'Journalistic representations of Asian Americans and literary responses, 1910-1920'

Evolutionist racism:
▪ Collier ran two pieces, one heralding the 'arrival of Japan' as 'nothing less than the miraculous creation of another Western power' and the other entitled 'The Awakening of China.' The language of both articles draws a time-line of evolution, where having 'arrived' or being on time (Japan) means Westernizzation, and where being late signals backwardness and stagnation.
▪ Socialist exclusion of Asiatic labor from its ranks -- because Asiatics 'were so far behing the peoples of Europe in the plan of evolution that they were not readily assimilable.' The party's appeal to 'evolutionary development,' though seemingly focused on progress and change, denied its subjects any potential for growth. Asiatic peoples could not develop class consciousness precisely because of the limits of their assigned stage of development. Clearly, the argument acts as a strategy of containment, which masks its purpose in pseudoscientific language.
▪ This evolutionary discourse that slotted Asian nations into developmental stages also amassed all Asians into a near-primate stage, with only the Anglo-American as the fully developed human. Other races remainde either 'anthropoid apes' or 'children' who needed to be 'spanked regularly.'

Perceived as a mass of undifferentiated peoples, homogeinty:
▪ The editorials of this era often conflated a single Asian nation with 'the East in general,' reflecting a propensity to see Asian nations as a political bloc and pointing to the way in which journalistic prose applied the 'character' of any of one Asian nation to all Asian nations.
▪ 'The yellow peril' during this decade served as a general reference to all Asiatic peoples and their perceived threat to Americna labor and real-estate markets.
▪ This tendency to lump all Asians under one racial category enabled various journalists to take single instances of culturally 'foreign' behavior and apply them to another national group so as to compile an amalgamated image of 'the Asian race' (which functioned less as a physiological category than as a discursive trope for the other).

McFarlane's article 'Japan in California':
▪ 'Unclear' becomes synonymous with noncomformity to American tastes in home decoratoin and husbandry (McFarlane's article 'Japan in California'). --> non-conformism, different cultural understandings.
▪ He called the aspirations of the Japanese 'sordid' because they 'are not our ambitions . . . Not our satisfactions, with morals that to us are no morals . . . ' In McFarlane's rhetoric, 'sordid' simply translates into 'not like us.' one sees the discourse of 'uncleanliness' appropriating scientific terminology in order to make 'cultural difference' a dirty word.
▪ This focus on the supposed unhygienic nature of the Japanese appeals to the racist fear of infection. Portayals of Asians as carriers of disease.

Othering, unknowability:
▪ The journals furthered the stereotype of Asians as 'stoic' and 'inscrtable.' Because of the American emphasis on emotional display, 'inscrutability' became almost a criminal trate - evidence of inhumanity.
▪ A picture of an infected person --> the caption transformed the observer's inability to read someone's facial expression into a projected fault of the observed.
▪ This 'inscrutable' laber also bespeaks an uneasiness with the implicit limits to which Asians can be 'known' (placed in familiar categories) and then assimilated (adjusted socially and politically so as to develop not only familiarity but similarity).
▪ Although the ostensible object of orientalist studies is to create a verifiable body of knowledge about the East, its underlying objective is to secure boundaries for the West, precisely by delimiting what the West is not. Having set up ontological boundaries between East and West (defining the East essenetially as 'not us'), the magazines' orientalist discourse rationalized diverse - even contradictory - poltical, economic, and social policies toward Asians. On the one hand, the 'not us' definition allowed Amreicans to ignore their brotherly duties toward Asian immigrants in their midst; on the other hand, it dissociated the Filipino cry for independence from a similar American one in 1776, thereby permitting US retention of the Philippines as a colonial possession. In the end, the 'not us' association led to a driving out of Asian Americans at home and an Americanizing of Asians abroad.

Asians, Asianness as a commodity:
▪ Magazines felt no sense of incongruity in circulating ads that promoted desire for a commodified Asiatic body yet printing articles and editorials that voiced loathing for Asian peoples.
▪ While negative images of the Orient encouraged an American readership to be wary of Asian peoples, the commodification of the Orient into a saleable product abated this sense of vulnerability promoted in editorial copy. By purchasing the product (or employing an 'Oriental' houseboy), an American consumer could figuratively 'own' a part of the East, thereby defusing its threat. Packaging the Asian as a commodity enacts a 'domestication of the exotic,' as Said phrases it, wherein the previously unknown becomes familiarized by its identification with a previous experience (e.g. Talcum powder, varnish).
▪ Negative portraits of the Orient, rather than discouraging purchase, might fuel the popularity of Asiatic goods. Thus, fear of Asians promoted by journalistic copy resulted not only in vociferous protest against social integration with Asians but also in readerly pleasure at seeing and consuming Asiatic commodities.

Literary responses:
▪ Overlapping these praactices in the popular press were literary representations of Asians that rpelicated, critically as well as uncritically, the various types of Asian portraiture circulating in these magazines. They provide a window onto the literary trade that often reinforced images of Asians as recalcitrant children needing punishment, but in rare instances countered the notion of Asians as inscrutable aliens.

The Riddle of China, Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu-Manchu:
▪ A blurring of fact and fiction. While certain narratives are revealed during the course of the detective story as unreliable discourses, others, though cerrtainly as highly constructed, become privileged as 'facts.' the investigators must sort through a mass of sensory data to separate fact (cerifiable events) from fiction (false leads). On one level, then, the episode is about the process of detection itself, teaching the audience how to read - decipher - the mysterious East.
▪ The stories only pretend to seek answers to the 'riddle of China.' Under such pretense they intensify the puzzling and 'inscrutable' characterizaiton of the Chinese and their exemplar, Fu-Manchu.
▪ The success of Smith and Petrie's investigation reinforces the notion of 'clean British efficiency' reasoning through the sneaky ways of the Chinese. Theirs is an ideological, Western 'science' that eradicated symptoms of Eastern 'supersition.'
▪ Rohmer's books helped eto justify the many violences in USA directed toward Asians (economic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, physical assault, social segregation, and exclusion from immigration) by framing that violence as a necessary means to preserve the integrity of Western character.

Western Professors and Japanese Pupils in Onoto Watanna's Tama:
▪ Whereas Rohmer's pieces advocate domestic exclusion of Asians, Watanna's romance Tama (1910) portrays the Japanese as children who learn well the stern lesson of the West. Onoto Watanna actually a child of British parents, born in China (?), he reinvented herself as a Japanese noblewoman.
▪ Though exploiting exotic stereotypes of the East, Tama nevertheless broaches issues of colonization, Japanese-American relations, and interracial intimacy. The village of Fukui during the earliest stages of Meiji restoration (c. 1868) provides a microcosm for the intrusion of Western force, power, and value systems on a isolationist Japan. Supporting Western 'enlightenment,' Watanna portrays the American professor as opening this small province to Western science and reason. The professor uses Tama, the mysterious, blind fox-woman, to teach his imperialist lesson.
▪ Tojin-san implies that the Japanese people's arrested development is manifest in their 'childish' legends. His attack on indigenous folkore and cultural belife comprises the first step of his lesson plan.
▪ The narrator not only naturalizes the West's imperialist incursions as 'the order of things,' but also makes clear that the ex-samurai warrior's discontent born of unemployment lies at their own feet for being 'too proud.' only those who humbly concede to the wisdom of the Western father will succeed in this new 'order of things.'
▪ Throughout the narrative, Watanna manipulates the interest generated by her romance plot to undermine potential critiques of imperialism. Having portrayed the American 'cure' for Japanese ignorance, the narrator displays the Japanese people's gratitude.

Paz Marquez Benitez and Pastoral Resistance:
▪ In contrast to Watanna's fiction of Japanese gratitude for Western tutelage, Paz Marquezz Benitez, herself a colonial subject, pens a more subdued and allegorical response to Americanization. Benitez was tangibly affected by the composite image of Asians as less-developed, diseased, and unknowable, because this image justified American's initial retention of the Philippines and policy of 'benevolent assimilation.' Her stories of disillusionment in the contex of Filipino thwarted independence and the people's loss of political idealism when forced to settle for American tutelage.
▪ 'Dead Starts' - the protagonist Alfredo Salazar who has to choose between two women, Julia and Esperanza, Julia being the less Westernized Filipina, comes from Laguna (which symolizes the dream of independence). Because Philippine locales (cities, plantations, formerly remote hills) were rapidly being transformed in accordance with the new American policy of infrastructural development, the fictional space of Julia's timeless town emerges as the oinly site uncorrupted by foreign influence. --> narrative reliance upon the pastoral, wherein the writer looks 'back to a happier place, to a lost "organic" moment.'
▪ Benitez's use of the pastoral and her themes of lost youth and lost authenticity remain literary metaphors for cultural alienation, a product of American colonial practices. She glosses over colonial specificity by tracing her characters' sense of cultural loss to an innate aspect of the human condition.

'Its Wavering Image': Sui Sin Far's Reflecitons on Journalistic Reflections:
▪ Of the four authors examines, she wrote most directly about the problems of journalistic intrusion, biculturalism, production of knowledge, and commerce in exotica.
▪ 'Its Wavering Image' (1912) - critiques the circulation of 'knowledge' about Asian immigrants in the press. A 'Eurasian' woman falls in love wiwth a white journalist. Sui uses this narrative to tackle the issue of how to write about Asians without exposing them to a critical white gaze.
▪ Carson's professional mission (finding a story about Chinatown) soon turns personal. He teaches his unknowing informants, Pan, a lesson about assimilation to white ideals and the problems of interracial romance in the present society.
▪ He insists that she has to choose whether she is Chinese or white, later that she is white. In addition to proclaiming Pan's racial difference from the Asian community, he attempts to distinguish her 'real self' from he rpresumably daily self that communes with the Chinese. Appealing to notions of higher, educated life, he implicitly associates this intellectual life with Western culture and learning.
▪ Carson accomplishes his discursive exploitation first by educating Pan, or assimilating her to his beliefs and his loyalty, second by plunderin gher for information, and third by exporting and trading on her as a (re)source. These phases mimic the process of colonization and highlight how cultural assimilation through 'education' acts as a first step to knowledge production and trade. Furthermore, the colonization metaphor underscores the way in which orientalist discourse, whether in journals or novels, acts in conjunction with the 'sword' to further the exploitation of less powerful peoples.

• 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, 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.

Thematic concerns:
▪ Loss of homeland
▪ Uses of memory and indigenous folklore as sustaining mechanisms in alien environments
▪ Reconciliation
▪ Hope in creating new spaces of belonging.

Earlier writers/hyphenated identities:
▪ Zulfikar Ghose - is from pre-Partition India and Pakistan, lived in Britain from 1952-69 and then moved to the US. Issues of rootlessness, migrations, and identity formations, a sense of not belonging to any one place. The Loss of India (1964) - encapsulates enormous personal despair, loss, and rejection.
▪ A. K. Ramanujan - India-born poet, scholar, and translator. The value of the oral tradition in the Indian context. 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. His 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. Speaking of Siva (1973).
▪ Himani Bannerjee - was born in what is now Bangladesh but was then still part of pre-Partition India. A poet and engaged theorist about issues of race and multiculturalism in the Canadian context. Volumes of poetry: A Separate Sky (1982) and Doing Time (1986). '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.'
▪ Indo-Canadian writers: Saros Cowasjee, Rohinton Mistry, Uma Paramswaran (play Rootless But Green Are the Boulevard Trees [1985]). Indo-Trinidadian-American Ismith Khan. Indo-Guyanese-Canadian Frank Birbalsingh, and Cyril Dabydeen. Sri Lankan Canadian writers Rienzi Crusz and Michael Ondaatje.

Ethnic identities and transforming geographies:
▪ The simultaneity of geography - 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. 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.
▪ 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.
▪ Matters of 'choice' in terms of location often turn out to be necessitated by the geopolitical and geoeconomic realities of the world today. Geoeconomic national borders are redrawn under financial dictates of bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank in a capitalism 'new world order' that has unleashed 'all kinds of satanic geographies on the third world.' as capital travels and establishes new controls over physical soaces, its effects pervade silently into the bodies of vast populations. Forced relocations are part of a contemporary geography drearily full of dry statistics taht must be humanized.

Identities defined and defied by locales:
▪ Agha Sahid Ali - a poet. 'Triple exile' from Kashmir to New Delhi, and then to the Unites States, traces a journey of loss that has been extremely enabling in his creative universe. His poems explore and contain the anguish of displacement and exile through memories, history, and the Urdu poetic tradition. Along with nurturing, 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.
▪ Sara Sureli - from Pakistan. Meatless Days (1989) - autobiographical narrative; 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.

Meena Alexander:
▪ Born in India, was taken to Sudan when 5, since 1980 has lived in NY.
▪ Her 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 affets so many ordinary people.
▪ She explores th eneed 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.
▪ Nampally Road (1991), Manhattan Music (1997), memoir Fault Lines (1993).

Ethnicities celebrates or erased in terms of locations:
▪ Sakhi - an 'activist' group which deals with Souath Asian women and domestic violence. 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.
▪ 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.
▪ 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.

Bharati Mukherjee
▪ Mukherjee's adoption of an immigrant as opposed to an expatriate identity has been profoundly enabling for her writing.
§ Her 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 religious and social code, equipped with a English-language education. Also - disillusionments with marriage and struggle between identities as defined within their upper-class home environments in Calcutta, and their movements into an impersonal USA where they must face loneliness and redefinitions of their ethnicities.
§ Jasmine (1989) - her village protagonist leaves behindd the stranglehold of traditional customs and embraces the myth of becoming an individualistic American, prepared to forge her own poath and destroy what stands in her way.
§ Mukherjee's upper-class background and the classist and elitist tone she adopts toward her characters. She overtly endorses the melting-pot 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 US.

Several distinctly identifiable groups:
▪ Foreign students and political exiles who came to the US between the early part of the century and the mid-1960s
▪ Children and grandchildren of immigrants to Hawai'i between 1903 and 1905, when sugar planters launches an intense though short-lived campaign to recruit Korean plantation labor
▪ Children of immigrant farm and cannery workers in California and on the Pacific Coast in the early decades of this century
▪ Children of the post-1968 immigrants, whose presence in the US was made possible by changes in US immigraiton quotas in 1965.

History:
▪ Historically, Korean Americans, like other Asian Americans, were materially and discursively excluded form the mainstream of US American life, denied subjectivity, and defined according to the degree of threat they were thought to pose to the dominant culture at particular points in time.
▪ The earliest Korean American writing emerged from the contex of a century and a half of persistent and deeply rooted racist inscriptions of Asians in both official and mass culture as grotesquely alien 'others.' Pressed to demonstrate the falseness of these representations, early Korean and other Asian American writers often attepted to present the 'true story,' sometimes by shoing ho Asian Americans could become successfully 'Westernized' or 'Americanized.' For writers who had to fight even to establish themselves as discursive subjects, dealing with subtleties, hybridities, paradoxed, and layers must have seemed impossibly luxurious.
▪ The double impact of US racial discrimination and Japan's colonization of Korea effectively limited the growth of Korean American communities for six decades. Political and economic development of Korean American communities was also impeded by the 'double colonization' of Korean immigrants, who could not look to their homeland as a source of merchandise for trade or for diplomatic assistance as other immigrants in the US traditionally did, with carying degrees of success.

Immigrant writers (born in Korea?):
▪ The early Korean American literary voice is largely autobiographical and speaks primarily from the perspectives of members of an elite class of education, nonlaboring immigrants.
▪ Younghill Kang (1903-72) - he came to represent Korean and Koreans to Western readers, for whom he was both purveyor of the unfamiliar in terms of a faraway Oriental nation and reinforces of the familiar in terms of popular notions about backward peoples yearning for the light of the West.
§ The Grass Roof (1931).
§ East Goes West (1937) - presents an unflattering vie of the underside of US life from the perspectives of people locked out by the color bar. Stories of rejection, brutality, loneliness, and hunger; subjects - Korean exiles in the 1920s and 30s, their work, aspiration and absolute exclusion from American social and intellectual life.. Kang satirizes both the misguided optimist and naivete of his characters and the arrogance and ignorance of the Americans who reject them. The book calls into question US American nationalist narratives of progress, equality, assimilation, and upward mobility.
▪ Richard E(un Kook) Kim - The Martyred (1964) - explores the human conscience and the meanings of evil, suffering, and truth. The Innocent (1968) - focuses on events surrounding a military coup d'etat in South Korea; the characters are all male army officers who learn the dangers of soft-hearted emotionalism and discover that at times one is forced to do evil deeds in order to be truly moral. Lost Names (1970) - Japanese occupation of Korea, emphasis on the anti-Japanese activities of son and father.
▪ Ty (T'ae Young) Pak - Guilt Payment (1983) - collection of short stories. Mostly male-centered war and adventure stories.
▪ Sook Nyul Choi - her characters are women who are able successfully to survive the privations of foreign occupation and the turbulence of war without husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, from whom they are separated by political upheaval and war. In both novels USA is seen as a promise or a promised land.
§ Year of Impossible Goodbyes (1991) - set in northern Korea near the end of WWII; then Russian and Korean Communists after the war.
§ Echoes of the White Giraffe (1993) - refugee life and young love are depicted from a teenage girl's point of view. Sookan is compelled to leave because she understands too well the limitations facing her and other women in Korean society, even though they exhibit extraordinary courage and strength during times of political upheaval.

Second-generation women writers:
▪ The daughters of early, mostly working-class Korean immigrants in Hawai'i and on the mainland began to imagine in the 90s their parents' lives in fictional and nonfictional accounts as well as in oral histories collected by researchers. The promised land hoped for in Choi's novels is not what these second-generation Korean American women writers imagine.
▪ Margaret K. Pai's The Dreams of Two Yi-Min (immigrants) (1989) - traces five decades in the history of the author's family in Hawai'i. The book details the mother's participation in the movement for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule, the father's attempts to succeed in his own business, and the subtly strained relations between them as they struggle to establish their livelihood and raise their children in the adopted land.
▪ Mary Paik Lee's Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990) - autobiographical account of her and her family's life in USA, their search of a livelihood during time sof relentless poverty and race discrimination.
▪ Ronyoung Kim (Gloria Hahn): Clay Walls (1987) - a daughter's perspectives on her immigrant parents' changing and often conflicting notions about being Korean in California meant in the decades between the two world wars.

Emerging young Korean American writers of the 1990s:
▪ Though acutely conscious of the insinuation of their forebears' lives into their own, they were born after the war, and their work emerges from their hybridity, heterogeneity, and multiple positions as raced and gendered Korean American subjects in the West.
▪ Gary Pak (b. 1952) - born in Honolulu.
§ A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) - about an outspoken Korean immigrant union leader in Hawai'i at the turn of the century. Pak is not necessarily interested in Korean nationalism itself but rather bringing to the light the hidden, the forgotten, and the derogated, whether it be Asian labor leadership, Korean history, or the pidgin spoken in Hawai'i.
§ The Watcher of Waipuna (1992) - a collection of short stories. The characters belong to many different ethnic groups, not defined exclusively or even primarily by their ethnicity. The narratives are infused with reminders of Hawaii's blended 'talk-story' traditions, incorporating elements of the supernatural, spirited dialogues in pidgin, and vivid adventures told from a child's viewpoint. Sinister suggestions of atrocities wrought by racism and green, often seen opaquely by children.
▪ Cathy Song (b. 1955) - born in Honolulu. Poet. Picture Bride (1982). Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988). Song cherishes and writes about her Chinese and Korean heritage and her roots in Hawai'i, among other things.

Young woman writers of the 90s:
▪ Many of the daughters of these immigrants belong to what some Korean Americans call the '1,5 generation,' a term coined in the late 70s and early 80s to denote those who were born in Korea and speak Korean but were educated primarily in the US. Key elements for the younger writers is their experience of America, which involved the interplay of racial, ethnic, female, and colonial subjectivities.
▪ Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82) - DICTEE (1982) - a subversive book about a specific set of excluded experiences. It undermines popuarly accepted notions of genre and of history and questions common assumptions about time, place, origins, identity. By questioning the notion of progress from fragmentation to wholeness or from immigrant to citizen, Cha challenges the US nationalist narrative.
▪ Marie G. Lee (b. 1964) - addresses the issue of how young Korean American struggle to find a place for themselves in a society that is ignorant of their cultural roots. Finding My Voice (1992). If It Hadn't Been for Yoon Jun (1993). Saying Goodbye (1993).

Read broadly, the body of Japanese American literature can be interpreted as an ongoing construction of identity at numerous levels: individual, collective, political, and generatoinal. Throughout various historical periods, Janapese American authors have grappled with major issues of their times and in the process have examined the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality, often arriving at increasingly complex and sometimes antagonistic definitionst of Japanese American identity.

Generational identity has been central to 'nikkei,' the term used to refer to people of Japanese ancestry living in North and South America. Japanese Americans have developed distinct terms for each generation:
1) 'Issei' refers to immigrants ho arrived in Hawai'i and the US mainland between 1885-1924
2) 'Nisei' to second-generation Japanese Americans
3) 'Sansei' to the third generation.

History:
• After the imposition of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that barred immigration of Chinese labourers and after th eliftin gof internal Japanese edicts restricting emigration, young Japanese male laborers began settling in Hawai'i and the western US in 1885. initially an almost exclusively male population who worked in agricultural, mining, and railroad jobs, the Japanese in the US were the only Asian American community in the early 20th century to develop families. Federal laws prevented the immmigration of Chinese and Filipino women, but Japanese women were allowed into the country. Because of this, stable Japanese American communities formed in Hawai'i, California, Oregon, and Washington prior to WWI.
• Historical and political factors such as alien land laws prohibiting Japanese ownership of land and the 1921 Supreme Court decision in Ozawa v. U.S. denying Japanese naturalization rights contributed to a sense of generational identity among issei. The internment during WWII of over 110,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps affected the issei but perhaps had its most profound impact on the nisei, most of whom were born between 1910 and 1940 and were adolescents or young adults during the war years. Simultaneously influenced by their parents' Japanese values and the 'American' ideas of their peers, nisei negotiated between two cultures, but ultimately considered themselves Americans. Consequently, the mass internment raised fundamental questions for them regarding race relations and the definition of nationality.
• Although most sansei were not yet born at the time of internment, the event has marked the third generation physically mainly through the silence issei and nisei maintained about the complexities and traumas of the war years. Many sansei were also affected by the various social movements of the 60s and 70s and sought to recover the history of their parents and to shape a self-conscious Japanese American culture.


Issei writing in English:

• Although most issei were relatively well-educated, the demands of their daily lives left little time for them to master the English language, let alone time to write. Issei did, however, compose poems (haiku, tanka, and senryu) and other literary works, many of which appeared in Japanese-language newspapers in major cities in Hawai'i and along the West Coast.
• The few issei who did write in English are unique and do not reflect the concerns of the majority, who, for the most part, were plantation workers and small-business owners in Hawai'i, and farmers, small-business owners, or domestics on the West Coast.

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann - the most flamboyant of early Japanese American writers in English. Born of a German father and a Japanese mother, Hartmann was well known as an artist, art critic, writer, and aesthetician at the turn of the century. He introduced avant-garde European writers and artists as well as Japanese art and literature to American audiences. He may have been the first author to compose haiku in English. A noted figure in the Greenwich Village cultural milieu of the fin de siècle, he consciously cultivated an identity as the 'king of Bohemia' and influences many noted artists and writers of his time.

Etsu Sugimoto - four novels about life in Japan. First came to the American public's attention with the publication of her autobiographical novel, A Daughter of the Samurai (1925). Raised in the aristocratic class of Japan, she received a thorough education in the English language and Western culture. She saw herself as a cultural ambassador between Japan and the US, a role many nisei were to assume in the prewar years. Her novels present a romantic view of Japanese culture and customs that Sugimoto saw disappearing due to Japan's rapid modernization.

Bunichi Kagawa - wrestled with an identity as a Japanese American. He had the closest link with Japanese American communities and wrote poems that appeared in their newspapers. In the 1920s, he had immigrated to join his father in the Los Altos area of northern California. Hidden Flame (1930), a volume of poetry; the question of identity; the opening section of the book is titled 'Identity,' and the title poem conveys an austere sense of isolation and self-reflection that characterizes many of the other poems in the book.


Establishing and identity: prewar nisei writing:

• Beginning in the late 1920s, a number of nisei began writing poems and stories for the English-language section sof Japanese American newspapers on the West Coast. Iwao Kawakami - English-language editor of the newpaper The New World-Sun; he encouraged budding nisey literary talents by initiating a story and essay contest, from which a story and essya club among his young nisei readers developed.
• Influence of Western literary traditions. Other works by nisei - highly formal verse, extravagant love poems, murder mysteries, stories in which protagonists are indistinguishable from other Americans except for their Japanese names - reflect not only the popular literary forms of the period, but also a nisei desire to claim those traditions as their own.
• Nisei literature of the 30s and 40s also reveals the growing concern of the second generation about international tensions, domestic race relations, and self-awareness as a distinct ethnic group. Chiye Mori's 1932 poem 'Japanese American' was one of the first nisei works to explore explicitly the intersection between peresonal identity and international politics. She lays out in definite terms the frustration and politically precarious position of the nisei. The political critique of both the US and Japan was bold for a young nisei.
• Other nisei writers were interested in politics, particularly in cross-cultural relations within the US, and in building bridges between nisei and other American ethnic groups. A leading figure among thi group of nisei was Mary Oyama, who wrote in various forms for the Japanese American press all along the West Coast. She attepmted to forge a nisei identity as second-generation Americans. She looked to other ethnic Americans for models and corresponded with well-knwon writers of the time. She was a cofounder of the League of Nisei Artists and Writers.

Taro Katayama's short story 'Haru': Explores internal conflicts resulting from cultural rather than political tensions. Chronicles the emotional turmoil of a young nisei who agrees to an arranged marriage. Remakable for its psychological insight and control of style and plot. Katayama shows how economic, cultural, and pschological factors force the protagonists, Haru, to marry a man she finds repulsive.

Toshio Mori - perhaps the best-known Japanese American authors to prewar audiences.
§ Yokohama, California - a series of stories about the Japanese American inhabitants of a fictional town situated across the bay from San Fransisco in the late 30s. Mori focuses on the seemingly mundane and reveals the profound in daily life; the ways in which the smalles incidentals of daily life carry significant meaning.
§ He also portrays distinctive Japanese American characteristics. Stories dealing with issei refer back to a heritage in Japan. Even more subtly, Mori records Japanese American norms and cultural expressions.


Identity in question: Internment literature:

• The wholesale internment of over 110,000 nikkei without trial or hearing raised serious questions for Japanese Americans, especially the nisei. For some, it resulted in a fierce embracing of a thoroughly 'American' identity. For others, it led to bitter disillusionment over what were perceived to be the empty rhetorical promises of American equality and justice. Others fell between these two extremes, as Japanese Americans attempted to cope with the truamas of forced removal from their homes and internment in desolate camps scattered throughout the US.

Camp literature:
§ Mirrored the struggles of Japanese Americans during the era. Three camps published English-language magazines: Tulean Dispatch (Tule Lake, California), The Pen (Rowher, Arkansas), and Trek (Topaz, Utah).
§ Trek - each issue opens with a lead article on the state of camp life, followed by stories, poems, articles on the geography and history of the Topaz region, and a women's column entitled 'A la Mode.' each issue of the three one published reflects tensions between 'optimistic' and 'critical' perspectives. 'Optimistic' writing is characterized by admonitions not to be bitted and to believe in America. Because camp publications were censored by government authorities, overt criticism of the interment was rare. Consequently, writeres had to mask their criticisms.
§ Toyo Suyemoto - his wartimes poems as examples of 'resistance and critique embedded within the forms and diction of poems which appear apolotical' (Susan Schweik).


Identity in flux: postwar nisei literature:

• After being targets of intense racism and hostility, many nikkei were eager to blend in and not be noticed. In an effort to rebuild their lives, many sought to merge into the American mainstream, to forget about the traumas of internment, and in some cases to escape from nikkei communities and heritage.

• Perhaps because Japanese Americans in Hawai'i, for the most part, did not experience the traumas of internment and constituted a large portion of the islands' population, it might have been easier for Hawaiian to explore Japanese American history and identity in the immediate postwar years. Three novels written by Hawaiian nisei dealt with issei history and intergenerational issues:
§ Shelley Ota's Upon their Shoulder (1951) - focuses on the trials of the issei immigrant Taro Sumida and his family both in Japan and in Hawai'i. Adopts what could be called 'karmic attitude' regarding history. Writing in the assimilationist period of Japanese American history, Ota implies that nikkei cannot escape their history, which is bound to recur in new manifestations.
§ Margaret Harada's The Sun Shines on the Immigrant (1960) - the protagonist, Yoshio Mori, climbs the enterpreneurial ladder from poor immigrant to comfortable businessman. The novel makes no attempt to tie Mori's rise to a broader Japanese American community and ends curiously just before WWII, leaving the postwar reader with a sense of disillusionment, knowing the history that follows the novel's end
§ Kazuo Miyamoto's Hawaii: End of the Rainbow (1964) - grounded in history, basde in part on the author's journals written while he served as a physician in mainland concentration camps, where he himself was imprisoned. The novel is epic in tis detail, chronicling the lives of two issei as well as the experiences of Hawaiian Japanese Americans interned during the war. The novel insists on addressing a traumatic episode in collective Japanese American history.

Hisaye Yamamoto - her stories often explore tensions between issei men and issei women, and also the relationships between nisei and issei, especially the bonds between mothers and daughters. She is one of the few nisei to address internment in the immediate postwar years.
§ 'The Legend of Miss Sasagawara' (1951) - the story is layered with implicit allusions to the suspicions hurled at Jaoanese Americans during the war. Miss Sasagawara becomes a symbol of all Japanese Americans who, especially during the war, were thought to be disloyal and consequently were interned. In its exploration of intracommunity tensions, the story also mirrors broader societal conficts.

Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (1953) - autobiography, another literary work depicting the internment in the immediate postwar years. Provides insight into the development of a nisei identity. Chronicles the prewar discrimination and prejudice issei and nisei encountered in employment and housing. The book ends on a hopeful note.

John Okada's No-No Boy (1957):
§ Although not about internment, it is a powerful depiction of its aftermath. Set in Seattle at the war's end. The novel is a bildugsroman that focuses on the struggle of a 25-year-old nisei, Ichiro Yamada, to accept his wartime actions.
§ The double negative of the title refers to two quesitons that internees over the age of 17 were required to answer. One asked men if they would serve in the military. The other demanded unqualified allegiance to the US. The government permitted only yes or no answers, denying internees the opportunity to voice their complex reactions to these questions. For answering 'no' to both questions and for refusing to be drafted into the army, Ichiro spends two years in prison.
§ The novel depicts Ichiro's attempt to acclaim an identity as an American as he also tries to understand why he answered 'no' to the questions. He must confront an antagonistic and fragmented nikkei community in the process.
§ Okada explored the gray area between polarized definitions of 'Japanese' and 'American,' individuality and community, assimilation and cultural maintenance.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians began to explore the possibility of obtaining monetary redress for their wartime experiences ---> many thinking and speaking about their internment and foces migration and breaking decades-long silence about those years. Nisei began writing about internment and dislocation.
§ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973) - a memoir that captures the details of camp life and its effect in adjucting to postwar society.
§ Joy Kagawa - a Canadian. Her novel Obasan (1981) - attests to the traumas endured by Japanese Canadians during the war. Set in 1972, it focuses on the war's effects as discovered and remembered by a middle-aged sansei woman, Naomi Nakane. Confrontation with family history, and by extension the history of Japanese Canadians. The onset of the war bring about a series of events that results in the virtual disintegration of the family. Explores also the multiple layers of silence and speech: the varying natures of silence, its oppressiveness as the mechanism of secrets but also its symbolism as a sign of strength and courage; the ways how speech can be liberating but also the source of profound pain.

Milton Murayama's All I Asking For Is My Body (1959) - the story of Japanese American family living on a Hawaiian sugar plantation in the late 30s and early 40s, the novel depicts plantation and family politics. Through the antagonistic dynamic that develops between issei and nisei, Murayama explores the complex interaction between traditional Japanese values of family loyalty and the exploitative and racially stratified plantation system. Also one of the first literary works by a nikkei to incorporate 'pidgin English' or the Hawaiian Creole English that has developed on the islands.

Wakako Yamauchi - central themes: the ambiguities of gender relationships, tensions between issei and nisei, and the confining lives of issei, especially women, who seek escape in various ways. And the Soul Shall Dance - a play based upon a story of the same name. By viewing issei women's drunkenness, adultery, and abandonment of family through a nisei lens, Yamauchi recovers and recounts the history of women rebelling against strict norms. She creates strong somen characters who pursue their desires, often in defiance of societal standards.


Expanding identities: sensei activist writing:

• The late 60s and 70s were years of self-conscious 'Asian American' literary production. Influences by the progressive and radical politics of the times, sansei writers often linked their literary work to overtly political agendas: many likened the battles for independence of colonies throughout the world with the struggles of people of color in the US.
• Sansei writers also sought to recover the traditions and literature of issei and nisei.
• These authors also recognized the politics of literature and rejected traditional literary forms in favor of styles forged from their own experiences or those of other people of color in the US as well as internationally. Many sansei women, affected by the feminist movement of the 70s, wrote with a consciousness of gender and its implications.

Lawson Inada's Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) - a melange of styles, themes, and influences, and foreshadows postmodern Japanese American writing of the 80s and 90s. Inada claims colloquial language as the stuff of poetry and fuses powerful emotion with contemporary idioms. Jazz has been a major influence on him, and the rhythms, figures, and strategies of music flow in his poetry.

Janice Mirikitani - Awake in the River (1978), Shedding Silence (1987) - reveal a sensibility that is deeply concerned about connections between the personal and the political.


Identity in location: sansei writers of place:

• One subset of contemporary sansei literature is characterized by a sense of rootedness in a particular geographic locale. Sansei who write from an identification with place recall nisei writing of the prewar era, especially the work of Toshio Mori. A sense of urgency, to capture Japanese American communities that are either disappearing or changing in dramatic ways. ---> Talking to the Dead (1992) - a collection of stories by the Hawaiian sansei, Sylvia Watanabe. Watanabe honors traditions associated with a particular place and community.
• Several sansei writers depict what those who are born and raised in Hawai'i refer to sa the local culture of the islands. Local culture exists in contradistinction to the tourist culture of Hawai'i and captures a mix of people and traditions. Juliet Kono's poems (Hilo Rains [1988]). Garret Kaoru Hongo's poems (Yellow Light [1982]).
• David Mas Masumoto - a connection with place is grounded in an understanding of family history in a particular region: the Japanese American farming communities of the lower San Joaquin valley of California. Silent Strength (1984).
• Rick Shiomi - a Japanese Canadian who has written plays in various styles and has captured the spirit of Canada's nikkei community. Yellow Fever and Once Is Not Enough.


A diversity of identities: postmodern Japanese American literature:

• Perhaps because the activist writers of the 70s forged a political and cultural identity as Japanese Americans, postactivist writers can take for granted the validity of writing about their experiences as ethnic Americans. Although writing from a sense of Japanese American experience and history, postmodern Japanese American writers explore other identities and sympathies that may have little or no covert connection with Japanese American culture or communitites. These authors may write from a variety of identities and places or with a sense of rootlessness that characterizes postmodernism in general.

Cynthia Kadohata - The Floating World (1989) - her hypnotic, spare prose style and her cinematic narrative structure enchance the jarring, sometimes surreal situations that fill the book. Because the characters that populate the book are unconventional, the novel points to the diversity of Japanese American experiences. Kadohata's characters, who engage in premaritalsex, behave cruelly and crudely, and speak eloquently, often defy impressions of Japanese Americans as a 'model minority.' she subtly explodes that myth and reminds readers that there is no one monolithic Japanese American experience.

Karen Tei Yamashita - she has set her two novels, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Brazil Maru (1992) in Brazil, the country with the largest Japanese diaspora population. The Arc - a dazzling mixture of magic realism, satire, and futuristic fiction, the novel explores the folly of environmental ruin for short-term gain and the vain attempt to substitute material comfort for spiritual well-being.

Many Filipino migrants and their second-generation offspring usually resist usage of the term 'Filipino American', which tends to occlude the historical and power differentials engendered by the Philippine-American colonial experience. The colonial legacy is significantly embodies in an 'indigenous' Philippine literature in English and in its convergences or contiguities with Filipino writings 'nurtured on American shores'. Marked by chronic and multiple displacements, Filipino American cultures/texts were and continue to be created under material, historical, and political conditions that are better described by the (post)colonial analogy of world literature rather than the 'immigrant analogy' of US multiculturalism.

Spanish era (1521-1898?):
▪ Expression only through orality
▪ The native talent hid in anonymity - if we give meaning to Fr. Blancas de San José's use of the first-known poem in his Memorial de la Vida Cristiana en la Lingua Tagala, published in 1605. in that instance, th enative imagination learned about the virtue of self-abnegation. Fulfillment seemed possible only in folklore and in the domain of metrical romances; immagination was afforded an experience in the use of the literary form.
▪ Tagalog poetry: José de la Cruz and Balagtas.
▪ José Rizal; Noli Mi Tangere (1886) - a picture of the life and immorality of the friars and the insolent Filipino chiefs and caciques (bosses?).

US colonialism (1898-1946/1902-40):
▪ US broughts with itself the English language.
▪ Immigration to Hawai'i in the 20s and 30s; after the WWII to the USA.
Neocolonial dependency (1946-91).

José Garcia Villa:
▪ Footnote to Youth (1933) - a collection of short stories.
▪ Have Come, Am Here (1942), Selected Poems and New (1958) - collections of poetry.

Bienvenido Santos:
▪ What the Hell You Left Your Heart in San Fransisco (1989) - the seting is American, so are the characters and the attidues and values that they cling to or pervert in the course of their lives. It is among the young generation of students that the society's hapless state is most evident, specifically in how they shirt any serious encounter with books and how they prefer much that is pointless and fivolous.

Carlos Bulosan:
▪ America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946).

Four formative moments in 'Filipino American' literature:
▪ The republication of Carlos Bulosan's now classic America Is in the Heart (1946) by university press in 1973
▪ The contemporaneous emergence of 'Flip' (and a a half- and second-generation) writers in the early 1970s
▪ The international publishing breakthrough acieved by nNinotchka Rosca's Monsoon Collection (1982)
▪ The phenomenal critical success of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters in the 1990s.

Colonialism:
The twentieth-century Filipino 'fusion of migrancy and exile' - a historic consequence of US colonial dispossession and as the defining condition for the globally itinerant and indeterminate production of a Filipino nationality or national culture.
▪ Filipino texts, like all literary efforts emerging out of the colonial condition, are colonially dismissible as 'nonliterary' or not 'transcendentally universal' enough to escape their 'ethnic-specific' conditions.

Terminology - 'Asian Americans':
The term 'Chinese American literature' is itself a product of a specific historical moment. There exists no consensus on what properly falls within the purview of Chinese American literature; the boundaries of the field, as inferred from critical practice, have fluctuated with changing histrical conditions.
▪ The group now known as Chinese Americans can trace a long history in this country dating back to the first influx after the Gold Rush in 1848 and the massive importation of laborers to build the transcontinental ailroad in the 1860s. The group was regarded by the dominant society as foreign - exotic or terminally unassimilable. The policy of Exclusion (1882-1943), which banned the entry of Chinese laborers to and prevented the formation of Chinese families in the US, was just the most visible institutional expression of such an othering attitude; its effects were not significantly reversed until the liberalization of the immigraiton laws in 1965.
▪ Because of American political rejection, no less than Chinese cultural imperatives, even those immigrants who had managed to put down roots on US soil tended to think of themselves as huaqiao, 'overseas Chinese.' It was only with the pan-Asian movement of the late 1960s and early 70s, which highlighted the importance of recognizing Asians in America as an internally colonized ethnic minority, that the term 'Chinese Americans,' like its superordinate 'Asian Americans,' began to take on its current meaning, connoting at once a claim to full membership in American society and intragroup coalition based on similarities in historical circumstances.

Constructed and open-ended nature of canon formation:
▪ When the 60s generation of Asian American activists turned their attention to literature, their interest was not abstract or academic. In this period of profound demographic, social, and political change, they saw the building of an Asian American cultural tradition, withs its concomitant challenge to the Anglo-American canon, as an integral part of the group's larger struggle for a rightful place in this country.
▪ In this movement Chinese Americans played a key role. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974). It was Frank Chin and his associated who, in their prefatory essays affirming cultural dynamism, set forth most of the terms of debate on what counts as Chinese American literature. Controversial as these view are, they represent the first clear articulation of the possibilities of a Chinese American literary identity. They valorize works written in English by American-born writers on American subjects addressed primarily to fellow Asian Americans, preferably with a pronounced anti-Orientalist agenda, working class sympathies, and an interest in rehabilitating Chinese American masculinity (overlapping criteria, of varying degrees of elusiveness: author's nativity, language of composition, intended audience, subject matter, and sensibility).

19th century:
▪ Few firsthand record left by 19th century immigrants.
▪ Except for a small number of women and some merchants, immigrants of this period were predominantly male laborers, poorly educated peasants charged with supporting their families left behind in Guangdong Province in southern China. Exclusion and other discriminatory laws created gender-imbalanced 'bachelor societies' in Chinatowns; prolonged family separation was often ended only through fraudulent entry with purchased immigration papers. Extreme physical and psychological hardships, coupled with llimited schooling, did not favor artistic creation.
▪ A glimpse of the early Chinese Americans' original cultural mileu: Chen Yuanzhu's Taishan geyao ji (A collection of Taishan folk rhymes) (1929; rpt. 69); Hu Zhaozhong's Meizhou Guangdong huaqiao liuchuan geyao huibian (A collection of folk rhymes popular among Cantonese in America) (1970). These folk rhymes exhibit characteristics of oral compositions: formulaic opening lines, simple prosodic structures, directness of language, anonymous authorship, and depictions of rural life. Many pieces speak of the harsh conditions that forced young men to emigrate, the pain of leave-taking, and wishes for success in 'Gold Mountain.'
▪ Island (Him Mark Lai et al. 1980) - consisting of poems carved by detained immigrants into the wooden walls of barracks on Angel Island (San Fransisco Bay), which was used as an immigration station between 1910-40 in which to interrogate Chinese entrants and screen out 'paper sons' with forged documents. Almost lost when the barracks fell into disrepair, the poems were preserved through community effort: studies, transcribed, and translated, then published in bilingual format. The angry and poignant voices of these early Chinese immigrants constitute a powerful counterdiscourse to the myth of America as a natoin open to all immigrants.

Jinshan geji (two volumes in 1911 and 1915) ---> Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Fransisco (1987), rendered into English by Marlon K. Hom.
▪ These 'songs' were not transcriptions of oral recitations (Hu, Chen); rather, they were composed in written form by member of 'poetry societies' then active in San Fransisco Chinatown. These anonymous authors were most likely members of the better-educated merchant class (one of the handful of exempt categories under the Exclusion Act).
▪ The poets' voices are unpretentious, exuberant, and candidly patriarchal; they cover topics ranging from American hardships to fantasies of triumphant return to China, from the pain of family separation to the 'allures of Chinatown prostitutes', from support for Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Republican Revolution (1911) to outrage at the un-Confucian ways of 'emancipated women'.
▪ The prefaces - arguing that the homeland literati's rigid aesthetic standards are no longer relevant to 'Gold Mountain' poets, because of the latter's Cantonese origin, use of dialect, and American experiences, the preface writers affirm the validity of cultural transformation in a new land. Innovative mixture of Cantonese slang, classical poetic diction.

Kuxuesheng (The industrious student):
▪ A well-crafted novella published in China under the pseudonym of Qiyouzi. Contains perhaps the first fictional character with a clearly non-sojourner mentality. Part of a vast body of anti-Exclusion literature arising from the 1905 Chinese protest boycott of American goods and collected in Aying's Fanmei huagong jinyue qenxueji, an enormous, multigenre comiplation publishedin 1960.
▪ Kuxuesheng describes a patriotic student who travels to America in order to acquire the knowledge needed to save his crumbling country from corrupt Manchu rule as well as economic and military invasion by foregin powers.

Sui Sin Far: A Eurasian writer who had lived in Britain and Canada before immigration to the US.
▪ Current scholarly practice tends to designate him as the first Chinese American writer in English.
▪ Pen name for Edith Eaton, daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother.
▪ Chinatown subject matter and nonstereotypical portrayals of the Chinese (to the extent allowed by the prejudices of her times and the stylistic conventions of sentimental fiction).
▪ 'Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian' (1909) - autobiographical account. Mrs. Spring Fragnance (1912) - short-story collection.

Stereotypes, depictions in literature:
▪ Unassimilable aliens: either docile, grunting brutes or corrupt villains 'too clever for their own good.'
▪ The settting is usually a phantasmic Chinatown of ornamental Orientalia and heathen rituals, of intrigues, savagery and sexual degradation.
▪ Defending and explaining the Chinese to white readers became a preoccupation of 'ambassadors of goodwill': highly educated, often aristocratic Asians who used their knowledge of the English language and American culture to dispel negative images about their ethnic group. E.g. Lee Yan Phou, Wu Tiongfang (America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat [1914]), Lin Yutang (Chinatown Family [1948]), Chiang Yee.

WWII as a turning point:
▪ China being US's ally in the war, Chinese Americans suddenly became the 'good' Asians as distinguished from the 'bad' Japanese; the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943.
▪ 40s saw the coming of age of a small American-born generation biliterate men and women who grew up in Chinatown but were socializzed into the assimilationist ethos of the time. They were positioned to be cultural mediators.
§ E.g. Pardee Lowe, whose Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) interprets Chinese customs to white readers; Jade Snow Wong, whose Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945). Their type of writing - 'autobiography as guided Chinatown tour': both chart a trajectory of Chinese American life from tradition to modernity, from conformity to individual freedom, that fits neatly into mainstream myths about the inevitable 'progress' of the immigrant family. Jade Snow Wong shows that growing up Chinese American meant vastly different things for the male child than for the female.
▪ But -- communism triumphs in China, the Korean War, Cald War --> Chinese Americans as 'bad' Asians again.
§ Some of these changes reflected in a series of short stories in a leftist journal, Xinmiao or The Bud (1947-48) - multifaceted picture of NY Chinatown in the social realist tradition; the stories depict waiters, gamblers, students, war brides, family and district association leaders, and a handful of black and white ppl with whom they come into contact.

Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961):
▪ A comic tale of romantic love and community renewal during the postwar period.
▪ Set in NW Chinatown, and exhibits a working-class, realist 'Chinatown' sensibility; revolves around the impotence of Ben Loy, a second-generation Chinese American veteran who brings over Mei Oi as his 'war bride' but is unable to produce an heir for his watchful elders. Mei Oi is seduced by a Chinatown ne'er-do-well; her pregnancy wreaks havoc on the community, but when a son is born, the young people are forgiven, free to start a new life in San Fransisco.
▪ The dying 'bachelor society', a legacy of the Exclusion era, trnsformed into a community with future, one not defined exclusively by 'bloodline'.
▪ Importance: it departs from the autobiographical imperative as well as the mediational cultural stance prevalent in many previous tales of Chinatown; provides a narrative of community life at a critical historical moment; employs a 'Chinatown English' without overtones of caricature.

Frank Chin:
▪ His works bear the mark of the turbulent 60s. In revolt against institutional racism and white cultural hegemony, and inspired by the heroics of the Black Power movement, Chin is determined to forge a uniquely 'Chinaman' language fusing the cadences of Cantonese and urban black vernacular to the English language.
▪ Chin glamorizes - highly selectively - certain aspects of Chinese traditions, for instance, by identifying the heroic fraternity of Chinese classics The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh as the authentic essence of 'Chinaman' culture. At the same time his fictional Chinatown is peopled with a cast of traditoin-bound, moribund elders and rebellious Americanized youngsters. Fiercely anti-assimilationist, he yet builds an oeuvre rich in allusions to icons of American myth and popular culture, which he at once invokes and subverts.

Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940):
▪ The Woman Warrior (1976):
§ Subtitles Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. First marketed under and 'autobiography' label, and featuring a blend of personal reminiscences, imaginative reconstruction sof family events, and outright fantasies. Problematizes generic definitions and the idea of representational responsibility in 'ethhnic' writing.
§ Focus on the mother-daughter relationship, and on concerns such as sexism in Chinese culture and the need to break silence - a feminist text.
§ Intricacy of its formal structure, with its attendant epistemological issues, also places it within the 'postmodern metafiction' category.
▪ Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989): Formally and stylistically innovative narrative centered upon Wittman Ah Sing, a 1960s Chinese American playwright modeled on Frank Chin. Through chronicling his attempt to put on a show for his friends and family, Kingston alludes to Asian American cultural history and the San Fransisco Bay Area counter-cultural scene, plays with both Chinese literary classics and the Euro-American canon, and gestures toward the possibility of a community-building, mythmaking Chinese American art.

Works by women writers with a focus on matrilineality:
▪ Ruthanne Lum McCunn's fictionalized biography of a Chinese pioneer woman, Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981)
▪ Alice Lin's autobiographical Grandmother Had No Name (1988)
▪ Short stories by Chinese American women in Watanabe and Cruchac's 1990 anthology Home to Stay
▪ Fae Myenne Ng's novel on a Chinatown immigrant family of three daughters, Bone (1993)

Drama:
▪ David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988-89).
▪ Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon.
▪ Laurence Yep's Pay the Chinaman (1990), set in the Sacramento Ddelta at the end of the 19th century
▪ Genny Lim's Paper Angels (1991) - about early Chinese immigrants in the Angel Island Detention Station. Bitter Cane (1991) - about the lives of Chinese contract laborers on a Hawaiian sugar-cane plantation.
▪ Reconstruction of certain canonical historical experiences. Style tends toward realism hile staging is adapted to the paucity of amterial resources with which ethnic theater usually has to content.

'Re-viewing Asian American Literary Studies' by King-Kok Cheung.


Asian American literature - works by people of Asian descent who were either born in or who have migrated to North America - has gone dramatic changes since it emerged as a distinctive field in the wake of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s.
1) The most visible difference arises from its rapid and extensive growth over the past three decades. Today - representing and selecting among writers of diverse national origins. As this literature - along with the theory and criticism accompanying it - expands, original parameters are modified and contested; paralleling the explosion in volume is a profileration of perspectives.
2) Earlies - identity politics with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity governed earlier theoretical and ciritical formulations. Now - the stress is on heterogeneity and disapora. The shift has been from seeking to 'claim America' to forging a connection between sia and Asian America; from centering on race and masculinity to revolving around the multiple aces 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.


Identity, cultural nationalism, heterogeneity:
w 'Asian American' was coined in the late 60s to promote political solidarity and cultural nationalism. This movement was a broad-based one, appealing to immigrant and American-born Asians alike. By contrast, early Asian American cultural criticism placed a much greater emphasis on American nativity. Asian American 'sensibility' - one 'that was neither Asian nor white American. Mostly included writers of Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese descent.
w More recently - challenges to the idea of a unifying Asian American sensibility and underlining the need to take into account 'heterogeneity,' 'exile,' and 'diaspora.
w Asian American literature has now broadened to include writings by Americans of Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian, Laotian, Nepali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese descent.
w Without the initial naing, subsequent institutionalizing, and continuous conestation over this litearure, the many voices that are now being heard might have remained unheard. Perhaps the most important reason to maintain the designation of 'Asian American' literature is not the presence of any cultural, thematic, or poetic unity but the continuing need to amplify marginalized voices, however dissimilar.

American, Asian, Asian American:
w 'Asian American' accentuates the American status of immigrants from Asia and their descendants. The terms grows out of the frustration felt by many American-born citizens of Asian extraction at being treated as perpetual foreigners in the US despite the fact that their roots in this county go back as many as seven generations.
w Such racist treatment, along with Orientalism tendencies that fetishize Asian objects, customs, and persons, has also engendered in many Asian Americans an internal ambivalence about their Asian heritage. Because of the dominant perception that what constitutes 'American' is white, mainstream, and Western, the desire to reclaim a distinctive ethnic tradition seems forever at odds with the desire to be recognized as fully 'Americans.
w Writing by Asian Americans has coalesced around the theme of 'claiming an American, as opposed to Asian, identity'. The obsessive desire to claim American has induced a certain cultural amnesia regarding the country of ancestral origin. Many people of Asian descent feel, to this day, the need to prove their Americanness by shedding their originary culture and by setting themselves apart from new Asian immigrants. Thought different sensibilities admittedly characterize the American-born and the foreign-born, insistence on American nativity can result in the double exclusion of current Asian immigrants - by non-Asians and by American-born Asian alike.

Race and gender:
w Race and gender have been interwines from the beginning in Asian American history and literature. On of the most damaging stereotypes about Asian Americans considered to be the 'emasculation' of Asian men. Outraged by Hollywood's representation of Asian Americans as either sinister or subservient, they resolved to invent a form of ethnopoetics that is specifically masculine. The editors of Aiiieeeee! - a preoccupation with reasserting Asian American manhood, their classification of desirable attributes as masculine.
w Maxine Hong Kingston's The Warrior Woman (1976) - 'the literary decade which had begun on a note of brash machismo with the liberating outcry from the editors of Aiieeeee! . . . Ended on a deeply plangent note of powerful feminism independence and literary vision' (Garrett Hongo 1993).
w The reality of sexism in both Asian and American cultures and the imperative for Asian American women to engaage in gender politics. The hyperfeminization of Asian women in popular American culture is no less demeaning than the emasculation of Asian American men and is in as much need of refutiation.
w The Big Aiieeeee! - discovering a style for Asian American manhood: presenting Chinese and Japanese heroic epics as the sources of the 'Asian heroic tradition' and maintains that 'authentic' Asian American writing must hark back to these heroic tales and to early immigrant annals.
w The relationship between feminism and cultural nationalism is more complex. Many Asian American feminist critics champion cultural nationalism in their own way by contending not only against Asian and white patriarchy but also against Eurocentric feminism.
w Feminism has gone through mucn internal revamping to take into consideration differences in race, class, and culture; both patriarchal and Eurocentric constructions of femininity and masculinity are currently being questioned in cultural studies and gender studies. Similarly, nationalism (increasingly exposed as being complicit with patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality) is being revaluated in ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies. These ongoing investigation may enable scholard and critics of Asian American literature to go beyond the binarism of feminist and msaculinist agendas, to extend feminist concern to men of color who had been subordinated by the dominant culture, and to dispel stereotypes by inventing alternativre models that do not simply conform to patriarchal templates.