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ElaineKim_DefiningAsianAMericanRealitiesthroughLiterature1.pdf
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Defining Asian American Realities through Literature*
Elaine H. Kim
There were some letters in the ‘‘Dear Abby’’ column recently that reflect a gulf
between Asian Americans and the descendants of European immigrants. Two
Irish Americans wrote that they could not understand why an American of
‘‘Oriental’’ descent would complain about being asked ‘‘what are you’’ within
five minutes of being introduced to a ‘‘Caucasian.’’ One wrote, ‘‘I don’t think it’s
rude . . . I think it’s a positive component of international understanding.’’ Abby
says that the ‘‘Oriental’’ readers, ‘‘without exception,’’ responded like the
following letter writer:
. . . What am I? Why, I’m a person like everyone else. . . . ‘Where did you come
from?’ would be an innocent question when one Caucasian asks it of another, but
when it is asked of an Asian, it takes on a different tone . . . . When I say, ‘I’m
from . . . Portland, Oregon!’ they are invariably surprised . . . because they find it
hard to believe that an Asian-looking person is actually . . . American . . . . Being
white is not a prerequisite for being . . . American . . . and . . . it’s high time every-
one realized it.
Significantly, Abby concludes the column with the other Irish American letter:
‘‘The Irish are so proud of being Irish, they tell you before you even ask. Tip
O’Neill never tried to hide his Irish ancestry.’’ 1
So much writing by Asian Americans is focused on the theme of claiming an
American, as opposed to Asian, identity that we may begin to wonder if this
constitutes accommodation, a collective colonized spirit – the fervent wish to
‘‘hide our ancestry,’’ which is impossible for us anyway, to relinquish our
marginality, and to lose ourselves in an intense identification with the hegemonic
*Elaine H. Kim ‘‘Defining Asian American Realities through Literature.’’ Cultural Critique 6
(1987): 87–111. Reprinted by permission of University of Minnesota Press. The version printed
here has been reworded in places by the author especially for this publication.
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culture. Or is it in fact a celebration of our marginality and a profound expres-
sion of protest against being defined by domination?
Today, as we study the power of ‘‘otherness’’ and the celebration of margin-
ality, we must pause to think about the complexity and diversity of minority
discourse in order to understand why the political concerns expressed in Asian
American literature are unique. Tied to issues of gender, social stratification,
racial oppression, and the need to restore the foundations of our history and
culture, the most recurrent theme in our writing is what I call claiming America
for Asian Americans. That does not mean disappearing like raindrops in the
ocean of white America, fighting to become ‘‘normal,’’ losing ourselves in the
process. It means inventing a new identity, defining ourselves against a racial
fantasy, so that we can be reconciled with one another. It is this seeming
paradox, the Asian American claim on America, that is the oppositional quality
of our discourse.
In this article, I have deliberately chosen to provide a roughly chronological
survey of various Asian American literary works, because our literature is still
unfamiliar to most scholars and because it represents diverse nationalities and
different class backgrounds, nativities, generations, historical moments, and
genders, factors that often make quite contradictory demands. In general,
though, I think it is fair to say that the literature I discuss reflects an overarching
collective concern, the invention of an American identity.
Through the early 1980s, much of Asian American literature was produced by
American-born, American-educated Asians whose first language was English.
The Asian American writer often existed on the margins of his or her own
marginal community, wedged between the hegemonic culture and the non-
English-speaking communities largely unconcerned with self-definition. They
continued to be second and third generation American born Chinese and
Japanese. They did not speak in the voices of the vast numbers of immigrants
and refugees whose stories have never been well represented in our literature,
past or present.
Inscriptions of Asians in US Popular Culture
Although we are no longer under direct colonial domination, clumsy racial
fantasies about Asians continue to flourish in the West, and these extend to
Asian Americans as well. Familiar representations of Asians – always unalterably
alien – as helpless heathens, comical servants, loyal allies and, only in the case of
women, exotic sex objects imbued with an innate understanding of how to
please, serve, and titillate, extend directly to Asian Americans and exist in all
cases to define as their dialectical opposite the Anglo man as heroic, courageous,
and physically superior, whether as soldier, missionary, master, or lover.
These racial romances may be part of the baggage of Western imperialist
penetration into Asia; nevertheless they are extended to us, who have not been
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allowed a separate identity. Asian America is after all itself a creation of white
racism that groups nationalities and nativities together, making it possible to
blame – and murder – a Chinese American out of frustration over competition
from Japanese auto manufacturers.
We can see how the notions about Asians and Asian Americans overlap in the
‘‘middleman minority’’ function for both. British and American scholarship
traditionally placed Asians between blacks and whites on a racial continuum: if
whites were born to lead, blacks were best at hard labor, and Asians were suited
to carry out orders. This notion has been sedimented into our interpretations of
economic development in Asia today: the ‘‘little tigers,’’ South Korea, Taiwan,
and Singapore, are sandwiched between the industrialized nations of the West
and the countries of Africa and Latin America. Only Japan presents a classifica-
tion problem. In this country, Asian America is a buffer zone between whites
and blacks or Latinos: supposedly obedient, docile, efficient at carrying out the
mandates of the decision makers, Asian Americans are increasingly visible in low
middle management, high clerical, and small business occupations. Ideologic-
ally, we occupy the position of ‘‘model minority,’’ living proof that racism is not
what keeps other people of color down.
Views of the Literary Critics
Racist and culturally hegemonic views of Asians and Asian Americans are
inscribed in works by well-known Anglo American writers like Jack London,
as well as a plethora of lesser writers, like the creator of Charlie Chan, Earl Derr
Biggers, whose caricatures have survived him. That both Biggers and his British,
counterpart, Arthur Sarsfield Ward, creator of Fu Manchu, received recognition
and honorary degrees at Harvard demonstrates how extensive has been the
penetration of these views of Asians and Asian Americans into the American
intelligentsia. Indeed, it is difficult for Anglo American literary critics to remain
unaffected by the same notions embedded in the minds of Dear Abby’s readers.
Contemporary Chinese American playwright Frank Chin noted that New York
critics of his play, Chickencoop Chinaman, complained that his characters did not speak, dress, or act ‘‘like Orientals.’’
Certainly reviews of our literature by Anglo-American critics reveal that the
criteria used to assess their literary merit have been other than literary and
aesthetic. Reviewers of Etsu Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai (1925) praised the writer because she ‘‘pleads no causes, asks no vexing questions’’
2
at a time when the controversial issue of Japanese exclusion was being spiritedly
discussed. Critics of The Grass Roof (1931) lauded Younghill Kang’s Korea, which is described as a ‘‘planet of death,’’ its brilliant colors, haunting music,
and the magic of its being fading into an ‘‘infernal twilight’’ of decay com-
manded by the inability to modernize. But when Kang depicts the arrogance and
race prejudice of the American missionaries in Korea, the critics are indignant:
Elaine H. Kim
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Mr. Kang does not, I think, give a full account of American missionaries.
Doubtless these are blundering human beings, just like the rest of us. He accuses
them of lack of education, yet he longed ardently to come to their country for the
kind of education they receive. He was desperately eager to receive the benefit of
their escort to America. 3
During the World War II era, the American public became widely aware of
broad distinctions among Asian nationalities, at least between Japanese and all
others. China and the Philippines became known as allies in the Pacific, and
popular magazines like Life and Time carried feature articles on how to tell the Chinese from the Japanese. In 1943 and 1950, the first books by second
generation Chinese Americans were published by major houses. Promoters of
Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant suggested that the book might be worth reading because Lowe’s enlistment in the US Army showed him to be
‘‘one of America’s loyal minorities.’’ 4 Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter
5
was valued primarily as evidence that American racial minorities have only
themselves to blame for their failure in American life. Such a view, expressed
by a member of a racial minority group, was important during the Cold War
period, when charges of race discrimination in the United States were circulat-
ing in developing countries which, having recently been freed from direct
colonial rule, were questioning the value of American world leadership. The
US State Department in fact negotiated the rights to publish Wong’s book in a
number of Asian languages and arranged a tour for her in 1952 to forty-five
Asian locales from Tokyo to Karachi, where she was to speak about the benefits
of American democracy from the perspective of a Chinese American.
During the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s and the period of increased
ethnic awareness immediately ensuing, several books by Japanese Americans were
brought out by major publishers. Critical reception was shaped by political
concerns at a time when people of color vociferously seeking justice and equality
could be shown the example of the non-militant approach of the ‘‘model minor-
ity.’’ Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar 6
was
celebrated for its ‘‘lack of bitterness, self-pity, or solemnity’’ 7 in portraying the
wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Daniel Okimoto’s American in Disguise
8 was appreciated by critics for having been written with ‘‘restraint’’
during ‘‘the current racial uproar.’’ 9
One reviewer praised him for talking of
‘‘the Negro problem sympathetically and yet not without the racial pride of one
from a subculture which always worked hard and had a devotion to education as a
spur to achievement.’’ 10
Ironically, what the reviewers call ‘‘racial pride’’ can also
be seen as racial self-hatred: American in Disguise illustrates that the price for such ‘‘success’’ is rejection of both Japanese and Japanese American identiy. Okimoto
thus finds white women ‘‘personally as well as physically’’ appealing, because they
have the ‘‘seductive attraction’’ of being able to provide him with ‘‘[c]rowning
evidence of having made it.’’ The ‘‘key to final assimilation,’’ Okimoto notes, is
intermarriage, and the book ends with the writer’s reference to his own children,
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for whom ‘‘[p]hysically, at least, half the disguise I have worn will be lost.’’ Even
in the end, his own face is still an unfortunate ‘‘disguise.’’ 11
The barriers to understanding Asian American literature posed by the
blinders of culturally hegemonic interpretations can be seen in other non-literary
criteria. In Publisher’s Weekly, one critic praises Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
12 for its ‘‘myths rich and varied as Chinese brocade’’ and its
prose manifesting ‘‘the delicacy and precision of porcelain’’: ‘‘East meets West
with . . . charming results’’ in the book. 13
A closer look would have revealed its
deliberately anti-exotic, anti-nostalgic character:
The old man opened his eyes wide at us and turned in a circle, surrounded. His
neck tendons stretched out. ‘‘Maggots!’’ he shouted. ‘‘Maggots! Where are my
grandsons? I want grandsons! Give me grandsons! Maggots!’’ He pointed at each
one of us, ‘‘Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot!’’ Then he dived
into his food, eating fast and getting seconds. ‘‘Eat, maggots,’’ he said. ‘‘Look at
the maggots chew.’’
‘‘He does that at every meal,’’ the girls told us in English.
‘‘Yeah,’’ we said. ‘‘Our old man hates us too. What assholes.’’ 14
A critic notes with approval that Kingston’s name indicates that she is married to
an ‘‘American,’’ that is, a white, implying that she herself is not ‘‘American’’ and
that her marriage has some bearing on the critical approach to her book. 15
In the
National Observer, one reviewer defends his interpretation by mentioning that his wife is Chinese Canadian. Even Kingston’s portrayal of ambiguity as central
to the Chinese American woman’s experience is misconstrued: ‘‘It’s hard to tell
where her fantasies end and reality begins,’’ the critic complains. He is confused
by her depiction of some Chinese women as aggressive and verbal and others as
docile, as if there can only be one type of Chinese woman. These confusions are
‘‘especially hard for a non-Chinese,’’ he concludes, ‘‘and that’s the troubling
aspect of the book.’’ 16
One of the main points of The Woman Warrior is that a marginal person indeed derives power and vision from living with paradoxes.
The narrator says: ‘‘I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so
that there is room for paradoxes.’’ 17
Asian American literature has been considered narrow and specialized work
penned by aliens to whom the English language and the culture it represents can
never really belong. Thus, despite the place we are supposed to occupy as an
assimilated ‘‘model minority,’’ it’s hard to think of an Asian American writer
who is not immediately identified as such, attesting to the continuing margin-
ality of our literature.
Early Immigrant Writers: a Class Perspective
The first Asian American writers in English were acutely aware of common
misconceptions about Asia and Asians. These early immigrant writers were not
Elaine H. Kim
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representative of the general population of Asian Americans, who were predom-
inantly laborers recruited for agricultural and construction work in Hawaii and
on the Pacific Coast. Consumed in struggles for their livelihood in a hostile
environment and segregated in field labor camps and ethnic urban enclaves, they
usually did not speak or write in English. Even Filipino immigrants were mostly
illiterate, since recruiters in search of a docile labor force preferred those without
formal education. Then too, autobiographical writing and popular fiction were
not found in the traditional cultures that produced the first immigrants. In
China and Korea, writing and literature were the domain of the literati, who
traditionally confined themselves to classical poetry and essays. Autobiography
as such was unknown, since for a scholar to write a book about himself would
have been deemed egotistical in the extreme. Fiction was considered frivolous
and was usually written under pen names. Farmers and peasants performed as
master storytellers, dramatic dancers, and singers but rarely expressed them-
selves through the written word.
Scholars and diplomats, who had been exempted from exclusion legislation
aimed at restricting the entry of Asian laborers into the United States, com-
prised a disproportionately large part of the early Asian American voice. Ad-
dressing an Anglo American audience, they tried to win sympathy for the people
of the educated elite of which they were part. Their portrayals of Asia are
focused on high culture, and their criticisms of American society are tentative
and apologetic.
Probably the best known interpreter of Asia to the West is self-styled cultural
envoy Lin Yutang, whose My Country and My People 18
enjoyed enormous
popularity in the West, although Chinese critics have pointed out that Lin was
‘‘out of tempo with the Chinese people,’’ indulging as he does in ‘‘chitchat on
the moon, rocks and gardens, dreams, smoke and incense’’ while Chinese were
dying by the millions in their struggle against foreign domination. ‘‘No
wonder,’’ writes one critic, ‘‘many Chinese called his book ‘My Country and
My Class’ or, resorting to a pun. . . . ‘Mai Country and Mai People,’ mai being
the Chinese word for selling and betraying.’’ 19
Ironically, Lin spent most of his
life in the United States as a Chinese expatriate; the place he won for himself
here was made possible only if he remained Chinese.
The writings of Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan illustrate the transition
from sojourner to immigrant searching for a permanent place in America. Kang
and Bulosan paint vivid portraits of the lives of Korean and Filipino exiles –
their work, their aspirations, their exclusion from American social and intellec-
tual life. Searching for entry into that life, first through books and then through
American women, both discover that the America of their aspirations does not
yet exist: it must be invented, brought into being.
Not one of the characters in Kang’s East Goes West 20
achieves his American
dream. Reading Shakespeare in his unheated room, the narrator is only able to
think of food, and the young American woman he so eagerly hopes to befriend
moves away, leaving no forwarding address. The story ends with his dream of
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being locked in a dark cellar with some black men as torch-bearing whites are
about to set them all on fire. His only hope is a Buddhist interpretation of the
dream, that he will be reincarnated into a better life.
Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart 21
describes the lives and work of the Filipino
migrant workers who followed the harvest, working in fields and canneries from
the Mexican border to Alaska during the 1920s and 1930s. Although Bulosan is
attempting to claim America for the thousands of farmworkers and menial
laborers for whom he seeks to give voice, it is an America of the heart, a
dream, a promise, an ideal forged from loneliness and suffering.
We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can find
happiness. . . . We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known
oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to
the last Filipino pea-pickers. . . . America is a prophecy of a new society of
men . . . the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging
for a job and the black body dangling from a tree. 22
The war era’s paternalistically friendly attitudes toward certain Asian nations
has passed, Bulosan died in poverty and obscurity, and Asian Americans are
eternal aliens once again, periodically reminded that we have no right to
‘‘complain’’ about anything. Instead, we should be grateful. ‘‘If you don’t like
it here,’’ even third generation Asian Americans would be told, ‘‘you can always
go back.’’
The contemporary Southeast Asian refugee claim on America is captured in
Wendy Law-Yone’s The Coffin Tree, 23
which is the story of a Burmese refugee
woman who can never ‘‘go back.’’ The contrast between her life in Burma and
America provides us with a profound understanding of why she almost loses her
mind. Her brother, who had been the vital one in Burma, fails to thrive here.
After he dies and she hears of the death of her father, her last link to Burma, she
is totally alone in the world, having lost the continuity between past and future
provided by her family in the traditional culture. Unless she can adapt herself to
a hostile and terrifying new world, with its bitter loneliness, its telephone
answering machines, and its asylums for the insane, unless she can survive the
transplant and set down roots in American soil, she will disappear from the face
of the earth.
Community Portraits
In our communities, the wish to ‘‘disappear’’ by being fully assimilated into
white society has always been resisted in fervent attempts to preserve cultural
integrity within the American context. Although Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea
24 never achieved popularity or financial success during his lifetime, the
novel is now viewed as a cornerstone in the Asian American literary tradition.
Elaine H. Kim
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The book is set in New York Chinatown in the late 1940s, the characters aging
men who have spent their lives in laundry and restaurant labor. Their contacts
with American society are limited to harassment by police and immigration
officials and brief encounters with American prostitutes. Their lives have been
sustained by fantasies about China and by the profound warmth of their
friendships with each other. The central contradiction is the conflict between
the old community of bachelor sojourners and the young immigrants who will
make America their permanent home. Chu’s Chinese American community is
on the threshhold of change: forced by the Chinese Revolution to face the
likelihood that they may never return to their homeland after all, the old men
find that the community structure they have built in New York is all that is left
to them. The uncertain future belongs to the youth, represented by Ben Loy,
whose sexual impotence is a reflection of the social powerlessness of generations
of Chinatown bachelors constricted by genocidal American laws and policies.
The bitter tea he must drink is his willingness to compromise in order to obtain a
new life in America. The tea is Chinese medicine, and the move he makes is
from New York to San Francisco Chinatown. Although he will not raise his son
as he was raised, he will not forsake his Chinese roots. The vital quality of Chu’s
prose comes from his ability to appreciate the language spoken around him by a
people to whom verbal skill and witty exchanges were valued as a social art.
Instead of the ‘‘pidgin English’’ invented for comic effect by Anglo-American
writers about the Chinese, Chu translates the idioms and images from Cantonese
dialects, presenting them in skillfully crafted dialogues. In these, he gives us a
vivid picture of the social relationships and attitudes that governed Chinatown
life for many decades.
By deliberately not addressing Anglo American readers, Chu is able to present
a non-hegemonic view of his own community within the context of American
society – that is, as Milton Murayama says, ‘‘setting the record straight . . . with
love, with all the warts showing.’’ 25
At the same time, he is able to use the
English language in new ways.
Because of differential treatment of Japanese Americans under American
laws, American-born, American-educated, English-speaking second generation
Japanese nisei comprised about half of the Japanese population in the United States by 1930, resulting in the publication of more Japanese American literary
work in English earlier than those found in other groups. This work appeared
first in ethnic print media. Addressed to fellow nisei, it unself-consciously attempts to appropriate the English language and literary forms for Japanese
American use. The nuanced quality of these writings is a balance made possible
by the writers’ biculturalism, which gives them two pairs of eyes through which
to see both their communities and their American context. By the 1950s, some of
this work was published outside the newsprint ghetto.
John Okada’s No-No Boy 26
was probably rejected by the Japanese American
press and community in the 1950s because it depicts both American society and
the post-war Seattle Japanese American community in an intensely unflattering
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light. The characters have little in common with the ‘‘model minority’’ that
picks itself up by the bootstraps: incapacitated by self-hatred, their relationships
have been distorted by the internment experience. Parents and children, hus-
bands and wives, brothers and friends are pitted against each other in bitter
conflicts caused by their collective shame. The protagonist searches desperately
for a way to put together the pieces of his own fragmented life. Despite his pain
and alienation, he retains his profound faith in the promise of American justice
and equality. No-No Boy is an indictment of race hatred and a testament to the strength and faith of the oppressed.
Nor is the view of the pre-war Japanese American family and community and
its American context a pretty one in Milton Murayama’s All I Asking For Is My Body (1959).
27 The nisei stagger under the combined weight of Japanese family
traditions and the uniquely American plantation system of Hawaii. The book
challenges unquestioning acceptance of tyranny and hierarchy as impediments
to human freedom.
Murayama’s dialogues are carefully crafted to express the bicultural realities
of the characters in standard and pidgin English and in standard and colloquial
Japanese, which is translated into standard and informal English. Murayama
decided to print the book himself with the help of a linotype setter from Hawaii
because he felt that commercial editors would ‘‘correct the English and kill the
pidgin.’’ 28
Gender perspectives in the critique of pre-war Japanese American family and
community life on the West Coast are contained in half a dozen remarkable short
stories published between 1949 and 1961 by Hisaye Yamamoto. 29
The focus is
on the changing roles of women imprisoned with well-meaning but weak and
insensitive husbands and on the bleakness and isolation of rural toil. Ultimately,
the women are vanquished. The men are never condemned, but they remain in
the shadows as guardians of the prison doors, for the most part conventional and
colorless in comparison to the women who are the central figures. The women’s
strength comes from surviving sorrow. They also pass a legacy to their
daughters, who as a result may not be subdued in the end. Characteristic of
Yamamoto’s style is subtle irony and understatement, usually through the
juxtaposition of two currents that reflect the quintessential quality of Japanese
American life: beneath a placid and respectable surface, there are dark hints of
hidden tragedy, tinged with death and violence. Yamamoto accomplishes this by
presenting the stories through the eyes of an ingenuous young American-born
narrator who understands less about what she is describing than what readers
can guess.
Alienation and Loss
The contemporary generation of Japanese American writers, most of whom are
of the sansei or third generation, grandchildren of the immigrants, is feeling the
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effects of the internment and dispersal of the Japanese American community
Okada and Yamamoto depicted with such familiarity and confidence. Although
most returned to California after the US government’s largely unsuccessful
attempt to scatter them across the United States at the end of the war, they
never regained their hold on Pacific Coast agriculture, and the Japantowns that
had flourished all along Highway 99, the road that cuts through the fields and
past the canneries of Asian America, have disappeared. Nationally, more than
half of today’s sansei marriages are outmarriages. Ronald Tanaka traces the path toward cultural annihilation in a poem about a book of photographs on Japanese
American internment:
the people who put out that book,
i guess they won a lot of awards.
it was a very photogenic period
of california history, especially
if you were a white photographer
with compassion for helpless people.
but the book would have been better,
i think, or more complete, if they
had put in my picture and yours, with
our hakujin wives, our long hair and
the little signs that say, ‘‘what? me
speak japanese?’’ and ‘‘self-determination
for everyone but us,’’ and then maybe
on the very last page, a picture of
our kids. They don’t even look like
japanese 30
In the decade between 1965 and 1975, playwright Frank Chin and short story
writer Jeffery Paul Chan focused their attentions on a search for a viable new
identity for Chinese American men, an identity that would link them to the
cowboys who settled the American West and the nameless men who built the
transcontinental railroad with their bare hands. The identity crises of the young
in Chin and Chan’s work stems in part from the complicity of older generations
of Chinese immigrant men who cling to ‘‘mildewed memories’’ of China and to
Chinese American women who cater to tourists’ exotic fantasies. The failure of
fathers is a favorite theme: in Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman, 31
Tam Lum’s father
is a dishwasher who bathes in his underpants because he fears that little old white
ladies might peek at him through a keyhole. Women are represented as insensi-
tive and unsophisticated or else as seekers after white ‘‘racist love.’’ The only
possible survival is escape from the suffocating environment – escape, ironically,
into the culture that invented the fantasy in the first place. After lashing out at the
emasculating effects of racial oppression, Chin and Chan accept the oppressors’
definition of ‘‘masculinity.’’ The result is unresolved tension between contempt
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and desire to fight for their Asian American characters. Cynicism, sexism,
alienation, and preoccupation with death and decay have led not to a new identity
but to the conclusion that we are doomed. In 1978, Chin said:
There is no doubt in my mind that the Asian American is on the doorstep of
extinction. There’s so much out-marriage now that all that is going to survive are
the stereotypes. White culture has not acknowledged Asian American art. Either
you’re foreign in this country, or you’re an honorary white. I hope we can create
work that will add to the human estate, but then I think we’ll die out. 32
Reconciliation
Most contemporary Asian American writers do not share Chin’s pessimism. By
weaving connections between us and our history, our forebears, each other,
other people of color in this country and the world, these writers are inventing
Asian American identities outside the realm of racial romance and externally
imposed definitions.
Much contemporary Asian American literature expresses kinship with other
people of color in America, especially blacks and Native Americans, who
frequently appear in the works. ‘‘Soon the white snow will melt,’’ writes poet
Al Robles, and ‘‘the brown, black, yellow earth will come to life.’’ 33
Our self-invention was stimulated by US involvement in Asia, creating links
with Asia on our own terms. Because we had been defined historically by race, it
was difficult for many of us not to respond to the racial character of the war in
Vietnam. Stunned by graphic news coverage of war-torn hamlets, we sometimes
saw the faces of our friends and relatives in the visages of Vietnamese peasants.
We were susceptible to the argument that US foreign policy in Asia had always
been racist and genocidal, that profits had been more important to government
policy makers than Asian lives. We perceived the parallels between the war in
Vietnam and the conquest of the Philippine resistance during the Spanish–
American War, in which an estimated one-sixth of the population of Ilocos
was exterminated in the name of democracy. We concluded that the use of the
atomic bomb on Japanese civilians during World War II evidenced the racist
attitudes of military officials and policy makers toward the entire race.
In ‘‘The New Anak’’ (1975), Sam Tagatac writes of a Filipino American
soldier in Vietnam who thinks of the land of his birth and his countrymen when
he sees the tropical sun and rains, the distant hills, and the peasants with their
water buffaloes as they are strafed by American bombers:
I remember the light of that lagoon, the mythical sound of the flying dragon,
spitting fire, one pass, one strafing gun across water for what is water from the
sight of the gods, the crosshair splitting in the forming of a real image, so distant
the face of . . . your face, my face. 34
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In Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, 35
the Chinese American brother is
haunted by nightmares of himself as a soldier in the rescuing army, walking
among enemy corpses.
Laundry tubs drain beneath the bodies. The live women and children on the
ironing tables, the last captured, are being dissected. He takes up the sword and
hacks into the enemy, slicing them; they come apart in rings and rolls. . . . When he
stops, he finds that he has cut up the victims too, who were his own relatives. The
faces of the strung-up people are also those of his own family. Chinese faces,
Chinese eyes, noses, and cheekbones. 36
Dedicating her poems to dead heroes of Latin America and Africa like Orlando
Letelier and Steven Biko, sansei poet Janice Mirikitani reflects on the connec- tions between the wars waged by the US in the Third World, the bombing of
Japan, and the internment of Japanese Americans.
if you’re too dark
they will kill you
if you’re too swift
they will buy you
if you’re too beautiful
they will rape you
watch with eyes open
speak darkly
turn your head like the owl
behind you 37
Restoring the Foundations
Recognizing our kinship with others who struggle against domination, we must
also claim our own identity as Americans. Asian American writers must piece
together and sort out the meaning of our past, distorted and omitted by racism,
from shreds of stories heard in childhood or from faded photographs that have
never been explained. In Wing Tek Lum’s ‘‘A Picture of My Mother’s Family’’
(1974), the poet searches for the significance of each detail of an old photograph:
he must try to make the story of his half-forgotten ancestors relevant to himself.
Like many Asian Americans, he does not even know their names, where they
were born, or anything about their childhood in a distant land. The photograph
is tantalizingly unrevealing.
It is perhaps morning, the coolness
captured now in such clear light; they seem
somehow illuminated by beams from the moon,
. . . my grandfather . . .
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looks on . . .
towards his right far away. I imagine a dark rose
has caught his proud eye, though I do not know
if such flowers have ever grown there. 38
Taking up as their task the restoration of the foundations of Asian American
history in the US, contemporary writers are locating, translating, and publishing
work by previously little-known writers in their native languages, literature that
illuminates our American roots. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910–1940 (1980) is an anthology of poetry carved in Chinese by unknown immigrants on the walls of the Angel Island Detention Center bar-
racks. They give voice to the spirit of our forebears:
How many people ever return from battles?
. . . . .
Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my
sword, I came to America.
Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving
here?
If there comes a day when I will have attained by ambition and
become successful
I will certainly behead the barbarians and spare
not a single blade of grass.
Don’t say that everything within is
Western styled.
Even it if is built of jade, it has turned into a cage. 39
By penetrating and occupying the consciousness of his shadowy ancestors,
Lawrence Yep contributes to the effort to repair the foundations of the Asian
American heritage in Dragonwings, 40
a historical novel about nineteenth-century
Chinese in America who invented a biplane. Rewriting our history from an
Asian American perspective has brought to light new cultural heroes. The two
characters in David Henry Hwang’s play, ‘‘The Dance and the Railroad,’’ 41
are
Chinese railroad workers in the 1867 strike. Many contemporary Japanese
American writers focus on the internment. In ‘‘Family Album for Charlotte
Davis,’’ Lonnie Kaneko searches for the meaning of the word ‘‘Minidoka’’ only
to discover that the name of that desert camp means water.
Yesterday Charlotte asked, ‘You mean there is still
a bitterness?’ Something wormed its way through my blood
Snake. Water. Earth. ‘It is a thirst,’ I say. 42
Sensitive to the foreboding certainty that the elderly and their life experiences
will vanish before they can be understood and appreciated, Asian American
writers portray the old with a sense of urgency. Bienvenido N. Santos, himself a
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Filipino expatriate who has lived in the United States since the declaration of
martial law in the Philippines, says that his attention continually returns to the
Filipino manongs who are the unsung heroes of American labor.
. . . old timers among our countrymen who sat out the evening of their lives before
television sets in condemned buildings. . . . Then the grin in both story and writer
kept getting twisted in a grimace of pain close to tears. . . . now I realize that
perhaps I have also been writing about myself.
The preservation of the oldtimers’ tales is important to the young because
through the ‘‘transmission of grief from father to son we realize that it is the
son who is singing and leading the dance in the end.’’ 43
Claiming America requires reconciliation with our fathers and forefathers in
this country, Shawn Hsu Wong’s short novel Homebase opens with a garden book reference to a Chinese tree planted a century ago in California gold
country: ‘‘Often condemned as a weed tree . . . it must be praised for its ability
to create beauty and shade under adverse conditions.’’ 44
The narrator is haunted
by the ghosts of the men of his great-grandfather’s generation, men who built
the railroads over the High Sierras, setting down roots deep in the earth like
sharp talons clinging close to the heart of the land. He imagines letters his great-
grandfather might have written home to China: ‘‘I do not want the seasons to
run over my back, letting the days and night, the weather ride me, break me.
I will find a piece of land to work where I can remain . . . and watch the seasons
ease on that place, root down in this difficult soil, and nurture my land.’’ 45
But
the Chinese were ‘‘motherless and wifeless . . . in a country that hated [them].’’
They worked their way from the hinterland to the ocean’s edge; Rainsford
imagines that they tried to swim home to China and that the desert sands and
the white surf are made of their bones, bleached by the sea and sun. Rainsford
has been an orphan, living on the fringes of America, speaking Chinese or
English like a ventriloquist’s dummy through the grimace of clenched teeth.
He dreams of traveling across the country with a patronizing, whining, ‘‘cheer-
leader-teaser’’ white girl who is the ‘‘shadow, the white ghost of all my love
life . . . the dream of my capture of America . . . she tells me things about me that
I am not . . . that I am the product of the richest and oldest culture in the history
of the world . . . when in fact I have nothing of my own in America.’’ 46
When
Rainsford finally rejects her ‘‘love,’’ she becomes irritated and tells him to go
back where he came from. Driving on in the dark night, he sees his grandfather
in the mountain fog and smells his clothes in the redwood trees as he travels
through the canyons and cascades where his forefathers once worked and are
buried. An American Indian tells him that he must find out where his people
have been and see the town after which he is named, so that he can claim his
home, his history, and the legacy of his forefathers. By reaffirming the love that
connects his life to the lives of his father and forefathers, and thus his links to
Chinese America, he can affirm his American identity: ‘‘[I]dentity is a word full
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of home. Identity is a word that whispers, not whispers, but GETS you to say,
‘ever, ever yours. . . . ’ Dear Father, I say, I write, I sing, I give you my love, this
is a letter, whispering those words, ‘ever, ever yours.’ ’’
Immigrant fathers and American roots are brought together in Maxine
Hong Kingston’s China Men. Arriving in five different ways, by way of Cuba, Angel Island, or Ellis Island, the father is the ‘‘legal’’ and the ‘‘illegal’’
immigrant, the ‘‘father from China’’ and the ‘‘American father.’’ By
‘‘banding the nation north and south, east and west’’ with the transcontin-
ental railroad, these fathers have established their legitimacy as the ‘‘binding
and building ancestors of this place.’’ 47
Their spirits unbroken by the
treatment they face in America, they remain, planting trees that will take
years to bear fruit. Each China man claims America in his own way: by
bringing his wife, by buying a house here, by insisting that a Chinese
explorer discovered America first. The narrator’s ‘‘American father’’ has
‘‘the power of . . . making places belong to him.’’ 48
He claims America by
donning Fred Astaire clothing and admiring himself in hubcap reflections
along Fifth Avenue in New York City.
For Kingston’s China men, claiming America is an aggressive act; it means
refusing to be broken. Although he is worked like an animal on the sugar
plantations of Hawaii, Bak Goong seethes with rebellion and a burning desire
to break the silence imposed by labor foremen. He camouflages his talk in curses
coughed at his oppressors, avenging himself with a sword forged of his words as
he sings to his fellow workers:
‘‘If that demon whips me, I’ll catch the whip and yank him off his horse, crack his
head like a coconut. In an emergency a human being can do miracles – fly, swim,
lift mountains, throw them. Oh, a man is capable of great feats of speed and
strength.’’ 49
Gender Perspectives
Claiming America also means gender reconciliation. Racism has created a
haunting distance between men and women in our literature and culture.
Certainly the absence of significant female characters in Asian American
men’s writing reflects the harsh realities of the bachelor life created by exclusion
and anti-miscegenation laws. Carlos Bulosan, for example, wrote at a time when
Filipino men outnumbered women in some American cities by as many as forty-
seven to one. The inscription in American popular culture of Asian men as
sexless automatons is complemented by the popular view of Asian women as
only sexual beings, which helps explain the phenomenal success of Singapore
Airlines, the enormous demand for X-rated films featuring Asian women in
bondage, the demand for ‘‘oriental’’ bath house workers in US cities, and the
booming business in mail order marriages. There is no doubt that the rift
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between Asian American men and women caused by racism is reflected in our
literature. We can detect, however, an intense yearning for reconciliation. The
narrator in Wakako Yamauchi’s ‘‘That was all’’ (1980) is haunted by her vision
of the slim brown body and mocking eyes of a man she sees only in a fleeting
dream as an aging woman. 50
In ‘‘The Boatmen on Toneh River’’ (1974), the
narrator is ‘‘swept against the smooth brown cheeks of a black-haired youth
. . . and into his billowing shirt’’ only in death. 51
There are no lovers among
Kingston’s China Men. But perhaps a mending of the rift is at hand: the narrator in Shawn Hsu Wong’s Homebase dreams of the woman he loves: ‘‘she is the summit I must return to in the end.’’
52 In David Henry Hwang’s
‘‘FOB,’’ 53
it is not only the gap between the immigrant and American-born
Chinese that is bridged; the legendary woman warrior Fa Mu Lan teaches
Gwan Kung, god of warriors and writers, how to survive in America, and
Grace goes off with Steve, the immigrant, at the end of the play. With her,
he can claim a new American identity.
It goes almost without saying that homophobia and heterosexism in Asian
American and American culture repressed the expression of homosociality in
Asian American literature. We can only imagine the gender diversity that must
have flourished in the ‘‘bachelor’’ communities.
Community
Without the reconciliation of the self to the community we cannot invent
ourselves. This ‘‘community’’ begins with but extends beyond the boundaries
of our families, far beyond Chinatown to wherever resistance to domination is
taking place. While the narrator in The Woman Warrior has to ‘‘get out of hating range’’
54 of a community that hates women, that community is the curse and
blessing of her life. The escape into the ‘‘American-normal’’ world gives her a
new, antiseptic way of seeing things, but it has diminished her. Now when she
peeks into the basement window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing
like a bottle imp, she no longer sees a spirit in a skirt made of light; instead,
concrete pours out of her mouth to cover forests with freeways and sidewalks,
replacing the vibrant world she left with plastics, periodical tables, and ‘‘TV
dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots.’’ 55
It is not the colorless world she seeks refuge in that has taught her who her
enemies are, the ‘‘stupid racists’’ and ‘‘tyrants who for whatever reason can deny
my family food and work.’’ These are easily recognizable, ‘‘each boss two feet
taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye . . . if I took a sword, which my
hate must surely have forged out of the air, and gutted [him], I would put color
and wrinkles into his shirt.’’ 56
She has temporarily traded the glorious identity
of Fa Mu Lan, who could be both woman warrior and model of filial piety, for a
‘‘slum grubby’’ American reality. All she can do in America is get straight As
and become a clerk-typist. The question is whether or not her heritage and the
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tradition of Fa Mu Lan can serve her here. Although she has left the immigrant
community, she longs to return:
The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the
resemblance so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words
at our backs. . . . And I have so many words – ‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too –
that they do not fit on my skin. 57
If we read Cathy Song’s poetry as Asian Americans, we can see that the most
effective poems in Picture Bride 58
are not the ones replete with images of jade
and sour plums or that compare children to dumplings wrapped in wonton skins
or describe a girl’s cheeks as being like tofu, but the ones that explore the
relationship between the persona and her family, from whom she ventures forth
and with whom she is eventually reconciled. The volume as a whole traces the
strength of kin communion and the ties between the generations. The narrator-
character dreams of freedom from the constricted world of her mother, whose
vision is limited like that of a seamstress to the piece of cloth she is working on at
the moment beneath her fingers. The older woman sleeps in ‘‘tight blankets’’
and catches strands of her daughter’s braids in her gold ring. But after the
narrator moves across a series of landscapes that carry her ever further away
from her family, she comes to rest finally at her mother’s feet.
It has taken me all these years
to realize that this is what I must do
to recognize my life.
When I stretch a canvas
to paint the clouds,
it is your spine that declares itself:
arching,
your arms stemming out like tender shoots
to hang sheets in the sky. 59
This is not an urge to disappear into the ocean of American society. This is a
reaffirmation of our invention of ourselves. In Dangerous Music (1975), Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn’s America is the ‘‘loneliest of countries,’’ where the Filipino
immigrant can lose her sanity and forget who she is among bottles of foot
deodorant, mouthwash, and vaginal spray, where she can die a ‘‘natural
death’’ encased in Saran Wrap on the beach. She must ‘‘stay crazy all the time’’
with songs inside
knifing the air of sorrow
with our dance
a carnival of spirits
shredded blossoms
in the water 60
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The opacity of Asian American writing is also that it is opaque is the source of its
strength and vision. What Asian American writers express is the desire to remain
as ‘‘others’’ by defining our own ‘‘otherness,’’ not as foreigners but as American
‘‘others.’’ Our claim on America, then, is part of our resistance to domination.
Notes
1 ‘‘Dear Abby,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, 28 April 1986.
2 New York Tribune, 22 November 1925.
3 Lady Hosie, ‘‘A Voice From Korea,’’ Saturday Review of Literature, 4 April 1931, 707.
4 Pardee Lowe, Father and Glorious Descendant (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1943), book
jacket.
5 Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper and Row, 1950).
6 Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (San Francisco: San
Francisco Book Company/Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
7 Saturday Review World, 6 November 1973; Library Journal, 1 November 1973, 3257.
8 Daniel Okimoto, American in Disguise (New York: Walker-Weatherhill, 1971).
9 Phoebe Adams, ‘‘Short Reviews: Books,’’ Atlantic Monthly 227, no. 4 (April 1971), 104.
10 J. J. Conlin, Best-Seller 31, no. 9 (1 April 1971).
11 Okimoto, American in Disguise, 206.
12 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).
13 Publisher’s Weekly 212 (September 1976): 72.
14 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 222–3.
15 Jane Kramer, ‘‘On Being Chinese in China and America,’’ New York Times Book Review,
7 November 1976, 19.
16 Michael Malloy, ‘‘ ‘The Woman Warrior’: On Growing Up Chinese, Female, and Bitter,’’
National Observer, 9 October 1976, 25.
17 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 35.
18 Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (New York: John Day Co., 1937).
19 Chan Wing-Tsit, ‘‘Lin Yutang, Critic and Interpreter,’’ College English 8(4) (January 1947):
163–4.
20 Younghill Kang, East Goes West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937).
21 Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1946 and
1973).
22 Ibid., 188–9.
23 Wendy Law-Yone, The Coffin Tree (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
24 Louis Chu, Eat A Bowl of Tea (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961).
25 Interview, Louis Chu, 7 December 1979.
26 John Okada, No-No Boy (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957).
27 Milton Murayama, All I Asking For Is My Body (San Francisco: Supa Press, 1959, 1968,
1975).
28 Interview, Milton Murayama, 7 December 1979.
29 ‘‘The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,’’ Kenyon Review 12 (1) (Winter 1950): 99–115; ‘‘Yoneko’s
Earthquake,’’ Furioso 6 (1) (Winter 1951): 5–16; ‘‘Las Vegas Charley,’’ Arizona Quarterly 4
(Winter 1961): 303–22; ‘‘The Brown House,’’ Harper’s Bazaar 2879 (October 1951): 166;
283–4 and in Asian American Authors, ed. Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972), 114–22; ‘‘Seventeen Syllables,’’ Partisan Review 16 (7–12)
(July–December 1949): 1122–1134 and in Ethnic American Short Stories, ed. Katharine
D. Newman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1975), 89–103.
Asian American Realities through Literature
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30 Ronald Tanaka, ‘‘Appendix to Executive Order,’’ Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology
(San Francisco: Japanese American Anthology Committee, 1980), 240.
31 Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1981).
32 Nikki Bridges, ‘‘Conversations and Convergences,’’ Asian American Women Writers’ Panel,
Occidental College, January 1978, 16.
33 Alfred Robles, Untitled Poem, Aion 1 (2) (Fall 1971): 81 (Asian American Publications) (ed.
Janice Mirikitani).
34 Sam Tagatac, ‘‘The New Anak,’’ in Aiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed.
Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong (Washington,
DC: Howard University Press, 1974), 248.
35 Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1980).
36 Ibid., 291.
37 Janice Mirikitani, ‘‘Japs,’’ Awake in the River (San Francisco: Isthmus Press, 1978).
38 Wing Tek Lum, ‘‘A Picture of My Mother’s Family,’’ Yardbird Reader, vol. 3, ed. Frank
Chin and Shawn Hsu Wong (Berkeley: Yardbird Publishing Company, 1974), 141.
39 Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, eds, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese
Immigrants on Angel Island 1910–1940 (San Francisco: Chinese Culture Center Hoc Doi
Project, 1980), 84–5, 134–5.
40 Lawrence Yep, Dragonwings (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
41 David Henry Hwang, Broken Promises: Four Plays By David Henry Hwang (New York: Avon
Books, 1983).
42 Lonnie Kaneko, ‘‘Family Album for Charlotte Davis,’’ Amerasia Journal 3(1) (Summer
1975): 135.
43 Bienvenido N. Santos, ‘‘Preface,’’ Scent of Apples (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1979), xx; ‘‘The Filipino as Exile,’’ Greenfield Review 6 (1–2) (Spring 1977): 51.
44 Shawn Hsu Wong, Homebase (New York: I. Reed Books, 1979), 1.
45 Ibid., 27.
46 Ibid., 31–2.
47 Kingston, China Men, 146.
48 Ibid., 238.
49 Ibid., 101.
50 Wakako Yamauchi, ‘‘That Was All,’’ Amerasia Journal 7 (1) (Spring 1980): 115–20.
51 Wakako Yamauchi, ‘‘The Boatmen on Toneh River,’’ Counterpoint: Critical Perspectives on
Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1976),
533.
52 Wong, Homebase, 79.
53 David Henry Hwang, ‘‘FOB,’’ in Broken Promises.
54 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 62.
55 Ibid., 237.
56 Ibid., 58.
57 Ibid., 62–3.
58 Cathy Song, Picture Bride (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983).
59 Ibid., 48.
60 Jessica Hagedorn, ‘‘Something About You,’’ Dangerous Music (San Francisco: Momo’s Press,
1975).
Elaine H. Kim
Ono/Companion to Asian American Studies Final Proof 23.9.2004 5:40pm page 214
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Ono, Kent A., ed. 2004. <i>A Companion to Asian American Studies</i>. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Accessed May 10, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from sfsu on 2021-05-10 10:03:28.
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