Modern Minority : Asian American Literature and Everyday Life 9780199915842, 9780199915835

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Modern Minority

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Modern Minority ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Yoon Sun Lee

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lee, Yoon Sun. Modern minority : Asian American literature and everyday life / Yoon Lee. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-991583-5 1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. Realism in literature. I. Title. PS153.A84L45 2013 810.9'895—dc23 2012014959

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Yu Jin

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{ CONTENTS }

Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION:

Asian American Realism and the Forms of Everyday Minorness PART I:

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Discovering the Modern Everyday

1. The Outward Spiral: Why Kang and Bulosan Ignore the Everyday

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2. Little Things: The Uncanny Everyday of Internment Literature

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PART II:

The Problem of Identity

3. Unlikely Daughters, Exemplary Mothers, and Disembedded China Men: Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston

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4. The Changing Story of Thingness: From Kogawa and Keller to Ha Jin and Lan Samantha Chang

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PART III:

Everyday Immanence

5. Lists, Native Speaker, and the Politics of Emergence

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6. Extensive Time and Crumpled Surfaces: Projects of Identity in Frank Chin and Lois-Ann Yamanaka

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CONCLUSION:

Notes Bibliography Index

Encountering Modernity Every Day

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{ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }

The friendship and support of David Yoo and Ruth Chung planted the first seeds of this book. At Wellesley, Elena Creef welcomed me at the outset and has shown unceasing generosity and friendship ever since. I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues in the English department; particular thanks to Larry Rosenwald for reading early versions of these chapters. The friendship of Anjali Prabhu and Kathy Moon has sustained me, and thanks go as well to my colleagues in American Studies and to my students, for reminding me of the importance of Asian American matters. To John Plotz, Leah Price, Ramie Targoff, and Amanda Claybaugh: this book owes an incalculable debt to your individual and collective brilliance and your patient criticism over the years. Colleen Lye gave encouragement at a crucial moment; thanks also to Jed Esty and Joe Cleary, Marshall Brown, Sanjay Krishnan, Chris Bush, and Tim Bewes. Floyd Cheung, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rajini Srikanth, and Paul Watanabe have provided direct inspiration. Farther from Boston, Wing Tek Lum, Juliet Kono, Eric Chock, Darrell Lum, Nora Keller, and other members of the Bamboo Ridge Study Group welcomed me generously and helped me understand the everyday. For encouragement and wisdom, thanks to Ruth Yeazell, Chuck Rzepka, and John Farrell. Numerous research awards and leaves from Wellesley helped enable the writing of this book, along with a grant from the ACLS, the Barbara Morris Caspersen chair, a Mellon midcareer grant, librarians at the Special Collections of the University of Washington, and the assistance of Rhoda Feng. I would like to thank Brendan O’Neill and Shannon McLachlan and the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press. Finally, my deepest gratitude to those who lived with this book (and with me) every single day: Ji Min, Ji Hoon, and Yu Jin, who fill and redeem my everyday.

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Modern Minority

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Introduction: Asian American Realism and the Forms of Everyday Minorness

Everyday life, far from being a simple matter, is marked by the flickering play of difference. The quotidian rests on a certain frame of affective engagement with the world—one that requires increasing effort to maintain.1 When jobs, places of residence, or conditions of living can no longer be counted on, feelings of security or even normalcy cannot be taken for granted but have to be cautiously assembled time and again. The ordinary, far from being a baseline condition of uneventfulness outside history, is deeply interwoven with specificities of time and place, with historically changing forms of labor and leisure, and with modernity’s modes of presence and absence. Asian Americans have often been aware of this, and they have also known that their position within the modern Western fabric of ordinariness is a complex, contingent, and variable one.2 Asian Americans seem to have always fallen outside the ordinary binary certainties of race in the American context; as one writer remarked in the early twentieth century, “No one refers to Chinamen or Japanese or Indians as ‘colored.’ ”3 But Asian Americans are too colored to be counted among the European ethnic immigrant groups whose eventual assimilation into the nation was predicted by sociologists in that period.4 Both exotic and banal, familiar and foreign, neither reliably racial nor merely ethnic, their position relative to the material and ideological bases of American ordinariness continues to shift in response to national and global exigencies.5 The scale of the everyday and the modern experience of the quotidian have been vital to this process, as this book aims to show. Some Asian American groups have gradually become embedded in the hyperordinary routines of American everyday life—as the “respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor,” the nanny, the nurse, or the nail salon owner.6 But that position depends on a certain frame of awareness in which daily, weekly, or monthly repetition has the power to blur certain forms of difference while giving rise to others. As a recent sociological study of Korean American shopkeepers points out, “social order, routine, and civility are negotiated

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and maintained through hundreds of daily interactions between merchants and customers . . . Civil relations prevail because merchants make investments to maintain the day-to-day routine, recognizing that failing to do so can have dramatic consequences.”7 This frame of muted recognition and constrained action is what I seek to uncover. The day-to-day routine is not just blindly followed. For many Asian Americans, its tiny scale can become an object of unusual care, its minorness an object of both attachment and alienation. The everyday as a sphere of economic activity offers some Asian American groups the promise of upward mobility.8 But there is another dimension of intimacy between Asian Americans and the everyday. In its shimmering lack of visibility, the modern everyday mirrors the racial form of this particular minority as both acquire a certain configuration over the twentieth century. The modern everyday arises from the dominance of industrial modes of production and abstract modes of relating things and people to each other. Through simply keeping time by the hour, the day, or the recurrent act, the everyday can miniaturize actions and people. The everyday resides in the resolutely nonsublime awareness of large numbers stretched out over time. The phenomenon of repetition is crucial to it, but this repetition tends to diminish or erase particular qualities rather than reinforcing them. This everydayness combines smallness and infinity within a sense of time that is abstractly conceived and yet keenly registered. In this study, I will consider the everyday in terms of a minimal narrativity—one thing after another—and a minimal sociality: the side-by-side. This book investigates the curious relation between the configuration of modernity’s everyday, and the racial identity or role assumed by Asian Americans. Both subtly and continually alter over the twentieth century, as the following chapters show. But the idea that ties them together is that of an abstract minorness that arises, paradoxically, from pervasiveness, frequency, and superficial familiarity. We commonly tend to invest numerousness with importance—in political or statistical contexts, for example. The minority can thus be seen as the particular few that remain different and apart. But the everyday upends this way of linking quantitative measure and qualitative significance. In this domain, the more iterations, or the more instances there are, the more negligible something seems: a task, a phrase, a place or person encountered every day can easily come to be overlooked. Numerous instances of the same thing fail to add up to anything major; pervasiveness does not guarantee experiential resonance, heft, or even a sense of permanence. This process of abstraction erases particular features without producing the universal. But the everyday is more than simply blankness. It possesses an unstable, equivocal character, and is able to reverse itself, change its valence or even become a rallying point. In certain contexts, Asian Americans have become familiar enough so that their racial difference can be perceived without alarm by dominant groups. Asian Americans can be seen as a minor minority, a potential or occasional problem rather than a major one—even though the concept of the “yellow peril” always

Introduction

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evokes a teeming Asia on the horizon.9 The well-known phrase “the model minority,” often used to characterize Asians over here, as opposed to the ones over there, seems to carry within its overt meaning of exemplarity a certain miniaturizing vision of Asian Americans and a permanent deferral of their concerns.10 A related idea is found in Leslie Bow’s recent argument about the “racial interstitiality” of Asian Americans in the South.11 When needed, Asian Americans conveniently fill in, mediate, and sustain ideas about race, and, in particular, the much-cherished “progressive chronology of self-betterment and racial uplift.”12 But their presence also remains stubbornly, if only intermittently, marked by race, and thus contradicts the story of a postracial America.13 This book focuses on what Asian Americans themselves have thought about the everyday as both agent and echo of their own condition. Asian American writers have been laying bare the structures of modernity’s everyday, even before the adoption of the term “Asian American” in the 1960s. They do so with ambivalent fascination because of a sense that their own minority status both rhymes with the global minorness of modern everyday life and derives from it historically. Laboring alone or in numbers, in settled or unsettled conditions, these Asian Americans reveal a certain structure of feeling within the experience of industrializing modernity. This everyday minorness does not consist in any particular set of affects, though the “ugly feelings” examined by Sianne Ngai are certainly relevant.14 Rather, this structure of feeling resides in patterns, lived scales and rhythms that transcend any particular way of life. While the everyday can take on particular cultural features, it is not reducible to such life-forms. It has to do far more with an underlying sense of scale and relation than with a distinctive cultural identity or racial position. The everyday that I will examine proceeds from what Carlos Bulosan calls an “acute sense of time” as empty and noncumulative.15 It arises from a gap between this experience of time and its modern conceptualization as progress. Though often unacknowledged, this minor everyday is dialectically generated by the promises of capitalist modernity. This book examines how Asian Americans uncover and eventually lay claim to this world of empty time and little things: the uncanny domain of the day-to-day, the day-after-day.

“‘Modern’ was how she described it” Asian American writing asserts its own modernity by tracing the everyday of the capitalist world as a structure of feeling.16 Modernity, however, is a term whose use demands justification. Whether modernity is finished and superseded or unfinished and ongoing continues to be widely debated, along with its presumed geographical coordinates and vectors.17 The term conjures up a range of philosophical, sociological, as well as historical arguments: modernity has been described as the loss of an integrated lifeworld, as a loss of collective style; as speed or acceleration, constant newness and change; as a set of material conditions and as a narrative or trope.18

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But it is because of this broad range of meanings that the concept of modernity is timely and necessary to my argument. It best captures both the historical complexity of Asian Americans as a collectivity, and the conceptual and temporal complexity of their objects of desire. A surprising number of Asian American writers have seen America as one front of a global modernity that extends from Europe to Asia, as “a node in a global circuit.”19 The features and rhythms of modernity are central preoccupations of early twentieth-century Asian American writers such as H. T. Tsiang, Younghill Kang, and Carlos Bulosan. It is still the case with Ha Jin and Jhumpa Lahiri, among the more widely known Asian American writers of the early twenty-first century. America is understood as part of a larger field perceived less as a network of nation-states than as a historical epoch. The movements of Asian laborers, together with the simultaneous reach of Western nations into Asia, helped bring about this historically new condition in which societies come to be dominated by the laws of an artificially contrived market.20 As Asian American historians have pointed out, the migration of Chinese to the United States throughout the nineteenth century enabled America’s transition to industrial capitalism, and the global transition to a market economy.21 Asian immigrants were indispensable to the process of capital concentration, laboring on railroads, in mines and factories. Along with other immigrants, Asian Americans performed a vital role in the process that has been called the deskilling or homogenization of labor—the increasing reliance on mechanized or unskilled labor under conditions designed and controlled by a different level of management.22 A key development in this process was the increased importance given to the measurement of time, not only on the epochal, but on the diurnal and even subdiurnal scale.23 Modernization, America, and Asian Americans shaped and defined each other.24 The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metaphor of the “Yellow Peril” expressed anxieties about the human, social, and ecological costs of capitalism. When capitalism in the American context began to rely on the importation of Asian labor and development of markets across the Pacific, the image of the Asian came to signify “an unusual capacity for sudden [economic] development,” as Colleen Lye has argued.25 The racial form of Asians in the American context can be directly attributed to the part they played in the transformation of labor, and the “homogenization of industrial labor” in particular.26 Lye shows that the Asiatic came to be seen as “bearing certain essential qualities that allowed it to awake, fully fledged, into capitalist modernity.”27 Modernity thus lies at the core of both the racial image and the subjective experience of Asians in the West. In many ways, this is also true of the Asian American movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which arose through the quintessentially modern practice of social protest.28 Sometimes drawing on the model of internal colonialism, many Asian American activists, in William Wei’s words, “placed racial conflicts within an international context.”29 Marxist Asian American groups envisioned Asians as participating in a worldwide struggle against imperialist capitalism.30 Even non-Marxist groups were inspired by the links they

Introduction

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perceived between the status of Asians within the United States and national liberation movements in the third world. Both anticolonial struggles in Asia and these new social movements in the West illustrate what has been called the multiple modernities thesis.31 But equally vital to Asian American writing is the aspect of modernity that Fredric Jameson has characterized as a trope, a way of telling or revising a story to create a particular effect. Jameson comments that “the trope of modernity bears a libidinal charge . . . it seems to concentrate a promise within a present of time and to offer a way of possessing that future more immediately within that present itself.”32 Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), illustrates the desire for what Jameson calls the “unauthorized self-affirmation” inherent in the use of this trope: When Ma first arrived in America [from Vietnam], she had very long hair . . . After she cut it that summer, she looked more like the women who read the news on TV. “Modern” was how she described it. She didn’t want to be a seamstress any more, working all day long, her foot pumping the pedal so the machine would spin and murmur . . . My mother worked very fast, turning things out like a factory. I imagined that the sharp little needle was the loudmouthed man on a factory floor, shouting out orders for her to go faster. Faster than yesterday! Faster toward tomorrow! (67–68)33 Doing piecework at the kitchen table, putting together parts of quilts that will be assembled at a factory, the mother’s labor exemplifies the post-Fordist regime of decentralized production and “flexible accumulation.”34 But Lê’s narrative, like many others, names the modern, not the postmodern, as the object of desire. Modernity, personified and given a small, sharp voice, is positioned in the future. It urges forward, holding out the promise that faster repetitions of the same unit will get you there. Yet if modernity is an object of desire, there is also revulsion at its violent erasure of qualitative differences. Shapes, spaces, textures, and, most of all, time become subject to a process of homogenization. If Asian American literature sets out in search of the modern, what it often finds is the modern everyday as a realm of abstraction and diminishment through replication. What defines this everyday ordinariness is precisely the absence of the progress, freedom, and innovation contained within the charged trope of modernity. Daily life in these works replaces an active sense of history or a tangible sense of place with fungible units of time: the day-to-day. The everyday in question is not to be confused with an ahistorical concept of daily life. There has always been a realm of biological reproduction or “the maintenance of life,” ruled by the mere “wants and needs” of physical existence, as Hannah Arendt argues.35 But the concept and the experience of everydayness as a certain type of tedium only emerge in the modern world.36 Everyday life names the social experience of capitalism as a historically particular mode of production and relations of production.37 In this sense, everyday life has played a critical role

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in numerous recent studies of modernity.38 It functions, to borrow Mary Favret’s phrase, as an “unspectacular register” of far-reaching change, beginning in the nineteenth century.39 The everyday feels eternal, for it includes the unending rhythms of social and productive life: “nights and days . . . activities and rest . . . life and death . . . the repetitive gestures of work and consumption,” as Henri Lefebvre describes it.40 But at its core it is shaped by a modern process. In Harry Braverman’s words, “the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs, and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital.”41 Everyday life names the level at which the commodification of goods and services can be intimately, even wordlessly sensed.42 In the twentieth century, decolonization and global capitalism continued to draw attention to the operation of the everyday.43 In the urban context, the everyday felt new, looked modern, involved new things and ways of using them. Harry Harootunian emphasizes that “the identity of everydayness and the awareness of the primacy of the present signaled at a certain historical moment (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) the formation of a specific experience lived and represented in industrializing cities.”44 Advertising, journalism, and new media scrutinized the everyday through the project of capturing ephemera: that which is equally concrete and transient.45 Documenting the people and things that pass through a street on a given day, noting passing fads, fashions, and trends—whether in Berlin, Paris, or Tokyo—were ways to register the uneven, deceptive temporality of capitalism.46 The everyday is indeed “distinctively modern,” even and especially when it feels most timeless.47 But everyday modernity is characterized by its uneven social and spatial penetration, a phenomenon that Harootunian describes in the Japanese interwar context as the coexistence of different cultural forms and modes of production.48 There can be unevenness, too, in the Asian American representation of the everyday. Ha Jin, for example, chooses in his early novel Waiting (1999) to focus on this uneven development in China from the 1960s to the 1980s. Alternating between a small, provincial city and a rural village, the novel traces the conflicting impulses and restraints produced in the transition to capitalist modes of living. Rather than describing external changes in a way of life, this novel depicts the emergence of the everyday as a radical confusion about the temporal coordinates of action. Its plot focuses on a character, Lin Kong, who is unable to divorce his wife, though he attempts to do so each summer for more than twenty years. His girlfriend waits for him, while he waits for his divorce to happen of its own accord. This might appear to be action enough, were it not for the arrival of a new sense of time. A specifically capitalist sense of time is embodied in the widespread affect of impatience, in the novel’s criticism of Lin’s passivity, and most concretely in a villainous character who seizes opportunities and actively manages the future. These developments give rise to an acute sense of the day as a repeating unit suffused with a sense of loss.49 Asians who came to America or were born in it in the early twentieth century experienced modernity in a manner quite different from those who observed it in

Introduction

9

the great cities of the industrial core. Unlike Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in Europe, or Tosaka Jun and Kon Wajiro in Tokyo, Asian American writers tend to focus less on urban masses than on small, isolated, and marginal pockets of life that are transformed by new social relations and modes of production.50 For a writer like Toshio Mori, a second-generation Japanese American, the transition to capitalism is best examined not through large-scale phenomena such as the movements of crowds, the labor and leisure of large groups, but in small-scale impulses, the intimate feelings of those who live and work in relative isolation, tenuously connected to the larger world. Mori’s Yokohama, California (1949) sketches the emergent awareness of historical transition. In small, overlapping increments, Mori’s stories represent the daily lives of a Japanese American enclave in semirural California before World War II: characters reminisce, quarrel, gossip, engage in the business and leisure of quotidian life. Their actions reveal the displacement of older forms of social relation and experience by abstract ones that better serve the needs of capital. For example, one very brief story, “My Mother Stands on her Head,” illustrates a shift in value from felt meaning or common experience to a calculable quantity dependent on abstract time and labor. “Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Ishimoto-san came around in his 1928 Model-A Ford. He brought vegetables and groceries and peddled them . . . My mother pitied him, remembering the old days.”51 The mother is unwilling to drop the peddler despite his outdatedness, high prices, and the mysterious disparity between their monthly bill and the actual groceries that he leaves. That disparity turns out to be neither forgetfulness nor dishonesty, but the new principle of profit, as the family discovers to their consternation. “My brother . . . kept adding the figures . . . ‘That guy’s added a dollar and forty-nine on the total, that’s all . . . Here’s some more profit for Ishimoto-san on last month’s bill’ ” (37). The peddler has used a vestigial mode of social relations, face-to-face, personal, and embedded in traditional ethics, to mask a new mode of relation based on abstraction, equivalent exchange, and the commodification of labor. The quotidian regularity of his visits turns out to reflect not an attachment to old habits but a new way of using people. Despite this realization, the transactions continue, in a typical minor triumph of the everyday. The everyday is both the crowning achievement of modernity and its strongest unspoken critique. In Lefebvre’s words, “everyday life . . . responds and corresponds to modernity, the one crowning and concealing the other, revealing and veiling it.”52

Realism, Minimal Narrativity, and the Everyday as a Structure of Feeling Asian American literature, then, is rooted in the historical conjuncture from which literary realism emerges. Realism becomes a dominant force, according to Georg Lukács, when “rapidly growing forces of capitalism” triumph over older forms and relations and bring about a radical depletion of daily life by transforming “everything . . . into a commodity that can be bought and sold.”53 The historical stage that

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he has in mind is Europe in the nineteenth century. But his writings suggest that realism is theoretically possible whenever certain conditions of economic development and historical consciousness are present.54 The realist project derives from “the feeling first that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual.”55 Realism is defined not by a meticulous cataloguing of the external world as it exists, but rather by a commitment to representing “the process in which the categories of capitalism as forms of human living gradually penetrate bourgeois society.”56 Asian American writing, I will argue, represents the uneven transformations of capitalism as these changes are registered in and through the sense of the everyday. By turning to this definition of realism, I may appear to be paying insufficient regard to one of the most important themes of Asian American literary criticism. Realism was at the heart of Asian American literature as it was defined by the editors of the groundbreaking anthology Aiiieeeee! (1974) and in the work of Elaine Kim and other early critics.57 But it was viewed quite differently in this period, which was characterized by cultural nationalism, or the belief that Asian Americans were constituted as a distinct (and relatively homogeneous) subset of the nation. Singled out as the benchmark of the “serious” or authentic Asian American writer, realism was understood by Chin and his cohort as the negation of racist stereotypes through the accurate reflection of the writer’s community, using “the language, style, and syntax of his people’s experience.”58 Many critics still consider Asian American literature as primarily this discourse of counterorientalism.59 But as Viet Nguyen has pointed out, the configuration of race for Asian Americans is strongly tied to the needs of capitalism, and the desire to disavow the latter context can lead to critical blindness.60 The realist project of revealing the contradictions of capitalism is far from incompatible with the antiracist or antiorientalist goals of Asian American studies. Indeed, it is necessary in order to understand the position of Asian Americans in the national and transnational contexts. Critical discussion of the realist project can also help clarify what Asian Americans have in common: as Raymond Williams puts it, realism is “that which human beings make common, by work or language.”61 A few brief examples show how Asian American writers throughout the twentieth century represent the emergence of abstract equivalence as what we have made common, dwelling on the “dismal greyness” and “tedious, endlessly repeated routine” of the everyday.62 The details that are given delineate not the practices of a singular ethnic culture but the common world of capitalist production and exchange, refracted through an awareness of racialized perception. In the Marxist writer H. T. Tsiang’s novella And China Has Hands (1937), the immigrant protagonist buys a Chinese hand laundry business for four hundred dollars only to find that nothing accrues despite his endless labor and the ceaseless exchange of money, services, and commodities. He finds neither progress, accumulation, nor fulfillment. Early in the narrative, Tsiang offers a detailed

Introduction

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anatomy of one day from beginning to end, carefully noting the increments of time that different actions require, from getting up in the morning to drying and ironing clothes by hand, packing them up, and going to bed. “Day in and day out, year in and year out, that is the life of a Chinese laundryman, and Wong Wan-Lee was one of them.”63 Days, years, and laundrymen are forced into equivalence. The logic of equivalence is extended universally, as Wong later compares the price of a Chinese prostitute listed on a flyer with the prices of cigarettes (“forty packages of cigarettes”), beer, food (“ten meals”), rent, and travel fare back to China to acquire a wife.64 Deciding it’s a good deal, he enters the building, only to take the place of another unidentified man who walks out the back door. In her short story “The Unforgetting” (1998), Lan Samantha Chang also contrasts mass production and mechanical reproduction with traditional forms of making—in this case, the raising of a child. Its immigrant protagonist works in America not as a laundryman but as “a photocopy machine repairman,” enduring multiple forms of alienation for the sake of his son.65 But the son’s hard indifference and independence emerge with an almost mechanical necessity from the same regime that has produced the plates that they use every night: “brittle plastic plates that they had chosen at the discount store: bright, hard disks, flat and cheerful” (139), which, even when hurled in grief on the floor, merely compose “a bright mosaic” (151). The modern everyday continues impassively, regardless of memory, intention, or the work of hands. Asian American writing examines, in many different tonalities, the advent of this machinemade and machine-like daily life. Asian American writing participates in the realist production of referentiality. I do not mean, as some critics have recently argued, that it produces the referent of the phrase “Asian American,” summoning a community into being through the power of language.66 Both before and after the project of identity politics, claiming agency as a marginalized group, Asian American writing investigated the broader limitations imposed on agency by the historical development of capitalism.67 It takes up the task of representing modernity’s fundamental cognitive frame: what Jameson has described as “the newly quantifiable space of extension and market equivalence, the new rhythms of measurable time, the new secular and ‘disenchanted’ object world of the commodity system with its post-traditional daily life and its bewilderingly empirical, ‘meaningless’ and contingent umwelt.”68 Realism’s referent is as much a political concession as it is a way of making sense of the world; it is a way of inhabiting a world in which little can be changed even while many things have to be done. Even at the end of the twentieth century, when modernity might appear to be a finished project, Asian American writing explores how this meaningless, abstract, and uniform grid of time and space begins to coordinate the existence of things and lives. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), for example, many actions are given a time stamp; the clock seems to present simply the measurable empty time in which all things happen. Yet such references can also project the sense of a lost collective reality behind this world of quantifiable time and distance.69 In a moment of overwhelming grief, for example, one character

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plays “a cassette of people talking in her language—a farewell present . . . that her family had made for her” when she left India. She translates her mother’s words for her listener: “‘The price of goat rose two rupees. The mangoes at the market are not very sweet. College Street is flooded.’ She turned off the tape. ‘These are things that happened the day I left India.’ The next day she played the same cassette all over again.”70 The details are precisely of the type that clutter the realist novel, but here they do more than shore up an invisible belief in reference or in the ontological priority of the real. They suggest that such frames of reference can move from invisibility into awareness, that concrete experience can be had in memory, if not in the present. This one slice of dislocated, reified referentiality reveals the migrant’s discovery of the modern everyday as a present form of absence and as the suppression of content. In this sense, then, Asian American literature profits from its belatedness to remark critically on the very infrastructure of the realism that it practices. In Asian American realism, modernity is more a structure of feeling than an object of mimesis. Raymond Williams originally defined a structure of feeling as “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone . . . defining a social experience which is still in process.”71 His description usefully emphasizes both the shared nature of the feelings represented and their implicit, granular character. I want to put his concept into practice by reading at a rather elemental level of formal abstraction: by looking, for example, at how many times an act is narrated, whether objects are described as having histories or simply enumerated, and what types of equivalence are suggested between things, people, moments, and stories. The reining in of dialectical exuberance, the tonality of thingness, the impulse to count or to make lists are examples of my objects of investigation. When Mori opens a story by remarking, “This was the thirty-ninth time it happened” (33), we need to see iteration not only as a narratological concern but as a historically shaped impulse, part of an emergent system of perceiving and explaining.72 Even taking into account its rueful humor, or its tone of comical exaggeration, the reference to number still suggests that social relations shaped by histories of shared affect can no longer be relied upon in a world in which “[q]uantity alone decides everything.”73 Vagueness itself has become coded as sentimental, deliberate. Not quite merging into one general thing, multiple instances retain individuality insofar as they have an ordinal number, a place in a series. The topos of description likewise reveals certain impulses and restraints, if we look at how the dimensions, positions, and qualities of things in time and space are noted. What such urges and hesitations in Asian American writing point toward is the emergence of the everyday as a form, as a “materializing of recognition,” in Williams’s phrase.74 I want to suggest that the modern everyday intervenes and establishes itself formally in these works as an impulse away from strong narrative emplotment. Emplotment is not the same thing as having a plot; rather, it is that which “impose[s] a feeling of necessity on the events, characters, and elements thereby configured together: it is the arousing of this sense of necessity which brings . . . closure.”75 Emplotment can be thought of as the mental “grasping together” of many elements

Introduction

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that is made possible by an underlying sense of unity. It is the essential precondition of dialectical thought, narrative, and the qualitatively rich experience of time.76 Without it, there would be no sense of a narrative’s complication or resolution. What makes emplotment difficult for the writers I will consider is the modern condition of reification described by Lukács in his classic essay on that subject: “time sheds its qualitative, flowing, variable nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things.’”77 Things themselves lose their particular qualities, and whole processes are broken apart, as in the modern labor process, into small, repetitive, but unconnected acts.78 In narrative, this process can manifest itself as the absence of a strong sense of underlying necessary connection. I am not claiming that plots are absent or impossible in Asian American narratives. Nor do I want to say that Asian American writing embraces an aesthetic of fragmentation. Although at least one work, Theresa Hak-kyung Cha’s Dictée (1995), has been widely discussed and even celebrated for its self-consciously fragmented form, a greater number of Asian American narratives have followed different formal strategies.79 Rather, the weakening of emplotment more often results in the emergence of a schematic thingness, of small emptied shapes placed side by side in a way that suggests functional equivalence over time but not meaningful interconnectedness. If emplotment lends weight even to small events or characters, the writing of the everyday tends to show the draining away of significance through the phenomenon of repetition. The schematic thingness that results is more radical than subjective habituation, or the inattention that stems from familiarity. Things themselves lose their particularity to become outlined shapes or fungible units. Unlike the thingness that has been described by Bill Brown in terms of a rich dialectical interaction of subject and object, or an Adornian disparity between concept and experience, everyday thingness is characterized by transferability, countability, and simple perdurance.80 We can also think of it as the opposite of a cultural or ethnic object whose possession or exchange carries clear implications for national identities and gives rise to possible narratives about these identities.81 The thingness of the everyday is nonsignifying, quantifiable, abstract without being universal. Lan Samantha Chang’s story “San” (1998), for example, focuses on the countability of things. Starting with “apples, bean sprouts, grains of rice . . . blades of grass” (122), anything that can be counted becomes an instance of a number, and the story suggests that this process of abstraction itself both constitutes loss and works fairly well to disguise it. Counting and losing are the same thing. As the young narrator learns to “keep track of things . . . notice things,” and begins to keep lists of things that have disappeared from the house, she comes to perceive the outlines of absence: “A pale stripe on my father’s tanned wrist revealed where his watch had been” (122–123). The everyday becomes a way of not really seeing what’s behind what’s there—in Heidegger’s words, it is “a project of thingness which, as it were, skips over the things.”82 Words, too, become material shapes to be numbered and manipulated. They fail to adhere to each other or to lead anywhere. In Lê’s Gangster, words become flat

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measures whose repetition is used to circumscribe meaning rather than to reveal it. In the conversation of Vietnamese refugees, “the war was in the past . . . certain foods were in the past and certain smells . . . they talked about heat as something that was in the past . . . Red was in the past” (114). Beneath the superficial nostalgia, the phrase becomes a material instrument whose repetition can be used to cancel feelings in a world of abstraction. The thinglike word can be forced into proximity with another word, as in a chapter configured through a pun on the word “palm.”83 The chapter moves from a reference to a particular palm—a small tree planted in a filled-up swimming pool—to a schematic idea of a palm tree, to the other meaning of palm as one side of the hand, until the varied references come into contact: My palms in the dark: the fingers of my left hand feeling for the lines on my right palm; the fingers of my right hand reaching for the lines on my left palm . . . It takes me such a long time to trace a single line in the dark that the line seems to get longer and deeper, becoming a river, a tunnel, a trench . . . a tree . . . just a trunk with the skinniest branches . . . I imagine that my palms are all sand, desert . . . nothing between the sand and the sky but the smoothest open space. (64) It does not seem to be any characteristic of language that is in question here. Instead, the emphasis falls on a process of schematism, through which different material entities come to be linked through a common reduction to line, form, and space. The empty forms of the everyday are placed next to one another in a paratactic relation. A formal equivalence predicated on a loss of depth, specificity, location, and substance makes itself felt.84 What results is more of an array than a narrative. Lê’s novel is built on the principle of adjacency; it is composed as a series of small units placed side by side without transition. They are not placed in chronological order, and there is little sense that one moment follows out of another. Its final chapter, for example, alternates between small piecemeal accounts of the parents’ evening routine, and other bits of narrative that describe the accidental drowning of the narrator’s brother twenty years earlier in Vietnam. What results is a curiously powerful sense of dread at the inertness and emptiness of the everyday as a repository of human emotions. In one particular image, Lê evokes this paradox of static movement, of unsettling uniformity: “In the shade of the evening, as you looked over the second-floor railing into the swimming pool below, the shapes of things that had happened would slowly take form and come into focus. The day would return to you, and with it, like a school of fish, all the other days” (37). The final sentence conveys a sense of schematic repetition, of uniformly small and fleeting shapes. It also memorably captures the form of the side-by-side or the one-afteranother, a minimal narrativity.85 This is the form of the everyday. Narrativity means thinking of something as an action, whether performed or merely contemplated. In his essay, “Narrate or Describe?” Lukács argues that narrative emplotment consists in the priority that it gives to the temporal unfolding of

Introduction

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human action. “Men’s words, subjective reactions and thoughts are shown to be true or false, genuine or deceptive, significant or fatuous, in practice—as they succeed or fail in deeds and action. Character, too, can be revealed concretely only through action.”86 It is the outcome of the action that must serve as the true principle of selection. Reading narrative, then, ought to be a process of feeling an outcome emerge through details whose significance is sensed even before anything is known. The outcome lends unity and necessity to every element; and the outcome itself must be identified in relation to an agent’s intention and volition. This way of thinking is strikingly absent in much of the Asian American fiction that I will examine. Mori, for instance, disavows the “outcome” as a principle of totality. “The outcome of the [baseball] game and the outcome of the day do not matter . . . the game and the day . . . have little to do with this business of outcome” (72). His final story in Yokohama, California ends with the description of a “routine [that] is familiar . . . the outcome and prospect of it is a pretty obvious thing” (166). He tries instead to establish the fullness of “the day,” one of the most frequently occurring words in his book. “Everything is here, no matter what the outcome may be,” he asserts of one typical day (72). But any emergent sense of totality is eclipsed by the rhythm of seriality in which “the day that is present” is one unit to be followed by “the day that is tomorrow” (166).87 The day belongs to no one, and its arrival doesn’t depend on anyone’s volition. This emphasis is echoed in his book’s focus on a broad cast of minor characters. Not only Mori’s book, but Maxine Hong Kingston’s well-known The Woman Warrior (1975) and China Men (1977) and many more recent works of Asian American fiction adopt the form of interlinked short stories.88 While the dominance of the short story form in postwar America has complex historical and institutional determinants, as Mark McGurl has recently shown, in many Asian American works the form reflects not only a commitment to craft but a reluctance to single out a dominant, continuous chain of causality initiated by a human act.89 We see foreclosed the possibility of a single outcome that can retrospectively endow each element of the plot with necessity.

Minorness and Minimal Sociality Asian American realism stresses the minorness of the everyday. This may appear obvious from my account of the modern everyday as a structure of feeling, but this qualitative dimension cannot always be found in accounts that place greater emphasis on the modern than on the everyday. Particularly in the urban or metropolitan context, the everyday is often represented as that experiential dimension in which the repeated shock of the new is successively registered. For Harootunian, for instance, the discovery of the everyday as a “minimal unity of temporal experience” derives from the ceaselessly accelerating encounters with new social forms, practices, and objects that occurred “in the streets, the buildings . . . institutions of modernity.”90 For other critics, the temporality of the everyday even offers a frame

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for a modern narrative of ever-new self-actualization. Stuart Sherman, for example, traces how “a temporality of smallness and sameness occurred as an arresting innovation” in early modern culture.91 Basing his argument on technological innovations in chronometry, Sherman notes how time came to be subdivided into tiny units that go on endlessly without a sense of impending closure, but he finds nothing like the minorness that I will discuss in this study. Rather, he sees in this “serial and closely calibrated temporality” a scaffolding for “continuous self-construction,” as displayed in the “diurnal form” of the journal, daily newspaper, and travel narrative.92 This view of the everyday as the arena of small-scale heroic creation, selffashioning, or individualization can be found most notably in the work of Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, who examine the creativity of everyday practices.93 The minorness of the everyday in Asian American literature bears a different tone. It is not a matter of expressive style, of how much or how little to say, as in the literary minimalism that Mark McGurl has described as “an aesthetic of risk management, a way of being beautifully careful.”94 I would describe it as the unavailability of an immediate sense of wholeness for either epistemological or ethical purposes. Where this grasp of totality is easily accessible, the modern everyday looks different.95 Perhaps the best example of the latter can be found in Philip Fisher’s optimistic account of American culture as based on abstraction; as he puts it, “American aesthetics is intrinsically . . . an aesthetics of the subtraction of differences.”96 In Fisher’s view, the empty, repeatable, schematic unit of space and time, as well as its material counterpart, the mass-produced commodity, help to bring about equality and limitlessness. What makes this view possible is the strength of his belief in America as a totality; paradoxically, its firm borders are what permit limitlessness. A different totality undergirds Maurice Blanchot’s view of the everyday as the realm in which the individual loses the identity specific to himself in order to participate in the shared “ensemble of human possibilities.”97 But this concept is not readily available for the writers I examine. Instead of wholeness as the ground of intelligibility, we find an uneasy sense of scale, and unfocused comparisons of size.98 Their everyday rests on a kind of minimal sociality, a way of being side-by-side, rather than united within a single or prior identity. Bulosan offers a clear example. Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino American writer of the 1940s and 1950s, describes his experience of the everyday in terms that reveal the tenuousness of this unifying ground. The opposition between the vast/wide and the small/same runs through his best-known work, America is in the Heart (1946). More than a theoretical opposition, it seems almost to name two different ways of being: “I wanted to run away from the stifling narrowness of Temple Street . . . I was obsessed with looking across vast lands and staring into the sky. In vast spaces I found a nameless relief from the smallness of my world in America” (294). The everyday is defined for him by this sense of oppressive smallness; his fellow Filipino laborers “lived the same humdrum life. They met in a dingy restaurant or a dark poolroom to exchange news; then they scattered for another week of endless drudgery. It was the same life that had filled me with fear” (255). The sameness of

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this life is far more ominous than reassuring or pleasurable. Most importantly, the sameness of these days, weeks, and men does not add up to an identity that can be put into action on a public stage. That is reserved for the few moments in the book that clearly transcend the minor everyday. Bulosan poignantly describes what he feels at his first meeting with the Filipino Workers’ Association, held outside the city limits of Oxnard, California, and through the help of Mexican workers: “I . . . felt something powerful growing inside me . . . a feeling of growing with a huge life. I walked silently with the men, listening to their angry voices and to the magic of their marching feet” (196). Everyday smallness and sameness are momentarily transcended. Though Bulosan merely walks silently beside the other men, he is absorbed into a single, larger identity. As opposed to the minimal sociality of the everyday, the socialist labor movement offers a totalizing identity that unifies inside and outside, one man with another, word and thought: “There was the same thing in each of them that possessed me: their common faith in the working man . . . It was in every word and gesture” (311). But even this discovery, as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, succumbs to the fearful rhythm of everyday recurrence. The image of Bulosan staring into vastness can serve as an emblem of the everyday’s dialectical minorness. In his case, as for other writers I will examine, wholeness and intelligibility have to be sought, mediated back through the everyday itself. Even though, as I have been arguing, minorness is inherent in the everyday, it emerges most clearly as a predicament to those who are placed in the racialized position of the minority, those who are forced to experience themselves as smaller numbers and less-individual beings. As Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd have pointed out, “minority individuals are always treated and forced to experience themselves generically.”99 This combination of schematism and scale holds a key to the racialization of Asian Americans. Lê’s novel imagines how a Vietnamese family finds its way to the United States in 1978 on the basis of this perception of their size and number. Their American sponsor, “a retired Navy man,” is struck by his memories of the Vietnamese people as “being small and kind . . . he spent many sleepless nights staring at the ceiling and thinking about the nameless, faceless bodies lying in small boats” (4). This side-by-side smallness remains a crucial trope for the everyday and for the place of Vietnamese refugees within it, as in this description: “In the picture, our boat looks like a toy boat . . . There are little people standing in the boat . . . we are all so small. Small faces, small heads, small arms reaching out to touch small hands” (29). If miniatures, according to Susan Stewart, offer “a transcendent and simultaneous view . . . timeless and uncontaminable . . . a world of arrested time,” the smallness of the refugees restores a sense of autonomy, perhaps even a sudden glory, in Hobbes’s terms, only to the American sailors who rescue them.100 Lê continues: “they laughed so hard at the sight of us so small” (29). This sense of scale seems unavoidable; it is one way in which modernity manifests itself. Radical diminution characterizes the daily lives of refugees and immigrants in a world that has become a montage of repeating moments. In Chang-rae Lee’s ironic words, “Here is the great secret, the great mystery to an immigrant’s success, the

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dwindle of irredeemable hours beneath the cheap tube lights. Pass them like a machine . . . This will be your coin-small salvation.”101 Paradoxically, while the everyday as a set of practices can provide the experiential basis for a group’s solidarity, the everyday as a structure does not result in a conscious sense of identity. The discovery of a strong form of sociality, as in Bulosan’s case, can provide an opening or escape from minorness. For this and for other reasons, Asian American writers have shown a complex ambivalence toward modernity’s everyday. In the early twentieth century, the everyday is uncovered reluctantly and with dismay, as a failure or betrayal of a transcendent promise. The wartime writings of Japanese American internees reveal a painful and more intimate negotiation with the artificial, administered, uncanny everyday of the relocation camps. After World War II, Asian Americans continue to struggle with the everyday. Its banality comes under attack, but its very abstraction seems to provide an escape from the burden of racial embodiment. Following the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, Asian American literature searches for a distinctive identity, a full agency, and a coherent group history. It displays a notable impatience with the idea of an everyday common to the modern world. But in more recent decades Asian American writers have continued to give attention to modernity’s everyday, looking for the transformative and even lyrical potential contained in its structure of feeling and its empty moments and spaces. This shifting and uneven set of attitudes stems not only from the changing historical circumstances of Asian Americans in a century that begins with their legal exclusion, sees the expansion of U.S. empire into Asia, and includes the emergence of civil rights, new social movements, and large-scale demographic changes in the Asian American population.102 It also reflects the volatile, antifunctionalist character of everyday minorness itself. Its inchoate, transitory nature frustrates “hierarchy, classification, administrative tidiness and convenience, historical legitimation, or official commemoration,” in Sheringham’s words.103 Despite its adherence to the logic of equivalence, the everyday possesses an inability to coincide wholly with itself, a messiness, a tendency to take shortcuts wherever possible, to save and also to waste.104 Unlike capital, which accumulates, “everyday life is not cumulative,” Lefebvre remarks, and this difference is important.105 Through its repetitions and lack of emplotment, the everyday can generate a sense of virtuality, of forms or relations not yet realized.106 If the everyday is first discovered as the nonfulfillment of modernity’s promises, in another dialectical twist, a potentially utopian dimension arises from within its disorienting repetitions. The most influential account of this utopian potential can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature. In their study of Kafka, they posit that “[t]he three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”107 Minor literature uses language not to signify but rather to overturn expectations of meaning, to express states and pathways of objective, material intensity through sound and gesture, and to dismantle a certain

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rigid model of individual personhood. Deleuze and Guattari highlight in Kafka the impersonal, mechanical processes through which repeated and interlinked shapes give rise to a “polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary individual is only a part.”108 This process resists meaning; it deals in what they call intensities rather than signification. What takes priority over the speaking or feeling subject is the series, or a proliferation that “opens up a field of immanence” in which everything is contiguous.109 Their model usefully expands ways to conceptualize minorness as a practice.110 It also points to the need to rethink radically the definition of individuality in the context of political oppression. Most importantly, it illuminates the connection between repetition and immanence in a way that reveals the utopian potential buried within everyday minorness. In this striking example, a “minor practice” takes up and intensifies the very structure or rhythm of everydayness. “Children are well-skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself . . . Kafka tells how, as a child, he repeated one of his father’s expressions in order to make it take flight on a line of non-sense: ‘end of the month, end of the month.’”111 This phrase, “end of the month,” together with the practice of repetition, exemplify the intersection of cyclical repetition and linear time that Lefebvre sees as central to the everyday. Everyday recurrence can be manipulated to propel a form into a different realm, as in this series of adjectives: “finite-contiguous-continuous-unlimited.”112 This exercise of imagination begins with the small, bounded thing, places one next to another, keeps adding on, realizes that adjacency represents a possible path of movement, and then moves toward a new vision of universality as movement: in Ernesto Laclau’s description, “the always receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands.”113 Despite its potential political value, this degree of libidinal investment in the dream of immanence is not often seen in the works that I will examine. Likewise, there is little sense of emancipation, or of a triumph over the restrictive boundaries of selfhood, when the self is conceived as a field traversed by transpersonal forces or powers. The modern everyday hides within its dreariness, stasis, and disorientation a dream of freedom, but the nonidentity of the everyday is more often a source of distress; the separation of words from meaning, and the nonseparation of people and things, feel like conditions to be overcome rather than celebrated. There is a desire for a broader perspective, an inescapable and limiting sense of scale, though also a hope for something more. This is perhaps simply to say that we are not yet ready to leave modernity behind. For Asian American writers, modernity is not a settled question, or something that belongs to the past. It is still an open question, belonging to the present, and even more to the future. Asian American writing of the everyday turns to the transcendent concept of history to reground experience in meaning. Addressing the everyday has the advantage of making “the concrete presence of the experiencing subject,” in Sheringham’s words, something we can talk about.114 The critique of everyday life in postwar France took root in the fertile rift between

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the theoretical paradigms of phenomenology and structuralism. As developed by Lefebvre, the Situationists, Certeau, and others, the critique of everyday life avoided the pitfalls of both “reified institutions” and the “intentional subject,” turning instead to the “complex realm of social practice” as something relatively independent.115 It brings up the realm of the intersubjective, that social dimension whose fragile, even ineffable nature Williams describes: “all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known.”116 In Agnes Heller’s words, everyday life is “not ‘something’ but rather the shared modern life-experience on which our intersubjective constitution of the world rests.”117 This is one reason that I have chosen to focus on the everyday. It can be a way to bridge what appears to be a widening gap between Asian American studies and the needs and experiences of Asian American people; R. Radhakrishnan has recently described this as “the disjunction between the subject of politics and the subject of epistemology.”118 In the chapters below, I try to offer a theoretically useful account of how modernity has been experienced intersubjectively by a particular group. It will be noticed that I do not focus primarily on what makes Asian Americans distinctive: a demand whose taxonomic ambitions this study does not fulfill. Rather, I have chosen to view the minority status of Asian Americans as a concentration, intensification, or localization of the minorness that attends the modern capitalist everyday. This move aligns my work with, for example, that of Jaime Hanneken, who interrogates the “economy of minority literature,” as it plays out “within the field of cultural commodification.”119 This book thus places Asian American writing in a broader context than the political history of the American nation. The internal consolidation, ideological self-definition, and imperial expansion of the United States are immediately relevant sets of concerns for understanding Asian American writing, and cannot be dismissed, But I would like to point out that this literature also needs to be located where the larger projects of modernity, the everyday, and literary realism continue to intersect.120 My treatment of Asian American writing is far from comprehensive. I have tried to include works written by both men and women at different moments in the twentieth century. Many of the works will be familiar to critics working within the field of Asian American studies; a few may be recognizable to readers outside it. While I cannot account for every work I have excluded, I should mention my decision not to include poetry or drama. A consideration of the everyday in the context of Asian American poetry would certainly need to include the work of Cathy Song, Wing Tek Lum, Lawson Inada, and Li-young Lee, among others. In their scale, scope, and subject matter, many of their poems explore the realm of everyday occurrences and relations. However, I would cautiously suggest that poetry of the everyday seeks to transfigure our way of seeing or hearing the everyday; it may begin with the ordinary, in good Romantic fashion, but does not end there.121 The economy of representation in the theater also operates quite differently from the world of prose, and so I have decided not to discuss examples, such as Wakako Yamauchi’s play The Music Lessons, that could have been included for thematic reasons.122 The

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genres that I do examine, the novel, short stories, journals, letters, journalism, and photography, have a history that, even as some of their names indicate, is significantly intertwined with the rise of the everyday in the modern period. Asian American writers show that modernity is still an open question and an ongoing process, that the everyday is a living structure of feeling, and that a realism focused on little things offers a vital means of registering present social and historical change. The following chapters trace the gradual, uneven emergence of the everyday in Asian American writing. Though they are arranged in chronological order, I have tried to show how the recognition of the everyday arises out of a dialectical tension with both a desire for the modern and a revulsion from the abstractions that it necessitates. Arriving in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan explicitly seek a modernity conceived as intellectual progress and political universalism. They confront the everyday in its bleak, industrialized, racialized, and serial character, but try to negate it by incorporating it into a model of history as universal dialectical progress. In this Hegelian vision, the world moves from a state of abstraction to one of concreteness, in which particular, disconnected things lose their identities in a greater whole. Their narratives imitate that movement through the figure of repetition. Instead of the nonteleological repetitions of the everyday, they try to show how the world arrives at greater concreteness through the process of interfusing more and more instances of the same thing. Despite their declared intentions, however, the recurrence of objects and actions evokes the industrialized everyday of 1930s and 1940s America: an abstract anywhere, populated by thinglike people who are linked and moved mechanically. My second chapter focuses on the uncanny normalcy of the internment camps of World War II. Within these camps and assembly centers, Japanese Americans discover and even come to define themselves somewhat uneasily in terms of the everyday: the temporality of the day-to-day, the characteristic scale of littleness, the form of recurrence, and the activity of waiting. The project of internment sought to incorporate Japanese Americans within a certain national vision, creating in the camps simulacra of “normal” American communities. But we find a different sense of the everyday only intermittently perceived as American, largely unmoored from place, progress, and meaning, and marked by a sense of minorness, inertia, and opacity. Freud’s concept of the uncanny, itself a descriptive paradigm of psychological modernity, suggests the intimate relations between repetition, everydayness, and the limits of agency and progress—ties fully explored in the camp newspapers, journals, War Relocation Authority photographs, personal letters, and stories I examine. The phrase “little things,” used by internees to describe both what signifies and what doesn’t, signals their profound ambivalence. Strange relationships between people and things proliferate and become the focus of the everyday. The third chapter considers the difference between the postwar memoirs of Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston. For Chinese Americans during and after

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the war, everydayness offered a means of constructing a sense of identity that was both modern and American. Wong’s memoir, Fifth Chinese Daughter, relies on a particular type of everyday thinking based on the recurrence of actions and events. For Wong, the repeatability of actions, viewed schematically, forms the basis of knowledge—as well as the unproblematic basis of her own identity. Observing herself from the outside, Wong claims modernity by presenting herself as an anomaly in an almost statistical sense, as an unlikely daughter of Chinatown. Yet in this way she also illustrates her fitness as a postwar American citizen. A stronger model of identity as self-determination lies behind the ethnic identity movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior shows how relying on mere everyday recurrence comes to appear inadequate. Identity starts to be seen as based on unique laws of self-development. Kingston struggles to base a sense of self on her mother’s exemplary stories, but this project of identity proves untenable in the face of the modern world’s repetitions and reductions. In her second work, China Men, she turns fully toward modern history, offering a portrait of the everyday as the realm of faceless, endless, and abstract labor, performed by generic subjects. The fourth chapter more fully traces the crucial rupture between the aspirations of ethnic identity and the spatially unmoored, generic forms of the modern everyday. The Asian American movement of the late 1960s and 1970s gives rise to a desire for an identity grounded in history. In what could be called the literature of identity, everyday things are represented as reified fragments of a forgotten or repressed Asian American historical narrative. Thingness, the status of the inanimate material object, is vividly seen as a temporary condition that can be dissolved through unforgetting. The everyday that we have been describing is notably rejected as the antagonist of history, the realm of repressive ideology, whose hold is perpetuated by women. But some more recent writers such as Ha Jin and Lan Samantha Chang turn their gaze back to the broader context of capitalist modernity, offering detailed accounts of how individuals as well as nations undergo this disquieting transition. Their works replace confidence in an ethnic human subject with the uncanny attraction exercised by faceless everyday things. At times, conscious subjectivity even seeks to extinguish itself in the banal routines of modernity’s everyday. My final two chapters examine the utopian potential of the Asian American everyday. In one more dialectical turn, the everyday’s radical potential as an alternative to modernity begins to be more fully explored. Its emptiness now appears as a form of potential openness, as a way to open up political ideas of equality. Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker explores both the limits and the possibilities of mere proximity, of things and persons that exist side by side without knowing or affecting each other. The form of the list is the most significant example of this simple contiguity. Through its pervasiveness, the list becomes more than a material object or a form of discourse; it becomes a figure of modernity. An everyday form without boundaries or internal coherence, the list lies at the heart of Lee’s novel. Though it begins as a banal, everyday thing, it provides a crucial lyricism and a key

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to the novel’s subtle critique of nation-based thinking. Lee’s novel articulates the Asian immigrant’s longing not only for economic success, but also for political modernity—action in the public sphere. But when the latter is made impossible by the nation’s racial constraints, the novel offers a different model of political community. Reflecting the everyday and figured through the list, this imagined community consists in a pattern of emergence. Lee’s novel reveals the potential political value of open-ended, ongoing everydayness. Although the everyday seems to dissolve the particularities of location and identity in its cycles of recurrence, it focuses aimlessly on what is close at hand: the furniture in the room, the objects visible through the window, the signs on the street. This ability to reground its own abstraction becomes the key to its utopian potential in my final chapter. I show how writers in Hawaii have turned to the everyday to elaborate a critical concept of the local. Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s short stories occur within the familiar machine-made, mass-produced everyday that signals the regime of commodity fetishism. But she draws attention to the physical traces left on objects and environments by the very different small-scale microhistories of human use. This sensitivity to the intimate effects of time gives rise to a concrete sense of the local. Everyday duration and repetition, rather than anticipation and closure, form the basis of a different economy focused on the erosion and adaptation of the familiar. Through a figure of the “secondhand,” the reused or recycled, Yamanaka demonstrates how the everyday’s minorness, while not itself a chosen condition, could be imagined as the basis for an identity that is “finite-contiguous-continuousunlimited.”123

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{ PART I }

Discovering the Modern Everyday

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{1}

The Outward Spiral: Why Kang and Bulosan Ignore the Everyday

The desire for a new time propels both Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan. The Korean-born Kang arrives in America in 1921 at the age of eighteen to pursue his life in the West; seventeen-year-old Bulosan arrives nine years later from the Philippines, a U.S. territory.1 Both writers conceive of modernity as the limitless development of the new. In America is in the Heart (1946), Bulosan gives as his reason for leaving the Philippines, “my life there was too small to float the vessel of my desires.”2 His initial encounter with modernity had predated his arrival in the United States; in Baguio, a resort town frequented by Western tourists, the young Bulosan first notes the vast, uneven temporality and seductive materiality that characterize this condition. “The roads [of Baguio] are asphalt and the most modern and beautiful in the Philippines . . . In the center of the city is a lake strung with multicolored light bulbs that sparkle at night . . . And farther down . . . is the public market, teeming with European and American tourists” (66). Here he learns how to make a little money. “Whenever I saw a white person in the market with a camera, I made myself conspicuously ugly, hoping to earn ten centavos. But what interested the tourists most were the naked Igorot women and their children . . . and robust mountain men whose genitals were nearly exposed” (67).3 Even more than the aesthetic beauty of the modern, with its smoothness, sparkle, and multiplicity, it is this act of photographing the “native” that reveals the unauthorized self-assertion of modernity. In East Goes West (1937), Kang similarly finds in his first sight of New York City this illegitimate grandeur: “the city rose, like a dream dreamed overnight, new, remorselessly new . . . a city of Babel towers, casually, easily strewn end up against the skies . . . this gigantic rebellion which was New York.”4 In their conception, modernity negates boundaries and refuses minorness of all kinds. Kang and Bulosan imagine it to consist in a self-fulfilling time, a newly docile materiality, and expanded relations between people and things. Yet they also dream of finding in it a home, as Bulosan remarks on first viewing the Seattle harbor: “I knew that I must find a home in this new land” (99).

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The concept of epic, a traditional aesthetic form of grandness, can help explain what these authors are trying to attain. The dichotomy of epic and novel has often been invoked to define the concept of modernity, with the epic standing for an earlier, irrevocably lost epoch, and the novel representing the modern condition.5 But for Kang and Bulosan, epic is the mode through which they might capture the essence of modernity and their own relation to it. The account of epic found in Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel, first drafted in 1914–1915, describes what they hope to find in America: a world “wide and yet . . . like a home, new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own.”6 Approaching Seattle, Bulosan sees the shoreline as “native and promising . . . like coming home after a long voyage, although I had no home” (99). The land strikes him as both “familiar” and “new” (99), in precisely the configuration that Lukács saw as no longer possible in the modern condition of disintegration. Kang, too, dreams of finding in the West “the presence of meaning,” and anticipates modernity as the state in which “every action is only a well-fitting garment for the world” (TN, 30). The aspirations of Kang and Bulosan, so different from Lukács’s pessimistic appraisal of modernity, can be linked to their postcolonial status, as I will discuss below. Here, I want to suggest that both writers attempt to create in their works this epic condition of integrated vastness, of a world held together by the immanence of meaning. Both of their narratives are structured as continuous trajectories in which each step, twist, and turn marks a movement forward and upward, in which every return is weighted by necessity and full of significance. Dialectic in their narratives exists as the maximal form of emplotment. In a recent study, Fredric Jameson defines dialectical thought as that which opposes and dismantles “the ideologies of daily life” or “common sense.” The latter relies on a “belief in solid concepts, on the one hand, and the certainty of real things, on the other.”7 The dialectic, in contrast, doesn’t allow any single idea or thing to stand by itself, or even in stable, permanent opposition to another. It insists on interrelationship, interdependence, and continual change—“the interpenetration of opposites” and “the negation of the negation,” in Engels’s terms.8 Apparent opposites start to look alike; that which negates will itself be negated. The dialectic begins by assuming totality, rather than seeing it as an end point.9 The classic example of nondialectical thinking is what Marx calls the fetishism of the commodity, in which “the products of men’s hands,” instead of revealing social interdependence or mutuality, seem to possess “a life of their own.”10 The tendency of the capitalist everyday is to see things as unrelated, standing next to each other, or over against each other, while the dialectic insists on pulling relatedness out of apparently disparate things. Kang and Bulosan try to represent the material unfolding of a totality in their narratives. Their aim is to make every place, person, and encounter in America appear to cancel and preserve a prior, more limited version of itself. The narrator, too, successively negates more limited versions of the self only to discover that it was always already part of a larger whole.

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The form of recurrence seems intended to embody this dialectical movement. Bulosan’s narrative moves continually up and down the West Coast. A typical chapter begins, “I stopped in San Fernando,” then a few pages later, “I arrived in Bakersfield,” then “I arrived in Stockton during a strike” (271–275); from Stockton he goes to Oakland, then onward, yet again, to San Francisco: “San Francisco was glowing, and behind us Oakland was fading” (280–281). As he continually announces his arrival in the same cities, the same streets and restaurants, he tries to suggest a coming together of places, and of destinies. When he hears the foghorns in San Francisco Bay toward the end of his story, he is reminded of “carabaos lost in a wide meadow” and dreams of his childhood home in Luzon (281). His movements, though at first determined by the availability of work, are eventually shaped by the political and social projects in which he finds his vocation. But what is supposed to represent a spiraling movement ends up looking like a ceaseless, unmappable, haphazard scramble. When Bulosan describes his wanderings, the effect produced is one of disarray rather than destiny. It’s one escape, one arrival after another, with no continuous direction or even consistent rhythm. Only twenty pages from the end of the book, Bulosan remarks, “It was the same life all over again. None of us was employed” (300). Nothing seems to change, and the narrator seems trapped in an eternally repeating confusion. Kang’s narrator, eighteen-year-old Chungpa Han, continually spirals around New York, arriving in a different sense each time. When he first steps off the boat from Korea, he takes a dramatic oath in Battery Park: “I swore . . . I must get to know the West” (7)—New York is the mysterious object to be known. But at the end of the first volume he departs, having discovered only the unknowability of the city and of himself: New York . . . was shot through and through with vague intimations of fabulous, delicate worlds beyond my bounds of thought, of life reaching out and up in a scope unrestricted, north and south . . . east, west . . . life coiling and spiralling . . . But . . . I came away with no gain, except some poor Korean friends who had pulled me out of an outcast’s starvation. (87) Chungpa’s progress, or lack of progress, is measurable through his changing relation to the city’s rhythms, but these rhythms themselves never change. At the end of the novel, he returns to find a girl. “All the annoying world of dollars and cents seemed to have been halted for my Sunday afternoon. But my feet still kept time on the pavements to the rhythm of the els” (305). This mechanical rhythm is what he tries to avoid noticing. Neither Kang nor Bulosan fully acknowledge the seriality and schematism of the everyday even though they show it all around them, constituting their world and to a large extent shaping their actions. As a result, Kang’s novel is haunted by images of the everyday, by the distant presence of “the Dearborn assembly plants . . . dry, mechanical, tedious” (160). Its nightmare is the assembly line, in which you see the same single part go by you an infinite number of times.

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Dialectical repetition deepens and expands; but everyday recurrence is just the same thing over and over, never going anywhere. The latter is what reveals itself: “a reality that is heterogeneous in itself and meaningless to the individual” (TN, 80). In a sense, America is in the Heart and East Goes West are novels in spite of themselves, showing and disavowing modernity’s everyday as “the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life” (TN, 71).11 When Chungpa enters a diner to have his first American meal, he makes this friendly gesture to the counterman, whose name is MacNeil: I asked him, did he know “MacFlecknoe,” an English poem which I had learned in Korea. “Who?” [the man replies] And I quoted: “All human things are subject to decay: / And when Fate summons, monarchs must obey . . .” “Unhuh—that’s fine,” he said sceptically, with a wink at the girl. “And who’s that other Mac, the son-of-a-bitch?” (15) The splendid closure of Dryden’s heroic couplet and its epic scale of vision (even if ironic and nostalgic) offer a grotesque contrast with the world inhabited by MacNeil and his previous customer, a taxi driver who glumly observes, “Third breakfast this morning . . . First one at four, second at six . . . Been up all night” (14). This is modernity’s everyday: one breakfast after another, one MacNeil next to “that other Mac,” the world of immigration, monopoly capitalism, empty time, and the deskilling of labor. Chungpa tries to ignore this everyday world as long as he can. For him, the counterman is “touched . . . with the magic of the city” (16), a potential Virgil-like guide, and the flophouse where Chungpa spends his second night in America is epic, rather than everyday, in its degradation: like Milton’s fallen angels, “Men lay thickly on the floor” (20–21). But as he travels up and down the East Coast working a variety of minor and always temporary jobs, Kang’s narrator shows us a life of constant, small-scale economic desperation, the life described by H. T. Tsiang as an endless exchange of functionally equivalent units.12 The same holds true of Bulosan, whose work, ranging from the canneries of Alaska to the fields of Southern California, also presents itself as “a planless life, hopeless, and without direction . . . merely living from day to day” (169). Both Kang and Bulosan show how the modern everyday emerges through the disappointed hopes of transcendence, unity, and identity with others. The remarkable persistence of these ideals allows them to reveal the everyday’s confusing, repetitive tangle. These works are novels of the everyday in spite of themselves, with a doubleness of form that reflects the complexity of the writers’ historical situations. The aspiration to epic integration seems to derive from the postcolonial dimension of their writing. Insofar as they write as Asians about life in America, they encounter a novelistic world that stubbornly resists any attempt to integrate its pieces with each other or with an idea. But in a final dialectical twist, their presentation of the external, everyday world of American modernity ends up attaining an epic immanence because of the radical discrimination of the color line. Neither Kang nor

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Bulosan could become a U.S. citizen because of his race. Even though their racial classification as Asians could be uncertain—Kang sees himself as “outside the two sharp worlds of color in the American environment” (273)—the existence of the “invisible wall” (223) of race can never be in doubt. It is the objective link between “the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee . . . the black body dangling on a tree” (AH, 189).13 The external world negates the humanity of entire groups that include Kang and Bulosan, and this very negation paradoxically saturates their worlds with meaning. Every space, whether private or public, every action, whether voluntary or forced, acknowledges the significance of race. But in the end, the everyday goes on, trivializing even horror itself, as their works show with remarkable candor. Modernity’s everyday appears as a persistent puzzle, as a failure to sustain sublimity, as failure to progress, and failure to cohere.

Small Worlds Kang and Bulosan attribute the shapes of their lives to an unfolding totality that wears the appearance overseas of colonization. Both writers belonged to nations that no longer officially existed. Korea had been officially annexed by Japan in 1910; the Philippines became U.S. territory in 1898.14 Both describe empire not as the domination of one nation over another but as the global expansion of modern capitalism.15 A long history of “global vandalism” (47), as Bulosan puts it, propels the protagonists toward America.16 In their eyes, colonization reveals how events, persons, and structures separated by space and time are in fact concretely interconnected and full of meaning. Notably, though, neither looks to anticolonial nationalism to reverse this process. Instead of asserting the right of the particular unit to determine its own identity, they affirm their commitment to the universal. Both see themselves as belonging to something larger—ultimately, to modernity itself, understood as a material and a cultural condition. In Bulosan’s case, Popular Front socialism offers a political language to articulate his belonging. Close to the end of his narrative, he discovers with fellow labor activists that “[t]here was the same thing in each of them that possessed me: their common faith in the working man . . . it came to me that we were all fighting against one enemy: Fascism. It was in every word and gesture, every thought” (311, original emphasis). As in Lukács’s epic world, thought, gesture, and people are one. This unity, which Bulosan finds in the labor movement and Kang in romantic love, aspires to recapitulate a primal unity that both locate in the precolonial past of their countries of origin. Both authors balance their accounts of life in America with equally detailed accounts of the worlds they knew before emigration. In the first part of his book, Bulosan gives lucid, lyrical renderings of rural life at a particular moment in the history of the Philippines. He attributes his family’s struggles to the consolidation of power and property rights in a narrow segment of society (the landed gentry and the church), and the extension of American

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schooling and emigration to the “U.S. nationals” (not citizens) that Filipinos became.17 Kang devotes an entire book to the first part of his life in Korea. That book, The Grass Roof, published by Scribner in 1931, uses Kang’s childhood and education in order to recount the history of a colonized nation. East Goes West opens with “the disjointing of a world,” the ending of Korean monarchy by Japanese colonialism.18 Instead of asserting national independence, however, both Kang and Bulosan want to move away from narrow identification with one nation or one “strip of land” toward an ideal that is modern and universal. Kang’s original Korean village is “ruled by national ideals which had been handed down from father to son for innumerable generations” (5). Bulosan’s narrator, in the early part of America, identifies himself wholly with “this narrow strip of land . . . my soil . . . and my father’s faith . . . his love for the earth where his parents and their parents before him had lacerated their lives digging away the stones and trees to make the forest land of our village a fragrant and livable place” (76). But this homogeneous and single-minded attachment to the past makes the narrator into a problematic individual. The narrator of The Grass Roof, the same Chungpa Han, presents himself as Lukács’s novelistic hero, troubled by an incommensurable interiority. Introduced to Western learning, he claims that “[t]he contrast of my inner world—an expanding cosmos that would admit no boundary—and my outer, that secluded village of the Han, with roots many centuries deep . . . stimulated me to speculate and to speculate, and still I lived as in . . . starvation for more” (183). Precolonial Korea is “bound together it seemed, by invisible, indivisible unity,” but it is “unreal like a mystic’s dream” (165) because it is isolated from the larger movement of history. Both the natural unity of Korean tradition and the peasant’s organic attachment to the soil are unreal to Kang and Bulosan because they fail to acknowledge the dialectical movement of history. Carrying history forward, colonialism has the effect of placing meaning back in the sensuous empirical world—for Bulosan in each inch of land, each blade of grass that is taken from the father’s cultivation. It links together into a higher, no longer merely natural unity a congeries of “isolated persons, non-sensuous structures, and meaningless events” (TN, 80–81). As Bulosan describes the extension of capitalism to Asia, he notes that “the peasants had been the victims of ruthless exploitation for years, dating back to the eighteenth century when Spanish colonizers instituted severe restrictive measures in order to impoverish the natives. So from then on the peasants became poorer each year and the landlords became richer at every harvest time” (23). But the image of a zero-sum game changes, with the transfer of the Philippines to America, to a different metaphor of consolidation: [a] malignant cancer . . . was negatively influencing the growth of the Philippines from a backward and undeveloped agricultural land into a gigantic industrial country. The wealth that was not already in the power of

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large corporations, banks, and the church, was beginning to flow into the vaults of new corporations, banks, and other groups. (24) Linked together by the flow of wealth and rooting themselves in the land, these institutions make up the actual “expanding cosmos that would admit no boundary” (EW, 183). Bulosan’s poetry attempts to voice the new totality that capitalism dialectically anticipates. His poem “I Want the Wide American Earth,” for example, asserts: “We are millions everywhere, / . . . We are millions working together. / We are building, creating, molding life. / . . . / We are everywhere, we are everywhere.”19 Bulosan argues that colonialism releases the individual to “belong . . . to the whole world” (273). Initially, the loss of a national context leads to a crisis of agency. Kang’s narrator had dreamed of becoming a political leader in Korea, but after Korea’s annexation by Japan, “a Korean premier did not exist” (259). The absence of an external world in which Chungpa can actualize himself leads him to briefly contemplate suicide. But the elimination of the Korean nation relieves him of the need to create meaning through his own exertions. While still embedded in a national context, Chungpa’s agency had to take the form of rebellion against an “outer” world felt to be lacking in sense or vitality. However, East Goes West opens with the reflection that “the old traditions [were] irrevocably smashed not by me but by Japan . . . Korea, a small, provincial, old-fashioned Confucian nation, hopelessly trapped by a larger, expanding one, was called to get off the earth” (8, emphasis added). Chungpa thus comes to America free to seek what he calls “the embracing whole of life” (283). His personal desires become less important than the recurrences through which the oneness of the world will be revealed. Bulosan’s narrator articulates the same idea when his brother goes off to fight in Spain: “It’s much easier for us who have no roots to integrate ourselves in a universal ideal. Were we not exiles, were we not socially strangled in America, we would have never have understood the significance of the Civil War in Spain” (241). Merely national belonging would have kept them from embracing history’s forward movement, he suggests. While Kang and Bulosan express nostalgia for their childhood worlds, they criticize anticolonial movements as regressive.20 At a “nationalist meeting in the Korean Institute” in New York, a gathering place for Korean exiles, one of the “passionate national patriots” stabs a Japanese consul. Chungpa sees the act as “futile”: it was as if I saw Korea receding farther and farther from me. Lin [the attacker] failed to arouse my patriotism; he merely italicized my . . . lack of nationalist passion . . . I saw Lin as living in a narrow world, a small world in a large. No message came back and forth from the large world to the little nor from the little world to the large. (68–69) Kang opposes any efforts to revive the isolated existence of “small worlds,” but he is not suggesting that Korea actively embrace its status as a Japanese colony. He criticizes Canada for the way in which it clings proudly to its subordinate position

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within the British Empire. As a student at “Maritime College” in Halifax, Chungpa hears lectures on the greatness of the English, “backed by a great moral sense, expanding over the world in a great empire” (100). Canada sees itself as “perfect . . . still intact, showing a late firm ripeness, Victorian highmindedness at the very height of Tennysonianism” (119). It proudly “held the superiority of the Briton above all races created as its unquestioned dogma,” but, as a colony, “it, too, must cringe before the superiority of an elder country, England” (97). Canada, he concludes, is “strangely immobilized . . . another potential ruin of the age,” just as isolated as “the ancient habitation of [his] fathers” (120). Belonging to an empire results in stasis if the empire happens to be simply one nation writ large. He turns away from the “closed-off world” (120) of particular nations, wherever they may happen to be. He dreams of the continual self-surmounting of modernity itself.

Marginalizing the Novelistic Hero Kang and Bulosan oppose the separate existence of “narrow worlds,” however inwardly rich they may be. They extol an active submission to the onward movement of history, a process that involves the continual negation of boundaries. This has consequences for a certain dimension of narrative that Alex Woloch has described as “the narrative’s continual apportioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe.”21 If the novel as a genre gives priority of place to the character who possesses an autonomous interiority, to recall Lukács’s terms, Kang and Bulosan turn away from this ideologically significant convention. Their protagonists are not merely passive heroes, or observers. Rather, they actively negate their own singularity, identifying themselves instead with the material-ideal world “reaching out and up . . . life coiling and spiralling” (EW, 87). They even present themselves as minor characters to a certain degree: Bulosan’s narrator often describes his own efforts as small or little, even as he aspires to transcend this smallness through unity with a larger movement. Of a volume of poetry that he publishes, he remarks: “I had put certain things of myself in it . . . All of myself in this little volume of poems” (320). A rich novelistic interiority tends to be given to other characters who are then restricted to marginal roles or spaces within the narrative. They remain peripheral, isolated, and unimportant; they forge no lasting connections with the world, and disappear without leaving a trace, as though to illustrate once again the unsustainability of any inviolate, bounded world. Bulosan’s narrator, Carlos, has four brothers, from whom Amado stands out for his rebellious assertion of self. His original act of apostasy occurs in Luzon, while clearing a plot of land in the heavy rain: Amado stepped back and for a moment I thought the hand with the stick would strike my father. My brother raised his hand and stopped, shaking with blind fury; then he flung the stick angrily upon the carabao and started

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running furiously in the direction of Binalonan . . . he was running away from the cruelty of our hard peasant life. (16–17) When Carlos meets him again in America, Amado still insists on following his own desires, “desert[ing]” his family yet again. Carlos asks Amado to help send their older brother, Macario, to college, but Amado refuses: “‘I’m going into a new world, Carlos,’ Amado said. ‘Away from our people. I’m sorry it’s this way’” (201). Amado’s dreams of self-fashioning clearly fail to be realized; when Carlos meets him again years later, he is “startled”: “He had grown old and haggard. There was a long scar on his left hand. He looked as though he had been roughly handled” (295). Yet the narrative pointedly fails to develop any of the details of Amado’s story. He never explains to his younger brother where he had been or what he had experienced. The narrative does not give narrative space to the tribulations that were particular to this character alone. Another older brother, Macario, is a minor character in terms of the space he occupies in the narrative, but he clearly embodies the idealistic hero of a certain type of novel: “his ideals [were] so lofty I knew he meant everything he said. There was something in the way he talked—the impeccable movements of his hands, for instance—that dispelled all doubts. Slowly he was giving form to my dream . . . his idealism was so great that it moved his whole life” (241). Macario gives the stirring speech from which the book’s title is derived, a manifesto for a Popular Front literature that is the book’s rhetorical climax: “It has fallen upon us to inspire a united front among our people . . . We must achieve . . . the discovery of a new vista of literature” (188). And yet Macario is unquestionably a minor character in this narrative, embellishing the edges of the story. Macario’s devotion to the socialist idea is so total as to be singular, unachievable by anyone else. The narrator-protagonist, in contrast, sees himself as merely an incarnation of his brother’s words and intentions: “I knew that if he died somewhere in pursuit of what he had wanted to be, he would live again in me and in all the words that seized my mind” (261). Kang goes to greater lengths to develop a minor character that embodies the principle of autonomous interiority. The wealthy cosmopolitan Korean exile To Wan Kim plays a curious role as a novelistic hero relegated by the text to a marginal position. Kang had originally intended to focus a novel, called Death of an Exile, on this character, but abandoned this plan. From the outset, Kim is associated with the principles of solitariness, subjectivity, and novelistic irony. Chungpa first sees him sitting alone in a restaurant in New York’s Chinatown: “He was alone, and I got a sense of immense solitariness in his cool aloofness, and in his dark, melancholy gaze” (153). The literal translation of Kim’s first name, “Garden Isle,” “suggested at once some dreamy subjective life” (157). Kim, who describes himself ironically as “a Don Quixote out of the East” (203), has internalized the knowledge, literary traditions, and aesthetics of East and West, antiquity and modernity, as the description of his Greenwich Village apartment makes clear. It contains modernist furniture, rare Korean antiques and books, “new literature” from Korea and Japan, “whole

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shelves of English poets . . . German and French, Italian and Spanish . . . Latin and Greek” (157). Yet this extraordinary interior richness leads Kim to see in the world nothing more than, in Lukács’s words, “the dull opposition of an inchoate mass” (105). Kim dismisses the classical Chinese tradition he has mastered as “incredible childishness” (159); in the cultural modernity of the European Enlightenment he finds “nothing” (166). America is nothing more than “the Dearborn assembly plants” writ large (160). “I deny the values of two hemispheres,” he remarks (226), and he is led even to negate “cynicism” (226). Kim, “suffering and ironic” (282), eventually commits suicide alone and unnoticed in a significant narrative ellipsis. Chungpa only learns of his death from a newspaper, “several days old,” that reports “the suicide of a friendless ‘Japanese’ on Bleecker Street” (362); he never learns where Kim has been buried. The plot marginalizes Kim; other than introducing the narrator to several places and other minor characters, and giving a handful of long speeches, Kim does little. The tragic outcome of his own story—an unhappy love affair with a Caucasian girl—is vaguely, casually reported. The narrator forgets about him for long stretches of time. When Kim does appear, Chungpa describes him with increasing disapproval, and at a crucial moment abandons him: “I ran from Kim . . . a life that had lived in the ego and in the inner dream, that did not know if it was in inner dream or in outer reality” (359). Chungpa interprets Kim’s death as the only possible outcome of a subjectivity that seeks to be its own law and its own arena of action. After a long metaphoric description of “Eastern landscapes” and the changeability that these paintings depict, Chungpa remarks of Kim, “What different moods . . . the moods of storm, of blissful recollection, of impenetrable gloom! . . . he seemed always at the mercy of his moods . . . Neither sceptic nor believer, neither optimist nor pessimist, . . . he was one in one moment and another in another moment . . . At all times willful and unsatisfied” (363). Having internalized the totality of the natural as well as the social world, Kim is left a victim of subjective mood. While Kim sees himself as having heroically transcended all possible contexts, Chungpa quietly reduces him to a historical and racial type: “The Oriental exile of Kim’s generation is really a new character in history . . . by reason of the abnormal expansion of his knowledge and experience; he is at the same time so outside the alien worlds he travels in, so isolated and apart, he gives a new interpretation of the solitariness of the human soul” (218). In a final paean, Chungpa pays double-edged tribute to Kim’s vast interiority through an oddly material metaphor, describing “the greatest loss” as “his brain which bore in its fine involutions our ancient characters deeply and simply incised . . . And over their classic economy . . . was scrawled the West’s handwriting, in incoherent labyrinth, and seamy Hamlet design” (364). A more elaborate version of the scar that Carlos notices on his brother Amado’s hand, this trope of inscription suggests that individual identity is little more than the residue of history. Chungpa’s own development consists not in interior deepening but in a dissolution of the boundaries that separate the self from the larger world. He thus describes

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his highest aspiration: “I wanted to relive imaginatively, emotionally, Greek, Roman, Judaic cultures . . . but only briefly like a kind of gestational recapitulation . . . thence to pass onward to the Renaissance—first on the continent, then in England, and from there to America …” (189, original ellipses). Typically, Chungpa figures the acquisition of knowledge as a process of acquiring shapes and then surmounting them. The process closely follows the Hegelian account of the movement of freedom: “in approaching the West I was eager to feel its life in an unbroken stream pass through my heart-blood . . . Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Christ, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare . . . linked in continuous process of ever-revivified life with its vast onward momentum” (190). The self becomes a conduit, a passage rather than an interior space. Convinced that “Nature abhors separateness and inviolability” (189), Chungpa seeks not so much to possess Western learning as to become one with its continual progress. Not in Western learning, but in social and political unity with other men, Bulosan’s narrator shows the same desire to negate the boundaries of the self, to lose it in a “vast onward momentum.” He expresses a desire for boundlessness, for escape from “stifling narrowness”: “There in the broad fields, under the wide skies, . . . my mind would stir and radiate with a new light. I was obsessed with looking across vast lands and staring into the sky. In vast spaces I found a nameless relief ” (294). The relief is “nameless” in more than one sense: it cannot be named; but it also comes from not having a name.22 He describes his self-education in terms reminiscent of Kang, whom he cites as an inspiration: “I read, and reading widened my mental horizon, creating a spiritual kinship with other men who had pondered over the miseries of their countries . . . I plunged into books, boring through the earth’s core, levelling all seas and oceans, swimming in the constellations” (246). Bulosan’s tropes tend in the same direction: learning and reading do not shape the self or prepare it to assume a fixed place in a nation so much as they dissolve identity into social unity. On more than one occasion, Bulosan even uses the metaphor of pregnancy to figure this experience. At a meeting of Filipino and Mexican laborers, Carlos remarks, “I . . . felt something powerful growing inside me. It was . . . a feeling of growing with a huge life. I walked silently with the men, listening to their angry voices and to the magic of their marching feet” (196).23 Later, Carlos’s discovery of his true vocation—educating Filipino cannery workers, and farm laborers in the principles of socialism—is similarly described as a condition in which the boundaries of the self dissolve: “I felt something growing inside me again. There was the same thing in each of them that possessed me . . . I felt a warm feeling of humanity growing inside me” (310–312). The goal of the particular person is to be freed into a “configuration” larger than the self: “I was slowly becoming a part of their thoughts and hopes. Here at last was the configuration of my labors and aspirations . . . I found a new release” (311). He finds “release” by becoming not a whole but a part. These narrators do not exhibit development in the usual sense. What does gain concreteness is the external world through which they travel. The empirical world is

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represented not simply as a “sluggish, formless, meaningless mass” (TN, 105), but also as a unified, coherent, and expanding whole. In other words, the story is not merely the one we know as the classical bildungsroman: how a particular individual eventually discovers the social position that allows him or her to attain an optimal balance of freedom and happiness. There, the social world—or nation—confronts the protagonist as a complex that needs to be learned and negotiated. The novel does its cultural work, as Franco Moretti explains, by showing how harmony and meaning can be created “on the side of the consequences, of the effects of the great social mechanisms.”24 Something is given up, while something else is gained, and the novel approaches the status of a balance sheet. In Kang and Bulosan, it is not the individual who gradually attains a condition called maturity. Rather, the external, material, and social world gradually unfolds itself, showing how apparently isolated things or events are linked together in an objective dialectic of meaningful matter. Harmony exists on the side of the causes. Movements, actions, events, objects show themselves to be at once familiar, reminiscent of a known context, and unfamiliar, pointing toward an expanded context of meaning, a larger whole. The story that Kang and Bulosan try to tell, then, is one of a world growing more concrete, more filled-in and linked-up, through successive negations of particular instances. Kang provides an image for the overall movement: “life reaching out and up in a scope unrestricted, . . . life coiling and spiraling” (87). Because history is conceived as a dynamic totality, each part and every step has to feel linked with every other. There are in theory no unbridgeable gaps that separate that which is from that which should be, inside from outside, potential from actual.

The Stranger-Brother Dialectic Bulosan’s narrative combines the extremes of movement and stasis; the narrator is on the move constantly, and yet he never gets anywhere. But as we’ve seen, what matters is not his individual pattern of movement but the development, through repetition, of his relations with others and with a larger history. Recurrence is meant to illustrate a certain progress toward the universal, as the following two instances show. Toward the end of the book, Carlos finds himself again in Seattle, his point of arrival in the United States: “I suddenly discovered that I was sitting in the same corner where I had sat years before. The place was unchanged. There was even my name and the date of my arrival in the United States where I had carved it on the table” (222). He remembers that on the previous occasion, there had been a shooting outside the restaurant. At that very moment, a shooting happens again, this time to a fellow union activist, a Filipino man named Dagohoy. “I knew—now. This violence had a broad social meaning; the one I had known earlier was a blind rebellion” (222). The repetition of the scene is meant to accentuate Carlos’s deepening awareness of the world-historical struggle between socialism and fascism, something that transcends dailiness and individual dates. Individual events take their place

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within a broad historical framework. Not long after this scene, Carlos meets a friend whom he has not seen for a year: “ ‘I have been teaching the history of unionism,’ [the friend] said. ‘It’s strange!’ I exclaimed. ‘You have been doing the same, Carl?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But we are not alone . . .’” (313). It’s more than a coincidence. It is seen as a manifestation of the “common thread that bound us together, white and black and brown, in America,” as well as a sign that “[t]he revolution is not far off ” (313). Shared experiences give rise to a collective self-transcendence: “Our awakening was spontaneous: it grew from our experiences and our responses to them” (313–314). The most striking instance of Bulosan’s faith in the spontaneous self-awakening of the world can be called the stranger-brother dialectic.25 Bulosan uses these tropes to embody alienation, on the one hand, and a transcendent unity, on the other. The pattern can be thus summarized: a stranger is recognized to be a brother, as one belonging to the family. But the brother, in turn, becomes strange or estranged; the natural bond of family is not a sufficient guide to his actions, or to the knowledge of those actions. Thus the need for a more expansive bond is recognized, a universal fraternity, through which the brother’s features become recognizable again, in more concrete form.26 This pattern occurs in the narrator’s relationships with his brothers and with other Filipinos. It also structures the occurrence of abstract concepts such as labor and movement, and the representation of material objects and bodies. Its political correlative is a Popular Front socialist “faith in the working man . . . fighting against one enemy, Fascism” (311), but Bulosan suggests that political unity only prefigures a vaster and more inclusive unity.27 The opening scene introduces the pattern. The narrator recalls the most significant event of his childhood: “how I met my brother who had gone to fight a strange war in Europe” (4). This oldest brother, Leon, whom Carlos had never seen, returns home: I was the first to see him coming slowly through the tall grass in the dry bottom of the river. He walked with measured steps and when he reached the spreading mango tree . . . he put his bundle on the ground and sat on it, looking toward our house with the anxiety of a man who had been away from home for a long time. He was as yet unrecognizable in the early morning light, but it was evident from the way he walked that he had come a long distance. Apparently he was not a stranger in our barrio or village, for he seemed to know where he was going and to be unhurried. I rushed out of the house . . . I headed for the rich piece of land my father was plowing . . . “I think I saw brother Leon,” I said, hoping that I was right about the stranger who resembled my oldest brother. “I saw him coming toward our house.” (3) The narrator first tentatively identifies Leon as his brother through the mediation of an abstract category: “a man who had been away from home for a long time,” a man who “had come a long distance.” Leon’s strangeness is both affirmed and carefully tempered in the phrases “not a stranger” and “the stranger who resembled my

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brother.” The narrator’s father at first dismisses the suggestion: “Your brother Leon is still fighting in Europe. Maybe he is dead now. I have not heard from him” (4). But after the father confirms Leon’s identity, the feeling of strangeness does not subside: “I stopped suddenly when I saw my brother Leon. I had seen only his picture on the large table . . . I did not know what to say now that I was seeing him for the first time . . . ‘Welcome home, soldier,’ I said” (4). In the suppressed emotion of the boy’s cautiously generic welcome, the concepts of brother and stranger—and soldier—are brought together. Throughout the book we see this pattern in which the familiar is estranged, and the estranged becomes familiar again on a higher level, until an extensive totality is achieved. Labor, for instance, is first represented through the father’s act of plowing the field. This deeply familiar, richly sensuous scene opens the book: “It was the season for corn, and my father, like the other farmers . . . had gone to our land at early dawn to start the spring plowing. I could smell the fresh upturned earth in the air and the bitter smoke of burning grass” (3). This labor, embedded in an immemorial cycle, is given meaning through the simple personification of the land: “the earth that had fed our family for generations” (5). But the idea of labor as simple productive activity carried on with the help of nature soon dissolves. The “earth” becomes property, a legal abstraction used as an instrument of social and economic oppression. The following passage displays this transformation. It begins with the narrator describing the “long, broad leaves” of the corn as “like human arms upraised to heaven . . . bowing to the wet earth in reverence.” He remarks to his father, “We will have a good crop this year.” But the father replies, “‘It is not our plantation any more, son . . . It belongs to a man in Manila now . . .’ . . . ‘You mean the land does not belong to us any more?’ I asked. ‘The land never did belong to us,’ said my father. ‘It belonged to the church. But now it belongs to a rich man in Manila’ ” (27). Once Carlos comes to America, labor becomes dramatically estranged from any social context or meaning. He merely sells the labor power of his body in order to exchange his wages for the necessities of life: I found work at an ice plant . . . I lifted a block of ice almost twice my weight into a wheelbarrow and pushed it to a truck outside the plant. My hands became brittle and dead with the cold . . . I bought chop suey and Filipino dishes with the money I earned at the ice plant . . . I found work in a milk company . . . I started washing and filling the cans at one o’clock in the morning. When the truck drivers came at about four, I washed the floor and put the empty cans in order . . . It was a planless life, hopeless, and without direction. (169) In its gestures and implements, this labor recalls the “cooking and simple chores” that Carlos had performed as a young child. In the second chapter, he had described these daily chores in careful detail (driving a bamboo sled to the well, filling cans with water, cooking and cleaning the house). But there the labor demonstrated what

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Bulosan calls “this boundless affinity for each other” (10), the unity of the household in work (“every hand was needed until the harvest was over” [10]) and in rest; the earlier passage ends with the description of the communal meal and preparations for the night. In the American factories, labor is so divorced from a social context that it becomes, like the parts of Carlos’s body, “brittle and dead.” If it ended here, we would have arrived at the everyday. But writing emerges as a type of work that is supposed to raise to a higher level the distinction between natural and alienated labor, familiar/familial and estranged labor. Bulosan consistently stresses the public, productive nature of writing over its private, expressive side. When he first discovers that he “could actually write understandable English,” he shouts in joy, “I’ll tell the whole world what they have done to me!” (180). Writing creates affinities through the production of material objects. Carlos describes the physical labor necessary to produce the first volume of his poems: “I arranged and revised them in restaurants at night . . . I wrapped my [paralyzed] hand in a towel and wrote slowly, painfully, until the cold, outside air came . . . and stopped me” (320). This labor is scarcely less painful than his work in the ice factory. But his description of the book, once it arrives, emphasizes both its estranged objectlike character and its organic relation to his past. “The book was a rush job and the binding was simple, but it was something that had grown out of my heart . . . I had put certain things of myself in it: the days of pain and anguish, of starvation and fear . . . All of myself in this little volume of poems—and I would never be like that self again” (320). The book is both a harvest and a container that he has made for what he calls “certain things of myself ”—a curious phrase that suggests both detachment and continued belonging. The labor of writing is both integrated and alienated, the published work both living and inorganic, as is the socialist literary magazine that Macario and several friends had briefly produced: “They had surrounded the publication as though it were a little life . . . and breathed life into it . . . these young men breathing life into a dead thing” (194). Both physical movement and material objects undergo this dialectical expansion of meaning through repetition. In the book’s first part, Carlos’s family moves continually within the Philippines, driven by material need, around a world that they believe they know well. In America, Carlos at first moves aimlessly up and down the West Coast, jumping on and off freight cars, passing repeatedly through the same cities as he looks for work or runs away. However, movement eventually becomes purposive and meaningful rather than simply contingent. When Carlos becomes involved in the labor movement, he returns to these same places, often by the same means, but now in order to organize and to teach his fellow Filipino laborers. Material objects also recur in significant, interallusive patterns. In the first part of the book, details communicate not the essence of one distinctive culture but a sense of universal history.28 Objects like the rice pestles with which children come out at night to help construct a highway through Binalonan (31) concretely show how the colonization of the Philippines, and the “merciless exploitation of . . . dispossessed peasants” (24), restates in local form something happening

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“all over the world” (266). This belief in history as the “pervasive and universal” struggle of the working class lends an epic weight even to small details such as household objects. In American scenes, too, particular objects possess a luminous significance: “When the cauliflower season was over my crew moved to Nipomo to work in the lettuce fields . . . The lettuce heads were heavy with frost. I worked with thick cotton gloves and a short knife” (161). Again, details go beyond what the narrative requires: “I squatted between the long rows of peas and picked with both hands, putting the pods in a large petroleum can that I dragged with me. When the can was full, I poured the pods into a sack” (161). Ordinarily, such details might signify poverty, oppressive labor, poor working conditions (and they do this, too). But they also perform a certain epic function. The narrative fills in and links together not only a network of signifiers, but a world of material shapes, volumes, weights, temperatures, textures, opacities. These objects recall and anticipate each other (the “short knife” recalls the “broad cutting knife” that Carlos uses in a childhood scene [30]) and create an increasingly concrete world. Through a series of negations, particular things approach the status of a full, not empty, universal. This could account for the bewilderingly repetitive nature of the narrative, in which the same things, scenes, and people appear and reappear. “I rode in the bus and watched familiar scenes . . . It was where I belonged—here in the color of green, the bitter taste of lemon peels, the yellow of ripe peas” (270), Carlos remarks later. Here the “familiar scenes,” like the colors and the tastes, include within them the canceled shapes of previous, more limited experiences. One particular scene illustrates how the semiotic content of particular objects matters less than the dialectical relationship that things have with each other. After Carlos finds that his friend, Jose, has also found his vocation as an educator, other people enter the house, preparing for a celebration. Where had I seen this fraternity before? . . . I saw a Chinese farmer coming toward me with a sack of rice. He dumped it laughingly in front of me . . . I knew that it was for me . . . A Mexican came running to me with a jug of wine. He uncorked it. I took it from him. “Good vino, no?” he said . . . I ran toward the house, the half-filled jug gurgling under my arm. (314, emphasis added) Even beyond the transethnic solidarity of this scene, there is a “fraternity” of objects with each other and with previous incarnations. From much earlier scenes, estranged but now reclaimed instances of these objects emerge: the “sack with rice” that Carlos’s father carries with him when he goes “to fight for the repossession of our land” (28), a “beautiful drinking jar” that Carlos’s mother cherishes in a memorable episode. The point is that these objects are not invoked as universal symbols. Rather, earlier types or occurrences come to be negated and fulfilled by later recurrences. The book’s ending, at the threshold of World War II, reaffirms the strangerbrother dialectic on a number of levels. After Roosevelt allows Filipinos to join the

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military, Amado leaves for the navy, and Macario enlists in the army. In his final gesture, Macario gives Carlos a dime, telling him to give it to “the Negro bootblack across from the hotel,” whom he had forgotten to pay. When Carlos pays him, the bootblack, named Larkin, invites him to share a drink. “Well, I think I’m going now,” he said, giving me his hand. His hand, too, was like my brother’s—tough, large, toil-scarred. “I’m joining the navy tomorrow, so I guess this is good-bye . . . if I don’t see [your brother] again, I’ll remember him every time I see the face of an American dime. Good-bye, friend!” I watched him go slowly down the block. He stopped in a corner and looked around slowly and then skyward, as though he were committing it all to memory. He raised his hand and disappeared. I walked to my hotel filled with great loneliness. (324–325) The description of the bootblack’s hand is resonant. More than faces, which are never described, or names, which are likewise casually treated, hands are used to characterize people. Macario’s hands had been described as “toil-worn” (323), and earlier, as “hard and calloused, like my mother’s”; Carlos had seen in their battered materiality “the meaning of my father’s struggles . . . my mother’s sacrifices” (241– 242). The “long scar” on Amado’s hand (295) is also mentioned more than once. The bootblack is in a sense more of a brother than Carlos’s brothers because he is related not by blood but by a deeper affinity signified by these outward repetitions. His farewell is spoken on behalf of Macario and Amado, neither of whom directly utters the words to Carlos. Finally, his walking away from the narrator echoes the opening scene, when the stranger approaching is recognized to be the brother. “I was the first to see him coming” is negated and fulfilled by “I watched him go slowly.” But Larkin is departing only to join Carlos’s other brothers; it is equally a homecoming.

The Upward Spiral Although it concerns itself with a different ethnic group on the opposite coast of America, Kang’s East Goes West is structured by a remarkably similar dialectical pattern in which the world around the narrator unfolds its immanent meaning through repetition. The narrative begins with the antithetical terms “East” and “West,” established by a long history of orientalist discourse.29 Chungpa notes that “[u]p to a short while ago, the other side of this earth was like the turned face of the moon to people of the West” (4). But the alleged gap in space and knowledge is based on an arbitrary division—“to have gone on [West] would have meant to go nearer [to the East,] not farther” (7)—and it has already been bridged by “that fantastical mysticism which has sent Christian missionaries far and wide to the remotest pockets of the earth . . . breaking ground for ruthless, blindly selfish Western forces” (130). The two worlds have already begun to reveal their material oneness. On this

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basis, Kang’s narrative tries to illustrate the process of how antithetical ideas and things resolve themselves in a more concrete unity. Two areas in particular undergo such development through dialectical repetition: the topoi of “universal education” and of romance. What they have to incorporate on a higher level is the instrumental rationality of modernity, here described: Even the man who only goes to a show . . . has a business air. His every action decisive, orderly, purposeful . . . he must know exactly what he wants to do in his mind. Just to move in New York . . . man must prevision and plan out . . . man is reasoning from cause to effect here all the time—not so much thinking. It is intelligence measuring, rather than intellect’s solution . . . he is a good salesman, amidst scientific tools. His mind is like Grand Central Station. It is definite, it is timed, it has mathematical precision . . . all is accurate and conscious. (152) “Business” names the application of instrumental reason to the goal of creating capital. Kang tries to find the point at which “business” becomes one with its antithesis, which Chungpa generally refers to as “poetry.” Whether a remembered line of English poetry or a line of Chinese characters, poetry involves passive “surrendering” and the dismantling of the self rather than conscious planning and action. It evanesces rather than accumulating. On his first night in New York, Chungpa is kept awake by a poem that “against my will, . . . came into my head, one I had heard long ago” (13). Poetry, strongly linked with intuition and involuntary memory, in this case describes the self as a “leaf [that] floats loosely upon the sea . . . blown to rest against the branch of the white spring plum blossoms” (13). Chungpa gets up to write the poem, but notes that “the images were such that it was a poetic experience to write them in dynamic calligraphy, surrendering to the natural motion of leaves and scattering blossoms, of autumn and spring and the waves” (14). Poetry, then, names a shortcut to transcendence and universality through the dissolution of the self ’s boundaries. Chungpa’s goal is to establish a dialectical unity of poetry and business, the universal and the particular. Universal Education is the name of the encyclopedia that Chungpa finds himself selling from door to door in the Boston area. Published and sold by the company of D. J. Lively, “a large, prosperous, shiny gentleman, with . . . bustling movements and . . . air of peppy activity” (125), the merit of this publication is dubious; Chungpa never looks into it himself, and no one buys it with any intention of consulting it. Though the teacher of the compulsory salesmanship class claims that “we are not only helping ourselves and our company in placing Universal Education in all American homes, but we are . . . spreading the light of knowledge” (147), Universal Education is a commodity that requires a five-dollar deposit to purchase. It reflects the “blindly selfish” genius of “American business methods” (131). As a salesman, Chungpa does, however, acquire a certain practical knowledge, here articulated by his salesmanship instructor:

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it takes twelve minutes to give the main sales talk . . . But if you feel you have not sold your article, . . . [g]o on to the second talk, to the third . . . After that, you can scrap the manual and try your own resources. Anyhow, keep at it . . . Take out your sales form now and say softly, “Just sign here, under your neighbor, Mrs. Smith …” (146) The idea of education is taken up again when Chungpa meets the artist To-Wan Kim, and finds on the shelves of Kim’s cosmopolitan apartment what appears to be a genuinely universal taste and knowledge: I examined the titles of books. About equally mixed, Eastern and Western . . . rare books . . . a modern section from contemporary Korea, China, and Japan . . . whole shelves of English poets . . . German and French, Italian and Spanish, and in small sober Oxford bindings, Latin and Greek. There were also a number of books on art, both Eastern and Western, among them bound facsimiles of Korean paintings, a portfolio of seventh- and eighth-century things, and another of the fifteenth and sixteenth. (157–158) Yet this universal knowledge leaves Kim in a state of worldlessness; a piece of his Chinese calligraphy announces “The Exile, Man” (158). In the consummation of this spiral movement, Chungpa is hired at the novel’s end as a staff writer for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an enterprise that recapitulates Universal Education on a higher level. Franklin Henry Hooper, the American editor of the fourteenth edition, is described as “a man of enormous energy,” characterized by “swift definite decision and action” (353). While he retains something of Mr. Lively’s bustle, the Encyclopedia Britannica is a more real version of Universal Education. Echoes of the “business” world are not intended to impugn the project. On the contrary, the encyclopedia’s “startling regimentation of scholastic facts arrayed on the march . . . is one of the most spectacular things I have seen in this modern civilization” (353), Chungpa asserts. It synthesizes business and knowledge, theory and fact, ideas and commodities.30 The book’s treatment of what it calls romance also reveals the same dialectical pattern. George Jum, Chungpa’s first guide in America, pursues “his ambition . . . to become thoroughly Westernized” (40) through romantic fulfillment: “There is more meaning of life in woman’s arms than in all . . . the classics or the ancestors” (40). Romance is presented as a triumph of interiority, as George writes letters to an imaginary ideal woman. It even combines science (“I make a study of [girls],” he notes [37]) with wasteful expenditure. “Love has to be wasteful, or it is no more love,” he claims (234). George thus combines both the “good” and the “bad” narratives of modernity, societal and cultural, technological and aesthetic.31 Kim’s attitude to romance cancels and retains these features. Kim’s ideal is less material. The metaphor of the “white meetinghouse” (213) repeatedly characterizes what it is in Helen Hancock that inspires Kim’s ultimately tragic love for this woman. It is a nostalgic love of order: “Helen’s character and principles had irresistible fascination

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for the man of lost patterns, the man with a deep Confucian love of ordered life . . . his own innate simplicity of soul—an Eastern quality—found an echo in hers from New England” (222–223). When Kim says to Helen, “you have just the right pattern” (225), his love seems to allegorize modernism’s ambivalent romance with form. Chungpa’s own romance negates the negation. If Kim’s was a love of order and pattern, Chungpa’s love for a woman nicknamed “Trip” confirms his desire for a paradoxically concrete boundlessness. Trip remains a minor character chiefly worth noting for her name. According to her friend, “Trip had tripped at the wrong moment and fallen down,” thus earning the name (302). But given the book’s overarching metaphor of movement, as well as Kang’s curiously deterritorialized use of English, the name inevitably suggests journeying and expansion. When he finally meets her, Trip is unreadable: “she seemed to be wondering quietly to herself . . . Or she seemed to be bored” (316). This isn’t simply a reflection of Chungpa’s inability to decipher her; shimmering indeterminacy is her chief characteristic. In one scene her face is described as “trembling with the shake of water” as she laughs, cries, or both, in response to Chungpa’s recitation of Chinese poetry. She supplies the end that blind instrumental reason lacks, “a point which my whole being strove to attain” (315). When Chungpa finds himself unable to speak at their first meeting, the business methods he has learned finally find their proper use: “‘I want you to help me,’ I said confidently, adopting the aggressive attitude of Mr. Lively in making a big sale. ‘I want to write a book. Would you help me write a book?’” (309) He seeks her out in person because “business always is done on the scene” (361, original emphasis). The worlds of poetry and business, knowledge and material success have become one. Crucially, the book itself is what allows this synthesis to happen. Chungpa’s romance with Trip is conceived and pursued through a discursivity that is ideal, material, and commercial at the same time.32 When he first enters Trip’s apartment, he notices how “books lay around on the floor and a card-table was opened and spread with tumbling papers” (308). An aspiring poet, Trip is defined not through her private thoughts, but through the paper that appears to constitute her: “Trip . . . gave the impression of a person whose thoughts might become as involved and mixed up as her books and papers” (308). Chungpa becomes acquainted with her poetry by surreptitiously reading one of her poems that he finds on the floor: “On the floor the papers were sprawled out. Some seemed to be verse. By putting my head on one side like a bird, I could read one” (311). The physical presence and disposition of paper loom large in this scene: “ ‘It looks as if you have written a lot,’ I said, regarding the piles of papers on the table. Trip frowned again, and gathering them up unceremoniously, half-thudded, half-piled them under the table” (310). Yet literature in its ideal sense also informs how Chungpa first sees Trip’s face: “Miranda, Rosalind, Imogene . . . crowded to take their place behind the warm sweet face of my Western love” (309). At a loss for words, he happens to notice a typewriter: “I cast hurriedly about the room for the most immediate, the most practical thing to say in

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this emergency. My eye fell on the typewriter” (309). Inspired by the machine, he proposes to Trip that she help him write a “best-seller” (310) about his early life in Korea. Equally crass and commercial, poetic and nostalgic, Chungpa’s improvised project seems to win her over for the moment. He dreams of becoming not only her subject matter—“I would pose as ‘material’ ”—but her medium: “let me . . . put myself in paper’s place!” (361). Chungpa’s curious notion of “posing as ‘material’ ” suggests that the represented world has brought together materiality and its transcendence.

Discovering the Everyday But another way of reading these narratives presses itself forward. Like optical illusions that rely on figure-ground ambiguity, these narratives that disclose an all-embracing dialectic of history also reveal the inescapable presence of the modern everyday.33 Bulosan gives a precise account of everydayness as he describes his job at the milk company. “It was a planless life, hopeless, and without direction. I was merely living from day to day: yesterday seemed long ago and tomorrow was too far away. It was today that I lived for aimlessly, this hour—this moment. It gave me an acute sense of time that has remained with me” (169, original emphases). Bulosan describes the mechanical, “aimless” concentration on singular, unconnected moments of time, a “today” exactly like the others, subdivided into hours and minutes. This is the life of other Filipino laborers: “On Sundays they awoke at noon and walked to First Street, talked to the Pinoys, ate Filipino food, and went to a movie when night came. Their friends also lived the same humdrum life. They met in a dingy restaurant or a dark poolroom to exchange news, then they scattered for another week of endless drudgery. It was the same life that had filled me with fear when I had arrived in America. It was the same life that led me to the labor movement” (255). Even after Carlos grasps his vocation on multiple occasions, his life remains affectively unchanged in many respects. Even after he finds in the Committee for the Protection of Filipino Rights an outlet “through which I could release my creative energies,” (285), for example, he still feels like “a prisoner on some isolated island” (285), and complains of the “stifling narrowness,” “the smallness of my world in America” (293–294). The everyday cannot be left behind. Kang’s narrative, too, is haunted at every turn by the same condition: “day after day . . . with one day like another for us all . . . marking time, never inching out of desperate poverty . . . Day after day . . . waiting, waiting” (70). East Goes West may well be most important for its fine-grained analysis of the modern everyday. Kang presents this world as ruled by two principles: equivalence and seriality, or one thing after another, one thing equal to another. At one of his early jobs as a waiter at a Chinese American restaurant, Chungpa summarizes the menu (“There seemed a lot of nuts—almond nuts, walnuts, leechee nuts, peanuts . . . a lot of creams—soup-cream, chicken-cream . . . ice-cream”) and the customers: “In ceaseless

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procession . . . missionaries from China, businessmen from Malay, Harlem gangsters, Broadway actors, fat Irish policemen, country ladies from Indiana on a visit, traveling salesmen, shyster lawyers, Bronx family parties” (82–83, original ellipses). The overriding impression is not of the diversity of a total group glimpsed at one time, but rather of seriality: one after another in “ceaseless procession.” All are reduced to the same, abstract form—the money form. He notes that the experience of being a waiter “makes you size up all people in terms of the tip they will bestow” (83). If the dialectic shows how one thing or idea becomes another (or two become the same), the everyday provides a cruel parody, creating links between things that should be separate. Kang repeatedly shows this material and mechanical linking of commensurable and incommensurable things, of high and low, large and small. In Chinatown, Chungpa is able to exchange a written Chinese poem for food. When he later attends a university, he is disheartened by the lack of connection among his courses, and between literary criticism and creation. “I was distressed at the lack of unifying principles,” he remarks (189). And yet they are in fact connected by the everyday principle of seriality, of one thing after another: “that bombastic lecture to tourists on a bus . . . saying Arlington, Buckley [sic], Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, . . . all the way to Massachusetts Avenue . . . Boston on a bus” (189). When he takes a job in a hotel kitchen to keep himself from starving, he finds that this everyday principle is powerful enough to produce a single universe of value. Each day after attending his favorite literature professor’s lecture, Chungpa goes to his job at the hotel: My mind would be torn back from a platonic world of pure and radiant ideas . . . Coming in at the back door of the New Hotel I would report to a fat man sitting by the punch clock. I was admitted to the supply room, where I struggled into a white coat . . . I would be surrounded by tables of butter, sugar, salt, celery, olives, cherries . . . pyramid on pyramid of cans. I handed things out to the waiters . . . and took in return each man’s number . . . all proceeded with high-class business efficiency and the most modern sanitary methods. (181) Platonic ideas and pickles, Carlyle and cans, the idea of the university and the reality of the punch clock occupy the same realm, just as food goes out of one side of the kitchen and returns by the other door: “whole half-chickens and big pieces of steak or legs of duck intact,” ending “mixed up with broken dishes and salad refuse . . . in the garbage pail” (182–183). The modern everyday finds a fit emblem in the aftermath of dinner banquets, when he and others “worked by the service door to receive the plates before passing them on to the dishwashing machines” (182). The hotel’s “A-grade . . . system of sanitation” dictates that the leftover food passes “in steady stream into the garbage can,” though the hungry workers try to snatch bits of food from the plates. “Now come the ice-cream plates,” following the leftovers of other courses, on the way to “the latest, most modern dishwashing

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machines” (183–184). Chungpa imagines that “in another fifty years . . . there will be some machine, some endless caterpillar thing that will make the connection between tables and garbage pails complete without human intermediaries” (184). This mechanical “endless caterpillar thing” that connects production and waste provides a disturbing emblem of the modern everyday’s relentless, material continuity. An inexorable linkage establishes itself between the realm of ideas and “the kingdom of food”: “I was on duty from four in the afternoon until around eleven at night. My wages were fifteen cents an hour . . . At about eleven o’clock . . . I . . . could return to the utopian realm of pure thought” (181–184). It’s only a connection in empty time, but the heterogeneity of the everyday insinuates itself into higher levels. Chungpa comes to view his frantic studying as “a vast impossible feeding without digestion” (184)—another mechanical, continuous movement of bits of matter: “fingering my books chaotically, always catching glimpses, meager glimpses, and a million suggestions I never had the time to follow up” (184). The modern everyday builds pseudotranscendence into itself. D. J. Lively’s “class in advanced salesmanship” offers as a motto, “Service/Stuff/Sticking/Sales/Success,” arranged in an ascending diagonal on the chalkboard (143). Aspiration lies at the heart of the everyday, as Chungpa shrewdly observes when he goes to work in a department store in Philadelphia. The store, Boshnack Brothers, reflects the most modern methods of management and discipline. At the head . . . were the reigning members of the Boshnack firm . . . Then came the buyers, thousands of them . . . Each buyer was given so many inches of space in the big store. This was his kingdom . . . Below the buyer . . . was the assistant buyer . . . Below the assistant buyer came the aisle man, a still greater drop in fame and in fortune . . . I wonder how he could ever hope to be a buyer. But he did. Men must dream . . . After that came so many experienced saleswomen at $20 a week—and so many girls at $12 or $13 a week . . . in this system, only the owners made any profits. Still, the pretense was kept up of profit-sharing . . . Every clerk got one half per cent of all he sold. (285–286) Chungpa notes that “[t]he store was full of psychologists, psychiatrists, and other trainers and salesmanship . . . a good deal was made out of human psychology” (287–288). And the result is a clever combination of extreme “regimentation” (“Every employee had not a name but a number. His number was on his card on the wall, lined up with many other numbered cards” [290]) and a carefully dispensed freedom. The “Boshnack Brothers’ Men’s Club” (293), a club for salesmen, invites them to reassert their masculinity as a natural and irrepressible sexual force—outside working hours.34 Kang’s narrative idealizes modernity as “the new age of broad communication, cross-fertilization, and the shaking of boundaries” (268). It tries to represent this recapturing of epic totality through dialectical repetition. But it can’t help representing everydayness at its most grim: “This is American life . . . All day long . . . the worn-out machine bodies turning round in the aisles of unmoving glass and china

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sets, slowly figuring with shaking hands . . . recording 50 cents . . . two eyes to look at the customer, two hands to count the change” (294–295). In other words, it’s “the world of mechanism, the world of mass production” (245), and of the dehumanization of labor: “the man who helps to make machines by working on a particular detail, say, driving a nail. So his life work means that he repeats that single routine work in one narrow channel” (283). Modernity does not consist in the “embracing whole of life” (283) but in the relentless narrowing of lives into sets of repeated, minute actions. While Kang and Bulosan see this more clearly than anyone, they resolutely attribute an epic unity to the external world.

Race and Social Strangulation The attempt to present repetition dialectically is not completely successful. Indeed, even the discovery of unity, of the familiar in the strange, becomes another moment subject to the flattening and trivializing force of the everyday. But America offers Kang and Bulosan a different way to glimpse a strange, negative totality. The barriers of race restore a kind of “rounded world,” “a closed world,” full of “ready-made, ever-present meaning” (TN, 32). While it is oppressive and unjust, the existence of racial meaning in the outer world is never in doubt. For the colored, race permeates every action, relation, event, and thing with meaning. The external world in this regard is already formed, shapely, and substantial, a conceptually clear arena of action. Though rarely effectual in an immediate sense, neither the subject’s actions nor his sufferings feel pointless. The fields and crops of California, the buildings of New York, the suburbs of Boston, institutions of higher education, meetings of labor organizers, attempts to find jobs, or to find love: all of these constitute a segregated world that possesses shape, form, and outcome through the “pervasive and universal” (AH, 144) application of racial categories. Kang’s narrator describes it as a “crystallized caste system . . . seemingly beyond the power of individuals to break through” (273). A fellow student tells him of the “Negro’s . . . shadowy existence as an outcast in the white man’s world, and all the legal as well as illegal discrimination practised against him there” (273). Asians also fall within this system, as when Kim is warned by his Caucasian lover’s father, “Keep away. Barriers have been passed that were never meant to be broken” (265). Bulosan shows how Filipinos in California encounter violent persecution from every class, at every step, on practically every inch of land. “[T]he lives of Filipinos were cheaper than those of dogs . . . In San Diego, where I tried to get a job, I was beaten upon several occasions by restaurant and hotel proprietors” (143). The narrators do not have to create meaning, or impose forms upon a world evacuated of sense or resistant to meaning. The world of racial minorities is tightly circumscribed and internally articulated down to the most intimate level. Their movements are mapped, and their presence is conditional on the performance of exquisitely clear roles and functions. Chungpa wins admission into certain New

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England circles as long as he plays the role of a “fine clean Christian young Oriental earning his way through college” (134). He finds employment in a large Philadelphia store only as a salesman of tea sets and fake “Oriental objects” in the china department. Most tellingly, he earns a regular place at a Philadelphia lady’s dinner parties by confronting a “Hindu student” who suddenly explodes in unmannerly rage at the English. “I deflected his words and his wrath toward me . . . I was almost decorated for merit by the exhausted Westerners . . . I became a regular guest now, . . . every Wednesday” (299). Having proven himself a gallant Oriental, Chungpa is included in the evening circle once a week “for dinner and the evening” (299). Experience is painful but never meaningless because the arbitrariness of racialized distinctions is simply given as something to be overcome. Even if a relationship is banal, tragic, or aborted, it does not have to be experienced as simply contingent in a world saturated objectively with racial prejudice. It does not occur to Kang or Bulosan that the soul has to “look for itself ” (TN, 30). Because the external world strictly curtails their movements, activities, and even desires, because their acts are objectively blocked and restricted at every turn, and because the world holds out a singularly distorted picture of themselves that they need to negate, it is a question not of what to desire, or of how to discover the soul’s essence, but of how to show who they are. Unlike the modern everyday, which reveals the evacuation of meaning from experience, racial segregation paradoxically creates in these works something resembling a “tangible and graspable transcendence” (TN, 35). The white world is so radical in its freedoms and privileges that it becomes within these narratives a transcendent and yet this-worldly locus of value. White people and places occupy positions and roles resembling those of the supernatural actors of epic. Sometimes vengeful, sometimes compassionate, they make abrupt appearances as though from another world. It is not that they possess transcendent qualities but that they occupy a position entirely outside, and yet not outside, the world inhabited by Filipinos and Koreans in early twentieth-century America. One example from Bulosan’s text: That night, when Jose and I were in the back room of a restaurant preparing a leaflet to be circulated, five white men came suddenly into the room. I started to run to the door, but it was too late. Two big men, one wearing dark glasses, carried off Jose. The other man suddenly turned around and shot out the light bulbs. I was kicked into the back seat of a big car . . . I feared that they would burn Jose. (206) After Carlos manages to escape, he enters a strange apartment in a nearby town: “I found myself in a little room . . . a white woman came out . . . She ran to a little room and brought me a clean shirt. She brought a basin of warm water and began washing my face gently. Then she took me to the kitchen, where she prepared something for me to eat” (209). The white woman is as lavish and unexpected in her generosity as the white men had been in their violence. Little attempt to understand psychological motivation is made. Instead, the actions of these white men

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and women serve to establish the coordinates of evil and good by which other acts can be measured.35 Chungpa’s relationship to the white world is more tempered on the surface. In his case, violence tends to be more symbolic than material, as in the excessively considerate treatment he receives as a charity student at Maritime College in Halifax. But for him, too, the white world offers transcendent and yet sensuously graspable forms of beauty and value, as in his description of a “white shining village” in the Boston suburbs (171), or the “cool, dark, rather sacred feeling” of a house in Back Bay that belongs to “a prosperous citizen of Boston” (241). This temple-like dimension of the world is marked by “ordered spaciousness” (223), as in another “cool, dark house” belonging to a Philadelphia lady: “The polished floors gleamed around us, the brass answered back, the high old ceilings receded overhead” (300). These are secular temples in which time stands still. Chungpa distinguishes this world from “the world of dollars and of daily bread” (300). Occasionally, he receives the promise of unexpected aid, as when he hitchhikes from Maine to New York: “A long, low, big, rich-looking car, open to the skies . . . At the wheel was a tall, very good-looking, clean-faced man of forty-six or so with a healthy glowing tan and shining glasses” (349). This man, a former senator, promises Chungpa his help (“Next time I hold government office . . . write me and I will help you” [353]), and drives off, like a god, not to be seen again.36 For Kang as well, the racial barrier turns out to have important formal consequences for his representation of America, filling it with substance and immanent meaning.

Gigantic Things and Little Acts The curiously double quality of these early Asian American narratives has to do with the nature of America itself. On the one hand, Kang and Bulosan offer a portrait of a particular nation; but on the other hand, America is the name given to a particular historical moment. For Kang, America is where the moving edge of history happens to lie at the moment, the locus of the modern. His narrator calls it “a new world of time” (22). Very few references are made to what Lauren Berlant has called the “National Symbolic,” with “its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives.”37 For example, when Kang’s narrator first glimpses Manhattan from a boat, he sees not the Statue of Liberty, a monument to national singularity and wholeness, but a geographical and temporal edge: “not one tower of Babel but many . . . they stood at the brink, close crowded, the brink of America . . . there was no monument to the Machine Age like America” (6). Together with other metaphors of dynamic motion, the metaphor of the “brink” describes the outermost edge of a passing moment. America is a monument to one configuration in a continuous historical movement that will pass on and over it. Modernity moves on. Bulosan emphasizes both a transnational history, and an abstract ideal of democracy contingently associated with the American nation. The relationships between Filipino

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workers and “Chinese vice lords in Stockton” are more intimately bound up with global politics than with local history; the Spanish Civil War and the labor movement in California are part of the same universal struggle of “men of good will all over the world” against the bad, of “the forces of democracy” against fascism in all its forms (241).38 In the speech that gives the book its title, Macario declares that “America is not bound by geographical latitudes” (189). It names a “universal ideal” (241) projected into the future and belonging to all people: “an America in which our people can find happiness” (188, emphasis added). Because America incarnates both universal modernity (freedom, progress, democracy) and a particular, historically given racial unfreedom, the empirical world in these narratives is ambiguous. Even the smallest everyday detail (the crops growing in a field in California, the spatial arrangement of a department store in Philadelphia) is seen as both familiar and filled with expansive meaning. Apparently random movements (hopping on a freight train, hitchhiking on the highway) are part of a larger, total process; but they are also examples of meaningless, directionless repetition. Insofar as this modern everyday rests on contradictions of race and class, Bulosan and Kang can still ultimately embrace history as a dialectical process and see their role as one of extending to all human groups the space, freedom, and meaning present in the world. Kang is not hopeful, however. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, his narrator marvels at how “this magnanimous gigantic structure” emerges from “the world of mechanism, the world of mass production . . . The craftsman may have worked in deadening monotony, the engineer may have planned in routine formation. But the product emerges with individual creativeness, a monument to the American age” (245). Though Kang tries to see the bridge as a synthesis of “people and things . . . spirit and matter,” he is struck by how “the product emerges” with all the creativity and autonomy lost by human workers in “the world of mass production.” In that world, labor is racially segmented and managed in a way that minimizes the possibilities of transformative conflict. Inside the everyday, things loom large, while agency shrinks. At the end of Bulosan’s narrative, the revered Macario leaves to join the army. In an unanticipated and startling change of scale, Macario announces, “I’m not going on a worldwide crusade to save democracy . . . I’m just doing my job, but however small it is, I’ll try to do my best. I think this is really the meaning of life: the extension of little things into the future so that they might be useful to other people” (323). The future appears to lie in a world of little acts and small jobs, of sameness and tendentious understatement: in the American everyday.

{2}

Little Things: The Uncanny Everyday of Internment Literature

Familiarity marks the intersection of epic with the modern everyday. For the early twentieth-century writers Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan, epic names a historical condition distinguished by a sense of confident familiarity with the world as an arena for action. “Where had I seen this fraternity before?” Bulosan wonders as men and things gather around him in a moment of communal self-substantiation.1 The epic world was “wide and yet . . . like a home,” “new, and yet familiar,” in Lukács’s idealized account of ancient civilizations.2 Familiarity also forms the basis of the modern everyday, but this intimacy has little in common with the epic sense of déjà vu. Arising from inexplicably repeated encounters and scenarios, everyday familiarity confirms the alienation of the social world. Every day while attending college in Boston, for example, Kang’s narrator goes “to drudge in the New Hotel . . . from four in the afternoon until around eleven at night.”3 He comes to know its rhythms and routines well, without ever feeling at home in it. Although it is based on meaningless recurrence, everyday familiarity does, however, seem to offer a promise or a reminder of something more, an elsewhere. And that reminder is not always welcome. This dialectic of familiarity lies at the heart of the uncanny. When familiarity becomes the object of thought, when it becomes recognized, it becomes a puzzle and a problem rather than a source of comfort. Perhaps this is why perceiving “the uncanniness of the ordinary,” as Stanley Cavell does in his essay by that title, requires a special effort or unusual circumstance.4 Rather than focusing on the engagement of philosophical skepticism with everyday familiarity, this chapter examines a particular historical moment when the uncanniness of the everyday became broadly apparent. During the circumstance of Japanese American internment in the mid-1940s, the particular sense of strangeness that goes by the name of the uncanny also revealed itself to be a particular historical and political affect: a sudden collapse of a belief in progress or a sense of belonging. The seeds of this view can actually be found in the essay that established the uncanny as a psychological

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phenomenon. Freud initially defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”5 The uncanny phenomenon, he suggests, is “something which is familiar and long-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (944). Psychoanalytic readings generally emphasize the reawakening of certain beliefs belonging to an earlier stage of individual psychic development. But Freud also mentions a historical, collective failure of forgetting. The uncanny arises through the return of collectively discredited beliefs or “primitive” notions (945) that have been “surmounted.” We . . . once believed that these possibilities were realities . . . Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny . . . : “So, after all, it is true . . . !” (949, original emphasis) Freud’s phrase, “we once believed,” could introduce either a tale of disillusionment or a triumphal narrative of progress. If we read the narrative of individual development as repeating a collective experience, the uncanny identifies an ambiguity at the heart of modernity’s self-perception.6 It emerges when an apparent break with the past is contradicted by “constant recurrence of the same thing,” “repetition of the same thing,” or “unintended recurrence of the same situation,” (940, 941) as Freud himself repeatedly notes. Instead of leading to mastery, or attesting to a fundamental psychic drive, this repetition simply produces a “feeling of helplessness and uncanniness” (941–942). The uncanny can be seen as a characteristic affect of the modern everyday. This incongruous return of familiar forms, practices, and beliefs can be found in many accounts of Japanese American internment, though with an additional twist given by the political circumstances. For example, one diary kept by an internee features the following entry for February 17, 1943: The commander of the American Legion said: “When America takes the mandatory territory from the Japanese, I propose that we send all the [Japanese Americans] there after the war. They can live there without any fear of racial discrimination.” The queen contest is getting into the second week, and it is in full swing now. Miss Kimi Yamada holds her first place steadily, Miss Rose Matsumoto came up to second place from tenth place.7 The world-historical and the everyday, commanders and beauty queens exist side-by-side in this uncanny, displaced, and confined quotidian life that both confirms the break that was internment and denies it. When asked for an oral history, “what was a typical day like for you in camp?” another former internee answers lightly, “Fool around all day and go to dances.”8 Her husband adds that “there were searchlights, there were sentinel posts and there was twenty-four hours a soldier

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with a gun.”9 Through a historical twist that baffled internees, the modern American everyday, with its talent shows, model airplane clubs, young adult clubs, piano lessons, community orchestra, and scouting, comes to represent a world left behind, and a set of “discarded beliefs,” Yet this world is meticulously re-created within the confines of the internment camps, as can be seen in the pages of the Minidoka Irrigator, a camp newspaper published by and for internees.10 We are used to thinking of Japanese American internment as a historical event that began in 1942 with the removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of them citizens) from their homes on the West Coast.11 As an event, internment has causes, agents, instruments, and consequences, among them the desire of nativist groups to get rid of an “absolutely unassimilable” race multiplying in economic strength and numbers, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which carried out the expulsion, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency established in March 1942 to manage the “relocation program,” and the upheaval and dispossession that ensued.12 We might assume that the everyday was permanently disrupted for the internees. The “relocation centers,” as the camps were officially known, bore no resemblance to any known idea of home. Instead of streets, sidewalks, trees, or conventional houses, the camps contained black, tar-papered barracks in a stark geometrical array. There was also the matter of the fence: the barbed-wire perimeter with manned guard towers, built in some cases with the help of the camp’s residents after their arrival, was under the control of the military police twenty-four hours a day; all people and things moving in or out of the camp were checked and even escorted by armed soldiers.13 The obtrusive border, with its armed soldiers looking in rather than out, squared uneasily with the WRA’s goal of creating the simulacrum of “an American small town.”14 But the uncanny eventlessness of the modern everyday is what appears most strikingly in the letters, diaries, newspapers, and fiction written by internees, as well as in WRA photos and mass media representations of the camps. This everyday focuses on the temporality of duration, or what can be called extensive time.15 As one woman recalls, “all we could do was to sit on the stoop of our barracks and wait and wait and wait. Life became a waiting game, the whole time that we spent in camp. You waited in line to go to the latrines, to eat in the mess halls, to do your laundry, and to take your showers. It was just a total waiting game.”16 More than a casual idiom, “waiting game” describes the active experience of the everyday’s empty duration. When the evacuation orders were announced, “the stores in Little Tokyo had a big sudden pick-up in the sale of playing cards, hana cards, sets of go, and of shogi,” another internee recalls: “even at the exorbitant price [marked up from $.75 to $2.50 for a set of cards] the people bought them . . . They knew what they were going to do when they arrived at these assembly or relocation centers.”17 Between the moments of crisis that occurred before, during, and after internment— moments that have been documented and well studied by historians— there was the endless repetition of small increments of time.

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The very nature of everyday life became a puzzle inside the assembly center or the internment camp. Was daily existence itself a political act? Devoted to the simple maintenance and reproduction of life, the domestic everyday is characterized by the “inescapable” performance of the same activities, dictated by biological necessity. As Arendt reminds us, it traditionally stands over against the sphere of political freedom, action, and originality: the daily fight in which the human body is engaged to keep the world clean and prevent its decay bears little resemblance to heroic deeds; the endurance it needs to repair every day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition.18 But in this situation, it was far from clear how to read the ethics or politics of quotidian struggle. For example, Bill Hosokawa, a leading member of the Japanese American Citizens’ League, asserts in the Pacific Citizen: “A hundred thousand Americans of Japanese blood and their parents are living unobtrusively behind barbed wire today as their part toward American victory in a fight to the finish against the Axis.”19 His viewpoint was not universally shared. Others saw the everyday as an exercise in becoming things themselves. This chapter investigates the carceral quotidian of Japanese American internment. Its uncanniness derives from the continual half-return of certain beliefs that were essential to American modernity: democratic social space, the narrative of racial uplift or progress, and the self-affirmation of the individual.20 These ideas were important to retain and to repress in equal measure. Existing in an uncanny state of incomplete erasure, they affected the basic experiential coordinates as well as the interpretation of the everyday. Space in the internment camp was flattened and divided into equal units, and the temporality of the day-to-day replaced teleology. The centers were known to be temporary, but no one knew when the war would end or what the outcome would be. The captions of WRA photographs, for example, state that “evacuees” will remain where they are “for the duration.”21 Reflecting on their experience of the day-to-day, internees often emphasize the forms of empty recurrence, sheer seriality or the mere succession of identical moments, and a preoccupation with thingness. Persons and things enter into an uncanny partnership, sometimes exchanging qualities with each other. People become diminished and immobilized, while things, whether given or made, take on an autonomous quality.22 In one woman’s recollection of the ubiquitous camp craft show, for example, things seem almost to have displaced people: “all these beautiful things. We had a whole barrack full of exhibits, clear to the ceiling. You should see all the things that were made—everything you could imagine: carved things; sewing, embroidery. Even people that didn’t know what to do, they found little rocks . . . polishing, making little things.”23 This phrase “little things” becomes a crucial trope of the uncanny everyday. Even more than their obvious confinement, it was the temptation to become absorbed in the small recurrences and the intimate proximities of everyday life that could call into question beliefs about agency and self-authorization.

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In this chapter, I will argue that internment became an experiment in the side-by-side and the day-after-day. Inert proximity, abstract equality, and blank seriality created an uncanny everyday inside the camps. For some of those outside, the camps were uncanny for another reason. There was something almost too familiar, a generic everydayness about these communities, designed as they were to simulate an “ordinary American city of 10,000 or 15,000 inhabitants.”24 The Americanness of certain aspects of camp life was exemplary, often even hyperbolic. It perplexed beliefs about essential or ineradicable racial difference without entirely eliminating them. Internment documents and photographs, and the drawings and writings of Miné Okubo and Hisaye Yamamoto, show that the camps were uncanny, hybrid, minor spaces, both familiar and strange, old and new, offering an everyday layered with half-erased material and conceptual contradictions. This aspect of the modern everyday became visible when it had to be re-created from the ground up by forcibly displaced, dispossessed, and segregated persons. .

Uncanny Spaces The internment project was an exercise in creating and populating a certain type of abstract, democratic, and banalized space. In their removal, incarceration, and eventual relocation throughout the nation, Japanese Americans were treated as uncanny things, “foreign elements” that had been too closely clustered in “colonies,” in Roosevelt’s words.25 Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 deracinated more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and reconcentrated them within ten one-square-mile, fenced-in areas, scattered in remote, often desert areas. When the WRA decided in early 1943 to adopt an aggressive resettlement policy for all internees, it was only confirming its earlier tendency to view Japanese Americans as objects that needed to be spatially disposed in a rational bureaucratic way.26 A photograph taken by Hikaru Iwasaki in October 1945 shows a Caucasian female administrator (“family counsellor”) standing in front of a wall covered with what appears to be a chart with the names of camp residents (figure 1). Next to each name there is a colored pin that represents whether the individual is “out on terminal leave” or whether a “relocation plan has been made and approved.”27 Iwasaki’s caption notes: A total of nearly 15,000 evacuees were inducted into the Granada Project, Amache Colorado, since August 27, 1942, when the first group arrived . . . From September 1, 1945 to the closing date October 15, 1945, 3,105 persons have gone back to their former homes or have relocated elsewhere. The last to leave the center, a group of 126, left on two special coaches for Sacramento and nearby towns. At the peak of its population, Amache had 7,567 residents. 412 births were recorded and 107 deaths during the three years of its existence. It comes as a shock to realize that the apparently schematic shapes of the chart are in fact a bird’s-eye view of the blocks, rectangular barracks, and square “apartments”

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“Family counsellor is shown examining wall chart. Wall charts show residence of every resident.” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-7K-410, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 1

of the Amache, Colorado, camp, which was, like every other camp, laid out in a regular pattern of tar-papered cellular units.28 The uncanniness of the everyday derived in part from the spatial arrangement of camps into repeating patterns of blocks, barracks, and partitioned “apartments” and the even distribution of bodies therein. This layout may seem to demonstrate the operation of a disciplinary mode of power. Disciplinary power operates, according to Foucault, as a “pure architectural and optical system,” using “partitioning” and “verticality” to distribute bodies effectively in both conceptual and material space.29 But in many ways the camps fell short of this ideal. The blocks expressed no taxonomic ambition. Families were placed wherever there was space.30 If anything, the camps created what disciplinary power tries to avoid: “collective dispositions . . . confused, massive, or transient pluralities.”31 Crowds of people and things are among the most pervasive features of both visual and discursive representations of internment: mountains of disorganized bundles, baggage, and trunks, sometimes with people sitting on top of them (figure 2).32 Later WRA photos show similarly disorganized and heterogeneous masses of people watching a baseball game, for example, showing no signs of hierarchical organization or self-awareness. Rather, the ideal that seems more intimately linked to the everyday of internment, the ideal that generates an uncanny familiarity, is its resemblance to the Jeffersonian

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“Baggage . . . brought by truck to this assembly center.” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-3A-212, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 2

ideal of what Philip Fisher has described as “democratic social space”: an evenly divisible and infinitely extendable square mile, cleanly erased of its former contents, transparent in operation, and “identical from point to point.”33 The camps were intended by the state to create an abstract, egalitarian space that would level prior distinctions and train interned Japanese Americans “in the democratic principles of civic participation and responsibility.”34 What resulted was not so much a conflict between democratic ideal and carceral reality as their neighborly coexistence. Space becomes flattened out without acquiring homogeneity, and acquires transparency without quite attaining uniformity. The much-desired “normal” comes to consist in empty gestures of democracy, ironic symbols of possibility, and half-successful efforts to impose order on chaotic aggregates. The WRA’s stated “objective . . . was to create a community as nearly American in its outlook and organization as possible.”35 In practice, this came to mean the establishment of an egalitarian space by military and civilian agencies with the active cooperation of the internees. This space was meant to reflect and to enable the building of new, “normal” habits of democracy. All were to have access to roughly the same amount of conceptually uniform space. More than 10,000 people lived in rooms of more or less the same size (about twenty by twenty-four feet for a family of four) and with the same initial furnishings (one stove per unit, one cot and two blankets per person), ate, showered, and washed their clothes, studied, and played in shared spaces of identical dimension and initial construction.36 Of course,

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instead of civic participation grounded in the independence of the property owner, the camps imposed a nearly total dependence, as seen in that “accepted ritual of camp life”: waiting in long lines at the mess hall before each meal.37 Yet the notion of democratic civic virtue still played an important role in the official self-conception of the camps. The equal partitioning of abstract space was meant to encourage the practice of democracy. A key feature of the WRA’s project was the institution of democratic “community government.” An early policy statement notes that “community government shall have as its objectives the training of residents of the community in the democratic principles of civic participation and responsibility.”38 “Although it is impossible to transplant all phases of normal community life into the relocation centers, the evacuees will set up their own community government, [and] elect their own officers,” the WRA announced.39 By voting for representatives who would sit on community councils, internees would affirm an abstract political equality that was equivalent to the measured barrack spaces parceled out to each family group. But the community government exercised very little executive authority; that was done by the Caucasian staff or “appointed personnel” in each center, overseen by a “project director” with final authority over every matter. The sociologist Solon Kimball, head of the WRA Section on Community Government, notes that self-government “became in actuality an adjunct of administration,” noting that there was “almost complete dependence upon the managerial control system” for practically every need and activity.40 The administration depended heavily on the block-manager system, dominated by the Issei. Often following traditional patterns of deference and authority, each block chose a manager to handle much of the day-to-day business of life and to provide a link between the internees’ needs and the administration’s orders.41 The community councils were, in fact, derided by many older Japanese Americans as “a baby’s plaything,” or a toy “to make the kids feel good.”42 With no social context, little meaning, and little power, these councils seemed to cover over a highly asymmetrical use of administrative power. As laboratories of civic virtue, the councils embodied a theoretical scheme of democracy.43 The practice of democracy was more visible in the attempt to create social space cleansed of prior cultural, historical, or geographical significance. The type of space that internment tried to institute can also be thought of as bare space.44 Space was treated not as a scene of human activity, but rather as any extension that can be curtailed, divided, and controlled—the pure correlative of sovereignty.45 Miné Okubo’s graphic narrative of internment, Citizen 13660 (1946), gives an example of how such space can come into being simply through the application of power.46 On the way from Tanforan Assembly Center to the internment camp at Topaz, the train carrying internees stopped briefly: “the train stopped in the desert somewhere in northern Nevada and for half an hour we were permitted to get off the train and walk around. Barbed wire fences bounded the stretch on either side of the track and military police stood on guard every fifteen feet.”47 This space is arbitrarily created through barbed wire and guards; though it is located

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“somewhere in northern Nevada,” it cannot be mapped according to any other set of coordinates. The camps illustrated the same phenomenon. Hastily built by the army on unused federal lands, they were constructed in such a way as to make difficult, if not impossible, the kinds of emotions or knowledge that space evokes when associated with habitation or dwelling. If it is true that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home,” space within the camps was never fully inhabited.48 Space remained abstract and bare, even when it was strictly ordered according to function (barrack, mess hall, latrines, etc.). Okubo echoes many others when she notes, “All residential blocks looked alike; people were lost all the time” (136). This disorientation reflects the loss of not merely a cognitive but affective relationship to space. But the attempt to erase prior histories of use and habitation, to create a space without any history, either indigenous or imported, was as incompletely realized as the project of instituting democracy within the camps. The result was flat but layered space, a hybrid of the alien and the familiar. Two camps, Colorado River and Gila River in Arizona, were in fact built on Indian reservations.49 Even at Topaz, in Utah, internees sought and found evidence of prior occupation. “With luck,” one memoirist writes, “we sometimes found old arrowheads . . . inside the camp grounds.”50 Temporary assembly centers, to which Japanese Americans were first removed, were most uncanny of all. They were usually located on familiar fairgrounds and racetracks. Efforts were made to create something new, blank, and featureless, but the result could certainly not be described as “raw space.”51 Okubo describes her new home (Stall 50 at the Tanforan Assembly Center), seen for the first time: A swinging half-door divided the 20 by 9 ft. stall into two rooms . . . The rear room had housed the horse and the front room the fodder. Both rooms showed signs of a hurried whitewashing. Spider webs, horse hair, and hay had been whitewashed with the walls. Huge spikes and nails stuck out all over the walls . . . linoleum the color of redwood had been placed over the rough manure-covered boards. (35) Though the space is divided and whitewashed, enough traces of past use still remain to produce a distinctly uncanny effect. The WRA’s rhetoric of “pioneering” notwithstanding, internees such as Okubo faced an artificial, haphazardly produced space.52 Other internees also saw around them a layered space full of familiar reminders of former conditions that had been given up. Rather than turning away from this strange hybridity, their representations show a certain fascination with it. This can be seen, for example, in the last issue of the Camp Harmony News Letter, published on August 14, 1942, as the internees left for permanent camps in Idaho and elsewhere. “Camp Harmony” was the name given to the detention facility hastily built on the fairgrounds in Puyallup, where the western Washington state fair was held every year. The final edition of the internee-written newsletter has a separate cover

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page with the words “Souvenir Edition” jauntily drawn under the heading, “News Letter.” The full-page drawing, produced by the camp’s “Art Department,” shows the overlapping curves of the wooden roller coaster, the tall fairground loudspeaker with multiple speakers clustered at the top and jutting into the sky, and, in the foreground, in shallow perspective, two sections of the low-roofed wooden livestock stalls that housed the internees. A few closed doors and a bench next to a door are visible. Cut off by the bottom of the picture, two sheets hang on a makeshift clothesline, partially obscuring the stall closest to the viewer. Though the elements are radically heterogeneous, the artist’s perspective collapses the distance. The drawing unites them into one complex mass of curves and angles, the roller coaster appearing to grow out of the roofs of the stalls, and the loudspeaker tower emerging like a giant chimney from the same stalls. The lines made by the stall-barracks point to the fairground elements in the rear of the picture. Holiday and everyday, laundry and roller coaster, are fused together in an image difficult to read. It is a hybrid of holiday, everyday, and blatant oppression. The general effect of the scene can be described as an aura of familiar squalor that masks something. This final “souvenir” issue of the Camp Harmony News Letter stresses the familiar over the frightening. A full seven pages of sketches are included, two or three to a page together with lighthearted captions. On each page of sketches, there appears a portrait of one of the internal gates or thresholds of the camp with its different areas, A through D. These are drawn as makeshift structures, shacks and boards nailed together, with a figure or two lounging around. A typical caption states, “Visitors to Area C are familiar with the gate where their passes are okayed. The entrance to the smallest area in camp, it was always a popular spot.”53 The somewhat stilted nostalgia of this newsletter evokes an unsettling feeling. The drawings concentrate less on people, events, or activities than on spaces: different areas within the camps, nearly always shown empty. Where people are shown, they are either faceless, picturesque human shapes placed to the side, or miniature stick figures. What is not shown in any of these sketches, though its existence is metonymically invoked by each representation of a threshold, is the feature that defined Camp Harmony more than any other structure: the armed, guarded barbed-wire fence. Memoirist Monica Sone notes: All through the night . . . [t]he lights came from high towers placed around the camp where guards with Tommy guns kept a twenty-four hour vigil. I remembered the wire fence encircling us, and a knot of anger tightened in my breast . . . My citizenship wasn’t real, after all. Then what was I? . . . Of one thing I was sure. The wire fence was real. I no longer had the right to walk out of it.54 Sone’s anger is not common in internment publications, which tend to express a general anxiety or an affect of flat cheerfulness. One full-page sketch in the Camp Harmony News Letter, for example, shows an aerial view. The caption notes, “Area

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D built on the Fairgrounds proper was the heartbeat of Camp Harmony. The headquarters and barracks were built among the dipper, fun house and various concessions, while the race tracks and grandstands hummed with camp life.” The racetrack, with long rows of barracks built within its oval, occupies the lower half of the picture; in the upper half, the roller coaster and other fairground concessions enclose one corner of this area, in which nearly every open space has been filled in with rows of barracks. Six tiny stick figures less than one-eighth of an inch in height play baseball in an empty area, while a row of even smaller people, represented by dots and dashes, wait in line to enter the mess hall. With a strangely cheerful appreciation of Area D’s “unusual layout,” the sketch flattens the grotesque juxtaposition of carnival and penitentiary into something resembling a miniature everyday neighborhood. Okubo devises a visual language to represent the uncanny flatness of the everyday in these settings. In her pen and ink drawings, accompanied by brief, often ironic captions, Okubo represents the discovery of the everyday within the Tanforan Assembly Center, and later, at the Central Utah Relocation Project, as Topaz was officially known. Irony provides Okubo with an important tool; she often creates it through the picture-caption relation—as when, for example, the caption calmly recapitulates the official belief while the picture reveals the chaotic reality. But Okubo’s work also produces a more subdued uncanny effect, and this uncanniness, more often than not, arises from the half-suppressed notion of interiority or interior space. One of the most striking features of Citizen 13360, as many critics have noted, is the crowdedness of nearly every drawing. With three exceptions, which show the artist alone, in each drawing there are at least two or three major figures, and often hundreds in the background, of varying sizes. Okubo usually draws the closer faces in affectionate detail. Many individual faces are rendered with remarkable care, as are scenes of individuals, especially Issei men, pursuing various activities: kite flying, gardening, poetry singing. But the expressions on the faces are nearly always stolid, bemused, indifferent. And the individuality of the faces recedes in the overwhelming context of the crowd. When Okubo draws particularly crowded scenes, scenes that seem to show thousands, crowds are always placed within a visually confining structure, generally a makeshift one. In the course of their removal from Tanforan to Topaz, for example, hundreds of internees are subjected to such spatial manipulation. “Inside the laundry building, also used as a bull pen, long wooden benches separated the rooms into sections” (113). The picture emphasizes the vertical wooden beams of the structure as well as the horizontal benches on which many hundreds are seated, waiting. The next picture shows “the parade to the train,” as internees march in a corridor formed by armed soldiers and barbed wire to the heavily guarded train (114–115). Okubo’s drawings suggest that the difference between exterior and interior space collapses under the conditions of internment. It seems to be a twodimensional world in which there are only lines without depth. Okubo describes the first approach to Topaz: “the flat, dry land which extended for miles in all

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directions. Suddenly, the Central Utah Relocation Project was stretched out before us . . . Hundreds of low black barracks covered with tarred paper were lined up row after row. A few telephone poles stood like sentinels” (122). There are vertical and horizontal lines, and also lines of people: “ ‘Line-ups here and line-ups there’ describes our daily life. We lined up for mail, for checks, for meals, for showers, for washrooms . . . for movies. We lined up for everything” (86). Human lines, too, have a flattening effect. In one particularly complex image, Okubo describes the use of the grandstand at Tanforan: “The residents spent much of their time on the grandstand. The panorama from here reminded them of the hills of home. One had the whole view of the race track and the surrounding country . . . People came to bask in the sun in the wind-protected privacy of the grandstand booth” (101). The drawing shows Okubo, along with a few dozen others, from behind, as they sit in the raked benches of the grandstand. What’s shown before them, however, is not a panoramic landscape. Only rows of barracks and an administration building with an American flag can be seen. In between the viewers and the view is a series of emphatically drawn vertical beams. While the caption emphasizes memory and subjectivity, the drawing bespeaks a confinement that deadens interiority.55 An uncanny flatness pervades Okubo’s drawings. Though laws of perspective are generally followed, at times Okubo conveys the impression that faraway people and objects are not distant but miniature, arrayed side by side in the same plane. In one hospital scene, for example, a nurse in the foreground tends to a patient. In the background, what appears to be a miniature or half-sized nurse stands beside an oddly elongated bed (162). In another drawing, an elderly man flies a kite while Okubo suppresses a smile. The kite appears to fly toward the back of the picture space, beside or behind a carefully rendered elevated guard-tower. But again an uncanny flattening makes the man appear to hold a tiny, miniature kite on a short piece of string. The depth of space, as well as of time, has been erased. Okubo invents a particular technique to transfer flatness onto people: decorating certain surfaces, nearly always people’s clothes, with a regular pattern of small, repeated crosses.56 The crosses are not continuous but discrete, regularly spaced in rows. They never bend or adapt to indicate three-dimensional volume. Whether the body wearing this pattern is curved, bending, or moving, the neat rows of crosses remain perfectly straight as if drawn on a flat sheet of paper. The use of these crosses can be explained to a degree by Okubo’s need to differentiate visually the numerous bodies that populate her pictures. Some figures are white, some colored in, some wear checks or plaids. But the most prominent pattern is that of the crosses or barbs. While usually placed on Okubo’s own clothes, the barbs seem to migrate from person to person, sometimes within one sequence of pictures—so that, in one moment Okubo will be covered with these, while in the next moment in the same scene, someone else will be.57 These crosses are quite distinct from the fine cross-hatching that Okubo uses very sparingly to indicate volume. It seems more accurate to describe them as barbs because they so clearly allude to the wire visible in many drawings. They give the

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impression that the barbs have directly embedded themselves in persons’ bodies, flattening them into two-dimensional things. A drawing, for example, shows Okubo wearing a shirt with this pattern as she sits on a roof looking out over the fence of Tanforan to the highway and lands beyond. The caption laconically draws attention to the guard towers and barbed wire: “We were close to freedom and yet far from it” (81). One remarkable drawing suggests the origin of these marks not in the barbed wire, but in the barbed words that the wire will later merely come to materialize. “On December 11 the United States declared war on Germany and Italy. On the West Coast there was talk of possible sabotage and invasion by the enemy. It was ‘Jap’ this and ‘Jap’ that . . . All enemy aliens were required to have certificates of identification” (10). In this drawing, Okubo stands alone with her hands placed on an open newspaper. Words appear to have floated out of the newspaper. Scratched haphazardly around, behind, and over her, we see “Aliens-Citizens / A Jap is a Jap / Don’t Trust a Jap / We Don’t Want Them / Dangerous Criminals / Stab in the Back / Sabotage / Send Them Back to Tojo / Evacuation From Vital Areas / Sorry No Japs / Spy Ring.” These are only some of the phrases and words that overlap each other. The artist’s shirt is covered with even rows of the cross-marks, of the same size as the letters. The cross-marks appear to be schematized representations of the words “Jap,” “stab,” and so on. Okubo has been marked, inscribed, and flattened, and the marks migrate freely from one flattened human body to another.

Day to Day Within the hybrid space of internment, days had to be filled. The Pacific Citizen reported of life within Camp Harmony: the Nisei . . . promote entertainments, competition in work and play and manage to occupy their hands and minds, according to a letter written by one of them. ‘Life seems quite pleasant here in spite of everything which doesn’t make ‘home,’ Tadako Tamura . . . explains. She had just been . . . making a little garden . . . friends’ visits provide the Nisei’s number one pleasure; reading the newspapers the second.58 Many accounts explain such apparently cheerful acceptance through reference to the cultural values of inner fortitude, perseverance, and dignified resignation ascribed to the Issei.59 The image of “making a little garden” certainly evokes stoicism. The cheerfulness of the above account can also be linked to the official attitude of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Nisei organization that recommended willing cooperation with the war effort. But the words quoted convey awareness of the real conditions of internment: privation, monotony, isolation. Paradoxically, “everything which doesn’t make home” accentuates the quotidian activity that is still occurring in this nonplace of barbed wire and barracks. The simulation of everyday life has a way of bringing familiar beliefs about action and time into question.

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Within the camps, the boundaries and topography of the modern everyday are confronted with unusual clarity. Camp newspapers, private letters, artwork, memoirs, and interviews show a preoccupation with the peculiar features of everyday life: the nonhierarchized repetition of certain sounds, textures, rhythms, activities, sights, sentiments, and ideas. Often called the “day-to-day,” the everyday is greeted with ambivalence. More precisely, absorption in this everyday, the willingness to be content with day-to-day recurrence, provokes unease. It subtly brings into question the status of internees as agents with intentions, purposes, and the capacities to fulfill them. The everyday undercuts the quintessentially modern American narrative of racial uplift, even as it presents itself as the domain in which modernity is meant to be fully enjoyed. The everyday came to be noticed not only as a flattened, abstract space, but as a certain structure of time. Everyday temporality within the camps was both limitless and bounded. Everyone knew that the present conditions were only temporary. This was obvious in the case of the “Assembly Centers,” and became a matter of official policy beginning in late 1942, when the WRA announced its intention of relocating as many internees as possible in other parts of the nation. In an article entitled, “Relocation: Now or Never,” a staff writer for the Minidoka Irrigator points out, “Our present mode of existence is only temporary, and we must relinquish the security of this center some time in the future.”60 A few months later, an editorial tries to balance a sense of the present with the claims of the future: This sprawling, mono-racial municipality we now inhabit . . . is in every historical sense a stop-over point in the evacuee journey from the past into the future . . . All-important as the charting of the evacuee future beyond that barbed wire may be, it is, however, a simultaneous truth that the temporary present cannot be completely neglected, and that a certain minimum amount of attention and work must go to smoothing out the harsh, rough edges of the here and now . . . this evanescent but nevertheless actual period.61 The “rough edges of the here and now” exist in dialectical tension with that imagined “journey from the past into the future.” For many internees, this temporariness could exaggerate both the importance and the emptiness of the present. Each day became a stand-in for another day, leaving behind no permanent effect or even trace. A later editorial in the same newspaper notes, “In this monotonous life that we lead in the center, the seasons, the days and the months have a strange habit of slipping by and we have nothing by which to measure the change . . . and it is by the sudden realization that the sun does not rise as early as in the summer months . . . that we are reminded of the passing seasons.”62 Another writer insists that everyday time can be sensed only in the vaguest way. Instead of accumulating or even passing away, the unit of the day simply repeats itself. “One day blends into another, till one and all are the same. Little else but the closing of the canteen serves to mark the advent of the Sabbath or a holiday. The sands of Time loses [sic] its precious value, and slips through uncaring fingers with the speed of indifference.”63 Day-to-day

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time cannot be reckoned or valued without “the incentive to think and strive ahead,” this writer argues. The empty seriality of everyday time could be experienced as deeply uncanny. In the blending of one identical day into another, there was the sensation of a failure to act, to move, or to progress. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud recounts a parallel experience of finding himself again and again in the same spot in a strange city, despite his efforts to find his way out. Internees found themselves reliving the same day. As one wrote in his diary, “Every day is just the same twenty-four hours.”64 The sentiment was echoed by many.65 But this empty seriality also possessed a certain attractiveness. Mary Matsuda Gruenewald writes, “I became preoccupied with the mundane. Each evening I listened to the harsh voice of the woman down in the end apartment yelling at her child . . . and in our own living space there was always the endless job of cleaning up after wind storms.”66 Other letters and reports criticized such absorption as evidence of blameworthy “indifference.” A woman interned in Camp Harmony wrote to her brother: I am really amazed at the indifference of the Japanese young people . . . no one asked any question as to the future . . . that is after the war. What are our chances of coming back home . . . getting a livelihood . . . ? It seems as if at present everyone, rather most everyone is interested in dances, socials, etc. In other words live day by day.67 Repeatedly, both in private and in public, a lack of purpose was remarked. The “average nisei,” a columnist for the Minidoka Irrigator chided, “are like sleepwalkers, wandering blindly about with little idea of where we are going and what we are doing.”68 The recurrence of “everyday existence” seems to compete with the paradigm of agency.69 As one columnist puts it, “if I had no purpose in life, no clearly defined goals towards which to work and no principles upon which to act, then I wouldn’t mind staying here. The food is all right, the physical facilities are not so bad, and there is plenty of work to be done.”70 The modern everyday reveals its antithesis to be purposive action, ruled by prevision of a different future. Such action requires time to be measured on a different scale from the day-to-day. Another internee, Kenji Okuda, saw absorption in everyday recurrence as the active avoidance of “the future”: I can hear kids gleefully yelling and shouting outside the window . . . In a sheltered and misleadingly “comfortable” life, the harsh realities . . . are easy to push into the background and forget . . . we can live without worrying or examining the future—life becomes a superficial joke and laughter comes forth as though forced . . . What frightens me, though, is the number of young people and isseis who can joke and sleep and eat from day to day without thinking of the morrow . . . The future is black—we’re afraid—we’re weak—and so we

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cling with awful tenacity to the present making a joke out of everything that happens.71 Okuda develops the idea of the everyday as a psychological screen or form of repression: “It is so easy to have the athletic program, the dances, the parties become the main emphases and to constantly keep ourselves occupied with them, shoving all serious thought way into the back of the mind.”72 He even describes the social and recreational program as one of “two powerful drugs on camp life—drugs which produce a pleasant, stupifying [sic], dulling effect on the mind.” The other “drug” is the knowledge of the situation’s temporariness. Both work together, in his view, to produce an everyday that rests atop a half-buried fear: “we all seem so afraid of taking and fulfilling any responsibilities.”73 An oxymoron characterizes everyday life in camp: uncomfortable comfort. It offers another variant of the uncanny, the familiar-strange. In a public lecture given at Oberlin, for which he leaves in the winter of 1942, Okuda remarks: As a result of this uncertainty and the experiences of the past nine months, the nisei are finding it very uncomfortable to relax, to be slowly overcome by an enervating sense of indifference within the secluded confines of their cities . . . one discovers that camp life is not at all difficult to become adjusted to . . . Each day becomes an end in itself to be lived pleasantly . . . It is this effect on the individual personality which, to me, is the most unfortunate aspect of camp life.74 Other accounts also refer to the dismay created by some internees’ “willingness to ‘take the easy way out’ and live aimlessly.”75 Yet what seems most odd to me is not the aimlessness but the consciousness of it. Given this anxiety about inertia as a force that dictates their motions, the repeated appearance of the phrase “little things” is worth noting.76 “Little things” becomes a trope for the everyday as a form or structure of feeling. The everyday consists of discrete units that neither cohere nor fully disaggregate. It is a dimension of life marked by smallness, triviality, or de-animation, and yet its value cannot be entirely rejected. Looking back over the year, a September 1943 column in the Minidoka Irrigator weighs these “little things” of dailiness against the larger ideological abstractions crucial to modernity. Initially this phrase refers to the material conditions of camp life, or rather, its material privations: “the stench of the outhouses, the inexpediences of washing, the cramped one-room quarters,” the “gumbo mud,” the “meal being eaten across from former strangers,” “[t]aking an evening stroll to find the obstruction of barbed wires.”77 But the mention of “little things” irresistibly evokes the thought of “the bigger things” on which they depend: The unpleasantness of the year . . . only serves to lend value to the things one has taken too much for granted . . . the little things of daily living—the essential conveniences, the seclusion and security of a home and a family group . . . green foliage, and lawns; the bigger things—the glory of freedom, the pricelessness of one’s rights.78

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Neither the bigger ideals nor the quotidian pleasures of daily living are to be found within the confines of camp; little things are all there are. In an article entitled “Little Things,” in the “Souvenir Edition” of the Camp Harmony News Letter, Bill Hosokawa uses this formula to reframe the experience of internment. Instead of a narrative structure that would require actors, or roles determined by differing degrees of agency, we get a list of things and thing-like experiences: All things are made of little things . . . And so it was the little things that made our stay at Camp Harmony memorable, little things that stood out and seemed at the time like vital milestones on the path of evacuation. But in retrospect all the little things fell into perspective, and so we shall recount a few little things which cling to memory. At first the food was bad, then . . . the meals were better . . . There weren’t enough showers in D . . . this fellow snored, and that other one kept his radio tuned too loudly . . . There were little things like waiting in line that irritated you, and little things like a slab of watermelon . . . that made you feel good for the rest of the day.79 Not only objects but experiences and feelings are comprehended in this category. Though these reflections are offered as souvenirs, they do not suggest a temporally recursive or reflexive subjectivity.80 If anything, “little things” seems to name the way that experience dwindles from momentous-seeming event to pocket-sized, inherently forgettable fragments that randomly “cling” to consciousness. Like the day-to-day temporality whose structure it repeats, the formula of “little things” makes it difficult and maybe even unnecessary to conceive of a role for agency. It is a comfortable and uncanny phrase.

Little Things If the structure of everyday temporality produced uncanny sensations, this was even more the case when it came to the relationship with things. As in the work of Bill Brown and others, the word “thing” is often used to acknowledge a certain alien, indeterminate quality.81 The things of internment seemed to exist in a manner not reducible to their function, their use, their value, or even their beauty. Often things seem to possess a freestanding quality—not only heft and solidity, but even something like personality or agency, while representations of persons suggest an absence of interiority, of internal depth or space. Persons and things appear to be linked in a curiously intimate, uncanny exchange of qualities. One episode in Matsuda Gruenewald’s memoir hints at how things (also tiny, in this case) provide both the occasion and a language for a complex denial of subjectivity. At the Tule Lake internment camp, Gruenewald begins to participate, along with “many other women and girls,” in a “daily, early morning ritual”: collecting tiny shells from the sediment of this former lakebed.82 Once the shells have been gathered, the women make necklaces and other crafts with them. Gruenewald

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reflects, “Instead of being at home on Vashon working or making plans to finish high school and go on to college, here I am stringing these tiny shells one by one, and forming a necklace to hang around my neck.”83 “Stringing these tiny shells one by one” each day is contrasted with “making plans” or carrying them out. The image is resonant. Gruenewald interprets it symbolically as “piercing each experience, one by one.” But there is a strangely sacrificial quality to her act, as though interiority itself were being meticulously canceled, not merely symbolically but materially. Though the shells may appear to be passive objects in her hands, there is almost a reversal of roles. Gruenewald cannot voice her thoughts during “those quiet days.” But the shells, she notes, “spoke of other times and survival.” Gruenewald’s description of shell collecting is poignant, given the prevalence of the shell as a trope of sheltered, encased subjectivity, of subjectivity at home in a particular space.84 Many internees not only lost their actual homes on the West Coast but were dispossessed of the concept of home itself. As one “community analyst” noted, in camp “every home was broken into three or four distinct places, with all but the room in which the family slept shared by sixty or more other families.”85 It became difficult to retain even the idea of home as a space that was internally articulated, differentiated from the outside, and rich in affective associations.86 When internees began to leave the camps to “resettle” in other areas, this loss became clear: “Home” in quotes is just how most of those on the outside think of the relocation center, for even though the rest of the family is back in some center, somehow the one-room quarters cannot be called “home” in the fullest meaning. Not only those relocated, but we who live here don’t feel at ease in referring to 26-4-B, or 6-5-E, or any other number as “home” . . . More important than the communal mode of living, the instability expressed in the very name “relocation center” is discouraging to thinking of barrack, mess hall, and laundry room in terms of a home.87 Unlike the original “home,” often lovingly described room by room in terms of furnishings and function, the barrack apartment consisted of one cramped space.88 Home begins to mean little more than staying still for a while. This sense of persons being placed, rather than actively dwelling, emerges in several photographs from the WRA archives. One photograph taken by Dorothea Lange at the Tanforan Assembly Center and “impounded” by the agency, shows an elderly man sitting on the end of a bed (figure 3). Three bare walls of his horse-stall are visible, as is a lightbulb dangling behind him on a wire, and a woman sitting on the further end of the bed, knitting. The impression given is that of people contained in a wooden box (which in fact it was). Lange’s caption reads, “Old Mr. Konda in barrack apartment, after supper. He lives here with his two sons, his married daughter, and her husband. They share two small rooms together. His daughter is seen behind him, knitting. He has been a truck farmer and raised his family who are also farmers, in Centerville . . . where his children were born.”89 Lange’s photograph

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“Old Mr. Konda in barrack apartment, after supper. He lives here with his two sons, his married daughter, and her husband. They share two small rooms together. His daughter is seen behind him, knitting. He has been a truck farmer and raised his family who are also farmers, in Centerville . . . where his children were born.” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-3C-584, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 3

contrasts strikingly with the caption that emphasizes Mr. Konda’s history, what he has accomplished and where he has lived. Her subject is shown in full-length profile as he stares toward the partially opened door. Behind him at the far end of the bed, his daughter provides an image of absorption as she bends over her knitting. But Mr. Konda is neither asleep nor reading. He does not acknowledge the viewer. He simply sits in full-length profile, staring at something—or nothing—that we can see, occupying space. And behind him on the wall, a distinct shadow testifies to his solidity and stasis. A second photograph, taken by Clem Albers at the Salinas Assembly Center, is simply entitled “Barracks interior at assembly center” (figure 4).90 A young man, fully dressed and wearing a hat, reclines on his bed in a cluttered room. Unlike Lange’s photograph, which exaggerates the depth of the stall and length of the bed, this photograph takes in all its objects in clear focus, as though they occupied a single plane. A multiplicity of things hangs on the bed and the wall; shelves, nails, wires, small benches, and tables provide makeshift structures for the complicated assortment of personal effects visible in the picture: a pot, a dish,

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“Barracks interior at assembly center.” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-3A-223, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 4

scissors, books, bottles, clothes, and many other small things. There are two details, though, that provide what Roland Barthes refers to as the “punctum,” the accidental element that sticks out: on the cot pushed right beside this man’s bed, a hat rests on the pillow.91 And next to his own bed, a pair of boots stands, not neatly lined up but haphazardly placed (he had obviously taken them off to lie down on the bed). The man lies between them, also a haphazardly placed or misplaced thing. He looks directly at the viewer with a trace of a smile. But it is almost easy to overlook his presence in the welter of small, everyday things that dominates the photograph. By way of contrast, the archives offer a photograph taken by Lange after the evacuation of Japanese Americans was announced but before it took place. This photograph shows Japanese American workers harvesting cauliflower in Centerville, California (figure 5).92 While her caption notes that the “Japanese field laborers” are working “on large-scale ranch owned by white operator (L.E. Bailey),” she focuses exclusively on two workers, standing ankle-deep in large, dark leaves. No other operators are visible, nor any machinery. The worker in the center bends nearly double as he picks up a head of cauliflower to throw into a standing wooden crate. Another figure behind him precisely echoes his posture and motions. While only the worker’s hat is visible and no human face appears, the overall sense is one of power and purposeful action, in a temporal and spatial setting that seems at once universal and local. The photograph suggests both the nobility of these ragged workers, and

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“Japanese field laborers packing cauliflower in field on large-scale ranch owned by white operator (L.E. Bailey).” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-1C-319, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 5

their harmonious relation to their natural setting. The color, texture, and line of the workers’ clothes and bodies—particularly the curves formed by their overlapping backs—echo the dark line of mountains in the background and other textures in the photograph. Though subjectivity as a matter of interiority is not emphasized, the photograph enunciates a powerful agency. The worker’s right hand, holding an object, poised to swing it, occupies the center. And this is the case even though the caption reminds us that these workers do not own the land. That hired field laborers in ragged clothes can present such a powerful image of agency is one ironic effect of the everyday of internment. Inside the camps, everyday objects acquire a certain animate quality, as in a photograph titled “Close-up of barrack home with the carefully planned flower garden in foreground,” taken by Lange at Tanforan (figure 6).93 The garden in the foreground is in its early stages and offers little to see. What draws the eye, instead, is the way that a pitchfork, shovel, broom, and mop stand in front of a building with two windows and a doorway. They are evenly spaced, rigidly vertical, and upside-down (that is, from the way that they would be held or used). They are placed so as to give

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“Close-up of barrack home with the carefully planned flower garden in foreground.” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-3C-611, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 6

the effect not of leaning, but of standing upright and at attention. At least one of these things even announces its identity: a sign between the broom and mop reads, “mop for bldg 2 / please return.” There is almost a sense that these everyday domestic implements have by themselves claimed and created the “carefully planned” garden in front of them. They confront us, while people fail to appear in this photograph, either inside or outside the barrack.94 In Okubo’s Citizen 13660, certain objects take on an expansive personality, with the pot-bellied stove offering the best example. At Topaz, after the first snowfall, “Each family,” Okubo writes, “was given a pot-bellied stove. Ours was moved in with me” (146). Within a curtained partition, Okubo sits on her bed in a tête-à-tête with the stove. Over the tops of the blanket-curtains, a number of curious eyes peek in at this scene of uncanny intimacy. With a cooking pot resting on top, the stove has exactly the same size as the seated artist, but, unlike Okubo, who wears the customary barbed shirt and a pleased but somewhat blank expression, the stove is richly shaded and cross-hatched. Its shapeliness, solidity, and fullness are strongly emphasized. The hinged door in the front is securely closed; it has warm depths within. A photograph taken for the WRA at Manzanar by Francis Stewart reveals a similar scene (figure 7). A young girl wearing saddle shoes and rolled-up slacks sits in a folding canvas chair, looking at a magazine with a self-conscious smile on her face. Next to her, again nearly the same size as her seated figure, stands a bulky

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“Lucy Yonemitshu . . . enjoys a pleasant afternoon with her book. Lucy lives with her parents in this barrack home, which has been very tastefully decorated by her father.” National Archives photograph no. 210-G-10B-180, Records of the War Relocation Authority

FIGURE 7

and elaborate radio. With a vase of artificial flowers incongruously placed on top, the radio is gleaming, heavy, self-assured. Sound emanates from the radio; the girl passively listens, as the caption informs us.95 Behind the girl on a shelf, though, sits a wooden casket that is closed. Bachelard comments on the “homology between the geometry of the small box and the psychology of secrecy.”96 This picture raises a question about the relationship of persons and things: the radio speaks and sings, the casket contains its secret, the girl simply occupies space. The person-thing relationship that marks the internment everyday reflects the world of commodity exchange outside, and yet it has a particular intensity in the closed-off internment center. Things existed apart from their utilitarian, commercial, aesthetic, or epistemological value. They were familiar partners, secret questioners.

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At least one administrator at Poston seemed determined to view the internees as hybrid person-things, as he imagines the spectacle of permanent relocation, so strongly desired by the WRA: “we can see whole clusters of individuals, like molecules in a solution, flowing forward and escaping into a free condition, or flowing back and settling into crystallized attitudes of inertia.”97 But it would be oversimplifying to say that the WRA simply turned the internees into objects. Rather, the resemblance of persons to things can be seen as one of the ironic effects of the everyday.

Interior Spaces Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” set in the Poston Relocation Project where Yamamoto herself had been interned, draws attention to the ambiguous power of the everyday to disturb and undo itself. In the foreground, there is the familiar everyday life of little things cultivated by the community. It seems to consist in an almost oppressive attention to small, regular, and homely matters: the care and cleaning of the body, the education of children, endless curiosity and gossip about neighbors. The narrator, a nineteen-year-old girl, dreams lazily about the future, and before the end of the story leaves the camp to attend college. But against this is set the figure of the title character, Miss Sasagawara, an unmarried woman given to odd behavior, who arrives in the camp to live with her elderly father. Miss Sasagawara becomes the story’s means of revealing the everyday uncanniness persistently denied by others.98 She functions as a closed-off space and an arresting form that simply recurs throughout the story in a strange and fitful rhythm. Despite the foregrounded bustle of quotidian life, a sense of uncanniness lurks around every corner in “that unlikely place of wind, sand, and heat.”99 The situation of internment is inherently “unlikely,” bizarre, anomalous, full of contradiction. Poston is a “place” of abstraction, without identity or history. But this uncanniness is usually quickly dispelled or denied, as its inmates focus on the attempt to live a clean life. In conversation with her friend, the narrator remarks that “Elsie and I . . . ended up as we always did, agreeing that our mission in life . . . was first to finish college somewhere . . . and then to find good jobs and two nice, clean young men” (21). One of the primary tasks of the quotidian seems to be creating cleanliness, as many women’s memoirs note. When she first moves in, Miss Sasagawara’s neighbor offers “to wash the whole barracks down with a hose,” an offer she rudely and violently rejects (21). Importantly, cleansing provides the link between small everyday acts and a sanctioned type of transcendence. Miss Sasagawara’s father, an elderly Buddhist priest, is described as “blissfully bent on cleansing from his already radiant soul the last imperceptible blemishes” (32–33). Intent on such work, the community manages to overlook the deep uncanniness contained within the everyday.

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Miss Sasagawara’s arrival, her presence, and odd behavior reveal the frightening within the familiar. As a woman, according to the story’s logic, she should take on a well-defined role in sustaining this everyday of work, leisure, chatter. But her character is presented as unknowable, or not knowable in a regular way. Her appearance is strange and provokes curiosity. Having learned that Miss Sasagawara was formerly a dancer, the narrator imagines seeing her as a thing in a certain context: “it was easy to imagine [her] a decorative ingredient of some ballet” (20). She suffers from mysterious, invisible diseases; her behavior is not only aloof but antisocial, and she disappears for a time when she is sent to a state mental hospital, where she returns at the story’s end. Miss Sasagawara is represented as a thing that is locked, a living casket that could but does not speak of other places and times. Her interiority poses a problem in a flattened-out world. She is made the object of visual scrutiny to an extent that suggests how deeply the problem of interiority is usually repressed. When she appears one day at the camp hospital, claiming to feel a mysterious pain, she becomes the object of everyone’s attention in a comically exaggerated and yet uncanny scene: The whole hospital staff appeared to have gathered in the room to get a look at Miss Sasagawara, and the other patients . . . were sitting up attentively . . . she was staring at a certain place on the floor, and I knew she must be aware of that concentrated gaze . . . she continued, unexpectedly, to seem wryly amused with the entire proceedings. I peered at her wonderingly through the triangular peephole created by someone’s hand on hip. (26) The “peephole” created by another’s body merely underlines what the collective gaze aims to see but cannot: the mysterious interior of Miss Sasagawara, which becomes a matter of surmise. “I knew she must be aware.” But even the doctors cannot see anything wrong inside. In another scene, the narrator stumbles on her body in the shower and describes it as “smooth and spare and well-turned [at] thirty-nine” (22). As an enclosed, locked space, Miss Sasagawara’s body is aligned with similar objects in the story. One is the “small shrine” that her father keeps in his apartment, an object described as “more intricately constructed” than usual (23). The other is a container associated in several ways with this strange woman. The narrator learns that the Reverend Sasagawara had presided at her grandfather’s funeral. “Dimly I recalled the inside of the Buddhist temple . . . an immense, murky auditorium whose high and huge platform had held . . . a great golden shrine touched with black and white. Below this platform, Grandfather, veiled by gauze, had slept in a long grey box which just fitted him” (23). The account not only echoes the description of Miss Sasagawara’s “daily costume, brief and fitting closely to her trifling waist,” made of a gauzy, “coarse-textured homespun” (20), but links her with the “immense, murky” interior space of the temple and the well-fitting space of the coffin. She occupies space but also contains space within herself in a way that cannot be understood or recognized by a community devoted to maintaining the banality of the everyday.

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Miss Sasagawara’s person and actions also reveal an uncanny temporality. When she participates in a block Christmas party, her presence somehow draws attention to the “odd” layering of old and new, too late or too early, as in the rickety recordplayer “past its prime” and the “oldest occupant of the bachelor’s dormitory [who] gave a tremulous monologue,” or the “little girl in a grass skirt and superfluous brassiere [who] did a hula” (29). Most importantly, Miss Sasagawara herself embodies an uncanny rhythm of recurrence. She is linked with the rhythms of the everyday, as in her father’s daily rituals: “at regular hours of the day, he offered incense [before the shrine] and chanted, tinkling . . . a small bell” (23). But she makes these regular rituals appear problematic, troubling rather than comforting. “What did Miss Sasagawara do at these prayer periods, I wondered; did she participate, did she let it go in one ear and out the other, or did she abruptly go out on the steps . . . ?” (23–24). She tends to be described in terms of rhythm: her speech and actions are performed “erratically” (32) rather than consistently. She moves “abruptly,” speaks “without preliminary,” and feels pain in “excruciating flashes” (24–25). Only for a short period, when she returns from several months in the sanitarium, does she conform to the rhythms of the everyday, speaking “often and easily,” even teaching a dancing class with “patient labor” (28–29). In recounting her grandfather’s funeral, a scene intimately linked with Miss Sasagawara, the narrator emphasizes the memory of a reverberating blow being struck repeatedly. “From time to time there had reverberated through the enormous room, above the singsong, above the weeping, above the fragrance, the sharp, startling whang of the gong” (23). At the end of the story, Miss Sasagawara performs an idiosyncratic version of the same ritual. When a nosy neighbor admonishes her for her strange behavior, she runs into her apartment and “begin[s] to bang on the wooden walls with something heavy . . . The banging, which sounded as though Miss Sasagawara were using all her strength on each blow, had continued wildly for at least five minutes. Then all had been still” (31). Miss Sasagawara is the embodiment of a rhythm of recurrence, more erratic than regular, but still recalling this essential dimension of the everyday. The everyday is nothing if not a rhythm. The gong and the banging, for instance, allude to one of the most often-remarked phenomena of camp life: the mess-hall gong, struck three times a day. A typical reference in a memoir notes, “Every morning when breakfast is ready, they strike the iron bar that is hung at the mess hall.”100 As a strange thing that simply appears and reappears throughout the story, at one point disappearing for a length of time, returning and then disappearing again, she embodies the uncanniness, the unsettled and unnatural character of the everyday that usually passes without notice. Miss Sasagawara makes her final appearance in the story in disembodied form. A poem she published is discovered many years later by the narrator and paraphrased for the reader. It seems to be about her father, a man who aims “to extinguish . . . all unworthy desire” and to attain “highest understanding, highest mindedness” (33). But, as in Freud’s uncanny, that which has been “surmounted” returns again in the form of “human passions rising, subsiding, and again

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rising . . . within the selfsame room” (33). The description is deliberately vague about the nature of these “passions” or their location; the poem refers to a companion who lives with him. The affects appear to be almost free-floating, “rising, subsiding, and again rising” in an independent rhythm. What is emphasized is the phenomenon of recurrence (rising, subsiding, rising) and its link with madness. In the story’s final sentence, the poem ends by referring to “a sort of madness . . . which, pure of itself, might possibly bring troublous, scented scenes to recur in the other’s sleep” (33). The attempt to surmount or to deny these recurrent feelings amounts to a kind of madness. Miss Sasagawara’s words, finally encountered in the form of a flat thing, a published text, both criticize the everyday and affirm its form. She condemns the everyday for its oppressive and repressive devotion to the management of life, but affirms the rhythm of recurrence as a form: “rising, subsiding, and again rising.” Her description of it restores to this form of the everyday a pathos that only becomes obvious when everyday continuity is broken. But her poem does not seem to ask for sympathy or understanding; at once open and closed, it simply presents itself as something to be seen.

The Racialized Uncanny Yamamoto’s story suggests that the everyday, as Henri Lefebvre suggests, weighs most heavily on women. Within the camps, women in particular found in the everyday both an oppressive flatness and the opportunity to exercise inventiveness and even ingenuity. The female columnist for one camp newspaper tries to see in it a chance for the “Nisei Woman” to discover herself: You’ll find yourself resorting to . . . ingenious tricks at the centers in your work of making cheerful living quarters for your family . . . If you’ve always wanted to try a new color scheme . . . this is the time to do it. You are using inexpensive materials, often scrap . . . You’re fixing up a temporary home, not a permanent one . . . forget your inhibitions and let yourself go.101 But there was more to the everyday than domestic activities or domestic space. Self-forgetting was more common than self-discovery, and the everyday offered a means of avoiding and even negating attempts to establish political identities. Camp administrators encountered the strange, disorderly resilience of the everyday during their attempt to “register” all internees. Beginning in January 1943, all internees over the age of seventeen were required to affirm or to deny their “loyalty” to the United States, in a long and complex series of written questions. The most important questions asked, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States …?” and “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States . . . and forswear any form of allegiance . . . to the Japanese emperor?”102 Those who answered the two most important questions in the negative would be “segregated,” transferred to the Tule Lake Center, while those who answered in the positive would be

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theoretically “cleared” to serve in the army or to relocate elsewhere (but not on the West Coast until late 1944). The aim was to create not philosophical but political certainty. And, as in Stanley Cavell’s account of the ordinary, that pursuit only had the effect of exacerbating those qualities of the everyday that had provoked it in the first place.103 Some of the follow-up interviews reveal the extent to which subjective feelings became part of a new and strange language game. Words and actions refused to testify to internal feelings; they remained flat markers to be manipulated. Army questioners in Manzanar, for example, persistently asked one Nisei woman, who had answered no to the loyalty question, about her “real feelings”: “Do you feel loyal to this country?” They tell her, “you can say ‘yes’ if you really feel loyal and still go . . . with your husband.” Just as persistently, she focuses on the practical consequence of the answer she gives: “I’m going to do whatever my husband does . . . Maybe I’d better say ‘no.’”104 Rather than using her answer to express the “real feelings” she has, she views language as tactical and performative. Another Nisei wife, when asked by the Tule Lake Segregation Board, “Are you disloyal?” answers yes. Q. Why? A. Well—no reason. If I say “loyal,” will they take me or leave me here? . . . Q. Then it doesn’t have anything to do with staying? . . . A. Then I’m loyal.105 The loyalty oath was felt to be a crisis by nearly all involved, and does not illustrate the everyday, day-to-day life that I have been examining. But these examples remind us that the confusion between persons and things that we have been observing was part of a larger negotiation that was taking place between internees, camp administrators, and the nation. Often this negotiation took the form of open struggle—of work stoppages, strikes, and demonstrations. But in its uncanny inertia, flatness, seriality, and recurrence, the everyday also took part in this confusion. Its uncanniness registered the application of power in a form so blatant as to produce disbelief in these modern subjects. It is acknowledged in statements such as this one, recorded on May 15, 1945: “By the 9:00 a.m. bus, we will leave Block 45, Barrack 1-A, after 1,085 days residing there . . . The train is moving. And I have no feeling that the United States and Japan are at war at this moment. I feel as if I had had a bad dream.”106 But this generalized disbelief was not simply the effect of internment. The modern everyday, obsessed with little things, was haunted and haunting for those outside as well. I have used the terminology of the uncanny in this chapter to refer to a dynamic ambiguity about the distinctions between persons and things, feeling and numbness, voluntary and inertial movement, progress and recurrence, history and the everyday. There was, however, something else at stake in the uncanny banality of camp life, with its attention to gossip, dances and socials, self-improvement and baseball games, and that was the dogma of racial difference, of the Japanese as

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the racial other. Although it was their “absolutely unassimilable” racial character that provided the excuse for violating the civil rights of so many, what the camps showed to at least one observer was something absolutely familiar and for that reason frightening. Jim Marshall, a writer for Collier’s Magazine, described Manzanar in the summer of 1942: You wander around . . . noting what you see, and suddenly you realize there is almost nothing very unusual here. It’s just another typical American city . . . A couple of nisei cops are arresting a truck driver for speeding. A Catholic priest is marrying Mary Uyesato and Arthur Hiraga . . . Eagle Scout Philip Nagao is busy drilling a squad of kids . . . Art classes are running. There’s a card game going on in the firehouse. In the maternity ward . . . Dr. Masako Kusayanagi is delivering a baby . . . Over in the city room of the Manzanar Free Press, Sam Hohri and his reporters and desk men are getting out the community newspaper.107 Prepared to see exotic sights in this city “peopled and largely operated by members of an Asian race,” firm in his belief that “some human instinct . . . keeps the races apart,” this journalist ends up baffled. Looked at from a certain angle, “these communities are as American as San Francisco or Topeka.” Marshall’s article is titled “The Problem People,” but it ends up unable to distinguish between “problem people” and modern American people. The uncanny everyday becomes once again the sign of sameness that recurs when it is not supposed to.

{ PART II }

The Problem of Identity

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Unlikely Daughters, Exemplary Mothers, and Disembedded China Men: Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston

The internment of Japanese Americans was taken to be justified by the tautology that displays the essence of racist thinking: General John L. DeWitt’s much-quoted phrase, “A Jap’s a Jap . . . It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”1 While other types of people can bear several identities sequentially or simultaneously, the racial pariah can be nothing but her racial self. To become the basis of a government policy of segregation, however, this belief had to undergo some further refinement or modernization. The government lawyers who were asked to evaluate the constitutionality of the evacuation order reported, “It is a fact, and not a legal theory, that Japanese who are American citizens cannot readily be identified and distinguished from Japanese who owe no loyalty to the United States.”2 Such an assertion presupposes imagining people of Japanese descent as identical disembedded units, extracted from any local context and placed side by side. Race proceeds from this operation that distinguishes and then links separate things together. What made this discovery uncanny was its tension with a different view cherished by modernity according to which the identity of a person, moment, or place is seen as “an entirely unique configuration,” in Georg Simmel’s words.3 This sense of uniqueness could, as in the case of racial thinking, be expanded to encompass a group, but at the obvious cost of eliminating any claim of the individual. Moreover, the identity of uniqueness ought to be defined from within, over time, and by one’s own standards, with difference remaining an external consideration.4 These two ways of conceiving identity can be aligned with what some philosophers have called third-person selfhood and first-person selfhood. First-person selfhood consists in “the ‘I’ that we know from ‘inside.’ ”5 Presumably it affirms the uniqueness of the self, not least in the singular concern and sense of continuous responsibility that we feel for ourselves.6 In contrast, third-person selfhood is “the ‘someone’ considered from ‘outside,’ ” what it is that makes me identifiable as a certain individual rather than some other person.7 This view sets an individual

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within a field of other comparable phenomena, noting continuities and discontinuities in that broader field. Racialized ways of thinking about identity seem to offer minorities only the bleakest possible version of third-person selfhood: external markers of race that merely assign one to a group rather than hinting at a unique identity. But it is important to note that third-person selfhood is not limited to situations involving racial difference and discrimination. The idea of considering selfhood or identity from outside and mostly in comparison with others can be allied with the phenomenon of disembedding that Anthony Giddens has seen as characteristic of modernity: “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”8 Both the informal acts of everyday life and more formal institutions rely on “systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise,” and on the use and exchange of “symbolic tokens,” or “media of interchange which can be ‘passed around’ without regard to the specific characteristics of individuals or groups that handle them at any particular juncture.”9 An operation similar to disembedding is required to think about identity or selfhood from a third-person point of view. Disembedding shows little regard for any singular identity as it changes over time. The particularities of who did what when, where, or why can be deferred, or even ignored, as Simmel pointed out in the case of money.10 Stories or narratives, while not made obsolete, lose their explanatory necessity, while the accumulation of data acquires greater significance as a way of organizing particulars into knowledge. Giddens sees it as possible to tell stories about the self; indeed, he defines the modern “reflexive project of the self ” as “the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised biographical narratives, [which] takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems.”11 But there is an inherent tension between thinking of the self as a set of choices and decisions that someone has made, and seeing the self according to a more intimate and diachronic model: that of a narrative that weaves concrete choices and particular contingencies into a unique plot that can be told many times without losing its identity. And the Chinese American post–World War II women writers that I will examine in this chapter are acutely aware of this tension. Thinking in terms of third-person and first-person selfhood, unique stories, and anonymous averages allows us to move beyond the realization that racial identity is something constructed and often imposed on minorities without their consent. The emphasis on consent can lead to the assumption that one needs only to claim or voice an identity for it to be valid. But it is not only the source from which an identity claim emanates that matters. The telling of one’s own story is not the end of the story. We need to look at how that identity is conceived: that is, to what extent these minority writers see themselves from within or from without, as a story or as a set of data. What is at stake is their relationship with modernity’s broader practices and promises, and particularly their position relative to the changing modern project of the self. And in the process what they have to confront is the question of the modern everyday. Modernity, the everyday, and selfhood are intimately tangled together.

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For the writers in this chapter, identity can be conceived as a set of similarities tabulated from a field of recurrences, or quite differently as a plot chained together by internal necessity. Identity can be derived from the modern everyday or conceived in opposition to its abstracting, homogenizing force. Published in 1945, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter reflects the period following the end of Chinese exclusion, when Chinese Americans were not only allowed, but encouraged, to participate in the national project.12 Some thirty years later, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men appeared to wide acclaim. Between the publications of Wong’s and Kingston’s memoirs, notable changes occurred in the status, self-conception, and political organization of Asian Americans. The 1960s saw the formation not only of the model minority myth, which trumpeted the “success story” of Japanese Americans, but also of the Third World Liberation Front, composed of San Francisco State and University of California at Berkeley students who demanded the right to determine their own studies, their identities, and their future.13 To some extent, these developments help explain the differences between Wong and Kingston. Both writers identify the modern everyday with a way of thinking based on the preponderance of disembedded evidence. For Wong, but not for Kingston, this approach seems to work perfectly well as a means of arriving at a sense of her own identity. Wong aims at third-person selfhood, even choosing to relate her memoir in the third person. She takes the measure of her identity as a tabulated set of actions located within a larger collection of beliefs and practices. I will argue that her approach to identity reflects the influence of a particular modern epistemology. As Ian Hacking has shown, many areas of modern experience and thought have come to embrace abstract patterns of recurrence as an important type of knowledge about the social and physical worlds. Knowing the likelihood of an event comes to seem as good as knowing its ultimate cause. In what Hacking calls “the elimination of ordinary causality,” we come to be increasingly satisfied with knowing correlations between phenomena.14 In addition to replacing stronger forms of determination with regular occurrence, statistical approaches seek to collect facts about large numbers of individual cases in order to establish the average, and this mean is accepted as both normal and normative.15 Wong seems happy to rely on a weak form of probabilistic thinking, a tendency that Agnes Heller has identified as characteristic of everyday “schemes of conduct and knowledge.”16 In her account of the world she grew up in, San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wong pays considerable attention to the frequency with which certain types of events and persons occur. Her interest in probability balances and maybe even outweighs her interest in causes. Finding her touchstone in acts that are repeated often—daily, weekly, yearly—she observes, abstracts, and describes these procedures for us. Likewise, she observes her own acts and thoughts and abstracts from them the sense of “Jade Snow” as a phenomenon that has its place in a field of data, as her title, Fifth Chinese Daughter, suggests. But Wong presents her identity not as that of a typical Chinese daughter, but rather as that of a cultural anomaly, an outlier. Her odd embrace of third-person selfhood suggests

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that she finds in the disembedded procedures and stretched-apart, abstract space-time of the everyday a certain freedom. Based on the observation of discrete acts or feelings, third-person selfhood discounts specific contexts and particular narrative relationships. But first-person selfhood consists in the inner experience of the self as it develops continuously and reflexively over time. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston grapples with the ideal of the self as a configuration that is not only unique but coherent and self-determined. Her project echoes in some ways the stress placed on self-determination by minority activists in the late 1960s. That students themselves should decide all aspects of their education, including curriculum and faculty, was the first demand made by the Third World Liberation Front.17 Identity was without a doubt to be determined and articulated in the first person. In this historical moment, the ideal of first-person selfhood was expressed in a strong suspicion of third-party representation; as one member of the TWLF envisioned the ideal course, “if we wanted to talk about the 42-year old [in the Mission District], we would get a 42-year-old Puerto Rican or Mexican to teach that, because he knows it. He lives it. It is his life.”18 The notion of the stereotype, which relies on weak forms of probabilistic thinking, summed up everything to be rejected, as many proponents of Asian American cultural nationalism made clear.19 Thus, first-person selfhood is the goal that Kingston inherits. She finds in the inner form of the story, in narrative emplotment itself, a model of strong and necessary selfhood. I want to distinguish here, along the lines of narrative theory, between the act of narration or narrative enunciation, and a story. It is possible to recount a plotless series of events. But in the stronger sense that I will use, story refers to those enchained sequences of causes and effects that make up a narrative’s plot. It is not simply a pattern inferred from a tabulation of random occurrences. It is that sense of inner necessity which links together all the surface or discursive elements of the narrative. The story, we might say, is the cause of itself. The Woman Warrior consists of a series of stories, ranging from cautionary tales to the mother’s self-aggrandizing narratives of her own past in China. The tales are presented by the mother as exemplary; they offer models to emulate or to avoid. But they also serve, regardless of their content, as models of first-person selfhood: the story is always identifiable as itself, even if retold in a different version or imitated in real life. Its essential elements are felt to be bound together by necessity; it cannot be subsumed into a table of facts or subjected to a process of averaging.20 The story provides, in Simmel’s words, “the filling of a space held in reserve for [it] alone.”21 In The Woman Warrior, the stories are given to the narrator by a third party, thus complicating the situation considerably. The narrator’s relation to these tales is cagey. She won’t transmit them without framing them carefully, figuring herself as a skeptical listener, resentful repeater, desirous imitator. She measures herself against these narratives and comes up short not only in her accomplishments, but in her ability to be determined wholly by inner laws. Because of how they’re given and framed, the stories seem to possess a practically heroic ability to determine and

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to retain their own identity. They firmly exclude any sense of contingency; they could not have happened any other way. But the narrator feels acutely even within herself the dissipative, aleatory power of the modern everyday. She tries to defend herself from the stories’ power by trying to make sense of their claims within the context of everyday probability. Would someone really do that? Could it happen here? Questioning the probability of a story requires a sense that things repeat themselves. The everyday names just such a sense; it thus grounds a knowledge that creates composite images by collecting many instances, retaining similarities, and discarding contextual particularities.22 Kingston inserts a gap between the modern everyday, now felt to be universal, and the idea of culture. If an assertion or a story is seen as improbable, she refers it ironically to a particular culture. China becomes “there, where anything happens,” a dream place or utopian place with unknown laws.23 The placeless modern everyday stays in the background of The Woman Warrior, but becomes the dominant structure of its companion volume. In China Men, Kingston largely avoids the first person as a mode of narrative and seems to discard the notion of the self as a unique configuration with inner laws. China Men presents averages rather than individuals, extracting bits of information from the contexts in which they come embedded, and finding the patterns that recur. Her history of Chinese men in America proceeds as a series of tales that are not so much exemplary as generic: the figures in each story, as well as the plots, represent the average, or the composite portrait of many individuals. They are persons and actions repeated numberless times, often without any coherent psychological or logical underpinning. Chance and probability come back to claim a central place in this representation of the modern everyday. One result is that identity becomes a collective matter, not an individual concern. What seems to drive this turn to the everyday is the desire to represent these men not as exemplars of ethnic identity but as inextricable parts of a broader phenomenon of modernity. In a final twist, Kingston, like Wong, arrives at the idea of the everyday as the realm of a particular kind of negative freedom: the freedom of random occurrence and unmotivated repetition, freedom from the need to be coherent, original, and self-determined.

Self as Anomaly: The Modernity of Jade Snow Wong Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter is one of the more notorious of the San Francisco Chinatown memoirs that were published in the 1950s and 1960s.24 Spare, fact-oriented, and brisk, Wong’s memoir is organized around the instruction that she receives first as a young child from her father, then in Chinese and American schools, in various work settings (mostly as a part-time domestic in other people’s homes), and in college; she graduates from Mills College with a degree in economics and sociology, and eventually finds a “niche” making and selling hand-thrown pottery (246). The work’s notoriety among Asian American critics has much to do with

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the success that it achieved on its first publication in 1950: it was translated into German and numerous Asian languages by the U.S. State Department, which sent Wong herself to Asia in 1953 as tangible proof that anyone can succeed in America regardless of race and gender.25 Wong seemed happy to see herself in this way, thus setting herself up for future condemnation as the willing tool of the Cold War state. The success of Wong’s book has been attributed to the book’s desire to please and even to pander to readers unfamiliar with Asian culture. Wong’s rhetoric reflects a time before identity politics. It sometimes seems as though acceptance by the mainstream audience is the most that any minority could hope for. Likewise, the book can be read as suggesting that individual striving, humility, and force of will can overcome institutional racism and inequities of power. However, there are several formal features of the book that tend to provoke even more critical wrath than her political quietism: Wong’s use of the third person to narrate her own life (she refers to herself as “Jade Snow” throughout), and her inclusion of Chinese recipes and other forms of practical knowledge. Infamously, she gives lengthy instructions for preparing rice, as well as several other Chinese dishes. But these latter features need to be seen as part of the book’s most significant project: the search for “patterns” of action that occur regularly, the formal description of these patterns, and the disembedding from context that allows these forms to be discerned. Protesting perhaps a little too much, Wong justifies her use of the third person as rooted in “Chinese habit,” Chinese literary tradition, “Chinese propriety,” as well as in her own “psychological detachment” (xiii, vii). As recent critics have pointed out, her stance is also indebted to developments in anthropology and sociology associated with figures such as Franz Boas and Robert Park.26 Even apart from its source or motivation, however, this device allows Wong to see the self as something situated within a context of probability rather than strict determination. Wong could but does not, in the end, see herself as something rigidly determined by the numerous rules that appear to structure her environment. Rather, she presents this social environment in terms of disembedded protocols and procedures: ways of doing things, of performing actions that are repeated regularly, and are likely to occur again. Pulling these out of their contexts, she presents them as repeatable and thus transferable forms. The everyday thus comes into being as a context defined not by the cultural provenance but by the repeated performance of certain acts and gestures. Indeed, the narrative measures her growth by the extent to which what used to look like prescriptive laws come to be seen merely as repeated, regularized ways of doing things. So Wong’s is not a straightforward narrative of rebellion. Rather, she finds herself unlikely, anomalous, given the norms and procedures that constitute her world. Modern selfhood is defined as something that defies statistical prediction and yet emerges out of a context of probability. It functions as a portable, transferable form, part of the modern everyday’s repertoire of forms. Much of what Wong tells us about her childhood consists in what she was taught by her father, the most important figure in her environment. A defender of “the Christian concept [that] allows women their freedom and individuality” (246), he

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nevertheless serves as the primary means of transmitting Chinese knowledge and language to his daughters. What is curious is how Wong represents this transaction: she immediately transfers that same knowledge to her readers through the description of a disembedded series of actions. From the sentences of the first Chinese primer to the proper way of holding a brush, Wong passes on to the reader a series of bodily postures and motions: “one’s fingers should be curved in a continuous fluid line, with the brush held flexibly between the thumb and third finger” (16); she goes on to describe the “elementary stroke technique of starting her brush in a point at the tip, applying pressure for strength and stroke expansion, and then gradually decreasing the pressure toward the end of the stroke” (17). The recipes, the description of washing and cooking rice, for example (also taught to her by her father), are part of the same topos: “The rice was scooped into a heavy pot . . . It was first dampened with a little water, then rubbed . . . with both hands . . . You rinsed after the thorough first rubbing . . . Then rub, scrub, and rinse again. Rub, scrub, and rinse again” (58). What begins as a description of the proper procedure turns into an account of the procedure as it just occurs every day; the normative in the sense of the ideal or standard turns into the norm in the weaker sense of the way it happens on most occasions. Wong begins by remarking that her childhood was occupied with understanding “what was proper or improper in the behavior of a little Chinese girl” (2). Quickly, however, this sense of the proper as correct subsides into descriptions of a disembedded process, a series of steps that can be extracted from the local context and performed by anyone, at any time or place. The processes are not exclusively domestic or Chinese. Wong describes with equal attention the “manufacturing process” that occurs each day in her father’s overall factory, located inside their home: When a cutting order was received, Daddy laid out his material smoothly down the length of the cutting table, layer on layer . . . piling up a stack of five dozen. Then he rolled out on top a heavy, brown paper stencil . . . After the stencil was laid, white talc was dusted over the holes of the outline . . . After cutting, bundles of trouser parts . . . were assembled by size and distributed to the seamstresses . . . When the hemming was finished, the overalls were taken to the upper level for final finishing . . . Completed overalls were picked up by the “folders.” (52–53) In a sense, this procedure is what Wong’s narrative is doing: cutting out patterns and parts that can be assembled elsewhere, by others. Though Wong’s descriptions are meticulously detailed, they are almost never particular or what narratologists call singulative (in which what happens one time is told one time). Rather, they sum up actions that occur many times every day for years; they describe a statistical average rather than something that has occurred once. In a chapter devoted to the alternating rhythms of the everyday, “Saturday’s Reward and Sunday’s Holiday,” Wong makes clear her fondness for schematic descriptions. “Saturday afternoon,” filled with chores, “rewarded by Saturday night” at the movies,

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followed by Sunday’s church services and walks, are composite portraits of many such days.27 The description does make allowance for a certain limited variability of action, however. Three different options for Sunday walks are noted. Those walks are mentioned, one gathers, because of their greatest frequency. There is a certain nostalgic quality to Wong’s accounts of the everyday that goes beyond the fact that she’s describing her own past. This nostalgia emerges most clearly when she evokes a premodern type of labor time. In one chapter, she describes several Chinatown shopkeepers and artisans whom she befriends, among them an herbalist who is described as “a once-tall figure now bent to five feet” (219). When Jade Snow seeks his medical advice and he takes her pulse, his actions are thus described: “he closed his eyes and dropped his head low, in a gesture of concentration. In that instant, Jade Snow knew the reason for his stoop. It was from years and years of . . . practice” (225). Wong seems to find pathos in the regular, repeated bodily practice of such artisan figures. The time-space in which they acquire and exert their skills she describes as a “sanctum”: the interior of the herbalist’s store is “dusty, worn smooth, and age-darkened” (219). Wong’s nostalgic portrayal performs a kind of ideological compensation. The small, repeated bodily gestures that she idealizes here as a “timeless” (219) everyday are no different from the repetitive gestures of the body that attends the machine, as in this example: “Sometimes Jade Snow worked on the buttonhole and overlocking machine . . . the operator had to be sure to keep her fingers out of reach of the sharp, gleaming, razor-edged blade which chopped down in an unceremonious staccato immediately after the needle encircled the reinforcement for the buttonhole” (94). The bend of the herbalist’s back or the skill of the watch repairman allows Wong to wistfully imagine the repetition of gestures as leading to skill and refinement, rather than the deskilling that characterizes industrial labor.28 But the rooting of the everyday, and even of this particular ideological perspective, in modernity is apparent throughout Wong’s memoir. As the metaphor of the “sanctum” suggests, Wong is keenly aware of the modernity that she and the Chinatown craftsmen inhabit. The watch repairman, in fact, asserts his preference for smooth and shiny mass-produced commodities. Scorning “that handthrown pottery with the earthy look” as something “[o]nly peasants used,” this man prefers “those nice, shiny, smooth, bright dishes, reasonably priced at stores everywhere. I really admire American expertness with machines,” he tells her (214). The quasi-statistical regularities that she notices in others’ actions as well as in her own arise from her sense of modernity as a certain kind of temporality. This temporality is based on constant technical operation and innovation, “the imminence of continuous change” (163).29 Not only imminent change, but pervasive hurry: Wong’s first postcollege employment in 1942 is with the War Production Drive. Her “new schedule” involves getting up at five every day to take the ferryboat to the Marin County shipyard, where her office is located, in order “to punch the time clock” at eight (190). “At the yard, it seemed that everything should have been done two minutes ago, and the two

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telephones, which were ringing almost every moment of the day, were indispensable in expediting action” (194–195). Besides the pace of change, the most important feature of modernity visible in Wong’s account of the everyday is the ubiquitous operation of disembedding. Her job as a clerk-typist for the War Production Drive exemplifies the type of disembedding that Giddens describes: putting off in time, pushing farther in space, or entrusting to abstract impersonal systems the kinds of action, knowledge, or interaction that might once have occurred in a particular time-space setting between embodied participants. Take Wong’s office, for example: It was one of a national network of offices located in major war plants. Its purpose was to increase production; its method was to solicit suggestions from the workers as to ideas for improving production techniques . . . Workers deposited their ideas into conveniently located suggestion boxes and Jade Snow’s job was to type them into coherent form and acknowledge them, pending definite action. Two of their men were assigned to investigate the merits of suggestions and report their findings to the boss. The boss checked on [their] feasibility . . . Each month . . . the office would send a detailed report on them to Washington so that the best of their thinking could be shared with other shipyards. (191–192) An individual worker’s suggestion, typed up by Wong, goes through numerous stages of abstraction and elaboration before it is eventually sent to the central War Production Board, thence to be distributed to other shipyards, presumably to be replicated. Wong seems to see the bureaucracy as yet another fascinating machine to describe. Another aspect of disembedding is even more fundamental to Wong’s representation of the modernity/everyday dyad, and that is her tendency to see the world as a plurality of forms and levels. As we have seen, she often represents actions schematically, summing up many occasions or actions into one composite form. Her own life at home she sums up as “the familiar pattern” (132). But just as importantly, Wong’s viewpoint encompasses different orders or plural systems in which these forms can be placed. A useful rubric is given by her father, who refers not to culture but to “forms of action”: “because most Chinese do not analyze or question symbols, they are blind followers of tradition. Only those who have become Christians have the courage to question forms of action,” he tells her (144). What Wong’s father calls Christianity becomes a more secular type of modernity for Wong: the awareness of multiple orders. In her first sociology course, she hears a lecture about historical changes in family relations. This lecture, she writes, “revolutionized her thinking, shattering her Wong-constructed conception of the order of things” (125). A unitary model gives way here to a plural one in which there is not one proper procedure but many, and not one but many ways in which to compare and to analyze these procedures. In retrospect, we can see that this insight

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enables her meticulous description of the procedures and routines that make up the modern everyday. Where Wong goes beyond the anthropological perspective, however, is in the conception of the self that emerges from such observations. Wong acknowledges the extent to which she has been shaped by her father as well as by her larger social environment. She can even ironically describe her own blindness to these influences. In her junior college graduation speech, she exhorts “American-Chinese” to use their talents in China, and remarks: Thus Jade Snow—shaped by her father’s and mother’s unceasing loyalty toward their mother country, impressed with China’s needs by speakers . . . revolutionized by American ideas . . . thought that she had quite independently arrived at the perfect solution for the future of all thinking and conscientious young Chinese, including herself. (135) She is acutely aware of how she’s been “shaped” and “impressed.” In a striking moment, she enters a pottery studio for the first time and feels with “shocked excitement” the “half-completed forms . . . reaching out and speaking to her” (176). She identifies herself strongly with these “forms”: “Some were imperfect, thick, warped, or crude . . . but they all had that hand quality” (177). But despite this sympathetic identification with the made object, Wong does not see herself as having been strictly determined by others. Nor does she believe herself to be autonomous. Rather, she represents selfhood within a field of probability. Given certain ways of doing things, there are greater and lesser chances that one might turn out a particular type of person. And her own selfhood is clearly identified with her anomalous status. Despite all the repeated application of small gestures and routines, Wong sees herself as atypical, odd, an outlier. “She was independent. She was also frank— much too frank for many people’s liking. She had . . . no real friends who shared her interests . . . [she had] the habit of walking . . . wandering through odd parts of San Francisco” (133). In the context of her own family, she is seen as “their peculiar fifth daughter whom no one could understand” (245). Wong’s oddball status, however, which we gather by comparing her to other “normal” daughters or Chinese girls, carries another meaning in a different social and economic context. It becomes the key to her economic independence. When she begins to consider the possibility of making and selling hand-thrown pottery, Wong points out to the watch repairman that “in this country it is greatly in demand, and it is expensive,” to which he “scornfully” replies: “there are always a few who like to be different, if they can afford it” (214). Neatly anticipating future sociological arguments about class-driven desires for distinction, he reveals to Wong that there’s a market for oddness. Wong indeed finds success, setting up a pottery wheel in the display window of a Chinatown shop, making her wares in full public view, and, by her own account, almost causing riots: “the street was packed. There were even people . . . clinging to the telephone pole . . . The morning paper carried a picture and two-column story of the new enterprise. Jade Snow had become a wonder in the

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eyes of the Western world” (244). Her success is based on a careful calculation of probability in 1945. She has first ascertained from her teacher that “since the war had cut off imported European crafts, there was better opportunity for an American potter to sell his wares than ever before” (236). She has also taken into account both the fallen and the remaining barriers against women in the public sphere, as well as the decidedly modern norms of Chinatown, with its preference for marcelled hair (which she refuses) and machine-made dishes: Chinatown was agog. A woman in the window, her legs astride a potter’s wheel, her hair in braids, her hands perpetually messy with sticky California clay, her finished products such things as coolies used in China, the daughter of a conservative family . . . such a combination was sure to fail! (244) Actually, such a combination, through its defiance of both the proper and the probable, is bound to succeed. The scandalized reaction of Chinatown feeds her fame: “Caucasians came from far and near to see her work, and Jade Snow sold all the pottery she could make” (244).30 Wong sees herself as an anomalous product of her social world, the “daughter of a conservative family” who somehow did not turn out as might be expected. Her individuality arises from placing herself in a broader context of shaping forces and comparable figures, such as the other sisters who play a minor but nevertheless crucial role. At the same time, however, her individuality asks to be considered independently of this context, though without a clear purpose for doing so. The conceptual mobility that results from disembedding is even more important than the social mobility Wong achieves. This disembedding of the idea of selfhood is illustrated in one of the strangest passages of the book, when Wong launches a battleship at the height of the war. She is given this privilege by winning an essay contest sponsored by a newspaper; the essay is entitled “Absenteeism—Its Causes and Cures,” and is based on her statistical research, again proving Wong’s secure footing in the world of what Hacking calls “the new indeterminism” (144). This scene, which Wong remarks is “almost like a wedding” (197), invites comparison with an earlier description of her sister’s wedding in which the bride stands, bedecked in traditional costume and wedding gifts, as “a sort of decorative, noneating, nondrinking, nonspeaking accessory to the wedding celebration” (144). If a wedding celebrates a woman’s incorporation into a social institution, Wong’s ship-launching seems to celebrate pure disembedding as a kind of birth: The order was given for the workmen to cut away the remaining plates which held the ship’s hull lightly in place. “Burn One!” someone called out. “Burn One!” they echoed from below the ship’s bow . . . As the . . . last hole was burned through, the ship trembled momentarily and gave a great shudder. “Now!” the command was to Jade Snow. “I christen thee the William A. Jones!” she called, and struck the bow with the champagne bottle . . . Simultaneously, the ship rumbled down the way with a thunderous roar. (197–198)

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She seems to be neither fully agent nor accessory in this carefully described scene; it is hard to know if she is the recipient of an order or the initiator of a movement. There arises a sense of modern agency as distributed among various people and things: steel and fire as well as voices and gestures. What lingers is an odd sense that mobility by itself does not constitute freedom. The self is not entirely free to determine its own actions or its own stories, but the concept of the modern self can circulate anywhere.

Embedded and Exemplary Stories Born three years before Wong’s ship-launching, Kingston has acknowledged her debt to Wong’s text, and it is hard to say whether the similarities or the differences between the two memoirs are more striking. Like Wong, Kingston grows up in a Chinatown setting (Stockton, not San Francisco), coming to define herself as “strange.” Both narrators, as critics have pointed out, try to assert a measure of independence from their families despite their gender, or because of it; both are driven to do so primarily by the subordinate and undervalued status of daughters.31 The differences have to do with the forms of selfhood that dominate the two books. Kingston’s memoir is shaped around her mother’s stories, not her father’s instructions. The stories themselves, as Kingston rehearses or retells them, possess an extravagance of form, a superabundance not of detail but of energy that typically results in different versions of the same event. Multiple versions are in fact a signature motif of The Woman Warrior, as Kingston tries to figure out how the tale in question “fits” in the modern world.32 “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America” (5). As these metaphors suggest, the stories have the feeling of something meant to be applied. But they do not correspond or refer to the experienceable world. Instead, they seem to be normative schemas. Instead of conveying instruction in how to do things, their plots model and sometimes even represent a self determined by its own inner laws and unique logic. But this model of selfhood comes into conflict with the probabilistic thinking of everyday America. Kingston is caught in the contradictory demands of modernity: on the one hand, the expectation of a unique and autonomous selfhood, on the other hand, the rule of probability. In the course of struggling with these stories, Kingston exposes this contradiction. The differences between Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Woman Warrior reveal a tension in how modern identity is conceived. Wong’s memoir suggests that the idea of the self as singular can arise from compiling all the small causes that should have shaped and formed it in a certain way. But for Kingston, identity is contained deep within the self, manifested often through unconscious responses. Reflection begins and ends with the scrutiny of the self. As Kingston asks at the beginning of her book, “Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what

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things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?” (5). The essential self is imagined to exist prior to and outside these influences: I was born in the middle of World War II . . . I dream that the sky is covered from horizon to horizon with rows of airplanes, dirigibles, rocket ships, flying bombs, their formations as even as stitches. When the sky seems clear in my dreams and I would fly, if I look too closely, there so silent, far away, and faint in the daylight that people who do not know about them do not see them, are shiny silver machines, some not yet invented, being moved, fleets always being moved from one continent to another . . . I must figure out a way to fly between them. (96) Subsuming numerous motifs from Wong’s memoir (sewing, industrial production, war, housekeeping), Kingston locates geopolitical modernity within the unconscious, and stresses the first-person selfhood so noticeably absent from Fifth Chinese Daughter. If the gesture of hitting the ship with the champagne bottle is Wong’s preferred image of selfhood, what’s striking here is the internal pressure Kingston feels to transcend or escape even the context of modernity. The sense of selfhood doesn’t arise from noticing the regular, small recurrences of the everyday; it consists in the internal sense of a necessary trajectory—at least, in one’s dreams. The Woman Warrior as a book has no plot in a standard sense. It is divided into five sections, the first four of which retell one of the mother’s stories (they originate from her and/or she figures as the protagonist); the last section describes aspects of Kingston’s childhood, roughly organized around the theme, “I have a terrible time talking” (165). The absence of a single linear development draws attention to the schematic or formal aspects of the stories, as we keep encountering them. I use the term “story” here to designate what we generally refer to as the plot. Narrative theorists distinguish between “story” and “discourse.” The story consists in the events that occur and the characters that perform them; it is a chain of logical sequences, while the discourse is the particular form that we’ve actually read or heard or seen.33 The same story, in this sense, can be told in different forms or media; we can recognize, for instance, a novel or a play in adaptation. In a retelling, a character might even be reinterpreted, renamed, given a different psychological motivation or moral bearing, or the entire plot might be placed in a different historical period. Nevertheless, we can recognize it as the same story. And this is the crucial insight that Kingston develops in her first book. A story as a concatenation of actions is seen as a totality resting on its own logic, a unique identity. This logic might resemble that of the everyday world, as in realist fiction, or it might defy it, as in the genre of the marvelous. But the story is a self-contained universe with a certain way of relating its events to each other. It can be retold, condensed, expanded, disputed, without losing its identity.

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This is what Kingston discovers in the first section, “No Name Woman.” It begins by directly quoting the mother’s brief tale of an adulterous aunt in China. The discourse, in the narratological sense, is strangely proportioned. There is only a terse account of the aunt’s marriage, her husband’s immediate departure for America, the aunt’s pregnancy “long after the time when it could have been possible” (3), and then five of the eight paragraphs describe how the outraged “villagers” destroy the family’s house in retribution. The mother ends, “Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The next morning when I went for the water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well” (5). Feeling trapped, Kingston retells the story in several different versions, filling in events and supplying motives—all the critical details omitted in the mother’s version. She imagines the aunt first as a victim of rape, then as a rebellious individualist who “worked at herself in the mirror . . . dreamed of a lover . . . plied her secret comb” (9–10). But the ending is inescapable; all she can do is to imagine in more detail the loneliness that drives the aunt, “a tribal person alone” (14), to “[pick] up the baby and walk to the well” (15). The narrator’s different versions of the story only end up drawing even more attention to the rigorous, inescapable logic of the story: the aunt gives birth, and therefore she is punished. Kingston can view this story with outrage, with sympathy, or even with admiration for the aunt-as-rebel: “my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space” (8). But no account of psychology, affect or motivation can challenge the internal, causal connection made by the story. It’s not correlation but causation that links the two events: the aunt becomes pregnant, and therefore the villagers punish her family. The strength of the story does not lie in its application to the world, or the likelihood of its happening anywhere else, despite the mother’s closing warning to her daughter. Rather, it is the story’s inviolable self-containment that continues to trouble the narrator. This self-containment does not derive from the mother’s opening injunction to keep the story secret; it results from the story’s internal structure. Like an ideal self, the plot abides by its own laws. Multiple versions of the same story are frequent in The Woman Warrior. In the section called “Shaman,” the story of the mother’s night in a haunted dormitory room is given twice without remarking on the discrepancies between the two versions. Though one version is far more elaborate and fantastical than the other, the core is the same: mother encounters ghost, mother vanquishes ghost. Again, the different details draw attention to the invariant element, the plot that claims its own lawlike identity. The notion that stories embody necessity rather than chance is given a few clever twists in “At the Western Palace,” the tale of another aunt from Hong Kong, whose husband is living in the United States, married to another woman. The narrator’s mother, Brave Orchid, schemes to restore her sister, Moon Orchid, to her rightful place as wife. As she imagines innumerable versions of how Moon Orchid might confront her erring husband, each more absurdly melodramatic than the last, she reveals the story at the heart of all these versions:

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“A long time ago,” began Brave Orchid, “the emperors had four wives, one at each point of the compass, and they lived in four palaces . . . the Empress of the West has imprisoned the Earth’s Emperor in the Western Palace. And you, the good Empress of the East, come out of the dawn to invade her land and free the Emperor.” (143) When the long-awaited confrontation occurs, the husband refuses to take in his first wife, and the two women end up accepting the offer of lunch instead. Typically, Brave Orchid refuses to see this as a failure. The story of the four wives turns out to be a mere distraction; the real story is that of Brave Orchid herself, a character who believes her “will power [can] keep an airplane up . . . she . . . continuously and gently pushed up on the plane’s belly” (113). From inner necessity, Brave Orchid sees her failures as triumphs (some small, some large) and remains blind to the damage caused by her chronic self-aggrandizement. Kingston opens the final section of her book with a humorously laconic version of this same story. “What my brother actually said was, ‘I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt’s husband who’s got the other wife’ ” (163). Multiple versions inevitably build up the authority of the original, even if they seem to dispute it. They feel like unsuccessful attempts to escape from a prison. The normative status of these stories has almost nothing to do with frequency of occurrence. They do not grow out of the everyday; claiming exemplarity, they present the “ought” rather than the “is.” But Kingston’s modernity finds the ground of this claim and maybe even the claim itself problematic. We can compare Wong and Kingston on this point. From the repeated actions that Wong observes, whether domestic, bureaucratic, or industrial, she extracts procedures that can be performed at any time by anyone. Kingston’s stories, by contrast, are embedded in a particular time, space, and relationship. The circumstances of their transmission are as starkly memorable as the stories themselves. The story of Fa Mu Lan was “given me by my mother,” Kingston recalls: “as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously” (20). This should limit the power of the story, but the opposite turns out to be the case. The story purports to determine the narrator’s identity: “She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman . . . I would have to grow up a warrior woman” (20). The normative authority of the mother’s stories is deeply entangled with the authority of its teller at a particular moment. Some are told exactly once: “My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts” (6). And yet it presents a rule to be followed on all future occasions. “Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on” (5). The norm, then, does not emerge by itself out of numerous repeated occasions. It is imposed by one person on another, face-to-face. “I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story” (9–10). Kingston sometimes questions the truthfulness of the stories, though she is aware that this involves a certain misprision. To ask of a tale that aims solely to

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inspire a strong emotion whether its events could have actually happened is to miss the point in a certain way, but it shows how Kingston tries to find in everyday probability a kind of defense against the story’s normative claims. “Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads . . . and boil the feet in vinegar . . . could such people engender a prodigal aunt?” (6). As in this quotation, standards of probability often come into play under the rubric of a quasi-ethnographic idea of “culture.” Kingston supplements what she has heard from her own parents with information about “the Chinese” gathered from elsewhere: taboos, customs, manners. Culture is imagined as a kind of totality in which every single detail signifies the same thing. “In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the living creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land . . . The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables . . . round windows and rice bowls—these talismans . . . [warned] this family of the law” (12–13).34 But by exaggerating both the coherence and the otherness of “Chinese culture,” Kingston finds herself back in the same defenseless position. Chinese is “the language of impossible stories” (87), China becomes simply “there, where anything happens” (190). Probability is forced to admit this cultural loophole. In the end, Kingston settles for an everyday that feels like a flawed, negative, formless actuality. She establishes a gap between ideal and empirical existence. The core of the plot is clear and invariable: crimes are punished, ghosts are vanquished, Brave Orchid remains a legend in her own mind. Measured against these stories, the empirical everyday is only a patternless uncertain flux. And the narrator sees herself as characterized primarily by its incoherence and failure, its lack of clear determination. She does not have a sense of the laws of her own being. She can’t even define herself as a distinct anomaly, in Wong’s fashion. As if to point out the gap between the identity the story possesses and her own inchoate sense of self, Kingston tries a story on for size. In her retelling of the legend of Fa Mu Lan, she performs the exact reverse of what Wong does, relating a third-person narrative in the first person. The result is strange. Initially, the narrator clumsily highlights the lack of fit between this heroine’s characteristics and her own. “ ‘Have you eaten rice today, little girl?’ they greeted me. ‘Yes, I have,’ I said out of politeness. ‘Thank you.’ (‘No, I haven’t,’ I would have said in real life, mad at the Chinese for lying so much. ‘I’m starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies’)” (11). The empirical I of “real life” is easily contrasted with the I of the tale. But later in the narrative, the story’s first person takes over entirely. As Fa Mu Lan recites her heroic exploits, any sense that she could have acted otherwise disappears. She seems to become an automaton. She carries out the requisite vengeance on her family’s oppressors, punishing some and liberating others, and returns to her husband’s home, making announcements along the way: “ ‘This is a new year,’ I told the people, ‘the year one’ . . . I knelt at my parents-in-law’s feet . . . ‘Now my public duties are finished,’ I said. ‘I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework’ ” (45). In the end, the use of first person emphasizes the absence of private thoughts and feelings. Fa Mu Lan’s identity consists

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only in the acts she has to perform as dictated by the inner necessity of the story. Kingston succeeds in making us experience how inadequate this story can feel as a representation of first-person selfhood. At its conclusion, the narrative recounts at length how diligently the narrator, as a girl, tried to emulate the heroic deeds of that story, and how elaborately she failed: “My American life has been such a disappointment” (45). This stubborn lack of fit between the norm and the actual self becomes the narrator’s identity as well as the mark of the everyday. In the last section, a strange episode illustrates the paradox of exemplarity. The mother’s stories demand a counter-autonomy that emulates but also negates the original story. You must determine yourself exactly as I do, the stories seem to say, only in your own way. The actuality of the self is both too weak to determine itself, and too resistant to be molded by another, as we see when the narrator tells how she confronted her double after school in sixth grade. The narrator torments this girl, another Chinese American girl “who could not speak up” (172), for an impossibly long period of time, pulling her face and her hair, trying to force her to “say something” (180). She fails, as the girl refuses to the end to say a single word, even though both start to sob, “sometimes together, sometimes alternating” (181).35 Here the narrator, in more explicitly physical fashion, does what the mother’s stories do: she grabs the girl, yanks her around, and demands that she exhibit an equally strong sense of identity. “ ‘Talk!’ I shouted into the side of her head . . . ‘Say “No,” then,’ I said . . . ‘Say your name. Go ahead. Say it. Or are you stupid?’ . . . ‘Say, “Leave me alone,” and I’ll let you go . . . Just say, “Stop” ’ ” (176–178). The narrator plays the role of the singular, forceful story. She grabs the listener to impose her words on her in order, paradoxically, to make her use her own voice: “I reached up and took the fatty part of her cheek . . . between my thumb and finger . . . She tried to shake her head, but I had hold of her face . . . ‘Say “Hi,” ’ I said. ‘ “Hi.” Like that’ ” (176–177). In the face-to-face violence of this encounter, we can see the gap between an ideal identity and the disappointing actuality of the everyday. Except that an important twist occurs. As the narrator keeps demanding that the girl speak or act, she finds herself repeating her own words and her own actions in a way that she can’t control. She can’t stop, and she can’t understand what’s making her continue: “I felt dizzy . . . We had been in this lavatory together forever” (179). What begins to dominate the scene is the sheer heterogeneous materiality of the other girl, whose “skin was fleshy, like squid . . . Her straight hair hung, the same all these years . . . The skin on her hands and arms seemed powdery-dry . . . Snot ran out of her nose” (176– 179). She is apparently without bones or muscle: “her long hands . . . swung limply at her sides. Her fingers were so long . . . They couldn’t possibly make fists like other people’s” (179). The girl seems to exist as material extension with the various qualities of “rubbery,” “papery,” “powdery-dry” (177). To the end, we don’t know whether her silence is a refusal or an inability, evidence of strength or weakness. But the girl’s thingness conquers the narrator, who finally breaks down into tears and confessions of her own weakness. It drives the excruciating repetition of the narrator’s demands: if the quiet girl fought back or gave in, the episode would have

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ended. As it is, it’s just interrupted, inconclusive. What happens afterward is just as meaningless; the narrator becomes, without any known cause, a broken thing. “I spent the next eighteen months sick in bed with a mysterious illness. There was no pain and no symptoms, though the middle line in my left palm broke in two. It was the best year and a half of my life. Nothing happened” (182), and no explanation is given. Her mysterious illness has neither cause nor effect. When “one day” she’s told by her mother to get up and return to school, “the poor girl I tormented . . . had not changed. She wore the same clothes, hair cut, and manner” (182). The everyday wins by persisting. The quiet girl plays an important part in the book’s most extended attempt to represent the everyday. She has been in the narrator’s class at school “for twelve years” (172). Her resemblance to the narrator is unnerving: “We were similar in sports . . . I hated her when she was the last chosen for her team and I, the last chosen for my team” (173). But her function is not to be hated but to represent a context of familiarity, a field of similar, nonexemplary figures, within which the narrator can see herself as “normal” in the sense of average. “My younger sister [and I] were normal ages and normally separated” (172). When the narrator confronts the girl in the bathroom, her voice is “steady and normal, as it is when talking to the familiar, the weak, and the small” (175). The entire episode is carefully framed in the context of the American everyday. This isn’t a mythical heroine confronting her nemesis but one sixth-grade girl bullying another after school, while playing hide and seek in a familiar institutional environment. “We were chasing one another through the playground and in and out of the basement, where the playroom and lavatory were . . . The playroom was army green and had nothing in it but a long trough with drinking spigots in rows,” while the lavatory contains “rows of twenty-five open stalls” and sinks (174). Despite the genuine terror experienced by both girls, there is also a minorness built into the bathroom scene, a banality that adds an ironic and even comic effect. It takes place “during the Korean War, which you knew about because every day the newspaper printed a map of Korea with the top part red and going up and down like a window shade” (174). The brilliant banality of this image captures the everyday perfectly: even battles can be negligently imagined to follow a random, loosely diurnal rhythm.

Disembedded Figures, Chance, and the Making of the New Like The Woman Warrior, China Men consists of a series of tales, most of which relate the history of Chinese men who worked in Hawaii and the western United States. Other brief legends seem to provide elliptical, enigmatic commentaries on their experiences. Kingston’s book participated in the widespread Asian American project of constructing common histories.36 But it did so in a curious way. China Men makes use of the collective history of Asian American men in order to represent the abstracting, homogenizing effects of modernity on the everyday experience

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of the self. Kingston’s second book feels completely different from her first because it concentrates on third-person selfhood, rather than selfhood as felt or known from within. It limits itself to what can be surmised from the external observation of a person’s acts, and it emphasizes the difficulty of such an undertaking, the uncertainty of its conclusions: “I want to know,” she announces, addressing her own father, “what makes you scream and curse, and what you’re thinking when you say nothing” (15). She continues, “I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken. You’ll just have to speak up with the real stories if I’ve got you wrong” (15). She bases her suppositions on observed patterns of behavior. But the result hardly amounts to what you might consider a satisfactory portrait. In the father’s case, we get two different tales, “The Father from China,” which tells of his birth, childhood, and adolescence in China, of how he came to America (in several conflicting versions) and eventually to California. “The American Father” opens by blatantly contradicting that first story: “In 1903 my father was born in San Francisco, where my grandmother had come disguised as a man. Or . . . she gave birth at a distance . . . Or the men of those days had the power to have babies” (237). It cheerfully advertises its own failure to ascertain the most basic datum of identity. In fact, China Men more often than not puts aside questions of identity, incomparability, unique configurations. It explores the historical and social phenomenon of disembedding, the uprooting of something in a way that erases its original context in space and time. Most obviously, this is what the Chinese immigrants have in common. As one of them thinks, “Now that he was in a new land, who could tell what normal was?” (110). The stories in this book are also disembedded; they’re rarely framed as a speech-act, as a memorable face-to-face telling at a given place and time. They usually dispense altogether with the representation of a storyteller or a scene of enunciation. “Many times it has happened that a young man walks along a mountain road far from home” (74), one brief legend begins. There are references to printed texts, to books. Some of the fables and legends also seem to possess an exemplary or explanatory status. A retelling of a brief Taoist fable begins, “As you know, any plain person you chance to meet can prove to be a powerful immortal in disguise come to test you” (119). But even those stories exist in a vacuum, an absence of context that draws attention to them as enigmas rather than as exemplars of identity. Who are they being told to, when, and for what reason? Kingston describes how the exiled poet Ch’u Yuan is shown in paintings “floating above the tips of trees and horned houses, over other people’s heads, his gown blowing with the clouds at his feet” (257). The tales in this book, like the China Men themselves, seem to float in this fashion; they aren’t in a place, they don’t have a place, and they seem to disdain the sort of meaning that comes from belonging to any place. Kingston justifies her turn to third-person selfhood quite differently from Jade Snow Wong. A detachment that seemed to come easily to Wong here requires a more elaborate defense. Gender difference, emphasized throughout, provides

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Kingston with one ground for observing her subjects from the outside, telling their stories in the third person, and looking for observable regularities in their actions, deeds, behaviors, anecdotes. Kingston treats it as an irreducible distance between herself and her subjects; this ensures that their stories make no claim on her. But what begins as an epistemological safety barrier becomes an organizing feature of the history that she represents. China Men shows a world divided into two. There is a world in which specificities of time, place, and personality matter deeply. Meaning, emotion, and value depend on respecting such specificities, and the difference between presence and absence is clear and unambiguous. This is identified as the world of women: “it was women who missed people, minded the distances, the time, and cared about whether or not they saw someone again” (186). It’s the realm of culture and ethnic identity: “holidays do not appear with the seasons . . . The cooking women, the shopping and slicing and kneading and chopping women brought the holidays” (72). When the narrator’s mother, a minor character in this book, calls her younger brother in Singapore, she shouts into the telephone “in her loudest voice,” “What time is it there?” (219). This attitude is explicitly identified with tradition, the embarrassing attempt to hang onto that which should have been left behind. The other world is that of men; here, time and space exist as abstract forms of measurement. They are not embedded in relationships. “On New Year’s eve,” the narrator reminds her father: you phone the Time Lady and listen to her tell the minutes and seconds, then adjust all the clocks in the house so their hands reach midnight together. You must like listening to the Time Lady because she is a recording you don’t have to talk to. Also she distinctly names the present moment, never slipping into the past or sliding into the future. (15) This world is full of strange simulacra, substitutes for human presence, and is marked by an absence of strenuous or long-lasting emotions: “I did not think that men had feelings” (186). It is characterized by movement rather than meaning, and by the easy exchange or even extinction of identities. Identities shrink to a scrap of paper: in Hawaii there are men “who had forgotten the names of their Chinese family or the name and location of their Chinese village. They kept shaking their heads . . . They had lost a last piece of paper or a letter with the address on it” (106). In China Men’s myth of gender difference, women will, after fifty years, call a brother across the world and ask what his local time is, while men adjust the clocks to match a recorded voice that announces one moment after another, each one equal, unconnected, and empty. But if we compare this to Jade Snow Wong’s account, we can see that there is not anything necessarily male about this purported world of men. It’s the world of the modern everyday, of disembedded forms, structured more by the rhythms of abstract labor and leisure than by specific days or cultural rhythms: “men let holidays pass . . . a holiday was another free day” (72). Kingston presents the Chinese men

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variously as the antagonists of their own women, as the “binding and building ancestors” (146) of America and, most importantly, as typical subjects of modernity—a condition even more fundamental to this book than gender difference. Gender is never treated as a clear determining cause. Rather, it offers one possible hermeneutic. It enters into that modern everyday type of thinking that emphasizes chance and probability over causation, limited or restricted forms of calculation over knowledge of laws. Despite its occasional allusions to medieval Chinese texts, China Men is most concerned with disembedding as modernity’s characteristic feature. The book itself performs the sort of operation that was deplored by early critics of statistical approaches. Although Kingston doesn’t end up with a table of facts, her composite portraits seem to evolve from the assemblage of particular facts, multiple occasions, and even disparate identities. Even when the protagonist is an actual male ancestor, a member of her own family, the stories seem to present a typical or average experience.37 The major tales have titles such as “The Father From China,” “The Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains,” “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” “The Brother in Vietnam.” The definite article paradoxically suggests both particularity and the lack of it. In treating them as composites or averages, Kingston reflects the actual history of how the China Men become placeless and faceless in the impersonal systems of modernity: the segmentation and delegation of labor, substitutable people, abstract space and time. Identity becomes diluted and even lost in the endless repetition of chores and the acceptance of randomness. This everyday provides an uncongenial setting for questions of identity. It is when Kingston puts aside the concept of identity as a sense of unique inner necessity that she can introduce the modern everyday, structured by chance and likelihood. A curious short tale at the beginning of the book, “On Fathers,” suggests that even in the intimate sphere, identity rests on the calculation of probability rather than on certain knowledge or inner feeling. In this story the narrator, her brothers, and her sisters greet their father eagerly when he returns home from work. “We surrounded him, took his hands, pressed our noses against his coat . . . reached into his pockets . . . The littlest ones hugged his legs” (6). But he’s not their father. He says to them, “ ‘I’m not your father’ . . . Looking closely, we saw that he probably was not” (6). The children watch him walk away, “certainly looking like our father” (6). “A moment later, from the other direction, our own father came striding toward us . . . We ran again to meet him,” the story ends (7). Certainty resides only in the surface: the “two-hundred-dollar suit that fit him just right,” the “good leather shoes with the wingtips” (6). But identity, even when supported by all the evidence of the senses, is still a matter only of probability. The title suggests that this is characteristic of fathers; but the rest of the book applies even more broadly the principles of substitutability and repetition. The labor done by Kingston’s immigrants is characterized by the existence of absolute banality in the context of the historically new. Clearing the Hawaiian land for plantations, reconfiguring the western landscape to build the Central Pacific

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railroad, the China Men do “what had never been done before” (131). They provide the muscle power for modernization; they’re shown “changing the face of the world” (132), tunneling through mountains, moving rivers. In Hawaii, they “were to level [the wilderness] from the ocean to the mountain” (98), creating the plantation system that was eventually to transform Hawaii from an independent kingdom to the fiftieth state; while on the mainland, “After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel” (146), laying the structure for economic growth and national expansion. But doing what’s never been done before involves doing the same thing every day. “You go out on the road to find adventure . . . and what do you find . . . the same things happen day after day. Work. Work. Work. Eat. Eat. Eat . . . Sleep. Work. Work,” (100) thinks Bak Goong, the Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains. The everyday appears as the antithesis of “adventure.” These narratives tend to fall into the iterative mode, telling once what happened numberless times. Instead of a plot, what we get are descriptions of typical days: “after work,” the plantation workers jump in the ocean, “after dinner, young men gave advice to young men . . . exchanged remedies” (98–101). “On their ‘day offu,’ the China Men went into Honolulu to spend their pay” (106). Instead of a plot ruled by internal necessity, we see repeated actions whose rhythms are controlled only by the capitalist structures within which these men labor. Like notable events, personalities are defined only by their deviance from the norms established by repetition. Bak Goong is more talkative than most of his coworkers; Ah Goong, the railroad worker, is somewhat more romantic and naïve. While the narrative sometimes explains what they saw, felt, and thought, they’re not given the full characterization of a Jade Snow Wong. They lack reflexivity. What prevails is the average. This indifference to individual identity is built into the situation, and the protagonists themselves frequently display it. Ah Goong sees fellow workers fall out of their baskets or succumb to explosions, without feeling any particular sense of loss. “Across a valley, a chain of men working on the next mountain, men like ants changing the face of the world, fell, but it was very far away. Godlike, he watched men whose faces he could not see and whose screams he did not hear roll and bounce and slide like a handful of sprinkled gravel” (132). The China Men lose their distinctive identities as individuals in the dreamlike repetitions of labor: “again and again he seemed to jump out of bed, run sluggishly about gathering his clothes and tools, run through thick air in search of the fields, hear the demon boss in wait for him saying, ‘Late. You late, Paké’ ” (114). Even at the climax of the Sandalwood Mountain story, when the men defy a ban on talking, dig a hole in the earth, and shout words into it, they begin by saying different things, only to end up shouting the same desire. “ ‘I want home,’ Bak Goong yelled . . . ‘I want my home,’ the men yelled together. ‘I want home. Home. Home. Home. Home’ ” (117). But home is less an ideal or a memory than an abstraction, almost just a sound. Documenting the work done by the China Men, the narratives have virtually no plot: “there was clearing and planting, the hoeing and harvest, and the planting season again” (104). Instead of movement forward, there’s the repetition of identical

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increments of time: “one day the same as the next, one hour no different from another” (135). When one job is finished, one railroad complete, the China Men scatter to do more of the same work “in every part of the country” (146). Just as the work has no end, it has no particular place (in fact, much of the labor goes toward obliterating the natural features of the landscape). It can be done anywhere, and it doesn’t matter who does it. Kingston makes this point wittily in an interpolated tale, “The Adventures of Lo Bun Sun.” Described as “a book from China about a sailor named Lo Bun Sun” (224), the story quickly reveals itself to be a Chinese translation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but its status as translation remains unacknowledged. Instead, the narrative gives a highly condensed description of an everyday defined by repetitive labor and limited calculation. “He set up a work schedule . . . Every day he worked during the daylight hours just as if he had a job, stopping only to eat at set mealtimes . . . Lo Bun Sun marked the days with notches on a board” (225). He uses the double-entry “method of reckoning” to assess his situation, making “two columns . . . entitled ‘Evil’ and ‘Good’ ” (227). Though Kingston takes her details from Defoe’s novel, the effect is far more schematic for being compressed into eight pages. It becomes a fable about the placelessness of everyday labor. It happens in no place, a featureless and nameless island, and seems to have neither beginning nor end. Lo Bun Sun began writing “fictions about raving death, starvation, and mutilation, but stopped to continue chronicling his chores, which were endless” (227). In Kingston’s third-person digest of Defoe’s first-person narrative, Lo Bun Sun’s motivation seems even more opaque. “Food grew plentifully on the island . . . yet he did not loaf and tan himself on the beach; neither did he nap or play. Lo Bun Sun worked. He was never idle, never lazy . . . Lo is ‘toil,’ what one does even when unsupervised; he works faithfully, not cheating” (226). What he does every day seems to determine his name; his selfhood is a mere effect instead of a cause of what he does. Lo Bun Sun applies his labor power and performs his diligent calculations on the basis of probability: “in case some accident disabled him, he planted two or three year’s supply of grain” (230). The sight of the footprint gives shape to this possible event: “cannibals might come when he was doing his chores or sleeping” (230). As in Defoe’s novel, larger gaps in logic and meaning go unquestioned while the small ones are filled. Friday (“Sing Kay Ng”) is as extravagant a minor character as Lo Bun Sun is affectless and toiling. Their adventures are summed up rapidly enough to highlight the absurdity of the everyday; the story ends, “Lo Bun Sun . . . retired at the age of seventy-two” (233), as though he had been an office worker, an actuary, or an accountant. Like Lo Bun Sun, the China Men work without questioning; they disembed the operations of logic from the knowledge of ultimate ends or purposes. One exceptional character, mad Uncle Bun, illustrates this rule. Uncle Bun is modern in all things, the wearer of three-piece suits and gold pocket-watches that he constantly consults, a great believer in science, nutrition, and Communism. But he can’t accept mere probability: “ ‘these aren’t dreams or plans,’ Uncle Bun said. ‘I’m making predictions about ineluctabilities. This Beautiful Nation . . . this America will end as we

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know it. There will be one nation, and it will be a world nation . . . World Communism’ ” (193). Predictably, Uncle Bun’s mania for knowing causes is soon revealed as paranoia. “ ‘I am on the verge of discovering the real plot,’ ” he announces (198). Noting the elaborate American system of garbage collection (“every week, regularly, on a highly organized schedule, teams of garbage demons come to each house and collect garbage . . . ‘Have you ever thought about what they’re saving the garbage for? . . . There has got to be a purpose behind this storing up and bagging and chuting’ ”), he comes to believe with absolute certainty that it’s going to be fed to him. “ ‘That day is coming soon. They’ll make me eat it’ ” (198–199). He can’t believe that this degree of rational organization can exist without a clear moral and political purpose, a necessary plot focused on him as a unique person. Unlike Uncle Bun, the other China Men seem not only to accept but to embrace chance, the likelihood of an event that could happen once, many times, or not at all. “They bought chances” (106) when they gambled. The “sugar” story illustrates this embrace of chance. It’s told as an adventure that happens to Bak Goong, the Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains. On his day off, Bak Goong finds himself stopped by a policeman in a strange part of town; lost and disoriented, he calls across the street to a younger Chinese man, “ ‘Sook-ah,’ that is, ‘Hey, Father’s Younger Brother’ . . . ‘Sugar?’ said the police demon. ‘Sugar plantation? You better hurry. The wagon is leaving soon.’ He pointed . . . to a street that jumped into recognition” (111). “Old men laugh with tears in their eyes every time they hear or tell the ‘sugar’ story,” (109) the narrator comments, before offering another version of this apocryphal tale. In both versions, the story hinges on the purely contingent resemblance of two words (“sook-ah” and “sugar”), and the equally contingent recognition of this resemblance. The Chinese man happens to call to another, the white man happens to overhear it, the two words just happen to sound similar, and the happy ending occurs that could just as easily not have happened at all. The domestication of chance becomes almost literal in the story “The American Father.”38 The father’s job is to manage a gambling house, where men bet on certain combinations of Chinese characters, drawn at random from a spinning drum. The gambling occurs in a setting that combines institutional “order” with domestic coziness: “a big old orange cat sat dozing in the window . . . Inside was an immense room like a bank or a post office . . . Here was horizontal and vertical order, counters and tables in cool gray twilight” (240). Even the illegal nature of this activity becomes part of a routine. “Once a month, the police raided with a paddy wagon, and it was also part of my father’s job to be arrested” (242). But the incorporation of chance changes the nature of domesticity. The father’s presence in the household has the odd effect of mining it with what the narrator calls “father places,” places that strongly concentrate the principles of both order and risk. The cellar underneath the family’s laundry is “wild”: “mounds of loose dirt, piles of dumped cement, rough patches of concrete tamping down and holding back some of the dirt. The posts were unpainted and not square on their pilings . . . wild areas” (252). But on “shelves built against the dirt walls, BaBa had stacked boxes of notebooks and

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laundry tickets, rubber stamps, pencils, new brushes” (254). The father places are located at the margins and the foundations, the attic and the cellar of the house, but instead of being solid, these places become fragile, permeable: “Once I had seen his foot break through the ceiling. He was in the attic” (239). The cellar contains “the bottomless well . . . the end and edge of the ground, the opening to the inside of the world . . . I stepped on the boards . . . What if the cover skidded aside?” (239). The narrator imagines falling through to emerge in China, where all norms would be literally upside down. Nothing is certain. Or rather, little seems certain but the orderly repetitions of the everyday, which provide the infrastructure of modernity’s most ambitious projects. “The Brother in Vietnam” offers an account of war as housekeeping. The enlisted brother grumbles, “Make beds. Fold clothes. Shine shoes. Sweep. Swab. The Navy is housework” (287). Even in the middle of the heaviest U.S. bombing of Vietnam, “his job of flipping switches and connecting circuits and typing was the same as on land, the numbers and letters almost the same” (296). With only a slight effort not to make connections, to look only at the letters and numbers rather than to think about what effect the codes might produce, the brother finds the experience of war no different from everyday experience anywhere else. When he finally accepts an invitation to ride along on one of the “routine bombings” (“just business, a job”), he feels “the steadiness one feels riding in any plane, train, or car . . . There did seem to be some turns and banks like a ride in any small plane . . . The brother felt no different from before” (298). In this context of the modern everyday, identity comes to mean the sameness of everything, the inability to mark meaningful distinctions or differences. The brother, a pacifist, justifies his decision to enlist by pointing out that there’s no difference between joining the military and simply living an ordinary American life: “we ate a candy bar, drank grape juice, bought bread . . . wrapped food in plastic . . . cleaned the oven, washed with soap, turned on the electricity, refrigerated food, cooked it . . . we couldn’t live day-to-day American lives without adding to the war” (284). The brother’s identity as a pacifist comes to depend not on doing one thing rather than another, but on not doing any particular thing. “He had not gotten killed, and he had not killed anyone,” the story ends (304). So in a way, his identity rests on the small repetitions of the everyday, seen as a dimension that both grounds and hovers above “the invasion and colonization of Asia” (295). Kingston questions whether the everyday offers an alternative to narratives of domination, and identities tied to that narrative, or whether it is simply the medium through and in which war occurs. One of the book’s final images finds the meaningless continuity of the everyday at the heart of war itself: “in lonely parts of airports, he saw electric conveyors move coffins draped with flags on and off planes” (304). China Men seems to point to something stronger than mere probability, more definite than the everyday, in one chapter called “The Laws.” Placed at the very center of the book, it gives a dated chronology from 1868 to 1978 of the laws, treaties, and Supreme Court decisions that determined the status and the numbers of Asian immigrants in the United States. For example, it quotes an article of the

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1868 Burlingame Treaty between China and the United States that asserts the “inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects” (152). Juxtaposed ironically is a long list of the discriminatory acts and rulings at state and federal levels that tried to limit, harass, or exclude Chinese immigrants. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was neither the first nor the last of such acts. “Victories” are also duly noted: the gradual lifting or reversal of earlier restrictions on Chinese immigration and naturalization. The descriptions are scrupulous, and discrepancies between the letter and the effect of the law are often noted. For example, the 1965 Immigration Act “changed the quota system so that ‘national origin’ no longer means ‘race’ but ‘country of birth’ . . . quotas were reallocated to countries—20,000 each. But this did not mean that 20,000 Chinese immediately could or did come to the United States. Most prospective immigrants were in Hong Kong, a British colony” (158–159). Giving such attention to the laws seems to contradict the emphasis on mere probability. Certainly, this would appear to be strict determination. But, by placing them in a separate chapter, Kingston refuses to say that these laws were what actually determined a particular individual to act in a particular way. What they do is present basic parameters that regulate the overall patterns of immigration and settlement. They don’t describe what any individual or even any aggregate of individuals does. More often than not, the China Men evade them anyway. “Driven Out, [Ah Goong] slid down mountains . . . hid sometimes with companions and often alone, and eluded bandits . . . He was careful to find hidden places to sleep” (146). At the same time, however, the immigrants consciously plan and execute their everyday lives on the basis of these arbitrary rulings, resorting to paper identities and other ruses to lessen the chances of being caught. The laws themselves are full of chance, and only give rise to a sense of probability, of guessing how many and where they are, not so much who they are within.

{4}

The Changing Story of Thingness: From Kogawa and Keller to Ha Jin and Lan Samantha Chang

The representation of material objects serves to index a range of genres, styles, and historical epochs.1 In works falling under the rubric of realism, a special kind of relation to the object world reflects the modern everyday.2 In Roland Barthes’s influential thesis of the “reality effect,” realist works include objects that play no part in the story in order to signal the existence of a meaningless, empirical reality that legitimates their representational enterprise.3 As we have seen, the early Asian American writers Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan tried to overcome the inert meaninglessness of everyday things by giving their narratives a dialectical form. In the case of internment writing, thingness became a reminder of an interiority that became increasingly puzzling in the carceral everyday. At once ordinary and strange, familiar and mysterious, the person-thing relation offers a way to trace the situation of Asian American writing. Through the object world—those things that sit on the table, in the drawers, in the closets, inside suitcases—we can see emerge in the later decades of the twentieth century a tension between the project of delineating ethnic identity and the critique of economic modernity more globally conceived. The theme of reification or thinglikeness has been essential to the critique of capitalist modernity. Comprehensively elaborated by Lukács in a 1922 essay, reification refers to a way of encountering the world as “a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects.”4 Reflected in positivist habits of thinking as much as in everyday interactions, reification freezes history into a state in which “the reality that just happens to exist persists in a totally senseless, unchanging way.”5 It hides the ongoing connections, relations, and mediations that constitute reality; reified thought is the “tendency to oust the process” and to see only isolated things.6 The “ossified, impenetrable thing alienated from man” is specific to capitalist modernity, Marxist thinkers argue.7 Reified reality needs dialectical thought to dissolve things back into their properly dynamic, relational character. As Fredric Jameson

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explains, in “process-oriented thought it is the relationships that come first”; dialectic thus dismantles “the notion of things and concepts as free-standing entities, as free-standing autonomous substances . . . only later inserted into relationships and larger networks and structures.”8 Seeing the relationships as primary brings an end to the state of reification. For Lukács, only class consciousness and revolutionary praxis can accomplish this end.9 This chapter argues that a critique of reification is indispensable to a number of Asian American works in the two decades following the publication of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) present themselves as projects of counter-reification. While the theme of silence has been much studied in works of this period, it has been largely understood to be a human, and often female, affliction. But I see a broader critique being undertaken. Reified forms, mute things, and thinglike subjects exhibit a condition of alienation that can affect people and objects equally. The freestanding thing is often revealed to be not a thing at all but a temporary condition of frozenness or separation. Notably, what has been forgotten is not the social dimension of material production, but a particular segment of history: certain events that occurred to a particular group of people at one time. In Obasan’s case, this is the history of Japanese Canadian internment, and in Keller’s that of Korean “comfort women” conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army. When this history is restored, false distinctions dissolve in a literal matrix. Using overlapping tropes and figures, the novels engage in an almost ritualized anamnesis, a formal unforgetting. In these texts, things are capable of speaking or of withholding. Containing within themselves the secret or the key to identity, they have to be dissolved. In both cases, history is revealed when objects speak: an old letter is translated aloud, a cassette tape recorded long ago is played. Things are vehicles for transferring meaning and connecting bodies with a collective past. These novels do, however, indirectly suggest their awareness of the link between reification and economic modernity. This awareness emerges in their attitude toward the everyday. Those who merely handle, preserve, or transmit things in their reified state are those who maintain the everyday. At best, they are marginal helpers, and at worst, they are seen as guilty of perpetuating a reified condition, of maintaining rather than transforming it. The novels show a clear disdain for the reified everyday that simply accepts frozen forms and distances. Curiously, these novels’ counterreifying energies are not directed at capitalism as a totality that transforms relations into things, and living substance into abstract forms. Rather, the critique of reification is aimed specifically at the Asian American subject. Asian American female subjects are shown with great sympathy as having become thinglike through severance from their own histories. They must be released from this condition, and liberated into a true, larger identity. In certain ways, this aspiration toward a larger process is reminiscent of Bulosan and Kang, but reflects a greater distrust of institutionalized politics. Transformation occurs at the most intimate level, inside rooms with the doors closed.

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We can see in these works the important role played by history in the construction of identity in the 1970s and 1980s. The creation of a shared history was critical to building a panethnic Asian American identity, as Kingston’s China Men demonstrated in its own way. The official curriculum philosophy for the new Asian American Studies program at Berkeley noted that “[t]hroughout much of America’s history, Asians . . . have been the victims of contempt and exploitation. Often they were singled out as scapegoats in periods of severe economic depression . . . , and Asian Americans were regarded as enemies during times of international conflicts.”10 The recovery of a common history was a vital instrument in this program of study “designed to help students ‘know who they are as Asian Americans.’ ”11 For particular groups as well, oral histories and historical documentaries became crucial ways to ground their own identities, as can be seen in the New York Chinatown History Project, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Filipino American National Historical Society in Seattle.12 In the cases of Kogawa and Keller, however, their novels do risk losing sight of history as a broader knowledge of concrete relations and processes. The recovery of a group-specific history is figured as the restoration of a primal unity of being, as the emphasis on the mother-daughter relationship suggests. To some degree, the drive to counter everyday reification with a primordial unity can be understood in terms of a desire to transcend the ethnographic object. In the discourse of ethnography, the thing is understood as the material epitome of a particular culture.13 But the production of cultural difference through the object lies uncomfortably close to the ways in which inanimate things have shaped the racialization of minorities in America, as Bill Brown and Sianne Ngai have shown.14 The boundary between the racial subject and the animated thing tends to waver.15 For instance, in this passage from her internment memoir, Nisei Daughter (1953), Monica Sone describes her family’s apartment in Seattle: At first glance, there was little about these simple, sparse furnishings to indicate that a Japanese family occupied these rooms. But there were telltale signs like the zori or straw slippers placed neatly on the floor underneath the beds . . . And on the table beside the local daily paper were copies of the North American Times, Seattle’s Japanese-community paper . . . Here in the kitchen were unmistakable Oriental traces and odors. A glass tumbler holding six pairs of red and yellow lacquered chopsticks, and a bottle of soy sauce stood companionably among the imitation cut-glass sugar bowl and the green glass salt and pepper shakers at the end of the table. The tall china cabinet bulged with bright hand-painted rice bowls, red lacquered soup bowls, and Mother’s precious somayaki tea set . . . In the pantry, the sack of rice and gallon jug of shoyu stood lined up next to the ivory-painted canisters of flour, sugar, tea and coffee.16 This description comes in a chapter called “A Shocking Fact of Life,” in which the six-year-old American-born narrator hears from her mother for the first time that

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she “had Japanese blood.”17 As the startled child looks for confirmation, the slippers, chopsticks, and so on, function as signs of a racial identity, even participants in a narrative of racial identity, as their almost aggressive animation suggests. The objects are evidence in an almost forensic sense, as the language of “telltale signs” and “unmistakable traces” suggests. After Pearl Harbor, these things will be the ones selected to be destroyed, confiscated, or packed up and put away as evidence of a criminalized race. The wish to avoid placing things in another reified context is understandable. But I will suggest that the scope of history in these novels of identity becomes at once too particular and too universal. The more recent works examined in this chapter represent what has been called “post-Tiananmen” Asian American literature, works that adopt a more diasporic and less resolutely domestic American perspective.18 Ha Jin’s works, for example, have primarily addressed Chinese history. Waiting (1999), set entirely in China, represents the uneven modernization of that country from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although Lan Samantha Chang is a second-generation writer, her stories in Hunger (1998) express a different attitude toward everyday reification. Thingness becomes part of a story of how we use objects to make or to defend ourselves. There is a greater acceptance of what Bill Brown has described as an “indeterminate ontology” not fully reducible to the fetishism of the commodity.19 Things are represented not as frozen or amputated bits of history, hiding within themselves a link to transcendence. Instead, we see something approaching what Brown calls “the material object’s own excessiveness.”20 In these works, the excessiveness of the thing is peculiar; it is too abstract and too material at the same time. The thingness of the thing exceeds the demands of any particular narrative or framework. Their particular identities often do not matter. Whether it is one thing or another makes no difference: they are abstract, fungible. What matters is their outsideness. These things can have no story, tell no story, and are prized or even envied for their sheer indifference to modern human projects of self-fashioning. They aren’t usually contemplated with any attention; they are glimpsed, noted, pointed at, minimally described, or just counted. Often they lie just outside or beyond the frame of vision. But there’s a powerful investment of affect in the thing’s complete freedom from the project of selfhood. Things are simply perduring, and enviably unconscious of modernity’s demands. These later works also represent modern everydayness as the domain of reification—as the inapparent, meaningless, schematic world of recurrence and routine. The connections that tie subjects to objects or other people are hidden behind apparently freestanding things. But the representations are not themselves reified. That is to say that the narratives of Ha Jin and Chang do not present this senseless external reality as immediate or unmediated. Rather, their works show the historical and social causes behind the everyday’s excessive thingness. Here, history is conceived not as a set of events experienced by a particular social group, but as the concrete transformations that accompany the arrival of capitalism, or its bewildering discovery by immigrants. Reification is seen as the effect and the affect of

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capitalist society. History is not a lost legacy that can reconnect an individual thing or person to a larger unity, but a certain structure of feeling: an inescapable pressure on powerless individuals to take action and to make choices. In light of these contradictory and impossible demands, thingness becomes enviable. The everyday is not seen as the enemy of authentic identity. In its habitual distraction, forgetfulness, and minorness, its rhythms and frequencies, it stands as a possible refuge from a relentless global dispossession.

Dissolving Things / Restoring the Historical Matrix of Identity Kogawa’s and Keller’s novels focus on women who have become things through forgetfulness of their own history. Obasan was the first novel published about Japanese Canadian internment during World War II, while Keller’s Comfort Woman was the first about the Korean women forced into service by the Japanese army during the same war.21 In both novels, a daughter uncovers the truth of her mother’s past. Naomi, the second-generation Japanese Canadian narrator of Obasan, has never learned the fate of her mother, who had gone to visit family in Japan before Pearl Harbor. At the end, after Naomi reluctantly recalls the painful past of her own internment as a young child during the war, she learns that her mother, disfigured by the Nagasaki bomb, chose to keep her fate a secret from her children. In Comfort Woman, similarly, Becca is ignorant of her mother’s past as a Korean comfort woman, forced to serve Japanese soldiers and later brought to Hawaii by an American missionary husband. Her mother, Akiko, works as a shaman, mediating between the living and the dead; Becca learns her mother’s history only after her death. Both mothers are shown as things, injured and empty bodies; but both daughters have also become things through separation from their mother’s histories. In both novels, thingness is seen as a temporary, abnormal condition. Through unforgetting, this problem is resolved, and a locked or muted interiority is released into the true matrix of identity: collective history. And the reified everyday must be dissolved in the process. The mother-daughter relationship figures a relation to history, which is conceived on an intimate and yet universal scale. The mothers are primarily puzzling absences. Naomi’s mother is a photograph, a few sparse memories, and a reference in a long-lost letter. Becca’s mother denies that she is alive, though she moves, speaks and inhabits the world; she sees herself only as a connection to the world of the dead. The active function of mothering is relegated to substitute or surrogate figures—aunts—who are strongly linked with the banality of the everyday. Naomi’s and Becca’s mothers transcend the everyday by negating it. They attain sublimity through the scale of their suffering. Certain beliefs about history’s shape, scope, and relation to the self are thus conveyed. History is both immediate and abstract, narrowly defined and limitless. It is, first of all, a particular set of events, the bodily experience of which is both vividly imagined and drawn from documents. But

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history also functions as the dialectical partner of the everyday, the realm of reification and forgetting. Even more abstractly, history is conceptualized as an intimate totality, a primordial connectedness or oneness. Rather than a medium of action, history is what connects body to soul, your self to another. Both novels move toward an ecstatic dissolution of individual boundaries into a timeless unity that is ultimately outside history. The thing’s destiny is to dissolve into an identity of relation. In a description repeated like an emblem of primordial totality, Obasan figures the mother as a matrix, as a rootedness or interconnectedness that is the essence of history. “I am clinging to my mother’s leg . . . a young branch attached by right of flesh and blood. Where she is rooted, I am rooted. If she walks, I will walk. Her blood is whispering through my veins . . . I am her thoughts.”22 This relation can contain and reconcile contradictions as well. Naomi’s clearest memory before her mother’s departure involves an episode in which a white hen pecks its chicks to death, “bayoneting” (70) the creatures whose description and condition make them clear allegories for the Japanese Canadians. It’s a clear betrayal of a maternal relation: “One chick reaches the hen’s feet. Without warning, the hen’s sharp beak jabs down on the chick . . . deliberate” (70). But through her “steady and matter-of-fact” response (71), the mother contains the violent contradiction: “it is allowed to be . . . What is there is there . . . There is no blame or pity” (71–72). Reification happens when subjects—and objects—are cut off from this historical matrix of identity. Both are reduced to the condition of things when they insist on their material or conceptual integrity as a single unit. The novel tends to give equal weight to external oppression and to self-imposed thingness.23 In a brief, abstract prologue, Obasan claims, “There is a silence that cannot speak. There is a silence that will not speak.”24 The prologue figures silence through the metaphor of the stone: “The word is stone …” But this dialectical image contains the possibility of its own cancellation: “Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word.” But the way to arrive at this “freeing word,” speech, or voice is not to turn to it as an alternate materiality, but instead to transcend the voice/silence opposition with the idea of intention. Naomi discovers at the end that her mother’s absence was full of meaning, directed at herself, even if her protective intention was ultimately misconceived. Obasan makes a distinction between objects and things.25 Objects are part of a context of embodied action and memory. They stand over against the subject, reinforcing their embeddedness in a common context or world. For example, Naomi recalls her childhood home in Vancouver, from which her family was expelled in early 1942: “a fireplace, and a mantel clock with a heavy key like a small metal bird that fits in my palm . . . The sofa is a mountain to climb, a valley for sleeping in . . . Beside the sofa is a large record player with a shiny handle on the left-hand side which I can just reach” (61). The objects are more felt and used than seen, described with reference to body size and spatial orientation. Spaces, too, are moved through rather than depicted in abstract relation to one another. In her recollection,

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Naomi moves through the house and remarks, “Here they are in the music room in the evening, before dark, Mother in her chair beside Stephen,” her brother (62). Here, objects are deeply embedded within an originary matrix. Naomi is guilty of having attempted to forget this original wholeness, to deny that it existed. “It does not bear remembering. None of this bears remembering” (60), Naomi remarks, typically putting a pronominal thing in the place where she ought to be. Far more common in the novel, though, are things that stand apart, separated from any relation of production or use. They stand by themselves. It is not so much that they defy categorization or naming but that they stand apart in the plot and mainly in a rhetorical relation to each other. There’s the “black loaf of Uncle’s stone bread, hefty as a rock” (15) that Naomi sees when she enters Obasan’s kitchen. The last thing made by Naomi’s uncle, whose death inaugurates the plot, it stands as an uncanny thing separated from its maker.26 Discursively, it is linked to a large package that has arrived in the mail from Naomi’s other aunt, Emily, an activist for Japanese Canadian rights. The package, also separated from its sender, is full of historical documents and papers, including the letter that contains the truth about her mother’s fate, but to Naomi initially it’s just another uncanny thing on the floor: “The parcel is as heavy as a loaf of Uncle’s stone bread. Someone, I see, has already opened it and the Scotch tape wings stretch out unstickily from the two end flaps” (37). It is an image of materiality longing to attain transcendence, to spill its contents and to take flight. It contains scrapbooks, clippings, envelopes, folders, correspondence related to Japanese Canadian internment. The separation that makes this a thing is not only its spatial detachment from the sender but Naomi’s emotional self-detachment from what it contains. “The thin wafers of paper were fragile with old angers. Crimes of history, I thought to myself, can stay in history . . . Out loud I said, ‘Why not leave the dead to bury the dead?’ . . . All of this belongs to yesterday and there are so many other things to attend to today” (50). Thingness figures the detachment of a subject or object from the historical matrix that provides meaning and identity. A minor episode illustrates the phenomenon. Obasan goes to her attic in the middle of the night: “As she pushes a box aside, she stretches the corner of a spider’s web . . . A round black blot . . . suddenly sprouts legs and ambles across the web, shaking it” (29). It’s as though a blot of ink suddenly decides to walk away from its signifying shape. The metaphor of the blot links the spider with other descriptions of writing, such as the “handwriting in blue-black ink” (93) that covers the pages of Aunt Emily’s journal, and the “blue-lined ricepaper sheets with Japanese writing which [Naomi] cannot read,” the letter that contains the truth but which appears only “like a bead curtain of asterisks” (281). In the attic, the blot—the signifier—suddenly comes alive, running away from its own signified: “In a burst of speed, the first spider leaps down the roadway of webs and disappears into the floorboards” (29). Naomi is overcome with a visceral disgust. Thingness signals a disjointedness more radical than the brokenness of what should be integral in space and time. Naomi’s Japanese doll, for example, is a thing many times over: not only are her legs “dislocated” and “[t]he fingers of her left

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hand . . . broken,” but the doll herself is lost on the way to their internment site, moved to a wrong place (136). Obasan suggests that even private or incommunicable feelings lead to a condition of thingness. Even before her mother leaves, Naomi fears that she has already become separated from her mother through a secret: the fact that their neighbor, “Old Man Gower,” molests her. The secret is the figure of a false interiority, a separation that keeps Naomi in a state of thingness: “here in Mr. Gower’s hands I become other . . . the secret has already separated us” (77). Power creates in its victims a private space paralyzed by affect. One of Naomi’s recurrent dreams concerns “three beautiful oriental women [who] lay naked in the muddy road, flat on their backs . . . lying straight as coffins” and guarded by soldiers, who fire rifles across their bodies. In this position, the women feel “abject longing” as well as “fear, and utter helplessness . . . deathly loathing cut through the women” (73–74). These affects sever them into the condition of thingness. When history is unforgotten, things dissolve, as in the scene when the mother’s letter is finally translated for Naomi: “the ordinary Granton rain slides down wet and clean along the glass, leaving a trail on the window like the Japanese writing on the thin blue-lined paper” (281). All dissolve into the prologue’s primal image of an “amniotic deep.” When the young Naomi jumps off a raft into a lake and nearly drowns, she loses a sense of her own boundaries. “Sky and lake swirl as I gasp and swallow . . . Eventually there is the sound of a steady slap somewhere in the distance . . . With the pounding is a dull unlocatable weight and a roaring sound” (176). There is a confusion about the self’s extension in space: she cannot locate sounds or substances relative to her own body. Referentiality disappears, together with the everyday. But this loss of proper boundaries is freeing. In its “swirling” of worlds, that moment prefigures her reconciliation with history. After learning her mother’s truth, Naomi silently addresses her, asserting a unity that transcends physical absence. “Silent Mother, you do not speak or write . . . You are tide rushing moonward pulling back from the shore. A raft rocks on the surface . . . I sit on the raft begging for a tide to land me safely . . . but you draw me to the white distance . . . am I not also there?” (289–290). Thingness, like a metaphor, contains the idea of history. History is more than an act of remembering what happened; it is the restoration of a primordial oneness. Comfort Woman shares this understanding of thingness as a reified condition to be overcome. The comfort women have been made into things through forcible separation from any territorializing relation—from their nations, and even from their own bodies. Akiko does not acknowledge her sensations as her own. She describes herself as “already dead” when she escaped from the Japanese military camp: I looked into the Yalu River and, finding no face looking back at me, knew that I was dead. I wanted to let the Yalu’s currents carry my body to where it might find my spirit again, but the Japanese soldiers hurried me across the bridge . . . My body moved on.27

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Akiko speaks as one who is no longer a subject. Fittingly, in this scene she walks across what had been the boundary separating two nations (China and Korea) before Japanese annexation. Like Korea, Akiko exists as a thing without name or coherent identity. Even years later, Akiko’s body seems to be manipulated by some greater force when she goes into her periodic trances, as her daughter observes: When the spirits called to her . . . [i]t was as if the mother I knew turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space. During these times, the body of my mother would float through our one-bedroom apartment, slamming into walls and bookshelves and bumping into the corners of the coffee table and the television. (4) But the problem is not simply one of dispossession, nor is the answer to be found in restoring things to their proper owners. Restoring Korea to the Korean people or even returning Akiko’s spirit to her body would not be the solution. Instead, the novel tries to dissociate things from the notion of property. Dissolving boundaries, the novel asserts that things find their true identities by passing through, permeating, and even combining with other things. It can be read as an allegory of mediation. Knowing history frees apparently separate, isolated things from their condition by revealing their mutual constitution. Mediation even takes on a mystical quality. While the name “Akiko” identifies one of the novel’s two narrators, it is actually one of several Japanese names that were assigned serially to Korean comfort women in the military camp. When one Akiko dies, another takes her place. The narrator is the forty-first, as the label on her dress, “Akiko 41,” indicates; the previous Akiko was another Korean woman named Induk. The narrator relates how she came to assume this identity: One night [Induk] talked loud and nonstop. In Korean and in Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion of her country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive . . . All through the night she talked . . . Just before daybreak, they took her out of her stall and into the woods . . . They brought her back skewered . . . That was my first night as the new Akiko. (20–21) The unbearable immediacy of Induk’s death mirrors the immediacy of Induk’s claims, as she directly equates her individual body with the categories of nation and woman. Rather than simply claiming an identity, Akiko 41 comes to see herself in and as the other, that which is not herself. “She comes in singing, entering with full voice, filling me so that there is no me except for her, Induk” (36). The distinction between first and third person is both canceled and retained. Induk’s identity blends with those of other women who bear this same ambiguous relation—mothers and foremothers: “I saw her with my eyes closed, though how I knew she was Induk I do not know, for she looked like my mother, standing there next to the river . . . It was as if . . . the boundaries between them melted, blending their features, merging their spirits” (36). The notion of a “separate person” (36) is transcended, together

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with any claim of exclusively embodying one’s own meaning or agency: “it was as if I liquefied; I lost the edges of myself and began to soak into the floorboards” (95). If Obasan focuses most of its attention on the condition of thingness, Comfort Woman devotes its energy to figuring history as dissolution. Everywhere opposites blend into each other, finding themselves in the other. When Akiko leaves the military camp after a forced abortion, she walks into a river. “I waded into the stream and rubbed at the dried blood caked on my legs . . . The mud-colored flecks turned liquid red in my hands, then dissolved” (39). Solid becomes liquid, white things become dark, as Akiko drags a borrowed gown in the dirt when she goes unwillingly with the missionaries to be baptized as a Christian. “I . . . watched how the white cloth . . . soaked up the earth” (103). A privileged instance is found in the relationship between mother and daughter, as Akiko finds. “As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me” (55). The mother finds herself in and through the daughter, who is both opposite and counterpart. The daughter likewise performs her part; when Becca discovers the tape recording that her mother had made for her, she writes down what she hears; then, as she prepares her mother’s body for cremation, she takes the cloth on which she had written and dissolves the ink in the water she uses. Spoken word becomes written word, which finds its identity in dissolving into a matrix. The everyday appears as history’s banal other. If historical meaning evokes the sublime, the everyday is the realm of embarrassment, alienation, and third-person selfhood. Many of the sections narrated by Becca relate the embarrassment she felt as a child at Akiko’s strange behavior. Becca lives in fear that others will see the “frail, wild-haired lady in pajamas” (87). The reified, commodified everyday recognizes only the distinction between the used and the new; it cannot see use as a sign of experience or history. Akiko sees all rivers as instances of one eternal type; but Becca sees only the Ala Wai canal full of trash. “I spent hours on the bank . . . trying to see what my mother saw in the brackish, polluted water . . . I saw a handful of date pits . . . a once-white satin shoe . . . a condom . . . beer bottles and soda cans” (47–50). The everyday is a world of detritus, devoid of historical meaning or connection. It is a condition of abandonment and unfulfilled waiting. Becca returns to the canal after her mother dies: “I watched the water of the canal lap at the trash under me and waited for something, some sign from my mother” (51). It’s either trash or sign, thing or symbol; these are the two possibilities. If embarrassment and guilt are types of reified interiority, then reified materiality, cut off from a larger social history, is what the everyday calls “reality.” Both novels invent a secondary mother figure, an “aunt,” who embodies the false independence and self-sufficiency of everyday things. Although Obasan and “Auntie Reno,” Akiko’s employer and self-appointed “manager,” are superficially quite different, they are both identified with an ethic of service and humility, guarding abandoned children, and maintaining material existence. They also faithfully guard the mothers’ secrets: the everyday bears primary responsibility for the occultation of

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history. Auntie Reno, who seems to know Akiko’s past, only hints at this knowledge, speaking in pidgin as she always does: “Your maddah was one survivah. Das how come she can read other people . . . Das how come she can travel out of dis world into hell, cause she already been there and back” (203). An unabashedly capitalist entrepreneur, she had only appeared to be exploiting Akiko’s abilities as a medium, “telling people [Akiko] was a renowned fortune-teller and spirit medium in Japan and Korea . . . Auntie Reno’s words impressed so many people that customers would wait for hours” (11). Reno’s role is grudgingly acknowledged as necessary for material survival. She turns history into income and profit, translates Akiko’s suffering into bowlfuls of cash that customers leave, but redeems herself by giving this money to Becca. In Reno’s hands, a vision of history as the ecstatic dissolution of particular being into a larger matrix is transformed into a “special [bank] account” in Becca’s name, and a real estate title. The everyday is treated with affectionate condescension. Both novels assume that only the ethic of maternal care can justify the everyday’s banal materiality. The ceaseless transformation of things into cash is the everyday version of the transcendent idea of history. Whether past, present or absent, all things flow into the strange, insubstantial materiality of money. Obasan is more ambivalent about the everyday’s ethical justification. Obasan’s silence and the mother’s secrecy are maintained “for the sake of the children” (263). Obasan “remains in a silent territory defined by her serving hands” (271). The everyday focuses on what’s near or at hand in order to repress the claims of history. When Aunt Emily speaks angrily about internment, Obasan “[stands] at the sink . . . She surrounds herself with a determined kind of stillness and a certain slow concentration on anything her hands are doing” (46). But the movement of her hands, a metaphor for the everyday, erases history for the sake of comfort. After the mother’s letter is finally removed from the folder that contains it and read aloud, “Obasan’s eyes are closed and her hands are moving back and forth across the gray cardboard folder—to erase, to soothe” (292). Old and deaf, Obasan embodies the modality in which the everyday preserves history: as stickiness, as that which adheres, weighs down. Obasan’s eyes and mouth are described as “unclear and sticky” (14). History pervades the present as clutter. When Naomi enters Obasan’s house, she sees that “the house is in its usual clutter. Nothing at all has changed. The applewood table is covered with a piece of discolored plastic . . . Along one edge are . . . glass salt and pepper shakers, a soy sauce bottle, a cracked radio, an old-fashioned toaster” (14). The kettle is encrusted, the boots covered with sticky mud; Obasan ineffectually tries to scrape them off each day. One dream of many included in Obasan represents the dramatic change in the everyday brought about by the unforgetting of history. In the dream, there toils a woman who possesses Obasan’s attributes: “[s]low and heavy,” “square . . . dense.” Her labor is directed by “a British martinet . . . His glance is a raised baton” (34). The work possesses all the characteristics of reified everyday labor: “we . . . toil together . . . We move without question or references in an interminable unknowing without rules, without direction” (34). Their obedience is embodied in an animal

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that appears: “a huge gentle beast . . . It belongs to the man” (35). But when this animal is discovered to be a mechanical thing, a transformation occurs in the relations of power. “My electrifying discovery occurs just as the animal yawns. Its yawn is frozen . . . longer than a natural yawn should be and in that moment I see that the inside of its mouth is plastic . . . when the mechanism that hinges the jaws has proven faulty, a house of cards silently collapses . . . the knowing spreads and the great boulder enclosing change splits apart” (35). The collapsing of things announces the end of everyday reification, and the restoration of agency: “The square woman . . . moves up . . . She begins to speak . . . she recites an ancient mythical contract made between herself and the man” (35). Discovering one’s imbrication in a shared history leads to freedom; or so the novel dreams.

The Coming of Capitalism and the Counterplot of Thingness In Ha Jin’s novel Waiting, history is not locked away but an open secret. It pervades every crevice, marks surfaces, and influences actions. The coming of modernity is experienced as an inescapable pressure on the subject; and in the face of this pressure everyday thingness takes on a different character. In what can be described as the novel’s counterplot of thingness, certain descriptive moments evoke a world entirely composed of things, independent of human action. Reflecting the modern everyday, such descriptions offer schematic, numbered assemblages of generic objects. But they exert a profound, almost gravitational pull on the novel. They command contemplation. The history of political and social institutions in China from the early 1960s to the 1980s structures and infiltrates the story of Lin Kong, an army doctor in a provincial Chinese city. Though set in the decades during and after the Cultural Revolution, this novel offers no accounts of battles or wars. Typically, bureaucratic orders are issued arbitrarily from above: “In the winter of 1966 the hospital undertook camp-and-field training. For some reason a top general in Northeastern Military Command had issued orders in October that all the army had to be able to operate without modern vehicles, which . . . could soften the troops” (37). Orders are executed without being understood, as their senselessness is already assumed. History is visible only as it is registered in the everyday lives of Lin Kong, his wife, Shuyu, who still lives in Lin’s rural hometown, and his girlfriend at the army hospital, the nurse Manna Wu. With dates discreetly but unfailingly noted, history appears in the stilted rhetoric of country newspapers, bulletins, and petty officials, in rules and regulations at the army hospital, in routines of work and recreation, the books on someone’s shelf, a private hoard of Chairman Mao buttons locked away. When Manna goes to Victory Park in Muji City, the description of “a stout statue of a fully equipped Russian soldier” (113) exemplifies public history’s mode of presence in this novel. Erected at the end of World War II “in memory of the Russian soldiers who had fallen while fighting Japanese troops in Manchuria,” the

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statue has had its helmet and parts of the gun “chopped off by the Red Guards at the outset of the Cultural Revolution,” but is “currently . . . under repair, surrounded by scaffolding . . . in front of the monument, a slogan was still legible: ‘Down with Russian Chauvinism!’ Those words had been scraped off, but the dark strokes remained distinguishable on the grayish concrete” (113). History is legible on everyday objects—if there is anyone willing to pay attention. At a deeper level, history shapes the plot by altering the consciousness of what counts as an act. China’s modernization occurs in the background, its movement from rural traditionalism to communism to recognizably capitalist practices. In this sense, Ha Jin’s realism follows the model of Balzac and Tolstoy as described by Lukács. Every detail, each action is seen from the viewpoint of a central problematic, the arrival of capitalist modernity.28 It makes itself felt through the sudden leaps and incremental changes to intentions and lives. When Lin first sees the wife chosen for him by his parents, a traditional practice that the already-urbanized young man reluctantly accepts as a last vestige of filial piety, he is dismayed to discover that Shuyu’s feet are “four inches long.” “This was the New China; who would look up to a young woman with bound feet? . . . he believed she was absolutely unpresentable outside his home village” (8–9). Geng Yang, the novel’s villain, is first seen as the aide of an important Communist Party official. At the end of the novel, some two decades after its beginning, he appears on television as the rich manager of a construction company; the news report is called “To Get Rich is Glorious” (283). But his economic success is not a surprise. He is the type of man who creates his own opportunities, as the novel’s ugliest example makes clear: after he becomes close friends with Lin and Manna, he rapes Manna on discovering that she is still a virgin. The key aspect of the modernization in question is not material but ideological. The contrast between the rural agricultural world and the urban world of factories and crowds is evoked, as is the gradual acceptance of capitalist practices. But the vital change occurs in the paradigm of history itself. History comes to be conceived as a series of framing opportunities for individual action. Will you act or not? Will you respond or not? Who will act? and why? In frequent conversations with himself, Lin’s inner voice is not the voice of conscience but the voice of modernity, ruthless in destroying all illusions. This shift is also illustrated by means of Shuyu and Manna. Shuyu’s performance of prescribed actions lies outside the framework of choice. On his annual visit back to his village, Lin tells Shuyu that he intends to “go visit his parents’ graves” (92), only to find the next morning a basket of offerings already prepared. “Shuyu had gone . . . Lin touched the bamboo basket, its side still warm” (93). Lin finds the graves “well kept, covered with fresh earth . . . somebody had cleaned up the place lately. Against the head of either grave leaned a thick bunch of wild lilies . . . Lin knew that it must have been Shuyu” (93). Rather than executing actions, Shuyu leaves traces behind. Things bespeak her gestures, since her performance is nearly imperceptible as an individual act. But Manna Wu, raised in an urban orphanage and younger than Shuyu, cannot help

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but perceive history as a series of opportunities for choice or action. After she sees Lin chatting with another woman, she decides to take action: “What should [she] do? Let that girl take him away? No, she had to do something” (47). The effect of her action is thus summarized: “[Lin’s] life had been simple and peaceful, until one day Manna changed it” (49). She offers a ticket to the opera, “The Navy Battle of 1894 at 8:00 p.m.,” to the unsuspecting Lin, who finds himself sitting next to her. The following scene offers a comic illustration of historic action on two levels simultaneously: before the opera reached the point where the warships engaged the enemy on the Yellow Sea, a hand landed on Lin’s left wrist. He wiggled a little but didn’t withdraw his hand. He glanced left and right and found everyone enthralled by the send-off party on the stage, drums thundering, horns blaring, gongs clanking . . . He looked sideways at Manna, whose eyes narrowed, squinting at him. (51) Lin finds himself under attack by the forces of modernity, as Manna follows her carefully planned strategy: “her fingertips stroked his palm . . . pinched the ball of his thumb . . . she caressed his wrist with her nail. The itch was so tickling that he grabbed her hand and their fingers were entwined” (51). The battle on stage ends with “the entire Chinese fleet . . . sunk to the bottom of the sea” (51), defeated by the modernizing forces of Japanese empire. “When the curtain fell . . . people continued shouting ‘Down with Japanese Imperialism!’ Lin gazed into Manna’s eyes, which were gleaming intensely . . . Her moist lips curled with a dreamy smile” (51). Manna’s erotic forwardness illustrates what now counts as an act: something planned in response to a perceived opportunity, and executed in order to bring about the new. Manna’s actions reveal at the level of the everyday a change in the understanding of the texture of history. “Manna was almost twenty-nine; why should she remain an old maid forever? . . . she shouldn’t just sit and wait without doing anything . . . She resented this situation, which she was determined to change. So she decided to act” (65–66). Intention becomes the motor of history: the determination to act on something, to do something, to be about something. Geng Yang, the future capitalist, is initially admired by both Manna and Lin as “a man full of certainty and decisive action, a real go-getter” (165). He advises Lin, “If you really have the will to change, you can create the condition for change” (167). He adroitly retrieves from a dictum of Chairman Mao a thought that happens to encapsulate the emerging primacy of capitalist initiative. This ideological investment in free human action reflects what Bruno Latour has described as the basic constitution of modernity. Latour argues that modernity is structured by a theoretical division of the world into the natural world, ruled by impersonal laws uncovered by science, and the social-political world created by human action. On one side, there is the world of objects, of “natural mute nonhumans,” and on the other side, there is the world of “conscious speaking citizens.”29 In Ha Jin’s novel, the division between human

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persons and inanimate objects is striking and gives rise to a curious affective stance of envy. The emphasis on consciousness and freedom of action places an impossible demand on the subjects of modernity. From this ideological shift there results an oversaturation of every human act with significance. Action or inaction alike is assumed to reflect an intention, which in turn elicits interpretation. For example, Manna creates an “opportunity” for a sexual encounter with Lin. When he refuses, she ponders the meaning of his refusal: “She felt that there must have been something more than the reason he had given . . . Did he really love her? . . . Did his refusal mean he was reluctant to get embroiled with her?” (70). Thus there arises the central antinomy of waiting: waiting is both an act and a failure to act, an active choice and a passive neglect. It is the ultimate proof of faithful desire and also a sign of indifference. It seems to be a test case of intentionality. How can one distinguish between waiting for something, for someone, and simple inertia? A modern emphasis on agency has the effect of making humans whose motives cannot be read into mere things. The novel opens by informing us that Lin Kong has returned to his village each summer for nearly eighteen years to try to divorce Shuyu. In the opening scene, he simply sits outside his house in rural Goose Village; though his leave is almost over, “he had not yet mentioned a word to his wife about the divorce” (3). In the garden pole beans and long cucumbers hung on trellises, eggplants curved like ox horns, and lettuce heads were so robust that they covered up the furrows . . . Their sow was oinking from the pigpen . . . Against the wall of the pigpen a pile of manure waited to be carted to their family plot, where it would go through high-temperature composting in a pit for two months before being put into the field . . . Lin went out of the front wall . . . In one hand he held a dog-eared Russian dictionary he had used in high school. Having nothing to do, he sat on their grinding stone . . . he couldn’t recall the grammatical rules . . . so he gave up and let the book lie on his lap. Its pages fluttered a little as a breeze blew across. (4) The things in this scene are teeming, open and alive with anticipation, while Lin is content to merge into the scenery. He has no use for the dictionary, or for the intentional construction of words and sentences. Its fluttering pages serve merely to link his figure with the small movements of other nonhuman things in this scene. Is Lin’s peaceful thingness an action? Each year he fails to divorce Shuyu, either because of his inability to bring it up, her officious brother’s interference, or her own impulsive reluctance to consent. Finally, after eighteen years, due to an army hospital rule “established by Commissar Wang in the winter of 1958” (14), Lin is able to let his marriage expire, claim his divorce, and marry Manna. Manna waits eighteen years for Lin. Or is she simply waiting for lack of other opportunity? “Probably it was already too late not to wait” (159), she reflects. But the novel never resolves the meaning of waiting. It cannot distinguish whether it has a meaning at all, or is simply a meaningless gap of time, an absence of data.

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As a consequence, things play a crucial role in this novel beyond indexing external historical change. As characters are “sighing and thinking” (79), as they talk, fight, eat, or wait, they are surrounded by things whose description often follows a particular pattern. Usually the things are located in the background, over a character’s head, or outside the window. When Lin sees Manna after the opera episode, for example, they chat about the condition of a patient. He was amazed that he could talk with a woman so naturally, without his usual diffidence. Outside the window, the sunlight was flickering on the cypress hedge, and four white rabbits were nibbling grass behind an enormous propaganda board. A blue jay landed near a baby rabbit, its head bobbing while its wings fluttered. “Can we take a walk together Sunday afternoon?” she asked . . . looking at him expectantly. (53–54) This example is typical in combining natural objects and man-made, clearly historical things such as the “enormous propaganda board.” The same pattern occurs in the following description, in which the airborne objects differ more in scale than in kind: “With a numb heart he watched her disappear at the corner of the lab building. Around his head a few midges were flitting. A pair of magpies clamored in a tall elm, tossing their mottled tails. In the distant sky a squadron of jet fighters were banking away noiselessly like silver swallows” (78–79). There is always a careful enumeration of the objects contained—four rabbits, a pair of magpies, a squadron of jet fighters. In another scene, the characters wait in a restaurant: Outside, four sparrows perched on the window ledge, which was coated with soot . . . The birds were chittering and shivering with the blasting horns of the automobiles passing on the street. One of them had a blind eye, whose corner carried a drop of frozen blood. It was snowing lightly, a few snowflakes swirling beyond a pair of power lines slanting across the window. (170) Even when particularized, as in the one blind eye of the sparrow, these things retain a generic quality that is enhanced by their arrangement into certain configurations or shapes. At the very end of the novel, Lin returns home to Manna, now finally his wife: a line of cow dung dotted the white road, still sending up curls of steam. Up on the slope a cart was climbing toward the hilltop, its iron-rimmed wheels rattling away on pebbles and ice. Down there, at the foot of the hill, a tiny whirlwind was hurling dried leaves along the bank of the frozen brook, swirling away toward the vast field studded with corn stubble. (297) Here, the things are not counted for us, but the line of dung, the vector of the whirlwind, even the pattern of the corn stubble, all evoke schematic shapes and quantities. Because of the careful arrangement of these self-contained scenes, we can see in such descriptions a counterplot of everyday thingness. I borrow the term

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“counterplot” from Geoffrey Hartman’s classic essay “Milton’s Counterplot,” in which he focuses on the figure of the “observer ab extra” so often found in Milton’s epic similes. Hartman finds that in the stillness of these figures and their removal from the story’s action, they remind us of the providential counterplot, the redemption that we already know will counteract the tragic fall that we see happening. In Ha Jin’s novel, the major plot concerns the gradual coming of capitalist modernity, in many ways also cast as a fall. The emergent ideology would like to perceive everything like the plot of a narrative. Opportunities arise or are created, choices are made that constitute new beginnings, and actors and events are charted—their positions plotted—relative to this ongoing story of action. The counterplot of everyday thingness envisions a position outside this history. The things described or enumerated share characteristics of the modern everyday that we’ve seen before— most notably, schematism or lack of particular identity. But even though this everydayness arises in and through modernity, its very ideological opacity, its resistance to intention, holds out a profound sense of peace. The distinction between man-made and natural objects doesn’t seem important enough to maintain; the industrial and the ecological sit comfortably side by side. These configurations of inanimate things seem to constitute total scenes in which human agency would be superfluous. Their spatial location outside or above the plot underlines this detached, independent, self-contained quality. Rather than inviting action, they seem utterly indifferent to human intervention and even observation. It does not matter if anyone sees them or not. There is no meaning, no action, no creation or change occurring in these configurations of thingness. If anything, there is a not unpleasant sense of desiccation or dissolution. The most powerful instance of this counterplot comes at a moment of literal natality in the novel, when Manna gives birth to Lin’s twin babies. While Manna is in labor, cursing and screaming insults at him, Lin takes refuge in the hospital bathroom: he was sitting on the windowsill . . . absentmindedly watching the backyard. It was already dark; beyond the screen mosquitoes were humming and fireflies were drawing little arcs. From a dormitory house a harmonica was shrieking out “The Internationale” disjointedly. A truck driver was burning oily rags at the corner of the garage . . . Far away on the hill a cluster of gas lamps were flickering in a temporary apiary. Some beekeepers were still busy collecting honey over there despite the nightfall. (271) The heterogeneity of its elements—the combination of work and leisure, industrial pollution and natural beauty—subsides into a feeling of harmony that contrasts poignantly with Lin’s confusion and misery. This harmony is linked to a thematic of indifference. Lin himself is “absentminded,” and the humming and doodling of the insects also embody distraction. The song is “shrieked” out without regard to continuity or beauty; and the humans mentioned in this scene are indifferent to time and place. In this moment, what Barthes calls the referential illusion, the sense

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that a signifier is there purely in order to correspond to a thing existing outside language, comes into play as a semiotic element, a sign of Lin’s character.30 Lin would like to believe that he notices these things only because they are there, not because they signify anything relevant to his predicament. There’s more than referentiality at stake, however. Thingness registers the sense of a possible exclusion or exemption from history’s demands. It stands “over there.” Thingness negates a negation. The modern everyday transforms everything into a potential commodity, even as it insists on the necessity of agency. The things in this novel go one step farther and turn the cheap mass-produced commodity or the leftover into art. The indifference of the everyday thing to the business of life endows it with aesthetic power. Calendars, fans, and illustrations, for instance, possess an odd intensity. They are entirely self-sufficient, leaping out of their context of use and exchange. For example, when Lin and Shuyu first go to the local courthouse to divorce, Shuyu is asked for her consent. During a long silence, “the judge was waiting patiently, waving a large fan, on which a tiger stretched its neck howling with a mouth like a bloody basin. He said to her, ‘Think hard. Don’t rush to a decision’ ” (11). The extraordinary effect of the fan’s description arises from its narrative incongruity, its total containment within a different sphere or dimension. It marks a moment of waiting, of suspension in the narrative action. A similar effect of tightly constrained plenitude arises in other examples. In one of their first encounters, Manna comes to Lin’s room to look at his large collection of books; inside one cover, she notices a bookplate: At the bottom of the plate was a foreign word, ex-libris, above which was an engraving of a thatched cottage, partly surrounded by a railing and shaded by two trees with luxuriant crowns, five birds soaring in the distance by the peak of a hill, and the setting sun casting down its last rays. For a moment Manna was fascinated by the tranquil scene in the bookplate. (33) The description of the bookplate tallies with the scenes of thingness examined above. There is the same attention to the configuration of counted generic shapes. Here, its alterity is emphasized through the exoticism of the Latin and the aesthetic effect of tranquility is emphasized even as the object draws attention to the status of private property. The picture stands outside the business of action, intention, and history. Everyday thingness offers the chance to lose oneself in recollections of tranquility—rather than recollections of missed opportunities and failures. Things do not look back at you, demanding recognition and action. This historical pressure makes what Michael Fried has called theatricality, the active recognition of the spectator, nearly unbearable in this novel.31 At the end, Lin has run away from the domestic misery of his life with Manna, and reflects on his past. When he discovers that he had never loved Manna, there arises “the image of Manna in her late twenties . . . She turned and looked at him, her eyes dim with affection and kindness, as though full of secrets that she was eager to share with him” (295). Instead of inspiring him with

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desire to be united with her (as in the novels discussed above), the image fills him with despair: “What are you going to do? the voice kept on. He could not think of an answer . . . What else could he do other than to endure?” (296). The counterplot of thingness, then, circumvents this question with something approaching aesthetic power, as the novel’s final scene demonstrates. On the eve of the Spring Festival, Lin goes to visit his ex-wife Shuyu and his grown-up daughter, now living in a factory dormitory: Uncertain whether he should go in, he remained at the window, whose panes had almost frosted over. He bent forward and looked in with one eye through an uncovered spot. Inside, Shuyu, in a white apron and a green cotton-padded jacket, looked healthy and happy. Mother and daughter were making pies together . . . Hua was rolling out the dough with a wooden pin, while her mother was using a spoon to stuff the pies . . . Shuyu looked younger now, somewhat urbanized; she reminded Lin of a professional cook. For some reason he was overwhelmed by the peaceful scene, and his throat tightened. (301) The absorption of this scene, as Fried calls it, the obliviousness of the characters to their being watched, is underlined by Lin’s position. The indifference of the characters to his presence is in fact quite genuine. At this point, Shuyu and Hua are happily independent, as Hua has found work in a factory. The scene combines not only natural and industrial things, but traditional and modern ways of life. Hua and Shuyu are making the traditional pastries for the upcoming festival. The sight fills Lin with nostalgia for the repetitive rhythms of traditional, agrarian life: “He remembered that back in their home village each family would make thousands of pies and dumplings at the end of the year . . . Winter was the time to relax and enjoy themselves” (301). At the same time, Shuyu looks “urbanized,” even “professional.” The everyday contains these contradictions easily, harmonizes them into a self-sufficient unity, and makes them seemingly eternal, beyond one’s power to alter. It is always already under way, as the imperfect tense suggests (“were making, was rolling, was using”). Here, history can be forgotten and beauty found in the mechanical repetition of certain actions. And in the everyday, it does not really matter who’s performing these actions. The scene is powerfully generic, even evocative of a genre painting: “mother and daughter were making pies together.” Seen without identity, seen as thinglike, people can become part of a “peaceful scene.”

Countability and the Ethnic Totem In Lan Samantha Chang’s stories, that which is not unique cannot be lost. Unique things, stories, experiences that happened one time in one place are always lost, especially when remembered. This sense of loss defines her stories in Hunger. In contrast, the mass-produced, fungible everyday thing is indestructible, surviving as

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matter even when destroyed. Yet it, too, speaks of a broader social alienation. Thus, in Chang’s stories of immigrants and their children, banal, everyday things are evoked with hallucinatory intensity. The ethnographic thing or totem of identity is usually locked away. What matters is the common everyday thing, which suddenly appears with an epiphanic fullness, and then just as suddenly disappears. The rhythm of appearance matters more than the origins of an object. And the everyday thing is valued all the more for its lack of particular historical connection with the self. It substitutes probability for identity. Its ubiquity almost makes up for its radical alterity. But we are reminded that the everyday thing is also a fetish of a different kind. Chang’s “The Unforgetting” makes the discovery of Asian American identity not the story itself, but the ironic disruption of the plot. An immigrant Chinese couple move to Iowa to raise their son, and assiduously forget their own past for the sake of his assimilation. But the son becomes strange, independent and indifferent to their wishes. He is viewed only from the outside, mysterious even to his own parents. With a certain inevitability, he discovers an interest in Asian American history, and announces, to their shock, that he will leave them to attend college far away. Chang’s story proceeds mainly through the description and manipulation of material objects. Mass-produced, fungible, and nonsignifying things crowd the foreground: permanent-press shirts with plastic tabs inserted in the stiff, pointed collars . . . envelopes of onion soup mix . . . a jello mold shaped like a fish . . . they ate their meals off brittle plastic plates that they had chosen at the discount store: bright, hard disks, flat and cheerful, the color of candy: scarlet, lime green, yellow, and white. (138–139) These are posed against the irreplaceable, historical objects that remain in the closet or the basement: “inside the yellow carpetbag that [the wife] had carried from Beijing, were six rice bowls that Sansan’s mother said had once been used in the emperor’s household” (135). The husband’s old science textbook, “the only book that he had carried in his suitcase out of China,” has a “deep brown cover . . . cracked and stained” (135). Unlike the “flat and cheerful” plastic things, these are porous, soft, pathos-laden. They are “never used . . . rarely even mentioned” (135). Notably, the son never discovers them; they remain locked away as material tokens of a history thought of as “a long line of lost and missing” (143). Ming, the husband, decides to forget this history. He works as a Xerox machine salesman: “he found comfort in the presence of such effortless reproduction. He brought home photocopied samples to show Sansan [his wife] . . . To the inside cover of his logbook he taped a photocopy of Charles’s little hand” (136). What Ming fails to see is that modernity’s “effortless reproduction” proceeds without reference to unique human projects or desires. Ming hopes that his son will take up his own interest in science, and is dismayed when Charles expresses interest in history:

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Why the humanities? Ming wondered. What intricate foldings lay behind his son’s quiet face? . . . Ming bought him a wooden desk and a sturdy lamp with a metal shade. He adjusted his chair and bolted a steel pencil sharpener into the wall . . . heaped a shopping cart with blue spiral notebooks . . . a blue clothcovered binder, and an enormous blue eraser. Charles brought these things to school in his backpack, and after that, Ming glimpsed them only now and then, evidence of his son’s mysterious passions. (141) Using the language of objects, Ming tries to express his wish for Charles to embrace the universal abstractions of science rather than the “intricate foldings” of history. But neither sees that the history in question takes the shape not only of unique losses or personal mysteries, but of incomprehensible, impersonal laws that govern even the trajectories of persons. When Ming asks his son, “Why do you want to leave, then?” the boy answers, “Because I know I have to go” (149). Caught up in the illusion that history is something that has happened only to himself, Ming fails to see that the son inhabits the same world as the commodities that he routinely handles. The effortless reproduction in question only concerns things—not human intentions. At the end, the parents express their despair at their son’s defection. Rather than breaking the precious bowls from China, Sansan reached blindly for a brittle, plastic plate, raised it slowly into the air . . . then flung it against the kitchen floor. For a moment Ming stood, arrested by the sight of the red disk hurtling downward, surprised to see it breaking into pieces against the floor. He had not known such goods could shatter . . . They broke every plate on the shelf . . . Colorful disks flew through the air, cracked and bounced against the walls, the chairs, the cabinets. When they had finished, they stood transfixed . . . admiring their handiwork. The broken pieces made a bright mosaic on the floor. (150–151) In this apotheosis of thingness, the everyday is indestructible even when broken. Things have a density of being that persons lack in these stories, and this density paradoxically derives from their abstraction. Things may not be nameable or usable, but they can always be counted. Quantification can turn an object into a reified thing, but here reification helps maintain the self against extinction. The story “San” places the calculation of probability, and its everyday basis in the act of counting, at its center. Chang’s narrator recalls that she “could not count past three” as a child. Her teacher complains that Caroline “remains baffled by the natural numbers . . . She cannot grasp the countability of blocks and other solid objects” (121, original emphasis). The father, a gambler, teaches her “to keep track of things. We counted apples, bean sprouts, grains of rice . . . cars to learn big numbers . . . blades of grass” (123). The numbers themselves become abstract forms: “I learned to recite the table of squares and the table of cubes, both so quickly that the words blended together . . . almost meaningless” (122). The everyday act of counting provides the narrator with a new way of looking at objects. “After I learned to count I began . . . to

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notice things . . . A pale stripe on my father’s tanned wrist revealed where his watch had been. A new pair of aquamarine slippers shimmered on my mother’s feet” (123). One stripe, a pair, a collection of fourteen things; even when present, things become empty shapes. Through the unseen actions of her gambler father, things appear, vanish, and are duly noted. She makes lists. “Missing on February 3: carved endtable / painting of fruit . . . / jade buddha / camera (mine)” (125). But by noting only the presence and absence of reified things, the narrator can avoid stories, speculations, desire, and loss. In this story, too, unique historical objects are locked away “inside the faded red suitcase my mother had brought from China,” inside “little silk purses” that contain small treasures (123). In contrast to these unique objects that remain in one place, a series of new, mass-produced objects is brought home by the gambler for his family: “he brought us presents: a sewing kit, a pink silk scarf ” (124). The story’s hinge is the pair of dice. “He . . . reached into his shirt pocket. Suddenly, with a gesture of his hand, two dice lay in the middle of the yellow circle of light. Two small chunks of ivory, with tiny black pits in them. ‘Count the sides,’ he said. The little cube felt cold and heavy” (127). The die is the exemplary thing because it stands as the origin of all the other appearances and disappearances in the story; all the other things are lost and won through forms of gambling. More importantly, the dice stand for probability and for the principle of fungibility itself, whereby things can be relieved of their particular, concrete qualities and become abstract and exchangeable. They are used to cancel questions that the narrator does not wish to confront. In this scene, as the father teaches her to calculate abstract probability, the mother appears, “her two huge eyes burning in her white face,” and asks this question: “What will become of us?” (128). There is more than the survival of this one family at stake. The question seems to concern the uncertainty of history’s movement. Engaged in the quintessentially modern pursuit of mathematics, but without a sense of certainty, the narrator at the end describes what could be a schematic representation of modernity: “true mathematics . . . moves toward the unexplainable. A swooping line descends from nowhere, turns, escapes to some infinity” (133). In this story, the incalculability and singularity of loss can be domesticated through routine, repetition, and regularity. Everyday thingness is cherished, even envied for its lack of history, lack of identity, and lack of memory. With things, substitution is always possible. After the father disappears, the narrator and her mother “spoke gently to each other about harmless, tactful things. ‘Peanut sauce,’ we said. ‘Shopping.’ ‘Homework.’ ‘Apricots’” (132–133). The turn to the everyday is motivated by tact. At once abstract and close enough to touch, generic and abundant, the modern everyday offers comfort and alienation.

{ PART III }

Everyday Immanence

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{5}

Lists, Native Speaker, and the Politics of Emergence

The last two chapters of this book uncover a shift in attitudes toward the everyday. Earlier writers conceived of the everyday as a minimal narrativity and a minimal sociality—as one thing next to another, one day after another, a field of thinglike forms and formlike things. Although many saw this modern everyday as a realm of alienation, Jade Snow Wong seemed to find reassurance in seeing herself as an anomaly. And in the works of Ha Jin and Lan Samantha Chang, the quiescence of things even seems enviable to those faced with the difficult project of modern selfmaking. The minorness, the indifference, and the clear countability of everyday things and actions can under certain conditions give them a certain tactfulness. The “harmless, tactful” everyday thing becomes not only a reminder of loss and betrayal but also a means of avoiding their acknowledgment. In these final chapters, these other possibilities of the everyday will be more fully explored. This chapter explores how the abstract equivalence of things in the everyday can be translated into the political sphere when the boundaries of that sphere seem to be more open to redefinition. The process whereby things and even days lose their particularity and become exchangeable can be reimagined as a model for a new kind of politics. Lisa Lowe and others have argued that abstract equivalence, whether in the economic or political sphere, is a false claim, merely an empty promise for minorities. In Lowe’s words, Abstract labor, subject to . . . the logic of equivalence through wages, is the adjunct of the formal political equality granted through rights and representation by the state. Yet in the history of the United States, capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor “abstract” but precisely through the social production of “difference” . . . marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender.1 Even a passing familiarity with the history of Asian American labor and American immigration law provides numerous examples to support Lowe’s claim. At best,

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Asians seem permitted, as Lowe puts it, to operate “within” the world of the market, of economic exchange, but are forced to remain “outside” the “national polity,” providing an image of the alien against which “the American citizen has been defined.”2 Yet how are the world of the market and the political sphere related to each other? How is the political constituted, once we move into the later decades of the twentieth century and into the moment of American multiculturalism? How formal, how rigidly institutional is the political now? Does one need to speak, or simply to appear, alone or together with others? At what point do the activities or the sentiments generated in the course of quotidian economic activity begin to possess a political meaning? Can the forms and structures of the everyday redefine the concept of community? These are the questions explored by Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), a novel that I find unique among Asian American novels for its intense, lyrical preoccupation with the political.3 By using the adjective “political” by itself, I allude to a certain way of defining the boundaries between the public sphere and “the social” in the thought of modern political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s concept of “the social” draws on the traditional notion of civil society, the world of the unregulated or self-regulating market, and it emphasizes how a false and restrictive sense of necessity emerges from that world.4 When used as a noun, the word “social” reflects this self-imposed subordination to something that we’ve made ourselves. Political action breaks through this reified everyday and turns away from the world of production and exchange. Unlike the social world, in which relationships are mediated through things, the political operates solely at the intersubjective level, in Arendt’s view. It frees humans to disclose themselves and to see one another in the intangible medium of speech and visible acts. The political as such concerns “the capacity to form new relationships, new modes of relationship, people’s capacity to innovate institutional structures jointly.”5 As Hannah Pitkin explains, in Arendt’s thought “[a]ction, conducted exclusively in the medium of human relationships . . . inherently implies that institutions, relationships, and rules are humanly created and sustained and thus within our power to alter or replace.”6 This understanding of the political sphere illustrates what Bruno Latour has called “the modern constitution”: a self-understanding that rests on the theoretical separation between the world of inert things and the world of human action. Politics supposedly becomes the domain of “the quarrelsome and calculating multitude of citizens,” free to determine their own relationships, while on the other side of the modern divide, “the mute and material multitude of objects” falls to the investigation of science.7 In envisioning the brightly lit polis as an exclusively intersubjective space, Arendt and Pitkin imagine a type of action that is distinctively human because it is free from the constraints of organic life and the material world. Only in “the space of appearance” first realized in the polis, Arendt writes, can “men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”8 But the modern everyday in fact rests on the blurring of

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humans and things, and the entangled resemblance of their forms. The everyday’s minor, derivative, repetitive rhythms seem far removed from the glory of the public acts that Arendt celebrates. But this is where Lee’s novel makes its most significant intervention. Rather than trying to transcend the everyday, it looks for forms that can cross over into the political. It imagines how forms and rhythms of the everyday might become the basis of a politics of gradual, small-scale emergence. This is a mode of relationship, a space of appearance that remains tentative and shadowy. It is not a question of a fully constituted subject claiming its rights, or revealing its distinctiveness in a space already organized for its display. Rather, this novel tries to imagine how recognition can materialize in multiple spheres and through various mediations by those who have not been invited into the public sphere. When recognition takes on a concrete, apprehensible form, even a minor one, that is a political event.9 In this way of thinking Lee’s novel approaches the account given by Jacques Rancière of the intersection of aesthetics and politics: “aesthetics . . . is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.”10 For Rancière, “forms of art” are also “forms that inscribe a sense of community.”11 Native Speaker explores one particular form that makes perceptible a shape of community: the everyday form of the list. In its minor tracing of connections, the form of the list translates the abstraction and seriality of the everyday into a politics of emergence. Native Speaker is a novel of and about lists, though its lists tend to be quiet rather than exuberant or epic. Lists literally begin and end the novel; and they are crucial to both the novel’s plot and its political argument. They are compiled, printed out, handed over, exchanged, desired, thrust on people, read aloud, and put to use. At the opening, the narrator’s wife, Lelia, hands him “a list of who I was” as she leaves him.12 The main plot concerns the membership list of an immigrant money-club run by John Kwang, a rising Korean American politician. Someone who wants that list is paying the Korean American narrator, Henry Park, a private spy by profession, to obtain a copy of it. The client, as it turns out, is the Immigration and Naturalization Service, intent on rooting out “illegals” (329). But it is not primarily the content of any list that matters; it is the abstract form itself. Lists are important for the following formal and material properties with which this novel endows them: they are paratactic, accretive, open-ended, semiordered, and memorizable. In their shape and use, lists are an everyday form, and an everyday practice of putting together, of linking and ordering. The list hovers between seen and unseen, imagined and unreal, contingent and necessary. It becomes the key to the novel’s reimagining of the political. The value of the list is linked with the minorness of the form. It is important that the list is primarily a shape, with a tenuous but perceptible material existence. That distinguishes it from the pure concepts of multiplicity, heterogeneity, or plurality.13 The form is a minor one in that it fails to totalize, even if it attempts to do so. The

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lists that we see in Lee’s novel possess little taxonomic ambition. Instead of claiming to reflect an order found in nature, they display randomness or follow arbitrary categories, as in alphabetical ordering. As the antithesis of emplotment, lists present one thing after another. The ostensible reason for the list’s existence seems to be utilitarian, in keeping with its origins; as Robert Belknap reminds us in his study, lists probably began as tally marks, emerging out of “record keeping” and accounting.14 In Native Speaker, lists continue to present themselves as simple ways of keeping track of things. The everyday list is a self-consciously superficial answer to a practical problem of disorder. Though they are often used to remind, lists are not primarily persuasive.15 But lists are performative in their own way, and the act of compiling a list, represented numerous times, becomes a way of making a relation visible and hence a political action. Through this form, the novel figures a political community bound together not by identity of blood, race, origin, or foundational myths, or by the resemblance of life stories or cultural systems, but by contiguity, by the simple relation of being side by side, next to one another. It is a weak unity, perhaps even a minimal one, and yet the absence of strong internal bonds or external boundaries means that this community can be endlessly expanded, one item at a time. There is neither an original nor a final form. This idea is suggested by the fact that the list is linked with the motif of “multiple versions.” Henry, for example, takes Lelia’s list and destroys the original after making three copies of it: “I prefer versions of things, copies that aren’t so precious” (4). Later, he refers to himself and John Kwang as “outlying versions of each other” (138). The politician is a version of Henry’s father and of his dead son as well, as the novel suggests. It may seem like a coincidental reiteration, but this idea of multiple versions performs a vital mediation. Lelia’s list consists of differently formulated versions of Henry’s identity, efforts to invent an epithet or to coin an idiom that can describe what Henry is. “She had been compiling it without my knowledge for the last year or so we were together. Eventually I would understand that she didn’t mean the list as exhaustive, something complete, in any way the sum of my character or nature” (1). It is neither a series nor a sum but an acknowledgment of the versions of Henry’s identity. These versions are irreducible and nontotalizable. In its material existence as well, the list seems to be continually copied and recopied. John Kwang’s list is continually expanding, never complete. Reprinted each week with the addition of new members, it exists in multiple versions, each one equally important. John Kwang prints out his list of constituents every Friday, and memorizes the entire thing as “a discipline . . . a chosen kind of suffering” (177). Multiple versions replace the idea of a sacralized identity, whether individual or national. Craig Calhoun reminds us that “the most decisive idea behind nationalism . . . is the modern notion of the individual . . . Just as persons are understood as unitary in prototypical modern thought, so are nations held to be integral.”16 In the American context, a concept of pluralism, of multiple cultures or races existing together, appears to liberalize somewhat this concept of integral national identity. But Lee’s novel suggests that by appearing to accept and even embrace

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difference, pluralism can in fact make difference insurmountable in the public sphere.17 Set in New York in the 1980s, Native Speaker reflects a moment in Asian American history marked by new waves of immigration and increased tension and violence in major urban areas, particularly among Korean Americans, African Americans, and Latinos.18 At the end of the novel, an anti-illegal-alien crowd demonstrates: “people stand behind two sewn-together sheets spray-painted with the words: AMERICA FOR AMERICANS” (331). The slogan points to the constant temptation in the political sphere to think of identity as a single essence, even as the small descriptive detail of the “two sewn-together sheets” hints at the contingent, fabricated nature of any unity. Native Speaker moves beyond the idea of a unitary, integral nation, even as it also tries to leave behind the modern idea of an autonomous self with a unique identity deep within. The self is incomplete, minor, at most a lyrical impulse that exists in multiple versions, linked through the trope of echo with other moments and acts. Yet a certain impulse to connect remains strong. The list is more than a simple aggregate in that each additional item changes the whole in subtle ways. The list form bridges the everyday and the political public sphere. Even though it is never exhaustive, complete, or internally consistent, the list possesses a distinctive kind of unity based on contiguity: the “minimal unity” of the everyday.19 When the idea of multiple versions is added, this contiguity becomes something stronger than mere contingent proximity, things that just happen to be next to each other. Each item in the list can be thought of as a version, but not a copy, of the preceding item. They are not only held together by the external framework of the list form, but added onto each other. The list, in other words, is a tense, emergent and recursive unity, never finished. The novel chooses this schematic form, rather than a trope of substance (blood, for example), to envision a sense of community. It tries to imagine a community without shared origin or substance, a community held together only by the formal proximity of its parts.

Scaling Up, Putting Together, Becoming Visible Native Speaker devotes itself to “reconfiguring the territory of the visible, thinkable, and the possible,” in Rancière’s words; it attempts to “draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making.”20 It maps out possible connections between the social and the political, the everyday and the public sphere. It first configures this distinction as a matter of thinkable, tangible scale. The novel frequently counts, and does so with a keen awareness of scale or the unit of measurement. The world of the market is measured in pennies, dollars, and hours, and the novel captures this social phenomenon in a tone very similar to Younghill Kang’s. Korean immigrants “with wives and young children . . . worked twelve-hour days six days a week for $200 cash and meals” (54). Other immigrants, too, “know

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they will come here and live eight or nine to a room and earn ten dollars a day, maybe save five. They can figure that math, how long it will take to send for their family, how much longer for a few carts of fruit to push, an old truck of wares, a small shop” (335). The novel’s attention to quantity and scale is relentless, and variations of “small” or “tiny” appear with great frequency. Henry, the narrator, remembers arguing with his father, a grocery store owner, about the smallest denominations of money: “I made endless fun of the prices of my father’s goods, how everything ended in .95 or .98 or .99. ‘Look at all the pennies you need!’ I’d cry . . . holding up the rolls beneath the cash register” (55). The everyday is figured through the act of counting and amassing the smallest of objects in an apparently endless time. I knew that Mr. Baeh [another Korean store-owner] would stay open late tonight . . . The other merchants on the block would do the same . . . Here is the great secret, the great mystery to an immigrant’s success, the dwindle of irredeemable hours beneath the cheap tube lights. Pass them like a machine. Believe only in chronology. This will be your coin-small salvation. (188) The metaphor “coin-small” captures the minorness of the social as well as its orientation toward the abstract thing. The description also deliberately conflates the last things, salvation or redemption, with the ongoing temporality of the day-after-day. The “meager” scale of the social means that even sacrifice will be acknowledged with contempt: my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow, invent again the man he wanted to be. He came to know . . . that the truer height for him was more like a handful of vegetable stores that would eventually run themselves . . . I am bestowed only with the meager effect of his hard-fought riches, that troubling awe and contempt and piety I still hold for his life. (333–34) Even Henry’s “awe and contempt and piety” are a “meager effect,” an echo of the everyday and its merely human-sized measures. As was the case with Carlos Bulosan, the political is a scaling up, not a retooling down. The political is a matter of a different scale: not lavishness, but qualitative largeness. Early in the novel, when Henry is assigned to spy on John Kwang, he accompanies him to a public event: “I wanted to watch him work the crowd. I wanted to take in his every move among the people, to witness the telling presence that I’d seen glimpses of but on a much smaller scale, at the office, on building stoops, inside restaurants. I didn’t know if he could tread with the same proportion here” (149–50). Henry is not disappointed; Kwang fills large spaces, moves among the crowd without being diminished. “I have witnessed him shake fifteen hundred hands in the space of a city block, Q&A for five hours with an assembly of greedy malcontents, kneel whole mornings in Reverend Cho’s cavernous church praying

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for a rookie cop shot up in Hunt’s Point” (268). Even though Henry cannot stop counting and measuring, Kwang is not diminished by cavernous spaces, by the passage of time, or by the repetition of the same act because the medium in which he acts is entirely intersubjective. Relationships aren’t counted or measured in the same way as things. The proportions of Kwang’s relationships to others and to his surroundings are huge. Even after his considerable flaws are revealed and his career abruptly cut short, the narrator affirms “the hope of his identity”: “who he has been on a public scale when the rest of us wanted only security in the tiny dollarshops and churches of our lives” (328). Kwang himself describes the project of politics in terms of a broadening of scale: “There is a closing going on, Henry, slowly but steadily, a narrowing of who can rightfully live here and be counted” (274). The challenge, as Kwang puts it, is, on the one hand, to enlarge “the old syntax” of politics, “especially minority politics” (196); and, on the other hand, “to capture [the] imagination” of the private person, locked in the social or everyday realm like Henry’s father, “focused on his own life . . . The sole right he wanted was to be left alone . . . so he could just run his stores” (196). Kwang’s aim is to bring such individuals into the realm of political action, in which people, “recognizing their objective interdependence, jointly take charge of it,” in Pitkin’s words.21 Though the novel may appear to distinguish the social from the political to the latter’s advantage, it actually invests itself in figuring the acts that might bridge the two realms, the ways in which everyday motions can take on the dimensions of action in the broader sense. Putting things together is an example of an act that begins in the realm of the everyday but finds its end in the political sphere. This is not the same as the process of amassing inert objects, watching goods or watching “the money . . . coming in” (48). Lee’s novel pays extraordinary attention to the ways in which subjects and material objects are joined together, from the “two sewntogether sheets spray-painted” at a demonstration (331), to the “bundled manila envelopes” that arrive in Kwang’s office with “bills clipped, bills taped” or stapled (278), to the “impromptu parades of . . . husbands and wives . . . angry white people and brown people and black people” that eventually turn against Kwang (331). Rooted in the everyday, Lee’s novel harbors a deep conviction of the separateness of people and things, and thus is able to perceive the energy that is required to bring them together. As Henry’s closest friend says to him, “You understand . . . distance and separateness” (164). The novel takes separateness and isolation for granted as the social condition that must be overcome in the act of putting together. But putting together in this context is never a seamless or mystical union in the name of something higher. Instead of the ecstatic melting together of identities seen in the novels of Kogawa or Keller, this novel shows that every union is fractious, fractured, and temporary, held together only for a time through the various forces of power, interest, desire, or tact. Politics consists in the collective manipulation of closeness and separation, aggregation and dissolution, as this description of the protesting crowd makes clear:

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They stand in broken columns and flurry with both arms and both legs . . . Their calls first start all together and slow and then pick up speed and volume until they finally dissipate to separate voices and rounds of hand clapping and cheers. They slap hands in the air . . . They are every shape and color but they still share this talk. (340) The defamiliarizing description presents the forms and formations assumed by hands, arms, and voices as they come together and separate. As it turns out, this crowd is protesting against foreigners, immigrants, those like John Kwang. Sorting out, distinguishing the native from the foreign, is the other side of the act of joining together. The novel works hard to suppress this impulse of separating a jumbled crowd or heap into homogeneous groups, even as it recognizes that this is a form too often taken by politics. It emphasizes, instead, the ways in which heterogeneous things can be inventively put together and held together, even admired. Native Speaker suggests that the boundary between the political and the social is more like a dialectical hinge than a separating barrier. Though his public existence is measured differently, Kwang is not absolutely different from Henry’s father, or from the other immigrants who populate the novel. Lee makes much of this fact in the brief history of Kwang’s emergence as a public figure: He himself once ran a wholesale shop . . . He expanded quickly from the little neighborhood business, the street-front store . . . Other Koreans depended on him to find good deals and transact them. Suddenly, he existed outside the intimate community of his family and church and the street . . . He wasn’t bound to 600 square feet of ghetto retail space like my father, who more or less duplicated the same basic store in various parts of the city. Those five stores defined the outer limit of his ambition, the necessary end of what he could conceive for himself. (183) While Henry’s father stops at five identical units, quantitative repetition leads, in Kwang’s case, to a qualitative transformation. And Kwang’s expansion extends the limits of the thinkable and possible. This signals the political moment, the moment of emergence. Emergence is the master trope in Lee’s novel for political action. It is valuable not only for its visual character but for its temporality, its indebtedness to the imperceptible gradations of the everyday. Emergence is a temporal process rather than a thing. It is a relation unfolding over time, and thus spells the end of a reified existence. Henry notes of his father that “[t]he only time he’d come out in public was because of me” (52). The idea of an invisible, shadowy existence is concretely developed into Henry’s job as a spy; on one of his first training missions, he notes, “I felt explicitly that secret living I’d known throughout my life” (175). Through his assignment to Kwang, which is simply another ordinary job, Henry grasps the possibility of emerging out of the social realm into that of political action. But what matters is the tentative emergence of this possibility, the nonlinear process of marking out that border, rather than the act of crossing over it in a clear

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moment of development. In one striking scene, Henry, who’s posing as a volunteer in Kwang’s office, is asked to play Kwang for his “media advance team.” As the team walks through a neighborhood, planning and orchestrating Kwang’s future appearances, Henry is asked to come out of a building: “I stepped back into the entrance . . . I walked out in the light of breaking clouds. I lifted my face to the sky, as commanded. She told me to raise my arms in victory. So I did” (99). That Henry is pretending to be Kwang for a camera that doesn’t exist (“she . . . peered back at me through her palm-sized director’s view-finder”) is less important than the pure mapping of emergence. It is a simulation of something that has not yet happened, a rehearsal for a possible future. Development and fulfillment, finality and authenticity, are not the novel’s goals. Native Speaker isn’t interested in constructing a narrative that leads ineluctably from one concrete point to another. What counts is the possibility that enough minor gestures and small items may lead to an unforeseen transformation. This is what the list figures: it enacts emergence rather than narrating it.

The List as Unfinished Unity Lelia’s list begins the novel—not as a communication but as a material thing that plays the central role in a curious transaction filled with gaps of knowledge. The list is introduced in this way to dismantle any sense of it as a bureaucratic form. It is casual, ad hoc, an everyday intersubjective form linked more to memory than to any organizing impulse, though in this instance it seems to proceed from Lelia’s despair. “The day my wife left she gave me a list of who I was” (3). The opening sentence defies conventional narrative logic, which would tie these two acts together in a signifying relation. We might assume that the list justifies, necessitates, or excuses Lelia’s departure, or that it may compensate for her absence. But the list is uncanny and important in ways that exceed its narrative function. It is described in terms of a lack of knowledge: “I didn’t know what she was handing me. She had been compiling it without my knowledge . . . maybe she herself didn’t know what she was doing” (3). The parallelism of not knowing suggests that “who I was” (the first description of the list, parallel with “what she was”) falls into the category of the unknown, together with “what she was handing me” and “what she was doing.” And the content of the list indeed confirms this suspicion. Alone in the novel, this list is physically reproduced in vertically stacked form. One wonders why: it consists of seventeen items that range from phrases to single words, some of which are recognizable, but none of which are fully comprehensible. It begins, “You are surreptitious,” moving without punctuation to the next line, “B + student of life,” then “first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss,” “illegal alien,” “emotional alien.” The items dwindle in length; the bottom (or last) four items are single words: “stranger,” “follower,” “traitor,” “spy” (5).

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The list is a strange totality—in fact, no totality at all, and that is what gives it legitimacy as a model of the self and, eventually, a paradigm of a political community. Lelia’s list, for example, seems to embody discontinuity itself. Even though some of the items are related as synonyms or antitheses (“great in bed,” “overrated,” “sentimentalist,” “anti-romantic”), the list mainly conveys a sense of how much unquantifiable time or space separates the appearance of even the contiguous items on the list. Henry tries to get at this quality by imagining Lelia writing it in different moments: “I imagined her scribbling something down in the middle of a recipe” (5). The fact that Henry is tempted to place the list within a narrative in order to get at its meaning testifies to how perfectly this list is antinarrative in its form. Rather than manipulating its elements or functions to create an artificial structure of time, a counterpoint of delay and resolution, this list simply accrues over time (“the last year or so we were together,” Henry guesses), testifying to the hidden negativity of the everyday. But because of its internal discontinuities, its incorporation of negativity, this list gestures toward a more open notion of community. This community is imagined or anticipated rather than existing in the present; it is not simply the future of Lelia and Henry as a couple, despite Henry’s wistful decision not to regard the list “as a cheap parting shot, a last-ditch lob between our spoiling trenches” (5). Rather, it arises directly from the list’s peculiar use of language. Henry describes it as idiomatic: “She was drawing up idioms in the list, visions of me in the whitest raw light” (3). It’s important to see that the words and phrases in Lelia’s list are neither literal nor metaphorical descriptions of “who he is.” Henry initially perceives the list as “a love poem . . . Dulcet verse. But I was wrong” (5). Though there seems to be some faint ironic allusion to the traditional genre of the blason, Lelia’s would-be idioms do not represent the production of an individual lyric voice. Her list aims to evoke a plurality of voice, common usage, and shared temporalities rather than a single, speaking subjectivity. He introduces the list thus: “It said, variously”—that is, the list speaks with a nonsingular voice. Its items ask to be received as phrases that have acquired, through widespread usage, meanings that cannot be reduced to, or even deduced from, the “dictionary meanings” of the words. Some, such as “illegal alien,” are recognizable American idioms, part of the language, but even those cannot be literally applied to Henry, an American citizen. Most of the items are idioms that do not yet exist. What they imagine is a future history of usage, and a set of informal rules guiding that usage, generated by a community, rather than an individual. And the point is that that community does not exist. These are fake or future idioms—not even belonging to a linguistic community of two. Henry gives no clue that any of these phrases had a history, or any special meaning for himself and Lelia. He is as ill-prepared to read them as we are. Henry’s reactions suggest that what matters about the list is not the singular aura of the object but the odd potential unity that its form represents. The original, in fact, does seem to possess a considerable aura: “I could tell the page had been crumpled up and flattened out. Folded and unfolded. It looked weathered, beaten about

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her purse and pockets. There were smudges” (4). But its uniqueness or authenticity makes it a closed form, and thus Henry destroys the original. Before we’re even shown the list, in fact, he tells us what he did with the piece of paper: I would make three photocopies, one to reside permanently next to my body, in my wallet, as a kind of personal asterisk, I thought, in case of accidental death. Another I saved to show her again sometime, if I wanted pity or else needed easy ammunition. The last, to historicize, I sealed in an envelope and mailed to myself. The original I destroyed. I prefer versions of things, copies that aren’t so precious. (4) The list exists in three copies, none of which is the original. Again, comfort is found in the promise of immortality held out by mechanical reproduction. Moreover, Henry tellingly places one copy “permanently next to my body . . . as a kind of personal asterisk.” This relation of adjacency is important. Henry neither rejects nor embraces the list as a truthful representation of himself, but accepts its necessity by placing it in this relation of permanent contiguity. It is intimately related, but not identical. The formal existence of Lelia’s list matters more than its material substance, and its form can be described as an open-ended, anticipative unity. The list is never complete, even in a literal sense, as we see when Henry makes a fortuitous discovery some unspecified amount of time later: “just as I was nearly ready to forget the whole idea of it, maybe even forgive it completely . . . I found a scrap of paper beneath our bed while I was cleaning. Her signature, again: False speaker of language” (5–6, original emphasis). The scrap does not function according to the deconstructive logic of the supplement; I do not think it intends to uphold, however precariously, the pretended unity of the whole to which it is added. If anything, it suggests how open-ended the list form is, as opposed to the material piece of paper on which it is written, or conventional notions of identity. There is some ambiguity about this scrap’s temporal relationship to the list (is this an item that failed to make it onto the list? was it torn off and discarded? was it meant to be added?). But it does suggest that the list could, in principle, be infinitely extended, even if its items are not physically connected. We can imagine Henry continuing forever to discover items from the list on hidden scraps of paper, tucked here and there. John Kwang, the ambitious Korean American politician whose list is at the heart of this novel, appears to exist in many versions that refuse to be integrated into one. At one level, this figure’s lack of coherent outline is meant to testify to the absolute novelty of what he represents, within the context of Asian American history and also of Asian American literature. Kwang is in fact not utterly new; as we have seen from the time of Bulosan and Kang, a longing for vastness, for a larger public life, has been the consistent dialectical partner of the everyday. In the context of internment as well, broader political concerns were consistently elaborated; Kogawa includes the activist figure Aunt Emily in her novel about Japanese Canadian internment. However, Native Speaker insists on the newness

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of Kwang, and is justified in doing so to a certain extent. Kwang’s ambitions do not set themselves against the ordinary or the everyday, with all its limitations and lack of clarity, but emerge out of this shadowy jumble of the everyday. Henry remarks, “I had never conceived of someone like him. A Korean man, of his age . . . Not just a respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor, but a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family” (139). A first-generation immigrant, one generation older than the narrator, Kwang supposedly speaks English “perfectly” (179) and comfortably inhabits the American public sphere. No familiar strains of broken English in his case. As a rising Korean American politician, he is a shadow cast by futurity. He fails to fit what Henry considers to be the existing mold of the “ambitious minority politician and what being one had always meant—the adjutant interest groups, the unwavering agenda, the stridency, the righteousness” (139).22 His power base consists in those increasing numbers who fall outside what Kwang calls the “old syntax,” the black-and-white syntax, of American racial politics (196). The everyday becomes in this novel not only the domain of women, or of the family, but also of the racial minority and the immigrant. Kwang’s power base was every last Korean vote in the district [of Queens], and then most of the Chinese . . . the Southeast Asians and Indians, the Central Americans, and blacks from the Caribbean and West Indies. Some Eastern Europeans. The native whites didn’t seem to pay much attention to him . . . African-Americans didn’t seem to trust him. (142) But Kwang does not represent these groups well in the conventional mode of identity politics. He cannot be identified with, or even identified at all as a single type of figure. Kwang’s participation in the existing milieu of multicultural politics requires that he stand for many. Like his other constituents, Henry projects himself into this figure, anticipates an identity with Kwang that is disappointed: “I said John was my height. He was actually shorter than I was, two or three inches at least” (134). It is the expectation that Kwang will represent multitudes within a single, monumental form that leads to his downfall. On the level of plot, Kwang’s exacting demand of loyalty from his followers, of their complete oneness with himself, leads him to order the killing of a subordinate: “he was disloyal, the most terrible thing, a traitor” (311). But he is far more than a villain revealed. The novel suggests that Kwang exists in multiple or side-by-side versions, none of which is more authentic or truthful than the next: the smooth and youthful “almost pubescent” Kwang (134), Kwang the “old and weary” atavistic Korean (293), Kwang the public peacemaker of genuine integrity and devotion, and the violent, vengeful godfather-like figure ordering the execution of disloyal subordinates. These multiple Kwangs seem to coexist in an unfamiliar, nontotalizable way. Kwang belongs to the formal universe of the list: he refuses to bear a single racial, linguistic, or political identity. He will neither remain within a category, nor remain in a dynamic of hybridity. He is an act of endlessly putting things together.

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In fact who Kwang is comes to matter far less than where he is—and the answer to that is: everywhere. Those first days I walked the streets of Flushing, I saw his name everywhere on stickers and posters, the red, white, and blue graphics plastered on the windows . . . flyers, pamphlets—A Message from City Councilman John Kwang—buttons, ballpoint pens, keychains, lapel pins, every last piece of it stamped with his perfectly angled script, simply signed, John. (83) It is not only his printed name, but his intimate, first-name-only signature that is spread all over disparate locations. What it stands for is less important than what it does through its ubiquitous repetition. As a signifier disseminated through every crevice of quotidian life, Kwang links together not only these locations throughout Queens but even disparate domains—private and public, political and economic. In various households and lives the same function can be seen: The sight of his picture was equally evident . . . plainly framed black-and-white portraits of him, often hung in a kind of sacred paper altar that mom-and-pop businesses tape up on the wall beside the cash register: John Kwang hung there with the first tilled bills of each denomination, a son’s Ivy League diploma, a tattered letter of U.S. citizenship from the county clerk of Queens. (83) The signifier “John Kwang” stands in a relation of adjacency to the other objects composing this “altar” to individual legitimacy and progress. Without unifying them, it connects these signifiers of beginning and of completion, the forms of currency and credentials, the values of sentiment and economics. Kwang is most valuable as a form of relation and emergence, not as a representative of a body or a group. It is in his well-guarded lists that we see politics as the gradual, small-scale emergence of the new. First revealed are Kwang’s voter registration lists. His staff’s daily work is to go out and to register voters in an endlessly repeated series of small actions and gestures: “go out into the street, go into the stores, stop them in the alleyways . . . In ten different languages you say Kwang is like you. You will be an American” (143, original emphasis). The data collected is entered into a computerized database, which Kwang prints out and rememorizes every Friday. However, what Henry discovers as he becomes Kwang’s closest subordinate is that beneath this political activity, there is an almost exactly parallel one going on: a huge moneyclub, modeled on the Korean institution of the “ggeh.” A seemingly perfect example of civil society’s self-organizing ways, the ggeh functions as an informal way to acquire capital; “members contributed to a pool that was given out on a rotating basis. Each week you gave the specified amount; and then one week in the cycle, all the money was yours” (50). Typically, “the members all know each other, trust one another not to run off or drop out after their turn comes up” (279), as Henry explains. Kwang’s money-club is the subject of intermittent rumor, but it is only

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visible in the novel as a printed-out list: a list of names, addresses, and dollar amounts. The list offers an alternative to representation. The point of Kwang’s money-club list is that it is not the same thing as the official record of registered voters, and yet it brushes up against that official list, overlaps with it, aspires to become it. As a long printed-out “listing of names and addresses, names and ages of children, occupation, name and address of business or businesses,” it bears an uncanny similarity to its official double. But it is not limited to citizens, or potential citizens. It includes “illegal aliens,” and for this reason the list is an object of official desire for the state. After Henry finally delivers the promised copy of it to his employer, he sees a television news report that Kwang’s club was engaging in “lending activities that aren’t registered with any banking commission and haven’t reported to tax authorities” (329). The report gives way to an interview with the INS regional director, now revealed as the client who paid for a copy of Kwang’s list. He announces that “the INS has no records of birth or entry or naturalization for nearly three dozen of [the money-club members] and their families . . . The illegals are of all nationalities.” He ends by stating complacently that “we have hit all of the suspected illegals and their families at their residences early this morning . . . We have them all” (329–330). Kwang’s list is the object of pursuit by authority, here embodied in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The state’s constituted authority works to sort out rather than to join things together; taking control of the list allows it to close down rather than to open up the political realm. Kwang’s money-club list may seem to belong to the domain of the economic alone. Along with the above information, the list includes “estimated yearly income . . . year-to-date dollar figures, percentage changes. Then, to the far right, double-underlined, the dollar amounts” (275). The point of the ggeh is to provide an economic boost, to enable a down payment on a business, for example. But Kwang’s money-club is doing something more than establishing a private social network for economic assistance. It shows how economic activity and the currency through which it is conducted function as an immigrant vernacular, a kind of object language with which to articulate political aspirations. In this way, the list articulates a political community—a strange, half-disembodied, emerging collectivity. It drafts a new map of the visible and sayable. Henry becomes the linguist and historian of this immigrant money-language as he takes over the role of maintaining the money-club list. Every night in Kwang’s basement he links together contributions, disbursements, and names. The church money arrives in bundled manila envelopes from Christian congregations called Presbyterian Glory, Heaven on Earth, Korean Fellowship of Devotion . . . I receive hundreds of small white envelopes each week, some delivered by hand . . . a handwritten note . . . a five-dollar bill stapled to it . . . The writing is in pidgin English and Spanish and Mandarin and then languages I have never seen. (278)

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The description reads like a catalogue of minorness: handwritten, small, in pidgin and other minor languages. But it adds up to a remarkable excess of being. It is exclusively cash (“I tell them cash is acceptable. Please nothing else” [277]). But far from being a faceless universal equivalent, these bills are attached to and practically become handwriting in the full panoply of immigrant languages. The cash is a medium of communication rather than of exchange. Rather than being exchanged in equivalent measures, the money is circulated, given and received in uneven amounts. “In our ggeh, if you give a few dollars you can expect to receive a few hundred . . . everyone comes to learn what’s a fair amount [to ask for]” (280). The communication passes through Henry; and as it does so, it takes on the form not of a contract that hooks together past and future action, but of a list, in some ways the opposite of a contract. “I do the same thing every night. I enter the giving in vertical rows. I have the machine sort the figures into two dozen categories. Every way it comes out, I add it up, recompiling every bit of information we have to date . . . I am writing a new book of the land” (279). The activity of calculation in which Henry engages is one of the novel’s tropes for immigrant life, “a matter of margins, what you can clear on a $13.99 quartz watch, or how much selling it takes to recover when you give one away” (188). But what is at stake in Henry’s ritualistic calculation is not a personal “coin-small salvation” (188) but rather a “new book of the land,” a new type of political belonging. The list is never complete, but it represents a paradoxical whole. Narratively this paradox can be explained by the strange nature of Kwang’s ggeh: not only do new members join continuously, but money comes in and goes out ceaselessly, in such a way that no relation of equivalence is possible. Members cannot simply withdraw the amount that they put in (or vice versa). The whole is inexhaustible because never complete. In civic terms, what matters is that its members remain committed to this idea of the incomplete whole, linked to it through a relationship of loose reciprocity rather than strict equivalence: “The money comes in weekly, some of them giving as much as $250 and $500, others as little as $10. Most give fifty . . . It matters only that you give what you can” (277). The list is an action rather than a completed thing. In Pitkin’s paraphrase, political action “ ‘produces’ only relationships with other actors and creators and does not terminate in any fixed, objective product.”23 This is why Henry must compile his list every night. “Near morning, I print out what I have done in one long continuous sheet, the way he prefers to read the thick stack of names. He says it doesn’t seem right all broken up” (279).

The Disembodied Self and the Aesthetic Jumble The list is merely a form, and a minor form at best. Kwang’s list contains names and numbers; all other details are abstracted. The names are only linked alphabetically; they don’t add up to a story or a plot. They are connected in as weak a fashion as the bills and notes that Henry receives every night: clipped, stapled,

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taped tenuously together. Yet the novel insists that the utopian potential of the list is to be found in its abstraction and meaningless seriality. The list gains value from its lack of cultural aura. One doesn’t grow attached to a list; it is, most emphatically, not a family. This is where Kwang makes a crucial mistake, as the novel suggests: he tries to see the list, his money-club, as a unity or as a family. When he takes the list from Henry every morning, “ ‘This is a family,’ he reminds me, grasping it with both hands” (279, original emphasis). But the novel skeptically asks at the end, “can you really make a family of thousands?” (326) Seeing his money-club as a family, collapsing the metaphor into identity, was Kwang’s “one enduring vanity,” his inability to relinquish the dream of “a system paternal [in which] people would come right to the house and ask for some money and his blessing” (334). People come personally to make their requests: “Everything is in private, we deal like family, among ourselves, without chits or contracts” (280). But the idea of family cannot avoid the expectation of shared sentiment, shared essence, and a common, predetermined narrative: “I know all about that fine and terrible ordering,” Henry remarks at the novel’s beginning, “how it variously casts you as the golden child, the slave-son or daughter, the venerable father, the long-dead god” (6–7). The family is closed and its meaning determined: “the relation abides no argument, no questions or quarrels” (7). Kwang’s money-club operates as the antithesis of a family, despite his desire to see it as one. The emergent list reflects a special kind of disembodiment in which bodies are seen as repositories of loss or configurations of absence, linked formally or figuratively. Henry, as compiler of the list, has to see Kwang’s people physically, but his relation to them is strikingly abstract: you come at night and you make your request . . . Bring an interpreter or phrase book . . . It doesn’t matter what your color is, whether your breath reeks of garlic or pork fat or chilis. Just bring your wife or your husband, bring your children . . . Bring X rays of your mother who needs a new hip. I want to see the fleshed shape of the need, I want to know the blood you’ve lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you. (280–281) The bodies that he sees, one by one, in secret, are “fleshed shapes” of loss and possibility rather than evidence of a particular, singular identity: the more I see and remember the more their story is the same . . . How I come by plane, come by boat. Come climbing over a fence. When I get here, I work. I work for the day I will finally work for myself. I work so hard that one day I end up forgetting the person I am. I forget my wife, my son. Now, too, I have lost my old mother tongue. (279) Henry’s encounters with these immigrants, and indeed the entire list as a whole, are characterized by the uncanny coexistence of strangeness and intimacy. “Like John Kwang, I am remembering every last piece of them . . . The story is mine” (279). The form of the generic leads to the discovery of immanence.

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In a different novel, we might imagine Henry’s nightly encounters with Kwang’s constituents as the occasion for richly detailed vignettes of immigrant lives. But at this point, Lee turns to the lyrical and, more specifically, the apostrophic mode. What evokes this lyric turn is not the assertion of self, but its emptying out. “I work so hard that one day I end up forgetting the person I am.” Is this ironic? Or the intended goal? A voluntary ascesis is regularly performed by John Kwang by means of the list. “He continually memorizes and re-memorizes the entire listing of contributors, every one of the nearly two thousand, the feat itself awesome” (277). The memorizing isn’t done in order to expand his sense of himself, but rather to empty it out, and even to eliminate subjective will and desire: “his purpose wasn’t statistical mastery . . . The memorizing was more a discipline for him, like a serious craft or martial art, a chosen kind of suffering involving hours of practice and concentration” (177). If the list as form aspires to figure an open-ended community linked by proximity, it requires a new model of selfhood as an interiority open to other sounds, ready to echo them. Instead of expressing pure subjectivity at its strongest, lyricism seems to stand for a radically attenuated subjectivity and thus reenters the everyday context. This is possible because echo becomes the figure of lyric, memory, and everyday repetition. “Within every echo from a city storefront or window, I can hear the old laments of my mother and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy . . . They speak to me . . . in the ancient untold music of a newcomer’s heart, sonorous with longing and hope” (304). Echo can be a matter of hearing the music contained in the past. But echo repeats over and over, acquires the form and features of the list so that list and echo become mirror forms.24 For Henry, the shape of involuntary memory is not that of a scene, but that of a list: “if I remember everything now in the form of lists it is that these notions come to me along a floating string of memory, a long and lyric processional” (227). The form of the list, even in its lyrical, nostalgic mode, hollows out the self rather than confirming its substance. The self is thus assimilable; it can consciously echo, deliberately imitate its masters: We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold . . . You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears. This is your own history. We are your most perilous and dutiful brethren, the song of our hearts at once furious and sad. For only you could grant me these lyrical modes. I call them back to you. (320) But Lee’s novel does more than represent Asian Americans as echoes or mimicmen. It aspires to find in this attenuated self, attuned to memory and to heterogeneous surroundings, a greater openness to different kinds of linkages that begin in the everyday. In one major set piece of memory, for example, Henry remembers the start of his relationship with Kwang: “I went to him this way.” What follows is a literal itinerary, a practical list of actions to take: “Take the uptown number 2 train to Times Square. Get off. Switch . . . to the number 7 trains, those shabby heaving brick-colored cars” (82). The itinerary is a classic form of the everyday, as Michel

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de Certeau has argued. While a map offers through its totalizing view the promise of mastery, the itinerary reflects “an opaque and blind mobility.”25 Certeau locates the everyday “below the thresholds at which visibility begins.”26 It is prepolitical, the space of emergence rather than full appearance. What follows this itinerary is Lee’s remarkable account of this emergence into visibility, from the train, of “John Kwang’s people,” those racial minorities who now embody the domain of the everyday on a global and yet minor scale: They were of all kinds, these streaming and working and dealing, these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians, these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless unheard nobodies, each offering to the marketplace their gross of kimchee, lichee, plantain, black bean, soy milk, coconut milk, ginger, grouper, ahi, yellow curry, cuchifrito, jalapeno, their everything, selling anything to each other and to themselves, every day of the year, and every minute. (83) The list itself emerges through the crisscrossing of internal rhymes and echoes. Final and initial sounds, vowels, rhythms, meters are repeated in such a way as to create linkages that remain at the edge of the perceptible, reconfiguring the territory of order. Nouns disappear or are transfigured into shapes, numbers, or pure acoustic materiality. The “streaming and working and dealing” can be seen not as modifiers of “platoons” but as agents themselves. The everyday becomes the realm of “whatevers, whoevers, nobodies, everything, themselves,” with this list of words enacting a movement from insignificance and absence to an immanent identity. The list is a form of becoming, occurring from one minute to the next. This passage also embodies a concept that the novel calls the jumble, another variant of the list form. Many scenes involve heaps of heterogeneous things—in the house of Henry’s deceased father, for example, “things were still in piles” (227). But the metaphor of the jumble is applied most daringly to describe Henry’s own family, his wife and biracial child, Mitt: “the three of us, looking like a family accident . . . the most serendipitous pile” (345). The jumble is not a dissolution of edges or boundaries into a larger or primordial unity. It names exactly the discord that persists within harmony. The child himself is described as a “boy’s form already so beautifully jumbled and subversive and historic” (103). Mitt has died in an accident, before the beginning of the novel. Notably, his voice is heard through the same device we saw in Keller’s novel: a tape recording that allows a voice to survive its material body. But here, there is no secret history to be uncovered. Rather, Mitt is preserved as a locus of possibility by being removed from the ongoing world. The possibility in question is that of perceiving discord and jumble, the messiness of the everyday, as a kind of emergence. Native Speaker tries to imagine a nation more like a growing list than a single body. It locates the political in minor steps toward something on the edge of visibility. In its final scene, Henry accompanies Lelia, a speech therapist, to a job at an elementary school teaching children who happen to be the same age as their dead

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son.27 Confronting “twenty anxious faces [in what is] really a form of day care, ESL style,” Henry accepts his role as her assistant: I like my job. I wear a green rubber hood and act in my role as the Speech Monster. I play it well. I gobble up kids, but I cower when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase, which Lelia has them practice earlier. Today the phrase is Gently down the stream . . . it helps that they can remember the melody of the song . . . and so they singsong it to me, to slay me, subdue me, this very first of their lyrics. (348–349, original emphasis) In this carefully chosen minor and even miniature setting, the novel reiterates its hope that agency can reside in small lyrical acts. At the end, rather than at the beginning of the scene, and as the novel’s final act, Lelia reads aloud the class list: Lelia gives each one a sticker. She uses the class list to write their names inside the sunburst-shaped badge. Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write on the sticker, and then have me press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces . . . Now, she calls out each one as best as she can . . . and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages. (349) The novel sums up its attempts to draft new trajectories of the visible and sayable in this “line of quiet faces” and names. The list does not summon the children into being as political subjects but dismisses them by name, sends them out one at a time into the world: “we bid each kid goodbye . . . we probably won’t see them again this summer” (349). The abstraction and the seriality of the everyday, the one-afteranother structure that we have seen many times, become transfigured. Each child is recognized not quite as a unique identity, but as an exact physical shape of abstract possibility: “When I embrace them, half pick them up, they are just that size I will forever know, that very weight so wondrous to me” (349). They are linked together by a formal equality given substance through memory. Balanced between serendipity and order, the list becomes the figure of democratic openness.

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Extensive Time and Crumpled Surfaces: Projects of Identity in Frank Chin and Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Though its attention typically wanders, the everyday tends to focus on what is close at hand. This final chapter examines a different way in which everyday proximity in time and space can be reclaimed. I begin by exploring the contrast between strongly emplotted narrative and minor everyday duration. The essence of a certain kind of narrative lies in movement and a sense of discovery. I will argue that this model of narrative plays a crucial role in works that I take as representative of the cultural nationalist moment of Asian American history, when Asian American identity began to be publicly asserted in various institutional settings. This programmatic commitment to establishing ethnic identity dates from the Asian American movement discussed above in chapter 4, but continues to be exerted even as other trends, demographic and otherwise, start to change how Asian America is conceived.1 In the writing of Frank Chin and even of Maxine Hong Kingston, it is felt to be imperative to address the question of the distinctiveness of Asian American identity, even if it is set aside in the end as irresolvable. But at its most confidently pursued, as we see in Chin’s Donald Duk (1991), this impulse fulfills itself through narrative’s capacity to tie past and present together in a continuous, directional motion. A clear sense of identity lies at the end of this movement and gives meaning to Chin’s Asian American bildungsroman. I set in contrast to this work the very different project of the local Hawaii writer, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, whose Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996) explores the possibilities of time as intermediate duration. Yamanaka’s novel can also be seen as a coming-of-age novel, or a novel of subject formation.2 But the sense of directed movement toward a singular identity is less compelling than the contingent discoveries of everyday duration that make themselves felt at every turn. From this aimless and intimate everyday time, there arises a different sense of identity as embedded in the worn, used, and ultimately eloquent surfaces of small and local things.

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Everyday duration is time whose passage can be felt and even measured, without seeming to lead anywhere or to produce any decisive difference in a state of affairs. It is an intermediate time, a time of waiting, of nonhappening or not-quite-happening. Kathleen Stewart describes it as “the jump of something coming together for a minute” in one’s attention before dissolving away.3 Everyday life, as she puts it, possesses “the quality of a continuous motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” within which certain durations put themselves forward as more perceptible, more fraught with affect than others, though all blend back into that continuous “reeling present.”4 Yamanaka evokes the affect of pure temporal duration, of simply waiting it out: “It’s another Sunday. Mother with her Parliaments hanging off her lip, watch the ash grow long, crackle, then fall. Watch the smoke rise.”5 Lovey, a girl on the threshold of adolescence, sits with her mother on the front porch of her home in Hilo, Hawaii, as they pick fleas off their dogs in a weekly ritual that discovers nothing that is not already a deeply familiar part of their world. In terms of time, this is neither a beginning nor an end but “another Sunday,” a middle point in an unspecified, ongoing series. The scene contains measures of everyday duration: “watch the ash grow long, crackle, then fall.” Its measure is taken in a half-conscious way, and the subject is not even grammatically specified (as permitted by Hawaiian pidgin). Is it first or second person, third, or none? Despite this ambiguity, Yamanaka restores qualitative texture and depth to an ordinary, featureless, and inconsequential moment. We can think of it in the terms Certeau uses to distinguish between what he calls “space” and “place.” A place is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed . . . each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location . . . A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.6 In a system of time considered as place, Yamanaka’s scene occurs within certain hours on a certain day with a particular date. But through the details of the ash growing and falling and the smoke rising, she actuates a sense of time by tracing how attention wanders, projects itself outward and retreats inward within a vague duration. We witness the representation of an intermediate duration, and of a particular type of open, interpretive attention composed of mobile elements. This treatment of time as actuated by the movements of everyday attention sets Yamanaka’s everyday apart from what we’ve seen in other Asian American writers. Her everyday also acquires a new function, pointing not only to the global dimension of modernity but through it to a renewed concept of the local in time, space, and experience. In Yamanaka’s writing, the everyday is what there is when nothing much is happening: the normal, the boring, the ground as opposed to the figure. Like many of the other writers examined in this book, she focuses on things. The object world of Wild Meat is precisely rendered in space and time: Hilo, Hawaii, in the 1970s, seen

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through the eyes of a “local” girl, a second-generation Japanese American, who is working-class, resentful, curious, and preternaturally observant. The things in question range from toys to clothes, tools, gadgets, signs, machines, and animals; the price, age, provenance, appearance, and use of a thing are almost always noted with great precision. Attention to these concerns makes sense for a character like Lovey Nariyoshi, who is poor but desirous, seduced by the images of mass media and full of consumerist fantasies.7 But Yamanaka’s representations of such things go beyond what is required for the purpose of characterizing a person or even a milieu. She focuses on the surfaces, the exteriority of things not as outsides but as the material bearers of historicity. In other words, surfaces are not superficial. Or rather, the surfaces of local things are not superficial: unlike the ever-new, shiny, and out-of-reach commodity, these local things and bodies display dust, fingerprints, wear and tear, rust, and erosion. Their surfaces not only change over time but themselves constitute the historicity of the everyday. This is a minor historicity of use and duration—not the major historicity of origin. It isn’t just a question of where this came from but of how (and for how long) it’s been used. The shift may not seem important, but it is. This emphasis on everyday historicity offers an alternative to the same “floor plan” of capitalist modernity and the nation-state to which Certeau alludes: the installation, on the one hand, of an abstracting grid of equivalence over space and time, and the demand, on the other hand, for unique stories of national development and personal identity. To ask how something has been used rather than where it is from, to ask where you have been staying rather than where you belong, can circumvent the latter demand. It’s not that Yamanaka is engaged in a bold act of political resistance. Rather, she takes advantage of the very limitations of the everyday, its limited inquisitiveness and range of action, to adumbrate how the texture of the here-and-now matters. Yamanaka’s work draws on a particular, well-established idiom of the “local”: the term by which residents of Hawaii of Asian descent refer to themselves. The remarkable writers and poets affiliated with the Bamboo Ridge journal have embodied this idea in their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Preferring the term “local” to the label “Asian American,” writers such as Wing Tek Lum and Eric Chock show how local identity arises not from origin or filiation or even conscious affiliation, but from a duration of time, a facility of practice, and an attachment to place.8 Both the term and the practice of “talk story” have been crucial in establishing this distinct sense of local identity, as the Bamboo Ridge writers realized vividly at the 1978 “Talk Story: Hawaii’s Ethnic American Writers” conference. Rob Wilson has traced the political significance of the concept of locality: “within a globalizing economy of transnational circulation that would construct and produce the local/ locality into a tourist icon,” Wilson argues, the Bamboo Ridge writers have succeeded in reconstructing the local “as ground of place and vision . . . as a distinctive place, ground of commitment and identity and language.”9 What seems most distinctive, though, in the broader context of this study, is their embrace of the everyday. At the inception of the Bamboo Ridge group in the late 1970s, their

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interest in the everyday was criticized by “mainland” Asian American writers as showing insufficient political engagement.10 This is in keeping with the tension that I have traced in earlier chapters between a commitment to ethnic identity in a national or imperial context and an attention to the everyday in the context of global modernity.11 But the local and the everyday share a common scale and span: both are content with intermediate durations and transitions, with the “gradual process of appropriation,” with the “predominance of the middle, the median, and the mixture,” in Michael Sheringham’s words.12 Both the local and the everyday hinge on what Certeau calls “the ambiguity of an actualization,” the ambiguity of practice and usage as opposed to an abstract system of rules and coordinates.13 In Yamanaka’s practice and in those of other Bamboo Ridge writers, representations of the everyday feed back into a local practice of place and time. What this entails, however, is a different orientation toward narrative representation, and a different understanding of how and where identity comes into being. The development of a character remains in the background, while in the foreground, particularly in Wild Meat, there is an almost essayistic attention to surroundings, practices, and the surfaces of bodies and signs. It’s a matter of tracing and retracing the same patterns. As a result, identity emerges as a sense of the local, but it does not emerge as a clearly grasped object of knowledge at the end of a process of searching. Instead, it arises as the result of repeated minor encounters and routine handling. Heidegger notes that “the closest kind of association is not mere perceptual cognition, but, rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things which has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’ ”14 For Lovey, the narrator of Wild Meat, the self is something more like a tool for unremarkable acts than an object to be known. “I pick up rocks and juggle three of them. Put one between the fingers of one hand. Then the other. I squeeze my fingers together . . . And I throw the rocks at the road all at once” (37). In Yamanaka’s work we see a deliberately haphazard, yet precisely executed anatomy of a familiar world, and the emergence of an identity through proximity, physical familiarity, and contact, rather than internal development or reflection.15 This contrasts with the narrative of ethnic self-knowledge whose impulse was memorably articulated by Maxine Hong Kingston: “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?”16 Even though other aspects of the Asian American movement were directed at different goals, in the creative works of the cultural nationalist moment, the clarification of ethnic identity was of paramount significance. Kingston presents it as an epistemological challenge, but it is also ethical and political in its use of ethnic identity as the basis of a demand for social justice. The Woman Warrior displays its modernity through the presentation of this desire to know, to separate the true from the false and the certain from the uncertain. Though never completely realized, the aim is to construct a clear and adequate image that corresponds to “what is Chinese” in oneself and in the larger world. When Kingston declares, “I want to go to China and find

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out who’s lying . . . I’d like to go to China and see those people and find out what’s a cheat story and what’s not,” the bravado is ironized, but the impulse is not abandoned.17 There seems to be hope that eventually, at the end of a long process of “sort[ing] out,” one will come to know oneself as a whole. But in Yamanaka’s fictions of the everyday and in the writing of Bamboo Ridge, a kind of implicit identity emerges not by anticipating an end, searching for truth, or negating a false ideal, but simply through repeated association with what is at hand in everyday existence. Narrative plays a crucial role in the recovery of ethnic identity. Reclaiming lost or denied historical narratives, as we have noted, is seen as an essential step in the discovery of the ethnic self. Moreover, narrative form itself becomes a trope for identity, a way of making a claim about the trajectory of the self. Ethnicity itself becomes a grand plot. It illuminates every detail in retrospect; it is the end of the story that had been there all along. In the temporal structure of narrative, as Roland Barthes has described it, small elements of potential meaning are not only integrated vertically into more general levels of meaning, but also developed over time, picked up and fulfilled at a later point in the narrative. For example, when an object is described, an anticipation of its later use is established. There is a counterpoint of anticipation, deferral, and the fulfillment of meaning, and this rhythm depends on the presence of a certain forward pull of time—the time of reading as well as the represented time of the narrative. It leaves no traces behind itself that can’t be assimilated to the narrative drive. This dynamic becomes a way of demonstrating the centrality of ethnicity to the self, as I will discuss below. But the everyday possesses a strongly antinarrative tendency. By antinarrative I do not mean simply that elements of the story are told out of order, or by different voices or viewpoints. Those are standard features of narrative, as Gérard Genette and other theorists have shown. Rather, it is emplotment that is strikingly absent, the sense that each moment will be redeemed decisively in a future one. Instead, there appears to be a cycling and a recycling of time, stories, signs, and things. Dramatic events occur without being anticipated; they fail to mark a permanent change in time or consciousness. Recurrence is simply recurrence. But Yamanaka’s fiction is neither aimless nor engaged in a game of disrupting form.18 It suggests the historical limitations of master narratives of ethnic identity: stories that represent a passage from shame and confusion to enlightenment, agency, and self-knowledge. Those narratives can wishfully conflate the individual story with history itself. But in Yamanaka’s work we rarely lose sight of a larger history within which the everyday arises. Though the quotidian seems to stand outside history, it is the product and the sign of modernity, as we see through the novel’s unceasing small-scale attention to mass-produced and mass-marketed commodities.19 The commodity is a ubiquitous object of desire for Lovey, but is usually unattainable: too expensive, too far away. But it’s only through the mediation of the commodity form that everyday proximity and squalor become discernible as historical structures of feeling. The commodity never bears the traces of history: it’s

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always fresh, unmarked, and translucent, the novel’s dominant trope. Against the eternal newness of this object of desire, we can perceive the historicity of everyday things: traces left on the surfaces of objects, patterns of recurrence, and the feelings generated by these patterns. These are things, usually, that no one wants. But they can restore a sense of immanent meaning, an intimate, unspoken one, to the local. They point, in Lefebvre’s words, toward “the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings.”20 If the modern assumption is to place these terms in opposition to each other (either familiar or conscious, either virtue or blind habit), Yamanaka’s everyday shows how they inhere in each other.

Narrative as Instrument of Identity Frank Chin’s novel Donald Duk (1991) exemplifies the rejection of the everyday by a model of identity based on one-way narrative movement. As a writer and critic, Chin has been an influential figure in the literary branch of Asian American cultural nationalism; together with Shawn Wong, Lawson Inada, and Jeffery Chan, he edited the groundbreaking anthology Aiiieeeee! (1974), which restored attention to the work of writers including Carlos Bulosan and Toshio Mori at a moment when much of their writing had been forgotten. Chin has achieved notoriety for his vision of Asian American masculinity, a stance derived from a rejection of the model minority myth (which Chin renames “racist love”), a claim about the centrality of Chinese immigrants to the history of the American West, and an eclectic invocation of Chinese myth and epic.21 All of these ideas are present in this brief novel, which reads like a primer to Chin’s thought. Some basic similarities to Yamanaka’s Wild Meat make the contrast between their approaches even more striking. Like Yamanaka, Chin places his protagonist on the cusp of adulthood. Both characters live in insular communities, places in which ethnicity has become a commodified tourist spectacle (San Francisco’s Chinatown; Hawaii). And Chin’s novel occurs within a certain duration: the two weeks of the Chinese New Year celebration in the year of Donald’s twelfth birthday. But for Chin, the goal is clear, and the goal is everything: Donald’s self-discovery as an autonomous male Asian American subject. Narrative is the form that self-discovery takes; and one particular historical narrative becomes an indispensable means to this end. Donald Duk tells the story, in other words, of how Donald discovers his own story.22 Donald, a fifth-generation Chinese American twelve-year-old, begins in a state of ethnic shame, pained by the “racist love” that Asian Americans receive from established power (represented by Donald’s teacher, Mr. Meanwright) but unable to express his anger. He lives in an inauthentic state, oppressed by the opinions of others, dimly aware that there must be some truth inherent in his condition. The first chapter ends: “Donald Duk does not want to laugh about his name forever. There has to be an end to this . . . an end to all kidstuff . . . An end to nursery rhymes.”23 Though we don’t know how he is going to get there, the end is clearly

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anticipated as an event that shapes the movement toward itself. Donald’s progress toward authentic identity occurs as a narrative and by means of appropriating one particular story: the building of the Central Pacific railroad, and its completion at Promontory Point in May 1869. Donald is linked to this historical narrative through his descent: his great-great-grandfather worked on the construction of this railroad, as he discovers. But this means nothing until Donald himself, in the novel’s main structural device, relives this history each night in his dreams, which form a continuous, developing and suspenseful story. Knowing the true history of one’s ethnic forebears means reliving it inside oneself: “he wants to dream for a look at his great-great-grandfather . . . The dream comes on like a movie all over his eyes” (25). Donald’s progress toward self-possession and the railroad’s spatial extension are exactly synchronized. Chin gives this segment of Asian American history a simple narrative structure. Rather than dwelling on the everyday life of the Chinese railroad workers, for example, or describing the gradually growing length of the railroad as it is laid down, Chin shapes the dream-historical narrative around one event: a competition between the Union Pacific’s Irish workers and the Central Pacific’s Chinese workers to see who can lay down more track in a single day to achieve the world’s record. The event is repeatedly anticipated, announced in the first narrated dream. The intention is repeatedly proclaimed: “Today we make history!” the Chinese foreman calls out (95). The workers collectively shout their intention before the competition begins. While the Irish workers can only lay seven miles in twenty-one hours, they will build ten miles in ten hours: “ ‘Ten miles! Ten hours! Ten miles! One day’s work!’ The gangs cheer” (96). A non-Chinese spectator comments on the “arrogance” of this intention, but is proved wrong (96). The emphasis does not fall, as one might expect, on the relation between empty time and abstract labor. Everything underscores the physical agon, the strength, daring, and technical skill of the Chinese workers as they work furiously with tons of steel in order to break the world record: “the rail sings fishplates and nuts and bolts wrenched tight with tools as long as a man is tall, made of solid steel that gets hot in the sun, hot with the work” of the Chinese men (111). Their triumph—“We made history,” Donald repeats later (122)—is ratified by a supernatural appearance of a mythical group of Chinese outlaw heroes. In the final scene of Donald Duk’s embedded historical narrative, Chinese workers lay the final cross-tie that connects the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory Point. It is a world-heroic event and the culmination of clearly heroic self-conscious activity—the antithesis of the everyday. In a crucial twist, Chin represents this event as one that has been excised from the official narrative of American history. In Donald’s dream, the owner of the Central Pacific tears out the final cross-tie, inscribed with “[a]ll of our [Chinese] names. Ten thousand names” (129). The Chinese workers are barred from the official ceremony of the last spike, while Crocker adds (in case of any doubt), “The Last Spike will be hammered home . . . our photograph made to preserve a great

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moment in our nation’s history, without the Chinese” (131). The Chinese workers “made history” in one sense; Donald himself has to make history as well, in the sense of uncovering its truth and appropriating it as his own. Donald’s father, when he hears of his son’s dream, gravely affirms, “The truth came looking for you in the dreams . . . You know what is true. You know what is true” (139). Donald comes into possession of this true narrative through his dreamwork; because it is officially denied, it becomes even more intimately the core truth of his own identity. When he complains to his father that “[w]e made history . . . And they don’t even put the name of our foreman in the books about the railroad,” his father responds, “You gotta keep the history yourself or lose it forever, boy” (122–123). The larger historical narrative becomes his story to keep, as well as the basis for the construction of a distinctive, oppositional Asian American identity. Once recovered, it is relocated to a permanent place within the self, where it becomes the token and the totem of ethnic, masculine awakening. Chin uses every device of narrative in order to increase our feeling of suspense as we watch the performance of a heroic action. He links the forward momentum or pull of narrative to an aesthetic of the sublime and a particular concept of masculine autonomy. “The crashing pulses of rhythm . . . moments of rhythmic senseless violence” (53) are what unify the various musical and dramatic genres as well as forms of physical labor that Chin praises as authentically masculine and authentically ethnic. Somewhat surprisingly, Chin includes cooking as a form that combines art and labor, heroic creation and sublime destruction.24 Donald’s father, a famous Chinatown chef, is thus described in his kitchen, working also with steel: “I will restore ways that have become abandoned and recover knowledge that has been lost,” Dad yells . . . He doesn’t turn down the squirt of flames . . . The startled steel of the large woks clicks and sings. Dad’s hands and arms disappear into the steam . . . The steam and smoke bloom and mushroom-cloud about Donald Duk’s father. (63) The telos is autonomy, the power to create and destroy solely on one’s own terms. There is a distinctively modernist willingness to destroy the past as well. Chin would like to require a sublime indifference to past accomplishments and an exclusive orientation toward the future.25 We could describe this as an internalizing of the forward motion of narrative itself. At the end of the novel, Donald “believes the dreams are gone. The last spike . . . seems the end of the story” (169). But the New Year’s parade that he is running in, as part of a large dragon, signifies the continuity of forward narrative motion, and Donald’s new status as a man, sublimely and mythically alone. “No parents . . . Nobody from the public library, the school . . . Inside the dragon, he can’t see the faces in the crowd . . . Up Powell, down Sutter, up Stockton, down California, up Kearney, he seems running forever” (171). Running forever should not be confused with going nowhere. Narratives can keep going through further heroic exertion; but the ongoingness of the everyday is something no one does.

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The Sense of Endings What happens if you never get to the end? Or if you never thought much of the end to begin with? Michael Sheringham provides a possible answer in his discussion of the word “project,” as used in the French discourse of the quotidian: although it points towards an end, a project makes the end less defined, more hypothetical. Compared to a plan, a project is less determined by a specific goal that is known in advance and is to be achieved in a set way . . . In a project the relation between the activities in the foreground or midterm and any eventual issue is uncertain: to talk of a project is to invoke the hazards of that relationship . . . A project—a commitment to midterm actions—implies a preoccupation with the domain of practice.26 Yamanaka’s novel is as committed to the openness of the project as Chin’s is devoted to the ideal of progress. We can see the curiously suspended status of the end at the literal end of the book. The final chapter recycles an earlier story, one told (an unspecified number of times) to Lovey by her father, Hubert, who grew up on a Kauai plantation as part of a large and poor family. When Hubert’s older brothers would go up a favorite mountain, he would be left standing behind a line they had drawn in the dirt road. This was not a finish line but a line of interruption. He ends his story, told in the middle of the book, by reiterating his wish to ascend the mountain on a future day and to bring back some of its soil, as his own father had done from Japan. In the final chapter, Hubert’s eyes are injured in a hunting accident, and Lovey decides to return alone to this plantation to fulfill her father’s wish. But rather than demonstrating her autonomy, her trip painstakingly repeats the itinerary of her father’s often-told memories. Most significantly, her goal of ascending the mountain remains unaccomplished when she is stopped by a plantation guard. Lovey fills a bag with “two handfuls of dirt . . . from the side of the pine tree road to Kipu” (274) and brings this instead to her father at the novel’s end. Here, the middle is literally substituted for the end. The intermediate, the adjacent, and the proximate are where this novel directs its attention. Though aware of the allure of endings, of their role in giving the middle a sense of significance, Yamanaka’s novel seems to accept them almost grudgingly, as a narrative convention.27 The novel’s ending makes less of an impression than its bold claims for the independent meaning and form of intermediate durations of time. Wild Meat seems skeptical of the idea that knowledge of one’s own or another’s identity depends on the outcome of a narrative. It remains suspicious of the normative, disciplinary nature of certain pervasive narratives. And it affirms a kind of interpretive project exemplified by “handling, using, taking care” of objects in the context of everyday association. The banality of endings is suggested by the opening chapter. Called “Happy Endings,” it questions the idea that the middle as such receives meaning from

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anticipated and deferred endings. Lovey begins: “Shirley Temple movies made me cry on Sunday mornings, cry, made me want to miss Sunday School. Wish it were just one hour later so I could see Shirley as Heidi say, ‘Grandpapa, Grandpapa, I love you, I love you,’ as her words echoed in the Swiss mountains” (3). The joke is that endings are regularly scheduled events that one may miss because of other obligations, such as the need to be saved every Sunday: “I hardly got to those endings. I was out the door and on my bike to Sunday School when Shirley was on her way to the hospital” (3). Endings are exposed as inherently theatrical; they are occasions manufactured for a kind of sentimental exertion oriented toward the spectator. They find their justification in the audience’s emotion. “I used to wish I was just like her, with perfect blond ringlets . . . and a happy ending every Sunday, and crying ’cause of being happy, I mean real happy, so someone watching can cry too” (3). Endings bear a taint of theatricality in the sense of unreality, as well. When Lovey imagines writing her “very own happy ending,” she artlessly imagines herself and her friend Jerry lost and then found by their mothers coming “through a crowd of people who are actors. My mother hugs me and Jerry’s mother hugs him . . . Shirley watches and cries” (4). The point of an ending is to be seen; yet, in a possibly dangerous kind of theatricality, endings tempt spectators and actors to switch positions in imagination. At best, endings are regular occasions for a kind of catharsis. Jerry “said that him and me shouldn’t watch Shirley Temple together. We’d hold back the tears . . . Better to watch by yourself ” (3). But rather than purging spectators of fear or pity, happy endings fill them with satanic envy and self-pity. Endings are things that lucky ones possess. Jerry says to Lovey that they “weren’t good enough to have the kind of love” that Shirley receives at the end of the movie (4). From Shirley Temple, the chapter moves on to a children’s television show that Lovey and Jerry watch “every day after school” (6). The show culminates with the selection of a fortunate child who is allowed to take “a hand full of pennies” from a jar each Monday; “the studio lights dim and a spotlight shines all around. All the kids try to look angelic . . . They all smile” (5). The same dynamic of theatricality, envy, and understated irony is set in motion by the salvific ending. This chapter replaces endings altogether with intermediate durations. Lovey and Jerry write their own endings to the Shirley Temple movies during the church services, using the Sunday bulletin. They take turns writing “line by line . . . until the end of the service” (4), but it is not clear whether they actually get to the end of their ending (though they get far enough to make each other cry). The directionality of narrative is replaced by the seriality of line after line. Lovey and Jerry also re-create the final scene from the TV show: “We took the biggest handful of pennies from a . . . mayonnaise jar” (5). Though they know they will “never be there” in the studio, Lovey acquires a certain type of embodied knowledge of what is at hand: “I know how good it feels to stretch my hand over the cool of the pennies” (8). As the two children play, they confirm the value not of the theatrical ending, but of the private in-between dura-

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tion of the everyday: “At the top of the slide at school, Jerry says, ‘Happy endings all the time, Lovey: Multiply by twenty and hold your hands up high and you going feel infinity before your feet touch the sand at the bottom.’ And it happens, feeling like infinity, if my eyes are closed, closed tight like a fistful of pennies” (8). The image of Lovey closing her eyes is not simply one of blocking out, but also of holding in: of retaining what is at hand, what is close enough to feel, though not necessarily possessed. Infinity occurs somewhere between the top and “before your feet touch . . . the bottom.” Narrative structures with clearly envisioned endings are linked by the novel with an oppressive disciplinary power. Discipline, or the diffuse power to inscribe normality, is vividly embodied in the figure of Lovey’s sadistic English teacher, Mr. Harvey, who lectures his class “for the fiftieth time this year” on the necessity of changing their speech from pidgin to “Standard English”: “You’re speaking a low-class form of good Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life” (9). Mr. Harvey forces each student to stand up and to declare, as an exercise in speaking Standard English, “what you would like to be when you grow up” (11). Another assignment is to write their own obituaries. It is not a coincidence that the children are being asked to imagine an ending as part of the process of linguistic standardization. Yet Lovey cannot or will not imagine, as her teacher would have her do, a narrative that progresses from a particular beginning to a concrete end. When assigned as another writing theme, “What would you do if your parents died in a train crash?” Lovey will only imagine an unchanging everyday: I’ll probably live with my grandma . . . who makes me take Flintstone vitamins every morning, and eat S & S saimin with chopped green onions . . . for lunch. At five o’clock Aunty Bing will drive the Malibu to the drugstore where Grandma works. Grandma will have a whole box of chocolate wafer candy in gold paper for me. (18) Though this time is subdivided into periods and hours, Lovey’s description inhabits the eternal present of repetition; she concludes, “All of this I’ll do over and over again” (18). The day is not a temporal setting or location for a singular event, but a set of routines, shapes, and sensations. These routines lead to a form of identification based on nearness and familiarity, surface texture and leftover traces rather than essence. When Lovey privately imagines her own death (“I might be deaf . . . I might be blind”), she addresses her grandmother: “Come close when you take me home. I know you by the smell of . . . green onions on your fingers. I know you by the feel of gold paper” (19). Everyday association is far from blind or naive, however. In Yamanaka’s novel, attention to the surfaces and textures of things reflects an awareness of how signs change their meanings over time. As material vehicles of meaning, signifiers are vulnerable to the effects of ongoing everyday time, time without marked beginning or end. The erosion and alteration of everyday signifiers, on the one hand, and the cunning adaptations of everyday interpretation that keep up with them, on the

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other hand, are almost polemically opposed to the way in which narrative forms relate time and meaning. We can see this contrast most strikingly in the chapter called “Wrong Words.” This chapter relates the tragic narrative of Crystal Kawasaki, Lovey’s after-school babysitter and girlfriend of Jerry’s older brother. Though rich, beautiful, and kind, Crystal inhabits a tragic story; she becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and ultimately hangs herself. But these events, given in terse and minimal narration, only occupy the chapter’s interstices. The rambling, disconnected chapter is composed mostly of brief anecdotes and reminiscences concerned with two topics: signs and reading. Signs of local gas stations, restaurants, and stores, for example, are discussed. “At the Chevron by Uncle Ed’s house, someone erased the S from SMOKING and it read NO MOKING like no mokes could moke around the station” (232).28 A local Chinese restaurant is called “MOMI’S KITCHEN . . . At night, the K in KITCHEN fizzles off and on, so the sign says MOMI’S ITCHEN and the joke in town . . . is, yep, she itchin’ all right” (234). The signs are the occasion of inevitable jokes, but what emerges most strongly from the accumulated examples is a sense of how material and how frangible a signifier is over the course of time. The Poi Kakugawa Store reveals this: “Everybody in Hilo thought the name of the store on my street was Poi Kakugawa Store. Everybody called the old man, ‘Eh, Poi.’” Lovey, however, stumbles on an old photograph that shows that “there used to be two signs. One sign said fresh poi and the other, KAKUGAWA STORE until the FRESH on the first sign got broken off ” (233). A letter is erased, a lightbulb wears out, or a part of a sign falls off. Such events do not count as events, even though there occurs a shift in meaning, orientation, and identity: “the sign broke and the old man got to be Poi” (234). The attendant shift in interpretation also occurs within this everyday time, unregistered and unnarratable. Crystal, too, is constituted less as a subject of narrative than as a sign, but not in the disciplinary sense that we might anticipate. She does not become the sign of either liberated or transgressive female sexuality. The melodramatic narrative in which she figures is reduced to a few whispers of gossip, a thirdhand anecdote, a one-sentence description of Crystal’s end (“Crystal hung herself from the pneumatic arm of her back door”) and a description of Lovey’s embarrassment at Crystal’s funeral. Instead, the pile of brief scenes turns Crystal into a sign of everyday reading. Lovey remembers Crystal as one of the “fifth-grade helpers” for slow first-grade readers like herself, and as her after-school tutor for many years: “In the first grade, Crystal read me A Pair of Red Clogs and Ping stories every day after school” (236). As a signifier, and despite the meaning of her name, Crystal is opaque and subject to change and defacement. But the chapter makes the point that such processes do not occur with the force and inevitability of narrative, whose ending establishes a permanent meaning. Rather, signs invoke a different context of everyday use and time. Signs are altered, read, and misread not once and for all but every day: “The gas station sign said STOP YOUR MOTOR. NO SMOKING . . . I read the words STOP YOUR MOTHER and really, I didn’t know how” (232–233). The lack of a definitive ending becomes the occasion for hope as well as despair.

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Objects, Traces, and Uses Wild Meat represents everyday time through its effects on the surfaces of things: the perceptible traces that certain durations of time leave behind. It is sometimes a process of accretion, sometimes subtraction or erosion. But it doesn’t look at everyday duration in isolation. Rather, everyday time is distinguishable only in the context of a larger history of modernity. What Henri Lefebvre describes as “the advent of competitive capitalism and the expansion of the world of trade” is evoked through sly references and allusions.29 The Shirley Temple movies that Lovey watches every Sunday are only one example of mass culture; television and radio are ubiquitous. Though they seem to be only the chatter or buzz of the moment, we gradually see these examples of mass media as part of the same system within which Hawaii’s plantations developed, as occasionally alluded to by Lovey’s father. This larger history, unlike Frank Chin’s history, emphatically belongs to no one. It seems to be a universal history of dispossession. The novel constructs a certain language or discourse of objects in order to convey the distinction, as well as the close relation, between everyday duration and history. It invokes at least two categories of material objects. The commodity is mass-produced, exchangeable, pristine, and somehow always untouchable. It stands as the goal dreamed of, desired by many, and often actively pursued through a narrative of directed effort. It is also a racialized object, the totem of a dominant racial group, and it plays a critical part in a discourse that assigns material qualities to immaterial distinctions and relations. Over against the commodity stands the everyday object, which is scorned rather than desired. The everyday object is something left over or recycled rather than actively sought out, saved for, and acquired at last. It is inevitably “local” in use, if not in provenance. Although a retrospective narrative could be inspired by the everyday object, it is valued in this novel more for its antinarrative qualities. The everyday object is associated with the flux of embodied being. Bodies are, in fact, the quintessential everyday object in Yamanaka’s novel, sometimes one’s own and sometimes another’s. As familiar everyday objects, bodies occupy space, move through space haphazardly, possess the capacity to work and to be worked on in determinate ways, and bear traces of the ambiguous influence of time. These superficial qualities, when observed and interpreted, become the basis for Yamanaka’s formulation of identity. Commodity fetishes frequently appear according to their classic definition in Wild Meat. They are concentrated in a chapter entitled “The Perfect Haole House,” in which Lovey deliriously envisions an environment perfectly dominated by the social relationships between things. There is no place for human use or for the exchange value that should be rooted in mutual need. There is a Dixie bathroom cup dispenser with cups that have blue and pink flowers around the bottom in the perfect house . . . a knitted poodle covering

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the next roll of toilet paper, rose-shaped soap in matching porcelain dishes, and rose-colored towels. A rosy shower curtain and a rose rug around the toilet and on the toilet seat . . . In the kitchen there are blue glasses . . . and Tupperware that’s still shiny . . . And automatic ice cubes that drop out of a clean freezer . . . On the coffee table, magazines . . . spread out like a fan, all the time like that . . . Mother wipes the clear-plastic covers on the furniture every day and the material underneath looks crispy. (20–21, original emphasis) In the harmonious relationship between the cup dispenser and the cups, the rose-colored accessories, and the ice cubes and the freezer, mass-produced commodities create their own utopian society based on the authenticity of the corporate brand. Human use is banished—at best, humans serve to maintain the perfection of things, to eliminate any traces of use. Even though Lovey notes the actions of a generic haole (Caucasian) mother, who “pours real Coca-Cola and 7-Up,” or “takes out the Christmas mugs and makes real hot chocolate” (21), the point of consumption, the destruction of the object through its use, is elided. Clearly, despite the reference to “every day,” this scene does not represent any ordinary duration. In its own seriocomic way, it offers an apocalypse of the everyday in pure racial whiteness, and the repeated references to Christmas seem to underline this curious sense of critical rather than ordinary time, kairos rather than chronos: “At Christmastime, the mother and daughters wear matching flannel nightgowns with lace . . . they sing ‘Silent Night,’ at least three verses in three-part harmony” (21–22).30 This heaven on earth is always new, and entirely white. What defines the commodity, and what paradoxically constitutes its historical dimension, is its resistance to wear and tear. The commodity form transcends any use because it transcends the material body of the object. Yamanaka cleverly makes this point not only in the above description, but in her general use of the trope of translucence. The objects of Lovey’s desire are shiny, translucent things. “A satin pastel pincushion . . . A huge plastic, see-through sewing chest. And a shiny, silver, official Singer’s scissors from the locked showcase” (198) that the rich girls in her sewing class own. Or a “see-through cosmetic bag full of cotton balls and silver shiny mirrors too” (226), again associated with a particular “official” brand of cosmetics. The “official” commodity forever locks away its essence and offers its transparent body up for inspection. It has a name, and it signifies itself. There are no fingerprints, no marks of the passage of time. But Yamanaka makes it clear that the commodity form arises in its greatest perfection through a dialectical relation with the everyday object, which is local, derivative, soiled and worn, opaque. The commodities that inhabit the “Perfect Haole House” are in fact evoked through the meticulous negation of the quotidian objects that actually compose the world around Lovey. The negation of empirical vision by mass-produced and massmediated fantasy is wittily hinted; the passage begins, “I see a wicker hamper, not a plastic laundry basket . . . and a rose rug around the toilet . . . that is plush, not flat”

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(20). To perceive this heaven of commodities, you have to erase certain signs, or rather signs of signs: class and culture-specific signs and, most of all, signs of use. The father sprays Lysol all over the bathroom [in the perfect house] . . . There are . . . pink ruffles and white eyelet bedspreads over beds that are made every day the way haoles do with the pillow tucked under, not a vinyl punee covered with a sheet and a folded futon or a grandma-made quilt out of old dress material crumpled at the bottom of the bed. (21) There are no fingerprints on the “clear-plastic covers on the furniture.” The covers also ensure that the fabric is only seen, not felt: “the material underneath looks crispy” (21). Everyday objects not only bear the traces of everyday use but nearly disappear into these traces, crumples, creases, and folds. “The perfect house,” Lovey remarks, “doesn’t have an old pea-green bedspread over a sofa with foam padding crumbling like sand into the creases of the cushion. The father doesn’t stuff the TV Guide into the crack of the La-Z-Boy” (21). Henri Lefebvre argues that capitalism produces “two inter-dependent ‘realities,’ the Quotidian and the Modern”: The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in . . . a regular, unvarying succession . . . it encounters the modern . . . what is novel, brilliant, paradoxical, and bears the imprint of technicality and worldliness . . . The quotidian and the modern mark and mask, legitimate and counterbalance each other.31 The everyday life that Lefebvre describes is marked by a yearning for the modern, the worldly, and the new: a yearning that is regularly implanted and managed by a bureaucratically managed society dependent on continual consumption.32 While Yamanaka evokes this interdependence brilliantly, the quotidian-modern dialectic she describes is inflected by the particular history of Hawaii’s inclusion in the United States. The advent of capitalism as a distinct mode of production is tied up with a complex history of colonization, immigration, and racialization.33 These processes stand behind apparently simple observations in this chapter such as “Japanee girls all want haole last names like Smith or Cole . . . Mokes like haole girls with strawberry-blond hair . . . from places like Kenosha, Wisconsin” (24–25). The desire for the worldly or modern bears a decidedly geographical as well as a racial character in this case: “Just better to be haole. Live in Riverdale . . . Talk straight to the mainland Japanee cousins who say things like ‘Gee, you talk funny . . . does everybody here speak so strangely?’ ” (28–29, original emphasis). Modernity is part of a vision of normative racial whiteness, not to be confused with the literal color. The novel’s imagined consumption (or enraptured contemplation) of an abstract kind of modernity, a “white” modernity, arises through the concrete evocation of ordinary, local experience: minor routines, routine handling, the historicity of scarred and uneven surfaces. A brief story is embedded in the chapter called “Ordinary Days.” Lovey’s family, under her father’s direction, goes one

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weekend to pick macadamia nuts for “extra money”: “Father plans these wageearning weekends for us to contribute to the Family Money Pot” (33). The object of desire, once again, exemplifies modernity, technology, and global capitalism: “A Magnavox console stereo with wonderful carved wood engravings of elephants like it came right from Taiwan. Like the ones you see . . . on Let’s Make a Deal. The Family Money Pot will pay for this new stereo system” (34). At once up-to-date, exoticized, and mainstream, the image of the console stereo is meant to inspire an earnest day’s work at “eight measly dollars a burlap bag . . . eight dollars for a whole day’s work,” as Lovey remarks (33). The novel skips over the act of abstraction that makes it possible for a whole day’s work to equal a bagful of nuts, which will be exchanged for dollars that will ultimately be traded for a stereo. The macadamia nuts signify nothing in themselves once they have been commodified. And so the particular form that their weekend labor takes is immaterial, in a sense. The “wage-earning weekend” illustrates reified labor, or labor erased of social and qualitative content, measured in terms of time and extracted in order to produce value.34 A more positive way to think of this reification would be to see the wage-earning weekend as a narrative of what Pierre de Mayol has called “temporal mastery . . . a relationship to time that makes one say, or think, that one dominates it from the point of view of everyday practical experience.”35 As Lovey’s family works together to fill the burlap bags with nuts, what ought to happen is a “collectivization” of time and effort, as these take on a visibly cumulative form, and a lesson in patient expectation. De Mayol describes the everyday as “an apprenticeship in waiting” and as a “game” that teaches “an active patience for the delay that defers . . . the desirable object . . . The game is thus a medium of which at least one function is to make the ‘time of desire’ visible.”36 But what happens in this little narrative is nearly the opposite. Lovey’s labor does not make time productive or desire visible. Instead, it restores qualitative dimensions to a measured duration of time: she begins to think of her actions not as pure, abstract labor measured by time, but rather as the bodily experience of the immediate environment. Particular textures and surfaces are restored to things through handling and using. In the process, too, desire is not renounced, but simply lost. Lovey notes that the labor is “[e]asy when you first get there. Then I take a water break. It may have been my biggest mistake of the day. I begin to wonder if this is all worth it” (34). In a comically literal narrative of decline, Lovey begins to pick up the nuts “sitting down,” and then lying down, rolling from one spot to the next. She thus recovers, though not very happily, qualitatively distinct, embodied experience out of the abstracted form of labor: Mac-nut fields may look grassy from the roadside . . . but mac nuts got thorns on them and the leaves too. And the ground is rocky. I look to the right side of my face for nuts . . . I stare up at the sky and watch the clouds pass, then disappear between the thorny leaves . . . Wonder about the evenness of a blue sky. How it happens like that even on the most ordinary days. (34)

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Left and right, up and down, thorny and smooth reassert themselves from within a narrative of attempted abstraction. What is restored in the everyday is not any aspirational narrative, but rather the particular surfaces of objects. Even the sky in this account is imagined as something that can be touched or felt. These surfaces bear the visible traces of everyday time and use. These traces are deeply particular in that they record an infinity of particular historical moments of contact. The surfaces of objects come to figure this primordial everyday, while the depth within or beyond is thought of little or not at all. In their weathered historicity, everyday objects might be taken as exemplary narrative objects, or objects that tell or occasion a story.37 This possibility, however, is all but eliminated in “Ordinary Days,” the novel’s most intense study of everyday traces. This chapter features various objects whose origin, history, and telos are felt to be in some sense irrelevant. Where they happened to be found matters less than the fact that they were simply there, then, and are simply here, now: “Mother and me sit on the porch to pick fleas off of Melba and Spam, the two black poi dogs we found in the ditch by Grandma’s house” (30). Their color and their history seem to be simply superficial, accidental qualities. They are, like other objects in this scene, everyday material for a series of operations that leave behind nonsignifying traces: “one of us finds a blood tick . . . whose body indents when you press a fingernail into its back” (30). The everyday object that looms largest in this chapter is the body of Lovey’s mother. Lovey not only watches but tends to this object, as Lovey’s mother smokes, watches TV, takes a bath. “I like best to pinch blackheads off her back before she takes a bath on Friday nights,” Lovey remarks, after which she “point[s] out all the splotchy red islands on her back, connect[s] all the islands with fingernail-scratch bridges until Mother says thank you . . . Then Mother soaks for a half hour . . . every Friday night” (32). The mother’s body bears both these temporary traces and the more enduring traces of history: “Mother says I gave her white hair . . . from the moment I was born; she saw stars first and sprouted white hair” (36). Yet there seems to be little to say about how the past gives these traces meaning. Rather than encrypting a historical narrative, the traces on the mother’s body seem to be antinarrative in a particular way. They characterize an object that wishes merely to be itself.38 Objects that survive their stories, in a sense, undo the ending that ought to seal and legitimate the narrative. We can, by way of contrast, look back again at Chin’s novel. In Donald Duk, the possibility that an object might outlive its story and become simply a scarred everyday object is strongly repudiated. The elimination of this possibility, in fact, gives rise to an elaborate branch of the plot that concerns model-airplane building. For years, each evening, Donald’s family has been constructing model airplanes until they have 108 of them, representing the outlaws in a Chinese legend. On the last night of the New Year’s festival, Donald’s father plans to pack them with fireworks and explode them in midair. Another character objects to this plan: “It will be something he made with his own two hands. Why burn it up and explode it after all the work he put into it?” The tiny airplanes are also described as “works of art”

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(156). The answer is that they must not be allowed to become everyday objects that bear the traces of use: “they get banged up . . . You can’t bury the thing. It’s not dead. And you can’t lose it or abandon it” (157). Keeping the objects is out of the question. Thus, in the novel’s final scene, the planes are lit and sent into the air from Angel Island: “The flight of years of nights of work around the dining room table covered with an inch-thick sheet of plywood, launched, flown, burned out of the low-slung sky . . . in maybe five minutes” (173). A fitting, heroic end is the generic opposite of the everyday trace or leftover. With its strong commitment to forwardmoving narrative, and the formal closure of identity, Chin’s novel has to circumvent this intimate erosion of objects’ surfaces through numberless acts of handling. Yamanaka’s novel fully appreciates the ingenious interpretive projects that surface traces elicit in the context of everyday boredom. This interpretation can be thought of as a minimal, superficial, recursive hermeneutic: rather than pursuing meaning in the depths, this lazy interpretation of traces remains engaged with the surface, sometimes simply watching as such traces appear and disappear. Neither completely engaged nor disengaged in the apprehension of such formal traces, this is Lovey’s typical posture and attitude. Eventually, what emerges is a trajectory toward identity quite different from the usual project of self-knowledge. Instead of being conceived as a buried essence to be discovered within, Yamanaka’s everyday identity arises from a series of operations performed without apparent goal, purpose, or observer. These operations are performed in near isolation. Like the everyday projects that Sheringham describes, they often appear to consist of arbitrary rules that are followed without any clear anticipation of an outcome. “I pull a strand of hair from my head . . . Stroke the strand of hair. I split the split end slowly and watch one side kink . . . Throw it into the wind and watch it spiral down” (37). There is no other audience besides Lovey herself. Sometimes these operations look like aimless gesture-sequences that bring the body into association with the material world outside. They do not result in clear knowledge of any outside object. They never lead to a sublime affect. These gestures seem to establish identity as one particular way of occupying space, of holding a place. Lovey’s “beauty spots,” for example, are interpreted paradoxically as traces left, as it were, by the future: waiting for the sampan bus to take me home, count the beauty spots on my arms. Connect them with pen lines. Try to make a pattern. I ask my mother when I get home how come I have so many beauty spots . . . everywhere on my face, on my arms, my hands, my legs, and Mother says, “Everywhere there’s one beauty spot, you going be lovely when you grow up.” I believe her. (31) Lovey creates a temporary “pattern” with her pen lines rather than a narrative form. Her mother’s words invoke a future line of development, but, closely examined,

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they do so at the expense of bodily coherence. Are beauty spots spots of beauty? Whether motivated by kindness or by laziness, Lovey’s mother offers a minimalist interpretation rather than a story. And Lovey’s response—“I believe her”—seems to voice a certain almost satisfied incredulity at her ability to believe this explanation. As a lazy, rather than a fervent, belief, it belongs to the world of everyday interpretation. Acts of everyday interpretation proceed from a state of semidistracted absorption.39 In the case of smoke, Lovey watches something almost, but not quite, rise into meaning. She comes within arm’s length, as it were, of an interpretation of that meaning: “watch the ash grow long, grow, crackle, then fall. Watch the smoke rise, and Mother squinting her eye” (30). An allegory almost shapes itself, then drifts away. Second, this everyday interpretation seems to consist in following a certain procedure. It resembles a series of operations. At the end of the chapter, Lovey again, having nothing else to do, observes the smoke from a burning mosquito coil: “I watch . . . smoke coil into the air, thick at the bottom, then real thin and gray near the top, where I blow it gently” (39). Again she visually follows the singular, unrepeatable pattern made by the smoke from the bottom to the top. She seems less interested in drawing a meaning from this sign than in simply being aware of her own operation. The concept of “ways of operating” plays a crucial role in one of the best-known theories of the everyday, Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life. Certeau sees such “ways of operating” as the daily, almost microscopic counterpart to the disciplinary power that Foucault argues has penetrated down to the very ground of everyday life. What Certeau looks for are the “clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’”—in short, ways of straying or wandering that suggest the possibility of subjective freedom, or at least escape.40 Lovey’s operations or practices certainly occur within a disciplinary context. Moreover, she executes most of them using the most ordinary material available: her own body. Yet Certeau’s romantic celebration of the oppressed as “poets of their own acts” does not quite seem to fit.41 The structure of feeling in question is too minor. As Lovey sits on the curb outside the beauty parlor, waiting for her mother to emerge, she engages in a series of supermundane operations, each described in a separate paragraph: she kills ants, pulls hair from her head and examines it, picks up rocks, bites her nails, and so on. Such operations establish Lovey’s body as an everyday object: it occupies space in a particular fashion, it has a certain structure and texture (“I bite my fingernails and crunch each nail until nail bits . . . rub on the inside of my lip”), and it has the capacity to perform certain movements. These movements are presented not as a narrative but as a sequence of gestures that might be performed by anyone who has nothing better to do: “I pick up rocks and juggle three of them. Put one between the fingers of one hand. Then the other. I squeeze my fingers together. Relax. Squeeze. Relax. And I throw the rocks at the road all at once” (37). What stands out about this passage is the precision with which the rhythm of the gestural sequence is evoked.

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The rhythm, as it were, drowns out the question of intentionality or interiority. This is what Lovey does: she handles objects, traces their dimensions, flings them away rather than collecting them. Instead of defining her identity as a history inwardly possessed, Lovey affirms her identity with the place where she happens to be, by using things close at hand.

Minorness and the Question of Empathy The traces that are most important to this representation of the everyday are not the traces left by bodies on their surroundings, but the traces left on bodies as the visible impress of a time with no clear direction. We are far from the world of the nineteenth-century metropolis, in which the bourgeois subject, according to Walter Benjamin, transforms his immediate, private dwelling into a case for himself. With a “marked preference for velour and plush,” the metropolitan bourgeois “take[s] the impression” of his belongings (watches, umbrellas, etc.): The nineteenth century . . . conceived of the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.42 Imprints, fingerprints, and other worn surfaces in Yamanaka’s novel do not bespeak the existence of a private life or a subjectivity that creates a phantasmagoric world for itself. We have emerged from the other side, so to speak, and are in a world in which subjects dream of finding themselves in and through the very hard, reflective surfaces of glass that some modernists hoped would abolish bourgeois subjectivity. What traces and imprints offer, then, is an occasion to remark the passage of a collectively experienced, intermediate duration: a local time that doesn’t belong to any particular body. The everyday temporality that I have been describing in this chapter is similar in many respects to the “lived temporality” that Michael Fried finds characteristic of the work of the German painter Adolph Menzel.43 Fried argues that Menzel’s paintings are able to represent a lived temporality by precisely invoking embodied experience—for example, the experience of grasping, twisting, or turning. That Menzel is able to do so relies on a certain tradition that Fried names the “aesthetics of empathy,” a discourse that finds in the physical experience of having a body the key to aesthetic understanding. As one of its theoreticians, Heinrich Wölfflin, argues, “as human beings with a body that teaches us the nature of gravity, contraction, strength, and so on, we gather the experience that enables us to identify with the conditions of other forms.”44 August Schmarsow specifies that “the vertical line that runs from head to toe” distinguishing “above and below, front and back, left and right” allows us to appreciate built spaces: “As soon as we have learned to

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experience ourselves and ourselves alone as the center of this space, whose coordinates intersect in us, we have found the precious kernel.”45 What is remarkable is the ability of these critics, including Fried, to consider the body as the unified center of space, whose motions and gestures become the true measure of time. The subject is still at the center, though now at the service of empathy with other forms, both living and nonliving, built, represented, or implied. Empathy seems to rely, then, on the assumption of a universal measure. I can project my own feelings into your form because the fit is guaranteed, as it were. Even as he stresses the particularity of Menzel’s own body, Fried easily assumes that bodies are translatable and experiences transferable. Yamanaka does not seem to share these assumptions, and it is here that we can see the phenomenon that I have been calling minorness. Even while the embodied experience of up and down, left and right, is still primordial, it is strongly associated with feelings of constriction and heteronomy. Rather than assuming that empathy will occur, Yamanaka’s novel challenges us to recognize the familiarity of what is represented. The particular experience that seems to be emblematic for “Ordinary Days” is not that of standing erect, or even of grasping or using an object, but the curious phenomenon of parallax. It is evoked earlier and then developed at the chapter’s end, when Lovey is banished from the house for her failure to behave decorously while waiting for her mother. “I’m to sit on the back steps until it’s time to sleep” (39). She watches the smoke, watches mosquitoes, counts the stars: “I stare at the biggest, most reddest one that my father once told me was Mars and I close my right eye. Then my left eye. Back and forth. Open, shut. And the whole sky moves” (39). Where is the center of space? Doesn’t this phenomenon mock the notion of a “space, whose coordinates intersect in us”? I think Yamanaka wants us to see more than a message about perspectival truth. This scene invites us to recognize the nonidentity of the self, a rootedness that is real, and a willingness to give up dreams of transcendence. The self is less like a “precious kernel” than a minor intersection of forces; at the same time, however, its location in a particular place is affirmed. Instead of moving on the basis of this physical experience to a higher consciousness of the self, we stay with the minor curiosity of this phenomenon: “back and forth.” The type of recognition that Yamanaka’s writing invites is not the formal, public recognition of identity that is at stake in what has been called the “politics of recognition,” nor is it the dialogical structure of identity that Charles Taylor has defended as fundamental to modern Western political thought: “a person’s understanding of who they are . . . is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others.”46 Taylor argues that a sense of one’s own identity has to be validated or legitimated through the recognition and respect accorded by another. While other Asian American texts orient themselves toward the response of others (Chin’s narrative, for example, relies deeply on the figure of theater), Yamanaka seems to ask for a recognition closer to what Freud finds in the figure of the uncanny: an experience of temporality from a place in one’s past and possibly, again, in the future.

Conclusion ENCOUNTERING MODERNITY EVERY DAY

The qualities of reflectiveness, transparency, and newness often receive a particular kind of attention in Asian American literature. The “shiny, smooth and bright” machine-made thing is contrasted with the rough-hewn or handmade quality of older objects and ways.1 Sometimes the mass-produced commodity is an unattainable object of desire, locked inside a representation; at other times, it is part of the texture of everyday life. It has been my contention in this book that through such figures Asian American writing offers a critique of modern everydayness. The concept of modernity and the figure of the Asian American are intricately and closely entwined—so much so that it has been difficult to perceive this relation. Another term that could have been applied to interpret these phenomena is assimilation. That concept might be invoked to describe, for example, an Asian American family’s everyday use of a “set of dinnerware Americana purchased at the local hardware store.”2 Through assimilation into the larger American culture, this story goes, older ethnic ways and things are abandoned, and this process can be celebrated or deplored.3 The very notion of assimilation, however, as Henry Yu has shown, is a cornerstone of the way in which modernity was theorized by the Chicago school of sociology. Known as the race relations cycle or assimilation cycle, this process, as influentially theorized by Robert Park, purported to describe a “universal, natural process” that began with competition between native and immigrant groups and ended with the newcomers’ assimilation into the larger society.4 The explanatory power attributed to this cycle reflected these sociologists’ belief that migration and the movement of peoples were the definitive features of modernity.5 Less well known is the role that the so-called Oriental problem played in securing this theory. The Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast was undertaken by this same school of sociologists in 1924, the year when immigration from Asia was effectively curtailed. The participation of young and self-consciously modern Asian Americans in this survey and in future studies of the “Oriental problem” was critical

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to establishing the modernity both of America and of the discipline of sociology.6 In interviewing young “Orientals” for this survey, however, sociologists made very clear their own aesthetic modernism. What they tried to elicit from their subjects were, in Yu’s words, “the moments of epiphany that came about when someone realized his own race or ethnicity.”7 Their belief in modernity as essentially a process of accelerated speed, pace, or tempo revealed itself in their preference for the quick flash over the long narrative or “books full of numbers and facts.”8 It is just this understanding of modernity as the epiphanic moment, as the sublime encounter with the other or with oneself, that the Asian American critique of the everyday brings into question. If we look at Asian American writing not from within modernity’s own discourse but from a different angle, we can see how it offers a different view of the twentieth century that holds true for more than simply this minority group. Particularly but not exclusively for second-generation Asian American writers, modernity reveals itself not as a dramatic interruption or break but as a dialectical, ongoing process of emergence and forgetting. The writing I have examined in this study emphasizes the repetition, smallness, and the flickering effects of strangeness and familiarity that characterize the modern everyday. These effects occur within the ever more precisely calculated world of clock and calendar time, of synchronization and abstraction. Asian American writing is not the first or the only writing to draw attention to the depletion of experience that occurs in the modern era; the critique of modernity’s abstract and rigid social forms was associated with it from the outset.9 But I do want to suggest, with due caution, that what gives it distinctiveness is an unusual attention to matters of scale.10 This means the tendency to see modernity not only in terms of stark contrasts of new and old, transitory and permanent, mechanical and organic, self and other, but in terms of measure: how big or how small something is, how close or how far things are, how many times something happens. This is an aspect of narrative that deserves more attention because it seems to offer a sensitive register of historical structures of feeling. I want to end with a reading of one brief story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999). “The Third and Final Continent” tells in spare, minimalist fashion of the narrator’s journey from India, through England, to America, where he lands coincidentally on the same day as the first American moon landing in 1969. He acquires a job, rents a room briefly from a very old lady, is joined by his wife, and settles into an American existence. Lahiri provides a study in different scales of time and space, translating immensities into quotidian and subquotidian units of time and space. The second continent becomes a house in London where poor bachelors preoccupy themselves with the routines of daily life: “We . . . took turns cooking pots of egg curry. . . . On weekends we lounged barefoot . . . drinking tea.”11 The moon landing is an event announced by the pilot as the airplane descends over Boston Harbor; the narrator recalls reading newspaper accounts of “what certain people in Boston had been doing at the exact moment the astronauts landed . . . a woman had been baking rolls for her grandchildren” (179). The third continent of

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America materializes as a room in the Cambridge YMCA, “walking distance from MIT, and steps from the post office and a supermarket” (174). Most importantly, the character of the very old landlady, Mrs. Croft, invites us to read the story as an allegory of the encounter with modernity. The narrator learns that she is 103 years old and feels “in awe of how many years she had spent on this earth” (189). She represents “a century” (191), and behaves in a suitably imperious manner. The details repay close attention. Mrs. Croft, who “looked fierce” and always “bellowed” and “commanded,” is “a tiny, extremely old woman” (177). Frail and tiny, she sits on a bench at the bottom of her staircase and never seems to move. Every night for the six weeks the narrator lives in her house, she forces him to participate in a peculiar ritual: “she declared with the equal measures of disbelief and delight as the night before, ‘There’s an American flag on the moon, boy! . . . A flag on the moon! Isn’t that splendid?’ I nodded . . . ‘Say “splendid!” ’ . . . I felt like an idiot. But it was a small enough thing to ask. ‘Splendid!’ I cried out. Within days it became our routine” (182–83). As an embodiment of the twentieth century, of modernity, Mrs. Croft is herself splendidly unexpected. She is, we might say, a subject position; she forces the narrator to adopt that position and to repeat her words. Formal and even Victorian in dress and appearance, she gives voice to that most modern of affects, that epiphanic sense of a new and unprecedented conquering of space and time through modern science. And she does so every night, with equal astonishment. Every day’s repetition is, like her continued existence, “something of a miracle” (188). At first humiliated, the narrator becomes accustomed to the routine and then grows attached to her, though well aware of his lack of relation to her other than that provided by the repetition of words or payments: “apart from those eight dollars [of weekly rent] I owed her nothing” (189). But Mrs. Croft provides the story’s most important affirmation when the narrator nervously presents to her his new wife from an arranged marriage. While he has been somewhat indifferent to his wife so far, Mrs. Croft’s response changes that. I wondered if Mrs. Croft had ever seen a woman in a sari, with a dot painted on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists . . . I wondered if she could see the red dye still vivid on Mala’s feet . . . At last Mrs. Croft declared, with the equal measures of disbelief and delight I knew well: “She is a perfect lady!” . . . for the first time we looked at each other and smiled. (195) Through Mrs. Croft’s tone of “disbelief and delight,” the unexceptionable femininity that here meets her eyes is linked to that other more public and masculine achievement of modernity. The shared “first” smile of the husband and wife, an epochal and intimate event, both affirms and denies this connection. But what permits Mrs. Croft’s hearty approval is a process of radical abstraction. Where the narrator sees Mala generically as “a woman in a sari,” a racialized and ethnic woman, Mrs. Croft sees her as simply “a lady.” Though the term carries with it a heavy burden of class and generational specificity—Mrs. Croft herself always wears

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a “starched white blouse” and “tent-shaped skirt” (181–84)—the story’s joke lies in the radical abstraction produced through this equivalence. Lahiri’s story suggests that the same set of historical forces propels the astronauts to the moon and the narrator to America: the conjuncture of Cold War politics, third-world decolonization, and accelerating technological and economic development. But it shows how modernity manifests itself more tellingly on a different scale through innumerable small displacements and minor victories of equilibrium. These are accomplished at the scale of the everyday through repetition and abstraction. World-historical events are also measurable in ordinary acts and small intervals. “For a few hours, [the astronauts] explored the moon’s surface. They gathered rocks in their pockets, described their surroundings …, spoke by phone …, and planted a flag” (179). The narrator, likewise, gathers his mundane American implements one by one (a bank account, a post office box, a job) and remains in place for thirty years. What distinguishes the sublime achievement is that, unlike the ordinary, it does not happen every day. In the everyday, what is strange becomes familiar. Then, in another well-known turn, that familiarity becomes the strangest achievement of all.

{ NOTES } Introduction 1. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). See in particular Berlant’s discussion of “post-Fordist affect” (161–190). 2. Speaking of Asian Americans as a single entity, I am aware, is a contentious act: this group has become demographically diverse and conceptually fractured to the extent that some scholars have proposed viewing Asian American studies as a “subjectless discourse,” one that refers to no preexisting or predefined object. See Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. While largely motivated by the wish to dismantle essentialist notions of identity, the recent demographic diversity of the Asian American population plays a part in this move, as Chuh explains (21). 3. Charles Chesnutt, cited in Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 24. 4. See Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). 5. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 139. 7. Jennifer Lee, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6. The breakdown of this fragile acceptance can be dramatic indeed, as events in Los Angeles in 1992 demonstrated. See also James Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) as well as the films Sa-I-Gu, dir. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson and Christine Choy (1993) and Wet Sand (2003) dir. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson. 8. See Christine So, Economic Citizens: A Narrative of Asian American Visibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 9. This is the concept that Frank Chin has referred to as “racist love” for Asian Americans. See Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffery Paul Chan et al. (New York: Penguin, 1991), 1–93. On the “yellow peril,” see Okihiro and Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) for a psychoanalytic account of this interstitial position. 10. See Palumbo-Liu’s discussion of the model minority thesis in Asian/American, particularly 158, 176. In the article that did much to promulgate the idea, William Petersen refers to the model minority in question, the Japanese Americans, as a “subnation,” i.e., as

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a group distinguishable from an actual nation only by its “‘smaller size’” (cited in PalumboLiu, 177). This idea is comparable to what Rey Chow has described as “ethnic abjection” in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 147–152. 11. Bow, Partly Colored, 39. 12. Ibid., 95. 13. So, Economic Citizens, 9 ff. 14. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1–8. 15. Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 169. 16. The quotation in the subhead for this section comes from Lê Thi Diem Thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 67. Further references will be given in the text. 17. See Dilip Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, 1 (1999): 1–18, on the distinction between “societal modernization” and “cultural modernity,” as found in Western discourses of modernity (1), and as selectively shaped and adapted in different non-Western sites (16–18). See also Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, 3 (2001): 493–513, and “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13, 3 (2006): 425–443. The concept of multiple modernities will be discussed below. On the relationship of modernity to postmodernity and the unfinished project of modernity, the most influential studies are Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). See also Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 193–221. Morse’s paradigms of distraction (half-engagement) and of nonspace (“a ‘bubble’ of subjective here and now strolling or speeding about in the midst of elsewhere”) does describe, for instance, the particular constitution of subjectivity and otherness in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student, for example, but I do not find that its diagnosis of postmodernity fits what we see in twentieth-century Asian American literature. 18. See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 1998); Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby and trans. Tom Bottomore (London: Routledge, 1990); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, eds., NowHere: Space, Time, and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” Modernism/Modernity 6, 1 (1999): 1–49.

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19. Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar, Globalizing American Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 26. 20. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 75 ff. 21. See Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 23. 22. Ibid., 56. See also David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Moon-Ho Jung and others have studied the particular role played by the Asian “coolie” in this process. See Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Caroline Yang, “Indispensable Labor: The Worker as a Category of Critique in China Men,” Modern Fiction Studies 56 (2010): 63–89. 23. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 37, 58, 119 ff. 24. See Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 42. 25. Lye, America’s Asia, 15. 26. Lee, Orientals, 56. Lee shows the differentiation of “skilled craftwork” as white from industrial or heavy labor as racialized or colored. 27. Lye, America’s Asia, 17. 28. See Shmuel Eisenstein, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129 (2000): 1–29, 6. 29. As did the Black Power movement, a source of inspiration. See William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 42. See also Shirley Hune et al., eds., Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1991). See also Daryl Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). On the transition from the earlier model, often termed “cultural nationalism” to a transnational model, see Amerasia Journal 21, 1, 1–2 (1995), and in particular, Sau-ling C. Wong’s essay “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia Journal 21, 1 (1995): 1–27. An example of the more recent trend toward considering Asian American literature in the broader geopolitical context is Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). On the institutionalization of Asian American studies, see Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: NYU Press, 2009). 30. Wei, The Asian American Movement, 229. 31. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 14–17. 32. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 34–35. 33. Ibid., 25. 34. See Lee, Orientals, 192; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, eds., The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 35. Arendt, The Human Condition, 28, 30. 36. It is important to distinguish between the cultural or ethnological use of the everyday, and the historical analysis of everydayness. The everyday practices of a group

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provide the object of analysis in the first case; the second approach examines the global emergence of everydayness in the context of capitalism. See, for example, Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987). 37. Philippe Ariès and other historians linked the everyday as such with the historical transition to modernity. See Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 26. Charles Taylor gives a somewhat differently based account of the emergence of the ordinary in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 38. Laurie Langbauer, in Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850– 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), examines how not only the Victorian and modernist series novel but poststructuralist theory and cultural studies define themselves, likewise, through and against the concepts of everyday life and ordinary usage. Ruth Yeazell, in Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), explores the intersection of the realist novel and the visual representation of the everyday. As Michael Sheringham’s study reveals, a particular kind of attention to the everyday characterizes and even constitutes a discursive tradition that ranges from Baudelaire and the surrealists to Barthes, de Certeau, Georges Perec, and beyond. The indispensable antagonistic role played by the concept of byt, everyday life, in the formation of Russian and Soviet cultural identity is the subject of Svetlana Boym’s study, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Harry Harootunian has given a fascinating account of how interwar Japanese writers turned away from historical narrative and toward new media and philosophies to describe the new “culture of modernity” that was being invented and performed around them; see History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 113. He points out how well this happens to “match the existential conception of everydayness” found in Heidegger. 39. “Everyday War,” ELH 72, 3 (2005): 605–633, 613. Favret argues that Jane Austen’s novels, written in the same period as Sir Walter Scott’s, reflect how the everyday becomes “the unspectacular register or correspondent of wartime”: “Modern war . . . is the history which possesses, even determines our own current thinking about the everyday” (606). Favret turns to the Freudian model of trauma to describe the relation of war to the everyday; neither the everyday nor trauma can be consciously experienced: “trauma, like the everyday, resides in the area of eventlessness and repetition, of dense if unarticulated affect that . . . defies historical record” (619). 40. Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 7–11, 10. At times, Lefebvre points to “the misery of everyday life, its tedious tasks, humiliations” as well as its unrealized creative potential in ways that make it seem timeless (Everyday Life, 35). 41. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 188. 42. In the twentieth century, everyday life, Lefebvre argues, has become the target of a state apparatus that serves the ends of capital: “cut up and laid out on the site . . . each oneworking life, private life, leisure––rationally exploited . . . organized, neatly subdivided and programmed” (21-22) (58–59). See the feminist critique of Lefebvre in Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life.

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43. See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonisation and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 44. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 5. 45. See, for example, Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Harootunian’s discussion of Kon Wajiro and other Japanese documentarians of the fleeting contemporary moment in the 1920s and 1930s, History’s Disquiet, 129 ff. 46. See Smith, Everyday World as Problematic, on the everyday as a field of effects whose causes are indiscernible. 47. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 4. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998). 48. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 57. 49. Ha Jin, Waiting (New York: Vintage, 1999). 50. See Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, on the relation between these geographically disparate theorists of the everyday. 51. Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 34. Further references will be given in the text. 52. Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 24–25. 53. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 84. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik and trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964). See also Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 54. As he suggests in his discussions of Scandinavian and Russian literature. See Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Others, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Howard Fertig, 2002), 137. 55. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 23. Lukács assumes that history comes to a people, as in the Napoleonic wars; he does not take into account the factor of migration. 56. Ibid., 149. 57. Frank Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974), xxxvii. The use of the masculine pronoun can be seen as somewhat deliberate. See also Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). 58. Chin et al., Aiiieeeee! xxxvii. I retain Chin’s use of the male pronoun as characteristic of his approach to defining Asian American realism. 59. See the interesting and thoughtful essays in the special issue of Amerasia 31, 1 (2005), “Orientalism and the Legacy of Edward Said.” And this definition also accounts for some of the most important internal critiques of Asian American literature, as in the 1998 controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging; see Chiang, Cultural Capital, 173–211. 60. See Viet Nguyen, Race and Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5–12. See also the essays in Labor Immigration under Capitalism, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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61. See Immanuel Wallerstein and Etienne Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991). Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 288. 62. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 193, 53; Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 182. See also Heidegger’s critique of the everyday in Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). 63. H. T. Tsiang, And China Has Hands, ed. Floyd Cheung (Forest Hills, NY: Ironweed Press, 2003), 27. 64. Ibid., 96–99. The prostitute is also making similar calculations, as she thinks of the tips she might get: “until she had two thousand dollars of the tip money to buy herself back, she would have to remain as a slave” (100). 65. Lan Samantha Chang, “The Unforgetting,” in Hunger: A Novella, and Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), l36. All further references will be given in the text. This story movingly contrasts the organic reproduction of the nature around them in Iowa, the “exuberant and wild” soil and the things that almost audibly grow in it, with the commodities and institutional settings that regulate their American lives; but what it shows is a kind of dialectical unity: organic reproduction and capitalist production are equally indifferent to human projections and emotions and both proceed at a scale that can’t be grasped. 66. On Asian American literature as catachresis, see Susie Pak and Elda Tsou, “Introduction,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14, 2 (2011): 171–191, 179. 67. On the relation of identity politics to the New Left, see Grant Farred, “Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Roots of Identity Politics,” in “Is There Life After Identity Politics?” special issue of New Literary History 31, 4 (2000): 627–648. 68. Fredric Jameson, “The Realist Floor-Plan,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 374–375. See Sheringham’s excellent discussion of Lyotard’s theory of le figural and its links to le quotidien, Everyday Life, 362 ff. See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 152. Jameson alludes here to what Hegel and Lukács had described as the increasing abstraction and fragmentation of the social world and personal experience in the condition of modernity. See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, vols. 1–2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). 69. On politics as “the distribution of the sensible,” see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). As Timothy Bewes has shown in Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), to think about reification is to become aware of a paradoxical necessity of reification (168). 70. Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 128. 71. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132, original emphasis. See Colleen Lye, “Racial Form,” Representations 104, 1 (2008): 92–101, for a timely reminder of the usefulness of Williams’s understanding of form in the context of racial minority literature (96–99). 72. Mori, Yokohama, California, 33. Gérard Genette, for instance, in his examination of time in narrative draws attention to the importance of the quantitative relation between how many times an event occurs, and how many times it’s narrated, but does not see this as a historical question. See his Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

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73. The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), cited in Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89–90. 74. Ibid., 191. See also Lye, “Racial Form.” 75. Ricoeur is here paraphrased by Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 505. 76. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 61. 77. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 90. 78. See, for example, Braverman’s account of modern industrial labor in Labor and Monopoly Capital. 79. Theresa Hak-kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995). See also Writing Self, Writing Nation, ed. Elaine Kim et al. (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1994). 80. Brown describes thingness in terms of a “latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable)” and “an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects)” in “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, 1 (2001): 1–22, 5; see also Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 81. The ethnic object is illustrated in this passage from Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953): “At first glance, there was little about these simple, sparse furnishings to indicate that a Japanese family occupied these rooms. But there were telltale signs like the zori or straw slippers placed neatly on the floor underneath the beds . . . in the kitchen were unmistakable Oriental traces” ([Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979], 11–12). See also Christopher Bush, “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age,” Representations 99, 1 (2007): 74–98. Bush discusses how the specifically Japanese thing in the American context of commercial exchange managed to be both “overtly foreign and substantially ‘universal’” (87). 82. Martin Heidegger, What Is A Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1967), 92. 83. Deleuze and Guattari also note Kafka’s aversion to metaphor: “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification . . . Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor” (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 22). 84. On the universal equivalent vs. the expanded form of value, see Sanjay Krishnan, “Reading Globalization from the Margin: The Case of Abdullah Munshi,” Representations 99, 1 (2007): 40–73. On economic vs. political equivalence, see So, Economic Citizens. 85. The side-by-side is what some have identified as the conceptual opposite of form; Georg Simmel, for instance, argues that “[f]orm tears the bit of matter away from the continuity of the next-to-one-another and the after-one-another and gives it a meaning of its own . . . What is decisive is the for-itself, in-itself character of individual form in its contrast to the all-embracing continuous stream of life.” See “The Transcendent Character of Life,” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Form: Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 366–367. 86. Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (iUniverse, 2005), 123. This is why Lukács uses metaphors such as “an arena for human ambitions, a stage or battlefield for men’s struggles with each other” (135) to describe what narrative should be.

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87. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 1, on possibility. 88. Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey obviously adopts a novelistic form, as do some of the works that I will examine. But see, for example, Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), Don Lee’s Yellow (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (New York: Knopf, 2008). 89. Mark McGurl has recently examined some of these institutional determinants in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 90. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 4, 19. 91. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 8. 92. Ibid., 8–9. 93. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2: Living & Cooking, trans. Timothy Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). For example, “Doingcooking thus rests atop a complex montage of circumstances and objective data . . . through which tactics are invented, trajectories are carved out, and ways of operating are individualized” (2:201). 94. McGurl, Program Era, 294. 95. In Michael Sheringham’s account of French twentieth-century writers of the everyday, we see everyday schematism emerge as a potentially satisfying mode of perception in its own right. Discussing the work of Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau, Sheringham remarks that “to focus on the everyday is to pull back from the perceived world just enough to be able to see generically––patterns, rhythms, repetitions . . . On one side, a world of specifics: this house, this street, this bus, this neighbour. On the other side, abstract, scientific knowledge . . . Between these poles is our awareness of the street, the house, the bus, not as analysable phenomena, nor simply as purely localized, one-off experiences, but as constituent parts of a rhythm, a series, an order of repetitions” (128–130). 96. Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 69. 97. See Sheringham, Everyday Life, 22. 98. For an account of this in the postcolonial context, see Benedict Anderson’s The Spectre of Comparisons (London: Verso, 1999), as well as the special issue of Diacritics 29, 4 (1999), ed. Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler, devoted to Anderson’s work. 99. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse: What Is To Be Done?” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–16, 10. 100. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 66–67. 101. Lee, Native Speaker, 188. 102. See Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, for a meticulous discussion of this history. 103. Sheringham, Everyday Life, 380. As Michael E. Gardiner summarizes in Critiques of Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2000), “the everyday is the realm in which occurs

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a ‘crisis of rationality,’ ” the “collapse of . . . homogeneous value-orientations and the ethical pluralization of the lifeworld” (143). 104. Certeau, Everyday Life, 91–102. 105. “Everyday life . . . evolves according to a rhythm that does not coincide with the time of accumulation and in a space that cannot be identified with that of cumulative processes” (Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 61). 106. See Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, on how the everyday complicates teleology (12–13), as well as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih on the “transversal connections” possible through what they call a minor transnationalism (Minor Transnationalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005], 8). 107. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18. 108. Ibid., 85. 109. Ibid., 55. 110. See Sheringham, Everyday Life. Among many examples, Sheringham discusses the Situationists’ desire to reclaim everyday life through creative urban movements (160–169); as well as the elevation of the essay form as reflective of “a lived manifold of interconnections” (52). In her work on the nineteenth-century novel and its relation to the idea of “Dutch painting” as the detailed, meticulous representation of everyday life, Ruth Yeazell notes that genre painting, or the visual representation of the everyday, involves a type of assimilation to a broader category: “The simple act of identification by which we look at a painting and see a woman sewing or a group of peasants fighting, rather than the specific subject of a portrait or a history painting, requires us to assimilate what we are seeing to a familiar category of human life” (Art of the Everyday, xviii). 111. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 21. 112. Ibid., 73. 113. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 93–108, 107. 114. Sheringham, Everyday Life, 269. 115. Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, “Introduction,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 1–4, 3. 116. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128. This is his definition of “structures of feeling.” 117. “Can Everyday Life Be Endangered?” Philosophical and Social Criticism 13 (1987): 297–313, 297, cited in Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, 132. 118. R. Radhakrishnan, “Minority Theory, Re-visited,” New Centennial Review 6, 2 (2006): 39–55, 51. 119. Jaime Hanneken, “Scandal, Choice, and the Economy of Minority Literature,” Paragraph 34, 1 (2011): 48–65, 48. 120. See, for example, Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, and Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). But on newer directions in Asian American studies, see the special issue of Amerasia 21, 1 (1995). See also Shirley Lim’s introduction to Transnational Asian American Criticism: Sites and Transits (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1–26. 121. See, for example, Cathy Song, Picture Bride (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and Land of Bliss (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Wing Tek Lum, Expounding the Doubtful Points (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1988); Lawson Inada,

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Legends from Camp (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1992); Li-young Lee, The City in Which I Love You (Brockport: BOA Editions, 1990); recent studies of Asian American poetry include Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Joseph Jeon, Racial Things, Racial Forms: Avant-garde Asian American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012). 122. Wakako Yamauchi, The Music Lessons (Chicago: Alexander Street Press, 2004). 123. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 73.

Chapter 1 1. See Allen Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 29–38; and John R. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 1–24. 2. Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 65. All further references will be given in the text, and abbreviated AH when necessary. 3. On the role of gender in Bulosan’s work, see Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17–43. On masculinity in Asian American literature see also Daniel Y. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 4. Younghill Kang, East Goes West (New York: Kaya, 1997), 7. All further references will be given in the text and abbreviated EW when necessary. 5. See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 6. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 29. All further references will be given in the text with the abbreviation TN. 7. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009). 8. Friedrich Engels, The Dialectics of Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1940), chap. 2, cited in Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 13. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 165. 11. Kang’s and Bulosan’s have been read as bildungsromans; see Patricia P. Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). See also on the bildungsroman as a European genre, Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in Popular Culture (London: Verso, 1987), and Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 12. H. T. Tsiang, And China Has Hands, ed. Floyd Cheung (New York: Ironweed Press, 2003), 121–123. Tsiang’s novella was published in the same year as Kang’s novel. 13. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) emphasizes the importance for Asian American literature of “disidentification” with the larger ideal whole (103), but I would argue that the stronger emphasis is on how the elements come together to produce a type of unity. 14. See Isaac, American Tropics on the “multiple temporalities” that result (13).

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15. On the emergence of multiple, differently inflected modernities and modernisms in the context of colonialism or the non-Western, see the essays in Public Culture 11, 1 (1999), and in particular Dilip Gaonkar’s “On Alternative Modernities” (1–18); as well as Public Culture 14, 1 (2002), in particular in that issue, Dilip Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction” (1–19) and Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries” (91–124). See also Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), and for a recent overview, Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernisms: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13, 3 (2006): 425–443. 16. For the Philippines, that history begins, Bulosan argues, with “Alexander the Great, who was alleged to have reached Mindanao in search of fine horses and gold,” continues with the Moors, the Christian Spaniards, and then only lately with America (47). 17. See the valuable discussion in Isaac, American Tropics, 23–47. 18. Kang describes in his memoir The Grass Roof (New York: Scribner, 1931) how Japan pressured the Korean king in 1907 “to abdicate to a minor son,” and then declared the annexation of Korea on August 29, 1910 (167). 19. In E. San Juan, ed., If You Want to Know Who We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader (Minneapolis: West End Press, 1983), 75. 20. See Carlos Bulosan, The Cry and the Dedication, ed. E. San Juan Jr. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). This novel is a curious case: while the protagonists clearly belong to an anticolonial movement, the cyclical, inward, and backward-looking form of the narrative, as well as its ambiguous resolution, make it difficult to know exactly how Bulosan thinks of the success of the movement. 21. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13. 22. The narrator, once he arrives in America, is called “Carlos,” his Christian name, even by his brothers—a fact that he finds deeply distressing (124, 130). The name by which he calls himself, and by which he is called in his childhood, is “Allos.” 23. Rachel Lee points out that Bulosan reserves a particular value for maternal self-sacrifice; however, the use of the metaphor of pregnancy here and elsewhere seems to suggest the possibility of viewing gender as possessed of a rhetorical and imaginative element as well as biological and social dimensions. See Lee, Americas, 28–29, 32–33. 24. Moretti, The Way of the World, 54. 25. Rachel Lee offers a thought-provoking account of the trope of brotherhood in this same work, pointing to its use in the contexts of both the War of Independence against Spain and the U.S. imperialism that quickly followed it (Americas, 19, 43). Lee argues that “Carlos desires a homosocial community of male-to-male links . . . The free male subjects of this imagined community exist in relation to each other by virtue of their shared gender privilege” (Americas, 37). My argument differs from hers in seeing Bulosan’s movement beyond the national not as conceptual confusion, but as highly deliberate; also, I argue that the dialectical movement of deepening or growing encompasses more than the homosocial community. It aims ambitiously at history itself. 26. I use “concrete” and “particular” as nonsynonymous terms.

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27. See Chris Vials, Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935–1947 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009) on Bulosan, Tsiang, and Popular Front culture (110–148). 28. See the essays in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 29. See Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994). See also Amerasia 31, 1 (2005), “Orientalism and the Legacy of Edward Said.” 30. The entry on the fourteenth edition in the Encyclopedia Britannica notes that it had been purchased by Sears in 1928; in 1932, the vice president of Sears, Roebuck, became president of the company. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, January 11, 2010, http://0search.eb.com.luna.wellesley.edu/eb/article-2111. 31. Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” 1–3. 32. See Chu, Assimilating Asians, on authorship as an important trope for subject-formation (6). 33. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 34. Kang notes, “there was a good deal of talk. Five per cent was on business management; 70 per cent was on sex; 25 per cent was about Rudy Vallee . . . and Babe Ruth” (292). 35. On the gendering of this pattern, see Lee, Americas, 17–43; and Chu, Assimilating Asians, 27–63. 36. The significance of this episode can be gathered from the image of the “American car” in the novel’s intriguing closing dream. 37. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20. 38. See Colleen Lye’s excellent analysis of Carey McWilliams and other liberal writers of this historical moment in America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893– 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 108 ff.

Chapter 2 1. Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 314. 2. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 29. 3. Younghill Kang, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (New York: Kaya, 1997), 181. 4. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 153–180. 5. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage Classics, 2001), 930. 6. See, for example, Dilip Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, 1 (1999): 1–18. 7. Takeo Kaneshiro, “The Diary of Takeo Kaneshiro,” in Internees: War Relocation Center Memoirs and Diaries, ed. Takeo Kaneshiro (New York: Vantage Press, 1976), 39.

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8. Ann Koto Hayashi, Face of the Enemy, Heart of a Patriot: Japanese-American Internment Narratives (New York: Garland, 1995), 131. 9. Ibid. 10. Minidoka Irrigator, February 13, 1943, Kaoru Ichihara Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle. All numbers of the Minidoka Irrigator cited below were found in the Ichihara Papers. 11. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Western Defense Command to exclude certain civilians from newly declared military zones for an indefinite period of time. The target of the order was the Japanese American community of some 110,000 people living in the states of California and Washington. When it became clear that voluntary evacuation from these zones was leading to chaos and violence, the decision was made to establish camps or centers in which to keep these people, two-thirds of whom were Americanborn citizens, and nearly as many under twenty-one years of age, “for the duration.” 12. Valentine Stuart McClatchy, “Assimilation of Japanese: Can They Be Moulded into American Citizens,” in Four Anti-Japanese Pamphlets, ed. Valentine Stuart McClatchy (New York: Arno Press, 1979 [1921]), 10. See Elena Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: NYU Press, 2004); Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) on the notion of critical absences. See Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 13. U.S. Department of the Interior, War Relocation Authority, The Relocation Program (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946). The WRA complied with the demand to build and maintain this armed border around each relocation center, but noted the uselessness of the fences in the barren desert-like surroundings and described them as “psychologically bad” for the residents (8). 14. Ibid. 15. See Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 141–166. 16. Arthur A. Hansen, ed., Japanese-American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project, vol. 1: Internees (Westport: Meckler, 1991), 67. 17. Richard Nishimoto, Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona, ed. Lane R. Hirabayashi (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 132–133. 18. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 98, 101. 19. Bill Hosokawa, Pacific Citizen, July 2, 1942, Kaoru Ichihara Papers. All further numbers of Pacific Citizen cited below were found in the Ichihara Papers. 20. On democratic social space, see Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). On the narrative of racial uplift, see Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York: NYU Press, 2010). 21. See Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 22. In a speech given at Oberlin, one internee describes the “newest Colorado city, Amache” in terms of its spatial arrangement into blocks and barracks, and ends with a stark

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recitation of the things that were to be found in each unit, supplied by the War Relocation Authority: “a huge Army-style stove, Army cots and light mattresses, a bucket and a broom.” Kenji Okuda, “Living in a Relocation Center,” talk given at Oberlin College, March 2, 1943, http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/harmony/interrupted_lives/five/letters/talk.html. 23. Lili Sasaki, quoted in Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America’s Concentration Camps (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 104. 24. War Relocation Authority, Relocation Communities for Wartime Evacuees (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 3. 25. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, quoted in ibid., 35. 26. In January 1943, following a “complete reversal of national policy,” the WRA began to try to “resettle” as many internees as possible. War Relocation Authority, The Relocation Program, 14–21. 27. Photograph no. 210-G-7K-408,10/1945, “Family counsellor is shown examining wall chart. Wall charts show residence of every resident. A yellow button . . . in center of any residence shows that a relocation plan has been made and approved. A red button after a name shows individual is out on terminal leave.” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 28. In a poignant footnote, this same photographer reminds us that these were not data but bodies; another photograph, taken from near ground level, shows a simple grave with a wooden cross painted with Japanese letters and weeds held in a jar. Iwasaki notes in his caption, “Not all the center residents will return to their former homes. Many have found permanent ‘relocation’ in the sandy soil on which the tar paper barracks were hurriedly erected” (Photograph no. 210-G-7K-410, 10/1954, Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD). 29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 141, 2–5, 200. 30. Foucault writes, “the table was both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge . . . the table has the function of treating multiplicity itself, distributing it and deriving from it as many effects as possible” (148–149). An important exception, however, was the notorious internal prison within Tule Lake, where “troublemakers” were kept apart. There were also various attempts made within Tule Lake to separate “loyals” from “disloyals”; however, the very attempt to distinguish these two categories of Japanese Americans was singularly problematic and unsuccessful. For the most detailed account of the proceedings within and related to Tule Lake, see Dorothy S. Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946). 31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143. 32. Photograph no. 210-G-3A-212, 3/31/1942, “Baggage . . . brought by truck to this assembly center,” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 33. Fisher, Still the New World, 42–44. The Jeffersonian land ordinance was used to map out the western territories, as Fisher notes. 34. “Supplemental Policy Statement on Project Government,” July 20, 1942, quoted in War Relocation Authority, Community Government in War Relocation Centers, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), 10.

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35. Ibid., 7. 36. With the exception of appointed and military personnel, who lived in a separate zone of the camp. A typical account: “a bare twenty foot by twenty-four foot room in the middle of a one-hundred-twenty-feet-long barrack . . . six army cots and pile of blankets. Nothing else . . . Only a single, bare light bulb” (Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps [Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005], 48). 37. Hatsuye Egami, “Wartime Diary,” quoted in Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1976), 82. 38. “Supplemental Policy Statement on Project Government,” quoted in ibid., 10. 39. War Relocation Authority, Relocation Communities, 2. 40. War Relocation Authority, Community Government, 5. 41. Edward H. Spicer et al., Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969), 10–11. Many of the older Japanese Americans were inspired by the wish to create “harmonious communities” or “ideal cities” within which to live peacefully pending the outcome of the war. 42. Quoted in Weglyn, Years of Infamy, 120–121. 43. But in practice, as many perceived, community government was an attempt to level the social landscape. Most conspicuously, it placed Nisei in charge of their elders: only the American-born Nisei could be elected to these councils, since first-generation immigrants were not able to become naturalized citizens. 44. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 148. Agamben uses the phrase “bare life” to describe biological existence, “the pure fact of birth.” Although such bare life is meant to be the antithesis of life as conducted within the ordering structures of the polis, it is in fact what supports political sovereignty: “what lies at [the modern state’s] basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare life,” which Agamben bleakly summarizes as “an unconditional capacity to be killed” (127, 128, 185). Homo sacer in Roman law may be killed with impunity by anyone; there is no official significance attached to either his existence or his death (82). Agamben argues that in modern politics, “homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen” (170). Studies by Richard Drinnon and others have revealed the extent to which the internment camps and detention centers operated as permanent states of exception, outside any existing penal laws or judicial control. 45. As in this example, released by the Presidio of San Francisco on May 3, 1942, and posted in the affected areas of Los Angeles: “All of that portion of the City of Los Angeles . . . within that boundary beginning at the point at which North Figueroa meets a line following the middle of the Los Angeles River; thence southerly and following the said line to First Street; thence westerly in East First Street to Alameda Street; thence southerly on Alameda Street to East Third Street; thence northwesterly on East Third Street to Main Street; thence northerly on Main Street to First Street; thence northwesterly . . . to Figueroa Street to the point of beginning.” Civilian Exclusion Order No. 33, reproduced in Lawson Fusao Inada, Legends from Camp (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993), 4. Inada’s quotation transforms what might be familiar as a legal description of space into something far more radical, an attempt to imagine pure space as the object of power’s exercise. The order appears to circumscribe and cleanse an area of the city almost ritualistically. Rather

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than referring to an existing neighborhood or district, the order traverses the streets in imagination, reciting their names and anticipating in its encircling movement the confinement of people behind barbed wire. We could even say that this order changes the status of both the streets and the neighborhood. Instead of being paths along which people and things move or orient themselves, or spaces which they inhabit, streets, blocks, and even directionality itself become simply part of the syntax of power. This exclusion order performs a radical decontextualization of space as well as of language—place-names in particular. Inada’s first poem in this collection, “Instructions to all Persons,” on the page facing this exclusion order, confirms this reading. He, in turn, decontextualizes certain words from this executive order, rearranging their disposition and their meaning, repeating and italicizing the words within parentheses as if to confirm their return to a sphere of human use and meaning: “Let us take / what we can / for the occasion: Ancestry. (Ancestry) / All of that portion. (Portion) / . . . Beginning. (Beginning)” and so on. It’s interesting to compare this with the attitude that Walter Benjamin and others held toward the magic of street names; see Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 46. Xiaojing Zhou has argued that Okubo reveals the production of racial identity through the manipulation of social space in “Spatial Construction of the ‘Enemy Race’: Miné Okubo’s Visual Strategies in Citizen 13660,” MELUS 32, 3 (2007): 51–73. See also Creef, Imaging Japanese America. 47. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 119. All further references will be given in the text. 48. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 5. 49. On the very real continuities in personnel and policies between Japanese American internment and Native American reservations, see, for example, Richard Drinnon’s study of the career of Dillon Myer in Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 50. Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 138. 51. I borrow the term from Jean-Christophe Agnew, quoted in Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 156. 52. The WRA defined “relocation center” as “[a] pioneer community, with basic housing and protective services provided by the Federal Government, for occupancy by evacuees for the duration of the war” (quoted in Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps). An early “Community Analysis Report” written by one of the WRA’s resident sociologists notes, among other “Causes of Unrest at Relocation Centers,” that “[t]he psychological shock of being housed in stables is still far from overcome” (John Embree, “Causes of Unrest at Relocation Centers, Community Analysis Report No. 2,” January 1943, Koide Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle). 53. Camp Harmony Newsletter Souvenir Edition, August 14, 1942, Kaoru Ichihara Papers. Pages are not numbered. 54. Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 175. 55. See Vivian Chin, “Gestures of Noncompliance: Resisting, Inventing, and Enduring in Citizen 13660,” Amerasia 30, 2 (2004): 23–41. In an alternative reading, Vivian Chin

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focuses on the gestures and activities performed in Okubo’s drawings and argues that they “attempt to assert boundaries between a subject and the exterior world” (31). 56. See Chin, “Gestures of Noncompliance,” who notes that Okubo uses this technique to ironically illustrate and contradict the common assertion that all Japanese looked alike (25–26). 57. See, for example, pp. 44–45 and 96–97. 58. Pacific Citizen, June 11, 1942. 59. See, for example, Sone, Nisei Daughter, Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy, and, from a different viewpoint, Spicer’s analysis in Spicer et al., Impounded People. 60. Minidoka Irrigator, January 23, 1943. 61. Ibid., April 10, 1943. 62. Ibid., October 16, 1943. 63. Ibid., June 3, 1944. 64. Kaneshiro, “Diary of Takeo Kaneshiro,” 83. 65. See, for example, Gruenewald: “Days of the week no longer mattered. The slow hours were broken up by the mess hall gong calling us to breakfast, then lunch, and finally dinner” (Looking Like the Enemy, 71). 66. Ibid., 78. 67. Shizuko Higano to Norio Higano, August 17, 1942, Higano Family Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle. 68. Hiroshi Odio, “Confronting a Dilemma,” Minidoka Irrigator, January 16, 1943. 69. Kenji Okuda to Norio Higano, May 30, 1942, Higano Family Papers. 70. Pacific Citizen, August 27, 1942. 71. Kenji Okuda to Norio Higano, December 11, 1942, Higano Family Papers. 72. Kenji Okuda to Norio Higano, November 7, 1942, Higano Family Papers. 73. Ibid. 74. Emphasis added. Okuda, “Living in a Relocation Center.” 75. This description of “evacuation mind” is quoted from a speaker at the first Topaz High School Commencement, cited in Thomas James, Exile Within: The Schooling of Japanese Americans 1942–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 76. The reference suggests that it seems to have been a widely recognized pathology. 76. Okuda refers to a “wall of indifference and inertia,” Kenji Okuda to Norio Higano, December 22, 1942, Higano Family Papers. 77. Minidoka Irrigator, September 25, 1943. 78. Ibid. 79. Camp Harmony News Letter, Souvenir Edition, August 14, 1942. 80. See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 81. For an overview of thing theory, see John Plotz’s essay, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory,” Criticism 47, 1 (2005): 109–118. 82. Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy, 81. 83. Ibid., 85. 84. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 220. Benjamin remarks that “the original form of all dwelling is existence . . . in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant.” Bachelard develops this insight in his discussion of the shell’s

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phenomenological meanings: aloneness, repose, “protected space,” “protection in all its nuances of security” (132). 85. Spicer et al., Impounded People, 105. 86. As Yoshiko Uchida notes, for example, “To say that we all became intimately acquainted would be an understatement. It was, in fact, communal living, with semi-private cubicles provided only for sleeping” (Desert Exile, 75). 87. Minidoka Irrigator, January 1, 1944. 88. See, for example, the descriptions in Sone, Nisei Daughter, Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy, Uchida, Desert Exile. 89. Photograph no. 3C-584, June 16, 1942, “Old Mr. Konda in barrack apartment, after supper. He lives here with his two sons, his married daughter, and her husband. They share two small rooms together. His daughter is seen behind him, knitting. He has been a truck farmer and raised his family who are also farmers, in Centerville . . . where his children were born.” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 90. Photograph no. 3A-223, 3/31/1942, “Barracks interior at assembly center,” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 91. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and wang, 1980), 27. 92. Photograph no. 210-G-1C-319, 4/9/1942, “Japanese field laborers packing cauliflower in field on large-scale ranch owned by white operator (L. E. Bailey),” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 93. Photograph no. 3C-611, 6/16/1942, “Close-up of barrack home with the carefully planned flower garden in foreground,” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD. 94. This photograph in particular might be compared with Walker Evans’s still-life photographs taken in Alabama in the summer of 1936 for the Farm Security Administration. One photograph of a kitchen corner in Floyd Burroughs’s home in Hale County shows a broom leaning against a wall, a chair, and several other domestic implements. In his study, James Curtis notes that both Evans and James Agee “were fascinated by the arrangement of commonplace items in one corner” (James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered, ed. Allen Davis [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989], 43), and suggests that Evans, along with Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and other FSA photographers, carefully composed his photographs in order to maximize their rhetorical effect: “he tried to show how they created a world of order in the midst of poverty” (44). While this intent was shared by many WRA photographers (such as Lange, who worked for both agencies), the effect is more uncanny in the latter case, I would argue. 95. Photograph no. 210-G-10B-180, 2/12/1943, “Lucy Yonemitshu . . . enjoys a pleasant afernoon with her book. Lucy lives with her parents in this barrack home, which has been very tastefully decorated by her father,” Records of the War Relocation Authority, Prints: General Photographs, 1942–45, Record Group 210-G, National Archives, College Park, MD.

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96. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 82. 97. John W. Powell, “The Community and the Management,” cited in James, Exile Within, 139. 98. See King-kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 27–73. 99. Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1988), 20. All further references will be given in the text. 100. Kasen Noda, “Memoir and Diary,” in Kaneshiro, Internees, 17. 101. Pacific Citizen, June 25, 1942. 102. Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 57. 103. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 170–171. 104. Thomas and Nishimoto, The Spoilage, 92–93. 105. Ibid., 103. 106. Noda, “Memoir and Diary,” 29. 107. Jim Marshall, “The Problem People,” Collier’s, August 15, 1942, 50.

Chapter 3 1. Cited in Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 164. 2. Cited in Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 103–104. On the importance ascribed to the scrutiny of the Asian face, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 81–115. 3. Georg Simmel, “Freedom and the Individual,” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 224. 4. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28. See also Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6. Seigel, Idea of the Self, 102. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21 ff. 9. Ibid., 27, 22. 10. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby and trans. Tom Bottomore (London: Routledge, 1990). 11. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 5. 12. See David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier 156 ff., as well as Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Vintage, 1989), 157. Wong was sent on a tour of Asia by the State Department in 1953, as she notes in her 1989 introduction to Fifth Chinese Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989),

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viii. Further references to China Men and Fifth Chinese Daughter will be given in the text. 13. See Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 174 ff.; and William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 15 ff. The late 1960s saw the first application of the name, “Asian American,” to people of Asian descent living in the United States. As Yen Le Espiritu and others have pointed out, this panethnic movement was possible because of the growing number of second-, third-, and even fourth-generation descendants of Asian immigrants, and their greater dispersion and mixing in the post–World War II period. In many cases speaking only English, influenced by the civil rights and Black Power movements and by anticolonial nationalist struggles in the third world, the members of this movement constructed a history “common to all Asian Americans”: “a record of violence against Asians, who were denied the rights of citizenship, forbidden to own land, interned in relocation camps, and forced to live in poverty-stricken enclaves.” See Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 37. 14. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 188. 15. Ibid., 160 ff. See also Paul Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 16. Agnes Heller, Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1984), 165. 17. Cited in Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 64. See also Wei, The Asian American Movement, 15 ff. and Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity. 18. Cited in Chiang, Cultural Capital, 79. 19. See Frank Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974). 20. This is what Vladimir Propp does with the folktale, but what enables him to perform this kind of structuralist analysis is a disregard for singularity, or for the situation of enunciation. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975). 21. Simmel, “Freedom and the Individual,” 224. 22. Paul Fleming argues that the same type of observation was linked to a new concept of the sublime in the German context (Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 140 ff). 23. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 190. All further references will be given in the text. On the concept of culture, see Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Kingston alludes frequently to the modernization of China occurring at the same time under Communist rule, but also consistently elaborates a sense of China as a place of fantasy and “child-sight.” Thus, in some ways, Frank Chin’s condemnation of Kingston as an orientalist writer can be understood, but I would argue that Kingston hedges her self-consciously orientalist representation of China with irony. 24. Others include Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943) and Virginia Lee, The House That Tai Ming Built (New York: Macmillan, 1963). For a recent study of these works, see Christine So, Economic Citizens: A Narrative

NOTES TO PAGES 90–111

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of Asian American Visibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).). On Wong’s work in particular, see also Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 63–70; and Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 77–91. 25. See Palumbo-Liu and Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 26. See Christopher Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 27. They are classic examples of iterative narrative, as Gérard Genette analyzes it in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 28. See Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 29. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 30. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 146. 31. See Douglas, Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism. 32. On “extravagance” as a theme in Asian American literature, see Wong, Reading Asian American Literature. 33. See, for example, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Routledge, 2001) on this basic narratological distinction. 34. Buzard defines this ethnographic concept of culture (Disorienting Fiction, 15–16). 35. Anne Anlin Cheng offers a fascinating reading of this episode in The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 36. See Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity; and Wei, Asian American Movement, 54–64. 37. Hacking discusses Francis Galton’s creation of composite photographs of different social types: “a sequence of individuals was successively exposed on a photographic plate. Then you could actually see the slightly blurred ‘type’ before your very eyes” (The Taming of Chance, 183). This describes very well the effect of Kingston’s portraits. It is instructive to compare the latter with the types offered by Anselm Adams in his photographs of Japanese American internees at Manzanar. In his Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center (New York: U.S. Camera, 1944), Adams applies generic titles as a way to elevate these individuals into ideal types rather than empirical averages. 38. On the intricate relation between formal domestication and domesticity, see Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

Chapter 4 1. For example, see Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 2. Lukács distinguishes between realism and naturalism on the following basis: realism represents objects as part of a total theater of human action within a situation of class

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conflict, while naturalism gives detailed descriptions or dissections of things as they appear in a completely reified world––finished, separate, and detached. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Others, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Howard Fertig, 2002); see also Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 110–148. 3. Roland Barthes, Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 147. More recently, critics have broadened the questions that we ask about both real objects and represented ones. Through what discourses do certain types of objects come into being? When is it historically possible for a certain kind of thing to exist, to be named and perceived? What sorts of “alibis” are invoked to justify the representation of a certain type of thing? What sorts of things need to be made visible through textual description? When are things simply alluded to and under what cultural conditions? Such questions are also explored by Wall and in Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, 2 (2006): 175–207. For an overview of “thing theory,” see John Plotz, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory,” Criticism 47, 1 (2005): 109–118. 4. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 193. Lukács develops Marx’s remarks on the fetishism of the commodity in the first volume of Capital (trans. Ben Fowkes [London: Penguin, 1990]), 163–177). 5. Ibid., 184. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 17. 9. On the relation between class consciousness and ethnicity, see Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 38–42. On reification, see Timothy Bewes, Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002). 10. Contemporary Asian Studies Division, University of California, Berkeley, “Curriculum Philosophy for Asian American Studies,” Amerasia Journal 2, 1 (1973): 35–46, 35, cited in Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 36. 11. Ibid, 38, cited in Espiritu, 36. 12. Wei also mentions Loni Ding’s documentary, The Color of Honor: The Japanese American Soldier in WWII and other documentary films in The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), 56–58. 13. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 198. In this sense, descriptions of objects have been seen as vital to “the ethnographic stance . . . a commitment to . . . producing understanding through richness, texture, and detail,” as Sherry Ortner has remarked. Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 43. 14. See Brown, “Reification,” and Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 15. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91–92. 16. Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 11–12.

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17. Ibid., 3. 18. See Sau-ling Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia 21, 1 (1995): 1–27, as well as Belinda Kong, “Theorizing the Hyphen’s After-Life in Post-Tiananmen Asian America,” Modern Fiction Studies 56, 1 (2010): 136–159. Eleanor Ty has also argued that in the 1990s, Asian American literature has notably “shifted from those that were mainly auto-ethnographic to those that are no longer tied to ethnic and national identities” in Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xviii. Jennifer Ho examines what she calls “transgressive” texts, ones in which there is a disjunction between the race of the writer and represented characters, in “The Place of Transgressive Texts in Asian American Epistemology,” Modern Fiction Studies 56, 1 (2010): 205–225. 19. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. It was very soon followed by Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (New York: Riverhead, 1999). See also Positions: East Asia Critique 5, 1 (1997); and Chungmoo Choi, ed., The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Since 2000, public hearings and many scholarly studies have drawn further attention to this historical episode. 22. Joy Kogawa, Obasan (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 77. All further references will be given in the text. 23. On the “ascension of the personal” and the “transition from the . . . collective politics of class and gender to the overriding logic of personal healing,” see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 406. 24. The prologue occurs on an unnumbered page that precedes p. 1; hence, no page numbers will be given for citations from this part of the book. 25. See Brown, A Sense of Things, 18 on the object-thing distinction, as well as his “Thing Theory” in Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–16. 26. On the symbolism of the stone bread, as well as the imagery of mobility in Obasan, see Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 20 ff., 139 ff. 27. Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (New York: Penguin, 1997), 15. All further references will be given in the text. 28. Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 145. 29. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 56. 30. Barthes, Image/Music/Text, 147. 31. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Chapter 5 1. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 27–28; see also Christine So, Economic Citizens: A Narrative of Asian American Visibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Victor Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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2. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 8, 4. 3. For a reading of Lee’s novel as a counter-orientalist text, see Liam Corley, “ ‘Just Another Ethnic Pol’: Literary Citizenship in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” in Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 55–74. 4. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 188, 192. 5. Ibid., 196. 6. Ibid., 176. 7. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 13, 29. 8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198–199. 9. See Gayatri Spivak’s essay and the other essays in Rosalind C. Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 10. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13. 11. Ibid., 14. 12. Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 1. All further references will be given in the text. 13. See Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora 1, 1 (1991): 24–44. 14. Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 9. 15. For an interesting study of lists from the viewpoint of systems theory, see Patti White, Gatsby’s Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1992). 16. Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 315. 17. See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 18. See James Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 19. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 4. 20. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 41, 39. 21. Pitkin, Attack of the Blob, 194. 22. See Daniel Y. Kim, “Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, 3 (2003): 231–260, on how Kwang as representation draws on an African-American model of activist legitimacy. 23. Pitkin, Attack of the Blob, 197. 24. On echo as a figure, see John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 25. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93. 26. Ibid.

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27. For a contrasting reading of these scenes, see Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 2–3.

Chapter 6 1. The essays that establish this debate between cultural nationalism and transnational Asian American studies can be found in the special issue of Amerasia 21, 1 (1995) that contains the introduction by Sau-ling Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads” (1–27). For a more recent consideration, see Belinda Kong, “Theorizing the Hyphen’s After-Life in Post-Tiananmen Asian America,” Modern Fiction Studies 56, 1 (2010): 136–159. 2. On the Asian American bildungsroman, see Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); for a strong critique of the bildungsroman as a falsely universalizing genre, see Shelley Sunn Wong, “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” in Writing Self, Writing Nation, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcón (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1994), 103–140. 3. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 4. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 30. All further references will be given in the text. 6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 7. On consumerism in this work, see Jennifer Ann Ho, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (New York: Routledge, 2005). 8. See in particular, Eric Chock, “I Wuz Hea,” in Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawai‘i, ed. Eric Chock et al. (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1998), 345–347; and Wing Tek Lum, Expounding the Doubtful Points (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1987). I am grateful to Wing Tek Lum, Juliet Kono, Eric Chock, Darrell Lum, and other members of the Bamboo Ridge group for clarifying the concept and the history of the local. Wing Tek Lum and Eric Chock have provided me with much valuable insight into the relationship between mainland Asian American literary studies and the different way in which identity is regarded or disregarded in the local context. See also the careful discussion of the term in the preface to Stephen H. Sumida, And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), xiv–xviii. 9. Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 164, 179. 10. Personal communication, Wing Tek Lum, February 23, 2006. 11. The interest in everyday life in the context of global modernity is given striking shape in Juliet Kono’s recent novel, Anshu: Dark Sorrow (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 2010), which portrays quotidian life in Japan during the war and after the bombing of Hiroshima. 12. Sheringham is describing how Henri Lefebvre brings attention to the “temporal dimension” of Marx’s discussion of alienation. Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 140.

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13. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 14. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 63. 15. See Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 16. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 5–6. 17. Ibid., 205–206. 18. Eric Chock points out that Bamboo Ridge has tended to prefer writing that is more realistic, more referential than “postmodern” or formally experimental. Personal communication, February 24, 2006. 19. See also Franco Moretti’s interpretation of the everyday world as the anthropomorphic counterweight to the abstracting forces of modernity in The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987), 50–51. 20. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 24. 21. See King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 22. See Bill Brown’s discussion of this novel’s relation to what he calls the “culture of identity” in “Identity Culture,” American Literary History 10, 1 (1998): 164–184. 23. Frank Chin, Donald Duk (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991), 7. All further references will be given in the text. 24. Perhaps less surprising now given the phenomenon of the masculine celebrity chef; but it is important to see that Chin wants to rehabilitate as hypermasculine the vocation of cooking in Chinese restaurants, a type of labor performed by Chinese immigrants that was often seen as demeaning and feminized. 25. This is most clearly seen in the subplot involving the construction and then destruction of model airplanes, a Duk family activity. 26. Sheringham, Everyday Life, 388. 27. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 28. “Moke” is a local word for a certain type of tough young man. 29. Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 38. 30. See Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 45. 31. Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 24–25. 32. Ibid., 79. 33. See Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Haunani Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); and Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific. 34. See Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 83–222; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). 35. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 36. Ibid., 99.

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37. On the ideas in things, see Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1–19. 38. The antinarrative impulse is critical to the everyday relationship of familiarity. See Wing Tek Lum, “Childhood Memories,” in Chock et al., Growing Up Local, 314. 39. I am indebted for this idea to the work of John Plotz on semidetachment in Victorian literature. 40. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv. 41. Ibid., xviii. 42. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 220–221. 43. Fried, Menzel’s Realism, 143. 44. Ibid., 35. 45. Ibid., 36. 46. Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25.

Chapter 7 1. See, for example, Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 214; Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 12; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 28–29, 302–303; Frank Chin, Donald Duk (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991), 51–54; Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 198, 226. 2. Sone, Nisei Daughter, 12. 3. For an account of this abandonment of older ways as the essence of American national character, see Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). On the question of ethnic betrayal, specifically in relation to gender, see Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27. 4. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40. 5. Ibid., 32 ff. 6. Ibid., 86 ff. 7. Ibid., 105. 8. Ibid., 99. 9. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 10. See Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 399–410. 11. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 173. All further references given in the text.

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{ INDEX }

abstraction, 7, 10–14, 17, 21–23, 40, 69, 77, 93, 106, 131–137, 150–153, 169, 176–178 Adams, Anselm, 199n37 aesthetics, 13, 16, 27–28, 35, 45, 76, 128–129, 137, 149–153, 159, 161, 173, 176 African Americans, 31, 43, 50, 139, 141, 146 Aiiieeeee! (literary anthology), 10, 159 Albers, Clem, 72 Salinas Assembly Center Barracks interior photo, 72–73 Amache Relocation Center (Colorado), 58–59 Agamben, Giorgio, 193n44 America is in the Heart (Bulosan), 16–17, 27–35, 37–42, 47, 50–53. See also Bulosan, Carlos American Citizens’ League, 57 And China Has Hands (Tsiang), 10–11 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 57, 136–137 Asian Americans: anticolonialism and, 6–7 assimilation and, 175 everyday experience and, 3–5, 16, 18–21, 176 immigration and, 6, 135–136 labor and, 6–7, 135–136 minorness and, 4–5, 15–17, 20 modernity and, 6–10, 19, 21, 176–178 panethnic identity of, 113, 154, 198n13 racial identity of, 3–6 third-person selfhood and, 85–86. See also Chinese Americans; Filipino Americans Japanese Americans; Korean Americans Vietnamese Americans Bachelard, Gaston, 76, 196n84 Baguio (Philippines), 27 Bailey, L.E., 73–74 Bamboo Ridge group, 156–158 Barthes, Roland, 73, 111, 127, 158 Belknap, Robert, 138, 202n14 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 173, 195n84 Berlant, Lauren, 52 Blanchot, Maurice, 16 Boston (Massachusetts), 44, 48, 52, 54, 176–177 Bow, Leslie, 5, 95 Boym, Svetlana, 182n38 Braverman, Harry, 8 Brown, Bill, 13, 70, 113–114, 185n80 Bulosan, Carlos: capitalism and, 32–33

description of writing process in, 41 dialectical processes in, 17, 21, 28–29, 32, 39–42, 47, 53, 111, 145 education in, 37 epic, and 31, 42, 50–51, 54 everyday experience and, 5–6, 16–17, 21, 30, 40–41, 47, 53 Filipino American characters in, 16–17, 37–43, 47, 50–53 interiority in, 34–35 labor organization and, 17, 31, 37, 39 marginalization of the novelistic hero, 34–35 material objects in, 41–42, 53 migration in, 27–29, 38, 41 modernity in, 27–28 Philippines in, 27, 31–35, 41–42 Popular Front socialism in, 31, 35, 39 postcolonial themes and identity in, 31–33 racial identity in, 31, 50–51 repetition in, 29–30, 38, 41–42, 47 stranger-brother dialectic in, 39–42 U.S. military themes in, 42–43, 53 Burlingame Treaty (1868), 110 Bush, Christopher, 185n81 Calhoun, Craig, 138 Camp Harmony detention facility (Washington), 62–64, 66, 68, 70. See also Puyallup Camp Harmony News Letter, 62–64 Canada: Kang’s representation of, 33–34 Kogawa’s representation of Japanese internment in, 115–118, 120–121 capitalism: Bulosan’s representation of, 32–33 Ha Jin’s representation of, 8, 22, 122–124, 127 modernity and, 5–11, 31, 135, 156, 166, 168–169 realism and, 10–11 reification and, 111, 114–115 Cavell, Stanley, 54, 81 Centerville (California), 71–74 Central Utah Relocation Project (Topaz), 64–65 Certeau, Michel de, 16, 20, 152, 155–157, 172, 186n93 Ch’u Yuan, 103 Cha, Theresa Hak-kyung, 13 Chan, Jeffery, 159

222 Chang, Lan Samantha, 129–132, 135 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 179n9 Chiang, Mark, 181n29, 183n59 Chin, Frank: Asian-American masculinity and, 159, 161, 179n9 Central Pacific railroad in, 160–161 Chinese American characters and themes in, 159–161, 170–171 material objects in, 170–171 Chin, Vivian, 194–195n55 China Men (Kingston) 15, 22, 87, 89, 99, 102–110. See also Kingston, Maxine Hong China: Ha Jin’s representation of, 6, 8, 22, 111, 114, 122–124, 127, 135 Japan and, 124 Kingston’s representations of, 88–89, 100, 157–158 Tsiang’s representation of, 10–11 Wong’s representations of, 94 U.S. government policy toward, 110 Chinatowns: New York City, 35 San Francisco, 87, 89, 92–95, 159–161 Chinese Americans: Chang’s account of, 130–132 Chin’s description of, 154, 159–162, 170–171 Kingston’s description of, 96–97, 99–110, 157–158 Wong’s description of, 87–97 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 110 Chock, Eric, 156, 203n8, 204n18 Chow, Rey, 180n10 Chuh, Kandice, 179n2 Citizen 13660 (Okubo),61–62, 64–66, 75 Civilian Exclusion Order No. 33, 193–194n45 Collier’s Magazine, 82 Colorado River Relocation Center (Arizona), 62 Comfort Woman (Keller) 112, 115, 118–121 comfort women, 201n21 commodity, 9, 16, 44, 76, 128, 156, 158, 166–167, 175 contiguity, 22, 138–139, 145 counterplot, 122–129, 138 counting, 13, 131, 138, 140–141 Curtis, James, 196n94 Cry and the Dedication, The (Bulosan), 189n20 Death of an Exile (Kang), 35–37 Defoe, Daniel, 107 Deleuze, Gilles, 18–19, 185n83 DeWitt, John L., 85 dialectic: Bulosan and, 17, 21, 28–29, 32, 39–42, 47, 53, 111, 145 everyday experience and, 5, 17–18, 21–22, 28, 111 familiarity and, 54

Index history and, 21, 32, 47, 53, 115–116 Jameson on, 28, 111–112 Kang and, 21, 28, 32, 43–45, 48–50, 53, 111, 145 modernity and, 176 quotidian-modern, 168 recurrence and, 29–30 stranger-brother, 39–42 time and, 13 Yamanaka and, 167–168 Dictée (Cha), 13 disembedding, 86, 90, 93, 95, 103–110 Donald Duk (Chin), 154, 159–161, 170–171 East Goes West (Kang), 29–30, 33, 35–37, 44–53. See also Kang, Younghill Embree, John, 194n52 emplotment: antitheses of, 138, 158 Asian-American literature and, 13, 15 definition of, 12–13 dialectic and, 28 outcomes and, 14–15 reification and, 13 Engels, Friedrich, 28 epic: Bulosan and, 31, 42, 50–51, 54 Kang and, 30, 49–50 Lukács on, 28 Espiritu, Yen Le 198n13 Evans, Walker, 196n94 everyday experience: Asian Americans and, 3–5, 16, 18–21, 176 Bulosan and, 5–6, 16–17, 21, 30, 40–41, 47, 53 Chang-Rae Lee and, 17–18, 137–139, 141, 151–152 dialectic and, 5, 17–18, 21–22, 28, 111 familiarity and, 54 French theorists and, 19–20 Ha Jin and, 6, 8, 22, 124, 127, 129 internment and, 21, 55–61, 63–64, 66–71, 76– 79, 81–82 Kang and, 21, 29–30, 47–49, 53–54 Kingston and, 22, 87, 89, 100–109 minorness and, 4–5, 15–17, 102, 135 realism and, 15, 20, 111, 123 repetition and, 13–15 temporality and, 154–155 Wong on, 22, 87, 91–94 Yamanaka on, 155–159, 164, 166–174 Executive Order 9066 (1942), 56, 58, 191n11 Favret, Mary, 8, 182n39 Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong), 22, 87–97. See also Wong, Jade Snow Filipino Americans, Bulosan’s representation of, 16–17, 37–43, 47, 50–53

Index Filipino Workers’ Association, 17 first-person selfhood, 85–86, 88, 97, 101 Fisher, Philip, 16, 60 Foucault, Michel, 59, 172, 192n30 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 55, 68, 79, 174 Fried, Michael, 128–129, 173–174 Gangster We Are All Looking For, The (Lê Thi Diem Thúy), 7, 13–14, 17 Gardiner, Michael E., 186–187n103 Genette, Gérard, 158, 184n72 ggeh (money club), 147–149 Giard, Luce, 16 Giddens, Anthony, 86, 93 Gila River Relocation Center (Arizona), 62 Granada Project (Amache, Colorado), 58 Grass Roof, The (Kang), 32 Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda, 68, 70–71, 193n36, 195n65 Guattari, Félix, 18–19, 185n83 Ha Jin: China, representation of, 6, 8, 22, 111, 114, 122–129 counterplot of everyday things and, 126–129 everyday experience and, 6, 8, 22, 124, 127, 129 modernization in, 8, 22, 114, 122–124 reification in, 124–128, 135 Hacking, Ian, 87, 95, 199n37 Hanneken, Jaime, 20 Harootunian, Harry, 8, 15, 182n38 Hartman, Geoffrey, 127 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 157 Heller, Agnes, 20, 87 Hilo (Hawaii), 155, 165 Ho, Jennifer, 201n18 Hosokawa, Bill, 57, 70 Hunger (Chang), 114, 129. See also “The Unforgetting”; (Chang) and “San”; (Chang) “I Want the Wide American Earth” (Bulosan), 33 identity: bildungsroman and, 154 ethnic, 4–5, 22, 89, 104, 111–114, 130, 154, 157–158 historical matrix of, 115–117, 120 immanent, 152, 156 politics, 11, 90, 146 refusing, 129, 146, 150–156 sacralized, 138–139, 156 Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, 110 Inada, Lawson, 20, 159, 193–194n45 internment: assembly centers, 61, 64, 67 Canada, 115–118, 120–121

223 democratic social space and, 60–61 everyday in, 21, 55–61, 63–64, 66–71, 76–79, 81–82 homes in, 62, 71–72 “little things” trope, 57, 69–70 loyalty interviews, 80–81 material objects, 70–71, 73–77 newsletters, 62–64 newspapers, 56, 67–69 photographic documentation of, 57–60, 71–76 spatial themes in, 57, 58–66, 71–72, 76, 193n45 uncanniness of, 18, 21, 54–59, 62, 64–65, 68–69, 75–82 United States, 21, 54–82, 85. See also individual camps interiority: Bulosan and, 34–35 internment and, 64–65, 70–71, 74, 77–78, 111, 115, 118 Kang and, 32, 35–36, 45 Kogawa and, 115, 118 Lukács on, 34 Yamanaka on, 172–173 Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri), 11–12, 176–178 Iwasaki, Hikaru, 58, 192n28 Jameson, Fredric, 7, 11, 28, 111 JanMohamed, Abdul, 17 Japan: China and, 124 Korea and, 31, 33, 112, 115, 118–121 Japanese Americans: internment of, 21, 54–82, 85 Issei, 61, 64, 66 Japanese American Citizens League, 66 Mori’s representation of, 9 Nisei, 66, 68–69, 81 Sone’s representation of, 113–114 Yamanaka’s representation of, 155–158, 163–173. See also Canada internment in Jung, Moon-Ho, 189n22 Kafka, Franz, 18–19, 185n83 Kang, Younghill: Canada and, 33–34, 52 dialectical processes in, 21, 28, 32, 43–45, 48–50, 53, 111, 145 education in, 32, 34, 36–37, 44–45, 48 epic and, 30, 49–50 everyday experience and, 21, 29–30, 47–49, 53–54 interiority and, 32, 35–36, 45 Korea and, 32–33 Korean-American characters in, 29–30, 33, 35–37, 44–53 marginalization of the novelistic hero in, 34–36

224 Kang, Younghill (continued) modernity and, 6, 27–28 New York City and, 27, 29, 35–36, 44, 52–53 poetry and, 44 postcolonial themes and identity in, 31–33 racial identity and, 31, 50–52 repetition in, 29–30, 47–50, 53 romance in, 31, 45–47 Keller, Nora Okja, 112–113, 115, 118–121 Kim, Elaine, 10 Kimball, Solon, 61 Kingston, Maxine Hong: China, stories of, 88–89, 98–101, 107, 198n23 Chinese American characters in, 96–97, 99–110, 157–158 disembedding in, 103–105 everyday and, 22, 87, 89, 100–109 first-person selfhood and, 87–88 gender in, 96, 103–105 modernity and, 96–97, 105 probability and, 89–90, 94–95, 100, 105 third-person selfhood and, 103 Kogawa, Joy, 111–113, 115–118, 121–122 Kon, Wajiro, 9 Kono, Juliet, 203n11 Korea: Japan and, 31, 33, 112, 115, 118–121 Kang’s description of, 32–33 United States and, 102 Korean Americans: Kang’s representation of, 29–30, 33, 35–37, 44–53 Lee’s representation of, 139–153 Kracauer, Siegfried, 9 Laclau, Ernesto, 19 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 6, 11, 176–178 Langbauer, Laurie, 182n38 Lange, Dorothea, 71–74 Mr. Konda, photo of, 71–72 Latour, Bruno, 124, 136 Lê Thi Diem Thúy, 7, 13–14, 17 Lee, Chang-rae: American racial politics in, 139, 141, 146, 148, 152 everyday in, 17–18, 137–139, 141, 151–152 immigration in, 17–18, 137, 139–140, 142, 148 Korean-American characters in, 137–153 lists, use of, 22–23, 137–139, 143–145, 147–153 measurement and quantification in, 139–141, 149 minorness and, 140, 149, 152–153 political action in, 23, 136, 139–143, 146–150 Lee, Li-young, 20 Lee, Rachel, 189n23, 189n25 Lefebvre, Henri, 8–9, 18–20, 80, 159, 166, 168, 182n40, 182n42, 187n105

Index “Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (Yamamoto), 77–80 lists, 12, 13, 22–23, 70, 110, 132, 137–139, 143–149, 151–153 “Little Things” (Camp Harmony Newsletter), 70 Lloyd, David, 17 local, 23, 73, 86, 154–159, 166–168, 173 Lowe, Lisa, 135–136, 188n13 Lukács, Georg, 9, 13–14, 28, 31–32, 34, 36, 54, 111–112, 123, 185n86, 199–200n2 Lum, Wing Tek, 20, 156, 203n8, 205n38 Luzon (Philippines), 29, 34 Lye, Colleen, 6, 184n71 Manzanar Relocation Center (California) 75, 81–82 marginalization of the novelistic hero, 34–38 Marshall, Jim, 82 Marx, Karl, 28 material objects: 200n3 in Bulosan, 41–42, 53 in Chang, 114, 129–132 in Chin, 170–171 in Ha Jin, 124–128, 135 internment experience and, 70–71, 73–77 in Keller, 120 in Kogawa, 116–118 in Yamanaka, 157–159, 164, 166–170. See also reification Mayol, Pierre de, 169 McGurl, Mark, 15–16 Menzel, Adolph, 173–174 Mexican Americans, 17, 37, 42, 88 Minidoka Irrigator, 56, 67–69 minimal sociality, 4, 16–17, 135 minimal narrativity, 4, 14–15, 135 minor transnationalism, 187n106 minorness: Asian Americans and, 4–5, 15–17, 20 Deluze and Guattari on, 18–19 everyday experience and, 4–5, 15–17, 102, 135 Kingston on, 102 lists and, 137, 149 Lee on, 140, 149, 152–153 modernity and, 27 realism and, 15–16 reification and, 115 Yamanaka on, 23, 174 “model minority,” 5, 87, 159 modern everyday. See everyday experience modernity: Asian Americans and, 6–10, 18–21, 175–178 Bulosan and, 27–28 capitalism and, 5–11, 31, 111–112, 135, 156, 166, 168–169

Index disembedding and, 86 dialectic of, 176 Kang and, 6, 27–28 Kingston and, 96–97, 105 minorness and, 27 realism and, 12 repetition and, 7, 10–11 trope of, 7. See also everyday experience Moretti, Franco, 38 Mori, Toshio, 9, 12, 15, 159 Morse, Margaret, 180n17 Music Lessons (Yamauchi), 20 “My Mother Stands on her Head” (Mori), 9, 12

225 15–16, 20–21 capitalism and, 10–11 everyday experience and, 15, 20, 111, 123 modernity and, 12 minorness and, 15–16 naturalism and, 199–200n2 reification, 13, 111–116, 121–122, 131, 169. See also material objects “Relocation: Now or Never” (Minidoka Irrigator), 67 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 107 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 42, 56, 58, 191n11

quotidian. See everyday experience

“San” (Chang), 13, 131–132 San Francisco (California): Bulosan’s representation of, 29 Wong’s representations of, 87, 89, 92–95 San Francisco State University, 87 scale, 3–6, 9, 16–17, 21, 23, 30, 115, 137, 139–141, 152, 157, 176 Schmarsow, August, 173 Seattle (Washington), 27–28, 38, 113 Sheringham, Michael, 18–19, 157, 162, 171, 186n95, 187n110 Sherman, Stuart, 16 Simmel, Georg, 85–86, 88, 185n85 Sone, Monica, 63, 113 Song, Cathy, 20 space: as escape from the everyday, 16, 37 colonization and, 31 democratic social, 16, 57 in camp, 57, 58–67 interiority and, 37, 70–80 modernity and, 7, 11–14, 18, 49, 86, 88, 92–93 narrative, 34–35 occupying, 171–174 of appearance, 136–137, 140, 142 of emergence, 152 scales of, 176–177 versus place, 155–156 Spanish Civil War, 53 Stewart, Francis, 75 Yonemitshu, Lucy, photo of, 135–136 Stewart, Kathleen, 155 Stewart, Susan, 17 stranger-brother dialectic (Bulosan), 39–42 structure of feeling, 5, 12, 15, 18, 21, 69, 115 Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast (1924), 175–176

race relations cycle, 175 Radhakrishnan, R., 20 Rancière, Jacques, 137, 139 realism: Asian American literature and, 9–12,

Talk Story: Hawaii’s Ethnic American Writers conference, 156 Tamura, Tadako, 66 Tanforan Assembly Center, 61–62, 64–66, 71–72, 74

“Narrate or Describe?” (Lukács), 14 narrativity. See minimal narrativity Native Speaker (Lee), 136–153. See also Lee, Chang-rae New York City: Kang’s representations of, 27, 29, 35–36, 44, 52–53 Lee’s representations of, 139–153 Ngai, Sianne, 5, 113 Nguyen, Viet, 10 Nisei Daughter (Sone), 113, 185n81 Obasan (Kogawa), 115–118, 121–122 ordinary, 3, 81, 109, 146, 167, 172 Okubo, Miné, 58, 61–62, 64–66, 75 Okuda, Kenji, 68–69, 191–192n22, 195n76 “Oriental problem,” 175–176 Ortner, Sherry, 200n13 Palumbo-Liu, David, 179n10, 197n2, 201n23 Park, Robert, 175 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 49, 51–53 Philippines, Bulosan’s representations of, 27, 31–35, 41–42 Pitkin, Hannah, 136, 141, 149 Plotz, John, 205n39 Popular Front socialism, 31, 35, 39 postco Relocation Center lonialism, 31–33 Poston relocation center (Arizona), 77–80 Practice of Everyday Life (Certeau), 172 probability, 87–90, 95–96, 100, 105–110, 130–132 “Problem People”(Collier’s Magazine), 82 Propp, Vladimir, 198n20 public sphere, 23, 95, 136–139, 146 Puyallup (Washington), 62

Index

226 Taylor, Charles, 174, 182n37 temporality: day-to-day, 21, 56–57, 67, 70, 140 early modern, 16 everyday, 15, 142, 155, 173 lived, 173 of capitalism, 8, 27, 92 uncanny, 79, 174 Theory of the Novel (Lukács), 28, 30, 32, 38, 50–51 thingness. See material objects; reification third-person selfhood, 85–88, 103, 120 “Third and Final Continent” (Lahiri), 176–178 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), 87–88 Topaz Relocation Center (Utah), 61–62, 64–65, 75 Tosaka Jun, 9 Tsiang, H. T., 6, 10, 30 Tule Lake Relocation Center (California), 70, 80–81, 192n30 Ty, Eleanor, 201n18 Uchida, Yoshiko, 196n86 “The Unforgetting,” (Chang), 11, 130–131, 184n65 uncanniness: Freud on, 21, 55, 68, 79, 174 internment and, 18, 21, 54–59, 62, 64–65, 68–69, 75–82 lists and, 143, 148 University of California at Berkeley, 87, 113 upward spiral, 43 Vietnam, 14, 109 Vietnamese Americans, 7, 14, 17 Waiting (Ha Jin), 8, 114, 122–129. See also Ha Jin War Relocation Authority (WRA), 21, 56–62, 67, 71–77, 191n13, 194n52, 196n94 “ways of operating” (Certeau), 172 Wei, William, 6 Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka), 154–159, 162–174. See also Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Williams, Raymond, 10, 12, 20 Wilson, Robert, 156

Wölfflin, Heinrich, 173 Woloch, Alex, 34 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 15, 22, 87–89, 96–102, 157–158. See also Kingston, Maxine Hong Wong, Jade Snow: Chinese American characters in, 87–97 criticisms of, 90 disembedding and, 93, 95 everyday and, 22, 87, 91–94 first-person selfhood and, 87–88 gender in, 90–91, 96 nostalgia in, 92 pottery and, 89, 94–95 probabilistic thinking and, 21–22, 87, 90–91, 94, 99 San Francisco, descriptions of, 87, 89, 92–95 self as anomaly in, 22, 87–88, 94–95, 135 Wong, Sau-ling C., 181n29 Wong, Shawn, 159 World War II. See internment Yamamoto, Hisaye, 58, 77–80 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann: dialectical processes and, 167–168 endings in, 162–164 everydayness in, 155–159, 164, 166–174 Hawaiian setting and, 155–156, 165, 168–169 historicity in, 156, 158–159, 166 Japanese American characters in, 155–158, 162–173 material objects and, 157–159, 164, 166–170 minorness and, 23, 174 temporality in, 155, 164, 169 Yamauchi, Wakako, 20 Yeazell, Ruth, 182n38, 187n110 “yellow peril,” 4–6 Yokohama, California (Mori), 9, 15 Yonemitshu, Lucy, 76 Yu, Henry, 175 Zhou, Xiaojing, 194n46