 103–104, 108 expatriation, 23 experimental poetry, 135 Eye to Eye (Chang), 81

214

Index

Filipino novels, 87–104 Fireweed, 14 Flame from the Rock (Lin), 71, 72 flexible citizenship, 131 food, 57–58 foot binding, 158 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 186 fragmentation, 77 Frontiers of Love (Chang), 81 Fuse Magazine, 14 gendered discourse, 90–91 gendered violence, 19 geographies, 15–18, 59–60 A Gesture Life (Lee), 139–143 Ghose, Zulfikar, 10 ghostwriters, 107 global solidarity, 131–132 God, 151–152, 167n2 goddess, 152, 163, 167n2 God’s Will (Mai), 110 Goellnicht, Donald C., 123, 128, 137n2 The Golden Coin (Lin), 78 Gonzalez, N.V.M., 37 Gramsci, Antonio, 130 “Grandmother’s Letters” (Alexander), 21 “Grandmother’s Mirror” (Alexander), 20 Great Mother, 58–59 guerrilla theater, 95 guerrilla warfare, 92, 95, 102 guilt, 109 Gunn, Sean, 128–129 Hagedorn, Jessica, 87–90 Hawaii, colonization of, 30–32 Hawaiian literature, 29–36 Hawaiian Renaissance, 31 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 152, 166 Hayslip, Le Ly, 51, 107–108, 110, 112, 115

Hearst, Patricia, 146–147 heterogeneity, 130–131, 170 “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity’’ (Lowe), 130–131, 171 heterosexuality, 99, 100, 101 history, spatialization of, 15–16 Hollywood melodrama, 96–100 Holter, Mai, 112–113 homogeneity, 22, 170 homosexuality/homosexuals, 88–89, 92–95, 101 Hongmou, Chen, 160 Hongo, Garrett, 51 hooks, bell, 90 House of a Thousand Doors (Alexander), 20 “House of Mirrors” (Alexander), 20–21 House of Orchids (Lin), 78 The House that Tai Ming Built (Lee), 48, 80–81 Howells, William Dean, 69 Hsiao, Ruth, 49 Hsu, Francis, 64 Hsu, Kai-yu, 48 Hua, Chuang, 53, 82–83 Huang, Guiyou, 151 The Hundred Secret Senses (Tan), 54, 56–57, 58, 59, 61 Huntley, E.D., 43 Hwang, David Henry, 39, 51 hybridity. See cultural hybridity Ibsen, Henrik, 157, 166, 167 identities, 170–171 American, 184–185 Asian-American, 123–126, 128, 130–133, 171 Asian North American, 123–137 broken, 23–26 cultural, 22, 36, 170–171 ethnic, 14–18, 56 female, 24–25

Index

Filipino, 90–92 gendered, 90–91 immigrant, 23–26 Indian, 22–26 local, 32–33, 35 national, 91, 92 personal, 23–24 identity politics, 124, 130, 173 Immigrant Acts (Lowe), 132 immigrant identity, 23–26 immigrant locales, 21–23 immigrant writers, 5–8. See also specific writers immigration laws, 7, 45, 46, 51, 52, 64, 66, 78, 128 imperialism, 89, 90, 103–104 In the Skin of a Lion (Ondaatje), 13–14 India, 7, 10 Indian identity, 22–26 indigenous literatures, 36 indigenous peoples, 30 Indo-Canadian writers, 12–13 internal colonialism, 131–132 interracial relationships, 53, 133–134, 185–189 invisible theater, 95 Irrawaddy Tango (Law-Yone), 139, 143–148 “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” (Alexander), 21 I’ve Come a Long Way (Kuo), 76–77 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 166 Janette, Michele, 105 Japanese, 46, 52, 66, 70 A Japanese Nightingale (Eaton), 69, 70 Jasmine (Mukherjee), 24 Jen, Gish, 169, 173–192 Jewish Americans, 184, 185–187 Jordan, June, 14–18 The Joy Luck Club (Tan), 43, 51, 54– 59, 61, 134, 151

215

Kalākaua, David, 31 Kampoon Street (Lin), 78, 79 Katrak, Ketu H., 5 “Kaulana nā Oua” (Prendergast), 31–32 Keller, Nora, 134 Khan, Ismith, 13 Kim, Elaine, 44, 53, 74, 127, 128 Kim, Myung Mi, 135 Kincaid, Jamaica, 15 King Lear (Shakespeare), 157, 167 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 1–3, 36, 50, 53–54, 64, 83–84, 126–127, 156, 166 Kinney, Katherine, 114 Kitchen (Yoshimoto), 41n12 Kitchen God, 153–154, 157, 163, 165–166 The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan), 54, 56–57, 59, 61, 151, 152–167 plot of, 152–153 Wen Fu in, 154–157, 163–166 Winnie in, 152–154, 156–167 Koh, Karlyn, 136 Korean adoptees, 135 Koshy, Susan, 124, 130–131, 137n4 Kuo, Helena, 52, 64, 71, 72, 76–77 Ky, Nguyen Cao, 108 The Lady of the Lily Feet (Clark), 68 Laresen, Wendy, 107 Law-Yone, Wendy, 139, 143–148 Leba, John, 112 Lee, Chang-rae, 134, 139–143, 148, 149n1 Lee, Josephine, 135 Lee, Li-Young, 51 Lee, Rachel, 132 Lee, Virginia, 48, 80–81 Leong, George, 37–38 Li, David Leiwei, 127 liberation theorists, 132 The Lilacs Overgrow (Lin), 78, 79

216 Lili’uokalani, Queen, 31 Lim, Genny, 51 Lim, Janet, 71, 76 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 69, 123, 124 Lin, Adet, 70–71, 72 Lin, Anor, 64, 70–74, 78–79 Lin, Hazel, 78 Lin, Meimei, 70, 71 Ling, Amy, 52, 53, 63, 123, 125, 130 linguistic hybridity, 176–179, 182–184 literary Chinatown, 169, 174 literary marketplace, 8–9 literature African-American, 36 Asian-American, 36–39, 44–51, 60–61 Asian/Pacific-American, 29–42 ethnic, 60 Hawaiian, 29–36 indigenous, 36 minority, 29–30, 37, 38, 60 oral, 55 postcolonial, 36–39 South Asian–American, 5–27 Vietnamese-American, 105–122 war, 52, 70–74 local identities, 32–33, 35 locations, 21–23, 59–60 Long, Ngô Vinh, 111 loss, 17 “Love Poem for a Wife. 1” (Ramanujan), 11 Lowe, Lisa, 130–131, 132, 151, 171, 173 Lowe, Pardee, 47–48 M. Butterfly (Hwang), 51 Magnuson Act, 45 Mai, Nguyen Thi Tuyet, 107, 110 Manalansan, Martin, 89, 93, 95 manhood, Asian American, 50 A Many-Splendored Thing (Suyin), 79, 80

Index

Mao Zedong, 132 Marcos, Ferdinand, 88, 91–92 marginalization, 8–9 masculine gaze, 97–98 Mathur, Saloni, 6 Mazumdar, Sucheta, 7 McCarran-Walter Act, 7 McCauley, Anna Kim-Lan, 113 McGregor, Davianna, 29 Me (Eaton), 70 Meatless Days (Suleri), 18, 41n12 The Melancholy of Race (Cheng), 132 melodrama, 96–100 Melucci, Alberto, 170 memoirs, 46–48, 106–108 metafiction, 102 The Middleman and Other Stories (Mukherjee), 25 migrations, geopolitics of, 14–16 Miki, Roy, 129 mimicry, 94 minority American literature, 29–30, 37, 38, 60 Miss Numé of Japan (Eaton), 68 Mistry, Rohinton, 12, 13 model minority, 23, 46, 187 Mona in the Promised Land ( Jen), 169, 173–174, 182–192 The Moon Vow (Lin), 78 mother, absence of, 157 mother-daughter narratives, 58–59, 134, 156 Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Eaton), 67 Mukherjee, Bharati, 23–26 multiculturalism, 6, 8, 124 multiplicity, 130–131 Mulvey, Laura, 97 My Country and My People (Yutang), 47 Nampally Road (Alexander), 37 narrative structure, 53–54 national boundaries, 104

Index

National Federation of Indian Associations (NFIA), 22 national identity, 91, 92 nationalism, 31–33, 38, 71, 124, 155 nation-state, 90–91, 171 native Hawaiian, 35–36 Native Speaker (Lee), 134 Nazareth, Peter, 12 neocolonialism, 88 “new world order,” 6, 15 Nga, Tran Thi, 107 Ngan, Nguyën Ngoc, 110 Nguyen, Huong Giang, 113 Nguyen, Thomas XT, 111–112 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 87, 157 Nhuong, Huynh Quang, 111 Night-Scene, The Garden (Alexander), 21 Nishime, LeiLani, 134 “No Name Woman” (Kingston), 1–3 No Passenger on the River (Dinh), 107 A Nostaligist’s Map of America (Agha), 16–17 “Note Autobiographical—2” (Agha), 17 Okada, John, 38 older woman character, 58–59 Ondaatje, Michael, 13–14 “One Chooses a Language” (Ghose), 10 Ong, Aihwa, 131 The Only Game in Town (Chang), 81 oral literature, 55 otherness, 126–127, 130 Pacific Island literatures, 36 Palubinskas, Helen, 48 Palumbo-Liu, David, 126, 132, 133, 173 Parameswaran, Uma, 12, 13 parochialism, 56 Partridge, Jeffrey F.L., 169

217

“Parts” (Yamanaka), 33–35, 37 A Passion for Life (Chang), 81 Patel motels, 7–8 patriarchy, 49, 157 Peach Path (Kuo), 76 pedagogical essays, 111 A Perfect Love (Chang), 81 personal identity, 23–24 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 6 Philippines, 37, 87–89, 91, 98, 103– 104. See also Filipino novels The Physicians (Lin), 78 Picture Bride (Song), 50–51 pidgin English, 33–35 polyculturalism, 192 postcolonial literature, 36–39 postcolonialism, 29–30, 35, 37, 38, 172–173 Postmodern Geographies (Soja), 15–16 postmodern techniques, 102 postmodernism, 124, 134, 172–173 Prashad, Vijay, 172, 173 prejudice, 51, 52 Prendergast, Ellen Wright, 31 psychoanalytic feminism, 97 psychoanalytic theory, 132 publishers, influence of, 107–108 queer body, 88–91 queer practices, in Philippines, 92–95 queer sexuality, 88–90, 92–95, 97 Quyen, Duong Van, 111 Rachel Weeping for Her Children, Uncomforted (Lin), 78 Racial Castration (Eng), 132 racial hybridity, 133–134 racism, 26, 49, 77, 113, 187–189 Rafael, Vicente, 91 Ramanujan, A.K., 11–12 The Red Army of Women (ballet), 159, 162 relocations, 14–15, 19–20

218

Index

reverse ancestor worship, 2–3 revolution, 90–91, 100–103 Rody, Caroline, 135–136 Rootless But Green Are the Boulevard Trees (Parameswaran), 13 Rosca, Ninotchka, 87–90 “Rosie’s Theme” (Nazareth), 12 Rush Hour (film), 134 Rushdie, Salman, 26 Sakhi, 22 San Juan, E., Jr., 103, 104, 191 Santa An, Jeffrey, 133–134 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 152, 166 Schafer, John, 113 Schuller, Malini Johar, 136 second-generation immigrants, 49–50 sex tourism, 89 sexual revolution, 88, 92, 101 sexuality, 90–91, 96 female, 91 heterosexuality, 99, 100, 101 homosexuality, 88–89, 92–95, 101 queer, 88–90, 92–95, 97 Shakespeare, William, 157, 167 Shallow Graves (Nga), 107 Silent Children (Sze), 77–78 simultaneity of geography, 15 Sledge, Linda Ching, 54–55 Smith, Neil, 15 “Snow on the Desert” (Agha), 17 Soja, Edward, 15–16 Sold for Silver (Lim), 76 Song, Cathy, 35, 50–51 South Asian–American literature, 5–27 categorization of, 5–6 ethnic identities, 14–18 location and literary marketplace, 8–9 South Asian immigrants, 5–8 South Vietnam, 114

Speaking of Siva (Ramanujan), 11 spectacle, 89, 95–96, 97, 102 spectatorship, 97–98 spider woman, 147 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 90, 130 Stacey, Jackie, 97, 98 State of War (Rosca), 88–95, 102–104 stereotypes, 45–46, 83–84 Stevens, Wallace, 1 Stone, Oliver, 115 The Storm (Alexander), 19 subaltern spectators, 98 Suleri, Sara, 18, 41n12, 135 Sumida, Stephen H., 29 Suyin, Han, 52, 53, 64, 65, 70, 71–72, 79–80 Sze, Alfred, 77 Sze, Mai-mai, 52, 71, 77–78 Tadiar, Neferti Xina M., 91, 98 Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, 111 Tai-yi, Lin (Anor Lin), 64, 70–74, 78–79 tales of witness, 108–110, 116–117 talk-story, 53–55 Tan, Amy, 36, 43–44, 51, 134, 151. See also specific works Asian-American literary canon and, 60–61 narrative style, 54–55 novels, 54–61 themes, 56 use of divine metaphors by, 151–168 “Text from the Middle Earth” (Alexander), 20 Thai, Nguyen, 111 Thi-Lâm, Ngyuyën Thi, 108 third sex, 94, 95 The Third World Writer (Nazareth), 12 Tiger Lily, 14 The Tiger’s Daughter (Mukherjee), 24–25

Index

Till Morning Comes (Suyin), 80 Toai, Doan Van, 110, 111 The Toronto Asian Review, 14 Tran, Kim-Lan, 111 Tran, Qui-Phiet, 109 Tran Van Dinh, 107, 108 “Transit Lounge” (Alexander), 19–20 transvestites, 88, 89, 92–95, 102 “The Travellers” (Alexander), 19 Trinh Minh-Ha, 112 Tropic of Orange (Yamashita), 136 Tuyêt, Trân Khánh, 111 Ty, Eleanor, 123 Tyloe, E.B., 170 Typical American ( Jen), 169, 174–182 United States ideal of, 38–39 Philippines and, 87–88, 103–104 tales of life in, 112–113, 119 Vietnam War, 114–115 Vietnamese-American literature, 105–122 beginnings of, 107–108 bibliography, 116–120 contexts, 113–115 defining, 105–107 educational, 110, 117–119 oral histories, 119–120 tales of life in America, 112–113, 119 tales of witness, 108–110, 116–117 Vietnamese-American writers, 106 Vietnamese Entrepreneurs in the USA (Leba), 112 violence, gendered, 19 visual media, 136 Vu, Nguyen Van, 112–113 War Bride Act, 49 war literature, 52, 70–74 War Tide (Lin), 72–74

219

Watanna, Onoto. See Eaton, Winnifred Webner, Pnina, 173, 191–192 Weeping May Tarry (Lin), 78 Wen Fu (Kitchen God’s Wife), 154– 157, 163–166 West Indies, 6 Westward to Chungking (Kuo), 72 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Hayslip), 107–108, 110 whiteness, 186 The Wife (Mukherjee), 24–25 Winnie (Kitchen God’s Wife), 152– 154, 156–167 witness, tales of, 108–110, 116–117 A Woman of Thirty (Chang), 81 The Woman Warrior (Kingston), 1, 50, 53–54, 79–80, 83–84, 126–127, 166 women Chinese, 49, 51, 63–64, 158–163 Chinese-American women writers, 51–54, 63–85 education of, 160–161 as guardians of tradition, 22 older, 58–59 working-class, 69–70 Wong, Jade Snow, 47–48, 52, 71, 74–75 Wong, Paul, 136 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 131, 171– 172, 173 working-class women, 69–70 World War II, 46, 52, 70 Wu, William, 68 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 33–35, 37 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 136 Yee, Paul, 129 Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, 136 The Yellow Peril (Wu), 68 Yoshimoto, Banana, 41n12 Young, Robert J.C., 172 Yutang, Lin, 47, 52, 71