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.