The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American 9780822378945

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The Children of 1965

The Children of 1965

On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American

Min Hyoung Song

Duke University Press • Durham & London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Whitman by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For

Grace, Yohan, and Alexandra

Contents Introduction “We All Have Our Reasons” • 1

Part I

Impositions of Form 1 Theorizing Expectations • 29 2 The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 59 3 Not Ethnic Literature • 81 4 American Personhood • 104

Part II

Lines of Flight 5 Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 127 6 Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 152 7 Becoming Planetary • 179 8 Desert–Orient–Nomad • 197

Conclusion World-­Making • 220 Acknowledgments • 239 Appendix Contemporary Asian American Literature 101 • 241 Notes • 245 Works Cited • 261 Index • 271

Introduction

“We All Have Our Reasons”

A woman talks to her grandfather in his “aging fortune cookie factory.” She thinks, as if discovering something new about him, “I realized that he was very much like the thing he’d spent his life making: a hard, protective shell containing haiku-­like wisdom.” A little later, she reads what is written inside a fortune cookie her grandfather gives her: “Your love life will be happy and harmonious” (fig. intro.1).1 In this way, Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings begins as an ending to what seems to be a conventional story about growing up Asian American. This is a story about the process of individual maturation, bridging a generational divide, and coming to peace with one’s ethnic difference from a majority culture. It is preoccupied with self-­discovery. It placates conflict with epiphany. It is swift to allow food to act as a convenient marker of difference. Above all else, it is prepared to reach a conclusion of some kind, a sense of arrival and closure that signals the end of the story. The conclusion is easily reached, and is as a result pat and dull. As if to emphasize such expectations about the kinds of stories Asian Americans are likely to tell, the visual arrangement of the figures is static and uninteresting. The complex perspectives of the panels do little to compensate for the lack of motion in the images. This renders in graphic form the wooden narrative movement the story mimes. The next page reveals that these images were comprised of shots from an independent film being screened at the “Asian American digi-­fest.” This detail explicitly puts race and enjoyment at odds with each other because focusing on race apparently leads to storytelling that is uninteresting, predictable, and boring. With brutal frankness, Ben Tanaka says to his girlfriend Miko Hayashi, who is one of the organizers of the festival, “Because

Figure intro.1.

Detail from Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings. The figures in these panels are noticeably static.

everyone knows it’s garbage. But they clap for it anyway because it was made by some Chinese girl from Oakland! I mean, why does everything have to be some big ‘statement’ about race? Don’t any of these people just want to make a movie that’s good?”2 In this last comment, Shortcomings explicitly sets the film festival’s desire to show support for the work of a community member’s fledgling attempts at self-­expression, acknowledging— if weakly—the ways in which such attempts are not fostered or valued in other venues, against Ben’s apparently more individualistic desire to hold Asian American cultural producers to a presumably higher, race-­free standard. As an example of Asian American storytelling, the film represents for Ben what is common and uninspiring. Like the “shortcomings” of the title, 2 • Introduction

the opening panels gesture toward disappointment and a failure to live up to a different set of expectations. The alternative Ben celebrates is a storytelling that will entertain, enlighten, provoke thought, and contain some surprises. In such a narrative ideal, conventions and unfolding of events will not so easily line up with each other. This book starts with this example for a number of reasons. First, it exemplifies the complex ways in which Asian American writers have approached the topic of form. The fact that Shortcomings is a graphic narrative that begins as an explicit critique of a film highlights the ways in which Asian American literature is constantly commenting on and drawing from other texts of various kinds. Indeed, it is often an amalgam of forms, genres, and mediums: borrowing, confusing, mimicking, and violating. The spoken-­word artist Beau Sia’s comedic volume of poems entitled A Night without Armor II: The Revenge, for instance, lampoons the title of A Night without Armor, a book of poetry written by the pop star Jewel. Sia’s satiric and often vulgar poems—in contrast to the earnest and pedestrian verses that Jewel writes—also draw inspiration from violating what one might associate with poetry, refusing to take the poetic form seriously even as they seek to alter the reader’s relationship to habituated forms of speech.3 R. Zamora Linmark’s hard-­to-­define Rolling the R’s, which is ostensibly about growing up gay and ethnically Filipino in Hawaii during the 1970s, is a mash-­up of references to popular movies, television shows, songs, and fashions. The form itself is a blend of poetry and prose, some of which is written in pidgin.4 Likewise, I-­Hotel is, like other works by Karen Tei Yamashita, self-­conscious of the ways in which received forms fall short of helping it reach its narrative aspirations. The novel, if it can be called this, is broken up into ten shorter novellas, switches points of view, employs vernacular speech of various kinds, and includes drawings and a comic strip.5 Even in more seemingly conventional works, like Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction or the novels of Susan Choi, Monique Truong, Han Ong, and Chang-­rae Lee, one finds a subtle but unmistakable commentary on their own form, a restless relationship to its traditions and a ceaseless search for another order of connection to its possible alternative pasts leading to more open presents. As Betsy Huang observes about Choi’s American Woman, “Part historical fiction, part fugitive thriller, and part road narrative, the novel stitches together several genres to interrogate the narrative conventions that frame representations of social rebellion and the determination of ‘justice.’”6 “We All Have Our Reasons” • 3

Such formal restlessness further heightens the complexity of the question that Ben asks in Shortcomings. What is “good” about any of this literature? While many of the most successful contemporary writers have usually gained their success by demonstrating an unusual degree of mastery over their craft, there is nevertheless an excess—even if this excess appears a too faithful adherence to a tradition—that challenges simple aesthetic pronouncements. A salient example: Chang-­rae Lee’s novel The Surrendered was greeted by James Wood in the New Yorker as “commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and, alas, utterly conventional. . . . Many of these scenes are piercingly evoked, and the novel is so spacious in design and reach, so sensitive to historical catastrophe, that it seems churlish to bridle. Yet in the aggregate this slabbed magnificence seems, if not melodramatic, then certainly stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto, something made for the novel rather than made by it.”7 What is notable about this judgment is how it seems blind to the ways in which The Surrendered does exactly what Wood bemoans it doesn’t. In its apparently conventional use of realist narrative devices, it undermines their reality-­making effect by being overtly stagy. As Lee observes in an interview conducted as part of the research for this book: “It seems on the surface that there’s a lot of realism going on, but actually at the end, the feeling that I wanted to leave with is not that you felt that you were really in that place, but that you were transported into a very real feeling and emotion. That’s why I would use the word ‘operatic,’ because in opera everything is heightened, and the action builds, and then it gets to a point at which something’s got to break.”8 Readers of The Surrendered might also note how the novel borrows not only from an exalted form like opera but from the more lowly forms of genre fiction, from noire and crime to the superhero. The novel might even contain an homage to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. This book also begins with a discussion of Shortcomings because it raises a question that critics of Asian American literature have been addressing in various guises. Namely, what purpose does calling a work of literature Asian American serve at the present moment? That is, to put this point perhaps a bit too sharply (and confining it to a debate within Asian American literary circles rooted in its particular developmental history), should reading, writing, and the study of literature be political acts? Should these activities seek to critique coercive ideologies and contribute to novel ways of seeing the world that are potentially more liberating than the ones ex4 • Introduction

tant today?9 Or should reading, writing, and study treat this literature primarily as what Sue-­Im Lee calls “aesthetic objects—objects that are constituted by and through deliberate choices in form, genres, traditions, and conventions”?10 And indeed if this literature is no longer one focused self-­ consciously on politics, then does it also make sense to keep using a term like Asian American to describe it? This term, after all, names a racially based political project that began as politicoeconomic critique and aspirations for alternative social formations, and may therefore appear from another vantage point to be a hindrance to the making of aesthetic objects. As Christopher Lee points out, those within Asian American literary circles who have turned to aesthetics—a move this book participates in— do so with a great deal more nuance than Ben does in Shortcomings, so as not to make this an either-­or choice.11 One can be equally attentive to politics and to the making of art. Nevertheless, the very fact that some critics have sought to stake out a position explicitly critical of the reading practices of earlier critics suggests there remains an important tension between politics and aesthetics in the interpretation of Asian American literature. One concrete consequence of this tension is a greater willingness among critics to consider whether it makes sense to give up on the term Asian American altogether. In trying to understand this move toward aesthetics, however, it is important not to confuse cause and effect. It is not the case that a rising interest in aesthetics is leading some critics to question the value of the overtly political and by extension of the term Asian American. Rather, the debate over what mix of politics and aesthetics should inform the practice of Asian American literature might better be thought of as symptomatic of an underlying tension around the term Asian American itself, which repeatedly falls short of its founding movement’s aspirations at a time of mounting hostility toward open discussions about race. It is the uncertainty around the term and its political valence that has given critical force to aesthetics as a domain worthy of greater independent attention. For the more politically minded, the term feels limiting, making commitments to a narrow band of liberal position-­taking that is not faithful to the greater struggles for wholesale societal change that once energized those who had initially organized under its banner. It has, instead, turned into a synonym for an ethnic way of thinking that owes more intellectual debt to the Chicago school of sociology than to a tradition of racial solidarity-­making among Asians in America and a necessary attentiveness “We All Have Our Reasons” • 5

to structural issues.12 For the more aesthetically minded, the term is also limiting, failing as it does to grant authors and cultural producers of various kinds the opportunity to pursue their creative impulses freely. In valuing the political overmuch, Asian American literary studies as a whole has failed to appreciate the ideological heterogeneity of its population of cultural producers.13 The beginning of Shortcomings brings this tension to the foreground in as forceful a way as possible. It asserts that even in a community of culture producers and consumers outside the network of a formal academic setting this tension remains a live concern. Finally, this book begins with a discussion of Shortcomings because it highlights how a restless relationship to form and uncertainty about the purpose of literature are connected to the meaning of race for Asian Americans. A few panels after Ben berates Miko about the film’s failures, a visual detail pokes fun at the play of expectations that is set in motion by these comments. In a panel meant to establish where the next part of the story is taking place, a drawing of a building’s exterior features a restaurant’s name in big lettering: “Crepe Expectations” (fig. intro.2).14 This pun obviously belongs to the surfeit of kitschy advertisements in which daily life is awash, which suggests that Ben struggles with how the film he had seen the previous evening might be connected to this kind of commercial come-­on. Ben tells the friend he meets at the restaurant that what he objects to most about his argument with Miko is how she connected him to the film. As he puts it, “I just hate that she has to take a conversation about some stupid movie and turn it into a personal attack on me.”15 As an example of Asian American literature, broadly defined (although the focus of this book will primarily be on fiction and poetry), the film represents to Ben what is common and uninspiring about the world he lives in. It also raises the fear that Ben himself might be implicated in such a narrative. Thus, one reason that politics and aesthetics in Asian American literature can stir as much debate as they do is that literature as an important purveyor of narratives about Asian Americans frequently acts as a reflection of a person’s relative worth. No matter how much one might decry such reading habits as unsophisticated, one can’t separate representations from the ways in which representations mediate how others understand one and how one understands oneself. It is precisely because literature can seem so personal to raced subjects like Asian Americans that the race of the author, the race of the characters it focuses on, and the racial nature of the themes it develops are such in6 • Introduction

Figure intro.2.

Detail from Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings. The pun of the restaurant’s name suggests a metonymic link between kitsch and personhood.

tense objects of scrutiny in both scholarly and lay discussions. One might say that neither focusing on formal restlessness nor questioning what purposes literature can serve produces much that is unique to Asian American literature. Such emphases can obviously be understood as being applicable to the routine operations of contemporary literature as a whole. To put this point more sharply, any literary work being written today worthy of attention struggles precisely with its received forms and with the purpose it seeks to serve. And yet it seems too quick a jump from this observation to the insistence that there is nothing particularly racial about the ways in which the authors mentioned above, and discussed in the rest of this book, struggle with these questions. To assert this would be tantamount to arguing that the term Asian American has outlived its usefulness and that race itself has lost its meaningfulness in both the study and writing of literature. It would also be to accede to the implicit logic that there is something innately parochial, because raced, about Asian American literature that isn’t true of American literature, by which many critics seem to mean a small number of championed white writers studied alongside one or two token minority writers. If the distinction between Asian American literature and American literature seems to collapse, it may be less because the former is vanishing into the latter and more that the latter is in a process of reinvention and requires something like the former as an impor“We All Have Our Reasons” • 7

tant model. In other words, if contemporary American literature is marked by formal restlessness and a questioning of its purpose, it is because it is being forced to respond to pressures with which Asian American literature as a whole has for some time been contending. One does not read and study Asian American literature to understand only Asian Americans. One also does so to understand American literature in its expansive plasticity and its potential for constant renewal.

The Creative Potential of Race

The Children of 1965 is about a generation of writers who have largely been born since the mid-­1960s and who are in the process of making a substantial mark on American literature. The writers this book calls attention to are part of the largest and most celebrated cohort of American writers of Asian ancestry ever to exist, which also means that the study of this literature has wide-­ranging significance for the whole of contemporary American literature. As Cynthia Sau-­Ling Wong observed when this cohort was just starting to become visible, the year 1991 is an “annus mirabilis” for “it witnessed the appearance of an extraordinary number of well-­received books, some of them debuts for first-­timers, others representing new directions of established authors.”16 If 1991 was indeed a year of miracles, what makes it doubly miraculous is how its accomplishments have been dwarfed by the productivity and success of the writers who published their works in the decades that followed. A survey of ten prominent literary awards given to American writers— the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Award in Poetry, the National Book Award in Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, pen/Faulkner, pen/Hemingway, the Yale Younger Poet Series, and the Barnard Women Poets Prize—compactly conveys this fact (table intro.1). It reveals that Asian Americans have won these awards seventeen times, almost all of them since the mid-­1990s. Most of the honorees were under forty when they won their respective prizes, with most having been born after the mid-­1960s. This may explain why the pen/Hemingway can boast the most Asian American honorees, as this award is given only to first books of fiction. This may also explain why Asian American poets, who have fared poorly as award winners when compared to their fiction-­

8 • Introduction

Table intro.1.

Asian American Winners of Ten Major Literature Awards Year 1981

Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, National Book Award in General Nonfiction

1986

Cathy Song’s Picture Bride, Yale Younger Poet Award

1996

Chang-­rae Lee’s Native Speaker, pen/Hemingway Award

1997

Ha Jin’s Ocean of Words, pen/Hemingway Award

1998

Bharati Mukherjee’s Middleman and Other Stores, National Book Critics Circle Award

1999

Ai’s Vice: New and Selected Poems, National Book Award in Poetry

2000

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, pen/ Hemingway Award

2001

Akhil Sharma’s An Obedient Father, pen/Hemingway Award Ha Jin’s Waiting, National Book Award in Fiction, pen/Faulkner Award, Finalist for Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

2003

Sabina Murray’s The Caprices, pen/Faulkner Award

2004

Susan Choi’s American Woman, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

2005

Ha Jin’s War Trash, National Book Award in Fiction, pen/Faulkner Award, Finalist for Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Yiyun Lee’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, pen/Hemingway Award Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, Barnard Women Poets Prize

2006

Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, National Book Critics Circle Award

2008

Maxine Hong Kingston, National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

2010

Ken Chen’s Juvenilia, Yale Younger Poet Award

The majority of the awards were conferred in the past two decades.

writing peers, have had volumes selected as part of the Yale Younger Poet Series twice (none of them has won a Pulitzer or a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry). In addition, since the mid-­1990s Asian Americans have published literary works at an unprecedented rate. As one small marker of this expanding productivity, the number of nominees for the Asian American Writers Workshop’s literature awards for books published in 2008 is revealing: fifteen books in nonfiction, twenty-­two in poetry, and twenty-­five in fiction.17 These numbers would have been simply unthinkable a few decades ago, no matter how capaciously one defined the term Asian American. Surveying these works, this book argues that there is something particularly Asian American about them, even as this literature might slip past such critical boundaries or challenge their configuration. In building its case, the book also makes a series of claims that run the gamut from the obvious to the controversial. To those who insist that the United States has arrived at a historical moment that exists beyond the divisiveness of race, what follows responds that race continues to divide—even as it might, paradoxically, bring together in original ways. The book claims that race also continues to organize social experiences, to set limits to cultural expression, and, just as important, to inspire creativity. It calls attention to the ways in which Asian Americans bring their constitutive histories, characteristic concerns, and heterogeneous perspectives to bear on the writing of contemporary American literature as a whole. Finally, it asserts that, far from being parochial, the study of Asian American literature is a study of American literature’s future, not in the sense it somehow leads the way to what’s next but in the sense that it represents what is already imminent to American literature that pulls its creativity forward in time. Whether the writers discussed herein realize it or not, whether they want it or not, their ability to cope with, and even to thrive on, the onrush of racial expectations that saturates their work gives the literature they write a special vibrancy. As a result, race more often than not turns out to be a source of creativity in the pages these writers are producing. Indeed, to think of such a diverse collection of ethnic groups and individual histories as comprising a single racial category, as the term Asian American does, is already to call attention to an act of profound creativity. It is no easy task for the imagination to look at a population as diverse as the one called into being by the term Asian American and see in that population shared experiences, common causes, and structural affinities. In such 10 • Introduction

an instance, race is not a preexistent condition, but is being actively produced. Hence, this book seeks to recuperate the idea of Asian American creative expression from the narrow way in which Ben at the start of Shortcomings defines it. While there certainly are narratives that conform to a fairly convention-­bound idea about what stories and poems about Asian Americans should be like, the majority of the works discussed in this book refuse this idea. And by refusing, these works help their readers think imaginatively about what the near future holds for a country on the cusp of dramatic changes to its demographic composition, geopolitical prominence, and environmental well-­being. Unavoidably, the project this book undertakes is potentially convention-­setting. In arguing that Asian American literature is at its best when it refuses conventions and helps readers see their past, present, and future in dramatically different ways, the book also asserts these are the qualities that make some works of literature Asian American. As it attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Asian American creative expression does not have to be convention-­bound, and in fact is especially interesting and worth reading when it isn’t, it thereby suggests boundaries about what it should be. There is no way around this conundrum except in the struggle against it—a constant overcoming of boundaries that creates their own boundaries that must in turn be overcome. What this book does is locate Asian American creative expression in the struggle itself, something already encoded in its formal restlessness. Asian American literature is a perpetual-­motion machine that continuously turns out fictive narratives, poetic visions, life stories, bits of insight, flashes of brilliance, and moments of dangerous reflection. It is certainly the case that to describe Asian American literature as a machine is to conjure a long history of associating the Asian with the machine-­like, but it does little good simply to repudiate this association. What is more interesting is to embrace it and in the process to redefine the machine to show how it is not incommensurate with the human. The two are bound together, occupying a zone of indeterminacy that continually coproduce, and reproduce, each other as concepts. As the opening example suggests, however, many Americans of Asian ancestry, writers not least among them, find it difficult to think of a bureaucratic category like Asian American (a mechanical term, if there ever was one) as anything so dynamic. Far from a call for inventiveness, the “We All Have Our Reasons” • 11

term seems to put people into a neat box. It’s no surprise, therefore, that many writers might not only refuse the conventions that seem to boundary Asian American literature, but might also refuse to be called an Asian American altogether. It is a label that is affixed too haphazardly onto one’s person. It lacks flow, beauty, familiar self-­identification. To say “I am an Asian American” does not lend itself easily to conversation. Rather, it trips up the tongue in an ungainly manner, arrests attention, and seems to force an issue that always requires further clarification. It is so much easier to say, “I am Hmong,” “I am Laotian,” “I am Cambodian,” “I am Sri Lankan,” “I am Vietnamese,” “I am Pakistani,” “I am Indian,” “I am Taiwanese,” “I am Burmese,” “I am Chinese,” “I am Japanese,” “I am Filipino,” “I am Korean,” “I am Thai,” and so on. These ways of self-­identifying would at least have the advantage of ethnicity, which compared to the racial term Asian American is comfortingly concrete and immediately graspable. Such self-­identifications are also more accommodating and less prone to confrontation. Moreover, what trips the tongue up most is the addition of the “American” either to Asian or a specific Asian ethnic designation. The noun sounds forced, irrelevant to a primary identifier that makes what follows seem either an afterthought or even a contradiction. Indeed, the addition of “American” adds a layer of historical consciousness, asking one to consider what has happened in the past that the geographical regions named in conjunction should strike one as being so improbably forced. Asian American also has an opposing problem: in purporting to be representative of all of these ethnicities located within a specific host country, its expansiveness excludes as much as it includes. What about those who are indigenous to the Pacific Islands? Or those who can trace their ancestry to South Asia or West Asia (what is primarily known in the U.S. as the Middle East), when Asia itself is so often understood in the United States to refer only to the countries of East Asia? Or those who don’t think of themselves as Americans? Or those who live in Canada and Latin America, who are also Americans in the broadest sense of this word? In response to such questions, several alternatives have been floated as more descriptive of a vastly heterogeneous population. These include Asian Pacific Islander American, South Asian American (as a complementary term to Asian American), Asian Diaspora, Asian/American, and Asian North American. From a writer’s point of view, all of these possible self-­descriptors must exacerbate rather than alleviate the problem the writer may have with a term like Asian American. Each is more technical and bureaucratic than the 12 • Introduction

former. They are what a committee might come up with to cover all contingencies. They say nothing about lived experiences, about finding just the right word to convey an inchoate sensation or thought, or about maintaining narrative momentum. Simply put, they are all soulless. What might therefore be critically indispensable, especially as any critical enterprise must seek precision as a mark of its rigor, will seem to creative writers as impediments to their work. A gulf thus appears to exist between the professional writer, who above all else might want to preserve his or her right to create in as unencumbered way as possible, and the professional reader, especially one who values an approach to reading that rejects the idea that literature exists in its own tightly contained rarified sphere. But, when scrutinized, this gulf might turn out to be smaller than it at first appeared. While creative writers might not favor using a term like Asian American (or its more inclusive alternatives) and may even reject this term outright as a descriptor of who they are and what they do, they nonetheless do respond to the same set of concerns that mobilizes critics of their work. That is, they are equally interested in making creative sense of forces that critics seek to understand in the most innovative and rigorous ways possible: How are people with ancestry from Asia perceived and treated in this country? How might such perceptions change? What would it mean to lead a full life without denying parts of oneself, such as one’s Asian ancestry, that others don’t seem to value or value in a way that feels discomforting? What are the obligations one owes to others who are less fortunate, or excluded by conceptualizations of the self? What does it mean to lead a good life? What is an ethical way to think of oneself in the world? What does justice look like, and for whom? What kind of future does one want to help create? What makes creative writers different, however, is that they struggle more with a racial designation that critics and those in other fields (such as history, sociology, psychology, policy-­making, law) more easily accept as a necessary part of what they do. Indeed, those who actively question whether critics should find another term to organize their thinking do so in the interests of finding a way to organize their thinking more adequately or at the very least to be more flexible to accommodate dynamically changing social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances. Perhaps many writers are wary of racial designation because they perceive any such designation, no matter how flexible, as limiting their freedom to imagine what they want. Or perhaps they are wary because a racial designation like “We All Have Our Reasons” • 13

Asian American seems to come from the world of academia and government and business, and therefore to threaten a pursuit that defines itself as opposed to such institutional and compromised ways of thinking. Or perhaps resistance to being labeled comes from working in a field dominated by assemblages of creative-­writing programs, talent agents, editors, and marketing departments that relentlessly seek to commodify all that is different about a writer and that is thus also compromised in a way a writer might want to work against. Or perhaps such resistance emerges because writers, precisely in being writers, are intimately aware of the ways in which representation seems always to be invading personhood. For whatever reason, many of the writers interviewed for this book were reluctant to be called Asian American writers or accepted the designation only with great ambivalence. Some, however, accepted it as an important descriptor of what they were trying to do with their writing, thereby granting themselves the freedom to do what they wished under its aegis and thus finding the freedom they yearned for in a term that other writers saw as limiting. By either resisting or acceding to this description, these writers remain engaged in actively redefining what it means to be an Asian American. By vacillating between writing and not writing as an Asian American, these writers work within a space of tense creativity that reflects a national unease about the question of race and the many other concerns about an uncertain future that race signifies. When asked whether she considers herself an Asian American writer, Susan Choi responded, “Yes and no. I do have a particular interest in the lives of Asians in this country, and at the same time I don’t as a writer feel like that’s my writing identity.” Such ambivalence about the question of how to identify oneself acts as a kind of necessary friction to creative work. Because Asian American writers in particular, for whatever reason, seem troubled by their racial entanglements, they draw from these entanglements to produce something innovative, fascinating, and richly complex. Even when their works stumble and are uneven, disappointing, or unsatisfying—as they can be—these works are nevertheless usually worth the time it takes to read and to think deeply about. What makes these works rewarding is that they are fueled by an ambivalence about race that gestures toward, and may even correspond with, the uncertainty the reader feels about the future. In responding to the question “What purpose does calling this literature Asian American serve?,” this book proposes that the very contentiousness of this question 14 • Introduction

is fuel for greater creativity. Without restrictions, there can be little call for acts of transgression. Without boundaries, there can be few opportunities for boundary-­crossing. Without a set of expectations to guide and limit what a writer can write, there can be no striving for a horizon that endlessly and necessarily and often pleasurably eludes one’s grasp.

The Pleasures of Deep Reading

One might wonder, why begin a book about such a large and expanding topic by focusing on a single literary work? Surely there are many examples one can draw from that would enrich this discussion. And by selecting only one work to examine closely it is possible that the work was selected because it happens to fit what this book is arguing, and allows its author to ignore other examples that might not fit so neatly into its interpretive framework. These are valid criticisms that the rest of this book addresses by drawing on as large a number of examples as possible. Just as important as breadth, however, is careful attention to individual texts, something which movements toward a more quantitative approach to literary study risks eschewing.18 In making sense of how writers struggle with racial expectations, in particular, it is important to maintain the particularities of their individual writings at the center of attention even as what is being considered is the sweep of contemporary Asian American literature’s prodigious productivity. Such attentiveness helps avoid the kind of reductionism that racial expectations can enforce, so that a study of this kind does not simply end up duplicating the exact set of phenomena that writers find themselves struggling against. In addition, much can be learned by such attentiveness, or what might more descriptively be called deep reading. This involves reading every word and image, lingering over details, savoring the many permutations of meaning that a piece of writing offers, and allowing oneself to consider how these meanings are formed in relation to concerns outside the text. It is highly subjective, but also discerning of what is on the page. It is synthetic in the sense that no reader reads without a knowledge of other works and of a world that contains them in specific times and places and bodies. The developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf has argued that the human brain is not intrinsically designed for reading, but has gradually taken on this task through a historically long process of cultural development. What this means is that each individual must learn the task of “We All Have Our Reasons” • 15

reading, starting from early stages of exposure to the written word where one becomes aware that images on a page have meaning and correspond to spoken words. More advanced developmental stages automate what for the early reader is a slow and self-­conscious process, so that the brain of an advanced reader can decode printed words in milliseconds, leaving the mind several more milliseconds to contemplate what it has encountered. This is what Wolf calls “the secret gift of time to think that lies at the core of the reading brain’s design.”19 While related to close reading, deep reading seeks to get beyond the formalism that the former term connotes. As Wolf suggests, deep reading seeks to do more than to make sense of the words that are there on the page. It also tries to connect these words with questions that lead to the world beyond. One can’t savor the meanings of a work of literature without also seeing how these meanings are produced in conversation with what’s happening all around oneself. By asking one to slow down, even if by the milliseconds that digital media in their immediacy and distractedness often do not allow, print literature affords a space of contemplation from which one can reengage with a world that can otherwise be too immersive. That is, the world created by digital media can be so completely engrossing of one’s attention that one can continue without realizing it to see in the same way over and over, mistaking that repetition as simply the most rational way to understand the world. As the narrator’s mother in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior put it, “The difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-­story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”20 Deep reading, which is only possible after a long engagement with the printed word, draws one outward to what exists beyond the page so as to be better able to reengage it and to imagine it anew—to attain some sense of its potential, and in this way to remain sane when so many others seem to be completely mad. One might therefore say that deep reading allows the reader to make worlds rather than simply to accept the world as it is given, precut, prepackaged, tired in its rutted ways of seeing. Deep reading is also different from critical reading, which suggests an aggressive interrogation of the text, a searching for ideological incongruity and contradictions of thought that is brought to the surface through a rubbing against the grain of what is written on the page. While this is certainly an important intellectual activity, it sometimes fails to appreciate, and even encourages one to look with suspicion on, the many pleasures 16 • Introduction

that literature can yield to the careful reader. The literary text is unique in that it calls for deep reading. One of its chief pleasures is that the reading practice it elicits is unlike the instrumental forms of reading encountered on a daily basis (newspapers, magazines, blogs, and so on) when one is more often than not scanning for content and trying simply to get the gist of what is there as quickly as one can. In contrast, literature encourages one to slow down. In slowing down, one must interrogate the text. But one must also not only interrogate. One must enjoy it, find pleasure in it, or it ceases to be literature and becomes miserably indistinguishable from the mass of other writings that inundate one’s days. To keep literature literature as such, one must be able to articulate what one finds worth savoring about it. Only by opening oneself up to such pleasure can a reader discover what critical reading alone may foreclose. So, in the name of deep reading, this introduction returns to where it began—to a discussion of Shortcomings and the question of politics and aesthetics. Deep reading benefits from literary texts that are capable of rewarding the attentive reader and that as a result might side with those who favor aesthetic appreciation over political concerns. But even if it does, deep reading must also take into account the ways in which what defines “good” literature, as Ben might put it, is complex, mixing instrumental modes of reading with belletristic practices. It must also recognize that the literary text is itself varied, so that it cannot be limited to a few celebrated works or even simply to works in the medium of prose and verse. In language that Ben would surely find fitting, for example, one might say that the film that opens Shortcomings seeks nakedly to trade on its ethnic and racial difference from mainstream cinema. If it critiques the desire to make a lot of money, it nevertheless strives for an alternative form of capital accumulation in the realm of culture. It seeks to attain the prestige produced by the machinery of the Asian American film festival that can compensate, if poorly, for its being left out of the circuits of economic capital that enliven the national and global trade of cinematic material. Analogous to the kind of labor performed in the aging fortune-­ cookie factory (where the final scene of the film takes place), the film itself is engaged in a form of highly ethnicized work, producing products for a narrowly defined enclave economy. What seems to conjure the most disgust for Ben is how satisfied the filmmaker and the audience members are in accepting such meager compensation, applauding a kind of good that in another context would have been panned as not very good. Market ex“We All Have Our Reasons” • 17

pectations are low because narratives by and about Asian Americans have relatively little prestige where it counts—in precisely the same way that a fortune cookie has cachet only when served at the end of a meal at a Chinese restaurant. What gets celebrated within its small enclave would be considered weak, bland, and uninteresting in a broader context. All of this highlights for Ben the ways in which being Asian American has little value, so that any narrative attention given to Asian Americans must, by definition, be undeserving of such sustained attention.21 In response to this disgust and as a way perhaps to distance himself from becoming part of its object, Ben argues for a uniqueness that can transcend what is degraded about such a racially defined art form. In doing so, he enacts a recognizable modernist maneuver in his desire for a postracial form of storytelling. Unfortunately for Ben, his occupation as a manager of a local movie theater undermines this maneuver. Ben’s job reminds the reader that there are dominant forms of narrative that willfully announce their complicity with the desire to make money, that follow conventions as banal as the ones on display in the opening page of Shortcomings, and that actively exclude the range of persons and compress the range of possible types of persons that can be embodied onscreen. Tomine’s book undercuts Ben’s modernist maneuver in another way when it depicts a fight that Ben has with Miko after the latter finds his collection of pornographic films. This revelation accentuates the other qualities of his character that make Ben a suspect spokesperson for a modernist appreciation of aesthetic value. He is querulous, unsatisfied, emotionally stunted, and in a host of other ways unlikable. He is not a figure a reader is likely going to want to identify with. So one senses that Ben is perhaps a kind of antihero: the reader follows along not because he or she agrees with him or wants him to succeed in his exploits, but to find out what makes him tick. Regardless of how the reader might feel about him, Ben’s aesthetic claim, made so forcibly at the start, requires careful thought, if only because it allows one to appreciate the contradictions of such a claim. That Ben feels the need to keep his stash of pornographic films a secret suggests how it is not something that easily coexists with his aesthetic claims. It is precisely because of the apparent glaring contradiction between Ben’s disdain for Asian American independent filmmaking and his enjoyment of usually even more amateurish pornographic films that Ben is able to embody how consumers make contradictory demands on the art of story18 • Introduction

telling. The storyteller as belletristic artist is at once expected to occupy a plane of expression that is unimpeded by mundane concerns like popularity or making money, and often even to disdain such concerns. Simultaneously, such an artist is supposed to anchor whatever case for relevance his or her art might have to universal appeal. In other words, the story being told must have the ability to connect with as large an audience as possible. Indeed, the audience has to be large enough, to put this point a little circularly, to make a work popular and its author rich—an instrumental way of defining the good. One might say therefore that making a good movie, and by extension writing a good story, is never as simple as Ben originally makes it out to be, for what is good does not exist on its own Platonic plane. It is routed through expectations about what will sell and about who the audience will be, as well as how the author defines the goals of his or her artistic endeavor. Racial-­aesthetic expectations, postracial modernist-­aesthetic expectations, and racially tinged market expectations besiege Asian American writers and cultural producers. Ben makes visible in his contradictory responses how difficult it is to pick his way through these competing demands. The fact that these responses are being staged in the medium of comics, which has until recently had little cultural capital as literature, makes more salient the reader’s awareness of how slippery and embedded in time—such as a present moment that is witness to heightened critical appreciation of this medium as suitable for serious storytelling—any definition of good literature can be. As the conflict between Ben and Miko highlights, such expectations also exacerbate their romantic relationship. What upsets Miko most about the pornographic films she finds—she is notably silent about the form itself—is their relentless objectification of white women. As she puts it, “Do you have any idea why this might offend me? It’s like you’re obsessed with the typical western media beauty ideal, but you’re settling for me.”22 Just as in art, the choice of romantic partners in this work is caught up in a system of racial valuation that limits the appeal of what it means to be Asian American, even if someone like Ben insists race has nothing to do with romance. The rest of the narrative of Shortcomings explores this tension as Miko moves to New York to take up an internship opportunity. In her absence, Ben romantically pursues two different white women, with disappointing results. As the disappointments mount, he learns that Miko has lied. There was no internship. She moved to New York so she could be with another man, who, according to Ben, is white. When confronted, “We All Have Our Reasons” • 19

Miko insists that he is not: “He’s half Jewish, half Native American.”23 In the wake of this discovery (which revolves around the slipperiness of whiteness even as the narration insists racial hypocrisy is self-­evident), when his only friend Alice Kim asks, “Now am I finally allowed to talk shit about her?,” Ben responds with unusual generosity, “No, don’t. Look . . . we all have our reasons.”24 These are the last words spoken in Shortcomings. They evoke the kinds of compromises everyone must make in negotiating the expectations that race in particular generates. After these words are uttered, the story falls into silence, with the drawings taking over the heavy work of conveying Ben’s lonely departure from the apartment now inhabited by Alice, where she is asleep in the arms of her lover, his walk through airport security, and his literally endless plane ride back to a home where he has no friend or loved one left. In his final conversation with Alice, who has just announced her decision to stay in New York to live with her girlfriend, Ben admits his desire for deferral. He is unwilling to grow up just for the sake of growing up, and he refuses to embrace change because change is always happening: “You know, there’s still a part of me that thinks when I land in Oakland, everything will just be . . . back to normal. . . . You’ll be back in school. . . . Miko will be waiting for me at the airport.”25 The final panels, six all together, depict Ben looking forlornly outside a small porthole, the outlines of the airport and the city giving way to clouds, and then a white blankness (fig. intro.3). Nothing else is different about these panels except the scenery outside the window. The visual placement of Ben’s body looking outward at the passing world thus recalls the static arrangement of bodies that the book’s first page depicted. This time, however, the lack of movement, even more noticeable than in the opening page, does not figure the banal or trite, and definitively refuses any gesture of subjective arrival. Instead, it evokes an intensity of focus on a voiding of expectations, a subtle reminder that even in the stillness of his body Ben is, in fact, in motion. The quiet, poignant moment of reflection created by this static arrangement of panels with their subtle differences—the world standing still while the airplane moves through the air, the body perfectly still as the world rushes past— beautifully expresses how little Ben has to look forward to. Ben’s relationship to the future is one of dread and fear. These panels also model the kind of pose a reader might assume after having taken his or her time to read Shortcomings deeply. If expectations are a problem for contemporary 20 • Introduction

Figure intro.3.

Detail from Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings. Contemplation as a stillness in motion.

Asian American writers, as The Children of 1965 argues, they are a problem both because there are too many of them, which weighs heavily on the lives they write about and on the forms of their writing, and because, as Ben confronts in these final panels, there are also too few. At the same time, the ending is not entirely bleak. Or, it might be more accurate to say the ending exceeds the constraints of thinking in terms of optimism and pessimism, or of hope and dread. Instead, it figures a present and a future inextricably knotted together, a temporal immanence that conveys what can best be described as a becoming. A becoming is a perpetually ongoing process of arrival, waiting, being in a state of suspension, motion and stillness, or a stillness found in motion. Likewise, the “We All Have Our Reasons” • 21

work of the writer as an Asian American—to write with race in mind or as a starting place—is at its most engaging a restless endeavor, a deliberate dislodging of being for a becoming that ceaselessly searches out lines of flight, a movement that seeks to break free from constrained and habituated patterns of thought. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who more than anyone in recent memory has helped to make this sense of the word becoming resonate as it does in contemporary literary studies, could very well have had these drawings in mind, could very well have been thinking about Asian American literature, when he observed, “We sometimes congratulate writers, but they know that they are far from having achieved their becoming, far from having attained the limit they set for themselves, which ceaselessly slips away from them.”26

Impositions and Lines

What follows is divided into two parts for the sake of clarity. The chapters in the first part, entitled “Impositions of Form,” address what it means to write as an Asian American and how expectations that writers of Asian ancestry working in the United States will do so impinges on the work they produce. Chapter 1 launches this investigation by focusing on the topic of expectations, which animates the theoretical concerns of this book. It explores how expectations can help address the issue of change, and how literature in particular is an important, and distinct, discursive space for exploring this issue. Chapter 2 builds on these theoretical meditations by comparing ideas of writing that formed during a time in the early 1970s when many Asians in America began to think of themselves as Asian Americans in the crucible of popular political activism with those commonly expressed by younger writers writing in the present. It focuses on the ways in which the trope of the lost manuscript has haunted the origins of Asian American literature as a symbol of experiences whose stories have been lost, from Sui Sin Far’s missing book to John Okada’s burned novel. It emphasizes how the lost manuscript operates differently in contemporary works, such as in Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace. Chapter 3 examines works by Asian Americans who either actively wrestle with what it means to be an ethnic writer or who refuse altogether to broach this subject, mainly by focusing on non–Asian American characters. It draws on an interview conducted with Sabina Murray to set the stage for readings of two especially salient works that draw attention to the 22 • Introduction

question of what it means to write, or not write, ethnic literature. The first is Nam Le’s short story “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” which more than any other recent example tackles directly in narrative form what it means to be a writer of literature of Asian ancestry in the United States—and in doing so turns the trope of the lost manuscript once more. This is a struggle that is acutely relevant for Le, who grew up in Australia and had resided in the United States for only a short time when the story was published. The second is Ed Park’s Personal Days, which at first appears to be completely uninterested in the question of ethnic literature, yet reveals at the same time sharp insights into the ways in which race operates in a novel. The chapter ends with a short discussion of Ted Chiang’s works of science fiction. With the help of Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son and Susan Choi’s American Woman, chapter 4 focuses on why the word American creeps so often into the titles of works by Asian Americans, noting, among other things, the ways in which the word points directly to a national fixation on an individuality that associates a liberal personhood with a freedom from racial association. This chapter seeks to make sense of how the individuality imagined in these novels might not equate to the one imagined by neoliberalism, seeking in this way to consider how novels like Roley’s and Choi’s might be doing the difficult cultural work of imagining a personhood that is not reducible to nation, to ethnicity, or to individual self-­ possession. “Lines of Flight,” the second part of this book, concentrates attention on how contemporary Asian American writers help envision a near future inextricably tied to tumultuous forces—demographic changes, geopolitical restructuring, environmental catastrophe—already at work in the present. Chapter 5 begins by asking whether Asian Americans are a racial minority. It addresses this question by focusing on comics as a medium that allows writers to contest a visual history of race thinking, and in particular on the work of Gene Luen Yang. American Born Chinese, Yang’s most ambitious work to date, tests the boundaries of Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s paradigm-­setting work on racial formation and challenges the thinking of its critics, including Walter Benn Michaels and Colleen Lye. Chapter 6 explores how Jhumpa Lahiri, one of the most acclaimed American writers of her generation, employs allegory to dramatize the anxieties surrounding demographic predictions that in the near future the United States will no longer be majority white. This literary maneuver allows her “We All Have Our Reasons” • 23

fiction to focus on a specific population of Asian Americans—mainly professional, middle-­class, and upper-­middle-­class Bengali immigrants and their children living along the Boston–New York corridor—without seeming at the same time to be too narrowly focused. Her characters are allowed to lead lives that are, in this way, worthy of her and her readers’ attention across the span of several major books. By training attention on the work of the established writer Karen Tei Yamashita and the emerging writer Sonya Chung, chapter 7 anchors its investigation into the ways in which Asian American writers imagine how current geopolitical relations pegged to globalization are troubled by transnational relations of family, romance, and friendship. It considers how the use of multiple perspectives and nonlinear storytelling by these authors allow them to imagine a planetary, as opposed to a global, way of being together. Following the ecological bend that “becoming planetary” entails, the final chapter of this book turns to the issue of place, highlighting the ways in which Asian American writers like the poet Cathy Park Hong and the novelist Julie Otsuka set their work in the tropological richness of a desert landscape. They use this setting to consider the connections between widespread migration, the mingling of many languages, the possible suspension of the rule of law, and environmental degradation. This is powerfully true in Cathy Park Hong’s poem sequence Dance Dance Revolution, since it turns into poetry what Evelyn Ch’ien calls “weird ­English,” a mixing of languages into a pidgin or patois that acts as a potent source for literary creativity.27 This is also true of Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, which calls attention to the desert landscape that is at once ubiquitous and largely unremarked on in narratives about Japanese American wartime internment that the rest of this chapter considers. All of these chapters, as well as this introduction, have been deliberately written in a third-­person critical voice. This is the kind of prose many high school students are still trained to produce in their English classes and one that they will probably be told they no longer need to reproduce in college writing. Certainly, humanities professors themselves rarely write in the purely third person, and a growing number have also been experimenting, often in bold ways, with hybrid forms that collapse distinctions between autobiography and the critical essay. What might be lost in such a personalizing of scholarship? What might be gained by willfully not participating in such a personalizing? Writing purely in the third person implicitly highlights these questions. 24 • Introduction

To further emphasize this contrast, the conclusion suspends this book’s counter-­experiment in scholarly writing, to take a more personal approach to the questions raised by the book as a whole. By being written in the first person, the conclusion thus implicitly addresses the question, What is gained by combining scholarly work with autobiographical rumination? The conclusion seeks to be an example of such writing, and leaves discussion about its significance for elsewhere. What the conclusion does address explicitly is the case for the appeal, and the enduring importance, of the culture turn in literary studies made in the 1980s and 1990s, to which the personalization of scholarly writing is closely related. At the same time, it argues that the culture turn, in rejecting the logic of literary canonicity and great books, is in danger of viewing the literary work as a window into the world as it is. What the conclusion proposes is that readers should turn to literature as world-­making, a subtly more literary way of connecting the text to what lies beyond its pages that sees literature as unique because it seeks to imagine what is not yet. In composing these chapters, many literary works by Asian Americans published since 1990 were consulted as time allowed—over a hundred titles (see appendix). These works span genres, forms, and even mediums, ranging from fiction and poetry to life writing, creative nonfiction, and comics. The kind of work considered here was restricted to print culture in order to make the scope manageable. Novels dominate attention, as the form itself remains the most prestigious and most popular mode of expression in print literature. Asian American fiction writing has also dominated poetry in terms of sales and prizes, suggesting that the former has so far been more accessible to a general readership and taste-­brokering class than the latter. Life writing has generally been kept in the background because it is so uniquely complex that it would require more space than is available here to investigate fully. Despite its bias for the novel, and for fiction more generally, this book has nevertheless sought to call special attention to some poetic works in the hopes of contributing to a growing body of scholarship that acknowledges the budding significance, and beauty, of Asian American poetry. In addition, a series of original interviews with a wide range of authors has enabled an engagement with these authors as partners in conversations about their work. They are listed here alphabetically: Saher Alam, Alexander Chee, Susan Choi, Lawrence Minh-­Bùi Davis, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-­rae Lee, Min Jin Lee, Gerald Maa, David Mura, “We All Have Our Reasons” • 25

Sabina Murray, Ed Park, Brian Ascalon Roley, Ricco Siasoco, Monique Truong, and Karen Tei Yamashita. A wide range of criteria was employed to decide which authors to include in this list. Talking to writers of as many different Asian ethnic backgrounds as possible was a criterion. Another was talking to writers of diverse personal background and history irrespective of ethnicity: whether one was born in this country or immigrated here at a later stage in life, whether one came from a middle-­class professional family or from a working-­class family, whether one was later in one’s life-­cycle or still relatively young. Another was the desire to have a mix of writers who were well known, and even famous, and writers whose works appealed to smaller audiences or who were just starting out. While every effort was made to be as inclusive as possible, some of the writers invited to participate in these discussions were unable or unwilling to do so; thus, one more addition to the list of criteria is the author’s availability or willingness to be interviewed. While some of the interviews conducted for this book did not lend themselves to direct quotation, all of them have substantially informed the thinking that has gone into the composition of this book’s argument. Talking with these writers is a lot like reading their works. It can be an exciting endeavor, funny and thought-­provoking at times, frustrating at others, but always full of a generosity that is a key feature of the literature they are collectively writing.

26 • Introduction

Chapter 1

Theorizing Expectations

Everyone is invested with expectations of various kinds, to one degree or another, and some of these undoubtedly bear striking similarities to the ones that most frequently adhere to discourses about Asian Americans. Still, specific expectations pose challenges for Asian Americans that others, who are differently raced, do not face. The young in particular have often been reminded of how young they are and of what awaits them once they reach maturity. Harold Bloom, one of the most venerable American literary scholars of the postwar era, provides a vivid illustration of this point when he observes: One of my growing convictions, founded upon the last 20 years or so of my more than 40 years of teaching at Yale University, is that the life of the mind and the spirit in the United States will be dominated by Asian Americans in the opening decades of the 21st century. The intellectuals . . . are emerging from the various Asian-­American peoples. In this displacement, the roles once played in American culture and society by the children of Jewish immigrants to the United States are passing to the children of Asian immigrants, and a new phase of American literature will be one of the consequences.1 While it is now a commonplace to compare Jewish Americans of an earlier era with contemporary Asian Americans, as in this passage, the former were not compared to another group when they were first leaving their mark on American society. This means that the former were not confronted with the same demographic expectations that now confront the

latter, namely that they will follow the path laid out by another group in a kind of rite of ethnic succession. This succession begins with “the children of Jewish immigrants” and has as its only successor “the children of Asian immigrants.” This does not mean that comparisons between Asian and Jewish Americans cannot be made. They are often made and can prove highly informative.2 It does suggest, however, that there is something salient about Asian Americans and their relationship to the imagination of the future that can bring them into proximate discussions with other groups that might not be as immediately obvious. In this instance produced by Bloom’s self-­assured prediction, focusing on expectations brings into relief what is particular about “the children of 1965”: that they have become a potent representative of a future America, one which will no longer be majority white but will nonetheless keep alive a contiguous national character. As the root word of expectation suggests, having “to look out for” the future as Asian Americans do is fraught with ambivalence. From the Latin verb ex-­spectare, the word conjures two intertwined feelings that are simultaneously at odds with but inseparable from each other: “to hope for” and “to dread.” These feelings succinctly capture the relationship many Asian American writers working within the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twentieth-­first century have with the future. They look with both hope and dread on what they are trying to accomplish with their work and on how their work will be received. In their myriad ways, they carefully and creatively wrestle with the specific racial expectations that condition, surround, enable, and possibly choke the lives their works seek to imagine. While they each focus explicitly on individual characters, as individuals these characters are stymied by hopes and dread intimately related to the topic of race that exceed attempts at self-­definition, agency, and autonomy. By struggling with such expectations, their works also give texture to the ways in which race both affects and does not affect lived experiences, personal longings, and aspirations for meaningful e­ xistence. This chapter begins with a discussion on how such expectations have come to shape the experiences of Asian Americans and how Asian American writers have sought to negotiate their forceful and often contradictory impositions. It does so by theorizing the concept of expectations, considering along the way how such expectations keep bringing Asian Americans into surprisingly intimate juxtaposition with other discourses about personhood, including those that directly shape cultural understandings 30 • Chapter One

of children and queers. While the connections between the latter two have been richly explored, critics have yet to consider in an equally rich way how the racialization of Asian Americans might also be linked. The chapter then turns to the work of theory itself, explaining how the use of writings by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychotherapist Felíx Guattari seeks to respond—perhaps paradoxically—to the need for published work in the humanities to be at once accessible and engaging at a time when the humanities itself is under fire.

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act

To query how Asian Americans, especially those of a specific generation, have come to be vested with the kind of expectations that Bloom singles out is to take seriously the claim made by many in Asian American studies that it is difficult to overstate the importance of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.3 Publically available U.S. census data from 1960 to 2000 provide a dramatic sense of this act’s importance for a population that grew more numerous and more heterogeneous with each passing decade of the second half of the twentieth century. This data is obviously limited. The categories the census uses to record its findings have not remained consistent through the years and, like all data, they must be interpreted. Nevertheless, their use provides at least a rough snapshot of the momentous demographic changes that have undergirded and marked the bildung of a generation of writers. In the immediate decade before 1965, most Asians in America were born in the U.S.; in the decades after, they became numerically more foreign born. Before 1965, most Asians in America were of Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino descent, with the next largest Asian ethnic groups, Koreans and Indians, being far fewer in number; after 1965, the proportions between ethnic Asian groups changed rapidly and have expanded to encompass a dizzying diversity—a situation compounded by the arrival of many refugees after the end of the war in Vietnam. Even among the ethnic Chinese, diversity increased dramatically as new arrivals were more likely to be from all over China and the rest of the Pacific Rim, rather than primarily from a single southeastern Chinese province. Before 1965, most Asians in America were concentrated in the West, largely in segregated urban neighborhoods and in the agricultural countryside, with smaller but significant pockets in major urban areas like Chicago and New York; after Theorizing Expectations • 31

Birthplace, 1960–2000

Domestic

Foreign

8,000,000 7,000,000 6,000,000 5,000,000 4,000,000 3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Census Year Figure 1.1.

Asian Americans born abroad versus Asian Americans born in the United States. All charts in this chapter are based on data from Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-­readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010.

1965, major population centers formed across the country, with the largest numbers bunching on the West and East Coasts (see figs. 1.1–1.3). Before 1965, most Asians in America were laborers and service workers, with a small but substantial class of merchants and an even smaller group of professionals, students, and diplomats; after 1965, a distinct socioeconomic hourglass-­shaped split occurred, with a large group of professionals and a smaller group of managers being the most visible and another equally large, if not larger, group of service workers and laborers comprising a mostly unseen Asian American underclass. Before 1965, a large majority of Asians in America were male, with Japanese immigrants being one possible exception; after 1965, there were slightly more Asian women than men in the United States. And, finally, before 1965, Asians in America comprised adults who had a relatively small number of children after having settled in the United States; after 1965, many immi32 • Chapter One

Number of Asian American Ethnicities, 1960–2000 35 30 25

20 15

10

5

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Census Year Figure 1.2.

The increasing number of ethnicities recorded by the census.

Region, 1960–2000

Pacific Eastern Central Mountain

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 1960

1970

1980

1990

Census Year Figure 1.3.

Population of Asian Americans divided proportionally by region.

2000

Occupation, 1960–2000 45%

Labor Service

Managerial Professional

40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Census Year Figure 1.4.

Four broadly defined categories of employment by frequency. While these categories are somewhat subjective, they reveal the increasing prominence of skilled workers among Asian Americans. They also show more growth in skilled professional jobs and less growth in managerial positions.

grants were of child-­rearing age or had children when they arrived (see figs. 1.4–1.6). This last alteration has required the coining of a whole new category of immigrant that fell between the first and second generation. The “1.5 generation” names those who were born abroad but immigrated to the United States at such a young age that they were primarily acculturated here. Hence, as the number of Asians in America ballooned in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the composition of this population altered substantially along most measures: nativity, ethnicity, geography, class, gender, and family. Of these, the alterations to class and familial arrangements are especially relevant to the study of literature. Much more than in the past, many groups of Asian Americans, often numerically weighted in favor of some ethnic groups over others, are now members in good standing of a professional-­managerial class stratum. They serve in mainly technobureaucratic capacities, especially immigrants whose skills are valued by American employers—like engineers, scientists, doctors, nurses, and computer programmers. 34 • Chapter One

Gender, 1960–2000

Men Women

56% 54% 52% 50% 48% 46% 44% 42%

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Census Year Figure 1.5.

Percentage of Asian American men versus Asian American women.

One result of the 1965 immigration act was the creation of a mainstream within Asian America, complicating the distinction between margins and mainstream that Gary Okihiro, among others, helped to make an organizing principle of Asian American studies.4 The creation of an Asian American mainstream has also complicated claims of racial minority status for Asian Americans, even as the high visibility of an Asian American professional-­managerial class keeps from view the socioeconomic complexity of a population that is itself markedly split in terms of income and wealth. This is true even for those ethnic groups that are in the aggregate socioeconomically well off. All of this means that the emergent Asian American mainstream, marked by a heavy investment in higher education, instrumental striving for upward economic and social mobility, family centeredness, and the dominance of East Asian ethnicities (Chinese and Japanese in particular), has its own margins. These margins in part reflect the histories of U.S. imperialism and its many wars, transnational adoption, multiracial children born out of sexual relations between Asian women and American servicemen, geopolitically unequal accumulations of cultural capital that lead young people from Asia to study abroad in Theorizing Expectations • 35

Households with and without Children, 1960–2000 8,000,000

No Children Children

7,000,000 6,000,000 5,000,000 4,000,000 3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Census Year Figure 1.6.

Asian American households with children versus Asian American households without children.

the West, and similarly unequal accumulations of capital as traditionally understood. Such histories have produced classes of Asians in America barely able to make ends meet, abused by their employers and the state, and fearful of how refinements of immigration law will affect their rights in the United States. In recent years, a focus on empire in particular has emerged as a powerful interpretative aid for organizing research and discussion, tying these various concerns to one another and connecting Asian Americans to other racial groups.5 Understandably, scholars in Asian American studies, like many Asian American creative writers, have been preoccupied by these proliferating margins, seeking to illuminate the struggles of those caught within these spaces and to make sense of the structural factors that maintain them there. One consequence of this preoccupation, however, is that scholars and creative writers alike can lose sight of the accomplishments of those in the mainstream, whether established or emergent, who remain, despite their socioeconomic positioning, keenly aware of their own, often tenuous and fragile, construction as privileged and accepted members of their so36 • Chapter One

ciety. As Chang-­rae Lee, during an interview conducted for this book, observed about his decision to write Aloft from a middle-­aged Italian American man’s first-­person perspective, “Very early on, I definitely thought: well, is he Asian? Is he Korean American? And I decided very early on that he wasn’t. . . . Obviously it’s going to be set in the suburbs, and the character that I wanted, what I wanted that character to think about was exactly his sense of ownership and comfort. He was someone who was not at all at odds with his community or society or culture.” This reasoning illustrates the belief on one writer’s part that someone who is Asian American could not feel a “sense of ownership and comfort” in American society, which remains an affect pegged to a privileged racial and gendered and class position. What is notable is that Lee did not in his earlier works lose sight of the ways in which Asian Americans enjoy many societal privileges. His Asian American characters are notably a part of an American mainstream that is in the process of reinventing itself, usually through some kind of multicultural compromise. To call attention to the significance of the 1965 immigration act for Asian Americans is one way to foreground the sense of emergence that surrounds an Asian American mainstream within an American mainstream. This sense of emergence, if maintained, entails the strongly felt recognition that members of the Asian American mainstream did not achieve their relative successes alone, through individual effort, obligated to no one but their own self-­possessed selves, and that such successes remain still highly tentative. It also reminds writers that their current relative successes and numbers is a new phenomenon, something writers who started their careers even a few years earlier did not know. This is a point that Lee stressed when asked about the successes of his literary Asian American peers: MHS: I’d like to think that Native Speaker in some ways was one of the very first of your cohort to really break through, to gain a lot of serious attention, and then it was followed by the work of Susan Choi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Han Ong, the list goes on and on. Asian Americans have their fingerprint all over contemporary American fiction in a way that ten years ago would have been unthinkable. Lee: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. And I think it’s changing. I mean, I think it’s evolving. I think there’s much more acceptance, of Theorizing Expectations • 37

course, of who we are. But I still don’t really, really believe—and maybe it’s just a function of who I am, and how old I am, and how I grew up—I still don’t really believe that your typical reader— and that typical reader is usually white, right?—will see a certain name on a book, that seeing an Asian name wouldn’t send off some kind of sense that, oh, well maybe that book’s not really for me. You know what I mean? I still think that happens. And I think that it would be crazy for someone to say, no, that doesn’t happen. I think it does happen. Someone like Susan Choi, who’s gotten such wonderful reviews, and is respected, why doesn’t she have a larger readership?

Child-­like-­ness

Like everyone else, Asian Americans remain part of histories that they may be barely aware of but which nonetheless profoundly influence the shape of their lives. This is undoubtedly true of the ways in which the 1965 immigration act has acted as a crucial condition of possibility for the current flowering of Asian American literature. As the title of this book is meant to highlight, one notable effect of this demographic consideration is the ways in which it has fed the view of Asian Americans as childlike. The Children of 1965 turns on the notion of children to refer to the ways in which the Immigration and Nationality Act helped give birth to a whole generation of Asian Americans who started to reach the age of full adulthood in the early 1990s and to the ways in which this generation has entered the popular imagination as embodying the many promises and anxieties surrounding the imagination of children in the United States. Consider, for instance, the image of the Asian American whiz kid who exceeds all academic expectations by excelling in grade-­school science and math. Consider the racial composition of elite American college campuses, which now comprise numbers of Asian American students—and increasingly international students from Asia—largely out of proportion to this racial group’s demographic share of the general population. Consider the Asian adoptee, the most visible and pioneering figure of transnational adoption in the United States, who increasingly stands in for the children who professional middle-­class families are not having biologically but who, ideally, are loved and protected as if they have been. Consider the multiracial children of mixed coupling, who are now associated with crumbling taboos 38 • Chapter One

against intermarriage, especially between whites and Asian Americans (and most visibly between white men and Asian American women). Or consider, finally, the emergence of international families comprising primarily children who live and study in the United States while at least one of their parents lives and works in an Asian country. All of these children might be said to be “growing sideways,” a condition which Kathryn Bond Stockton describes as “moving suspensions,” meaning a persistent deferral of growth even as one continues to change and develop, and as “shadows of growth,” for deferral is always haunted by, and haunts (in Derrida’s use of this term as referring to, borrowing the words of Hamlet, “a time out of joint”), the expectation that one will arrive at a destination, reach a telos, complete a journey.6 Not only do children who will presumably become gay or lesbian adults—Stockton’s focus—­experience this kind of sideways growth, but all children are queer in the sense of being both normative and strange. That is, while children are normative in the sense of possessing an innocence that “seems safe to us and whom we therefore seek to safeguard at all cost,” such innocence is also strange “since it is ‘lost’ to the very adults who assign it to the children.”7 Hence, children “are seen as normative but also not like us, at the same time. The contours of this normative strangeness may explain why children, as an idea, are likely to be both white and middle-­class. It is a privilege to need to be protected—and to be sheltered—and thus to have a childhood. Not in spite of privilege, then, but because of it, the all-­important feature of weakness sticks to these markers (white and middle-­class) and helps to signal innocence.”8 This is certainly one racial expectation that children conjure, but it is by no means the only one. The argument that children are queered through estrangement is much stranger than Stockton lets on, as the “normative strangeness” of children is not connected just to the white and the middle class. Among other things, it also marks the almost, or perhaps more accurately the excessive, whiteness of figurative Asian Americans. It may be appropriate to use the word excessive here, for Asian Americans often enter into a discursive space—as both representative of actual bodies and individuals and of extant, often articulated anxieties, beliefs, and thoughts—as dedicated to cultural ideals frequently associated with whites of an earlier generation in this country. They are in myriad ways understood as privileged children in American culture. Unsurprisingly, then, Asian American characters—like Ben in Shortcomings, Mona in Mona in the Promised Theorizing Expectations • 39

Land, Gabriel and Tomas in American Son, Gogol in The Namesake, Henry in Native Speaker, Linda in Bitter in the Mouth, Julie in Middlesex, Eunice in Super Sad True Love Story, Hana in Asterios Polyp—are more often than not depicted by both Asian American and non–Asian American writers as growing sideways, rather than up, for their lives are marked by deferral and shadows. The trajectory of their lives rarely leads in a straight line from point A of childhood to point B of adulthood.9 Lisa Chen poignantly captures this sideways existence in the poem “Parachute Girls”: When asked about their parents, they look away and say their mothers are not well and their fathers are away on business.10 As this verse suggests, the vulnerability of these children as racially other further accentuates their innocent child-­like-­ness, a “feature of weakness” that excites the urge to protect and nurture and, just as important, save. In the queerest of ways, but through a queerness that has become fully estranged by race, many Asian Americans may be thought of as occupying a privileged social position. They are beloved because their race makes them vulnerable to losing their privileges as middle-­class subjects and as such cherished because this vulnerability evokes the innocence of children who need protection. Of course, this does not mean that the experiences of all Asian Americans are so uniformly privileged, either in the sense of enjoying material comforts afforded by a middle-­class standing or of being cherished for being associated with children. What this means, instead, is that some of its members do occupy such a social and economic position, and these members are in many ways the most visible. Indeed, they are visible enough to make the term Asian American synonymous with persons who occupy such a position. In Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere, a runaway teen who gets involved in prostitution, drug addiction, and petty crime confronts how her race makes her conspicuous when she gets into trouble with the law: “Listen,” he whispered, and scanned the hallway. “A lot of those women, in your cell, they’re suppose to be there. They grew up in shit holes worse than anything we got here. I understand that. I get it. They don’t know any better. But you . . .” His voice trailed off. “Where are you from?” “The Bronx,” I said. “No. I’m asking you, what are you?” 40 • Chapter One

I knew where this was going but I told him anyway. “I’m Korean.” “Korea. That’s what I thought,” he said. “Do you know what percentage of prisoners are Korean?” “A hundred percent,” I said. “In Korea.”11 The obvious assumption at work in the guard’s admittedly well-­intentioned comments is that because the narrator is racially Asian, she must have come from a background that is at a minimum middle class and stable. While the exchange that follows might sound as if the narrator is viewed as a foreigner, which she is, it is just as important to note that the guard is viewing her as someone who could not possibly belong in prison because of the way her race conflates with class in his mind. Perhaps queer theory comes easily to mind here, and in many other studies on Asian Americans, to make sense of how relatively visible middle-­ class Asian Americans occupy the spaces afforded them by the culture at large because they are, in addition to being in many cases also gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered themselves, structurally so similar with middle-­class, professional gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and, to a much lesser extent, transgendered as popularly imagined. That is, both are queer in the sense of belonging and not-­belonging in America. They are thus symbols of socioeconomic upward mobility and cultural indeterminacy. As Aihwa Ong observes, Asian Americans have moved away from being perceivable as subjects of a racism that refers to a set of relations determined by structural factors intrinsic to a nation toward being figured as members of an international elite of highly skilled workers that grants them the privilege of being accepted as almost white. They are, according to this thinking, not racial minorities, as this term is commonly understood in the United States and as some out of residual commitment to the politics of the late 1960s want to argue. They are, instead, something fabulously—and dismissively—akin to gays and lesbians in the social position they currently occupy: Contrary to the rhetoric of Asian American advocates, transnational skills, not intranational adversity, have become the moral capital used to claim a communal identity. In this sense, elite Asian Americans are like homosexuals in that their claims to moral citizenship rest not so much on suffering (although that continues as they are targeted by hate crimes) but on the revelation of their important and Theorizing Expectations • 41

diverse roles in a more complex American nation. We can thus say that in recent decades, Asian Americans and gays have become honorary whites because they embody middle-­class norms, but perhaps even more because of their cosmopolitan flair.12 As perceptive as this comment might be, the comparison also calls to mind the inadequacy of a term like “honorary whites” to contain the complexity of raced meanings that such mainstream Asian Americans code (or the surprise many white gays—and lesbians?—might feel at being told that their whiteness is only honorary). They may be “like homosexuals” in terms of what they seem capable of offering the nation, a “flair” that is more than just about cosmopolitanism, but they are also “like homosexuals” because they are potential, and potent, threats to the governing norms of that nation. Nowhere is this truer than in the ways in which their shared structural affinity in the national imaginary places both the racialization of Asian Americans and the queering of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered into a strange intimacy with the social construction of children, a premier figure of anxiety about a future that beacons with both hope and dread. There is nothing “honorary” about Asian America’s “whiteness.” There is only something expectant.

Expectations and Stereotypes

Thinking about expectations requires that one notice how expectations are like and not-­like stereotypes. While the two concepts overlap each other in meaning, in that they are both about how persons can be grouped together into preconceived ideas about how they will behave, talk, think, dress, and so forth, stereotypes tend to be more concerned than expectations with a misalignment between representation and reality. One might say against the stereotype that all Asian Americans are childlike that one is more complex and indeed in reality not childlike at all, while expectations are explicitly about a future orientation that can shape behavioral norms and provide a vocabulary for self-­fashioning. Stereotypes are about what one is supposed to be in the present, and what has always been and will always be, as the present colonizes time both backward and forward. Expectations, however, are about what is supposed to be in the future, and as a result leaves slightly more room for change and for what cannot be foreseen. 42 • Chapter One

In being oriented toward the future, expectations can set the bar very high or very low. When they are set high, they can be a tremendous burden, but when they are set too low or, worse, withdrawn altogether, their paucity becomes even more of a burden. One reason why so many Asian Americans might appear luckier than other people of color is the fact that so much is expected of them as a group, and so little expected of the latter. Unlike stereotypes, which are rarely considered valuable, expectations are valuable precisely because they gesture not to what one is, but to what one is supposed to be and would like to be. They invite one to identify with this future self or to fight against it. They set a baseline of comparison, a bar against which one can measure success or failure. One can be expected to behave in certain ways. One can have expectations for oneself. One can reject these expectations, fall short, meet them, or exceed them. Their absence, however, can make the future simply unimaginable. Another distinction can be made between expectations and stereotypes. While the latter are primarily preoccupied with how others perceive one, the former blur the boundaries between others and self. Expectations are certainly ascribed, but they also require active identification to be made fully into a set of ideas with material meaning in one’s life. Stereotypes do not require such identification, as claims of misrepresentation can lose their persuasive force if identification occurs. It may be possible for a stereotype to elicit identification, in the sense of offering an interpellative subject position one might actively respond to as if it were descriptive of one’s person, but in that case a stereotype becomes hard to distinguish from expectation. Indeed, the idea of interpellation itself— an idea that holds considerable sway within literary and cultural studies as a way to understand how subjects understand themselves as subjects through ideology—highlights the ways in which stereotypes and expectations blend into each other, yet also draw apart as their meanings pull them in different directions. As Louis Althusser argues in his founding explanation of this concept, “Everyone knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected. Which amounts to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the ‘sentiments,’ i.e. the forms of family ideology (paternal/maternal, conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected: it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-­already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it Theorizing Expectations • 43

has been conceived.”13 As this passage insists, in order for expectations to have meaning, individuals must recognize themselves in what is being said about them. This is true even as the conditions for such a recognition are put into place long before they are born and recognition itself more or less compulsory. To be “expected” in this way is also at once already to be made into a subject, something that happens to one before one is even born, and to receive an invitation to occupy this position, which suggests one has the option to decline. In short, expectations seem more capable than stereotypes to make conceptual space for change because expectations raise the potential for their own inaccuracy. As such, expectations contend more directly with what the early twentieth-­century philosopher Henri Bergson describes as innate to any idea of existence: “We are seeking only the precise meaning that our consciousness gives to the word ‘exist,’ and we find that, for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”14 To exist is, according to this passage, to be always in a state of becoming. Expectations provide a horizon in front of such a state, to suggest the direction becoming might be taking. Becoming itself is immanent, perpetually in a present that is in the process of producing its own future. Past, present, and future are conventional markers that seek to define an existing without such markers. When one imagines change, one imagines it as a movement from one stable state to another—a past, a present, a future. Change therefore is imagined as a series of striations that disturb a smooth being: “For I speak of each of my states as if it formed a block or were a separate whole. I say indeed that I changed, but the change seems to me to reside in the passage from one state to the next; of each state, taken separately, I am apt to think that it remains the same during all the time that it prevails.”15 A more accurate account of what is occurring, however, would insist that every state of being is in the process of a continual, uninterrupted changing. Intellect marks this constancy as alterations between stable being and momentous change: “Actually there is only a gentle slope; but in following the broken line of our acts of attention, we think we perceive separate steps.”16 What this means is that expectations are an attempt to predict where the next steps will fall by imposing a framework, a “broken line,” on what is actually uncontainable by such an attempt. In this way, expectations can be thought of as synonymous with the working of reason, which likewise takes what is smooth and imposes striations on it. As Bergson continues: 44 • Chapter One

Our reason imagines itself possessed, by right of birth or by right of conquest, innate or acquired, of all the essential elements of the knowledge of truth. Even when it confesses that it does not know the object presented to it, it believes that its ignorance consists only in not knowing which one of its time-­honored categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we put it? In what garment, already cut out, shall we clothe it? Is it this, or that, or the other thing? And “this,” and “that,” and “the other thing” are always something already conceived, already known. The idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to us.17 The theoretical task of casting light on expectations is to work against this drawered and precut habit of mind, to seek ways of showing how what one expects may not conform to what is becoming. It is to draw expectations away from possibility toward potential. According to Brian Massumi, a possibility is “back-­formed,” meaning it looks back at what has happened and sets “a region of nominally defining—that is, normative—variation.”18 When one says something is possible, one is also saying that other things are not. In this way, one circumscribes reality based on past experiences, extending into the future what one thinks one knows about the past. Potential, in contrast, is more open to what is about to happen, and is in its future orientation paradoxically more embedded in the present. “Possibility is a variation,” Massumi summarizes, “implicit in what a thing can be said to be when it is on target. Potential is the immanence of a thing to its still indeterminate variation, under way.”19 Possibility therefore delimits reality, especially as it unfolds over time, so that it insists on what can be and what can happen and what cannot be and what cannot happen. Possibilities necessarily posit the impossible. Potential is less sure about the limits that can be placed on reality, and is more willing to admit that while some things are improbable one can never be sure about what the future will bear. Expectations might thus be thought of as occupying the spaces in between possibility and potential, while a stereotype might be said to occupy the space squarely produced by possibility alone. Expectations put limits on what can be while acknowledging that such limits are not fixed in place.

Theorizing Expectations • 45

On Writing and Becoming

For those like Massumi who have been strongly influenced by Bergson, the inadequacy of the intellect to capture the immanence in time’s flow has led them to turn readily to literature for guidance. In particular, Deleuze, one of Bergson’s most notable philosophical acolytes, has insisted that literature is unique.20 It is at once more free and as equally confined as the other discourses it comes into contact with, allowing it a certain room for play while simultaneously positioning it as more than entertainment. Literature is not to be confused with direct social commentary or historical analysis or political propaganda or psychological experiment or philosophical inquiry, even when there are vast areas of overlap. Instead, it should be understood as approximating as closely as possible a state of becoming that defies reason: To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-­formed or the incomplete. . . . It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-­woman, becomes-­ animal or vegetable, becomes-­molecule to the point of becoming-­ imperceptible. . . . To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form.21 The analysis found in the pages of this book is powerfully guided by this passage. Likewise, these pages draw amply from Deleuze’s work more generally, especially A Thousand Plateaus (which was written in collaboration with Guattari). The sometimes outrageously fanciful and notoriously difficult qualities of this latter work is fitting for a consideration of the kind of “involution” to which focusing on expectations leads in a reading of contemporary Asian American literature. By involution, Deleuze and Guattari mean a process of forming alliances between heterogeneous things. It is not to be confused with regression, which refers to movement “in the direction of something less differentiated.” Rather, involution is an involving that forms “a block that runs its own line ‘between’ the terms in play and beneath assignable relations.”22 In 46 • Chapter One

this way, involution is also different from an evolution that connotes “descent” or “filiation,” terms which suggest biological ties and continuities that link like to like, that move toward greater differentiation but only because like has inherited its likeness from like through heredity. Involution is, in contrast, synonymous with an evolution that “brings into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation.”23 To put this another way, if regression moves toward less differentiation and evolution toward more differentiation, involution follows lines of flight from differentiation to differentiation, not disturbing the quantity or the intensity of what its finds. At the same time, involution forms blocks that replicate as closely as possible a becoming irreducible to terms like appearing, being, equaling, or producing.24 Involution is a creative process, much like becoming, and when applied to a racial term like Asian America connotes a becoming Asian American rather than a being that already exists. When someone wonders, therefore, what those who willfully call themselves “Asian American” can possibly have in common, given how diverse they are and how seemingly impossible it is to fit their heterogeneity under one large racial category, that person has failed to grasp how this term explicitly names an act of involution. For scholars of Asian American literature, a project informed by a becoming Asian American can be understood as coterminous with the kind of critical-­political intervention championed by Kandice Chuh, who has argued, building directly on the work of critics like Susan Koshy, Lisa Lowe, and David Palumbo-­Liu, that Asian America is not (or at least should not be) an object of identification.25 Rather, it is best understood as a site of critique. As the latter, the term Asian American refers to something that is “subjectless.” Chuh elaborates: “I mean subjectlessness to create the conceptual space to prioritize difference by foregrounding the discursive constructedness of subjectivity. In other words, it points attention to the constraints on the libratory potential of the achievement of subjectivity, by reminding us that a ‘subject’ only becomes recognizable and can act as such by conforming to certain regulatory matrices.”26 To think of an Asian American as lacking a subject is to keep in mind how races as fictions work. It foregrounds how as a racial category the concept of an Asian American is in large part a fiction, or—in keeping with the critical vocabulary of this chapter—an involution that disregards simple genealogical reason. In the process, an emphasis on the lack of a subject fosters greater self-­consciousness of how such fictions are constructed, as discourses that Theorizing Expectations • 47

are produced within a system of interlocked constraints, material competitions, and structures dictating what can and cannot be said produced through repeated iteration over a long expanse of time. One cannot simply make up any stories about race that might, willy-­nilly, strike one’s fancy. There are rules. And these rules are part of a system of meaning-­making that has much invested in the production of fictions about race, which are in turn especially remunerative when they can obfuscate their own ­fictiveness. To emphasize the working of such obfuscation is to produce narratives that will, at their most ideal, work to imagine the potential for entirely different ways of organizing a shared, and sharable, reality. The very instability of the term Asian American allows it to act as a kind of pivot around which such an imagining can take place. In agreement with Chuh’s argument, the analysis in this book does not approach such a site of critique as being intrinsically embedded within the notion of an Asian America because of the instability of its assembled parts. It is, rather, a becoming that must be actively confronted and embraced, a creative endeavor abetted by an instability that is surely already there but not so much so that it simply disassembles on its own. Asian Americans are not necessarily subjectless nor is Asian Americanist critique an always already subjectless discourse, a ghostly presence that is neither completely absent or present. Stable notions of an Asian American subjectivity exist, a mainstream closely related to Jasbir Puar’s notion of a “homonormativity,” that militates against such a claim.27 This is what Chuh refers to as a “temptation” to accept the idea that there is “a common, understudied object, the ‘Asian American,’ whom we narrate into legibility through a narrative of identity.”28 But, in providing opportunities to be critical of an emerging mainstream that seeks to forget the facts of its emergence, the term Asian American must also be an occasion for more than critique. Now pushing subtly against Chuh’s argument, this book insists the term, in eschewing a common a priori subject, nevertheless names a potential future subject, one which would seek in some way to free the individual from exogenously imposed constraints. It is not, as Chuh states, that one needs to choose “a critique of subjectification” over a “desire for subjectivity.”29 Rather, one needs to imagine both “critique” and “desire” as continually at work so as to make race a powerful way to conceive of a simultaneously destructive and creative process of becoming. Indeed, critics who have expressed dissatisfaction with Chuh’s argument have done so because they 48 • Chapter One

find creativity has been lost to critique. For instance, in the introduction to a recent volume of critical essays on Asian American literature, the editors write about Chuh’s argument: “‘Asian American’ is therefore above all a literary sign and an abstract signifier whose signified contents are so shiftable, provisional, and undecidable that attempts to contain them will always result in incomplete narratives.”30 Against such a purely negative view of the term Asian American and of the concept of race more generally, it is more descriptively rich to contend that both the term and concept produce the potential for alternative social arrangements, novel configurations of the real in which Asian Americans can reassemble as a horizon to be actively wished for and pursued. Asian American literature, to be worthy of critical attention, must not only be a form of critique. Instead, it must work through subjectivity as well as subjectlessness. In doing so, it imagines what is desirable not as complete narratives, but as narratives that open the future to more than a set of possibilities that is always necessarily shadowed by its own impossibility. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, contemporary theoretical discussions within queer critical circles—and one might add within Asian American critical circles as well—have become too focused on an unproductive kind of critique: “Shouting down utopia is an easy move. . . . The antiutopian critic of today has a well-­worn war chest of poststructuralism pieties at her or his disposal to shut down lines of thought that delineate the concept of critical utopianism.”31 A pursuit of a critical utopia is thus equally motivated by a “desire for subjectivity” as it is by a “critique of subjection,” not one over another.32 If imagining such a becoming Asian American energized by a desire for a critical utopia is the critic’s aim, then literature by Asian Americans beacons as a rich material site for the upending of fictions about race and the hard work of creating alternative imaginaries of the real that race can inspire. Creative writing itself requires a making subjectless and, just as important, if not more so, a remaking of the subject. As such, creative writing encourages the potential for a destruction that critics have found in the idea of an Asian America even as it makes room for a construction. This means that the purpose of such a critique and of creative writing is not to do away with the concept of race all together in an act of critical color-­blinding. The task is more properly deconstructive, in the sense of naming a ceaseless process of destruction and construction, or, in language that Deleuze and Guattari coined, deterritorialization and reterritorialization—that is, a disrupting of the striations that mark a smooth Theorizing Expectations • 49

existence and a striating yet again. This task requires the recognition that race and literature are open-­ended discourses, which so long as neither gets mistaken simply for a preexistent reality encourage imaginative play. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas are helpful for thinking about the relationship between race and literature as an example of involution, especially when they forcefully call attention to how destructive the act of critique alone can be to philosophy when it is all one does (which in many ways anticipates Muñoz’s argument): “Those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the force it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy.”33 The same can also be said of literature. Just as crucially, it is worth insisting that the many literary works under discussion in this book have contributed significantly to modifying these ideas and making them useful for thinking with. While an extended engagement with A Thousand Plateaus in particular can make any argument at times highly specialized and abstract, it also enables insights into literature that would otherwise not be available. It connects this literature to a rich, ongoing discussion about becoming and about the ways in which the culture turn must now bend back to make a more careful account of the nature it has sometimes sought to supersede, a point that Elizabeth Grosz makes with elegance: “We need to return to, or perhaps to invent anew, the concepts of nature, matter, and life, the most elementary concerns of the cosmological and the ontological, if we want to develop alternative models to those inscriptive and constructivist discourses that currently dominate the humanities and social sciences, in which the transformation of representation is the only serious political issue, and where the body is of interest only in its reflection through discourse, its constitution in representation, or its mediation by images.”34 This book also foregrounds what a careful and attentive reading of Asian American literature can contribute to such a “return” or turning “anew” to materiality, a departure from deconstruction in the sense of being interested in more than the play of language—and hence further reason to turn to Deleuze and Guattari, who were always interested in more than the play of language. As a way to further this intellectual project, this book’s emphasis on expectations is meant to get at a becoming that is rich with meaning and potential because it is always in process. This becoming is open-­ended and intimate in its sharing of cultural spaces with others of various kinds. Expectations, a concept drawn from a persistent concern found in con50 • Chapter One

temporary Asian American literature and more generally surrounding the racialization of Asian Americans (it is striking how often the word comes up in conversations with writers), and becoming, a concept borrowed from early twentieth-­century European philosophy and late twentieth-­century poststructural theory, are obviously quite different from one another. They need not, however, be mutually exclusive. Even if expectations are formed by what is not yet, and are therefore teleological, the not-­yet—because it is always formed within the temporal space of potentiality—must be understood as unavoidably liable to revision, redirection, and incertitude. Writing is also a kind of expectation, a catalyst to a potential that might, without guarantees, be waiting to find its fulfillment in a not-­too-­distant, but somehow always out-­of-­reach and unavoidably alterable, future. Expectations are a limit that must eventually be exceeded, but they also provide a horizon for thought, movement, and the opening of possibility to ­potential. Asian America, as a race, can embody this kind of creative limitation because it has been defined exactly by a future orientation since its inception. As Koshy argues at the start of her influential essay “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” “Unlike African American, Native American, or Chicano literature, Asian American literature inhabits the highly unstable temporality of the ‘about-­to-­be,’ its meanings continuously reinvented after the arrival of new groups of immigrants and the enactments of legislative changes.”35 While Koshy is uncomfortable with this insight, finding such a “tactic of deferral” to have “costs” that are hard to bear (because it leads precisely to subjectlessness), this book insists such a “deferral” is best understood as a becoming that is capable of breathing life into the racial concept of Asian America, making it an appealing starting place for writers to explore what it means to lead a meaningful life.36 Monique Truong, one of a handful of writers interviewed for this book who unhesitatingly embraced being called an Asian American writer, made this point explicitly when she responded to the question “What are the characteristics of Asian American literature?”: “I would not even begin to define it, because I don’t think that there is necessarily a good working definition. It’s whatever it is that we choose to write, from this point on.” Following this line of thinking, the role of Asian American literary studies that this book explicitly seeks to take up is to call attention to race as a creative limitation, to show how race and literature together open up the potential for a becoming that is neither a regression nor an evolution Theorizing Expectations • 51

but an involution. This is a position-­taking that situates Asian American literary studies and Asian American literature less as subordinate within a much larger field of cultural production and more as both what can be outside and inside this field. Literature and literary studies make alliances without at the same time marrying such alliances into some kind of intellectual filiation nor willfully acceding to the view that sustained attention to Asian Americans as Asian Americans is unmerited.

The Specter of Theory

Deleuze and Guattari are invoked here with hesitation because they raise the specter of theory. While there were undoubtedly many good reasons to draw as heavily on what is frequently referred to as poststructuralism as many scholars did throughout the last several decades, those reasons are increasingly wearing thin. There is at present a need for clear and readable writing that engages the reader. The present moment is defined by heated attacks on the humanities, and the less its practitioners are capable of communicating with an audience larger than their immediate cohorts the easier it is for these attacks to gain more traction. These attacks are also symptomatic of a present marred by anxieties about what the near future holds, especially in the United States where many are tortured by fears about where spiking racial diversity, waning superpower status, and climactic upheavals might be leading. These fears are not unfounded, and many reflect a materiality that poststructuralism’s preoccupation with play and signs—no matter how material such signs might be in themselves—is ill-­equipped to conceptualize. This also means that writing in a clear and readable manner is not enough. Those in literary studies cannot retreat back to a formalism that ploddingly provides close readings of one text after another, celebrating each for an aesthetic brilliance that shines in isolation on the page. Critics and scholars in the humanities must write in a way that communicates the relevance of what they are writing about to the reader, especially the specialized reader in other disciplines, and actively excites the reader’s interests in the ongoing debates which are the occasions for their individual contributions. In doing so, they must not lose sight of what makes their intellectual work important. As many literary scholars have already demonstrated, in doing this they can make the experience of reading their work both enjoyable and rigorous. For creative writers, such scholarship 52 • Chapter One

has the potential to accentuate what they do and draw them into a dialogue with a critical conversation that often seems actively to exclude them. As Truong observed, “Criticism is at its most successful when it creates a language for talking about something that previously had not been articulated—you know, concepts that are interrelated and in a way that had not been previously explored. That’s when it’s at its best. It’s at its worst when it’s like legalese, which is to use language not to expand and explode certain concepts, but actually to almost ring it in a barrier.” Highly theoretical writing, of course, neither was as homogeneously pervasive in the humanities as it might have once seemed nor has in recent years simply disappeared. It remains as pronounced and as vexing as ever, but its form seems to have changed. Like the specters that Derrida wrote about late in his career, theory persists and informs work in the present, often in ways that are hard to put a finger on. But it does so in a way that is more self-­aware of the point that Truong makes. At its best, it opens up potential; at its worst, it pens its reader into what is possible. It is hard not to feel, in other words, that the language of theory, when still used as some once used it, can resemble “legalese” as Truong defines it. Hence the hesitation in bringing up Deleuze and Guattari—for fear that to do so is to indulge only in a backward-­looking glance and to lose an argument simply because one could not be understood. Both Deleuze and Guattari are notorious for the difficulty of their language and may seem as a result to exclude more than engage the reader, as the preceding pages may unfortunately have done. Even their early adopters in the United States were careful to note this. Edward Said, for instance, observed about A Thousand Plateaus at a time when this work was starting to gain a wide readership in the U.S. academy: “A great deal of this immensely rich book is not easily accessible, but I have found it mysteriously suggestive.”37 Still, their ideas have gained an important place in critical thinking that is hard to ignore, and for good reason. Deleuze and Guattari provide the very kind of vocabulary Truong values in criticism. This vocabulary seems unusually evocative for talking about the relationship between nature, technology, and people (for Deleuze and Guattari, machines were always assemblages that included the human body), and about the ways in which categories of various kinds came undone even as they became fixed into place in a different order (what they called reterritorialization and deterritorialization). Their importance to contemporary debates about technology, governmental power, migration, and the environment is without Theorizing Expectations • 53

question. Even those who find their writings daunting and sidestep direct engagement with them nevertheless actively employ the language and ideas that Deleuze and Guattari coined. As Ursula Heise has observed, deterritorialization is a “central term in globalization theories” that has its origins in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings but has since taken on a more generic meaning, to explore “how experiences of place change under the influence of modernization and globalization processes.”38 By turning back to the origins of the term, one can recover some of its more specialized meanings and reconnect it to a larger toolkit of related critical terms. There may be another reason as well for those specifically working in Asian American literary studies to continue to engage theory, albeit in a way, one hopes, that understands that conditions have changed and the culture turn it helped inaugurate is now reaching another critical turning point. As Eric Hayot observes after reviewing some of the most influential critical works in the field, “That Asian American studies has come to think of itself in such formal terms—as a crisis, as a catachresis, as the subject of a barred joining (like Palumbo-­Liu’s Asian/American), or as a fiction—makes sense when one considers that those forms are the same ones that poststructuralism has trained scholars in the humanities to discover, privilege, and address.”39 Without quite realizing it, it would seem, the scholars and critics currently laboring in Asian American literary and cultural studies (it’s clear that Hayot is only talking about the humanities wing of a much more varied, and interdisciplinary, field of study) have simply been duplicating the assumptions they have been taught in graduate school. They are seeing like the dutiful students that they are into the objects of their inquiry a Rorschach reflection of their own institutional assimilation, and as such suffer from a form of belatedness when it comes to their appropriation of theory. As accurate as it might be on its face, this observation leads to another question. Why have these critics so wholeheartedly engaged the turn to theory, foregrounding as they do so a specifically political intent in making this move? This turn in Asian American literary studies is especially noteworthy when one considers how other fields have only made the same turn unevenly and often—to put it mildly—with great resistance. While there were extensive debates among Asian Americanists about this turn to theory when it was taking place in the early to mid-­1990s, these debates largely centered around whether theory was a continuation of the political aspirations that founded their field or was, rather, an aestheti54 • Chapter One

cization or textualization of a commitment to real struggles for greater equality and justice.40 Until recently, these debates did not revolve around whether theory was too political or not attentive enough to the aesthetic as such, which has positioned the field of Asian American literary studies as a whole decidedly to one side of an argument over whether or not politics should matter in the study of literature.41 One of the reasons for this apparent enthusiasm lies in the literature itself. It resonates powerfully with poststructural theory when the latter emphasizes the power of the sign over the referent, the discursive construction of lived experiences, and the self folded inside out. This is true of both literature by Asians in America before 1965 and the literature that immediately followed this landmark year. The authors of the former era that critics now recognize as prominent figures within this field—Sui Sin Far, Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, H. T. Tsiang, and many others—wrote narratives that weren’t entirely composed into the aesthetic wholes theorized by figures like T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and the New Critics that followed, nor did their literary output always contain the fully realized characters that supposedly breathe life into the clay of printed words. To study such authors was already to challenge norms governing the study of literature more generally, and required in the process less formalist, more historically sensitive measures of literary worth. Something similar can also be said of authors who wrote more in alignment with the dominant thinking of their day. They were pioneering “model minorities,” rather than “bad subjects,” in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s use of these terms, and their prose tended toward the linear and the clear and often the lighthearted. But when read closely, the works of authors like Onoto Watanna, Jade Snow Wong, Monica Sone, C. Y. Lee, Pardee Lowe, and others powerfully reveal themselves to be subtly as strange—or “bearers of a materiality that demands narrative invention”—as the other works that have been traditionally celebrated by Asian American literary criticism.42 Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, for example, which has often been critiqued as being overly sunny about race relations in the United States, is a memoir written completely in the third person.43 This odd stylistic choice suggests the linearity of its narrative required a certain separation of the author from herself. After 1965, the earliest and more prominent authors who could be described as Asian Americans without engaging in a little anachronism— Theorizing Expectations • 55

from Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston to Theresa Hak-­Kyung Cha and Jessica Hagedorn—markedly turned to a style of writing and themes that again emphasized fragmentation, invention, and an incredible self-­ awareness of the weight that language, discourse, and signs placed on their shoulders. This is true of all of these writers, who might therefore (although counterintuitive to some) be thought of as being members of the same cohort. This claim also suggests a continuity of style and theme that critics too often perceive as only departure or generational repudiation— from the cultural nationalism of Chin to the postmodernism of Cha.44 In the play The Chickencoop Chinaman, one of Chin’s characters observes, “Chinamen are born, not made, my dear. Out of junk-­imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, broken bottles, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia.”45 After telling her mother’s version of the “No Name Woman” in Woman Warrior, Kingston observes, “Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities.”46 In Dictee, Cha provides an indictment of the ways in which national identities impose themselves on the speaker: “One day you raise the right hand and you are American. They give you an American Pass port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their seals. Their own image.”47 And, finally, in Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, there is a sophistication of style and theme that supports a vision of a subject that is self-­aware of its own constructedness. As the narrator says of her father by way of introduction, “Maybe Spanish, maybe British, maybe Filipino, maybe anything. It is the sort of business he keeps to himself. He believes in dual citizenship, dual passports, as many allegiances to as many countries as possible at any one given time. My father is a cautious man, and refers to himself as a ‘guest’ in his own country.”48 When read together, these works tempt one to assert that without poststructural theory the flowering of Asian American literary studies as an academic field—a time when positions at universities and colleges became widely available and when energy did not have to be poured primarily into legitimating its object of study—may never have occurred. Or, conversely, it might be asserted that if poststructural theory had not already existed at the time of their field’s maturation, Asian American literary critics would have had to invent it. And who is to say, to push this line of thought a little further, that Asian 56 • Chapter One

Americans did not, in fact, participate in its actual invention? As the intellectual historian François Cusset points out, what has become known as poststructuralism was largely made up in the United States. Even the word used to describe this theory was coined in 1966 at a conference held at the Johns Hopkins University, where several prominent French intellectuals spoke, including Barthes, Derrida, and Lacan.49 Freed from the constraints of home, where they had been pigeonholed as structuralists, these intellectuals gave vent to the failure of such a label to capture what they were trying to articulate in their writings, and out of this frustration someone thought to add the now familiar—and ubiquitous—prefix to what they had already been called. While the newly christened term failed to catch on in France and while the French intellectuals who were most closely associated with this term found their star fading in their native country over the course of the 1980s, poststructuralism itself caught fire in the humanities departments of American universities and colleges during this same decade and beyond. This means that the term poststructuralism was coined in the United States and that its ideas were also largely developed here, while intellectuals in France moved in a sharply different direction. The U.S. academy is thus currently in the odd situation of exporting ideas which it has for so long considered French in origin and practice to an increasingly multiracial and socially fragmented France—in addition to many other countries around the world. What is most noteworthy about this story is the fact that the U.S. critics most responsible for this enthusiasm for poststructuralism, and also perhaps its greatest beneficiaries, were more often than not interested in questions of identity. What occurred in the 1980s and beyond was the parallel growth of poststructuralism as a methodology and of women’s studies, queer studies, U.S. ethnic studies, and postcolonialism as academic, and explicitly interdisciplinary, fields. Indeed, one of the most important early translations of a French theoretical text into English was done by a young Indian immigrant woman who had been teaching at the University of Iowa for seven years: Gayatri Spivak, who translated and contributed a substantial and influential introduction to Derrida’s On Grammatology.50 It might also be recalled that Cha had been a student, and an early translator, of Christian Metz, who was one of the first to apply Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of film in France.51 And certainly one of the early pioneers to combine poststructural theory and practice in filmmaking, and in critical writing about film, was the Vietnamese American Trinh Minh-­ha, who Theorizing Expectations • 57

made her political and intellectual commitments explicit in the seminal work Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.52 To this day, theory endures as a provocative way to frame for critics and writers how fragmented, disjointed, and mediated Asian American lives can be even if the ways in which the language one uses to talk about theory necessarily responds to the need for accessibility and engagement. One might finally pause here to worry about the present-­day implications of this line of thought. If there is indeed such a close relationship between the rise of poststructuralism and Asian American literary studies (as well as U.S. ethnic studies and queer studies more generally), does this mean that the waning of poststructuralism’s overt intellectual influence in a socioeconomic situation that has grown ever more weary of funding the humanities at any level is being paralleled as well by Asian American literary studies’ growing need to defend yet again the legitimacy of its work as an academic endeavor? Might this also suggest that the increasing calls among those in Asian American literary studies to “abandon” the racial term that organizes their research is, at least in part, a response to a harsh political reality that is imposing ever more rigid limits on those in the humanities, from scholars to creative artists?53 And, most important, how might the political situation now undergirding such debates, fueled by a rage for libertarian policies that will not only defund the humanities but a whole array of governmental programs that are meant to serve a broad civic purpose, be connected to the rising awareness of how the children who so strongly represent the future in this country are increasingly no longer majority white? To phrase this last point as plainly as possible, as the United States has become less white, calls for less government have grown louder and hostility toward any discourse about race has increased. Asian Americans as a race are at the meeting place of these demographic and ideological forces because they are often perceived as possible symptoms of, and solutions to, the many problems to which these forces give birth. As such, they occupy a horizon of expectations about what the future holds for America.

58 • Chapter One

Chapter 2

The Trope of the Lost Manuscript

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace begins in mourning: for a father who recently passed away, a house destroyed by a fire that swept through the Oakland Hills in 1991, and a lost manuscript that was supposed to be the sequel to an earlier novel. Any one of these tragedies alone would have been difficult to endure. Together, they comprise a loss that is greater than the sum of its parts. The absence of the father dislodges a connection to the past that has helped Kingston to understand her place in the present. The house figures the loss of a home, a disconnection from a hard-­fought sense of belonging to a place that for Kingston, whose famous literary works often delve into the feeling of belonging nowhere that surrounds an Asian American childhood, is especially poignant. More poignant still, the book manuscript (a sequel to Tripmaster Monkey), which Kingston focuses on as she picks her way through the debris left in the fire’s wake, draws together the sense of having lost a connection to the past and to a place. Its invocation at one point sets off a chain of associations that attaches its loss to the loss of other things contained by her home and, among them, the things that once belonged intimately to her father. This reaffirms how the loss of the manuscript powerfully accentuates a greater absence: “If I had only driven faster, I might have saved the book, and my mother’s jewelry, and my father’s watch, and his spectacles, which fit my eyes, and his draft card, which I had taken from his wallet. ‘This card is to be carried on your person at all times.’ He had carried it safely for over fifty years.”1 Despite the thoroughness with which these relations are explored in the opening section of The Fifth Book of Peace, one factor remains under-

explored. For those schooled in Asian American literary history, the invocation of a lost manuscript will call to mind two prominent examples of manuscripts that were similarly lost. First, in the afterword to the University of Washington Press edition of John Okada’s No-­No Boy (the only edition in print), Frank Chin recalls how he and the poet Lawson Inada, fired by their discovery of this novel, tried to track down the obscure author. They eventually found his widow, who told them that Okada had passed away only a few months before. Adding to their disappointment, she also explained that she had tried to give his papers to ucla, but was refused. Because she could not afford to house the papers, she burned what she thought was unwanted, including a second novel that had failed to find a publisher. Chin’s response to the news may have been inappropriate, but it also thus expresses the severity of the loss Chin felt: “I wanted to kick her ass around the block. I wanted to burn ucla down. Instead, we stayed up late talking about her life, talking about her marriage to John, keeping her up and asking every now and then about a letter, a story, a scrap of paper. But the answer was always the same. ‘Burned.’”2 The second example reaches further into the past, to an article that appeared in the Boston Globe in 1912, “Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career.” In this article, Sui Sin Far writes, “I have resided in Boston now for about two years. I came here with the intention of publishing a book and planting a few Eurasian thoughts into Western literature. My collection of Chinese-­American stories will be brought out very soon, under the title ‘Mrs. Spring Fragrance.’ I have also written another book which will appear next year, if Providence is kind.”3 “Providence,” as it turned out, was not kind. Eaton passed away soon after the publication of this article. All that remains of the second book is this passage. What makes both of these examples, as well as Kingston’s narrative about a lost manuscript, especially memorable is how they invoke all the narratives by Asian Americans that were not, or could not, be written and published, the many stories one is sure were there to be told but were not. Asian American literary studies was partially founded on the need to salvage what could be salvaged from this past, such as when Amy Ling in her book on writings by Chinese American women announces, “I want to put these writers on the scholarly map, to give them a heading in the Library of Congress Subject Catalog, to validate their existence and their work, to retrieve them from oblivion.”4 But as Asian Americans are becoming more and more the authors of their own narratives, and in the process making 60 • Chapter Two

substantial gains in the literary marketplace, has the sense of urgency circling the trope of the lost manuscript waned? What drives the more contemporary and more numerous writers as they contend with the weight of expectations generated by this literary history and the absence it figures, as well as the expectations that currently surround the publication and reception of literature in the United States more generally? Do such writers benefit from writing with their race in mind, which necessarily references a history of absent storytelling? Or does an awareness of race prevent them from doing more with their writing because it prescribes what kinds of stories they can tell? To address these questions, this chapter considers the tensions surrounding the ways in which the creative process was understood during the height of the Asian American movement. As recent critical and creative explorations of this period have revealed, this movement was an ideologically complex one, with myriad groups prone to schism and other expressions of deep-­seated differences. No simple phrase is capable of capturing this complexity. This is powerfully communicated in Karen Tei Yamashita’s multifaceted fictional account of this era. The notably long, National Book Award–finalist I-­Hotel is intentionally divided up into several shorter novellas to capture the dizzying range of opinions held by those who first thought of themselves as “Asian Americans.” Moreover, because literary writing was often embedded in complex and often discipline-­violating conversations about the meaning of creative expression in political action, no simple focus on literariness is possible when talking about this era.5 After exploring some of these tensions, the chapter turns to interviews with contemporary American writers of Asian ancestry, focusing in particular on their responses to questions about whether or not they think of themselves as “Asian American” writers, what the term means for them, and how they came to think of writing as a profession. In moving from self-­ reflections on the art of writing from the movement era to the present, it is tempting to formulate a progressive historical narrative. It would begin with disparate and sporadic struggles for self-­expression and end with a miasmic flow of words made possible by the institutional innovations of an intervening pioneer activist generation. By bringing such struggles together under a single rubric, this generation of creative writers and scholars might be understood as providing the cornerstone of a vibrant, racially based literature. This literature, in turn, would self-­consciously The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 61

facilitate efforts to expand the work of the imagination in thinking anew entrenched, unequal social relations. Unfortunately, conversations with contemporary writers make it difficult to give in to such a temptation. Most of the writers interviewed for this book, and more uniformly so the younger they were, expressed reservations about the limitations that being labeled Asian American might impose on their writing. Even those who said they did not mind being called Asian American were nevertheless concerned about what it might entail. As Brian Ascalon Roley observed, “I’m comfortable with the Asian American writer category. The only time I think it becomes problematic is when people start thinking, ‘Oh well, what does it mean to be an Asian American writer?,’ and they have certain expectations, and they want the work to be very Asian American, or they want the characters to be such, or the themes always to be about being Asian American. I think that’s a problem, and I think it can be a problem for the writers, if they’re writing for that audience.” On the other end of this spectrum, Alexander Chee does not mince words when the subject of Asian America comes up in ­conversation: Chee: Who wants to be valued just for what you are, as opposed to what you have to say? That’s disgusting. . . . No artist likes to be told what to write. I can’t imagine anyone who would like that, or want that. MHS: And you feel writing under the label “Asian American,” you are almost being told what to write? Chee: Not even “almost.” It’s most certainly within this category that you’re expected to have Asian American characters, and, not only that, but look what happened with Blu’s Hanging. . . . She [Lois Ann Yamanaka] had characters who didn’t fit the ideas of what was wanted, and so she was protested. For Chee, the creative process is necessarily something autonomous from collective political movements. Indeed, as suggested by Chee’s reference to the controversy that surrounded the rescinding of a book award to Yamanaka after protests about her book’s depiction of Filipino Americans, writers can now think of themselves as targets of such movements, rather than as part of them.6 In this context, it is interesting to compare Chee’s statements to what Yamashita, who started college in 1969, has said about 62 • Chapter Two

herself: “I’m an Asian American who happens to be a writer.” Even in this affirmation of racial identity, refreshing as it is at a time when acknowledging racial difference has been thoroughly confused with being racist, a sharp division remains between being an Asian American and being a writer. The two somehow seem incompatible. When read from the perspective afforded by these comments, literary works by contemporary American writers of Asian ancestry appear to be diverging from many of the ways a previous generation of self-­consciously Asian American writers understood their creative projects. This has happened in part because many wish to refuse publisher and reader expectations that they will write about their own group in a way that purports to be largely mimetic. Writing with race in mind can thus seem to many contemporary writers as giving in to the voracious marketplace demand for self-­Othering, as handicapping their ability to be creative, and as circumscribing their imagination within an ethnographic framework. What underlies such opinions, however, is not simply an animosity to thinking about race altogether. Rather, there is a sense that the term Asian American is not relevant to them, as if the self-­conscious building of a literature that can somehow fill the silences and absences surrounding Asian American experiences that the term once sought to enable has proven an empty promise. Worse, what has been built, rather than being enabling, has turned out for many to be irrelevant, so that a novelist like Saher Alam could not conceive of herself growing up to become a future writer and was not, when on the cusp of adulthood, encouraged to think of herself as part of a community of Asian Americans. As she recalled about her time in college, “I was taking writing classes when I could, but I don’t believe I ever thought I was going to be able to be a writer, as a lot of other writers do as children.”

A Sense of Urgency

Kingston, who figures large in this discussion because she continues to exert an enormous influence on the field of Asian American literature as a whole, may be said to have been writing about writing when she wrote The Woman Warrior—hence its many citations as an example of postmodern fiction. It constantly calls attention to the act of storytelling and to storytelling’s embedment within a social milieu. But just as important, it describes the aporias writers find themselves ceaselessly plunging into, so The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 63

that they must negotiate their desire to be fully engaged politically in their writing with their inability to do so. This ambivalence, between the desire to engage and the feeling that one cannot, is made salient by the fact that what is repeatedly at the focal point of The Woman Warrior is the narrator’s lack of knowledge. This is true from the beginning, when it asks its famous question to an explicitly Chinese American reader (breaking in the process a long tradition among earlier American writers of Asian ancestry, who all explicitly wrote for readers they assumed were white and unfamiliar with their ethnic cultures): “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? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”7 Such ambivalence marks other sections of the book as well, as in the chapter dedicated to a Chinese American retelling of Mu Lan, the woman warrior. While debates about this chapter have revolved around how accurately Kingston retells the story and what responsibility she bears toward a particular telling of it, debates which follow along the well-­trodden disagreements that Frank Chin has had with Kingston, few, if anyone, have mentioned the ways in which Kingston’s specific narrative of the woman warrior allegorizes the rise of communist China. This can be seen, for instance, in the narrator’s predictions about what will happen once their military struggle is complete: “The peasants would crown as emperor a farmer who knew the earth or a beggar who understood hunger.”8 And in the description of the battles that leads to this coronation, notable references to a long march and a redness evoke communism: “The land was peopled—the Han people, the People of One Hundred Surnames, marching with one heart, our tatters flying. The depth and width of Joy were exactly known to me: the Chinese population. After much hardship a few of our millions had arrived together at the capital. We faced our emperor personally. We beheaded him, cleaned out the palace, and inaugurated the peasant who would bring the new order. In his rags he sat on the throne facing south, and we, a great red crowd, bowed to him three times.”9 When asked about the possibility that she was writing about the rise of communist China, Kingston responded, “I was writing it as a myth. Why does this myth live for so long today? It must mean that it was useful for all sorts of reason. We can make it about a communist revolution. We can make it about a really good Kung Fu movie. . . . And feminism. We can 64 • Chapter Two

look at it as a feminist myth. It may not even have been meant for that.” That the “communist revolution,” among other things, was on Kingston’s mind as she composed The Woman Warrior certainly makes sense, especially as she came of age politically at a time when many young radicals were deeply influenced by Maoism—ironically at the same time Mao himself had initiated the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, destined to wreak untold damage to millions of lives. In this narrative and its reinterpretation from the perspective of a narrator who has grown up in the United States—“The news from China has been confusing. . . . I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry. My father screamed in his sleep. My mother wept and crumpled up the letters”— what comes across is the condition of not knowing whether the stories of political progress associated with Mao’s rise to power at the time were to be believed or whether they were mythicized for overseas audiences.10 Such uncertainty positions Kingston in a complex relationship with others of her generation, for she seems to want her writing to be fully engaged with the political issues besetting a racially identified community. At the same time, she is excruciatingly aware that she and her community are at an epistemological disadvantage. They do not know, and may have no way of knowing, their place in history, or how this history shapes who they are or what kind of political action best reflects their interests in relation to their obligations to others. On the one hand, then, the narrator readily admits her disadvantage: “It is confusing that my family was not the poor to be championed. They were executed like the barons in the stories, when they were not barons.”11 On the other hand, despite such a disadvantage, she insists that writing should be understood as part of a fully engaged political activity: “The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on my skin.”12 When reading The Woman Warrior alongside a heterogeneous collection of writings by Kingston’s cohort, one senses that these conflicted feelings, between the desire to engage and the uncertainty about how to do so, were fed by the idea that Asian Americans had urgent stories to tell that were not being told. It is this idea, for example, that compelled the late historian Ronald Takaki to title the introduction to his seminal Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian America, “Their History Bursts with Telling.” This is how he describes his source material, as comprised of “voices” that “contain particular expressions and phrases with their own meanings and The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 65

nuances, the cuttings from the cloth of language.”13 Such commentary on the importance of listening to voices for the quality of their speech as well as for their content points to a keen literary sensibility. In his writings, Takaki exhibits an ear attuned to questions of genre, style, tone, meter, and so forth, all of which work together to produce a meaning that cannot completely be divorced from the way that meaning has been expressed. While a movie might be adapted from a novel, neither can ever be more than distant kin to the other because each has been produced in such sharply different mediums. Takaki explicitly gestures to the ways in which the literary and the writing of history are sutured together when he addresses a question that echoes the questions posed earlier in this chapter: “What will the twenty-­ first century hold for the generation of Asian-­American students I have taught?” After listing some pertinent figures, he responds: “But statistics do not stir insightfulness or imaginative thinking about what will happen to Asian Americans in the coming century. After all, numbers cannot capture and convey dynamic movements and changes, or extravagant as well as dashed dreams, or thoughts and feelings in ferment.”14 Such an attention to the belief that what is expressed cannot be divorced from how it is expressed suggests how much Takaki was drawing on the power of literature as much as he was making a lasting contribution to the discipline of history. Indeed, it is hard to imagine his book making the impact that it has if it were not already so attuned to the literary qualities of its subject matter. These qualities, in turn, make Strangers from a Different Shore an accomplished example of narrative history. Together, Kingston, Takaki, Ling, Yamashita, and many other Asian American cultural producers who more or less reached adulthood during the late 1960s and 1970s (Yamashita is significantly younger than the figures mentioned here) give testimony to how important the literary was to their shared, if often contentious and conflicting, intellectual projects. They explicitly viewed literature, and art more generally, as a vehicle for political expression. They saw it as an essential way to pry loose the grip of a race thinking that considered Asians in America as always being from elsewhere and as having no claim to the country where they resided and often wished, against all discouragements, to call home. Carlos Bulosan exclaims in America Is in the Heart, a work that was celebrated by this generation of activist-­cultural producers as giving prescient voice to a struggle that had not ended for Asian Americans: “Then it came to me, like a revela66 • Chapter Two

tion, that I could actually write understandable English. I was seized with happiness. I wrote slowly and boldly, drinking the wine when I stopped, laughing silently and crying. When the long letter was finished, a letter which was actually a story of my life, I jumped to my feet and shouted through my tears: ‘They can’t silence me any more! I’ll tell the whole world what they have done to me!’”15 The meaning of the literary is slippery at best. And so, even here, in this passage that seems to reverberate with the political potential that writing beckons to Bulosan (and through him the self-­defined Asian American writers that followed), one might wonder what the distinction is between the literary and literacy.16 After all, what excites Bulosan in this passage is not his ability to write well but to write intelligibly. Writing is a means for giving expression to an experience, a weapon of class-­racial warfare that allows those who have no voice and hence no way to communicate an experience a chance to speak. If this is one’s primary aim, an emphasis on writing well might easily be approached with some suspicion, a possible affectation that gets in the way of content and meaning and political p­ urpose. This is not to say that those who approach the writing of literature in this way are not conscious about what they are doing or practice their creative expression as less of a craft than others whose primary focus is on craft alone. The former are obviously aware of what they are doing as writers, but what is more on their minds in the act of writing is the meaning they convey. As Bulosan explains in an essay entitled “How My Stories Were Written,” The making of a writer is not by accident. It takes years of painstaking preparation, whether one knows or not that he is on the path of a writing career; of extensive reading of significant contemporary writing and the classics of literature, and of intensive experimental writing, before one is ready to synthesize reading, writing and experience into a solid premise from which one should begin a difficult career as a writer. But the type of writing which flows from such a premise depends completely on the sensibility of the individual and his ability to crystallize his thoughts; whether he would interpret reality and maintain that art is not alien to life but a transmutation of it in artistic terms, or indifferently deny life and completely escape from it, as though the immediacy of man’s problems of existence were not the concern of the writer.17 The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 67

As the first half of this passage explains, for Bulosan all writers, to one degree or another, share a kind of training that teaches them the skills they need to turn written words into more than mere marks on a page. Such preparation leads all writers to a baseline starting place from which they can practice their craft and their trade as writers. From such a “solid premise,” writing itself can move in two directions: toward a separation of art from life or toward an attempt to grapple directly with “the immediacy of man’s problems of existence.” The latter approach is obviously no more a direct transcription of reality as the former, for Bulosan takes care to include the caveat that any such engagement must occur “in artistic terms.” The difference between the two directions available to the writer that Bulosan maps out is thus one of intent: whether one sets out to engage or not. Not all American writers and other kinds of cultural producers of Asian descent have necessarily wanted to engage, even during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the notion of an Asian American was first formally articulated. Many have simply loved creative expression for its own sake or considered engagement one of several tasks their expression undertook. Although he worked in a different medium, the painter Frank Okada, who is also John Okada’s brother, provides an interesting example of the latter type of cultural producer: Barbara Johns [interviewer]: We were talking about the post-­war years and the consciousness of the sixties and moving to Eugene. Did you ever made [sic] an equation between these experiences and the direction of your work? Frank Okada: No. No, I never said, “Here’s my painting, and this is my statement.” Barbara Johns: I didn’t mean that. I think we were talking about the term “dedicatory” [a term Okada had used to describe his paintings], a certain consciousness of the sixties, and you moved to Eugene to a more isolated place. I was trying to see if there was any kind of relationship in your own mind. Frank Okada: No, I felt the way I painted it would be a far stretch of the imagination to relate what I was doing to what was essentially happening in the literary discipline, in terms of being able to describe that experience. There was no way to make it fit, and, 68 • Chapter Two

if I did, I knew it would make me real uncomfortable, because it wouldn’t hold, I couldn’t stand by it.18 One reason Okada gives for his reticence to connect his painting with the political ambitions of the Asian American movement is that in artistic terms it had started as a literary movement, in part because “the written word is so much more precise, in terms of describing things.”19 Okada is explicit, as well, in stating that the separation he makes between his painting and the movement does not spring from any personal disagreement with the movement itself. Indeed, he is adamant that it had a strong influence on him: “My indignity or my consciousness about that [the aftereffects of the internment] came, oh, much later. . . . I suppose, probably in the late sixties, when the idea of the importance of your cultural heritage and a cultural identity was important, with the Chicanos, and with the Blacks, and with Asian American movements.”20 As this example suggests, few Asian American writers and artists who lived through this era, especially on the West Coast, were unaffected by the arguments about race that those involved in the various race-­based movements of this period had begun to make and to translate into tangible political and cultural action. What is important about this passage, however, is how much Okada resists the idea that his art could be interpreted through the prism of this movement, suggesting that the visual medium at least could not engage so directly, that the requirement to render life into art through artistic terms required a necessary separation that could only make visual art itself a poor vehicle for mirroring the life it sought to represent (see fig. 2.1). In contrast to what he claims his paintings cannot do (a position many other artists would not agree with), Okada points to literature as being better able to engage politically with the mainstream of the Asian American movement.21 In this regard, Okada refers specifically to Frank Chin and Lawson Inada, who were not only responsible for helping to make his brother’s novel more widely read after years of neglect, but were also two of the authors of the most commented on, and easily the most well-­known, statements about literature, race, and politics to emerge during the formative years of the Asian American movement. In the introduction to Chinese and Japanese American literature in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-­ American Literature, the editors Chin, Inada, Jeffery Paul Chan, and Shawn Wong argue that the majority of Chinese and Japanese Americans—the population group they address—are themselves ideologically blinkered: The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 69

Figure 2.1.

Frank Okada, “Untitled,” 1965, ink on paper, 41ʺ × 27ʺ. Collection of the Museum of Northwest Art, Gift of Julie Hamilton, 04.01. The painting is heavily influenced by abstract expressionism and is as a result notably antirepresentational.

“In terms of utter lack of cultural distinction in America, the destruction of an organic sense of identity, the complete psychological and cultural subjugation of the Asian-­American, the people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry stand as white racism’s only success.”22 If so, if Chinese and Japanese Americans are indeed “white racism’s only success” because they lack a culture, an identity, and psychological distinctiveness, the authors reason that what Asian Americans need most to save themselves from such subjugation is a language of their own. As they put it, “Language is the medium of culture and the people’s sensibility, including the style of manhood. . . . Stunt the tongue and you have lopped off the culture and sensibility. On the simplest level, a man in any culture speaks for himself. Without a language of his own, he no longer is a man.”23 The Asian American writer’s main task is therefore to craft such a language, speaking only for himself—the pointed use of the male pronoun, as in Bulosan’s writings about writing, fittingly emphasizes the male-­centered thinking of this passage—and in the process producing a whole culture. And in doing so, such a writer had to be unafraid to work “within a sense of rejection and isolation to the extent that it [white culture] encouraged Asian America to reject its own literature.”24 Only in this way, and in the face of popular scorn as well as the likely scorn from the very people one is trying to represent, can a new culture, a new identity, and a new psychological appreciation for Asian Americans as a distinct race become possible. The introduction to Aiiieeeee! seems to substantiate Frank Okada’s claim that there is an inextricable link between literature and the Asian American movement. But, as Mark Chiang argues, this introduction departs quite significantly from the ways in which many other Asian American cultural producers who were also part of a self-­consciously Asian American political movement understood their art. Rather than focus on the myriad concrete social problems that activists were preoccupied with at the time, such as “labor issues, housing, poverty, lack of social services,” and so forth, the editors focused their attention single-­mindedly on “self-­ contempt” and “the lack of manhood.”25 Chiang elaborates: “The concept of self-­contempt is the means by which the editors explain the antagonistic relation of the Asian American audience to ‘its’ literature, although this calls into question the claim that literature reflects or expresses the actual and authentic culture of Asian Americans. Instead, Asian American culture and identity are seen as a vanguard, as signposts of a future in which The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 71

culture (in the sense of cultural production) and culture (in the sense of a way of life) might correspond.”26 By insisting that Asian American writers are separate from the Asian American communities they claim to represent, what these writers promoted was their freedom from what the community might most want them to write about. They thus secured their freedom to pursue their own interest as writers, even as they could vest themselves with the very limited cultural capital that the movement itself had accumulated. In short, even in literature and even among writers who explicitly make reference to the Asian American movement, there is an insistence on the need to introduce a separation in art that makes it distinct from the social context from which it springs. This kind of thinking is in sharp contrast to that of other artists within the movement who saw their artistic expression as inextricably tied to their social context, not to a past encoded in literary texts. This perspective has notably been espoused by the late Chris Iijima, a former member of the movement musical group Yellow Pearl and the son of Kazu Iijima (who was once a member of the Young Communist League and who helped found Asian Americans for Action, a group of grassroots political activists, in New York in 1969). Years after the musical group disbanded, the partially red-­diapered Chris Iijima wrote about what had guided his singing and songwriting: “Asian American culture is too often defined backwards. That is, we tend to define it in terms of what artists do—poets, playwrights, filmmakers, jazz musicians, actors, and graphic artists—rather than in terms of the collective and shared experience of people. I’ve always believed that artists, despite what they themselves believe, are really just reflections of the time.”27 While there are some fundamental disagreements between this view of the role of the artist and Bulosan’s view, they share a belief that art should engage with the urgency of its present and the concerns that give it shape as an epoch in a way that gives voice to the voiceless. This is a belief that the Aiiieeeee! introduction explicitly refuses in its claim to vanguardism. For both Iijima and Bulosan, culture is not “what artists do”; rather, artists give expression to, try to make meaning of, and, most important, engage with what a culture is already doing. It is this notion of literature as engagement that makes the trope of the lost manuscript so eerily poignant in the history of Asian American literature, for it points to what cannot be represented of, in Iijima’s words, “the collective and shared experience of people.” Situated in direct opposition to this view is the example of Frank Okada and the editors of Aiiieeeee!, 72 • Chapter Two

who recognize at once the importance of the movement, but insist nonetheless that a certain remove must exist between it and the work of Asian American artists and writers. The trope of the lost manuscript is again poignant here, for it figures the remove that artists and writers must endure in occupying a position of enlightened consciousness, striving to make fellow Asian Americans understand and see in ways they resist with firm intransigence. Interestingly, Bulosan might also have agreed that such a remove is necessary for art. The phrase “in artistic terms,” used in his description of the artist who would engage with the world around “him,” suggests that such an artist would also add something in the process of interpreting reality. There is, however, no doubt that, in this formulation of the artist as interpreter of reality, authority itself for Bulosan lies with the reality that precedes the artist. It is up to the politically conscious artist to make sense of this reality. The artist himself—or, one must almost forcefully add here, herself—remains a mediating figure, someone who can help to explain to a larger audience a reality that a few endure without having the ability to make readable. Considered together, the following three literary figures illuminate a range of possible attitudes toward writing in particular that stretches from the fully autonomous to the fully engaged—with the tacit understanding that writers in general were not completely autonomous (as, in Frank Okada’s sense, modern art) nor completely engaged (as, in Chris Iijima’s sense, folk music). From the fully autonomous end of this range to the fully engaged, these figures could be lined up in relationship to each other as follows: Aiiieeeee! editors ↔ Maxine Hong Kingston ↔ Carlos Bulosan This does not mean, however, that writers and artists of this period were noncommittal in their opinions. As Iijima puts it in an essay written just before his death, the artist who exaggerates his or her significance, the one who tends toward the left side of this continuum, may contribute to a culture that has lost “a sense of urgency . . . to confront those who perpetrate present-­day assaults against people of color, the poor, and the disenfranchised.” Iijima continues: “There is much talk about getting Asian Americans into positions of greater visibility and political power, but there is less talk about what should be done once that visibility and power is achieved. . . . It may be because the general political sense of the times The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 73

today is so individualistic and reactionary.”28 From this judgment, it is possible to get a sense of how the political expectations born out of the history of Asian American activism impinge on what writers are supposed to write in the contemporary moment. While the range of attitudes toward art were wide at this time, those most active in the movement and therefore most active in the pioneering articulation of Asian Americans as a distinct racial group tended to favor the fully engaged end of this range. The fully autonomous end of this range, moreover, was itself also self-­ consciously political in nature or, at the very least, careful not to repudiate the importance of politics in creative expression.

Speaking Only for Themselves

It might very well be due to the existence of so many contemporary Asian American authors publishing with mainstream presses and winning awards and finding a wide readership and starting to comment on the act of writing itself (although much less frequently than their white peers) that Kingston does not consider how her lost manuscript might fall into a historically deep line of other lost manuscripts by Asian Americans. While the literary output of these contemporary Asian American writers is miniscule when compared to the field of contemporary literature as a whole and barriers to acceptance as writers still formidable, what they have succeeded in publishing is nonetheless impressive when set within an Asian American context. In the past, Asian Americans were not known for their literary prowess. The few authors who gained recognition as such often had to make many difficult compromises and were expected to act as spokespersons for their race and ethnicity. While such expectations certainly persist, they are now balanced by the relatively large number of authors whose works are being published. This output is impressively prolific, and the authors are obviously committed—almost uniformly—to producing literature that speaks earnestly to concerns of enduring importance. At the same time, it is hard not to miss a growing concern among writers that racial and ethnic expectations hold them back from doing more with their writing. As the exchange with Alexander Chee illustrates, contemporary writers who reached their adulthood in the 1980s and 1990s can often be highly vocal in their resistance to the idea that they share any racially defined “sensibility” as the editors of Aiiieeeee! understood it. Indeed, there may 74 • Chapter Two

now be enough of a tradition that a writer like Chee can reenact the theme found in “white writing” (as identified by Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, published the same year Aiiieeeee! was first printed), namely, as Chin and his fellow editors put it, of the son rebelling “against the accepted past.” Nor is there the sense in this kind of response that writers should want to engage with their time and place, or act as mediating conduits for a racially demarcated populace. Indeed, among contemporary Asian American writers who were born after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and are heirs to seismic changes in demographics, political sensibilities, and legal protections, as well as to the four decades of the libertarian tilt in electoral politics that have occurred since, it is difficult to imagine many ever exclaiming that they can write “understandable ­English” with the same joy that Bulosan does. After all, what enables writers of this generation to become celebrated—to find capable literary agents and willing commercial presses, to gain media attention, and to be considered serious contenders for major literary prizes, especially at a time of precarious changes to the publishing industry—is precisely their ability to write in a way that deliberately marks itself off from simple literacy. At the same time, what attracts publishers to their work is often the uniqueness of their background, so that their ethnicity is converted into a kind of commodity that helps attract attention to the stories they have to tell. As Mark McGurl argues, the ethnic novel itself has become a template for the ways in which much of contemporary American fiction organizes itself, as it paradigmatically combines “the routine operations of modernist autopoetics with a rhetorical performance of cultural group membership preeminently, though by no means exclusively, marked as ethnic.”29 By “autopoetics,” McGurl means the reflexivity found in the experimentation of highly esteemed contemporary fiction. This reflexivity is not so much a radical break from modernism as it is the “continuing interest of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research.”30 The combination of an intense focus on form with a preoccupation with ethnicity leads to a “high cultural pluralism,” which describes, according to McGurl, an impressive array of authors, from Jews like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to Native Americans like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Mormon Silko, and Louise Erdrich; Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-­rae Lee; Chicanos/as like Sandra Cisneros; and African Americans like Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison.31 More impresThe Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 75

sive still, authors who do not have the same claim to the ethnic as these writers nevertheless organize their work as if they were writing ethnic novels, minoritizing the lower middle class (Raymond Carver), Vietnam War veterans (Tim O’Brien), Southern culture (Flannery O’Connor), or even white technonerds (Neal Stephenson). So, while McGurl attempts in the longer version of this argument to systematize the organization of contemporary American literature around three different points—the high-­ cultural pluralist, technomodernism, and lower-­middle-­class realism—it is clear that ethnicity casts a long shadow on these arrangements (which is perhaps why he feels the need to coin the term technicity to describe the main interest of technomodern literature).32 Far from thinking of the ethnic novel as a marginal niche in the “postwar literary field,” one may thus consider the whole field to in fact be shaped by what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once denounced as a “cult of ethnicity.”33 If this is the case, it is interesting to note how many contemporary Asian American writers define themselves precisely against this kind of fixation on ethnicity. Against the expectation that they will somehow be channeling the experiences of their ethnicity (which also gets easily elided with race), these writers often insist that they speak only for themselves, and in doing so alter those characteristics which Iijima describes as “individualistic and reactionary” into traits of liberal principle. As Chang-­rae Lee states, refining past comments about how confining he finds the term “Asian American,” the term itself is for him “a private concept”: Lee: I just feel as if we can’t really talk about Asian Americanness as something that we share. We don’t. I can talk about my Asian Americanness, and no-­one else’s, and maybe that’s where I’ve come to. I’m more willing to talk about mine. MHS: So, could you talk a little bit about yours? What is your Asian Americanness? Lee: I guess my Asian Americanness is in my books, in some ways. I mean, it’s shown through my books, and, as you probably know in life, there’s no way to predict or maybe even quantify how it expresses itself, or its influence, or things just happen and I’ve given up trying to do so. I think people who do, and I’ve met a lot of people who really do, who really say, “No, I’m this and this,” and I always feel as if, well, that’s a lot of effort for an impossible 76 • Chapter Two

task. So I feel as if I’m just trying to let it happen, and I don’t know what that “it” is. And maybe, you know, take The Surrendered, would a white American, an Anglo-­American writer, have written that book? They could’ve. Would they have written it in the same way? . . . The more that you think about it, it’s just hard to say. Because I’m the particular unique Korean American writer who could write that book, and someone like Susan Choi, or Don Lee, or Min Jin [Lee], they would have written a slightly different book. It may not have had anything to do with their Asianness. At the heart of such a position-­taking is a widely and deeply shared antipathy to the tendency to make ethnic writers merely, or only, spokespersons of their respective groups, turning what they write into simply the raw material for an anthropological or sociological form of investigation— a concern that Elaine Kim had already registered in 1982 despite insisting on the need to focus on social context and that Yoonmee Chang has recently updated in her discussion of an “ethnographic imperative.”34 As Saher Alam so carefully puts it in her explanation of how she approached the writing of The Groom to Have Been (a novel, modeled on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, that focuses on a second-­generation Muslim from India living in Montreal and New York in the days after 9/11), there is a tension between wanting to explain rituals and customs unique to this community because one is interested in exploring how characters respond to them, and the urge simply to explain such rituals and customs for their own sake. As a creative writer, she is not interested in the latter. But the former requires, nevertheless, some explanation, and as a result can lead precisely to the kind of writing she does not want to write. She therefore made a self-­conscious decision not to explain, especially the non-­English words and phrases that the characters would have used among themselves: I had made a fairly conscious decision that felt a little bit, maybe not political. I’m not sure if I can find the word for it. By it I mean it is provocative I guess, at some level. But my idea behind that was, I was seeking to portray these people who are very comfortable in two cultures, they’re comfortable in two languages, and they’re sort of fluent in, and they move back [and forth] between these languages and without noticing, and that’s sort of integral to their experience, and then it also seems odd to me to corral the foreignness into little The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 77

phrases and words, so that it’s evident, and resolvable, and seems like it’s prompting you to find the translation of the term in order to make sense of a sentence. It seemed more interesting to pursue and portray a greater foreignness, and to not have these little things attract interest, or even suggest that the foreignness is only there. And I guess that foreignness sort of just involves these people who are feeling foreign to themselves, and in situations where they have to act against their own instincts and personal inclinations. So where people have sort of admitted or said to me that they had to go look up a term, I feel bad about that. When I read a novel that is set in a time period or in a setting that I’m not familiar with, I make my own sense of it, I look it up, or I make my own meaning, and then I move on. I wanted the book not to feel like a sociological study, or a guide. Although Alam resists calling this decision not to explain or translate words, phrases, and customs a political act, its “provocative” nature nevertheless renders it difficult to differentiate from politics. In making such a decision, Alam seems close to Kingston when the latter addresses her Chinese American readers directly in The Woman Warrior. Alam likewise, albeit less explicitly, addresses readers who may already feel at home in the world that she weaves in her text, and expects other readers not to take for granted the notion that a work such as hers, because its cultural references will not be familiar to a normative white middle-­class reading audience nor to many other kinds of audiences, will go out of its way to explain. In working her way through the challenges facing her as a writer, one who intentionally sets out to depict characters who are culturally unique without at the same time putting the focus on a description of that culture—as she explains, “What you want to talk about is not the ritual but how a character is responding to it or is affected by it”—she has found that the term Asian America has been of no help whatsoever. As she recalls, one incident early in her life shaped how she thinks of her relationship to this racial category: “I remember getting to college, the first weeks of freshman year, approaching the Asian American table, and being politely, jokingly, pointed to a table nearby, which was the South Asian American Students Association. . . . It wasn’t this hostile turn-­away. It was just this senior sitting at the table pointing a little freshman towards the right place. So I don’t think of it as a negative encounter, but it’s true that it has turned me away from including myself in that term.” If, as Chang-­rae Lee claims, 78 • Chapter Two

Asian Americans can only think of race in private terms, as “my Asian Americanness,” it also seems to be the case that there is a public boundary around who can claim such privacy. Alam learned in a gentle but firm way where that boundary lies. Still, Alam, like many of her cohort (no matter how one chooses to define it), must struggle with the ways in which her sense of racial apartness or difference affects how others will perceive her work. Lee is clear on this point. Even as he resists being overly defined as an Asian American, this resistance is shadowed by an awareness that as a writer who is not white he faces some specific hurdles: I don’t think it [race] influences what I write. I think it influences how it’s talked about. And maybe how it sells. Unless I win a major prize like the Pulitzer or something, there’s a good sizable part of the thoughtful reading public that probably, not that they’re against reading my books, but that probably would make it a third or fourth choice, because they might assume that it’s a certain way. Right? And that might be an unfair assessment, but I think that and I accept that. I mean, given my name and some of the things I write about, you know there’s always a qualification. It’s not fully American. I’m not talking about the American moment, like Jonathan Franzen, right? This sense of racial apartness similarly shadows Brian Ascalon Roley’s response to the question about how his race has affected the reception of his work. Commenting on the ways in which the current vogue for ethnic literature has tended to marginalize interest in Filipino American literature, he observes, “Their invisibility seems really strange, given this large history [of colonialism] with the United States. I didn’t really notice how weird it was until I went to London, and the immigrant population from former British colonies, they’re very visible. I mean, they have large numbers, but people in England are very aware of why there are so many people of Pakistani descent living for example in London. But people in American don’t even tend to notice that there’s all these Filipinos.” While there are obvious and also subtle differences between Alam’s, Lee’s, and Roley’s feelings of apartness, each writer nevertheless speaks to a yearning for a way to write themselves into a national conversation, a wanting to talk “about the American moment,” as Lee puts it, that doesn’t quite include The Trope of the Lost Manuscript • 79

them. Roley’s point is especially poignant here, as the invisibility of Filipino American writers might highlight the ways in which they are inconvenient reminders of a history of direct overseas colonialism that the nation has collectively sought to forget. In thinking about a yearning to be a part of a national conversation, Susan Choi offers an interesting response to the question of how race affects the writing of her work. While she may feel tangentially a part of an Asian American literary tradition, she also tells of how she self-­consciously sought out writings by Asian Americans, thus explicitly seeking out such a tradition: When I was at Yale, Korean wasn’t being taught. That wasn’t a language that was offered. You could take Japanese. I remember there was a course you could read Tale of Genji. But there just wasn’t any course on Asian American history. You know Ronald Takaki’s book? There wasn’t any course that used that book. And there wasn’t any equivalent literature course. It wasn’t until Cornell [that] I was even talking to people about how there should be a course like that. We put together this reading list that had Woman Warrior and [Frank Chin’s] Donald Duk on it. And it was a really easy reading list to put together, because there was so little. It wasn’t like we read everything, but still. Although Choi went to college in the late 1980s and graduate school in the early 1990s, just as English departments were becoming more open to Asian American literature as worthy of critical attention, it remained then, and remains still at many universities, little more than a promise of a tradition. Its lost manuscripts (“there was so little”) still evoked, and perhaps continues to evoke, a sense of the past that seems somehow as distant and hard to access, albeit in a different way, as when Ronald Takaki enthused about stories bursting with telling.

80 • Chapter Two

Chapter 3

Not Ethnic Literature

Caroline Rody has argued that Asian American fiction is noteworthy among its contemporary American cohort because it so often focuses on the puncturing of ethnic boundaries. As a result, it also gravitates toward imaginings that stress “encounter” and “produce shifting and surprising new compositions of the ‘we.’”1 Rody is careful to claim that this does not mean that writers, or readers, are compelled to choose between the “conception” of ethnicity “that traces one historical tradition, and that has been a crucial, powerful generator of stories to live by, as well as an essential, strategic marker for marginalized peoples” and an emphasis on what she calls interethnicity, which “attends to the dialogism that postcolonial theorists variously attribute to hybridization, sites of cultural encounter, the contact zone where cultures meet.”2 Still, it’s clear that what attracts her critical attention is the strong tendency in the Asian American fiction she focuses on to do the latter much more than the former. What attracts her attention to Asian American fiction, in other words, is its fondness for dissolving differences of various kind. There is surely an irony, if not a contradiction, in this observation. While readers of this fiction may recognize the point Rody makes, they might also be struck by how odd it is that Asian Americans are so willing to share or even sacrifice the limelight in the works that they are producing so as to foreground other people’s experiences, and especially the experiences of white people. Without being told, they seem to understand a logic that has long guided U.S. media representations of Asians and Asian Americans alike: narratives about Asian and Asian American characters

cannot be of interest to consumers lest they show how such characters can be connected in some way with characters that they are already habituated to care about—namely, white characters. For instance, in Slaying the Dragon (1988), a widely taught documentary about Hollywood representations of Asian women, the director of the television adaptation of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar recalls a meeting he had with a studio executive, who happened at the time to be the highest-­ranked African American. The executive had apparently been tasked to suggest, as gently as possible, that the Japanese American female lead be replaced by a white male schoolteacher from whose eyes the plight of the internees could be narrated. Otherwise, it was feared the film would offer its viewers no character to identify with. The valuation of the interethnic and the concept of the ethnic this term relies on thus raises a number of vexing questions. Does the emphasis on accessibility to a general audience and on exploring interethnic encounters found in these works mean that what is making contemporary Asian American fiction noteworthy is that it refuses to be just about Asian Americans? And if so, if Asian American fiction insistently points outside its boundaries and demands new compositions of the “we,” is such a move made possible because there is no Asian American as such? Or is it the case that Asian American characters are so often placed in the margins of these works because writers are responding to the logic that to be widely appealing their works must not focus too much on Asian Americans, who are as a group parochial and not worthy of attention? In short, is it possible that, in imagining new compositions of the “we,” these works risk defining the “we” by marginalizing or excluding Asian Americans? Have Asian American writers who shy away from casting Asian Americans at the center of their narratives internalized the logic of the Hollywood executive who fears that without a white male protagonist—or a similarly familiar figure—a narrative will remain for readers affectively unrelatable? There is, certainly, ample evidence to support Rody’s claims. In a notable break from the conventions dominant in earlier extant writings by Asian Americans, numerous Asian American writers since the start of the last decade of the twentieth century have experimented with taking up perspectives that are not exclusively, or in many cases not predominantly, Asian American. For example, Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, set in the Amazon, features no Asian American characters, although there are several Japanese Brazilian characters and one of 82 • Chapter Three

the central figures is a recent Japanese immigrant to Brazil. In her story “Sexy” Jhumpa Lahiri employs the third-­person-­limited perspective of a young white woman to narrate her sexual affair with an Indian American married man. Chang-­rae Lee writes from the first-­person perspective of an Italian American in Aloft, and allows the third-­person perspectives of white characters to dominate long sections of The Surrendered. Similarly, Gish Jen writes from a white woman’s perspective braided with the perspectives of her Chinese American husband, their adopted children, and a new immigrant from China in Love Wife, and dedicates a chapter of World and Country to the perspective of a white farmer who has lost his farm and become estranged from his white wife. Susan Choi writes from the perspective of a dispossessed son of a major white female character and a white husband she jilts in a significant part of A Person of Interest, and begins American Woman from the perspective of a white political activist who is looking for the Japanese American woman at the center of its narrative (she also dedicates a section to the perspective of a white reporter ruminating over how this woman’s story is destined to fall into obscurity). Other writers have opted to sideline Asian American characters even more aggressively. Monica Ferrell writes from a white male college student’s perspective in The Answer Is Always Yes, with a Japanese American woman playing only a supporting role. Sabina Murray writes exclusively from a white character’s perspective in The Carnivore’s Inquiry and Forgery, and unlike the other works thus far mentioned, neither of these novels depicts discernible Asian American or Asian diasporic characters. The same is true for the work of Ted Chiang and Charles Yu, perhaps two of the most inventive writers of science fiction working today. Stories of Your Life and Others and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, respectively, contain rare, if any, direct references to Asian Americans or Asians (although the latter is a clever retelling of the immigrant narrative as genre fiction and the protagonist has the same name as the author). And Ed Park’s Personal Days contains only trace references to race, suggesting with tantalizing subtlety that some of its characters may or may not be Asian American. On the one hand, it’s possible to argue that even when these writers don’t seem to be writing explicitly about race, they nevertheless are—and often, because of their ambivalence, in ways that startle with originality. In other words, what at first glance might appear as irony or contradiction, the ways in which some Asian American fiction stands out in its propenNot Ethnic Literature • 83

sity to marginalize Asian American characters, may be no such thing, for this propensity can often highlight how race itself is a concept that isn’t as fixed or fully formed as one might imagine. On the other hand, it may also be the case that race isn’t important to such writers. They are focused on other topics which seem more pressing and only tangentially, if at all, related to the topic of race. Both options seem equally valid when reading these works, or talking to their authors. Even if the latter is the case, however, these works may nevertheless offer the reader interested in the topic of race the opportunity to think social relations anew. In marginalizing Asian Americans or not writing about them, these works may help readers imagine how Asian Americans fit into a racial order that craves their stories but does so in a highly conventional form. More important, they may encourage readers to think about race itself in a way that departs sharply from the logic of ethnicity, so that race gestures less to an ordering of society and more to something fundamentally disturbing. Indeed, it may be that by avoiding ethnic literature, with its all-­too-­ familiar trappings, all of these writers are actively seeking alternative ways of thinking about difference and hence about race. By not speaking more directly about the experiences of Asian Americans as ethnic individuals, these works also draw attention away from the ways in which this literature can become focused in critical and popular reception as examples of storytelling that revolves inevitably around a search for “hybridization,” “encounter,” and “contact,” which, as Rody points out, are common critical aspirations. In contrast, this chapter seeks to argue that ethnicity is primarily interested in resemblance, while race is focused on difference, and it is for this reason that thinking in terms of race is the conceptually more challenging. By refusing to be ethnic or even interethnic, these works clear space to talk more directly about race. To elucidate this point, the chapter turns to an interview with Sabina Murray, who speaks directly about the ways in which ethnicity and race figure in her stories. It then looks at Nam Le’s The Boat, a collection of short stories that received immediate critical recognition for the ways in which it seeks explicitly to subvert the genre of ethnic literature as it has come to be marketed, and at Ed Park’s Personal Days, a novel that seems on its face to be as far away from a discussion about ethnicity as possible but that nonetheless speaks in interesting ways about readers’ racial assumptions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Ted Chiang, whose re84 • Chapter Three

fusal to speak about ethnicity offers startling, novel ways of thinking about difference itself.

“I Can’t Write That Book!”

There is no denying that there is pervasive pressure on Asian American writers to write about their ethnicity—though not about their race. As an example of how writers of Asian ancestry often experience this pressure, consider the following interview with Sabina Murray, in which she discussed how she is not an Asian American. As she explained at the start, her father is white, an anthropologist, and her mother is Filipino American. She was born in the United States but moved along with her family to Perth, Australia, at the age of two. When she was twelve, her family moved to the Philippines, where she remained until the end of high school. She returned to the United States to enter college feeling like an international student. Given this upbringing, she asserted, she does not “identify as Asian American at all.” Nevertheless, against the apparent naturalness of such a conclusion, as she continued to talk about how she sees herself racially, she reflected: “But at the same time, I have a lot of friends who are Asian American. A lot. And so I think that maybe that wasn’t completely clear. Well, it’s not clear to me exactly how I feel about that. Because, you know, even though I can’t say I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, I should go make an Asian American friend’ [laughter] . . . I was sitting at my dining table at a dinner party that I’ve thrown, and I look around at the faces. I’m like, ‘Oh, well, isn’t that interesting.’” Her relationship to Asian America is a complex one, made more complex by the elasticity of the term itself, but there undoubtedly is a relationship that is more intimate than Murray at first acknowledged in the conversation. If she is not an Asian American, why does she keep finding herself in the company of so many who seem to her to be unproblematically so? Is being Asian American defined by one’s origins, or by one’s upbringing and primary acculturation, or even by who one socializes with? As the conversation with Murray continued, the topic of race became further troubled by how others, especially within the publishing industry, view her. The conversation moved from how she identifies racially to how ethnic expectations are ascribed to her. She spoke in vivid detail about one encounter in particular. While a Bunting Fellow, she met an editor who Not Ethnic Literature • 85

agreed to publish a collection of short stories based on three stories she had shown him. The editor also arranged a lunch with several representatives of the press that employed him: I could feel there was something awkward going on. I could just feel it. And then finally the woman who was the Grand Poobah of all of these people I was sitting with, said, “Well, I just think, don’t you think, it would be much more interesting if you took out one story, that about your family. . . . Don’t you think you want to develop that into a novel?” All of a sudden, like this marquee flashing the front of my head, going, “Three Generations of Strong Asian Women, and the Weak Ineffectual Men Who Hold Them Back.” And I just said, “No, no, I can’t write that book. I can’t write that book. That’s not my book. I can’t write it.” I had a really hard time just not losing it, and saying, “You can’t expect anybody who has an Asian theme, who is a woman, to write this book!” . . . It’s demoralizing to think that your ethnicity coupled with your gender would rob you of the ability to be in any way intellectual. That combined “Asian, possibility, woman” mean that all we want is thinly disguised memoir. Don’t even try to make anything up. Not of interest. As a humorous coda to this story (although it might be humorous only in the retelling), Murray delivered both The Caprices, a collection of short stories about the Second World War roughly centered on the Philippines and told from multiple perspectives, which this press published, and a second manuscript entitled “A Carnivore’s Inquiry,” about a white woman, obsessed with her tortured past and with writings about cannibalism, who may or may not be a serial killer. The press rejected the second manuscript and demanded that she provide a different manuscript to fulfill her contract. She refused and returned her advance: “So [my agent] gets the book back from them, and then a day later, literally one day later, I won the pen/ Faulkner Award. . . . And all of a sudden they want it back. And so there was this tug of war. Then they were all at the pen/Faulkner Award ceremony, with me, and my parents. It was crazy.” With this story in mind, one could easily interpret A Carnivore’s Inquiry and her next novel, Forgery, which also does not contain notable Asian American characters, as a blunt refusal of all ethnic expectations. In Murray’s words, “You can’t expect anybody who has an Asian theme, who is a woman, to write this book!” The expectation she thus refuses is one 86 • Chapter Three

that crudely equates who she is to the kind of writing she should undertake. But to talk to Murray about what organizes and drives her work forward is to become aware of how important her Filipino ancestry is to what she writes, even when she is not writing about Filipinos or about Asians more generally. This ancestry also makes her keenly aware of issues that bear directly on the topic of race, and especially the issue of imperialism that is so inextricably associated with it. As she explained, “For me, I’m really interested in what happens to people when they go. Not only how they alter the place that they go to. I’m actually more interested in how the place alters them. And that’s everywhere. I don’t have a single piece that I sat down to write in the last fifteen years that isn’t ‘Someone goes somewhere and is altered by the place.’ And that’s really, as you’re colonizing you’re being colonized by the place. So it’s kind of give or take. And that’s really how I conceive of it.” Later in the conversation, she reemphasized this point and connected it to her interest in thinking of her writing as explicitly political: “My former teacher, Valerie Martin, said we all have that one thing that we write about. . . . In my mind, it’s always trying to shine light on the other, and make you see that your point of view is not the only one going. That’s colonialism. That’s what I write about. And I really think that young writers need to have that. They need to have that passion . . . to communicate an idea.” Even for writers who seem uninterested in writing about Asian American characters or have difficulty self-­identifying as Asian American, a critical thinking about race that involves issues inextricably connected to Asian American experiences—such as a history of colonial encounters—can remain a vital part of their imaginative undertakings and affect the aesthetic choices they make.

Without Ethnicity

Nowhere have the tensions surrounding the expectation that writers of Asian ancestry will write ethnic literature been more explicitly explored in narrative form than in “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the lead story in Nam Le’s debut collection The Boat. Le is an Australian living abroad in the United States, but the struggle over expectations that his story dramatizes is evocative of the problem that many Asian American writers confront. Indeed, the fact that Le’s work does not fit neatly into an Asian American label even while so easily fitting within the larger category of “ethnic literature” (or Asian diasporic literature) Not Ethnic Literature • 87

may speak directly to the ways in which writers might be eager to break free of any such label. This fact also speaks to the ways in which writers of Asian descent working and living in the United States are hemmed in by the expectations that an ethnic label bears. The protagonist of “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” who is also named Nam, does not think of himself as an Asian American, having only recently moved from Australia, where he grew up, to the United States, to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Despite this circuitous diasporic background, Nam finds himself being fit into an ethnic niche in the literary marketplace because he is ethnically Vietnamese, which makes clear that, from the perspective of the market, what matters is not where he grew up or how hyphenated his identity might be, but where he—or his father—came from. As one instructor tells him at a bar, “It’s hot. . . . Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.” A “couple of visiting literary agents” concur: “There’s a lot of polished writing around. . . . You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out? . . . Your background and life experience.”3 These comments are explicit exhortations to turn native informant, to sell one’s life’s story as a commodity for literary enjoyment and, decidedly as an afterthought, for serious contemplation; they also reveal a certain desperation that has crept into the writing, and selling, of contemporary literature more generally, as “a lot of polished writing” goes wanting for readers. What this might eventually mean, as some of Nam’s white Iowa cohort not so gently explain, is that those who do acquiesce to such market-­based expectations will end up not standing out at all. Rather, they will blend in, become mediocre, and move the whole field of contemporary literature toward a lower common denominator: “Other friends were more forthright: ‘I’m sick of ethnic lit,’ one said. ‘It’s full of descriptions of ethnic food.’ Or: ‘You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab.’” One friend in particular memorably tells Nam, in a moment of drunken frankness, “It’s a license to bore.”4 All of this so understandably depresses Nam that he finds himself suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. Moreover, his father is visiting from Australia, and his relationship to his white girlfriend is suffering because he does not want to introduce her to his father. In a fit of desperation, because a major writing assignment is due and he has nothing to turn in, Nam decides to capitulate to the pressure to make himself into an 88 • Chapter Three

ethnic writer and writes the story of his father, who—as it happens in the story—is a survivor of the My Lai Massacre. It is worth noting how dramatically different the character Nam’s impulse to write is from that of the narrator of Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. The latter portrays writing as a vehicle for giving expression to the suffering of fellow Filipino migrant workers, who were being horribly mistreated, while Le feels the horrors of the past only as a drag on his present. The past is something he writes about only reluctantly, because he feels it is what is expected of him and what will lead to his commercial success as a writer. With regard to Le’s story, readers might be excused if they feel relief when the father sneaks away with the manuscript that Nam has been up all night writing and burns it in a fire that a homeless man has going in a steel drum. Even when Nam is trying to explain to his father why he wants to write this story, and why he would like his father’s help in doing so, he has difficulty countering his father’s objections: “This is important, Ba. It’s important that people know.” “You want their pity.” I didn’t know whether it was a question. I was offended. “I want them to remember,” I said. He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Only you’ll remember. I’ll remember. They will read and clap their hands and forget.” For once, he was not smiling. “Sometimes it’s better to forget, no?” In the end, the only argument that gains the father’s assent is this one: “If I write a true story . . . I’ll have a better chance of selling it.”5 As it turns out, the father’s assent is no assent at all, since the father destroys what Nam imagines will lead to a new and more satisfying relationship between the two of them. Nam thinks, “He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering—how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me.”6 Writing becomes at this moment a form of vanguardism, in which the writer will teach the subject he is writing about how to regard himself, to view his experiences as more than what he could possibly have seen alone, and in the process the writer claims the right to define the experience his father has had to endure. His father’s response is a deliberate refusal to accept such a relationship. In doing so, he refuses the position staked out by the editors of Aiiieeeee! The trope of the lost manuscript, this time in the form of a manuscript intentionally destroyed by the person it purports to represent, has thus made a Not Ethnic Literature • 89

hard turn, even from its recent iteration in Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace, this time failing to resonate in any way with a past full of untold stories. Instead, the intentionally lost manuscript signifies an ethical refusal to tell certain stories, as the telling itself is no longer a principled political act. If the stories a writer writes about his or her “background and life experience” are to be used only for commercial purposes, it would be better, the character Nam concludes, “to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans—and New York painters with hemorrhoids.”7 With the exception of the “lesbian vampires” and with the addition of a story about aimless youth in Australia and Vietnamese refugees struggling to survive on a rickety boat (Le’s one apparent concession to the expectation that he will write “ethnic lit”), this is an accurate catalog of the stories in The Boat, which suggests that Le also agrees with this conclusion. Still, as impressive as the writing is in these stories, they can be disappointing to read because they give little reason for the reader to care about their characters. Because the first story acts as a frame for reading the other stories in the collection, the other stories become manifestations of Le’s refusal to be pigeonholed as an ethnic writer and of his virtuosity over the form of the short story. The collection thus becomes Le’s demonstration that he can do more than tell stories about being Vietnamese and about struggling with memories of a war that occurred several decades ago. In so forcefully resisting the expectations that surround his racial and ethnic identity, Le ends up getting defined by them as much as if he had acceded to them. The first story places an enormous pressure on the collection as a whole, creating a level of self-­reflexivity that renders the other stories dramatizations of the contemporary ethnic writer’s dilemma. The other stories thus become musings about the perils of writing when it encounters ethnic and racial expectations, even when they individually seem intent on telling a story about specific characters, places, and personal crises.8 As a meditation on generational change, the changing meaning of the lost manuscript as it affects a reading of all the stories in The Boat suggests the dilemma facing contemporary Asian American writers as ethnic writers at the dawn of the twenty-­first century. They can embrace a position prepared for them by a literary marketplace with a whetted appetite for stories that can operate as a form of ethnography, but in doing so they can feel as if they are selling out to the marketplace and not engaging in

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anything more meaningful than an economic transaction. At best, they can hope to take on a vanguard position, not so much speaking for a collective experience as trying to call it into being. Likewise, in refusing to embrace such a position, writers might find themselves narrating this refusal to be identified with their ethnic background, as if there is something shameful in it. Such a refusal may also feel like a turning of their backs on communities whose experiences continue to be squeezed through the distortion of powerful extant narrative frames about Asian Americans, and about Asian diasporics more generally. The apparent dilemma that these opposing expectations place on writers like Le (and Murray) might be understood as forming an impassable barrier, a lose-­lose situation that will attract criticism no matter what such writers choose to do. Write about his father’s experiences during the Vietnam War, and Nam feels as if he is selling out to literary agents and publishers who state plainly that “ethnic literature’s hot.” Write about something unrelated to his ethnicity, and he feels as if he is agreeing with his white classmates, who speak to him in private about how he is so unlike other aspiring writers of color with their “license to bore.” The choice feels stark and unappealing when Nam faces it head on. However, the fact that Le thinks so hard about the choices before him, as a writer, in writing this and the other stories and arranging them as he does in The Boat, suggests how much he cares to understand the reasoning behind what makes each position so unattractive to him and in the process to seek a way to reconcile them. His rejection of “ethnic literature” is thus a principled, and even a political, stance against turning his and his family’s experience into a commodity. It gives expression to his desire to write about what is important to him without at the same time falling into the trap of writing what is merely expected of him because of his ethnicity. In pursuing such a stance, Le is working through the same desire to write something meaningful that pioneering Asian American writers and artists struggled with. While his response is different from those of earlier writers and artists, in large part because he no longer lives in the same world, Le nevertheless shows an equal determination to write in a way that is more than merely expedient. If his response is not satisfying, it is at least admirable for how honestly it grapples with the problems created by the competing expectations that stem from what he is.

Not Ethnic Literature • 91

On Race and Racelessness in Ed Park’s Personal Days

As the questions organizing this chapter highlight, a tension exists between the increasing number of Asian Americans who are publishing creative writing and their willingness to foreground non–Asian American characters. Ed Park—who was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and has none of the complex migration histories that Murray or Le have—­ responded almost directly to this tension when he recalled, during an interview, his early attitude toward ethnicity and how it has affected his ­writing: I was very wary of writing an ethnic novel, an Asian American novel, or a Korean American novel. Mostly that’s not the kind of stuff that I read or enjoyed. I wasn’t well versed in such things. And for whatever reason, I avoided it. I think there was a certain degree of self-­ consciousness about not writing something too close to autobiographical. Everything I did would be invented, and I would push that aesthetic as far as it could go. And, yeah, it’s interesting for me to think about that now. Because now I do feel this weird freedom, like, oh, if I wanted to write about a Korean, I can. But you know, I feel much freer in that sense. When asked to elaborate on why he felt this reticent to write about his ethnicity when he was younger, Park observed, “I would say that it wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t want to include such aspects, but I was unsure of how to do it in a way that would be original. . . . You know, part of my thinking was, ‘I lived that, I don’t want to read it. What could be more boring?’” Oddly, later in the interview, Park readily admitted that to write his novel Personal Days, he drew from his own experiences as an employee of the Village Voice when it was going through a turbulent period of structural adjustment. This is not to highlight the ways in which Park contradicts himself. Rather, it is to highlight how difficult it can be to shake the belief that writing about ethnicity is “boring.” If so, what Personal Days may demonstrate is how such a charged belief can spark creative storytelling that is about race (as well as other things). That is, by not writing about ethnicity, the novel can speak more candidly about race. The tension between these two options—to write explicitly about Asian Americans and to leave them out or marginalize them—spurs Park to imagine race in the story he has to tell in a highly innovative way, one marked by departure

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from the ways in which Asian American literature has been framed as a form of ethnic literature. In Park’s novel a group of relatively young office workers struggle to make sense of their lives as their nameless company undergoes economic restructuring and in the process calls attention to how the absence of racial expectations can pose its own difficulties. The workers have distinct personalities and eccentricities, at least when the story is told from their individual perspectives, but at the same time their antics seem frenzied, as if they are trying to keep pace with how hard it is to differentiate themselves from one another when observed by outsiders. “In decreasing order of height: Laars, Jack II, Lizzie, Jonah, Jenny, Crease, Pru, Jill” find themselves not only being classified in ever more overtly random ways, but also being gradually let go without any particular recognizable pattern.9 The most noteworthy warning sign is when their boss, the Sprout, praises one of them for doing good work. Such praise usually leads to a reshuffling of work area and an eventual dismissal. The only other pattern to the firing seems to be the letter “J”; those whose names begin with this letter are being systematically let go as the novel begins. With such a drama at the forefront, it may not be surprising that this novel pushes the topic of race into the background. The following is one of the novel’s two explicit references to this topic: “Every payday we go to Henry in hr and he asks who we are, last names first, though he should know us by now. We oblige him, as if bringing up the issue would risk stoppage of pay. . . . Still, Henry invariably confuses the two Asian workers, giving one the other’s check before stopping himself, finding the right one. He also did the same to the two black workers, before one of them was fired. He used to apologize for the confusion but even he realizes how ridiculous it’s become.”10 The Asian and black workers share a sameness with their own kind that defies individualization. Even with the aid of a ritual that otherwise feels pointless, the Asian and black workers cannot be told apart from one another. In Henry’s eyes they are Asian and black first, individuals second. Yet even this obvious racial faux pas is quickly set aside as something so obviously lacking in sense, like everything else in the office, that it hardly seems worth complaining about. Indeed, for the workers, being Asian or black may almost seem an advantage in a situation where Henry must ask each employee his or her name every week, no doubt because he can’t tell any of them apart regardless of race. At least

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the recognition of racial difference helps to make four of these characters stand out in some way, to be less easily confused with everyone else in the office, even if they have to be confused with each other in order for this to happen. The other workers in being racially unmarked are also unremarkable, anonymous in the way those in charge of key aspects of their employment have trouble telling them apart from one another. Being marked as racially nonwhite thus serves to provide a little relief from such anonymity, since being marked in this way arrests attention for just a moment longer on who one is, which paradoxically makes membership in a minority race a potential ally, rather than a foe, of individuality. At the very least, being nonwhite doesn’t make one any less anonymous than being white. Still, the reader is not told which workers are Asian or black, which disrupts any assumption the reader might have about an unmarked whiteness—that is, if a character’s race is unspecified, the reader may simply assume the character is white. This point is brought into greater, and delightful, relief in the last section of the novel, when the first-­person narrator Jonah reveals who has been behind the workers’ tortured lives in the office. In a prolonged aside, Jonah—who is typing a long e-­mail in the dark, on a keyboard with broken delete and period keys, which inadvertently renders his prose a magnificent, densely layered, formal modernist experiment—observes, in the novel’s second explicit reference to race, “The weird thing was that the Sprout had opened up to me in the first place, years ago, because he had inexplicably gotten it into his head that I had a daughter, and thus assumed I was a family man like himself, and as time passed it became harder to inform him that I was in fact not only childless but morbidly single, and it became near impossible to come clean after he confided that he and Sheila had been trying to adopt a second child, a little girl from China (a companion for their first child, half black like me).”11 The parenthetical way in which Jonah reveals his race teases the reader with a revelation that might understandably come as a surprise, since there has been no prior indication that Jonah is anything but white. This again effectively undermines assumptions of an unmarked whiteness. It also asks the reader to consider more pointedly whether it is the Sprout or his wife or neither who is black. For that matter, would the adoption of “a little girl from China” by the Sprout and Sheila be a transracial adoption? Couldn’t the Sprout or Sheila or both themselves be Asian? These tantalizing, and unanswerable, questions lead to three final 94 • Chapter Three

points about Ed Park’s treatment of race. First, Personal Days poses the interesting possibility that the deemphasis of racial differences might serve the same purposes as hyperemphasis. For if the corporation is an extension of the state in the novel, the office narrative being in its idiosyncratic way an allegory about governance, what such an allegory points to is a system that is at once all powerful and without responsibility. Power itself does not reside in any single figure. As a result, all of these characters are caught in a system of governance so total that it defines who they are, gives shape to their everyday experiences and their major social relationships, and provides the means for their basic sustenance in the form of salary and benefits, yet they also experience that system as an alien intrusion into their lives and as a threat that might at any moment deprive them of these structuring effects for reasons unrelated to the quality, or importance, of their work. While most, if not all, of the employees in the office obsessively polish their resumes and discuss career alternatives, they live in fear that they will be let go—and this is not, it is important to add, an irrational fear, for prolonged unemployment in the United States represents not only the loss of income, but also the loss of access to affordable health care and retirement-­savings opportunities, as well as the possible loss of home and even social identity. It is this aspect of the novel that makes it such a witty reflection on a moment of economic crisis, when no jobs seem safe and when no one wants to take personal responsibility for the economic suffering that is taking place. The novel literalizes the fears generated by this kind of crisis, which has only achieved the status of crisis because high unemployment rates have finally caught up with middle-­class, professional whites who have in the past thought themselves immune from what has long been happening to communities of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, some Asian ethnicities, and the working classes in general. It does so by making it impossible to figure out who is in charge. The following is the most the reader finds out about the company, which suggests, with a witty bow to Frank Norris (and maybe to Japanese anime), how even company ownership is defined by incertitude: “Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with moustaches. After several decades it wound up, to its surprise, as the easternmost arm of an Omaha-­based octopus. The tentacles eventually detached, or strangled each other, a few of them joining forces, most dying out altogether. . . . Lately we hear that some Californians want to make us their easternmost outpost. We base this conjecture on an opaquely Not Ethnic Literature • 95

worded one-­inch paragraph on the fifth business page of the Times that appeared last month.”12 In addition, while the Sprout is the workers’ immediate superior, he seems shadowed by Maxine, a person whose authority is at least commensurate with his if not exceeding it. And in a position of even greater power is an even more shadowy person known only, with a nod to Kafka, as “K.,” who eventually turns out to be just as vulnerable as everyone else in the office. By the end of the novel, all three—the Sprout, Maxine, and K.—have been laid off. There is nobody in the office who cannot not be fired, although it is unclear who exactly makes the decision to fire. This shared vulnerability (and shared sense of ignorance about who is in charge) accentuates how each person is like every other person in Park’s novel, so much so that all the office workers ultimately become interchangeable. Deemphasizing racial difference contributes greatly to making this interchangeability possible, which may suggest that a restructuring state that legitimates its refusal to take responsibility for the lives that it rules, and is ultimately responsible for, through a disavowal of racial difference altogether is not much different from a state that is at the height of its powers, controlling every aspect of its subjects’ lives. Colorblindness might therefore be thought of as a managerial strategy that helps make possible a contraction of corporate—and governmental—responsibility to dependent subjects. Second, the novel’s focus on the alienating existence of these office workers is accompanied by, and depends heavily on, the ways in which intimate interpersonal relations and a sense of place are made to dissolve. All of the workers either lack significant others or, as with the Sprout, are in romantic relationships that are being strained to a breaking point. In addition, the novel emphasizes the placelessness of the office building, almost as if the workers’ anonymity is mirrored by the anonymity of the work environment: “Our office is located on what must be the least populated semi-­wide street in all of Manhattan, a no-­man’s-­land just far enough from two fashionable neighborhoods to be considered part of neither. Winds get stuck here. At twilight, crumpled newspapers scuttle across the pavement like giant crabs. Plastic bags advance in tumbleweed fashion. Sometimes it feels like the edge of the world.”13 If race ceases to matter or matters less in this novel than in other works of Asian American literature, or even in other works of American literature more generally, this effect is made possible—as this passage dramatizes—by stripping significant 96 • Chapter Three

markers of identity from the characters, namely interpersonal relationships and a sense of place. While this might conceivably be experienced as opening the way for individual liberation, a sense of self that is not barred by extrasubjective identifications, these workers feel nothing but terrible psychic pain at the loss (simultaneously made bearable and amplified by the novel’s humor). If anything, these workers give expression to a yearning for the possibility of extrasubjective identification, for a sense of belonging to some larger group and place, to which race thinking explicitly appeals. This yearning finds expression in the ways in which the workers huddle together during their breaks and after work, forming a tightly knit group that clearly demarcates an “us” and “them,” which is emphasized by the first-­person plural used in the first section of Personal Days. The formation of a group gives shape to the ever-­present possibility of the meaninglessness of their lives in the office, an affirmation of a shared experience that those who do not belong to this group cannot appreciate. While this group has fluid boundaries, the “we” only referring to those who still work in the office, the group is nevertheless the workers’ most enduring form of identification: “People drop off the radar once they leave the office. Week after week, you form these intense bonds without quite realizing it. All that time together adds up: muttering at the fax machine, making coffee runs. The elevator rides. The bitching about the speed of the elevator. The endlessly reprised jokes, as it hits every floor: Making local stops. You see co-­workers more than you see your so-­called friends, even more than you see your significant others, your spouses if you have them. None of us do at the moment, though there are reports that Jenny’s on the verge.”14 The emphasis on an “us” suggests a powerful logic at work in this novel. The more workers are made interchangeable, atomized into persons who are exactly commensurate with each other and hence equally expendable, the more they resist that individualizing process by forming a group that recognizes a shared experience. The group literally becomes what might be called a proteo-­race—a grouping based not on shared ancestry, tradition, or cultural practices, but on the simple day-­to-­day sharing of a common space and a common social position created by a powerful system of governance. Membership provides solace and an important resource for making meaning of a system that so completely dominates them (paradoxically, in part, by threatening to abandon them). Group belonging becomes an attractive form of identification as each worker is disciplined Not Ethnic Literature • 97

and managed by the workplace. One never forgets what differentiates one from another. In fact, difference itself remains a yawning problem for these office workers who have the very difficult conceptual challenge of accepting that they are different from one another and at the same time that they are different in exactly the same way. They are all individuals, different and the same simultaneously. Identifying with each other as a group and in doing so refusing their individuality, they might also, in finding a structural sameness with one another, be seeking to assert a different kind of difference that allows them to think more cogently about why they are so mistreated in their workplace. Finally, the critique of racial assumptions that Personal Days undertakes is made possible by the author’s deft, self-­conscious use of the form of the novel, including its clever literary allusions. In narrative mediums like comics or film, or genres like autobiography, the refusal to disclose the race of the characters either would have been impossible to achieve or would have called so much attention to itself that it would have become the reader’s, or viewer’s, primary focus.15 The novel, however, has no such visual or generic component, so the revelation of racial heterogeneity among the ranks of office workers who might otherwise seem so much alike has a force that is deployed with optimal comedic effect. What Personal Days demonstrates is how important it is that the reader pay heed to literature’s forms and the kind of deliberate aesthetic decisions that enable original ways of seeing. Without such attentiveness, without such an appreciation for the literary, the reader risks missing what makes this work, and others like it, so fascinating and exciting to encounter even if it and its peers don’t address head on the specific concerns about ethnicity the reader might expect the writer to address.

The Concept of Difference as Such

In Slaying the Dragon, Reloaded, the 2011 sequel to the documentary Slaying the Dragon, Robin Kelley as an expert media commentator observes about the increasing visibility of Asian and other nonwhite faces in mainstream films: “If anything, you see a browning of faces but you see a continuing whitening of characters.” The same might also be said about contemporary American literature. As the numbers of writers of color proliferate, the works that get most promoted contain characters that are hard to differentiate racially from the kinds of characters found elsewhere. But to argue 98 • Chapter Three

this about print literature is to accept a sharply demarcated premise that is difficult to accept. If there is indeed a browning of author photographs accompanying published works of fiction, this phenomenon exerts pressure on what it means to be white in character in a way that mainstream film, because more collaboratively produced and less influenced in its content by the brown faces it projects, might not feel. When Chang-­rae Lee writes from the perspective of an Italian American male character in Aloft, for instance, he has already altered what it means to be white. It is no longer an inviolate subject position, the source of narrative, but rather a subject position that can be occupied by another, an object of narrative. Likewise, when Ed Park writes in the first-­person plural in Personal Days, he subtly alters the reader’s understanding of race, challenging assumptions that equate racelessness with whiteness. When Nam Le writes stories from perspectives far removed from his own racialized one and from each other’s, he challenges readers to consider what kind of expectations they bring when they approach a literary text. And, as the interview with Sabina Murray helps to highlight, even in works that don’t seem in an overt way interested in either race or Asian Americans, there nevertheless is a hard focus on structural factors that are very much a part of what gives both racial minority and Asian American experiences their differential force. In thinking about “browning faces” and “whitening of characters” in print literature, one more example comes to mind with striking suggestiveness. Ted Chiang writes a particular kind of science fiction, one informed both by hard science (Chiang has an advanced degree in computer science from Brown) and by ideas. Hence, his works, all of them to date no longer than tantalizing novellas, are explicitly part of a tradition comprising authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. The focus of his work is less on character and more on setting. He is interested in rendering worlds unfamiliar to his readers as vividly as possible and in mounting within the perimeters of such a world a philosophical investigation into the concepts such worlds enable. In “The Tower of Babylon,” for instance, he imagines what might have happened if the builders of the tower in the Old Testament were not struck down by God but were able to continue their upward construction. What would life in the tower be like? How would a society sustain such a monumental task? More interesting still, it asks its readers to consider what would happen if the builders of the tower had an accurate understanding of their physical universe, a universe Not Ethnic Literature • 99

that is not like the one the reader knows. In this imaginary universe, the tower can rise into the sky, past the sun and the stars, which orbit as small spheres, until it finally, after generations of hard labor, reaches the hard dome that is the sky in heaven. Nothing about this story is about race, but in asking its readers to imagine an alternate physical universe that is convincingly detailed and consistent, the story stretches the reader’s mind, requiring a mental agility that makes accepting difference easier. Such agility becomes increasingly necessary as one story after another in Chiang’s collection Stories of Your Life and Others produces a narrative of similar conceptual difficulty, including one that recalls a first encounter between linguists and alien visitors. “Story of Your Life” is neither an invasion narrative nor an extended metaphor about encountering racial differences that easily dissolve after prolonged contact. More important, it is about trying to span a gulf of immense difference, trying to understand a way of seeing that is not chronological but premised on the ability to know the future: “When the ancestors of humans and heptapods [the name given to the aliens because of their radial, seven-­armed shape] first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently. . . . We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all.”16 What is most important about this encounter between humans and aliens is that the narrator, a linguist struggling to bridge the chasm between the different life forms, begins to think differently, acquires the skills the aliens possess for seeing the future: “Heptapod B [the aliens’ written language] was changing the way I thought. . . . There were trance-­like moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane.”17 Like the characters in Sabina Murray’s stories, Chiang’s narrator experiences an encounter with difference that changes her. No encounter with difference can leave one simply unaltered and able to transform the other into a mirror reflection of the self. There can be no continuity of character. Such an encounter transforms, and leaves its trace firmly in a sense of self that is newly strange. So one might ask, does Chiang write Asian American literature? In response, one might conclude, as Betsy Huang does, that his avowed disinterest in imagining a scientific form of colorblindness “reflects a guarded adherence to the conservative techniques of the genre, perhaps at the cost 100 • Chapter Three

of its radical political potentials.”18 Or one might be able to find ways in which his work can be read, despite what Chiang might have to say on the subject, as offering commentary on the topic of race as it relates to Asian Americans, from something as simple as the fact that the narrator and her future husband in “Story of Your Life” share their first meal together at a Chinese restaurant (which in itself doesn’t say anything about the race of these characters) to something more complex, such as the ways in which this story’s understanding of an encounter with difference resonates with Murray’s understanding of imperialism as an experience that necessarily changes the conqueror as much as it does the conquered. But perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. It may be more productive to wonder what Chiang’s works, when read as Asian American literature, are able to contribute to an imagining of difference as such. While applicable to “Story of Your Life” and the other stories in this collection, the latter question is even more provocatively and directly addressed in The Lifecycle of Software Objects (a work that deserves to be more widely available and read than it is). While this novella contains several characters with recognizable minority names, including a lead character named Ana Alvarez, who could be Latina or Filipina or neither, the narrative itself never provides details about their backgrounds. One might say, following Kelley’s lead in Slaying the Dragon, Reloaded, that there is a “whitening of character” in this short novel, as ethnicity and race decidedly get pushed into the background. But in this, the narrative propels to the foreground a way of thinking about difference that traverses the boundaries between human, animal, and machine. At the story’s center is the development of self-­aware computer programs originally designed as virtual pets; some have cute animal avatars and others equally cute robot avatars. As time goes by, the general public loses interest in them because they prove to be as demanding as real children. And, indeed, for the hardcore group of caretakers who continue to pour resources into nurturing them and finding ways for them to develop, they become just like children. The caretakers find themselves faced with many of the same dilemmas that parents raising more conventional children face, namely how best to help their charges find and explore their potential, how best to expose them to a world that can be cruel and exploitative, and how to decide the appropriate age for letting them make their own life choices and mistakes. What Ana discovers after years of taking care of her “software object” is that what makes him unique, capable of doing things that other self-­aware Not Ethnic Literature • 101

programs cannot do, is precisely the care she has put into raising him: “If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.”19 Moreover, Jax is now more than an advanced computer program. Like the others who have been raised like him, he “would have once seen the world with new eyes, have had hopes fulfilled and hopes dashed, have learned how it felt to tell a lie and how it felt to be told one.”20 As a result, he cannot be treated simply as a machine or an animal but deserves the same “respect” that humans are afforded. Against the obvious humanism of these conclusions, Derek, another caretaker of the self-­aware programs, reaches a slightly different appreciation for difference. While he would agree that nothing beats experience and that his programs deserve to be respected, he also thinks (according to the narrator), “Marco and Polo aren’t human, and maybe thinking of them as if they were is a mistake, forcing them to conform to [Derek’s] expectations instead of letting them be themselves. Is it more respectful to treat him like a human being, or to accept that he isn’t one?”21 An important theme that runs through all the works discussed in this chapter is the difficulty of imagining, much less living with, a difference that, as Deleuze observes, is not a “difference in the concept in general.” The latter transforms the question “What difference is there?” into the question “What resemblance is there?”22 The more one tries to define difference in this way, the more one is mired in thinking about identity, the self-­sameness of beings that stick together, like to like, without any sense of what lies beyond or between. As Deleuze goes on to explain, “When we define difference as conceptual difference, we believe we have done enough to specify the concept of difference as such. Nevertheless, here again we have no idea of difference, no concept of difference as such. Perhaps the mistake of the philosophy of difference, from Aristotle to Hegel via Leibniz, lay in remaining content to inscribe difference in the concept in general. In reality, so long as we inscribe difference in the concept in general we have no singular Idea of difference, we remain only with a difference already mediated by representation.”23 This is where being attentive to race in particular, as opposed to ethnicity, is helpful. For race is about difference in a way that ethnicity is about resemblance. This also means that to speak about interethnicity is the same as speaking about 102 • Chapter Three

ethnicity: both concern themselves with the traits that bind a concept to itself. Narratives that return readers to the question of race, however, can lead more saliently to the concept of difference as such, and the ways in which this concept can in turn lead one farther and farther away from too simple definitions of the human, or the animal, or the machine.

Not Ethnic Literature • 103

Chapter 4

American Personhood

Many literary works by Asian Americans signal in their titles a preoccupation with what it means to be an American, from Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Daniel Okimoto’s American in Disguise to Gish Jen’s Typical American, Shawn Wong’s American Knees, Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, Susan Choi’s American Woman, and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. The common theme that runs through these titles suggests how much the nation remains a force in the struggles each novel narrates. The individual and the nation are intimately related to each other in these works, and in the urge to tell stories that drives their authors. Despite this common theme, however, the longing for a sense of self that is somehow connected to America is expressed in these novels in contradictory ways. There is a longing for an ideal of individuality that the nation is supposed to guarantee. There is also a longing to defy the nation, to occupy the position it has relegated to its margins. And, finally, there is a kind of longing that seems to cohere to a sense of self that exists beyond the nation altogether but does so in a way that does not simply eschew the social. Susan Choi in particular speaks eloquently about the contradictions between the first two forms of longing when describing her experiences in college as a biracial woman: My father raised me, I have to say, deliberately as someone who didn’t have much of a sense of ethnic identity. . . . He was after some sort of Platonic ideal of the totally neutral American child. And that just doesn’t exist. And it was frustrating for me. And it was frustrating for

me getting to Yale, at the height of identity politics, and really feeling like I didn’t belong in the Korean American student union, and I didn’t belong at Hillel House, with the Jewish students. It was uncomfortable. And it was annoying to me, because I felt everything was a box, and if you were going to climb into the box there were all these other places you couldn’t be. I think that that’s softened a lot these days. Although Choi here imagines the “Platonic ideal of the neutral American child” and the “box” of “identity politics” as being mutually exclusive, it may be more accurate to argue that they work together to support the view that America is exceptional in its valuation of the individual. The liberalism of the Platonic ideal is a kind of radiant center in American life, a center which among other things comprises a play of signs that aligns individuality with America, and in turn aligns both with a host of other less explicitly stated attributes. When there is an attempt to break out of the gravitational pull of such a center, the ensuing line of flight also gets caught in a kind of box. Both “neutral American child” and “identity politics” frustrate a desire for an idealized personhood, even as they act together as the ground on which a sense of personhood can be found in America. The former leaves one yearning for a center defined only by a few key features. One also wishes to possess these features in order to share in the radiance of national belonging and of individual ease. The latter seeks to resist such a narrowing, and the kind of exclusions it must rely on to operate. In doing so, it also circles back on itself, offering as compensation for exclusion a passionate relationship to one’s own exclusion. To illustrate how these concepts work together, what follows turns to Roley’s American Son and Choi’s American Woman. Of the works mentioned at the start of this chapter, these two novels are most self-­conscious of how difficult it can be to escape the pull of America as a system of semiotic and affective entanglements that enshrine the individual as a good beyond reproach. Both works stand out as exemplary of how writers born around 1965 and reaching their maturity as writers in the 1990s imagine the meaningfulness of a longing for personhood that is circumscribed by nation and the difficulty of finding a way somehow to surpass it. In imagining this meaningfulness, these novels also work assiduously to recuperate an ideal of personhood that cannot be reduced to the constricting notions of subjectivity that critics—such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kandice Chuh, and Jasbir Puar, among others—have effectively challenged. American Personhood • 105

A Look of Longing

Catching his mother looking at a pretty girl in a coffee shop who seems at ease in her surroundings, Gabe, the young biracial narrator of American Son, contemplates the mother’s expression: “It is hard to figure out. Something about it bothers me, and as I am thinking about it her face has already become a memory, and then it occurs to me—I know it is strange to think this—that what I had seen was a look of longing.”1 In this vividly distilled moment, when desire leaves a trace on the face that becomes a trace in memory that can in turn, after some contemplation, suggest the tumultuous passions hidden away in a person who others do not think much of, the longing for an American liberal personhood is made into a powerful presence. This moment suggests how persistent and pervasive this longing is. There is an almost romantic embrace of the face at the center of a tangle of associations that revolve around the conflating of America with the individual. There is also a betrayal of a desire to be what the racial particularities of one’s being disallows. The word longing speaks dramatically to the distance between the particularities that hold one back and the object of one’s desires, an ideal that slips away from reach at the very moment it is contemplated. As such, this ideal must be valued surreptitiously. It must be hidden from view because it says too much about what one lacks, about how disappointing one’s life is, about how frustrating it is to feel ill at ease in a world in which others seem to exist almost effortlessly—and certainly without the effort that one exerts constantly in one’s everyday life. Gabe’s mother, Ika, strives for an American personhood that refuses racial identification even as this personhood is modeled powerfully by a white racial ideal and even as she herself is caught along a line of flight that carries her farther and farther away from attaining this ideal. The difficult slope of this striving is further accentuated by the fact that Ika is, even in the eyes of her son, so impossibly far away from this ideal, already so far along a line of subjectifying flight. To grasp the dynamics at work in Ika’s “look of longing,” one can begin by considering the argument often heard in the United States that race doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter. What is most important is that “we are all Americans.” In other words, the demand that Asian Americans confront when they seek to define their own individuality—to make their otherness recede into the background or disappear altogether—is an offshoot of a metonymic logic, or a logic of association, that equates individuality with being American. The chain of associations works this way: one is 106 • Chapter Four

granted individuality because one is first and foremost and exclusively American and therefore, ipso facto, an individual. Therefore, anything that might take away from this focus on being an American, such as a too-­pronounced racial difference, is also a threat to one’s individuality. A third point along this chain is the not-­so-­implicit assumption that being an American and being white are also closely aligned with each other, so that being an individual means being an American means being white. Whiteness itself is subsequently defined by the shedding, or at least minimizing, of markers of difference that might call too much attention to filiations that exceed one’s individuality. That is, whiteness is, as Toni Morrison has famously observed, not a race but a sign of race’s absence, a neutral position against which other racial markers gain their particularizing tint and hue and stigma.2 The narrative assumption that a character whose race is not identified must be white bolsters this sense of whiteness as naming an absence of racial difference. One does not therefore have to be white to share in what gives it meaning, namely a meaninglessness that allows other qualities in a person to spring to the foreground. Other points exist along this same chain: being an upper-­middle-­class professional, being heteronormative, being able-­bodied, and so forth. Each point along this simple chain refers to another point along the same chain, each point having no meaning except as part of a line that bends and circles back on itself. Because each point has no significance in itself, one can still participate in this loop even if one is any one or more of these things. One can be Asian American, gay, poor, handicapped, a recent immigrant, and so forth and still remain an individual and an American so long as none of these qualities call too much attention to itself. What is important are the ways in which these markers of difference are linked to one another and the ways in which these markers are interpreted. That is, each marker of difference must be given lesser or greater weight so that the ways in which one is an American and an individual first never get obscured. This is a pretty good, if abstract, description of what Choi calls the “Platonic ideal of the neutral American child,” an ideal comprising metonyms that constantly associate the American with the individual. A slash mark can be put between the two words to suggest both their conflation and their redundancy: American/individual. In his polemical book Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, the memoirist and legal scholar Ken Yoshino offers a concrete explanation of how this ideal has retooled American Personhood • 107

itself for the present. He argues that the treatment of homosexuals once demanded they convert to heterosexuality, usually by undergoing painful medical or psychological treatments. As times and circumstances changed, social expectations altered, such that homosexuals were granted limited rights if they closeted themselves. In the interim, calls for conversion largely, though not completely, lapsed into disrepute. Eventually, the demand for homosexuals to remain closeted gradually became déclassé. In its place, another regulatory demand arose. One is now expected to “cover” one’s homosexuality. One can thus be openly gay as long as one does not act gay in a manner that threatens the nation or its ideals. This new demand brings homosexuality into close proximity with others who must now likewise cover: “African-­Americans are told to ‘dress white’ and to abandon ‘street talk’; Asian-­Americans are told to avoid seeming ‘fresh off the boat’; women are told to ‘play like men’ at work and to make their child-­care responsibilities invisible; Jews are told not to be ‘too Jewish’; Muslims, especially after 9/11, are told to drop their veils and their Arabic; the disabled are told to hide the paraphernalia they use to manage their disabilities. This is so despite the fact that American society has seemingly committed itself, after decades of struggle, to treat people in these groups as full equals.”3 The focal point of Yoshino’s analysis is America, which describes a cultural as well as a social and legal unity— personified in this passage—which can make commitments and, having this ability, has with some equanimity committed to a formal equality of persons despite whatever might mark them as different. But as the emphasis on covering highlights, this commitment is contingent on a logical loop that binds America to individuality, and from there to whiteness, upper-­middle-­class professionalism, heteronormativity, manliness, and able-­bodiness. One can not-­be any one, or even more, of these things and still share in the radiance of American liberalism as long as none of these things shine brighter than one’s allegiance to the nation and the individual that it founds and is founded on. What is important about the look that Ika gives the girl in the coffee shop in American Son, however, is that if there is indeed such a “covering” demand at work in the service of a liberal ideal founded on American/ individual, it is a demand that is readily acceded to by many. That is, Ika longs to be the girl, to shine in a way that says one effortlessly belongs, is wanted, enjoys social and economic ease. The problem with the demand to cover, then, does not lie with its coercive nature. One is not, as Yoshino 108 • Chapter Four

seems to believe, simply forced to be something one is not and therefore made to fit into American society like a square peg in a round hole. If this were the case, covering would be too much like what came before, and too obviously coercive, to deserve commentary as a description of how difference is regulated in the present. What most distresses Ika, and indeed what seems to most distress Gabe, in this brilliantly telling scene is that she wants so much to be able to cover those markers of difference that prevent her from being like the girl, but she cannot. There is no coercion in this scene, only a desire that Ika nor her son can barely admit to. Its intensity and impossibility embarrasses them too much to be articulated between them in spoken words. Because she is far from being the object of her own desire, Ika finds herself in this scene, and throughout the novel, occupying a social position that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “counter-­body: the body of the tortured, or better of the excluded.”4 The counter-­body is what somehow cannot be made to fit into the radiance of a center like American/ individual. If being white is a sign of race’s absence, then Ika, being so obviously raced in body and demeanor and self-­consciousness, fails to cover such obvious markers of racial difference and therefore cannot be absorbed into a neutrality that would allow her participation in this center. The signs of her racial difference are too visible and cannot be made to vanish. She is dark in a social world that values light skin. She is small of stature in a social world that values tallness. She is shy and mousy in a social world that values boldness and confidence. She is a single mother in a world that values two-­parent households. And, perhaps the most difficult to overcome, she is poor in a world that values wealth. In short, Ika seems to have none of the things that she and the world she lives in value, and as a result she has few resources to mount a claim to an individuality that could guarantee her belonging in America. Signs that stand out too much and threaten the center’s claims to inclusivity: these are the explicit concerns the counter-­body is tasked to contain. The counter-­body—such as the suspicious body of the possible terrorist, the body of the criminal, the body of the undocumented immigrant, the body of a severely mentally ill or severely disabled person, or simply the body of a person like Ika, whose too-­visible racial vulnerability paradoxically renders her socially invisible (someone who is explicitly not seen because she is not an individual worth seeing)—absorbs a difference that cannot be made to work for a center that maintains itself as center American Personhood • 109

through metonymic slippage and interpretation. That is, the center constantly associates belonging with a series of attributes that act as signs closely aligned with each other. At the same time, the center can claim to be inclusive because it interprets the signs of one’s difference as signs of sameness, difference itself being overshadowed by what is understood to be unifying factors. All the signs that cannot thus be interpreted away are contained in the counter-­body. What is especially horrible for Ika is that her sons recognize her as possessing a counter-­body. Gabe in particular does what he can so as not to be tainted by association with it. The second, and by far the longest, part of the novel narrates Gabe’s attempt to run away from the family home in south Santa Monica, as he travels without purpose north along the far interior spine of California. During these travels, near the California-­Oregon border, Gabe meets a white tow-­truck driver who will inexplicably adopt him almost as his own son during their long drive together. The reader soon learns that what in part motivates the driver to assume the role of father figure is the loss of his daughter, who was killed in a drive-­by shooting when they were living in Southern California, a shooting in which he almost lost his own life as well. The reader also learns that the driver blames all people of color for his personal tragedy, proclaiming to Gabe— whose Filipino ancestry remains beyond the driver’s ability to perceive— that Venice is just a “bunch of fucking Mexicans,” but that it isn’t “near as bad as San Pedro . . . Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians. . . . All those mute Asians won’t even learn English.”5 Most alarming, the driver asks rhetorically, when discussing how nice it is to live in the country they are driving through, “You know how journalists keep coming up here to study reports of alien abductions? . . . Well there’s plenty of abductions, but it isn’t aliens that do it.”6 The driver calls Gabe’s mother and arranges to have her waiting when he and Gabe arrive in the town with Gabe’s car in tow; when they arrive, Gabe tells the driver that she is the family maid. He doesn’t want the driver to know that he has been lying to him about his race, as he has been pretending to be nothing but white (i.e., racially unremarkable). Gabe is finally forced, at this moment of heightened dramatic irony, to reveal that he can never truly play son to the tow-­truck driver. What is most memorable about this moment is how Ika responds to Gabe’s disavowal of her: she falls into silence and immobility, as if she is literally trying to disappear. In the last section of the novel, a contrite Gabe attempts to show his 110 • Chapter Four

mother more respect, but there is no question that she remains heartbreakingly far from the American personhood she and Gabe desire. During a visit to a mall, Gabe observes, “We near a group of skinny college-­ student types. They look like engineers, nerdy, and I would not normally get out of their way. But even though the pale one in a yellow button-­down shirt sees Mom, he acts as if he does not notice her, and she actually has to squeeze beside a bench to let them pass. The biggest one clips her shoulder.”7 Their inability to command the public spaces of the mall, which dramatically illustrates that the mother lacks a personhood that others would feel compelled to respect, is further emphasized at the makeup counter, when Ika waits fruitlessly for a “tall, model-­like redhead” to attend to her. When she is ignored, Gabe gets upset and verbally challenges the saleswoman, saying, “You shouldn’t not serve somebody just because they look different.”8 In response, the mother claims not to need any help and walks away. At this moment, the counter-­body comes willfully to the rescue of the radiant center. Given the emotional painfulness of these incidents, is it any wonder that Ika looks at the girl at the coffee shop with longing?

Boxes

The conflicted feelings his mother rouses in him lead Gabe to look for other models of what it means to be an adult and what it means for him to lead a fulfilling life. Everywhere, there is disappointment. Most notably, his father, a white former serviceman, briefly returns to the family after having abandoned them. He gets drunk one night and grows abusive, and the older brother, Tomas, is forced to intervene to prevent the father from physically harming their mother. On the lawn, wrestled to the ground, thrown out of the house by his own son, the father’s final words aim to maximize the hurt he can inflict. He says to his two sons and his wife that he had “only married [Ika] because he wanted someone meek and obedient, but had been fooled because she came with a nagging extended family. He said he never intended to come back to us permanently anyway and only wanted to sleep with her, and now he had gotten what he wanted and would leave.”9 Almost immediately, Gabe observes that he doubts his father “really meant the worst of what he said—there was, I remember, hurt in his voice.”10 This forgiving comment suggests how important fathers will remain in Gabe’s search for an appropriate role model, even as fathers, biological or proxy, perpetually let him down. American Personhood • 111

After his brief dalliance with the tow-­truck driver, Gabe turns his attention to his older brother, Tomas. When the latter had entered the same school Gabe now attends, “he had passed as a white surfer. There were no other surfers there, but he was known as one . . . and he put Sun-­In in his hair, though instead of turning blond it went all red.” Soon after, Tomas begins to identify himself as Mexican, Mexicans being “tougher,” so that by the time the reader meets him in the novel, Tomas has covered his body in tattoos that resemble the kind sported by the Mexican American youth gangs in Los Angeles, drives a tricked-­out Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and, in addition to stealing and selling merchandise, trains attack dogs, which he then sells to rich white clients as having pedigrees that can be traced to the Nazis.11 As seriously troubling as this behavior is, it is also a form of childlike role-­playing, which is apparent in the fact that Tomas does not speak a word of Spanish and that the dogs are easy to identify as being far from German in origin. When Tomas and Gabe go to Brentwood to sell a dog to a rich actor, they take along the dog’s mother, who is a prized family pet. When the actor wants to buy both dogs, Tomas pleads, “Please, mister. She’s a pet. Can’t you just buy the boy dog?”12 When Gabe later asks if Tomas is crying, Tomas punches him with his fist to cover up the break in his façade. He is a child acting like an adult by pretending to be what adults fear most. There is no question, however, that such playacting—such willful and muscular taking up of the position of the counter-­body—can be pleasurable, especially as it allows Tomas to assert his personhood as he could not do in any other way. When Gabe is walking with his mother at the mall and is forced to feel how insignificant he and his mother are to other pedestrians, he recalls what it was like to walk in the same mall with Tomas: “People always stepped aside, even older men in suits with a girlfriend or secretary whom they reluctantly guided out of our way.”13 Perhaps such menacing playacting is not what Yoshino has in mind when he argues that one remedy to the covering demand he uncovers is to commit oneself “to autonomy—giving individuals the freedom to elaborate their authentic selves.”14 But who is to say, if the self is the locus and originator of meaning, that Tomas is not in fact exercising his autonomy to explore his authenticity? From such a view, one would have to conclude that he is not in fact playacting. He is merely being who he genuinely is. Yoshino gives weight to such a conclusion when he writes about two cases, one in which a woman was penalized for wearing too much makeup and another in 112 • Chapter Four

which a woman was penalized for not wearing any. He observes about the superiority of his stance, “Each woman would then have the full panoply of options from which she could fashion her gender identity. And in protecting that range, the law would not articulate any presupposition about what an ‘authentic’ or ‘essential’ woman would look like. Authenticity would be something these women, and not the state or employer, would find for themselves.”15 One of Yoshino’s interlocutors, whom Yoshino quotes at length, asks how anyone can tell whether a person like Tomas is just playacting or genuinely exploring his authenticity: “Your commitment is to help people ‘be themselves’—to resist demands to conform that take away their ability to be the individuals they are. But the covering idea could perpetuate the stereotypes you want to eliminate. One way minorities break stereotypes is by acting against them. If every time they do so, people assume they are ‘covering’ some essential stereotypical identity, the stereotypes will never go away.”16 In essence this passage asks what the difference is between covering and not covering. If to “act white” is a form of covering for Asian Americans, isn’t it just as much an imposition to insist that they should not act white, perhaps by speaking with a thick foreign accent that signals they are “fresh off the boat”? If they don’t, even those who don’t ordinarily speak with an accent, are they merely acceding to a covering demand? And if the response to such a question is to say that each individual alone should be allowed to define what is in fact covering for him or her, then must one conclude that Tomas is not covering when he presents himself as a Mexican street gangster? But, then again, would he be covering if he were to present himself as a white surfer? What these questions imagine is a situation where the line of flight that is captured by the counter-­body breaks free, but in doing so nevertheless remains in an even tighter loop created by signs referring to more signs. A subject caught in this kind of loop is formed as an embrace of the self, and also as an object that is closely associated with the self. If one is struck with a counter-­body, one then wholeheartedly occupies one’s body and even boasts about all that comes with it. One is, in Susan Choi’s words, caught in the box of identity politics even as one tries to make the best of one’s capture. This is a box that, no matter how hard he tries, Yoshino cannot argue his way out of. It is also a box that contains Tomas, for in taking on the role of a Mexican street gangster he remains still profoundly defined by an American/individual. He has, in other words, simply agreed to embrace the logic American Personhood • 113

of the counter-­body fully, and in taking pride in being what is excluded from a radiant center he remains a defining exclusion. He embodies the very qualities Ika refuses and wants no part of, and what makes her longing for the girl in the café even more intense. In regarding each other, Tomas and Ika find themselves defining their sense of selves in mutual opposition, one embracing his exclusion while the other wants nothing more than to be included, one finding refuge in subjectivity while the other finds abjection in an embrace of a radiant center.

Uncertainty

The novel concludes with a story of a wealthy white woman, the mother of one of Gabe’s classmates, who hounds Ika for having damaged the rear of her suv. When she keeps calling their home, demanding $800 to defray the cost of repairs, Tomas takes Gabe along to visit her home, where they find the classmate alone. After suckering him into agreeing with disparaging remarks about their mother, the two brothers grab hold of him and begin to hit him with a tire iron. “And though my stomach wrenches,” Gabe observes, “I feel a rush not of anxiety but of confidence. In a scary way I realize I like it. Strangely, that only makes my stomach worse.”17 This conclusion insists on leaving the reader in a moment of uncertainty about the future. There is no way to know what will become of Gabe, whether he will follow in his brother’s path and continue to act out violently, or if he will move in some other, as yet unforeseeable, direction. It is precisely this kind of uncertainty, an individual development that cannot be linearly tracked, that might be thought of as figuring its own kind of liberal personhood. This ending suggests the ways in which this kind of personhood, one figured temporally as open to multiple forking paths of individual development, is drawn to the consumerism that surrounds these characters. It is noteworthy that it is at the mall where Gabe observes the ways in which his mother cannot command respect from others, and that Tomas’s transformations involves the clothes he wears, the money he can make, and the kind of car he drives. As Eleanor Ty argues about the goods Tomas steals for Ika, including pearls and a new sink and faucet for the bathroom, “Because success is typically represented as the possession of economic wealth, goods, and objects in America, as the man of the house, Tomas mistakenly tries to show his love for his mother by obtaining items that are 114 • Chapter Four

featured in advertisements, glossy magazines, television, and film.”18 It is also important to notice how the final scene of the novel revolves around damage to an suv, which itself is presented as a highly visible marker of consumer culture. The fact that the brothers’ anger, no matter how inappropriately it is expressed, is directed at how the suv’s owner values her vehicle more than she values their mother suggests that, as caught as they all seem to be in conceptions of personhood and self-­worth that are irreducibly tied to the nation, they are also critical of such conceptions. They yearn in their own inchoate ways for a personhood that can be valued differently. This might be a form of identity politics, but it might also be something else entirely different that is left undefined. As this reading of American Son suggests, it is not possible to maintain too rigid a distinction between what is inside and outside the self, much less to circumscribe an outer reality that will conform to an inner freedom. From this latter, critical perspective, longing for an American personhood might best be thought of as not originating in the individual at all but rather as emanating from social institutions and deeply ingrained patterns of cultural thought that teach one how to be an individual—much in the way that the consumerism that surrounds Gabe, Tomas, and Ika inform their ideas about the kind of persons they would like to become. As Hannah Arendt observes in an essay entitled “What Is Freedom?,” which provides an unusually lucid account of how liberalism has arrived at its present forms, “In spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, non-­political freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.”19 Such a perspective, which tries to rethink ideas of individuality as not grounded in a simple subjective autonomy, one defined by a preexistent core of inner freedom, requires viewing the emphasis on the individual as best networked through what Bill Readings suggestively describes as “obligations that have no origin except in the sheer fact of the existence of Otherness—people, animals, things other to ourselves—that comports an incalculable obligation.”20 Judith Butler more recently argues something similar: “I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very ‘I’ who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does nevertheless clutter my American Personhood • 115

speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.”21 According to this view, to discover one’s individuality is to recognize differences of various kinds and the existence of others to whom one perpetually owes debts that one cannot yet fathom or total. The discovery of one’s individuality requires awareness of connections that continually inculcate a certain humility of self, and that may even undo ideas of the self as the self becomes aware of such connections. To know individuality that refuses to be undone in this way is also to know separation, aloneness, and the difficulty of relating to others with whom one must share one’s existence, even as this knowledge encourages one to engage with this otherness. Crystal Parikh pursues this line of thought further when she observes, following Derrida’s lead, “An ethical perspective understands that the futurity, l’avenir, of justice and democracy is founded in the subject’s responsibility and responsiveness to the Other, involving all sorts of dissatisfaction, uncertainty, and even sacrifice, if the subject is to remain open to the possibility of being.”22 According to this argument, the individual as a subject can come into being only when he or she is situated in relation to otherness. There is no individual as such that precedes sociality as such. In this way, personhood can be reimagined as referring not to an individual autonomy operating only out of self-­interest or to an inner core of freedom that preexists the social, but to being connected in relations of unknowable obligation, and of unpredictable responsibility, to others. It is easy to view the end of American Son with a heavy heart, the reader now fully expecting Gabe to follow in his brother’s footsteps in a self-­ destructive behavior that also inflicts both psychological and physical harm on others. To think otherwise would be to believe in miracles. Fortunately, believing in miracles is precisely what Arendt recommends as the best way to imagine the political potential of an individual freedom loosed from its moorings in the nation while remaining, or perhaps precisely because it remains, obligated to others. A miracle is, according to Arendt, “something which could not be expected.” As such, miracles are something that occur, counterintuitively, with great regularity: The chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming. Not quite so overwhelming, to be sure, but very nearly so as the chances were that no earth would ever rise out of our cosmic 116 • Chapter Four

occurrences, that no life would develop out of inorganic processes, and that no man would emerge out of the evolution of animal life. The decisive difference between the “infinite improbabilities” on which the reality of our earthly life rests and the miraculous characters inherent in those events which establish historical reality is that, in the realm of human affairs, we know the author of the “miracles.” It is men, who perform them—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.23 This is a suggestive definition for what critics refer to as agency, namely an individual’s ability to exert influence on his or her surroundings, so that “miracles” in Arendt’s sense of this word, as a kind of potential, are made possible every day. A movement toward a personhood freed from nation is thus a movement toward recognizing such agency. By ending at a moment of uncertainty, a novel like American Son invites its reader to conceive more possibility for its characters than currently seems imaginable. Ika, Gabe, and Tomas have the potential to surprise by what they can become, a becoming that is miraculous because it is beyond the reader’s horizon of expectations and hence beyond what has already been set down before them as their possible futures. This emphasis on becoming can be called a belief in miracles, so long as it retains in its idealizations of individuality the social obligations such idealizations cannot shed. What makes this kind of agency different from, for example, the kind of agency that Yoshino celebrates as a freedom to pursue whatever sense of authenticity one feels is right is the emphasis it places on the intertwined relationship between the individual and the social. This kind of agency does not seek to free the individual from the social or the obligations it may engender. Rather, it begins with the awareness that freedom springs from such obligations and that action is enabled only because of them.

“Not Any Unusual Worth of Her Own”

A phrase from Susan Choi’s American Woman—which is loosely based on the real-­life exploits of Wendy Yoshimura, a young political radical who in the early 1970s became involved in the Patty Hearst kidnapping—festers in the mind. It is the final reasoning of the judge for giving Jenny (who is modeled after Yoshimura) an unusually light sentence: American Personhood • 117

Her trial . . . was short and disregarded by the press. But every day the courtroom was full of Japanese and Filipino and Korean and Chinese faces, the tight-­knit people her father had always avoided. They clustered resolutely around him, invited him to eat in their homes, brought him casseroles when he demurred. They wore buttons that simply said jenny. It was the tireless support of these people—she did nothing to earn or retain it, she simply received it dumbstruck, as she would any miracle—which the judge cited as his reason for sentencing her to the minimum. Not any unusual worth of her own.24 This passage pointedly observes how insignificant Jenny is in the wider world. She is one of many anonymous minor people on trial for committing some crime or another. In contrast, the “pretrial hearings [of the story’s heiress], and the results of her numerous psychiatric exams, and the fluctuations in her family’s optimism about her case’s outcome, continued to be news everywhere.”25 As such, the phrase “not any unusual worth of her own” suggests that no one much cares what Asian Americans want for themselves as individuals. As a group, perhaps, they are symbolically important, full of possibilities, impressive in their educational and entrepreneurial feats. But as individuals, their aspirations for self-­valuation seem somehow impeded by those around them and by forces that lurk more diffusely in the national imaginary. Hence, if an American personhood rhetorically overvalues the individual at the expense of the social, the social is all that is visible in depictions of Asian American individuals.26 When a reporter looks back at the research she did into Jenny’s life, trying to understand who she is and how she got involved in the kidnapping of a rich newspaper heiress, the reporter concludes, “Now she knows the truth, but Jenny still isn’t the story. Jenny’s nobody’s story. Although this might be why Anne [the reporter] pursues her, if only in her spare time. Because she knows no one else will; and that even she, in the end, will stash Jenny away.”27 In the world of American Women, Jenny is a historical figure destined to fade away as a person of no significance, someone who will not be mentioned in the stories about the kidnapping that appear in newspapers and magazines, on television, and in future books and documentaries. Outside the novel, she is a character who can stand in for a yearning to be “the story,” to be a major character (if only in one’s own life’s drama) on a stage larger than the one allotted to her, to be so cherished—as she imagines the heiress she has befriended and been betrayed 118 • Chapter Four

by is—as to make “those in power” to “scramble to suit her,” so that the poor would “be fed, tanks withdrawn,” and “apologies made.” She reflects on her past actions: “She had been enraged by the state of the world, but perhaps even more she’d been enraged by herself, such a ridiculous, small, not-­taken-­seriously, average American girl.”28 It is important to see how Jenny’s longing to be “the story” conforms to an age-­old notion of liberal personhood, one explicitly conflated in this passage with an American personhood (“average American girl”). This notion understands the development of the individual as liberatory because it refuses to be constrained by social conventions that stifle the full range of human experiences, desires, and aspirations. Freed from the shell of expectations, the individual finds unique expression and a fulfillment of being: a genuine, fully formed self waiting to be unshackled in the spaces divorced from politics, a self that is in turn oriented inward as a refuge from all that would take what the self possesses, namely itself. Arendt observes that the “modern individual, with his desire to unfold, to develop, and to expand, with his justified fear lest society get the better of his individuality, with his emphatic insistence ‘on the importance of genius’ and originality,” is rooted in the rise of Christianity in the wake of the waning Roman empire.29 This is when Augustine in particular discovered an inner core of being that acted as a kind of shelter from the inhospitable and fallen nature of the world all around. As Arendt elaborates: The experiences of inner freedom are derivative in that they always presuppose a retreat from the world, where freedom was denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access. The inward space where the self is sheltered against the world must not be mistaken for the heart or the mind, both of which exist and function only in interrelationship to the world. Not the heart and not the mind, but inwardness as a place of absolute freedom within one’s own self was discovered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in the world and hence lacked a worldly condition which, from early antiquity to almost the middle of the nineteenth century, was unanimously held to be a prerequisite for freedom.30 Such an “inner freedom” can thus be understood as what is opposed to politics and to the marketplace alike, anything that is worldly and contingent on a porosity of relationship between what is inside and outside the American Personhood • 119

self. It is what makes one unique and special, and grants the possibility for individual agency and potential, which the world as a whole is constantly striving to contain, repress, and foreclose. Unfortunately, any attempt to exercise this freedom, to give it expression in the world, and to make it a force for social intervention also threatens its absoluteness, tarnishing the self with a society ever eager to take away one’s inner freedom. Seen from this vantage point, the notion of liberal personhood seems just as compatible with neoliberal ways of thinking as it does with the thinking that has shaped liberal-­arts curricula. What neoliberalism strives for is the dismantling of worldly restrictions so that this inner freedom might be coaxed from its hiding place and made expressible in as unfettered a way possible. Neoliberalism does so by granting the individual primacy in the marketplace by freeing him or her from regulatory constraints of various kinds. According to this reasoning, the smaller the state (although in practice the neoliberal state needs to be very large, because while it does not restrict commerce, it must guarantee commerce’s security), the more free individuals are to pursue innovation, discover gains in efficiency, and contribute to the overall well-­being of a spontaneously self-­ organizing society. Such a state seeks to tap into an innate core of freedom that each individual possesses but is unable to transform into good works. As David Harvey explains, looking to current U.S. foreign policy for examples, “The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the U.S. stance towards the rest of the world. What the U.S. evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions of profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital. . . . The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital.”31 The motto for this kind of liberal personhood, one that makes little distinction between Christian spiritual and capitalist economic concerns, could very well be the motto a Chinese migrant worker uttered in a Dongguan classroom, as documented in Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls, a riveting journalistic account of young women in China who now make much of the world’s most coveted consumer goods: “The most important person in the world: yourself.”32 Although it would be easy to confuse the Augustinian concept of liberal personhood with the neoliberal, American Woman dramatizes how 120 • Chapter Four

they remain distinct. Jenny strives for a personhood that is not defined simply by her racial identity or by a material aspiration for wealth and social prestige. In conversation with Jenny, one of the heiress’s captors-­ turned-­comrades says, “Your Third World perspective’s a privilege. . . . She [the heiress] knows how important she is. The Publicity Princess. But she’s still got to learn that there’s no substitute for a Third World perspective like yours. Brown, yellow, black, red: those are the four things that she’ll never be. And she isn’t just white, she’s a filthy rich white. Y and I are from the Midwest, and I’m not saying our town wasn’t racist, or that we don’t have a taint that we’ll never repair. But at least we’re blue collar. We can relate to working brothers and sisters all over the world.” Jenny responds, “But it’s wrong to condemn her because of her background! She can’t be faulted for where she comes from. That’s as bad as racism.”33 What makes this condemnation wrong, according to Jenny’s response, is how it reduces individuality to a racial or class category, so that what one is determines completely who one is. This is “as bad as racism” because, like racism, such thinking ignores the intrinsic worth of the individual, as well as the inner freedom that that individual nourishes. This is not a neoliberal idea, although neoliberalism exploits it for the kind of socioeconomic argument it propagates against state-­sponsored social safety nets and regulatory laws designed to protect workers and consumers alike from irresponsible rent-­ seeking.34 It is, as Arendt argues, an Augustinian concept that emerged from a time when certain political freedoms were denied; it is a line of flight from the constrictions of a particular epoch’s political and social restrictions into an interiority that was subsequently reterritorialized, made a part of a strata that remains a powerful force in present-­day assemblages of various kinds—Asian America not least among them. Only as her story reaches its end does Jenny find herself affirming her ties to her own race, the novel concluding as it does with Jenny accompanying her father to what appears to be the very first Day of Remembrance held at Manzanar. Jenny views this event with skepticism, finding something comical in the fact that “manzanar or bust! had been spray-­painted onto the back” of an old school bus and in the way a “young man passed them, clutching a taiko drum like a beer keg to his chest. ‘Welcome!’ he called. ‘We’re just now setting up. Give a hand if you want, or just dig the cool view.’”35 Still, the significance of where she is and for what purpose is not lost on her, as she finds some peace in participating in an activity that affirms the connection between one generation of American Personhood • 121

Asian Americans with an older generation. In savoring this connection, she discovers that the ways in which her commitment to an American personhood, no matter how articulated in her radical political practice, is again becoming deterritorialized and reterritorialized. The generational link that enables this kind of rearticulation is brought to the foreground when Jenny observes that “her father seemed not to have seen the young man—the young man who was about the same age her father had been . . . when he was brought forcibly to this place”36 Jenny’s race is similarly foregrounded when she is facing trial for her involvement in the bombing of a recruitment center. Mimicking what actually happened during Yoshimura’s trial, Jenny’s defense is boosted by the miraculous support of numerous Asian Americans who voluntarily work to raise money and show solidarity: “Unsought, unexpected: first one, then five, then a church congregation. They were all Filipino-­, or Chinese-­, or Korean-­, or Japanese-­Californian-­American. Some were apolitical truck farmers or small-­business owners. A very few were politically Left college students. One was a Japanese Unitarian minister.”37 The attention to the ethnic diversity of the various Asian Americans who raise money for Jenny’s defense speaks directly to the fact that these groups had started to think of themselves by the mid-­1970s as part of a single race. As Glenn Omatsu has insisted in a widely read article on the Asian American movement and its misrepresentation by a younger generation, those who come together on Jenny’s behalf are not simply a “very few politically Left college students,” but rather originate from a large array of socioeconomic backgrounds, emphasizing how much the movement itself at this time enjoyed broad grassroots support.38 Hence, Choi’s fictive retelling of a series of events that actually happened affirms the power of a movement that sought to organize around the banner of race, seeing in this concept a shared experience, a common cause, and an opportunity for creative social participation. In this, one can see a pivotal moment in Asian America’s machining as a racial assemblage. Even the fact that Choi is not Japanese American, although her novel is primarily about a character who is, suggests how much this novel is informed by the history of race-­making. Interestingly, Jenny remains largely unconscious of the organizing on her behalf, numb as she is with the grief caused by the newspaper heiress, who has decided—as Hearst herself did—that she would join her kidnappers in robbing banks and fomenting armed rebellion against the established social order. In the novel, the heiress first befriends and then gets 122 • Chapter Four

sexually involved with Jenny, who has been conscripted by a fellow militant activist to hide the heiress and her kidnappers from the police. When they are captured, the heiress betrays Jenny. It is only after this betrayal that Jenny begins to wonder about her motivations for participating in antiwar activities with the people that she had chosen to be most intimately associated with: “Hadn’t she found herself, without quite knowing how, among the self-­confident children of the white upper class? With whom she had fought for the rights of the colored and the poor.”39 It is almost as if she wanted at once to do what she believed was just and at the same time to deny that she herself was one of the very people on whose behalf she was seeking justice. This point is subtly made by Choi, who suggests that while Jenny’s desire to engage in antiwar activities is admirable, the desire itself had been in this case troublingly channeled through an identification with all that whiteness and upper-­class socioeconomic status represent, a kind of beauty that is “incandescently gold-­skinned and gold-­haired.”40 Participating in antiwar protests as an Asian American, in movements with other Asian Americans, would thus have been for Jenny a repudiation of such an identification and of the savior thinking that such an identification enables.41 Rather than imagining herself as swooping down from a moral perch to lead, she would have as an affirmed Asian American to think about herself as a member of “the colored and the poor” who must organize laterally. This point is not explicitly made in American Women. But it lingers in the portrayal of Jenny, who is humbled and more grounded and even less angry by the time she finds herself at trial. The act of identifying with a movement that was at the time embracing a counter-­body status was, to be sure, falling into a box, but it also offered the potential for another line of flight and for another miracle to take place. One might even imagine such an embrace as holding onto something that is not a counter-­body at all, but a personhood premised on the obligations one has to others that in turn give one—as literally a gift, unsought after, unasked for, but nevertheless offered—a sense that one has the agency to create worlds that do not yet exist.

American Personhood • 123

Chapter 5

Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race

Are Asian Americans a racial minority? This question cannot be easily answered one way or another, for Asian Americans are, as Colleen Lye puts it, a “minority which is not one.”1 Seen from one perspective, Asian Americans are a minority, in that race is an inescapable part of their lives and constraint a reality that is not easily transcended. There is no mistaking that such lives are shadowed by associations with what is foreign and distant, nor that such associations contribute to the shaping of career choices, job advancement, residential preferences, social cohorts, choice of romantic and sexual partners, rates of mental illness, access to health care (including mental health care), political influence, civic engagement, media representations, and a host of other factors that affect the kind of lives Asian Americans lead, as well as the kind of lives they imagine they can lead. Many Asian Americans are among the most impoverished people in the country, live in crowded substandard housing, work incredibly long hours under poor conditions, are cowed by police and governmental bureaucracies, barely get by in service-­related jobs or through their involvement in grey areas of the economy, and find their U.S. residency status threatened by whims of the law. The last item in this litany was painfully experienced firsthand by many Cambodian American young men, who had chosen for whatever reason not to become naturalized citizens, when circumstances changed abruptly after 9/11 so as to make them eligible for deportation for crimes they may have committed years before and for which they had often already served prison sentences.2 Similarly, for many South Asian Americans and people of Middle Eastern ancestry, the time after 9/11 has been defined by mass

suspicion, surveillance both formal and informal, and severe curtailments of civil liberties.3 Jasbir Puar passionately enumerates how male Sikhs, in particular, have had to bear the brunt of racism: Verbal harassment (being called “bin Laden,” “son of bin Laden,” “Osama”), especially on the phone and while driving; tailgating; hate mail; defecating and urinating on Sikh gurwaras, Islamic mosques, and Hindu temples, leading in some cases to arson; blocking the entrance of a Sikh temple in Sacramento with a tractor and truck and jumping into the sacred holy water at the temple; throwing bricks, gasoline bombs, garbage, and other projectiles into homes of Sikhs and Arabs and slashing car tires; death threats and bomb threats; fatal shootings of taxi drivers, the majority of whom have been turbaned Sikhs; verbal and physical harassment of primary and secondary school children, as well as foreign students on college campuses; and attacks with baseball bats, paintball guns, lit cigarettes, and pigs’ blood.4 What triggers this violence and places these men in the position of the most precarious kind of counter-­body, according to Puar, is the turbans that observant Sikh men wear, an important religious symbol that not only visually, and catachrestically, conflates the Sikh with the Muslim with the terrorist but does so against a history of visual associations that gives the turban a similar cultural meaningfulness as the veil for women: “Like veiling, turbaning generates anxiety in the observer, the sense of inaccessibility, of something being out of place and out of time, of incomprehensibility.”5 Even for those who are materially and politically well-­to-­do, and who are not so visibly set off as racially different from mainstream white America, intimations of how temporary the signs of racial success might turn out to be are not hard to find. For instance, buried at the end of the 1987 Time magazine article that popularized the depiction of Asian American students as “whiz kids” is this observation: “The Rumbaut-­ Ima data from San Diego show lower grade-­point average for Chinese-­, Korean- and Japanese-­American students whose families speak primarily English at home compared with those whose families do not. The New York Times has reported that a Chicago study of Asian Americans found third-­ generation students had blended more into the mainstream, had a lower academic performance and were less interested in school.”6 When Asian 128 • Chapter Five

immigrant whiz kids grow up, it seems, they have children who are not so special. Whatever excitement the educational successes of such whiz kids might produce must therefore be tempered by the suggestion that such successes can prove fleeting, a demographic blip created by a wide array of causes that are not guaranteed to remain in place. This also suggests that what has allowed some Asian Americans to escape being classed as a racial minority who are just like African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans may have been their extraordinarily high levels of academic achievement. If such achievements are indeed destined to wane over time, who is to say they would not in that future moment begin to appear less exceptional after all? Would they seem at that future moment more like a racial minority as this term is presently understood? Despite these caveats, Asian Americans are not viewed as a racial minority in the eyes of many, nor often in their own eyes. Indeed, they can seem a salvation from race—or, as Walter Benn Michaels puts it, the emphasis on diversity often found at colleges and universities is based on “a model of differences we can love, like those between Asian Americans and Caucasians.”7 Asian Americans are also, Michaels insists, defined in a diametrically opposite way from African Americans, making any claim of a common minority status difficult to believe: “(Indeed, insofar as economic success is a measure of success in American society, the most recent data rank Asian Americans at the top of the charts, and African-­Americans at the bottom.)”8 That this prominent critic feels no need to support this claim with actual data or further elaboration and that he makes this claim in a parenthetical aside suggest the existence of a perception so pervasive it approaches the status of common sense. It is the self-­evident nature of this kind of race thinking that allows Eric Liu to proclaim in his widely read book of personal essays, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, “I never asked to be white. I am not literally white. . . . But like so many other Asian Americans of the second generation, I find myself now the bearer of a strange new status: white, by acclamation.”9 According to this way of thinking, Asian Americans are “white, by acclamation” because they are so like their white peers and because they are not black. Asian Americans are therefore not literally white. Rather, they are situational whites whose social location is determined by their place along a black-­ white hierarchy of racial gradation. In this latter, more narrow sense, which connects whiteness to social location (with whiteness itself continuing to designate a lack of racial Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 129

marking), many Asian Americans—especially those who enjoy a professional status, who have been thoroughly acculturated in the United States, whose tastes are often flawlessly contiguous with those of their white upper-­middle-­class peers, and whose speech is also likewise contiguous if not even more polished—may seem indistinguishable from an idealized American mainstream. They may even appear a powerful, if ironic, symbol of a mainstream ideal measured against which others within that same mainstream are perceived as falling behind. Asian Americans are, to put this another way, excellent at a time when so few others, even their white and socioeconomically equal cohort, seem capable of attaining the same level of excellence. They are distinguishable because almost indistinguishable from an ideal. They are perceived to occupy a position of liberal idealism, like the one that Ika in American Son longs for, that many others in the United States, especially from the lower middle class and from across the political spectrum, have given up hopes of attaining. In such situations, Asian Americans may even be considered more white than other whites, a surplus of whiteness that sets them off from whites who are merely biologically white—and in this way contribute to a redefining of what it means to be white. Asian Americans are thus the “whiz kids” whose academic successes pave the way for professional successes later in life and who in the process of growing up demonstrate, as the 1987 Time article concludes (albeit through a logic impossible to follow), how this mainstream can still facilitate development toward a liberal ideal: “If assimilation and other trends mean that the dramatic concentration of super students has peaked, talented young Asian Americans have already shown that U.S. education can still produce excellence. The largely successful Asian-­American experience is a challenging counterpoint to the charges that U.S. schools are now producing less-­educated mainstream students and failing to help underclass blacks and Hispanics.”10 According to this passage, Asian American educational success is both a product of a culture exterior to the United States, as the article explores in depth, and captured within the institutions of the United States, so that these institutions can rightly claim to have produced such “excellence.”11 At the same time, and paradoxically, it is the Asian American students’ capture by such institutions, their “assimilation,” that is leading them away from the very excellence they embody. Hence, their extraordinary scholastic accomplishment is understood both as a beacon for other minorities and for a “less-­educated mainstream,” who 130 • Chapter Five

cannot blame the current educational system for their personal failures, and as safely insignificant as they recede into the mediocrity of the general, racially unmarked, white population. In the midst of this kind of race thinking, where some privileged Asian Americans can be placed culturally both inside and outside the United States simultaneously—a subtle but extraordinary change from the kind of contradiction Lisa Lowe uncovers when she points out how Asian Americans are cultural outsiders to a “national polity” while remaining “within . . . its workplaces” and “its markets”—claims of racial minority status can easily run up against a wall of incredulity.12 What is essential to understanding the height and strength of this wall is to understand the ways in which Asian Americans as a racial group are heirs to a history of visual representation. Among explorations of how literature can facilitate awareness of this history of visual representation and of how this history is crucial to what Judith Butler describes as a “visual field” that “is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful,” Gene Luen Yang’s graphic narrative American Born Chinese stands out.13 Its intense focus on a visual field formed by this history retains memory of and provides an optic for the changing meaning of race as it affects Asian Americans. On its pages, past and present ways of thinking about Asian Americans collapse into each other. As a result, readers are encouraged to ponder how much race thinking has changed, in what ways, and where this change might be leading. American Born Chinese prompts such a response by employing the unique qualities of its medium, comics, to reflect back to the reader the difficulty of following the development of Asian American racial formations.

Realism and Genre Fiction in Comics

The medium of comics has emerged in recent years as an important topic of research and discussion within literary studies. This is compactly exemplified by two special issues of prominent critical journals devoted specifically to this subject, published almost within one year of each other— the first by Modern Fiction Studies and the second by melus. As Hilary Shute and Marianne DeKoven write in their introduction to the Modern Fiction Studies special issue, “The explosion of creative practice in the field of graphic narrative—which we may define as narrative work in the medium of comics—is one with which the academy is just catching up. Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 131

We are only beginning to learn to pay attention in a sophisticated way to graphic narrative.”14 Foremost on Shute’s and DeKoven’s minds is the need to pay attention to a form of literature that has for too long been relegated to the far margins of critical attention, even as its authors have pushed it into formally complex and creatively rewarding directions. Unfortunately, as Derek Parker Royal points out in his introduction to the melus special issue, this otherwise welcome attention to graphic narrative has limited the range of examples deemed worthy of such critical attention to a handful of titles by authors “whose work is nowhere near the mainstream of comics, underground and ‘alternative’ artists who define their work against conventional comic genres and modes.”15 The works discussed in the Modern Fiction Studies special issue, for example, are predominantly about serious subject matters in a recognizable social present, while the mainstream of comics rarely operates with such constraints. As a result, those works that have become lionized in the emerging criticism on graphic narratives, as a specific subset of comics, have followed the model set by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which has been hailed by producers and critics alike for its riveting exploration of the tensions between history and memory. This work is now widely cited as having given birth to a contemporary explosion of serious creative expression.16 Some of the most obvious examples of this contemporary explosion are, in no particular order, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–95, Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. That these titles come so easily to mind suggests that they are the ones that critics have most written about and most celebrated. The disproportionate attention these works have received reinforces an implicit assumption that there are some comics worthy of such attention and others that are not, and inevitably the other works end up being precisely those that have always been omitted from critical consideration. In this way, the term graphic narrative turns into a marker of distinction that elevates one group of works tending toward realism from another implicitly inferior group. The latter is generally referred to as “genre fiction” as a way to emphasize its preoccupation with what the late Harvey Pekar, whose autobiographical comics are decisively in the realism camp, dismissively describes as “costumed superheroes, cute little kids, and talking ­animals.”17 For Asian American graphic artists and authors as well, the tension be132 • Chapter Five

tween realism and genre fiction has emerged as a significant issue. Frank Cho, for instance, occupies the latter half of this divide as the author of Liberty Meadows, which contains cuddly but sardonic talking male animals and a busty white woman who takes care of them. Lela Lee, while equally in the comics mainstream, has worked explicitly against the sexism of this mainstream, which tends to contain lurid and anatomically exaggerated drawings of women. She has done so by deploying very cartoon-­looking characters in her comic strip Angry Asian Girls (and in its more recent reincarnation as Angry Little Girls) to highlight the ways her central character is mistreated as a result of her sex and race. Likewise, Bryan Lee O’Malley, a Canadian of mixed Korean and Quebecois ancestry whose work has become widely read in the United States and who currently makes his home in Los Angeles, melds the medium’s enduring connections to popular culture with an unpretentious cartoon look in his Scott Pilgrim books (a series which has since been adapted as a—far inferior—live-­action Hollywood film). By maintaining a cartoonish simplicity and by connecting this simplicity to childhood, O’Malley employs the narrative logic of video games to tell stories exploring the difficulties of growing up while subtly highlighting issues related to queer sexuality and race, as depicted in particular by the ambiguous racial position of an Asian Canadian high school coed. In contrast, G. B. Tran in his ambitious Vietnamerica has used an emphasis on realism to write a riveting and formally complex memoir about his family’s history both in the United States and in Vietnam while Belle Yang in Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale has used similar drawings to tell a (less riveting) story about her and her family’s history. Similarly, Derek Kirk Kim and Adrian Tomine have used the same techniques to explore everyday characters in everyday, and mostly suburban, settings. Tomine, in particular, has used the latter strategy most consistently, emerging as a major figure in the world of graphic narratives with his Optic Nerve series and Summer Blonde, most of which are populated with “Gen X or Gen Y characters who are proficient with technology, ironic/cynical, and well-­versed in popular culture.”18 More recently, he has turned his attention explicitly to Asian American subject matters in his most ambitious work to date, Shortcomings, which is about the self-­loathing that romantic failure brings to the foreground in its Asian American characters.19 As impressive as the combined output of these authors may be, however, Yang is notable for his willingness to bend the conventions of genre storytelling to contribute to his realist aspirations. This situates Yang’s Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 133

work between the twin poles of realism and genre fiction that currently divide creative work in this medium, resulting in narratives that appeal to and are suitable for both mature and young adult readers, a quality further accentuated by his work’s focus on children who are on the cusp of growing up. While American Born Chinese is the most important instance of how ambitiously Yang bends convention to produce startling, and often delightful, results, his other works also deserve attention. For instance, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks intentionally cleaves to the most familiar elements of popular genre fiction, including supernatural events and a secret order of technoscientifically advanced beings focused on saving the world. It then weaves these elements into a more quotidian story, that of a high school student trying to figure out how best to behave ethically in complex social situations. It begins with Gordon, a physically large and not very bright teenager, mindlessly following the lead of a malicious friend in bullying a nerdy fellow classmate. The quotidian gives way to the extraordinary when Gordon wakes up to find a bulge in his nose. The bulge turns out to be a tiny spaceship piloted by a tiny robot who belongs to the San Peligran Order, “a secret world-­wide society dedicated to the protection of the human species. As you can imagine, an organization of such magnitude needs a rather extensive data storage system.”20 This storage system is the unused portions of millions of human brains; while trying to retrieve data stored in Gordon’s especially underused brain, the ship malfunctioned and now requires Gordon’s assistance. This leads Gordon to the classmate he had been bullying, and in a series of events too complex to relate here Gordon learns to empathize with the grave troubles that afflict this classmate.21 In this narrative, Yang subtly interweaves the everyday, which is the hallmark of “serious” graphic narratives, and the fantastical, which is an aspect of mainstream comics. By doing so, he fashions a specific, and easy to grasp, moral message while revealing a keen sensitivity to the way issues of race affect a story that seems on its face to have no racial content. In Gordon Yamamoto, the interest in race is registered along its visual plane. Gordon works against racial type by being slow, large, and a bully. All of these qualities upend the usual post-­1965 expectations that representations of male Asian American youth will be more Long Duk Dong than Bluto Blutarsky. The reader’s resistance to such a reversal of expectations is softened by the visual presence of Gordon’s character. The drawings in this book present him as friendly looking, with an appealing smile, spiky 134 • Chapter Five

hair, a plain tank top and shorts, clunky sneakers, and a rotund body that is both soft and powerful (fig. 5.1). When he bullies, he is less filled with malice and more simply too dumb to consider how his actions might harm others. Because he is visually rendered on the page with such specificity and concreteness, if not also complexity of character, it is not difficult to imagine that such a person could indeed exist. As Gordon Yamamoto illustrates, the complexity of the stories Yang wishes to tell is conveyed with great succinctness through his use of the visual and the textual. Despite the density of its plot, Gordon Yamamoto is a short book. As many have pointed out, most notably Scott McCloud, combining the visual and the textual requires the reader to engage in active deciphering in order to follow storytelling that is at once linear and nonlinear. In relation to this general observation, it is worth reemphasizing that comics, because of this combination, are an important vehicle for exploring the concerns of race. Race and racism are as much about visual meaning-­making as they are about textual storytelling, and as such are powerfully suited to a narration that relies on both elements. In addition, because comics necessarily render the experience of time in spatial terms, they can be used to explore the problem of change over time.22 Gordon Yamamoto illustrates some of these claims in a specific example, but it is American Born Chinese that fulfills the promise implicit in his prior works. American Born Chinese is both visually more arresting, the drawings sophisticated and detailed in a way Yang’s earlier work is not, and simply longer than any of his other works, allowing more space and hence time to develop the story.

A Visual Vocabulary

American Born Chinese is divided into three distinct but interwoven parts that artfully fuse into a single narrative by the book’s end. The first part, a fanciful retelling of the classic sixteenth-­century Ming epic Journey to the West by Ch’êng-­ên Wu, focuses on the difficulties of the Monkey King. The second is about a Chinese American boy named Jin Wang who was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown but whose family has relocated to a predominantly white suburb. His only friend is a recently arrived Taiwanese immigrant named Wei-­Chen. The second part thus fits easily into the well-­worn grooves of the ethnic bildungsroman. The third part is perhaps the most interesting. In it a white high school student named Danny is revealed to Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 135

Figure 5.1.

Detail from Gene Luen Yang’s Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks. The racial commentary of Gordon’s character operates visually as much as textually.

have a Chinese cousin named Chin-­Kee. (Yes, as in “chinky”!) Chin-­Kee, the reader learns later, visits Danny every time he moves to a new school and begins to make friends; Chin-­Kee is so unpopular that his unpopularity rubs off on Danny, forcing him to start over somewhere else. At this point in American Born Chinese, it is easy to see why comics is ideal for the story Yang wishes to tell. Chin-­Kee is exactly what his name calls forth. He is the grotesque stereotype of the Chinese as racially alien that first appeared in the nineteenth century, as Western imperial countries chipped away at China’s sovereignty and as Chinese workers began to populate California and the rest of the American West in visibly large numbers. In a volume of carefully selected artwork and cartoon drawings entitled The Coming Man: Nineteenth Century American Perceptions of the Chinese, Philip Choy, Lorraine Dong, and Marlon Hom graphically demonstrate that popular racial exaggerations had the effect of creating a consistent, powerful visual vocabulary for imagining the Chinese as from elsewhere and as therefore not belonging in the United States. In almost all of the images the authors provide, the Chinese are depicted in strikingly similar ways. For example, in the San Francisco illustrated weekly magazine the Wasp, edited during its heyday by Ambrose Bierce, the Chinese embody an unfair competition, who, in league with the big manufacturers, are the enemy of struggling white labor in California (fig. 5.2). The classic topos of the caricatured coolie is in evidence in this figure’s slant-­ eyes, short stature, sallow skin, predictably Chinese clothing, and clawlike fingertips, and in the long, menacing queue. One quotation from the same volume of the Wasp stands out: “The unsophisticated Mongol, imitating, ape-­like, his fellow of this country, attains a monopoly of the cigar and laundry business, and smiles a cunning smile of triumph at his discomfited rivals.”23 The visual vocabulary developed in such early caricatures of the Chinese and buttressed by this kind of commentary is what causes Chin-­Kee to remain such a complex and troubling figure in American Born Chinese. The first time readers meet him, he appears in a full-­page panel arranged to look like the opening title of an old television show. In big yellow lettering, the text depicts heavily accented English: “Everyone Ruvs Chin-­Kee.” Immediately below and to the right of this lettering, Chin-­Kee’s head appears with a big grin, pronounced buckteeth, eyes so small they appear only as a bold black line, and sickly pale yellow skin, and a queue is once again visible. To emphasize further that this is an image originally formalComics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 137

Figure 5.2.

From the Wasp (May 20, 1881). Note the stereotypical visual details of this figure and its simian stature.

Figure 5.3.

Detail from Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. The satirical humor contained in the figure of Chin-­Kee is largely visual.

ized in newspapers and popular entertainment and later largely disseminated through the growth of popular mass media, the words “clap clap clap” line the entire bottom of the panel.24 “Clap clap clap” and “ha ha ha” appear in other panels as well, replicating the perfunctory applause and canned laughter of television sitcoms (fig. 5.3). Within the narrative itself, Chin-­Kee arrives at Danny’s house dressed in an outfit meant to be traditionally Chinese, shouts “Harro Amellica!,” and leaves his luggage made of oversized Chinese-­food takeout cartons for Danny’s father to handle.25 Finally, just in case the reader does not get what is being mocked, Chin-­Kee immediately proceeds to hit on Melanie, the girl that Danny has been flirting with before his arrival. Chin-­Kee says, “Such pletty Amellican girl wiff bountiful Amellican bosom! Must Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 139

bind feet and bear Chin-­Kee’s children!”26 As he says these words, he is depicted in the best Fu Manchu manner: body hunched forward, arms stretched outward, hands clawlike, and drool spitting from his mouth. Chin-­Kee’s presence, however, refuses to remain merely a satirical reference to long-­dead racial conventions. The next time Yang introduces Chin-­Kee, he begins to embody not only nineteenth-­century stereotypes about the Chinese coolie but also late twentieth-­century expectations that Asian American youths will be stellar students. The day after his arrival, Chin-­Kee follows Danny to each of his classes and raises his hands immediately whenever a teacher poses a question. It turns out that he knows more than any student at Danny’s school about the three branches of the United States government, Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, the names of different bones in the human arm, algebraic equations, the meaning of a story written in Spanish, chemical formulas, and lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. During lunch, other students are depicted in the background pointing at Chin-­Kee, whispering to one another, and casting furtive glances in his direction. Two students look as if they are about to throw up when they see Chin-­Kee eating from a takeout carton with a cat’s head poking out of it. Still, as disgusting as this may be, it is not clear what upsets the students more: Chin-­Kee’s questionable food choices, outlandish clothing, and “r”-­deficient accent, or the fact that Chin-­Kee consistently outshines them all in their subjects. In the first-­class period, the teacher exhorts his students, “You know people—it would behoove you all to be a little more like Chin-­Kee.”27 No wonder, then, that despite his invocation as irony, Chin-­Kee’s presence in American Born Chinese is just as likely to elicit a groan as a laugh, or perhaps both at the same time.28 As Binbin Fu observes, Chin-­Kee “is provocatively repulsive and hilariously funny at the same time. An intruder into the American classroom, he sings ‘She Bang, She Bang’ (à la the well-­known American Idol contestant William Hung) while dancing grotesquely in a traditional Chinese dress on a desk.”29

Transformations

In addition to pitting nineteenth-­century racial stereotypes about Asians against late twentieth-­century racial expectations about Asian Americans in this way, Chin-­Kee’s presence in this narrative thread also enlivens the question of how exactly Chin-­Kee is related to Danny. This is resolved when it is revealed that the other two parts of this work—the retelling of 140 • Chapter Five

the Monkey King’s fantastic epic and Jin Wang’s realist bildungsroman— meet in the story of Danny and Chin-­Kee. In the first part, the Monkey King is shown being denied entry to a party of other immortals. The guard tells him he cannot let him in because he is not wearing any shoes. Later, when pushed, the guard admits, “You may be a king—you may even be a deity—but you are still a monkey.”30 This insult leads the Monkey King to murder all the guests (a bloodletting that is meant to be satisfying), which then sets him on a violent path that lasts for several pages. In a sequence of extraordinary drawings, the Monkey King confronts several deities who could hardly consider him a threat. Each of the deities and their flunkies laugh when the Monkey King insists that he is not a monkey but their equal, and are then thoroughly punished by the Monkey King for their laughter. At the end of American Born Chinese, the Monkey King is revealed to be none other than Chin-­Kee himself, a disguise he puts on to become Danny’s “conscience . . . a signpost to your soul.”31 As such, he imparts the lesson the Monkey King himself has learned the hard way: “how good it is to be a monkey.”32 At this moment in the book, Danny is also revealed to be a disguise. In fact, Danny is Jin Wang (from the second narrative thread), who is so full of self-­hatred as a result of the ways in which he has been slighted by everyone at his school that he has turned on his only friend, Wei-­Chen, first by making an impulsive pass at Suzy Nakamura, a Japanese American girl Wei-­Chen is dating, then by calling Wei-­Chen an “F.O.B.”33 The next morning, Jin wakes up to discover that he has magically turned into Danny. These dizzying revelations emphasize the ways in which American Born Chinese is interested in what is hidden from view. Outward identities lead inexorably to secret identities, and bodies are always capable of transforming themselves—much like the Transformer robots that Jin and Wei-­Chen liked to play with when they first met. As the Hasbro tagline puts it, “There is more than meets the eye.” What occurs beyond the eye’s ability to perceive raises troubling questions about how race changes over time, and may explain why the term racial formation, which refers to one of the most established approaches to the study of race and racism in U.S. ethnic studies, conjures unease about how to account for change. Colleen Lye exemplifies this unease when she concludes that Michael Omi and Howard Winant, who first coined the term, render race a “transcendental signifier,” which emphasizes “the foundational status of racism in U.S. society at the expense of describing Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 141

its historical variability.”34 Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels, who refused to view Asian Americans as a racial minority, argues that Omi and Winant are unreasonably attached to the concept of race as “a central and even desirable factor in American life.”35 What seems to motivate both Lye and Michaels in making this critique is less a desire to return to the hoary debate about the relationship between race and class—although Michaels in particular does return to this debate eagerly (“we love race—we love identity—because we don’t love class”)—and more the sense that current thinking about race fails to keep up with the present.36 Following Michaels’s lead in particular, because he stakes this position out most explicitly, one may interpret the transformations that occur in American Born Chinese by saying that Danny is the person Jin could become, someone who could be socially accepted as if he were white if he so chooses. That Yang explicitly treats such a willed act of racial belonging as a lack of conscience reveals an abiding, and possibly unreasonable, attachment to the concept of race. Danny is followed by Chin-­Kee only because the latter believes that what the former is doing, finding social acceptance, is somehow a betrayal of who he really is. Such race pride, in turn, feeds into a more general culture of reified diversity-­talk that allows one to focus on “differences we can love, like those between Asian Americans and Caucasians[,] rather than differences (like the ones between smart people and stupid people or, more to the point, rich people and poor people) that are not so obviously appealing.”37 In short, the contemporary desire to insist on racial difference is a transparent form of deliberate fake consciousness that allows one to avoid talking about the more disturbing reality of economic inequality. This reasoning makes marginal sense in explaining the dynamics at the end of American Born Chinese, when Jin learns a lesson that might appear preoccupied with race pride. But Michaels’s insistence that one can choose only between focusing on race or on inequality lacks explanatory power in thinking about Wei-­Chen’s transformations. For most of the narrative, he is presented as a nerdy but fearless recent immigrant from Taiwan, but after his break with Jin he becomes an angry and despondent Asian American hipster. He is also figured ultimately as a monkey in disguise, like his father, who is revealed to be the Monkey King. More interesting still, his rage at being rejected by Jin is channeled into a specific and highly visible form of Asian American cultural activity: the Japanese import car scene. This scene’s sensational mix of tricked-­out automobiles, 142 • Chapter Five

dangerous street racing, and objectified female models is easily one of the most salient examples of an organic Asian American pop-­culture inno­ vation. The import car scene, before it became popularized for mass consumption in more racially familiar ways, was originally created by disaffected Asian American youths in Southern California who felt actively unwelcome at white racing events involving Detroit muscle cars.38 These youths also took inspiration from the intentional oppositionality of Mexican American low-­rider car culture. As a sign of defiance, these youths began to modify and race smaller, lighter Japanese imports, which at the time were perceived to be cheap and poorly made. By fitting the most generic imports they could find with more efficient and powerful engines and flashy exteriors that emphasized speed and a hypermodern aesthetic, these youths helped fashion the Japanese import into a synonym for an agile East Asian capitalist style capable of outperforming the more weighted down and brutish Detroit muscle car.39 Of particular note is the racial origin of this ostentatious display of consumerist self-­reinvention, of which Wei-­Chen becomes a part, a display that forcibly asserted the value of what was otherwise widely deemed valueless, namely Asian American masculinity. Hence, if Wei-­Chen’s apparent middle-­class status in American Born Chinese signals the kind of “economic success” that Michaels insists is the “measure of success in America,” it seems important to consider what it might mean for Asian Americans to be visibly perceived as economically successful and yet to remain racially different from those who are normatively thought to be American.40 This question has grown more difficult to answer since 1965. It also highlights a point that Paul Gilroy makes in Postcolonial Melancholia: “Race thinking has proliferated, but in order to maintain its grip on the world, it has had to change. The simpler hatreds forged in more innocent days now coexist with complex, proteophobic, and ambivalent patterns. This change means that blackness can sometimes connote prestige rather than the unadorned inferiority of ‘bare life’ on the lowest rungs of humanity’s ontological ladder. Under these conditions, the boundaries between contending groups must repeatedly be made anew and may only be respected when they have been marked out in warm blood.”41 In short, the more that familiar boundaries of racial difference and superiority are crossed, the more that new boundaries are frantically, and even violently, erected in their place. If so, remaining focused Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 143

on racial formation with “historical variability” in mind requires critics to consider how race thinking can prosper even as it may appear to give way in some instances. Still, despite careful analysis and the equally careful caveats often repeated by Asian Americanists about the role of the state and about the exercise of biopolitics in the current configuration of a heterogeneous, hybrid, and multiple Asian America, many commentators nevertheless fail to convey such nuances.42 Michaels in particular demonstrates a culpable lack of historical understanding—indeed, he approvingly quotes Henry Ford as saying, “History is bunk.”43 This willful ignorance has allowed him to blame people of color, and Asian Americans in particular, for being overly attached to the concept of race, without acknowledging the legacy of a white supremacy that has continually made the topic of race unforgettable and that has facilitated the creation of alternative (but far from utopian) spheres of cultural expression like the Japanese import car scene.

Monkeys Rule!

The frustration caused by how easily such nuances are overlooked has led many critics in Asian American studies to repeat that Asians in America were not always so widely known for their success. Indeed, the narrative of the Monkey King’s exclusion from the party in heaven in American Born Chinese is effective as a fable of the devastating impact of racial microaggression, or the subtle day-­to-­day acts of differentiation and discrimination a member of a racial minority experiences that are difficult to pin down as explicitly racial in nature (such as being routinely ignored by a flight attendant, repeatedly given tables close to the kitchen or bathroom in restaurants, or overlooked by a sales clerk who pointedly continues to gab with a fellow clerk).44 It does so exactly because it recalls how the image of the monkey has historically been deployed as a racial diminutive, a way to picture Asians as subhuman or beyond the realm of the human altogether. In the quotation from the Wasp that insisted Chinese coolies imitated their white peers in an “ape-­like” fashion, it is easy to make out how the comparison to the simian makes the Chinese appear less than human. The unflattering comparison is also highlighted in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. At one point, the narrator recalls how white police detectives entered the home of an acquaintance and harassed him for living with a white woman. While slapping him in the face, one of the 144 • Chapter Five

detectives says, “Listen to the brown monkey talk.”45 The narrator also describes how a Filipino traveling with his white wife and infant was told at a roadside diner, “You goddamn brown monkeys have your nerve, marrying our women.”46 As the celebrated historian John Dower has argued, such references to the simian also became a distinct and important feature of the American media’s representation of the Japanese during the Second World War. Although the Japanese were compared to other forms of life considered less than human, the monkey or ape was the most common. For instance, “Americans learned from Ernie Pyle that Marines in the Marianas had coined the word ‘Japes,’ a combination of ‘Japs’ and ‘apes.’”47 What makes Dower’s analysis especially interesting is how it stresses the malleability of such comparisons. After the end of the war, as Japan became domesticated and pulled into the U.S. geopolitical orbit, the fearsome “Jape” had turned into a loveable, if grumpy, chimpanzee, as is graphically demonstrated by a cover illustration from the September 1945 issue of Leatherneck, a magazine produced by and for the Marines (fig. 5.4). The chimpanzee in this picture, while dressed in a Japanese military officer’s uniform, is small enough to be perched on what appears to be a lower-­ranking American serviceman. His expression is grumpy, as indicated by the frowning mouth, and angry, as accentuated by the knit eyebrows and the staring eyes. And yet his expression is hardly menacing, as he is clearly in no position to give vent to the feelings it reveals. His domestication is further emphasized by the American serviceman’s broad grin, which suggests that nothing the chimpanzee can do will upset him. Also noteworthy about this extraordinary picture is that the chimpanzee’s facial features are highly detailed, while the American serviceman’s face has few distinguishing marks. As McCloud has argued, photorealism in the depiction of a face discourages reader identification, while a cartoonish depiction, one that is relatively simple and undetailed, encourages readers to see themselves in the image.48 The malleability of the simian as a form of racial representation, as exemplified in this picture, highlights how empty of content racial representation itself is, and how it can therefore be circulated to mean several different things at different moments. Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese were hardly the only groups to have been compared to monkeys. Moreover, such comparisons work as racial pejoratives only when one assumes that monkeys, and other animals, are intrinsically inferior to the human and Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 145

Figure 5.4.

Cover image, Leatherneck, September 1945. The fearsome “Jape” of wartime has been domesticated in this immediate postwar image.

therefore demeaning to be confused with. As Bill Readings has pointed out, such an assumption can lead to an exact distinction between human and nonhuman that is itself “the first step to terror, since it renders it possible to know . . . what it is to which we have no responsibility, what we can freely exploit.”49 The Monkey King narrative in American Born Chinese is a particularly interesting way to reflect on the history of racial signification because of the ways in which it blurs an exact human-­nonhuman distinction. It invites readers to consider, even if inadvertently, why comparisons to simians should necessarily be understood as pejorative—why, for instance, many people remain uncomfortable with the idea that humans share a lineage with apes and thus repudiate evolutionary theory. Very much along these lines of thought, the start of American Born Chinese retells the early chapters of Journey to the West as the Monkey King’s fall into racial knowledge. He feels no shame about being a monkey until he is forcibly rejected from a party because of this fact. This rejection teaches him that despite all of his many accomplishments, he remains in the eyes of others something that can be easily dismissed and laughed at. His string of violent acts cannot change his new awareness of the fact that being a monkey is something he should be ashamed of. This segment thus concludes with a poignant comment on his changed relationship to his kingdom on his return. The narrator says, “When he entered his royal chamber, the thick smell of monkey fur greeted him. He’d never noticed it before. He stayed awake for the rest of the night thinking of ways to get rid of it.”50 The drawing that accompanies these words shows the Monkey King with a very different expression than he wore in earlier drawings, and in doing so illustrates an affect altered profoundly by a newly developed sense of racial awareness (fig. 5.5). In subsequent installments of this narrative thread, readers learn how the Monkey King combats his newly discovered feeling of revulsion at what he is. He first decrees that all the monkeys in his kingdom must wear shoes, and then he studies kung fu with feverish intensity in order to make himself invulnerable and to master his own physical form. When he exits the cave, he is depicted as tall, muscular, more angular, and, of course, wearing shoes. As much as Yang’s readers might like to fantasize along with the Monkey King that they can retreat into a cave and emerge as masters of their own physical forms, it is important to keep in mind that rearticulations of racial meaning do not take place in a vacuum. Such transformations, although they can occur abruptly, are part of large and Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 147

Figure 5.5.

Detail from Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. The Monkey King learns to feel shame at a quality that makes him a monkey.

complex processes. What this means is that one cannot explain, as Dower attempts to do, the conversion of the fearsome “Jape” into the chimpanzee on the cover of Leatherneck simply in terms of America’s changing geopolitical relationship to a defeated but still strategically important Japan. As the work of scholars like Mary Dudziak and Penny von Eschen, among others, has shown, social movements focused on race relations within the United States play out within a larger geopolitical context; and, conversely, geopolitical arrangements are profoundly affected by social movements within the United States (as Christina Klein and Seth Jacobs have suggested).51 This line of reasoning has contributed greatly to adding an international perspective to Omi and Winant’s point that the significance of racially based movements within the United States cannot be underestimated, but the additional perspective still does not fully capture the complexity of how race accrues and changes in meaning. Certainly, one factor that needs to be taken into account is how the racially based movements Omi and Winant refer to in their book Racial Formation in the United States have largely lost their momentum in recent decades and can no longer muster the mass support or direction of purpose that once made them so powerful. Rather than think of such lost momentum and purpose as markers of failure, however, one could just as easily think of these movements as having achieved a significant level of altered awareness about race (an achievement that Lye in particular seems unable to appreciate in her critique of Omi and Winant in favor of a more abstract and literary understanding of race as form). De jure legislation discriminating against classes of persons have now largely been dismantled. Bold expressions of white supremacy are no longer officially acceptable, even if there are many who are eager to defend or make excuses when they are made.52 And while multiculturalism might not be official U.S. government policy, as it is in Canada, its ethos nevertheless reaches deeply into the regulation of many, but by no means all, major U.S. institutions. While none of these accomplishments comes close to the aspirations espoused by the various racially based movements Omi and Winant reference, and while it may even be a betrayal of such aspirations to think of these accomplishments as accomplishments because it might suggest a willingness to accede to the inequalities of the current social order, they nevertheless represent the clearing away of the most visible signs of a perhaps “simpler” (to use Gilroy’s term) form of racism. What remains, and what may be festering into even more worrisome race hatreds, is much Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 149

Figure 5.6.

Detail from Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. In the original, the panel image of Wei-­Chen’s inner monkey is rendered in black and white, while the other panels are in color, adding to the sense of vulnerability that Jin’s words conjure.

harder to address as racism per se because it does not always resemble the older forms. Finally, none of the explanations offered here take into account the change that is perpetually under way, so that what seems abrupt or momentous is mostly a product of a reason that records, as Bergson puts it, “the broken line” of its own thinking. The meaning of race is always in the process of changing, so much so that any claims about progress and reaction must be understood as seeking to striate a line of becoming that would otherwise be smooth. Yang’s American Born Chinese directly addresses these problems when it prompts its readers to consider how much changes in racial formation occur just beyond what is visible. There is one image in particular that distills a moment of rare insight, when the eye sees something that is actively being disavowed and hidden from view. When Jin confronts Wei-­ Chen for the first time after their falling out, Wei-­Chen appears behind the wheel of his rice rocket, large sunglasses covering half his face and his eyes, earrings dangling from both ears, a metal necklace hanging prominently around his neck, a cigarette drooping from his mouth, and hair matted down with oil except for a two-­fingered cowlick. He is far from the unassuming boy who originally befriended Jin, and the consumerist armor he has put on to fend off the dangers of such a friendship leaves no place for the eye to rest. He is all surface and emotional hardness, a subject that 150 • Chapter Five

looks but cannot be seen. Jin mentions having met his father, and the next frame shows Wei-­Chen as a monkey, small, fragile, emotionally vulnerable. His eyes are large, prominent and expressive, and the frame itself has turned black-­and-­white and sketchy, in sharp contrast to the vivid colors and delineated borders that adorn the rest of the page (fig. 5.6). At this moment, his consumerist armor has come undone, and in its absence what is revealed is a history of racial representation that remains very much a part of how Wei-­Chen must continue to define himself. The fact that when this armor comes off what is shown is that Wei-­Chen is nothing more than a monkey and that being a monkey is for him to be at his most vulnerable and lovable points directly to the need to confront a painful visual history of racial disparagement that has equated the animal with the subhuman. This history cannot be simply forgotten, as Michaels seems to encourage, just as race cannot be understood as epiphenomenal to a story about changes in modes of production or any other fundamental principle of social organization. Race must instead be understood, as Omi and Winant have encouraged their readers to do, as constitutive of everyday lives, which are defined not only by realist narratives but also by genre fiction, like the ones that comics has excelled in refining. Such fictions, like the ones that have associated Asians with monkeys, refuse to remain bracketed as merely manifestations of popular culture and continually bleed into the everyday, informing a common understanding of race and the ways in which it constructs inhabited worlds. Genre fiction fuses into one’s most intimate sense of self in such a way that it cannot simply be discarded as if it bore those qualities that have been forcibly ascribed to a preexistent nonracial personhood. American Born Chinese gives vivid witness to the impossibility of achieving a liberal ideal that will be unencumbered by considerations of race, even as it narrates the struggles of two childhood friends who discover both meaning and joy while living within such constantly adjusting constraints.

Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race • 151

Chapter 6

Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

The last three stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth constitute a formally inventive and ambitious single narrative that follows the intertwined lives of Hema and Kaushik. The first story, “Once in a Lifetime,” is told in the first person, with Hema directly addressing Kaushik as “you” in the text. Hema, who is in middle school and working on a report about ancient Rome, develops a romantic crush on the moody and standoffish sixteen-­year-­old boy Kaushik, whose family stays with hers while they look for a more permanent place to live. Kaushik and his parents had moved away a few years earlier, from Greater Boston to Bombay, “abandoning a struggle that [Hema’s] parents and their friends had embarked upon,” and have now returned, apparently to resume that struggle once again.1 The second story, “Year’s End,” is told from Kaushik’s perspective, but while it maintains the literary conceit of having the narrator address the other person in the narrative as “you,” Kaushik only rarely addresses Hema. Instead, he focuses on what has happened to him since he moved out of Hema’s family home: the drawn-­out death of his mother from cancer, his departure to college, and his inability to accept the fact that his father has remarried. Together, “Once in a Lifetime” and “Year’s End” create an expectation that the final installment of this short-­story cycle will narrate how Hema and Kaushik run into each other, fulfilling a romantic promise that the first sentence of the first story hints at: “I have seen you before, too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life.”2 The two seem to be bound to each other, destined by familiarity, similar family

contexts, and a common social experience to meet again and to recognize how they complete each other even when their paths have diverged. The stasis of Hema’s life—she has moved from city to suburb to suburb all inside Boston’s Route 128 hub, which creates the effect that she has always been in the same place—is complemented by Kaushik’s global errancy, in the sense not of being in error but of being errant, of wandering, as suggested by the Latin root word errare. Kaushik moves away and back and away across impressive distances, with little regard for national boundaries, until finally he has no place to call home. As a result, he offers movement for Hema. And, conversely, Kaushik’s loss of connection to a sense of belonging, created by his errancy and by the premature death of his mother, seems to have only one solution. “Year’s End” concludes with Kaushik set permanently adrift, as he runs away from his family’s home during the Christmas holidays, traveling as far north as he can, with the only anchor to his past being a memory of his final boyhood contact with Hema: “And it was then, wandering alone that winter up the coast of Maine, that I thought of you, and our weeks in your house during another winter five years before.”3 “Going Ashore” deeply troubles the narrative expectation set up by the two earlier stories. Hema is thirty-­seven and on the cusp of marriage to a man whom she hardly knows. Emphasizing the passage of time further, the narrative has given up the conceit of a first-­person narrator addressing the other person directly, proceeding instead to a third-­person perspective that alternates between focusing on Hema and Kaushik. This switch in perspective does not dispel the intimacy of the two preceding stories, as the lush use of free indirect style draws what were once distinct first-­ person points of view into more direct dialogue with one another. The switch thus suggests a fulfillment of expectations even as the content of the story speaks to expectations that have been kept in suspension for too long. Now a professor of classics, Hema is in Rome, still apparently working on a report about its ancient history. She avoids social contact, lies to family about her reasons for being there, and enjoys a solitude made possible by her extended holiday from what awaits her—marriage and eventually motherhood. The innocence that suffused the first two stories has now turned largely into cynicism, especially when she reflects on the disappointing end of a long sexual affair she has had with a married man. She has, it seems, been waiting for something to happen, anticipating an Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 153

event that refused to happen, and has grown so frustrated she has finally given up and given in to the life that has been laid out for her by her family and community. It is only then, at the moment when she has finally tired of waiting, that the person she has been waiting for turns up. Compelled to meet a mutual friend in Rome, Hema runs into Kaushik: “The woman looked up, confused, and he realized, in spite of her dark hair and fitted leather coat, that she was not Italian. That in fact she was Indian. That he needn’t have used the polite form in addressing her, that her face was one he’d known.”4 This much-­anticipated moment feels anticlimactic, the wait having been too long. This summary of the Hema-­and-­Kaushik short-­story cycle brings into sharper relief how allegorical Lahiri’s fiction as a whole is. That is, while the storytelling in this cycle is obviously and rigorously realist, especially in the way it details the names of actual places and provides identifiable historical markers (as in the cataclysm that marks the finale of “Going Ashore”), Hema-­and-­Kaushik locates its meaning elsewhere, beyond what is being said toward a simultaneously illuminated and veiled message. In a generic way, it recalls the cautionary tales that Kingston’s mother tells the narrator of The Woman Warrior, as in the chapter “No Name Woman,” where the mother says at the end of her talk-­story: “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us.”5 As in all allegories, the message being conveyed by the story of the No Name Woman is at once clear—it warns against the dangers of sexual promiscuity—and ambiguous, as in the ways in which the narrator is left pondering the various meanings this story conjures in her juvenile imagination. Like the child narrator found at the start of The Woman Warrior, the reader is put into a position of polysemous bewilderment at the end of Hema-­and-­Kaushik. Why does it take so long for Hema and Kaushik to meet again? Why does Hema feel unable to give up a life she finds unfulfilling to be with someone who so obviously makes her life meaningful? Why is Kaushik so set in his ways that he cannot change his plans and bend more to social convention to accommodate Hema’s reluctance? What is the significance of Kaushik’s death as a result of the tsunami that overflowed the shores of the Indian Ocean in 2004? And like the mother who tells the stories in The Woman Warrior, the author seems intent on telling the reader what her stories mean even as she is incapable of limiting the meanings her readers might find. This chapter does not claim to know de154 • Chapter Six

finitively what Lahiri wants to convey in telling this story, but it does insist that Hema-­and-­Kaushik locates its meaning in the jump it enacts between the child’s sense of potential that imbues “Once in a Lifetime” and the adult’s sense of deep disappointment that pervades “Going Ashore.” Indeed, the latter would not be as memorable as it is if it did not confound the reader with how much the earlier story’s sense of potential has been disappointed by the life that has been lived in the interval. In this way, the fate of the children that Hema and Kaushik once were is centralized in these stories, just as the fate of various child characters dominates Lahiri’s other fiction. The first story of Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, focuses on a couple driven apart by a miscarriage, encouraging readers to consider what the significance of the child may be, especially one as notional as a child who is never born. Children repeatedly appear as central characters in the stories that follow, with only two stories— “A Real Durwan” and “This Blessed House”—lacking either a significant child character or concern about the welfare of a child. The Namesake concentrates on a child born in its very first pages and his development into adulthood. The other stories in Unaccustomed Earth are likewise invested in the welfare of children and their future, with only one story, “Nobody’s Business,” taking up a different theme. In this fascination with children, Lahiri’s fiction is very much in the thick of a preoccupation that washes over much of contemporary Asian American literature. At the same time, her fiction stands out among its cohort in part because of the subtlety with which it tackles these issues. This subtlety is evident even in its use of allegory, a literary technique not known for its subtlety, to consider self-­ consciously what the stakes may be in the fascination with children. What follows explores these stakes by first considering what allegory is and how its use can contribute to Lahiri’s exploration of the cultural significance of children. The chapter then explores contemporary American society’s obsession with what Lee Edelman describes as a pervasive fantasmatic project of unification that engages an always deferrable and hence always potentially perfect moment of possibility represented by a vocal, if frequently empty, adoration of children. By doing so, the chapter argues explicitly that Asian Americans have, in an elliptical and imperfect way, increasingly come to occupy the position of the Child, which is Edelman’s term for the ideal that “reproductive futurism” nurtures and pursues. The chapter concludes with analysis of The Namesake, arguing that it narrates Gogol’s struggle against the yoke of allegorical expectations as an embodiAllegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 155

ment of the Child: either choose assimilation into a cultural unity that desperately needs—in its ever more visible density as fantasy—to be shored up by such an affirmation or to choose an allegiance to a pluralism that can be as suffocating as that which it seeks to supersede. In response to both options, Lahiri employs allegory against allegory.

Speaking Other in Public

Allegory comes from the Greek allos, meaning “other,” and a combination of words meaning to speak in the agora, a marketplace or a public clearing of some kind. As George Teskey elaborates, “That allegory refers to political discourse is suggested to the ancients by its rootedness in the verbs agoreuo (‘to speak publicly, to harangue’) and ageiro (‘to gather’). Allegory speaks in the agora, the gathering place, but in an ‘other’ way, mysteriously, disclosing a secret to the initiated while keeping away the profane.”6 It flourished during the early modern period in Europe, first peaking with the completion of Dante’s Commedia and then again with the publication of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. As these two examples suggest, allegory was closely aligned with the rise and dominance of Christianity in Western Europe, although more recent critical work has attenuated this connection by finding in allegory a way to think about how language in general operates. According to its etymological roots, allegory is about saying something other than what one means. It is also, as Teskey’s elaboration makes clear, a circumlocution that is conventionally signaled, allowing some to understand what is intended and leaving others unaware. This convention made allegory appear overly mechanical to writers of later eras (especially during the nineteenth century, starting with the British Romantics). In the twentieth century, however, the circumlocution that allegory signifies, its location of meaning as elsewhere to what is being said, resonated with intellectuals like Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, for whom allegory gained considerable importance. Associating allegory with the nonreferential operation of language as a whole, as these latter intellectuals did, however, causes allegory to lose its distinctiveness. If allegory is everywhere, then there is nothing distinct about it. Further exacerbating this dilemma is that allegory itself has its own history of confused definitions, starting in antiquity as a key rhetorical trope and as a way of reading. The latter was called allegoresis, or the

156 • Chapter Six

literary interpretation of texts that was also closely aligned with biblical exegesis. Allegory, in other words, was both a tool that writers could use to explore topics that eluded more direct forms of representation and a tool that readers could use to find meaning in texts that were not literally signified by these texts. Since in either case the signal that another meaning was being veiled by a literal layer of meaning could be oblique, it became difficult to know when one was in the presence of a work which employed such a device and when one was forcing an interpretation on a work that was not interested in this kind of shifting meaning. Finally, during the early modern era allegory also became a literary genre, a distinct class of discourse similar in status to “that of the generic term ‘epic.’”7 The difficulty critics have had in defining allegory may thus be rooted in the fact that allegory itself has had, and continues to have, multiple forms, being at once a trope, a hermeneusis, and a literary genre. Moreover, allegory can be all three things simultaneously, or it can be one of these things mistaken for another. This multiplicity of forms is especially apt, as it mirrors the polysemy that allegory figures in all its forms. Hence, for allegory to be considered a literary genre, the text must overtly give itself away as such through the use of rhetorical devices, such as personification or puns, that allow individual words to signify more than one meaning. Maureen Quilligan in particular has insisted on the importance of such devices in allegory’s routine operation, in large part, she argues, because what is centrally important about allegory is its “deft manipulation of us as readers into a position of self-­defining self-­consciousness about the nature of language’s power to shape us into what we are.”8 Teskey follows this line of thought: “When . . . we encounter in the opening episode of Spenser’s Faerie Queen a monstrous, book-­vomiting serpent named Error, we have been given more than a set of instructions on how to interpret her. We have been told to interpret in a similar way every other figure we encounter in the poem. Error tells us not only what she means but what sort of book we are reading, what conventions apply.”9 In exactly the same way, the reader knows what kind of story he or she is in the presence of when he or she encounters in The Woman Warrior a woman called the “No Name Woman” who has been ritualistically banished from a village and from memory. The reader also knows that The Woman Warrior is engaging in allegory as a literary genre when it calls a monster made completely of hair and ectoplasmic limbs

Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 157

that saps one’s willpower and threatens to lead to a state of depression, or acedia (to borrow from the language of early modern authors), a “Sitting Ghost.” In a similar way, Hema-­and-­Kaushik also signals “what sort of book we are reading.” Subtler than the character name Error or “No Name Woman” or “Sitting Ghost,” however, is the word on which Lahiri’s stories at the end of Unaccustomed Earth can be said to pivot, signaling polysemy and veiled meaning: “Rome,” the place about which Hema is writing a report when she meets Kaushik and where Kaushik’s family vacations before completing their flight to Boston. It is also where Hema travels to meet Kaushik later in life. Rome is not an innocent choice of location, for it gestures both to a history of imperial expansion and to an ancient foundation of Western culture. At the same time, Rome can be understood as referring to the homonym roam, which is what both Hema and Kaushik do—the former in the way her life moves without purpose or direction, and the latter in the way he physically moves from place to place, again without direction. If these stories toy with readers’ expectations about what might happen next, heightening expectation for what the final story will reveal, they also playfully signify at the most literal level, through the use of pun, how such anticipation can lead to disappointment. These two characters are destined to roam the surface of the earth without ever heading toward a particular place. Indeed, the whole of Unaccustomed Earth is intent on exploring the dilemma of having no sense of destination. This is made explicit from the start, in the epigraph, which uses a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-­House” (which prefaces The Scarlet Letter). It is from the same passage that Lahiri’s book draws its title: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-­out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” This epigraph signals precisely the meaning that roam signifies in the book’s final three stories, a physical movement from place to place, even as the stories themselves and their punning on this word point to what shadows Hawthorne’s apparent celebration of mobility, namely anomie and a sense of disconnection. Each story in Unaccustomed Earth darkens this shadow, twisting the meaning of Hawthorne’s hopeful comments about the advantages of, and the need for, migration by highlighting how a loss of rootedness can leave one 158 • Chapter Six

rootless. In short, what Hema and Kaushik endure in “Going Ashore,” and what the other characters in the other stories endure, is a lack of expectations, a set sense of where their lives are headed and what they can look forward to once they arrive there. This lack is further heightened by the fact that the characters in these stories tend to be older than the majority of the characters in Lahiri’s earlier stories; they are more likely to be the parents of young children or to be older parents at that (the kind of parents, all professionals, who have had their children late in life) than to be themselves children or young adults. The first story of the collection, “The Unaccustomed Earth,” depicts a young boy, a mother, and a grandfather sharing living quarters during a tense and quietly dramatic weekend, a multigenerational perspective that is absent in Lahiri’s earlier work. That the epigraph gestures toward the use of allegory to communicate a sense of displacement and even unhomeliness (a possible translation of Freud’s unheimlich, or “the uncanny”), whether self-­consciously or not, is surely something Hawthorne himself would have appreciated, for he is widely considered to be among early American literature’s most well-­known allegorists. By featuring Hawthorne’s words so promptly, at the start of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri lays claim to the genre of allegory as a central part of her own storytelling interest (a literary move her doctoral research on the ways in which the Italian palazzo figured rhetorically in Jacobean drama would have helped her to make). Literally speaking about otherness in the modern-­day agora of print fiction, her fiction seeks to navigate the hard choices that so distress the character Nam in the story “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.” Choosing to write about her own ethnic group, therefore fulfilling marketplace demands that she do exactly this, Lahiri also foils the process by which her fiction can be read as ethnographic fact by inviting readers to read the literalness of her work and thus to consider how allegory as genre can block pervasive and routine forms of allegoresis. The latter is the meaning that readers bring to a text, their expectations about what the text will be about. The foiling of allegoresis suggests that allegory, as a distinct literary genre, pulls readers back to the materiality of the text itself, refusing such interpretation as meaning keeps being displaced onto something other than what has been said, something that operates at the level of the signifier and, just as important, as something other to what the reader may expect. This is a point that Unaccustomed Earth, its last three stories in particular, makes explicit, Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 159

thereby making more visible the implicit use of allegory in Lahiri’s earlier work. In doing so, Unaccustomed Earth also calls attention to the ways in which allegoresis pervades the interpretation of Asian American literature more generally. It thus encourages readers to consider the difference between allegory and allegoresis as the difference between literary genre and hermenuesis—speaking other in a text and having otherness read into a text.

Against Allegorical Reading

The ethnic bildungsroman, another literary genre, has long been a source of anxiety for Asian American literary studies. Many of the works canonized by this field early in its development fit within its conventional strictures and might therefore be understood as moving toward a closure that would be the opposite of the openness that critics have wanted to read in these texts. In response, critics have sought to elucidate the ways in which such works, while operating within this genre, also spill over such strictures, undoing and troubling what might otherwise promise to lead to subjective wholeness. Lisa Lowe exemplifies this position when she points out how Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart “narrates the protagonist’s development from the uncertainty, locality, and impotence of ‘youth’ to the definition, mobility, and potency of ‘maturity,’” only to undo “the closure and reconciliation of the bildungsroman form” by calling attention to the complexities of Philippine culture and demands for Anglo-­American conformity found in the prewar years.10 The anxiety over the ethnic bildungsroman exhibited by this example undoubtedly stems from the way this genre might be read as narrating how Asian American characters learn to collaborate with nationalist projects of suppressing dissent at home and of consolidating power abroad. This can be seen, for instance, in the way Bulosan extols the promise of America as a national project amid the formal start of its involvement in the Second World War. The fact that critics have felt the need to contain such narrative possibilities thus suggests that they have implicitly understood these texts as allegories, locating their meaning not in the literal meanings that they traded in, but in the more abstract ideas that they might figure. Such critics have had good reason to think this. Asian American literature has always been understood to mean more than what it says literally, being so often subject to ethnographic interpretations that themselves are 160 • Chapter Six

hard to differentiate from allegoresis. In short, the characters found in these works have been perceived as personifications of something much more abstract. The narrator of America Is in the Heart is never read, and indeed may not be readable, as a particular character with no more representative status than what he says about his own experiences. He is also understood, and in fact the book encourages readers to understand him, as a figure in an allegory about national belonging, racial contradiction, cultured ways of being in the world, and so forth. While it would be a stretch to say that America Is in the Heart is an allegory, in the sense of being an example of a literary genre, it has certainly been read allegorically and employs allegorical rhetoric to enhance its aim to represent Filipino American experiences in all their complexity during the interwar years. For Asian American authors in the late twentieth century, such allegorical expectations—especially as Asian Americans have themselves come to figure a reconciliation between aggrieved minority and the nation-­state responsible for a lot of racial grief—have threatened to transform their characters into a model for other minorities to emulate, a social ideal of suppressed anger and a constantly performed willingness to get along. As Inderpal Grewal argues, the postwar narrative that provides the ethnic bildungsroman’s end-­of-­century “full expression” is Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (more than Kingston’s The Woman Warrior or Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club): “The first-­person narrative of a Hindu girl living in Punjab, India, whose family has been displaced after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the novel describes her struggles within India, how she reached the United States, and her life in the United States.”11 This narrative also includes the murder of her husband by Sikh terrorists, her rape by white men whom she has paid to lead her illegally into the United States, a love triangle between herself, a white man, and another white man who is a paraplegic living in Iowa, and the adoption of a boy from Vietnam. “Within this narrative,” Grewal observes, “America becomes the locus for Jasmine’s emergence as an individual with desires and ‘choices.’ Here we see the link between biopolitics and geopolitics in that security and care are believed to be impossible in Punjab because of the inherent violence attributed to its populations, but in America safety, security, and ‘ordinary’ life are p­ ossible.”12 A similar division can be found in Lahiri’s “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” a short story about a young Indian American girl named Lilia, who is growing up in a tidy, safe suburban home in New England. Between attending middle school and going trick-­or-­treating on Halloween, Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 161

she is bewitched by a family guest, Mr. Pirzada, who is conducting research in the United States while his family remains behind in what will soon become Bangladesh. At the start of the story, Pakistan’s violent civil war has just broken out: “In March, Dacca had been invaded, torched, and shelled by the Pakistani army. Teachers were dragged onto streets and shot, women dragged into barracks and raped. By the end of the summer, three hundred thousand people were said to have died.”13 It would be easy to read the contrast between the placidity of Lilia’s life and the violence of Pakistan’s civil war as reinforcing the conventional division between America and the rest of the world, as found in Jasmine. But, as Rajini Srikanth points out, if Lilia grows up to affirm this division, it will partly be because her budding interest in that other part of the world “was swiftly and efficiently suppressed by a grade-­school teacher focused on educating her students about the intricacies of the American Revolution.”14 Also noteworthy about this story is how subtly this self-­reflexive point is made through the use of a scrupulous realism, even as its narrative produces meaning through allegory, so that the simple act of hospitality that Lilia’s parents extend to Mr. Pirzada can be understood as a model of hospitality no longer possible on the war-­torn subcontinent. In this way, the story is not about how Indians and newly formed Bangladeshis behave in general, out of any particular context. Rather, it calls attention to how a particular Indian American family seeks to offer what solace they can to a person whom ethnically they might be thought to have animosity toward. Hence, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” is simultaneously more ethnic-­specific and more widely appealing to its readers than is Jasmine. Like this and the other stories in The Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake maintains a strong interest in the narrative doubling of thought back onto itself, a self-­reflexivity that excavates through such a return the different layers of meaning on which beliefs of various kinds rest. Lahiri’s fiction deploys the literary genre of allegory against allegoresis, encouraging readers to consider reading habits that are otherwise so deeply entrenched they can evade notice. The novel begins, for instance, with the mother in the process of giving birth to Gogol. It thus immediately signals that it will refuse to sensationalize what it nonetheless recognizes as a difficult struggle: “For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. . . . Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same com162 • Chapter Six

bination of pity and respect.”15 To identify foreignness with an expectant mother, as this passage suggests, is also to understand that such an identification entails a paradoxical burden. On the one hand, the foreigner as akin to an expectant mother is revered as the deliverer of the future, someone who guarantees the perpetuation of life-­making practices that connect through time so that the future is in fact the self-­same repetition of an ancient past. On the other hand, she is held up as an anthropological “curiosity.” A curiosity’s privacy can be violated by anyone, as when strangers feel no taboo in touching the protruding bellies of pregnant women or the cheeks of newborn infants. Curiosity can also be easily confused with disdain, just as maternal burden can be confused with social burden (as when mothers with dependent children get cast as welfare mothers). The fact that Ashima is both pregnant and a foreigner enables her, according to the novel, to see the paradox of her situation more clearly than others do, to imagine at once the range of meanings her particular pregnancy can represent and what it cannot ultimately guarantee. In other words, Ashima understands how her pregnancy is subject to allegoresis. When her doctor assures her that all is “perfectly normal,” she thinks, “For the past eighteenth months, ever since she’s arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. . . . Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort, she’d been astonished by her body’s ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-­grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made it more miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.”16 In this passage Ashima points to the narrative that pregnancy seems unquestioningly to encapsulate. Indeed, to call it a narrative is already to call attention to something that seems perfectly commonsensical. Pregnancy normally, and normatively, inspires thoughts of generational continuation, a stitch of life experience that connects one woman to all the women before who have endured the same pain of making life in their wombs. This is, as Lee Edelman writes, “a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subject’s alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history.”17 Such a “politics of the Symbolic,” Edelman goes on to elaborate through the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis, “allegorizes or elaborates sequentially, precisely as desire, those overdeterminations of libidinal positions and inAllegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 163

consistencies of psychic defenses occasioned by what disarticulates the narrativity of desire.”18 Each act thus becomes a ritual of repetition, a guarantor of meaning as it is passed down biologically from one generation to the next, from great-­grandmothers to grandmothers to mothers to daughters who will someday become mothers. Each sensation, each pain, each urge of the pregnant body is experienced as one more iteration of the same, nothing happening to Ashima that has not already, and predictably, happened to the women in the family before her, rendering each experience a return to experience felt intuitively at some almost primordial species level. There is, to be sure, something miraculous about this timeless “chain of signifiers,” the sameness that connects across time through an experience of regular rejuvenation, of fertile wonder, of biological initiation into an identity of motherhood that never changes—even as such a narrative excludes as “what disarticulates” those women who may not have, or want, access to such an experience. It is enticing to consider this allegory as no allegory whatsoever. Or, more precisely, it is enticing to consider this allegoresis as not a form of interpretation, for when Edelman uses the term allegorizes he means not the writing of a genre or even the use of a rhetorical trope, but an interpretation. But, as Ashima helplessly acknowledges, as identity, the meaning of motherhood changes and alters over time, calling attention to an allegoresis that seeks to hide behind the guise of something more primordial. The fact that Ashima is giving birth to Gogol in a foreign land calls to the surface the “tentative and spare,” or the fragility of a belief that some things never change. The strangeness of the surroundings for Ashima, the realization that she is for the first time in her life alone when she is in the maternity ward, highlights the fictiveness of any interpretation of pregnancy as having allegorical meaning. Rituals vary from place to place, and across time, and the experience is never the same for one woman as it is imagined for another. The “nothing . . . normal” of Ashima’s stay at the maternity ward calls into question the “perfectly normal.” For Ashima, whose name means “limitless,” professional normalization fails to reassure. The meaning of her name is apt because she engages so deeply with the seamless continuity promised by the narrative of pregnancy and also inappropriate because she calls attention to this narrative’s transience and vulnerability despite her best efforts to the contrary. If the chief rhetorical device allegory as literary genre employs is personification, as critics widely agree, allegory has always struggled with the 164 • Chapter Six

way personification itself refuses to remain only a rhetorical device. What has long attracted readers to Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, is not just its obvious religious meaning, which would appeal primarily to the already religious, but the way it clothes this meaning in the trappings of realism. Hence, as Quilligan claims, it “reads a great deal like a novel.” Moreover, it is able to seem like a novel while remaining an allegory because the characters themselves do more than refer to the literal ideas their names signify: “The bulk of Bunyan’s characters are individuals who do not incarnate by personifying but rather exemplify qualities.” Thus, when a character named Honest “says he hopes to grow into his name,” he is acknowledging this difference, and establishing in the process his character’s autonomy from the quality his name embodies.19 Likewise, and to a much greater degree than in a work like Pilgrim’s Progress, because The Namesake is not oriented toward substantiating a greater truth that has already been established elsewhere, Ashima exemplifies the quality of being without limits and remains at the same time more than what she exemplifies, in part because she remains so far from being an incarnation of it.

The Child as Future

By focusing on Gogol’s birth, the opening scene of The Namesake conjures a thorny theoretical dilemma that centers on what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” This is, Edelman explains, “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics” because the Child, which is its object of veneration, is “the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. Even proponents of abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political struggle, mirroring their anti-­abortion foes, as a ‘fight for the children.’”20 Against this horizon, and against those who wish to draw gays and lesbians somewhere safely within its boundaries, Edelman wishes to define the queer as a negation of such a future orientation, a refusal that is paradoxically a courageous ethical move: “By denying . . . our disidentification from the promise of futurity, those of us inhabiting the place of the queer may be able to cast off that queerness and enter the properly political sphere, but only by shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural position of queerness, after all, and the need to fill it remain.”21 By accepting one’s role as the villain of reproductive futurism, a foil it must have to make visible the future it wishes to secure, the queer Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 165

willfully occupies a position that another would otherwise have to occupy. In addition to the pleasure of altruism such an act might afford, there is also for Edelman the pleasure of refusing a coercive morality founded on the well-­being of the Child, an unimaginable freedom to imagine a politics not founded on the reproduction of the present into the future. And, finally, such a willful acceptance of an intolerable position would preserve for queers something other than complete abnegation endorsed by both foe and ally: “for the right wing the nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left, nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification.”22 Edelman’s argument, in its attempt to resist what might be thought of as the resistance paradigm, enables an interesting perspective from which to explore the cultural meanings that the children of Asian immigrants who began to arrive in the United States largely after 1965 have begun to assume. For years, there have been rumblings about these children, from media hype about Asian whiz kids in the 1980s to anti–Affirmative Action arguments in the 1990s that pointed to their disproportionate numbers in colleges and universities. And now, over a decade into the new century, large numbers of these children are becoming full-­fledged adults and occupying professional positions of their own. Some of the earliest popular first-­person attempts to make sense of what their coming of age might mean have favored an accommodating stance. Most notably, in his memoir The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, the former speechwriter for the Clinton administration and graduate of Harvard Law School, Eric Liu, repeats what has already been said about the most visible of his generation: they are uniformly privileged and well educated; little differentiates them from their professional white peers; race is only a residual concern for them (not having felt the sharp pain of de jure discrimination nor in some cases de facto prejudice); to be perceived as Americans is more important than whatever attenuated ties they might have to the Asian countries from which their forebears may have departed; and their experiences are merely the most contemporary, albeit accelerated, iteration of the immigrant narrative as told by successive waves of ethnic Europeans. Rather than reject these claims outright as an uncritical retelling of the ethnic bildungsroman, which they surely are, it is interesting to linger for a moment over the consequences of accepting these descriptions at face value. By accepting what Liu says as accurate of at least some individual experiences, one can begin to see how members of this elite group are 166 • Chapter Six

remarkable exactly because they fit so neatly—perhaps too neatly—into the ideal of mainstream American life. At a time when everyone seems to consider themselves aggrieved, a number of the children of Asian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the last third of the twentieth century seem effortlessly to claim the mantle of a national ideal. “I don’t mean,” Liu writes, “that my parents told me to act like an American. That’s partly the point: they didn’t tell me to do anything except be a good boy.”23 As Wendy Brown has observed, without the ideal which Liu and his cohort seem willingly to embody, “politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion.”24 Such identities are therefore “wounded attachments” to the extent that they allow one to be defined as, for lack of a better term, victimized because cast outside the glow of an ideal and deprived of the material rewards that such a glow entails. So focused are these attachments on their sense of dwelling in the malignant shadow of this ideal, Brown asserts, they become dependent on it for their very self-­definition. If so, what does it mean to have an identity defined as an embodiment of what injures because ideal? What does it mean for a member of a racial minority to be a “good boy”? Or, as Vijay Prashad asks, “How does it feel to be a solution?”25 This is the question that Ashima is literally giving birth to at the start of The Namesake. Although her son, Gogol, is not white, he might as well be. Although he is not sexist or homophobic, his gender and sexual identity never put him at risk of feeling the punch of such attitudes. Although he does not look down on his fellow South Asian Americans and other minorities who cannot share in his professional middle-­class fortuity, he cannot claim special knowledge about what it means to be, say, a Bangladeshi taxi driver in New York City.26 Gogol is not a member of a model minority, the fulfillment of the ethnic bildungsroman, if this is a reference to the ways in which Asian Americans as a race are esteemed as self-­sufficient, hardworking, culture-­bound, and family oriented in order to berate other racial minorities in the United States who supposedly do not exhibit these traits. Rather, he is an exemplary representative of the children of post­1965 Asian immigrants of professional background as they have been lovingly and anxiously fantasized into existence over the past several decades. Against the expectations Gogol embodies, all groups, including whites and other Asian Americans, are starting to feel berated. If queers are reproductive futurism’s negation, as Edelman asserts, then a select group of children of Asian immigrants are its objects of veneration. They are the Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 167

Child on whose behalf contemporary politics is mobilized even as others feel the sharp pinch of never being fully capable of living up to the potential the Child embodies or, worse, are targeted in the name of preserving this potential—as, ironically, many South Asian Americans, regardless of profession or class standing, have been since 9/11. There is, to be sure, little that is queer about Gogol, if by queer one means a “negativity opposed to every form of social viability” or even the more capacious definition offered by Kathryn Bond Stockton, who builds creatively on Edelman’s argument, of a “protogay child”: “This is a purely retrospective application, or so I have claimed, because all children are first presumed to be straight and are only allowed to come out as gay, or queer, or homosexual when it is thought they can know their sexuality.”27 And yet it might be said that there is at least something strange—a word that Stockton repeatedly uses to demarcate a queerness that coheres around all children who have been, according to her, “queered by color” or “queered by innocence” and hence not exactly queer in the sense that it is usually understood now, but somehow closely, even metonymically, related—in the vigor with which he is expected to get along, to fit in, and to excel at whatever he is doing.28 Therefore, before readers proceed to celebrate the privileges afforded in being an object of veneration, they should pause to consider how Gogol’s example hints at how occupying the position of the Child, always presumed to be straight but also strange enough to border on the queer, might in fact be as much of a burden as being cast in the roll of the villain. Neither villain nor Child is allowed to live, both being always oriented toward “a future that’s unattainable because always still to come,” and therefore neither is ever more than a placeholder for what is missing in the present.29 The Child is a magical solution to the multiple crises afflicting a strong sense of nationhood. Gogol rarely seems like a child because he is laden so completely by the expectation that he will achieve the future that he supposedly already embodies, while simultaneously always appearing childlike in the way others treat him.30 From birth, Gogol is thrust into the position of the Child, and even as he grows into young adulthood he finds he cannot quite shake off the childlike demeanor of his allegorical social position, and he continues therefore to struggle with the sometimes unpleasant feeling of being a marionette whose lifelikeness distracts from the strings pulled by a puppeteer. When the baby Gogol is six months old, family and friends gather around him to predict his future, in a ritual that is clearly meant to be an exercise in alle168 • Chapter Six

gory. Before him are placed several items, each representative of the person he might become: “Most children will grab at one of them, sometimes all of them, but Gogol touches nothing. . . . Gogol frowns, and his lower lip trembles. Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.”31

Refusing to Choose

As much as this incident points to how much others wish Gogol, playfully, to conform to their expectations about what shape his life should take, it is also possible to see his refusal to choose as an unwillingness to bend to the logic of magic that is at the core of allegoresis. His refusal is an expression of obstinate passivity. Gogol is a character who rejects what is offered to him, who no matter how he is prompted turns away from making a choice that is really no choice. In this ceremony, others are guiding his hand, demanding he become what others would like him to become, reflecting what they believe more than what Gogol himself might want. The encouragements he receives to reach one way or another merely betray the prejudices and desires of the adults around him: “‘Put the money in his hands!’ someone in the group calls out. ‘An American boy must be rich!’ ‘No!’ his father protests. ‘The pen. Gogol, take the pen.’”32 At this moment, Gogol is nothing more than a screen on which others project their social meanings, reading interpretations that have no active intention behind them. Gogol’s response might therefore be understood as a precocious refusal to reflect back to others what they expect of him. He models for the reader the difficulty of refusing the call of allegoresis, since any interpretation could be an acquiescence to this call just as any movement Gogol makes at six months of age might be understood as portending the continuity of his present self with an avowedly illusionary future. Like the objects placed before Gogol when he is an infant, romantic partners are also presented in The Namesake as full of allegorical meaning because representative of the promise reproductive futurism makes through “the fantasy of heterosexual love, and the reproductive Couple it elevates.”33 Namely, this promise gestures again to the Child, which the union between two people of the opposite sex will someday presumably conceive, as well as the future that Child is meant to secure for the present. Unlike the game his elders played with Gogol when he was six months old, however, the romantic choices he makes provide no pleasure in the play Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 169

that allegory can provide. Romance more closely resembles the experience of Ashima’s pregnancy, an act of allegoresis that imposes its meaning on a form that does not signal this meaning. Gogol’s first girlfriend, Ruth, for example, seems a personification of ruth, a descriptor that comes from the Book of Ruth in the Bible. Now largely signaling “compassion” and “pity” directed at another, the word ruth might suggest the kind of relationship Gogol will have with her. That the secondary, now rare, meaning of ruth is “regret” or “sorrow” might also suggest, even before its gets there, where the relationship will end for Gogol. His second girlfriend, more serious than the first if only because she has taken full possession of Gogol as one might an adored object found at an out-­of-­the-­way boutique, effortlessly and with assurance pulls him into the almost careless habits of her affluent, hypersophisticated lifestyle: “‘It’s Maxine. From last night,’ she says, not bothering to apologize for waking him. . . . Then, without awkwardness or pause, she invites him to dinner at her place.”34 If Ruth represents a form of ruth, Max, as everyone calls her, can be said to represent a maximalism associated with the Anglo-­ Protestant establishment. Contrary to self-­contradictory claims made on behalf of this establishment, it is, according to Lahiri, neither an indomitable rushing river into which all other cultural groups must learn to swim nor a beleaguered waterway on the verge of irreparable contamination. If Max’s family is any indication, the Anglo-­Protestant establishment exerts its influence on American culture from a distance, at once removed from its conflicts and simultaneously irrelevant to it. From this safe distance, immigrants from nonwhite countries are less likely to be threatening and more likely to be prized for the color they add to the scenery. For those who make up this scenery, it can be difficult to determine which—being seen as threat or prize—is the more insulting. When Max’s parents, a lawyer and a curator at the Met, leave for the family summer seat in New Hampshire, Gogol remains behind with Max to inhabit an enormous brownstone in Chelsea, immersing himself in the benign neglect of an upper-­middle-­class Anglo-­Protestant establishment. Despite the apparent freedom of this arrangement, Gogol cannot help but be aware of having assimilated into a milieu that willingly makes room for him but in ways that leave him feeling perpetually childlike, in need of tutoring, grateful for the opportunities he has been given, and handling objects that do not belong to him. “Now that it is just the two of them it seems to him,” Lahiri writes, “more than ever, that they are living together. And yet for 170 • Chapter Six

some reason it is dependence, not adulthood, he feels.”35 One can easily imagine how attractive and easy assimilation into such a life might be for Gogol. Why wouldn’t he be willing to turn his back, not without a little embarrassment, from the substantial but modest and slightly tacky materialism of his family’s immigrant life? When Gogol visits his parents with Max for the first and only time, he imagines he sees his upbringing through her eyes: “Once they get off at his parents’ exit he senses that the landscape is foreign to her: the shopping plazas, the sprawling brick-­faced public high school from which he and [his sister] Sonia graduated, the shingled houses, uncomfortably close to one another, on their grassy quarter-­acre plots. The sign that says children at play.”36 The road sign is almost too perfectly allegorical from Gogol’s perspective, for this is how Max might characterize his family. The third girlfriend, Bridget, hardly counts as one, since she is merely a fling, a married woman with whom Gogol commits adultery out of idleness and boredom, his relationship to Max having fallen apart in the wake of his father’s sudden death. Bridget thus personifies “the spare and transient” quality of many relationships in the United States, which Gogol’s mother succinctly observed in the maternity ward while waiting to deliver him. This quality entails a constant mobility that does not allow for a cultural formation to emerge: “They do not have each other’s phone numbers. He does not know exactly where she lives. She always goes with him to his apartment. She never spends the night.”37 Bridget thus figures what both Ruth and Max cannot—a mainstream that operates as an absence, a lack of social connectedness and unique particularity. Bridget’s brief presence in the novel is representative of how difficult it is to assimilate into something that is impersonal and not meant to last. Bridget is literally a “bridge” between Gogol’s earlier romantic relationships and the one he will form in the last part of the novel. She is also a bridge between the serial monogamy that has marked Gogol’s dating life and his encounter with adultery, which itself becomes fat with other meanings as the novel progresses. In contrast to the unsatisfactory choices these three romantic partners embody, Gogol’s fourth girlfriend and eventual wife allegorizes the ethnic alternative. Moushumi is, at least in Gogol’s mind and certainly in the minds of his Bengali elders, the figure of allegiance to his ethnic group, the daughter of an old family friend with the right kind of background and an uncomplicated familiarity. But even as Gogol turns to her as if he were turning himself over to one of his own kind, he is aware that he is Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 171

once again making a choice that is not a choice, a fulfillment of an expectation, which is all too reminiscent of when, as a six-­month-­old infant, he was made to face his destiny in the form of symbol-­laden objects. As his mother makes all the plans for the wedding, he ruminates: “It feels a little strange to be so uninvolved in his own wedding, and he is reminded of the many other celebrations in his life, all the birthdays and graduation parties his parents had thrown when he was growing up, in his honor, attended by his parents’ friends, occasions from which he had always felt at a slight remove.”38 No matter how adult his response, Gogol experiences it as a loss of control. If what is left of the assimilation narrative has made him feel like a dependent, so has ethnic allegiance, an alternative that feels increasingly like no alternative whatsoever. Moushumi is the first of the two to realize a person cannot remain fully satisfied inhabiting such a position, a safe resolution to a problem that is probably better not thought of as a problem, since resolution suggests completion, an end to struggle, a willful surrender of hard-­won personal agencies. These qualities are the opposite of what Moushumi desires. Namely, she wants a release from expectation, the kind of liberation that postwar critical theorists have repeatedly found in the unraveling of the sign and in the embrace of a hard anti-­identity position, a rebellion against meaning that seems the same as a rebellion against oppression. The will to turn away from expectation and from the demands of a future based on the necessity of perpetuating the past leads Moushumi repeatedly to the decision she made as a younger woman: to escape from being represented in a certain way and to embrace a liberation that has become almost synonymous with sexual license. As the narrator observes about her youth before she met Gogol: Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever. . . . Suddenly it was easy, and after years of being convinced she would never have a lover she began to fall effortlessly into affairs. With no hesitation, she had allowed men to seduce her in cafés, in parks, while she gazed at paintings in museums. She gave herself openly, completely, not caring about the consequences.39 172 • Chapter Six

Her willingness to be seduced, driven by the same impulse that led her to France, is viewed in this passage—and later when she falls into an adulterous affair with an old, and older, lover—as the opposite of allegoresis, a willful denial of social arrangements meant to reproduce the future as a copy of the present. It is also a rejection of identity. When she plunges herself into bodily pleasures, she comes as close as she ever has to a feeling of freedom. Many, of course, would judge her for the sexual choices she makes, in particular her choice to violate the conventions of marriage (something which women continue to be more harshly condemned for than men). It may be, as Laura Kipnis argues, that adultery feels like such a radical break for freedom exactly because there are so many who, at least publicly, demand allegiance to monogamy. Against the “welter of ideological, social, and juridical commandments” that might bring down shame, recrimination, and moral condemnation on Moushumi for the sexual risks she takes, readers should hold fast to the feeling of liberation she finds in the identity-­abnegating arms of her lovers, appreciating it as a freedom— no matter how “momentary”—that is elsewhere so cheaply sold as expressions of an empty political piety.40 This freedom, as Kipnis points out, might also be the affective germ of new social relations, “as-­yet-­unknown forms of gratification and fulfillment.”41 The personified meanings of the romantic choices Gogol and, eventually, Moushumi encounter might thus be considered as reflecting allegoresis’s simplifications, the reduction of experience to a highly codified other meaning that is attractive because it is not subtle and because it transforms the messiness, the uncertainty, the heart-­pounding risks, the numerous disappointments, the painful lows, and the just as painful highs that are an abiding part of these characters’ experiences into something safe. The power of allegoresis is found precisely in that it is able to bring an escaping meaning under symbolic control in the same way that magical thinking—in a nod to Joan Didion—fulfills a wish for power in the face of powerlessness. If you reach the door before you can count to ten, you will get the job that you covet. In the same way, if you marry a woman named Ruth, she will show you compassion and mercy, or perhaps provide occasion for regret or sorrow. Such forms of magical thinking recall Michel Foucault’s comments on logophobia in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, given at a moment in his career when he seemed to be looking ahead to his work on biopolitics: “There is undoubtedly in Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 173

our society, and I would not be surprised to see it in others, though taking different forms and modes, a profound logophobia, a sort of dumb fear of these events, of this mass of spoken things, of everything that could possibly be violence, discontinuous, querulous, disordered even and perilous in it, of the incessant, disorderly buzzing of discourse.”42 This passage illuminates how the conflict The Namesake narrates might arise from the tension between the expectation that one will accept the constraints of discourse and the desire to refuse such magical thinking in favor of a present defined by a more unpredictable future, to open oneself up, in other words, to “that which gives rise to the chance series” that have led one to where one is and to conceive of oneself as who one is.43 How to occupy such a present, one self-­reflexively aware of the accidental nature of the exteriority providing the conditions of one’s possibility, is, of course, a more difficult intellectual task than highlighting the operations of allegoresis when they are present, since any attempt to define such a present, to articulate it as a form of discourse, is itself already a form of allegorical interpretation. At the same time, as the narrator of The Namesake reminds its readers, such a present cannot remain contained by such a hermeneusis, for the “things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”44

A Direction of One’s Choosing

The women in the novel are not the only ones who struggle with the impositions of allegoresis. The name of Gogol’s father, Ashoke, means “without sorrow.” This is fitting because he, more than any other character in the novel and certainly more than Gogol, is most at ease with himself, at peace with the decisions he has made and the life he has chosen. He is also luckier than the other characters—indeed, more so than almost all the characters in the entirety of what Lahiri has thus far written—because he was able to choose the course of his own life, rather than follow the path that was laid out for him. On a return trip from Jamshedpur to Calcutta, the train he was riding suddenly derailed and, as a result, he was partly thrown out a window. Only by chance did rescuers find him, and later, in his family home, recovering from his extensive injuries, he thought about a conversation he had had with another passenger, now deceased, who advised him, “See as much of the world as you can.”45 He decided to do exactly this, to apply for a fellowship to study engineering abroad and in 174 • Chapter Six

this way to choose “another sort of future” than the one imagined for him by his parents.46 Even though he experienced something grievous, a physically traumatic event that left him prostrate for months and limping ever after, he is without sorrow because the trauma freed him from the life that he would otherwise, unthinkingly, have assumed as his own. He is wounded, but not attached to his wound. The same cannot be said about Gogol, whose name carries the trace of chance occurrence, but not the freedom it has afforded his father. The book Ashoke was reading on the train, the pages of which fluttered in the wind and caught the attention of rescue workers on the verge of giving up, was Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” When his mother’s formal name for their son is lost in the mail, never to be recovered, Ashoke decides to name their son after the author of the book that saved his life, giving him a formal name intended for use only within the intimate circles of family and friends. Gogol dislikes his name because it makes him stand out too much, being neither Anglo-­American nor Indian, and he eventually changes his name to Nikhil (a playful twist on his namesake’s first name). For most of his life, Gogol has tried to distance himself from the name he was given and from the story that is attached to it, enacting through the play of his name the struggle against allegoresis dramatized by his romantic choices and alluded to by the title of the novel. At the end of The Namesake, after his father has passed away and his mother is preparing to move out of the house where he has grown up, Gogol finds himself reading the copy of “The Overcoat” that his father had given to him as a present long before. The reader is clearly meant to consider the significance of this story in relation to the story of Gogol’s life. “The Overcoat” concerns one Akaky Akakievich, a clerk who wants nothing more than to make copies of official government documents by hand. Within his limited domain, he is the master of his reality, creating with his hands, word by word, the official world that others who receive his copies will have no choice but to accept. It is a reality of laws, conventions, formality, and symbols. They are as binding on the lives of the citizens as the clothes they wear define the physical reality of their bodily movements. This world of copies is upset when Akaky discovers he must replace his threadbare coat. Carried away by a drunken mercurial tailor, Akaky is convinced that he must buy a new overcoat. Impoverished, he forces himself to lead an even more meager life than before in order to save the money to do so, and becomes fixated on the splendor of his new Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 175

article of clothing after he eventually purchases it. His new overcoat attracts at first positive social attention to Akaky, and then negative attention when a group of men steal the coat from him. Obsessed, Akaky seeks help in recovering the coat, leading eventually to a meeting with a general who is known primarily as a “Person of Consequence.” The general insults him for taking up his time with such a trivial matter, and soon after, stricken by the severity of the reprimand he receives, Akaky dies of a fever. His new overcoat thus transports Akaky into an unpredictable exteriority of predatory social relations, criminal behavior, and bureaucratic power that negates any form of agency he may have possessed before. The world outside his own is scary, beyond his control, crushing in the obvious indifference with which it regards a nonperson like Akaky. The story concludes with a supernatural turn as a necessary response to such irregularity, as Akaky haunts the “Person of Consequence” whose behavior toward him in life has mortified him to death.47 In this way, Akaky extracts a small amount of vengeful justice from beyond the grave. This work, which frames the narrative of The Namesake by setting it in motion and being invoked at its end, captures the petty absurdity of the troubles that Gogol has with his name, the way in which he decides to have it changed legally to Nikhil only to find out, in a tearful exchange between father and son, why his father had originally given him the name. Like the tragedy of being robbed of his overcoat is for Akaky, the miscommunication about Gogol’s name seems enormous only to the individuals affected, just as the casual racism of an insignificant character like Pamela, whom Gogol meets at a moment of forced socializing in New Hampshire, might be painful only to the one who must endure it: “I mean, you must never get sick.” “Actually, that’s not true,” he says, slightly annoyed. . . . “But you’re Indian,” Pamela says, frowning. “I’d think the climate wouldn’t affect you, given your heritage.”48 As ordinary as the life Akaky has led before being forced to buy a new overcoat may be, there is something about this life that is worth preserving, that deserves to be grieved when lost, and that requires reprisal against the person who, enamored by his own importance, must inflate himself by demeaning another. In a similar way, it is difficult to dismiss the exchange between Gogol and Pamela too quickly. Pamela’s casual racism reveals a deep-­seated, and all-­too-­often encountered, uncertainty over how the 176 • Chapter Six

status of even the most privileged children of 1965 registers in the social settings they are coming to occupy. No matter how much they might wish to belong, the children of 1965 are marked as outsiders, a shadow of doubt that brings into slightly sharper relief the contradiction that Gogol embodies at such moments—that between the immigrant as threat to national security, which Mayor Giuliani’s police commissioner invoked when he uttered the phrase “taxi terrorists” even before 9/11, and the immigrant as founding myth of the nation, one shored up by successive legislative refinements that carefully gave preference to the immigration of specific kinds of professionals.49 If the select children of 1965 have found material and professional success, it is because the state has given them a firm push. One of the most graphic examples of the contradiction created by this Janus-­faced attitude toward immigration can be found in the fact that more “people entered the United States as highly skilled workers in the fiscal year 2001 than in any year in American history, but more people also died that year in trying to enter the United States illegally than in any other year for which we have records.”50 Those on the former side of this social equation might feel a lingering sense of uncertainty comparable to the one evoked by The Namesake as it turns in its last chapter toward the future. Lahiri brings intense attention to form: the verb tense begins in the present, then switches repeatedly between the past and the future, until, by the end, the future dominates. One moment in particular stands out in the shuttling of tenses: The cool air is pleasant on his face after his hours on the train. He’d slept most of the journey to Boston, the conductor poking him awake once they’d reach South Station, and he was the only person left in the compartment, the last to get off. He had slept soundly, curled up on two seats, his book unread, using his overcoat as a blanket, pulled up to his chin. . . . He must help his mother pack her things, settle her accounts. They will drive her to Logan and see her off as far as airport security will allow. And then the house will be occupied by strangers, and there will be no trace that they were ever there, no house to enter, no name in the telephone directory.51 The image of Gogol stepping off a train, where he has been cocooned reassuringly in his overcoat (the mention of which will signal polysemous meaning only a few pages later, when the novel ends—alas, all too neatly—with Gogol reading “The Overcoat”), lulled by the back-­and-­forth Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction • 177

motion of his compartment, only to face the chill of the tasks that lie before him, is breathtaking, not least because it recalls the moment when Gogol’s father came close to dying in a train accident. The image quietly evokes the futility of Gogol’s travels as he returns along permanent tracks that he has traveled many times in the course of his story, never once, unlike his father, having veered into bodily catastrophe, yet always feeling, again unlike his father, somehow unfulfilled as a person, oddly too much in place, located along static vectors of living, directionless because so overly guided by what has been expected of him. Rail travel has been safe and dependable, requiring nothing of Gogol, entailing no risks. It suggests a being still in motion (reminiscent of the set of images that concludes Tomine’s Shortcomings), which succinctly captures Gogol’s predicament at this moment in a largely uneventful life circumscribed by the allegoresis of reproductive futurism—the felt need to head off in a direction of his own choosing, to imagine “another sort of future,” without any firm idea about how he should do this.

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Chapter 7

Becoming Planetary

The huge investments in travel and communication technologies that have marked the start of the twenty-­first century have also made people more acutely aware of what Rajini Srikanth describes as “the past memory and future promise of connections with other lands.”1 That is, even for those who do not travel, distances have shrunk, and the world has become as a result more intimate. This compression of the world along vectors of time and space has put an enormous pressure on contemporary writers, so that the narratives found in their works ubiquitously jump from location to location, ceaselessly occupy one perspective and then another, switching from the first-­person singular to a free indirect style that bounds from character to character without respect for nationality or language, and jumble past events with present occurrences. Unusual among writers who are interested in capturing a simultaneity of social experience made possible by time-­space compression are narratives resolutely staying within a given moment that follow the actions of a character in a chronologically transparent succession of events uninterrupted by shifts in perspective, breaks in the text, flashbacks, and analepses. As Rachel Adams has pointed out, “If postmodernism is governed by a sense of paranoia, which suggests that these connections may be figments of an individual imagination, the literature of globalization represents them as a shared perception of community whereby, for better or worse, populations in other parts of the world are inevitably affected by events in another.”2 Calling this an “American literary globalism,” one which supersedes the prior dominant literary aesthetic loosely known as postmodernism, Adams enumerates who she thinks are its outstanding contribu-

tors: “Many of these authors—Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Chang Rae Lee [sic], Junot Diaz, Ruth Ozeki, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, Bharati Mukherjee, Susan Choi, Oscar Hijuelos, Edwidge Danticat, and many others—were either the children of migrants or were themselves migrants who had come to the US as a result of the global upheavals of the past two decades. Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-­American modernism or the politics of the Cold War, their fiction reacts against aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents.”3 The novel that for Adams exemplifies the move from postmodernism to an American literary globalism is Karen Tei Yamashita’s third novel, Tropic of Orange, which imagines Los Angeles as a meeting place between the national and global. Interestingly, Adams has little to say about Yamashita’s earlier two works, both of which were just as determinedly global in perspective, but located in Brazil, which in turn acts as the (quite literal) magnetic center, the place toward which people migrate and from which they imagine the world. Turning to Yamashita’s earlier novels, one finds the same interest in the themes and formal experiments that mark off the phenomenon Adams elucidates from an older aesthetic movement, but with an important difference: the globalism evoked in Yamashita’s earlier novels pushes America into its margins, its influence felt from a distance and, when mentioned at all, made a single strand of a more complex text. By doing so, Yamashita’s first novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in particular imagines what shifting and porous borders characterized by time-­space compression might look like if the colossus of United States were not at the center, dominating that moment. Just as important, the novel not only calls attention to the ways that globalization knits together the experiences of far-­flung populations but also, and with even more urgency, how globalization puts all these populations in danger as capitalism relentlessly exploits both bodies and environments. Because Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is set outside the United States and made determinedly a part of the Global South, the novel seems somehow more acutely aware of this connection. The novel thus offers a way to think about time-­space compression that at once encourages a geographically non-­American perspective and draws attention to the ways this compression puts both ecological and social balances at risk. This ecological way of thinking is, in other words, a complex

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view of a phenomenon that can neither be simply celebrated nor simply reviled. Although published in 1990, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest nevertheless looks forward to writings by Asian Americans, and others, that continue many of the same formal experiments that Adams persuasively argues are part of an emerging aesthetic movement. So it is not a stretch here to consider how this earlier novel helps readers to understand another debut work, Sonya Chung’s Long for This World, published in 2010. This novel is solidly within the milieu of a twenty-­first century that its readers are just learning how to interpret. Chung’s novel has been selected for attention here because it fits so well into the mainstream of a moment full of aesthetic striving to capture a simultaneity of social experience made possible by a world grown smaller. Being focused less on the geopolitical polarization of the world and the paranoia that fueled it (characteristic of twentieth-­century literary postmodernism), and more on the thoughtful turning into narrative of a world compressed along vectors of time and space, both Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Long for This World “imagine otherwise,” to borrow from Kandice Chuh’s borrowing from Avery Gordon.4 As their formal similarities suggest, both novels are invested in producing a smooth space not striated by a global imaginary, an act of deterritorialization that imagines less an American globalism and more a planetary becoming, one that involves a keen interest in social relations and the ecological concerns that are increasingly important factors in understanding those relations.

The Simultaneity of Social Experience

How does one convey, capture, depict a simultaneity that has become such a salient feature of the world as daily apprehended by so many of its inhabitants without at the same time losing sight of a finite planet which everyone must share? Critics have labored over different aspects of this question in their collective discussion of Yamashita’s novels, which, in turn, are notable for precociously anticipating how literary discussions would change. About her first novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Yamashita tells an interviewer: “It wasn’t Asian American feminist literature; it wasn’t magic realism; it wasn’t science fiction. . . . That was and still is my problem. I think a lot of Asian American authors or authors of color find

Becoming Planetary • 181

merchandising their work difficult because bookstores and publishers and publicists are looking for niches for these books.”5 For her readers as well, the question of how she fits into critical categories has been a recurring theme, with critics debating whether this novel in particular is an example of Asian American literature, or a part of a transhemispheric imaginary, or a forward-­looking environmentalist fable.6 In addition to American literary globalism, Tropic of Orange, published just a few years after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, has also become the prime example of the transnationalization of Asian American literature’s intrinsic interethnic creative impulse, a rapprochement between ethnic specificity and universalist discourses, and thus an illustration of a literary form that is at once transnational and locally contingent.7 Overall, the critical discussion of Yamashita’s fiction suggests a gradual shift in reader priorities, from one which valued classification (especially at a time when Asian Americans were producing so few works) to one celebrating the very quality that had made it so difficult for the author to get her writing published when she first started out. The following analysis contributes to this rich, unfolding discussion by arguing that what accounts for this shift is how Yamashita’s fiction models for readers a literary attempt to capture a simultaneity of social experience that does not lose sight of environmental concerns. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, in particular, beautifully fulfills the need to pay attention to the social and the ecological, telling the stories of characters from across the world who find enormous material success in the Amazon at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. It begins with Mané Pena, who “had wandered the forest like the others—fishing, tapping rubber, and collecting Brazil nuts.” Stumbling into a “clearing where one of his rubber trees used to be,” he finds government men busily remaking parts of the forest into a farm, which they promptly sign over to him. The man who officially hands title of the land to Mané tells him, “Whole new way of life, Seu Mané. Meantime, if I were you, I’d get some barbed wire, fence it properly. Congratulations.”8 The specialized help that is promised to get him started as a farmer never arrives. Instead, rain comes pouring down, and without the trees to hold the earth in place, the soil washes away. What is revealed is a mysterious black substance, nearly indestructible, “with a slick shiny surface” that stretches endlessly across the recently denuded landscape.9 This substance, called the Matacão, soon becomes a worldwide sensation, drawing scientists, tourists, opportunists, religious adherents, and others 182 • Chapter Seven

like a magnet; it is fitting therefore that its substance, a form of plastic produced as the world’s waste is pushed down into the mantle of the Earth and is acted on by poorly understood geological forces, turns out to have actual magnetic properties. In a related plot development, another in a series of delirious multiplications of plot and character that evoke simultaneity, Mané had also discovered only a few years before that the touch of a feather has amazing healing powers. The narrator, who is a plastic ball spinning wondrously in front of a Japanese immigrant man, muses, “Of course, it was not as good as sex, but what feather could compete with that? It had worked wonders on his sleepless children and was completely natural. It was like those copper bracelets everyone used for rheumatoid arthritis: if it didn’t help, it sure didn’t hurt.”10 Does the mysterious Matacão perhaps have something to do with this newly discovered power in the feather? Or is this discovery just one more episode in a novel bursting with such magical events? Certainly, a world where the Matacão is possible could also make room for a feather that confers as much calm as cigarettes do but without the noxious side effects, that makes one feel more energetic, that cures certain minor ailments, and that does all of these things while being ornamentally pleasing. As a large corporation in New York soon realizes to its immediate fiscal benefit, the feather is a perfect commodity—all natural, as addictive as nicotine but perfectly healthy to the user, and easily packaged, transported, and marketed. Together, the Matacão and the feather become more than clever plot devices allowing a host of unusual characters to meet at a site of feverish environmental and sociopolitical concern. Instead, they are important tropes for imagining the relationship between nature and artifice. The Matacão figures what may easily be the most artificial of substances, plastic, as something found deep in the earth, a natural deposit of sorts that can also become, as it does in the course of the novel’s story, a natural resource equal in value to the other rich natural resources mined in the Brazilian rainforests. The feather, by contrast, is a natural object produced without direct human intervention that becomes, as a result of the powers it is purported to contain, a kind of technology, almost as alluring as the small consumer electronics that have become the coveted objects of a self-­ proclaimed global age. Through an alchemical process of intense marketing, the feather becomes denatured, turned into a finished commodity with a use-­value completely shorn from its source, and as much a finished Becoming Planetary • 183

good as the plastic mined from the Matacão is a raw material. Such role reversals—when what is most artificial becomes most natural and what is most natural becomes artificial (striated becoming smooth, smooth becoming striated)—eventually collapse the distinction between natural and artificial in the novel. As a result, the reader is left wondering where the artificial begins and the natural ends in a world that has been wholly remade physically by human activities. Even the most pristine of places on Earth, it turns out, have been transformed by these activities even before its outward appearances are rearranged. To describe something as natural, reducing its becoming to a state, has its utility, a way of seeing fully exploited by the corporation known primarily through its initials, ggg. An employee at ggg realizes how profitable the feather as commodity could be. He therefore sets up business on the tourist edge of the Matacão and hires Mané to authenticate the feather’s power, so that its popularity might be understood as a product of the discourse spun around the apparent goodness of its innovator: “This was, someone said, science in the guise of folklore.”11 As the novel progresses, so does Mané’s fortunes as a “guru” of the feather, which has attained ubiquitous global popularity. But such success comes with a steep price. For Mané, it is social isolation: his wife, who finds the glare of the spotlight unbearable, retreats with their youngest children to the small town where she was born. The older children have also “slipped off one by one to a variety of jobs in distant cities in Brazil.”12 And another central character in the novel named Chico Paco, a young man from the seashore whose pilgrimage to the Matacão to fulfill the promises of a neighbor has made him a successful radio personality, could not visit his old friend: “It was not the same, not the same full house of poor but generous people who shared everything they had. And, too, Chico Paco was now so busy with Radio Chico.”13 Beyond these obvious personal losses, which alone would make the novel appear to buy into the “guise of folklore” that makes Mané such an ideal company spokesperson (with material success comes alienation; the only remedy to alienation is a return to a simpler lifestyle rooted in the land), the popularity of the feather also causes unforeseeable ecological problems. The price of feathers starts to go up, and with the rising price a black market also emerges. Throughout the Amazon and elsewhere, birds are being killed and left featherless and their plumage sold to companies more unscrupulous than ggg, which has wisely secured most of the legiti184 • Chapter Seven

mate supplies in exclusive deals, and to ggg as well, whose buyers sometimes have a hard time passing up a good deal. In response, “the list of petitioners was long, everyone from the membership of the Audubon Society to groups of schoolchildren in Ranger Rick Clubs, all concerned about the preservation and protection of birds, specially those nearing extinction. There were also vegetarians in leather jackets and tree lovers with digital sketch pads, who often picketed Mané’s lectures, accosting him with wild threats, following him everywhere, holding candlelight vigils and making videos of performance-­art pieces in front of his house.”14 In this passage, and in several more like it, it is clear that while the most benign use of a natural object, once commodified, can become yet one more rationale for plundering the natural world, Yamashita is also interested in satirizing the activist environmentalist response to it. Petitions, public gatherings, more creative forms of assertive protest, and even the turn to violence take on a festive air, as if the occasion for such actions gives rise to social possibilities, opportunities to gain fame, and, most important, the right to feel moral outrage. All of this suggests—at the risk of participating in what Frederick Buell calls the “outcasting” of environmentalists by various conservative groups in the United States—a tension at play in this narrative between those who can assert their dominance over the fantastic occurrences that swirl around them, a global perspective, and those who adapt to these same occurrences with a humbler sense of their personal agency, a planetary one.15 While Mané might seem at first glance to belong to the former category, he remains a passive character who keeps stumbling on the most important discoveries of the novel—the Matacão and the feather—and who attains his high level of success mostly by accepting what is handed to him. “To have one’s life changed forever, three times,” the narrator observes after Mané’s transformation from rubber tapper to farmer to founder of the feather, “amounted in Mané’s mind to being like one of those actors on tv who slipped from soap opera to soap opera and channel to channel, being reincarnated into some new character each time.”16 And like an actor on such a television program, Mané plays a part that someone else has written for him. By way of contrast, the activist environmentalists demonstrate their participation in the former grouping, as they signify through their actions a belief that they can make a difference in the world through simple gestures. Signing petitions, participating in protests, and related activities allow them to give expression to this belief, and by doing so also to claim Becoming Planetary • 185

a certain epistemological power to know what is objectively good for the Earth. Not shy about connecting her social satire to the ways that environmentalist discourses often operate in the world, Yamashita introduces the phenomenon of the Matacão, the origins of which remain a mystery until the end. As the narrator observes, almost as if Yamashita’s authorial voice is breaking into the lighter-­hearted voice of the spinning ball: Of course, the area surrounding the Matacão has been in question ever since international ecological groups discovered that the Amazon Forest was enormously photogenic and made beautiful calendars. Then, there had been the debate in the late eighties and earlier nineties about holes in the Earth’s ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. In those days, everyone, whether they understood anything about it, seemed to blame Brazil for burning down the forest and replacing oxygen-­producing plant life with roaming cattle and carbon dioxide. The big problem, people said, was that Brazil hadn’t asked permission to destroy the Earth. But who had? At one time, there was as many “save the rain forest” groups as there was lambada clubs in L.A. and New York. People were madly grinding their loins in the lascivious dance and gasping and moaning about the dying forest thousands of miles away.17 According to this passage, the Amazon is primarily important to American environmentalists because it allows them to make a strong aesthetic argument on behalf of conservation. In this way, the “photogenic” reproducibility of the forest into “beautiful calendars” renders it as much a commodity as the selling of feathers by a large corporation. The popularity of the Amazon as a potent symbol of a vanishing nature, a planetary lung slowly being hacked away by the forces of a thoughtless global progress that dangerously worsens the air quality for everyone, itself becomes what is consumed in the metropolises of the north, a cause that can be celebrated and symbolically benefited by the “moaning” of protest and pleasure. In the name of the Earth, what gets ignored are the differences in power between the Global North and the planetary south, between those who have already cut down many forests and rearranged other facets of their physical world in the relentless pursuit of modernization and those who are being cajoled into following the same path of economic development. This passage expresses anger about the obvious double standard and 186 • Chapter Seven

about the ways in which as symbol the vanishing rainforest can become another commodity, not the main message of the protest. As Yamashita makes clear in her second novel Bazil-­Maru, a sweeping account of an idealist Japanese-­Brazilian commune formed in the early twentieth century and heavily influenced by the writings of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau (and especially his novel Émile), the clearing of the forest that precedes their experiments in living and farming is something keenly to regret. “When my father talked of the sin of the immigrant,” the first of the novel’s five narrators observes, “I believe he meant this sin of clearing the forest away forever.”18 Imagining social relations anew, in other words, can often come at the cost of exploiting natural resources and destroying what cannot be recovered. Does this mean that the attempt to imagine social relations anew was not justified? And what are the costs of making no ­attempt?

Becoming Embedded in Becoming

He has lived in the United States for many years, almost as many years as he has lived in his country of birth, but still his command of its official language is mediated by distance and unfamiliarity. Its words do not roll off his tongue in quite the same way he imagines they do for someone who has been born here. But the “here” is problematic at the moment as he is taking a vacation from his immigrant life, cohabiting, by his own invitation, his brother’s Korean household; now his daughter has come to find out why he has left his wife and job as a medical doctor. Having taken her parents’ example of migration to the nth degree by moving ceaselessly from one conflict-­ridden country to another to record with her camera all the pain unfolding in these far-­flung places, his daughter is also looking for a vacation from her life. She has most recently been in Iraq, come close to dying by being too near an exploding car, and has watched her colleague lose his life. If she had been a little closer or if she had walked a little faster, she too would have died. Her hearing is slightly impaired. When she arrives, the father gazes at her; they have been apart for a long time. He is unaware of what she has recently endured: “She is beautiful, this daughter of his; which perhaps he has never quite seen before, not in this particular way. It seems an indulgent thought, and yet he understands at this moment what people mean when they say, in English, ‘She is quite becoming.’ Ah-­jin seems to be becoming—something, someone.”19 Becoming Planetary • 187

Perhaps this is a discovery only an immigrant could make. For a native speaker, the meaning of the word becoming might not seem so rich or so closely related to the other meaning of the word, which gets slightly estranged in this quotation from Sonya Chung’s debut novel Long for This World. In this passage, there is a subtle verbal shape-­shifting, from participle to gerund: “Is . . . becoming” and “to be becoming.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the former refers to a state of having arrived, a “having graceful fitness,” and the latter refers to a goal to strive for, a possibility that has yet to be achieved, a “coming to be.” The temporal oddity of these two uses of becoming is embedded in the meaning of the word itself, as becoming signifies in this instance both being fully present in a moment (“she is”) and looking forward to a future when one will be fully present (“to be”), a becoming “something, someone.” This temporal oddity is further accentuated in this passage through its juxtaposition of meanings. In the first usage, becoming is a description of someone whose beauty is captured in a person who belongs to a milieu (from the French, meaning “middle”), a surrounding that cannot easily be differentiated from the person who occupies this space. This is undoubtedly why becoming in this sense is just as often used to describe not the person but the person’s surroundings or, more often, the clothing a person wears (i.e., it is flattering but in a way that does not alter the appearance of the person wearing it). The meaning of becoming as a participle, to describe a person or a thing, enhances the sense that person and milieu are of one piece, a total belonging that shows one to be at complete ease where one happens to find oneself. But the other usage of the word, as gerund, denotes the sense that such a belonging is elusive, something that always slips into the future and out of grasp. This is certainly apt in describing a character who has been traveling the world, fearless and indifferent to personal security, who has no permanent home except an apartment that she keeps in Paris for those rare occasions when she is not working, and—to repeat a cliché about cosmopolitanism—who thus belongs everywhere because she belongs nowhere in particular. This also means, of course, that she does not ever experience a complete sense of belonging in any one place, a point the cliché tries to paper over. Regardless, the second usage—of a state of being defined less by a sense of having arrived at such a belonging and more by being in the process of arriving, a present progressive teleological state—recontextualizes the first meaning, infiltrates its peace. It suggests that the father’s observation of how his daughter is “quite becoming” 188 • Chapter Seven

cannot be separated from “becoming—something, someone.” A temporal oddity is buried in the concept, regardless of whether it is expressed as a participle or a gerund. Becoming thus necessarily refers to a present and a future, a complex flow of time described by Deleuze and Guattari (glossing a point explored by Henri Bergson) as a line as opposed to a point: “A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination. . . . A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle.”20 This sense of being in the middle, with “neither beginning nor end,” is exactly why they insist that “becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-­minoritarian.”21 To be majoritarian is already to have arrived, to be at a starting place or a terminus, but not to be in motion toward a something and a someone else. This also means that being a member of a minority, whether it be “Jews, Gypsies, etc.,” does not automatically vest one with the status of becoming: “Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-­black. Even women must become-­women. Even Jews must become-­Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state).”22 This becoming-­something, becoming-­someone is a non-­state of being of which Asian Americans are, as a consequence of their unique history, incessantly made aware. Moreover, this condition provides a way to be ­becoming–Asian American. What the father sees in Long for This World is a stillness that is found solely in motion, contingent on a sense of ease that becoming “something, someone” alone affords. In connecting the latter usage of becoming with the former, the father opens up an affective component in a concept that seems otherwise to flow through more material strata of concern, and in doing so he calls attention to how becoming can at once be minoritarian and also a kind of completion in its own right, a belonging in transitory and deterritorialized spaces that refuse reterritorialization (or at least keeps deterritorializing what gets reterritorialized)— a becoming embedded in becoming. Still, perhaps it is not exactly accurate to attribute this play of words exclusively to the father being an immigrant. Surely, even native speakers can be equally self-­reflexive about their language, especially if, like the father, they are dislodged from their usual settings, so that the altered vantage point enables even the most familiar object to appear in a different light. Why wouldn’t one’s language also begin to operate along novel lines Becoming Planetary • 189

of association if one were so displaced (if not because one has moved elsewhere, than because one’s surroundings have been altered in some way), even if it is the only language one knows? The father himself, as well, is not just an immigrant. He has a particular history, an irreducible uniqueness, a singularity, which Long for This World works to detail. And, just as important, this novel seems less focused on the experience of immigration, and more on the experience of living in a world of time-­space compression. Through the daughter’s profession, photojournalism, the novel also touches on how violently unequal the worlds being brought into such intimate proximity with one another are, the relative security of the home in Korea, more so (oddly?) than in the United States, standing in for a world insulated by wealth, education, and social status that abuts, and cannot quite keep out, the other worlds of devastating poverty, violent conflict, and societies in freefall. In terms of content, the interest in compression is signified by the plot’s refusal to remain in one place. The characters travel, meet in far-­flung places, communicate (or miscommunicate) through the use of phones and, more frequently, e-­mail. The family that the novel depicts is spatially far apart, dispersed, divided by time zones and oceans and languages and political borders, even by mental instabilities. Formally, this kind of compression is communicated by a multiplicity. Fitting precisely the formal description of contemporary novels interested in time-­space compression that begins this chapter, Long for This World jumps from one location to another, ceaselessly occupies one perspective and then another, switches between the first-­person voice of the daughter to a free indirect style that bounds from character to character without respect for nationality or language, and jumbles past events with present occurrences. The full texts of e-­mails between characters are also included between other forms of narratives, making the novel at least in part epistolary. Who is to say what an immigrant is in such a world? Even if one does not travel, like the members of the brother’s household on whom the father and daughter intrude, distances are shrunk and the world is at once vast and close by. If immigrant ceases to be a useful term to describe the perspective the father occupies when he finds his daughter becoming, then it is because—as occurs literally in Tropic of Orange—the world itself has shifted under everyone’s feet, blurring the distinction between immigrant and native. In such a circumstance, it may make more sense to talk of a becoming-­immigrant and a becoming–Asian American. 190 • Chapter Seven

Long for This World, and by extension its many peers, enacts a tireless, ongoing search for another order of connectivity that might respond to globalization as a geo-­social-­economic-­political fact without merely imitating and being complicit with globalization’s forms. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, to borrow an example from Adams’s list of notable contemporary works, the eponymous antihero, who has begun his existence as someone who possesses all the opposite qualities that the dictator Trujillo embodies in the Dominican imaginary, martyrs himself on behalf of what he calls love. It is an earthly love, rooted in his physical lust for an older woman who is also a retired sex worker, but the devotional speech he makes to love before his execution could have easily been borrowed from the tradition of religious devotional poetry: He told them [the henchmen who are about to kill him] that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybón and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same words. He told them that it was only because of her love that he’d been able to do the things that he had done, the things they could no longer stop, told them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak and about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved.23 Love, in this instance, is exactly imagined as another order of connectivity that deterritorializes the circuits of money, power, pleasure, and masculinity which have formed throughout the Dominican diaspora. It is such an enduring connection that it is imagined in otherworldly terms, a deterritorialization that cannot be reterritorialized even by death. In comparison, the Dominican diaspora itself is figured as already thoroughly reterritorialized by globalization, as in a joke that was earlier made at Oscar’s expense during a beating by the same men: “Then he blurted out, I’m an American citizen. The capitán waved away a mosquito. I’m an American citizen too. I was naturalized in the city of Buffalo, in the state of New York. I bought mine in Miami, Gorilla Grod said. Not me, Becoming Planetary • 191

Solomon Grundy lamented. I only have my residency.”24 The power of the state, which Oscar tries to invoke in saying “I’m an American citizen,” is a gesture toward the global, a striation, whereas his eventual recourse to love is something rootless, planar, smooth. If Díaz were Asian American, this would be a prime example of a becoming–Asian American (which leads one to ­wonder, extravagantly, about what might come of considering this novel as an example of becoming–Asian American, in addition to one of becoming-­immigrant, becoming-­Latino/a, becoming–Dominican ­American).25 Similarly, in Long for This World, the father looking at the daughter sees something that suggests a potential ease-­in-­motion, and not the friction that globalization routinely conjures: “She is different, he thinks; becoming. Quieter in her skin, not so anxious to go as she’s been all these years. . . . Once, after returning from a walk with Min-­yung, she seemed agitated, seeking him out with her eyes. But the moment passed. Whatever it was that may have disturbed her seemed to settle, like a cup of hot tea cooling to a soothing warmth as it goes down.”26 This search or, perhaps more appropriately, this yearning for another order of connectivity, figured in this passage as an easing of anxiety, a settling of personhood, a “becoming” that is both participle and gerund simultaneously, recalls Paul Gilroy’s insistence that there is an important distinction to be made between globalization and what he calls “planetarity.” Regularly confused terms, they “point to some of the same varieties of social phenomena” but “resonate quite differently”: “The planetary suggests both contingency and movement. It specifies a smaller scale than the global, which transmits all the triumphalism and complacency of ever-­expanding imperial universals.”27 There is, in short, something sovereign about what gets signified by globalization, a nomos that divides, restricts, hierarchalizes, and criminalizes. It is a royal epistemology, a striation. Planetarity, then, might be thought of as a different order of connection, an interrelatedness that runs along smooth surfaces, comprises multitudes, and manifests movement.

In the Anthropocene

In making this claim on behalf of the contemporary novel, as struggling to narrate a becoming planetary, one can’t help sensing in Long for This World and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a focus on the social, one that like Through the Arc of the Rain Forest offers a perspective on time-­space 192 • Chapter Seven

compression that does not exclusively privilege the United States, but that at the same time excludes the ecological. One is never asked to wonder, for instance, about the amount of oil that is required to make possible the extensive travel these novels narrate (not even when one of the main narrative traumas occurs during the Iraq War, as in Long for This World), nor to wonder how a world grown smaller through time-­space compression might endanger ecosystems as much as populations.28 These are concerns readers are not allowed to forget in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. When the end comes in the latter novel, it comes quickly. First, because of the plastic’s magnetism, the artificial feathers produced out of mined Matacão induce hallucinations, leading many users to their deaths because they come to believe that they can fly. Then, the natural feathers turn out to be carriers of “rickettsia,” which are “microorganisms that traveled via a minute species of lice, which in turn traveled via feathers.”29 The all-­ natural commodity is thus too natural, becoming the carrier of a dangerous form of typhus that kills indiscriminately, leaving only 10 percent of the population alive in its vector’s wake. The wholesale disuse of the feather in Yamashita’s novel is not enough to stop the contagion, so the Brazilian authorities take a logical leap that may be all too familiar to the reader. As they write to a pigeon enthusiast (another key character in the novel), “We are infinitely sorry for the loss you will have to suffer, but think of it, Batista, this is for the good of mankind.”30 Shortly thereafter (in a nod to Rachel Carson), the officials rain ddt down on the rainforest until every bird is dead and much of the vegetation withers. Finally, once everything in the region has become “void of insects and real living creatures,” the Matacão itself is “invaded by devouring bacteria,” until none of the plastic anywhere survives: Buildings were condemned. Entire roads and bridges were blocked off. Innocent people were caught unaware—killed or injured by falling chunks of stuff. People who stepped out in the most elegant finery made of Matacão plastic were horrified to find themselves naked at cocktail parties, undressed at presidential receptions. Cars crumbled at stop lights. Computer monitors sagged into their cpus. The credit card industry went into a panic. Worst of all, people with facial rebuilds and those who had added additional breasts and the like were privy to grotesque scenes thought only possible in horror movies.31 Becoming Planetary • 193

Rather than being in opposition or displacing each other, it turns out, artifice and nature are mutually dependent on each other. When one collapses, so does the other. The world that Yamashita thus conjures is one where such distinctions make little sense, insofar as what is a natural resource in the novel is also the most artificial, a waste byproduct produced by, of all things, the chemical manipulation of another essential natural resource, oil. In this way, both terms become deterritorialized. But even this observation relies too much on a distinction that the novel refuses. In one of the most oneiric descriptions to be found in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, which has deservedly attracted much commentary by critics, the narrator observes the discovery of a parking lot near the Matacão filled with vehicles from the fifties and sixties: “f-­86 Sabres, f-­4 Phantoms, Huey Cobras, Lear Jets and Piper Cubs, Cadillacs, Volkswagens, Dodges and an assorted mixture of gas-­guzzlers, as well as military jeeps and Red Cross ambulances.”32 As if anticipating the publication of The World without Us, Alan Weisman’s thought experiment about what might happen to the physical world should humans suddenly cease to exist, the narrator reveals that during the parking lot’s many years of inactivity “nature had moved to accommodate and make use of it.” A “rare butterfly” forms in the nests made by “vinyl seats of Fords and Chevrolets” and develops a beautiful red coloring that is “due to a steady diet of hydrated ferric oxide, or rusty water.” A “new species of mice . . . had developed suction cups on their feet that allowed them to crawl up the slippery sides and bottoms of aircraft and cars.” Because of their diet, the mice had “extremely high levels of lead and arsenic in their blood and fat” so that every predator that fed on them died, except “a new breed of bird, a cross between a vulture and a condor, that nested on propellers and pounced on the mice as they scurried out of exhaust pipes.”33 A plant that grew on the “decaying vehicles” attracted the “rare butterflies and other insects” who “fell prey to these carnivorous flowers; slipping down into those brown sacks, they were digested in a matter of minutes.”34 As if to emphasize further how important she considers the image of abandoned machines being repurposed as habitats through quick-­moving adaptation, Yamashita conjures a similar kind of takeover in Tropic of Orange. When a fiery freeway accident traps traffic along a one-­mile stretch near downtown Los Angeles, driving the homeless from the shelter they have found under a nearby overpass, they take over the automobiles. Adaptation occurs in Tropic of Orange even faster than it did in her first novel: 194 • Chapter Seven

“In a matter of minutes, life filled a vacuum, reorganizing itself in predictable and unpredictable ways.”35 For the rest of the narrative, the homeless set up residence in these makeshift dwellings, renaming streets and neighborhoods around specific arrangements of vehicles and the physical landscape of the freeway as if they are planners designing a new mixed-­ use suburban development. Businesses form spontaneously, while certain commodities—most prominently, a Mercedes with a car phone—become public property. To make a phone call, one simply waits in line. Being resilient, these developments dissolve only when the homeless are forcibly driven out by the state: “The coordinated might of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the Coast and National Guards, federal, state, and local police forces of the most militaristic of nations looked down as it had in the past on tiny islands and puny countries the size of San Bernardino and descended in a single storm.”36 In these ways, Yamashita’s fiction actively comments on a world full-­ to-­bursting with dreamlike tension between culture and nature, between human activities and the physical world, between global inequality and future catastrophes that will be visited on everyone without any respect for persons. About the typhus epidemic in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, the narrator observes: “Just as the disease would not remain with the poor, it would not be confined to the Matacão. It had become a national disaster. For the moment, most people assumed it would confine itself to the Third World. Europeans, Asians and Americans eager to see the Matacão simply rearranged their vacation plans that year. Wait until they find a vaccine, they thought. Epidemics, plagues, drought, famine, terrorism, war—all things that happened to other people, poor people in the Third World who cavorted with communism and the like.”37 As this passage illustrates, Yamashita’s fiction resonates eerily with the ways in which populations and nations who are most vulnerable to disaster keep trying to mitigate and adapt to environmental changes that human activities in toto—but disproportionately more so in the Global North—keep introducing, much like Yamashita’s imaginary fauna in the Amazon forest or the homeless in Los Angeles. As events like perennial wildfires in the Southwest, tornadoes in the Great Plains, floods along the Mississippi, searing droughts in the Deep South, earthquakes all around the Pacific Rim and in the Caribbean, and of course Hurricane Katrina, the bp Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the nuclear accident at Fukushima keep occurring, the imagination of disaster in the United States as something easily Becoming Planetary • 195

confined to “other people, poor people” is becoming ever harder to maintain, as geographic boundaries provide little refuge from what is happening to the planet as a whole. Of course, wealth and other forms of accumulated capital provide buffers from disaster, so that the effects are most often visited directly on those least capable of defending themselves. As is becoming increasingly clear, however, this advantage is a relative one. The steady pressure of severe weather in the Anthropocene— a recently coined geological term that marks the era of man’s impact on the planet—erodes wealth, strains resources, and even at times cuts across whatever protections money can buy.38 An epidemic like the typhus carried by the feather, for instance, ignores socioeconomic lines, disproportionately affecting those with least access to medical care, but nevertheless leaving no class of person unaffected. In Tropic of Orange Yamashita conjures the feeling of encroaching vulnerability by making the familiar landscape of Los Angeles and the whole region from the Southwest to the Tropic of Cancer move, condense, and rearrange in a dramatic literalization of geographical and cultural deterritorialization. As the character Buzzworm observes, “Harbor Freeway. It’s growing. Stretched this way and that. In fact, this whole business from Pico-­Union on one side to East L.A. this side and South Central over here, it’s pushing out. Damn if it’s not growing into everything. If it don’t stop, it could be the whole enchilada.”39 And so, even when the privileged in the First World work hard to freeze the imagination into prejudicial place, the work of adaptation continues, a perpetual and implacable becoming-­planetary. Such adaptation is also depicted in more recent novels, but many of them miss how the social is inextricably tied to the fortunes of the planet itself, so that even the relatively utopic vision of a becoming embedded in becoming, as explored in a novel like Long for This World, has costs that remain to be fully reckoned with as the current century drags on.

196 • Chapter Seven

Chapter 8

Desert–Orient–Nomad

The following appeared in a New York Times article concerning a one-­year ban on the opening of new fast-­food restaurants in South Los Angeles: “The idea is to bring new eating options to the city’s food deserts, the term now in vogue to describe poor neighborhoods whose residents have few places to buy fresh groceries.”1 The term food deserts conveys a presumed absence of diversity, an absence that nature is somehow foiled from filling with complex life because only one kind of life-­form—in this case, fast-­ food restaurants—dominates. Similarly, as the larger species of life-­forms die out in the world’s oceans because of overfishing, increased acidification, rising water temperatures, and widespread pollution (such as run-­ offs of nitrogen fertilizers from modern industrial farms) until jellyfish, algae, and slime are all that remain, the trope of the desert comes to mind as the best way to describe what endures. Following this line of thought, the investigative journalist Taras Grescoe observes about the use of dynamite and cyanide to catch fish around Pacific coral reefs: “After 250 tonnes of cyanide and five tonnes of dynamite were used to destroy every square inch of the [Dong Sha Attoll, two hundred miles southeast of Hong Kong], it became an aquatic desert.”2 Such tropological uses of the desert signify not only an absence of diversity, but also, less obviously, a dystopic future. This becomes more apparent when one considers how more overtly literary and cultural uses of this trope render the desert into a sign for what might lie ahead. For instance, environmental writers and United Nations policy documents alike often speak of “desertification” when chronicling the dangers posed by

unrestrained growth and intensive clearing of forest and jungle; and filmmakers speak of the desert more metaphorically as the absence of an explicit sense of place, as most memorably articulated in the first Matrix film when Morpheus welcomes Neo to “the desert of the real.” In addition to these meanings, the desert has also accrued one more specialized connotation in the work of cultural critics like Slavoj Žižek. Riffing on The Matrix (and Baudrillard), Žižek responds in the immediate wake of 9/11 to what he perceives as the lack of reality in an event that had previously belonged in the realm of fantasy: “The unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.”3 If even the effects of the 9/11 attacks cannot be said to belong to the real, because audiences “have already seen the same thing over and over again” in movies too numerous to list, Žižek suggests 9/11 also jarred them awake to “the border which today separates the digitalized First World from the Third World ‘desert of the real.’”4 In anticipating and upturning such standard uses of the desert as trope, the work of Deleuze and Guattari subtly highlights how the meanings of this trope circulate in close proximity with the racial discourses of the Orient. Most closely aligned with the Middle East, the desert as rhizome is defined by its ability to spread and to encroach. It is expansive and mobile. Like Said’s original notion of orientalism, it easily becomes inclusive of, or at least closely associated with, the whole of Asia, and indeed of other geographies, peoples, and things without much concern for ways of thinking and ordering reality dominant in the West. And although the migrant and the nomad are explicitly opposed to each other in their work, they are opposed in the sense that nomads are an intensification of the migrant. While the migrant deterritorializes with an explicit yearning to reterritorialize elsewhere, the nomad deterritorializes and seeks to remain so. After asserting that the nomad “does not depart,” Deleuze and Guattari qualify this statement by saying that this is so because they remain still while the world moves around them: “Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving.”5 The migrant thus easily becomes the nomad, especially if individual aspirations are subtracted and what is examined are their conditions of possibility—what makes migrants give up a certain territory and how those same conditions might make it impossible for them to reterritorialize elsewhere. In short, the difference between migrants and nomads is a matter more of expectations, and less of desire. One expects an end to their troubles, the finding 198 • Chapter Eight

of safer shores or at least a less inhospitable milieu, while the other has no such expectations, and seeks to habituate to a world in motion, ceaselessly changing, harshly inhospitable. Hence, Deleuze and Guattari claim: “If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant.”6 For the nomad, the whole world is a desert. Desert–Orient–Nomad might thus be thought of as a machinic assemblage that agitates many Asian American writers who are already, because of their race, conscious of the ways in which racial discourses of the Orient affect them and the works they create (although not all such writers, of course, are conscious of race in this way). Focusing on Asian American writers who struggle with such an agitation can thus illuminate how landscape, geography, and subjectivity co-­produce each other. More important, such a focus offers imaginative alternatives to prevailing assumptions about the desert, its standard tropological meanings, which in turn gesture toward a future that is more complex than the merely dystopic conjured by the “desert of the real.” What follows coordinates the play between landscape, geography, and subjectivity in a reading of a poem sequence (Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution) and of a literary genre (Japanese American internment narratives), finding in each instances of rhizomatic deserts that are not quite the desert of Deleuze and Guattari’s imagination nor the desert of more standard tropological meanings. The desert is, rather, the place where one happens to find oneself, a situation one must cope with and make the best of and seek to fashion a meaningful life from. At its most utopian, the desert provides occasion for doing all of these things along lines of flight that break free from the logic of trees.

Talking about Trees

​“We’re tired of talking about trees,” Deleuze and Guattari insist at the start of A Thousand Plateaus.7 What can they have against trees? Trees, after all, are the lungs of the planet, an image Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth powerfully evokes when describing the ways in which every year the amount of carbon in the atmosphere dips down and then up again as the deciduous forests of the north come into bloom and shed their leaves: “It’s as if the entire Earth takes a big breath in and out each year.” And don’t trees provide shelter on a hot, sunny day, and protect the soil from erosion, and keep moisture in the air that would otherwise disDesert–Orient–Nomad • 199

astrously evaporate? Doesn’t one feel a sense of loss every time one witnesses a tree being cut down, or its limbs torn apart by heavy rain, wind, and lightning? Who can forget the image of the chokecherry tree growing on Sethe’s back in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a symbol of beauty and rejuvenation created by the scars left behind by a brutal beating, a reminder of the ways in which beauty and brutality intertwine and cannot be separated from one another? Or, again in Beloved, how can one forget—why would one want to forget?—Paul D racing away from a Georgia prison that literally kept him buried in the ground every night with the flowering of the trees in Spring as his only guide north?8 In Epitaph for a Peach, David Mas Masumoto describes the toppling of an old orchard with language that evokes visceral pain: “The bulldozer marches in to begin its task, and the new farm year begins in the 90-­degree heat of early autumn. The massive machine rips and tears out trees. Branches crunch and crack against the roar of the engine. From a distance the machine works with a low growl, I can tell when it strikes a deep-­rooted tree because the engine races and lets out a piercing moan.”9 It’s not always clear if Deleuze and Guattari are referring to actual trees or to something more figurative, or even if this is a distinction that is worth making. What is clear though is that they are tired of “talk” about trees, not necessarily of trees themselves. They explicitly direct their dislike at discourse, which emphasizes that they are disgruntled with the way the logic of trees—roots, hierarchy, command, transcendence—structures a whole culture, an “arborescent culture,” that sees the same logic at work everywhere: “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths.”10 In linguistics, this logic pervades etymology, which imagines words as having roots and languages forming branches. In biology, the logic works the same way, with descent being traced along biological pathways that form into roots and give form to discrete entities in the present. In genetics, one of the most important clinical tools is the family tree. In computer science, as well, what is granted primacy is a “memory or central organ.”11 And so forth. The logic is so pervasive that there is something perverse about calling attention to it, much less critiquing it. The alternative logic that Deleuze and Guattari provide is predicated on the rhizome, which has inspired theorists of the Internet and social 200 • Chapter Eight

connectivity and horizontal cities and social movements since it was first introduced as a critical concept opposed to arborescence (and is the one concept that those otherwise unfamiliar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari are most likely to have heard about). They describe the concept thus: “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-­listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community.”12 The ideas in this passage are neither as original nor as counterintuitive as they might have seemed when they first appeared in an English translation in the mid-­1980s. At that time, the Internet did not exist, at least not as the visible and quotidian model for making concrete the notion that all things are connected without centers and without roots that it has since become. The Internet was at the time still in its infancy, a plaything for scientists and academics and precocious students with a modem and a phone. You might have seen the latter, if you were alive and in college—nondescript, easy-­to-­overlook figures (many nonwhite and already socially marginal) huddled over their first-­generation personal computers in dorm rooms. Without generalizing too much, it can be argued that the rhizome has come to define social relations since these early days, coexisting fitfully with and often in open antagonism to entrenched assertions of arborescent thinking. Among online activists, advocates for net neutrality are fighting a lopsided battle to keep the Internet rhizomatic. Their opponents are corporate giants, ceaselessly combining into larger and larger goliaths, that seek to choke access, create tiers of service, and produce centers through which information must pass. Corporations think in the logic of trees, while net-­neutrality activists think in terms of rhizomes. Interestingly, for Deleuze and Guattari, the tension between rhizomes and arborescence has a geography. The way they discuss this geography is astounding, almost as if they had read Edward Said’s Orientalism, published only a couple of years before A Thousand Plateaus was first published in France, and sought to immerse themselves completely in the reductionism that Edward Said had sought to combat. Or maybe they simply failed to read Said, and their timing was bad. Does this make them orientalists, Desert–Orient–Nomad • 201

or are they so complete in imitating its forms that they expose it to ridicule? They write: The West has a special relationship to the forest, and deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agriculture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals derived from a wide range of “clones.” Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree?13 One must admit that the reductionist thinking in which this passage indulges is troubling—as if the world could so easily be divided between East and West, as if East and West could mean something so unitary in their mirroring divide. The same discomfort must accompany the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari privilege the nomad, already evident in this passage in the way they write about the “desert” and the “steppes of the nomad,” but made more extreme in their elaboration of the War Machine. The War Machine, they argue in a later chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, is separate from the state, even if the state seeks to capture it and take control of its destructive force, and as such threatens the state even as it is being captured by it. The nomad is intimately related to the origins of this War Machine, and both are intimately related to the desert, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear: “Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forests, where the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.”14 Especially at a time when a so-­called war on terror has targeted the Middle East as its primary place of battle, and cast all those associated with its religions and cultures as suspect, the tendency to equate the warlike and the martial to nomads and 202 • Chapter Eight

deserts can feed this kind of thinking, exacerbating already hardened ideas of an East-­West divide that does little to promote an alternative imaginary. Without seeking to dismiss what is disturbing about such reductionism, one might also recognize that there is something creative in it. Deleuze and Guattari did not invent these associations. And in making use of them, they elaborate and twist and estrange the way they flow, thus making visible a tension that draws power from such geographical divisions but quickly becomes intertwined in a different kind of conceptual space. When they talk about nomads, their elaboration of this notion decouples from, even as it remains connected to, an imaginary origin in a particular geography and time and culture/race. It turns into a description of an ontology, a being-­in-­the-­world that seeks in its forms to imitate a becoming-­in-­the-­world. This is what Brian Massumi calls a “being-­in-­ becoming,” and it is kin to the becoming embedded in becoming teased out in the previous chapter.15 As opposed to the migrant, who seeks security from inhospitable surroundings, the nomad searches for the inhospitable, refuses the logic of arborescence for what is posited as its opposite, the desert or steppe, and as such positions him or herself as a marker of the future, for the desert or steppe is advancing as the forest recedes. As Deleuze and Guattari readily admit, their reductionisms are strategic (“At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical distributions”). And in admitting this, they also insist that such misdirection is productive, for their collapsing activates a dynamism that would otherwise be difficult to put into imaginative motion: “For there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here or there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. . . . It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again.”16 If so, then the desert is less a specific place and more a privileged trope. And in being posited as what is opposite trees, with all the tropological meanings they figure, the desert is revealed to be equally full of meaning. Forests and deserts, trees and steppes, arborescence and rhizomes: each refers to clusters of signifieds which coimplicate each other, unsettling and resettling, deterritorializing and reterritorializing meaning. This is not, in itself, an especially original insight. What is unique about Deleuze’s and Desert–Orient–Nomad • 203

Guattari’s imagining of the latter terms in these ever-­collapsing dualisms is their desire to assert that deserts are more desirable than forests, rhizomes preferable to arborescence. Such an assertion takes flight against settled meaning—against, to indulge in fanciful neologisms, arbor-­centrism or, even, arbor-­normativity.

The Languages of the Desert

One important standard tropological meaning of deserts has been left out of the introduction to this chapter. In addition to being a marker of a jarring awakening comparable to the “real” in Lacanian psychoanalysis, an environment that has grown impoverished of ecological diversity, and a social space devoid of important options for sustenance because it has been abandoned by capitalism, the desert is a place of hallucination, something Jean Baudrillard long ago picked up on in his fascination with Las Vegas.17 In the case of Las Vegas, or of Dubai, the desert is a blank space, a literal página en blanco, on which fantasies can be indulged. It is a place of illusion and artifice that gives pleasure because one can arrive at this (non)place exactly in search of these things. The latter signification of the desert is what Catherine Park Hong plays with in the introductory verses of Dance Dance Revolution, its title a playful homage to the popular music video game. The Guide speaks to the Historian: Here, city o ebening calm, ignis-­riles gone. If you want true history, go watch tailor and milna make magic. Dim more revolutionary den artist.18 As this passage suggests, a complex conceit shapes Park’s poem-­sequence. The poem is set roughly in the near future, in a desert location that approximates Las Vegas or Dubai without being actually named, and contains a dialogic structure between a Historian who writes in standard ­English prose and a Guide who speaks a versified “weird English” that has sprung up in the desert. The term “weird English” is borrowed from Evelyn Ch’ien, who argues that the use of “barely intelligible and sometimes unrecognizable English created through the blending of one or more languages with English” is fast becoming “the new language of literature and that it brings new literary theory into being.”19 This term is also descriptive of how Deleuze and Guattari imagine language to work in a rhizome: “It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural ele204 • Chapter Eight

ments, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for a people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of an impotence.”20 The “act of weirding English” aptly describes what occurs in Hong’s book.21 Indeed, Dance Dance Revolution begins as an academic précis on the very subject, seeking a way to “break a language down” according to the logic of trees, as the Historian explains how the language he encounters on his trip to visit the Guide has developed: In the Desert, the language is an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into the city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca. The language, while borrowing the inner structure of ­English grammar, also borrows from existing and extinct English dialects. Here, new faces pour in and civilian accents morph so quickly that their accents betray who they talked to that day rather than their cultural roots. Fluency is also a matter of opinion. There is no tuning fork to one’s twang. Still, dialects differ greatly depending on region. In the Southern Region, they debate whether they should even call their language English since it has transformed so completely as to be rendered unrecognizable from its origin.22 The dueling voices of the Historian and the Guide set up a classic dialogue between the analytic observer who records faithfully what he has witnessed in the process of field work, as a kind of anthropologist, and the observed who performs a whole way of life that will be interpreted by the former. The designation “Guide” further suggests that the observed will play native informant to the gaze of the Historian. The use of prose and verse reflects the hierarchical relationship between the analytic and the performed, even as the treatment of the Guide’s weird English as verse suggests readers should treat it as worthy of special attention, perhaps even appreciation as exemplifying linguistic beauty. Hiding behind this simple conceit, however, is a much richer complexity that seeks to map out conflicts between spectacle and memory, space and resource inequality, and the deterritorialized proximity of the Third World to the First in an age of neoliberalism. This complexity is quickly revealed as the Guide proves herself an adept cultural critic, both Desert–Orient–Nomad • 205

mocking and analytical and reflexive, while the Historian turns out, as revealed in a series of short prose excerpts from his memoir, to be highly self-­referential and self-­involved and indeed narcissistic to the point of solipsism. Many of these memoir fragments, which end each section, are about his childhood as the son of a Korean doctor who settled as a member of Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone during its worst years of civil war. The Historian as a child was cut off from the conflict and kept in a safe compound. Later, he was sent abroad by himself to school. The Guide, on the other hand, suffered a childhood ailment that left her bald and socially ostracized. She finds brief fame in Korea as a radical radio announcer during the Kwanju Uprising, and it was her voice that once inspired the Historian’s father. Indeed, in his typical self-­referential and self-­involved way, the Historian has come to visit her more to discover a connection to his own childhood and less to discover anything about her per se. In the Guide’s poems, the inward-­looking gaze is turned outward as the Guide seeks to circumvent the kind of introspection that the Historian asks of her and refers determinedly instead to the social world of the desert. In a series of early poems grouped under the headings “Stirrings of Childhood That Begin With” and “Education during the Year of Falling Hair,” the Guide relates a childhood spent bald and without a social place in Korea. This move refuses any romanticization of a Korean past against which her present diasporic state can be measured as a fall. Furthermore, in a poem titled “The Lineage of Yes-­Men,” she reveals how her own father had sought to curry the favor of American servicemen by being a purveyor of alcohol and women for hire during the Korean War and how her grandfather before him had behaved similarly to curry the favor of the Japanese during occupation. The Guide recalls, Nut’ing but brine jars y jaundice widows en mine old village. I’s come from ’eritage peddlas y traitors, whom kneel y quaff a lyre spoon-­me-­spondas. Mine fadder sole Makkoli wine to whitey gis din guidim to widows for bounce. Me grandfadder sole Makkoli wine to Hapanese colinists Dine he guidim to insurrectas . . . sticka hop? Some pelehuu?23 History for the Guide, it seems, is a source of pain and embarrassment, a lineage which does little to elevate her status or to suggest how much she has fallen by leaving Korea. Indeed, when a later section of the book returns to the subject of Kwangju, what the reader finds is that the adventure 206 • Chapter Eight

she relates is not one of heroism and valor, which the Historian has come to record, but rather one of social exclusion. Excited by the uprising, she allows her wig to fall off and reveal her bald head, her less-­than-­attractive “oysta eyes” becoming even less attractive as they “filla-­up wit wadder,” and as a result of the spectacle she thus makes, she inspires the crowd to “boo” her and “t’row rocks.”24 As if to accentuate the antiheroic vein of these verses, even when the content turns at last to the heroic (where she recalls her work on the radio, which had inspired the Historian’s father as well as many others during the uprising), the lines dissipate into a series of ellipses, which the Historian has explained denote places where the tape recording slipped. The Historian, it turns out, had left the tape player out in the rain. Hence, the poem “Kwangju Replayed,” the most direct retelling of the uprising itself, provides a series of thoughts that have been warped and distorted beyond recognition. . . . Centipede o batons irrigated de crowd, leaving blood marsh . . . volt shields pool . . . mine arm flat de floor de feet . . . tied back wit wire . . . me fes down smelling jellied fluid . . . Dam bladdabags blew . . .25 The missing pieces of this tale reminds the reader how the past comes to one incomplete, its most violent and momentous events beyond one’s reach to record and recall and make sense of. It thus frustrates the Historian’s “desire for history,” which Anne Anlin Cheng describes as a “desire to know and to bear witness as some kind of ‘redemptive’ act.” It is also a desire “for the documentary.”26 In intentionally frustrating this desire, Dance Dance Revolution deprives history of the ability to provide succor and meaning for the present, to give the present a coherence that is recovered by some original moment of violence and bravery. Simultaneously, at the heart of the book, a series of poems look away from the past and toward the surrounding social topography of the Desert in the present. Here is where the book is most explicit about the desert as trope, a place of imagination that is undergirded, supported, and made possible by what cannot be admitted into its constitutive fantasy. Interestingly, in these verses, the weird English that the Guide has been speaking gives way to a more formal and conventional poetic voice, as in the following: “Once, she said this is the way / through the Desert, not to the Desert–Orient–Nomad • 207

Desert.”27 The poem proceeds to explore the motif of mines, something buried in the Desert (the capitalization of this word perhaps suggesting how it refers not to an actual desert but to deserts more generally, as a tropological figure) that reminds how the Desert itself is landscape affected by others who have come before, bearing not only greed and self-­ interest but also violence and conflict. But even as this interest in mines turns attention to a history of wars that has shaped this landscape, and that conjures other histories of wars that have affected migrants from all parts of the world who might have, like the Historian and the Guide, ended up in this particular desert, the poem moves to the ways in which those left injured by the mines “adapted, created a caste system: / the fully limbed down to the fully limbless.” In a mocking image of an arborescence that emphasizes descent, ancestry, and bloodlines, the poem takes advantage of its desert setting to invoke something more properly rhizomatic: One intermarriage: A wedding with bowls of expensive oranges. The bride in a kelly green shawl, her long, elegant arm draped around the limbless groom.28 What makes this wedding an example of “intermarriage” is that the bride has an arm, while the groom is limbless, which in turn presumably violates the hierarchy of caste that has formed among these Desert dwellers, between those with all limbs intact to those who have none. Another poem from this series in the heart of Dance Dance Revolution, “New Town,” provides a rich subliming of the Desert aspects that have to be kept from view, that are covered but nevertheless foundational to the Desert illusion of the posh hotels where the Guide works and the Historian has come to stay. Each stanza of this poem is headed by a title that suggests a guidebook summary—“Architecture,” “Population,” “Borders”— while the stanzas themselves, written as prose but reading like free verse, work against the pigeonholing that the headers demarcate. For instance, under “Photos,” the stanza reads, “New Town is without image. It cannot be imagined.”29 Thus, the delirious invocation of the Desert as a place of fantasy, a place of playing signifiers and artifice, gives way to something that defies signification all together—the heavy cost in terms of lives and wasted resources and human suffering—that such fantasy accumulates like so much trash at its unheeded margins. 208 • Chapter Eight

Desert Time

Literary narratives about the Japanese American internment have amassed in recent decades. Starting in the early 1970s, the earliest firsthand accounts of the internment, Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, were brought back into print while John Okada’s overlooked novel No-­No Boy came to be lionized as representative of the anger, the conflict, and the difficulty of coming to terms with a traumatic historical event that everyone else wanted to forget. This period also witnessed the arrival of new works of memoir, fiction, and poetry about the internment, including Daniel Okimoto’s American in Disguise, Lawson Inada’s Before the War: Poems as They Happened, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar, Mitsui Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Poems, Janice Mirikatani’s Awake in the River, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (about Japanese-­ Canadian internment), and Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. Hisaye Yamamoto’s collection of short stories Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories also appeared during this period, although many of the stories had been previously published elsewhere. Even more works were published in the 1990s, so that by the early years of that decade the literature on the internment experienced a blossoming that also happened to coincide with a “memory boom,” when extant, and fierce, debates about how the past should be memorialized found an important focal point in accounts of the Second World War. As the historian Emily Rosenberg puts it: From the 1970s on, a memory boom reverberated through American life, proliferating and blurring forms of history, heritage, and commemoration. Set amid this engagement with the past, the fiftieth anniversary that began in 1991 riveted media attention on the meaning and experience of World War II, including the war’s most prominent icon—Pearl Harbor. After years of reticence, members of the older generation grew anxious to tell their wartime stories— to get them into the nation’s memory/history before passing from the scene. Their children, baby boomers of the Vietnam generation, seemed eager to honor and commemorate their parents and to rediscover a more glorious, less ambiguous time.30 This passage highlights how much a highly personal engagement with a frequently traumatic past has become increasingly commonplace since the 1970s, ranging not only from a public reconciliation between white Desert–Orient–Nomad • 209

baby boomers and their parents (which revolved so prominently and problematically around public memorialization of the attack on Pearl Harbor), but, perhaps more significantly, to the resurgent interest in recovering experiences obscured by racism and other forms of discrimination that set the stage for a widespread challenging of normative identities. In the final two decades of the century, however, these differences, whether they were expressed as a matter of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, region, religion, or so on, were eventually contained in mainstream discourses by being, as James Kyung-­Jin Lee succinctly puts it, “pejoratively dismissed as ‘identity politics.’”31 As accurate as this historical argument no doubt is, positioning the latest expansion of literary interest in the internment as part of a blossoming of interest rooted in earlier activist struggles and reactivations of memories poised on the verge of loss, it obscures the ways in which such expansion can be understood as an involution. This is, as the introduction explained, a rhizomatic movement that does not so much replicate the logic of trees as offer different ways of relating to the particular historical event of the internment. One way to gauge the meaning of this claim is to think about how diverse the authors of these more contemporary narratives are. The diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds of these authors break the genealogical logic that imagines the flourishing of literary interest in the internment as being primarily a Japanese American matter. Some noteworthy titles of the last decade or so are Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, Susan Choi’s American Woman, Nina Revoyr’s Southland, Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower, Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass, and David Mura’s Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. These novels, except for Otsuka’s, emphasize cross-­ethnic relationships which the internment has in one way or another fostered, often tracing out contact between groups that otherwise might seem counterintuitive. The authors of these works are also not uniformly Japanese American, and even those who are do not have direct personal experience of internment, but rather have learned about such from parents and grandparents, and from earlier published literary works and historical studies. Read together, these contemporary novels convey the sense that they are not interested in the twining of memory and identity, very unlike the memory boom centered on the Second World War that Rosenberg writes about. It is certainly noteworthy that, unlike earlier works, which tended to be written as memoirs or as fictions that drew heavily from the life ex210 • Chapter Eight

periences of the author (No-­No Boy and Yamashita’s short stories being important outliers), these more recent works are all fictions. Does this suggest that the earlier generation of works about the internment are arborescent, while the more recent works are rhizomatic? Surely not, for this would simplify too much the tension that exists between the two forms of enunciation. Rather, arborescence and rhizome collapse into each other, and so no work is simply exemplary of one or the other. Coursing through many of these works, perhaps all of them, are also attempts to make sense of how the landscape of the desert and the rhizomatic coincide, so that “rhizomatic offshoots” can be said to be constant and deserts a part of the scenery in these narratives even when they leave actual deserts behind. More precisely, still, more contemporary internment narratives seem better able to explore what was latent in the earlier works, mapping rhizomatic relations that earlier works could only trace. For instance, in almost all of the drawings that comprise Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, the narrator is prominently positioned in the foreground, and she is mute. She therefore becomes a notable figure of witness, who sees with her own eyes what she has committed to paper. Moreover, her muteness, doubly emphasized by the drawings that show her mouth tight-­ lipped, suggests she is a witness in search of a way to give testimony. Her position in the drawings also creates a dual composition, with both a prominent foreground and a determined detailing of background that sweeps beyond the individual subject. The latter is a constant reminder of the larger story that is taking place as told through the many bodies that crowd the page and by the specificity of the location that the drawings insist on. As Elena Creef observes, the composition of Okubo’s drawings makes “it virtually and visually impossible to forget the crowded conditions of the camps that were built to house ten-­thousand Japanese American prisoners in one square mile.”32 But what about the geography of the camps themselves? When the narrator and the other Japanese Americans are transported from the Tanforan Assembly Center, where thousands of them have been housed, to the Topaz War Relocation Center, the pictures and the words work together to remind the reader that they are going into the desert. Along the interminable train route, they are allowed to exit and stretch their limbs: “In the late afternoon the train stopped in northern Nevada. . . . Barbed-­wire fences bounded the stretch on either side of the track and military police stood on guard every fifteen feet.”33 The fence and guards in the foreground and the Desert–Orient–Nomad • 211

Figure 8.1.

Detail from Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660. Arborescent thinking takes root in the desert of Topaz. Courtesy of the Miné Okubo Estate.

length of the train in the background border the view of the desert, making the “desert” in the text synonymous with the penned area, an enclosed exterior that denotes the subjecthood of Japanese Americans as dangerous and suspect wards of the state (fig. 8.1). They are thus “included by means of an exclusion,” to borrow a phrase coined by Giorgio Agamben, so much so that, according to Hannah Arendt (whose work Agamben frequently cites to arrive at his idea of an inclusive exclusion), even a thief in jail for breaking the law—even a Japanese American thief—can be said to have more rights:34 A West Coast Japanese-­American who was in jail when the army ordered the internment of all Americans of Japanese ancestry would not have been forced to liquidate his property at too low a price; he would have remained right where he was, armed with a lawyer to look after his interests; and if he was so lucky as to receive a long sentence, he might have returned righteously and peacefully to his 212 • Chapter Eight

former business or profession, even though of a professional thief. His jail sentence guarantees him the constitutional rights that nothing else—no protests of loyalty and no appeal—could have obtained for him once his citizenship had become doubtful.35 This scenario illustrates Arendt’s explanation for how one can know that one has become a stateless person, or a person caught in a state of exception: “The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.”36 The irony that Arendt finds in the figure of a Japanese American thief who should consider himself lucky for having been caught and therefore being recognized by the state as a subject with rights (no matter how debatable such a scenario might be for legal scholars) is thus poignantly conveyed in Citizen 13660 as mapped onto the tropology of the desert. The desert is, in other words, a tropological marker of an evacuation of rights that position one in relation to the state as being less deserving of due process than is afforded a criminal. The desert figures a legal terrain, a spatialization of a relationship to the state that puts one outside the law and therefore makes one subject to the state’s whims. That the internees were in fact largely interned in the desert—Gila River, Manzanar, Poston, Topaz, Tule Lake, and so forth—only literalizes a figurative relationship, looping between content and enunciation a meaning that centers on the desert as a placeless place at the center of the law’s lawlessness. When the Japanese Americans finally arrived at their new homes, “the Chief of Project Reports at Topaz came on board the train and handed each of us the first copy of the Topaz Times. We chuckled as we read, ‘Topaz, the Jewel of the Desert.’”37 As if to emphasize the absurdity of the propaganda, the next page depicts a view from the bus that shows swirls of sand flying in the air, an armed man in the center of a desolate field, mounds of indistinguishable matter cutting across the central diagonal plane of the drawing, and rows of barracks in the distance lined along perfectly perpendicular streets. The roof of the bus is omitted, making it seem as if they are riding in an open-­air vehicle, their heads vulnerable to the elements they are viewing through the windows (fig. 8.2). The text reports, “We rode through seventeen miles of alfalfa fields and greasewood-­covered desert. Half of the distance was made over rough, Desert–Orient–Nomad • 213

Figure 8.2.

Detail from Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660. The desert as a bordered space. Courtesy of the Miné Okubo Estate.

newly constructed dirt roads. We were all eyes, hoping to spot something interesting in the flat, dry land which extended for miles in all directions. Suddenly, the Central Utah Relocation Project was stretched out before us in a cloud of dust. It was a desolate scene. Hundreds of low black barracks covered with tarred papers were lined up row after row. A few telephone poles stood like sentinels, and soldiers could be seen patrolling the grounds.”38 In the rhizomatic space of the desert, as these snapshots from Citizen 13660 convey, the state sought to erect a logic of arborescence, one dominated by groupings according to roots and arranged hierarchically along chains of command that order space vertically. This substantiates Deleuze’s and Guattari’s claim that “there are knots of arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offshoots in roots.” The state apparatus that has sprung up to guard the newly exceptioned can thus be thought of as a “knot of arborescence,” a flowering of order and control and command. The organization of the internees into administrative units and their willingness to go along with the prevailing rationale of their internment might also be understood as a knot of arborescence, as when the narrator ob214 • Chapter Eight

Figure 8.3.

Detail from Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660. The rhizomatic logic of the desert invades the hierarchy of loyal over disloyal. Courtesy of the Miné Okubo Estate.

serves “the ‘disloyal’ were finally weeded out for eventual segregation and the ‘loyal’ were later granted ‘leave clearance’—the right to leave camp, find a job, and ‘relocate.’”39 In the accompanying drawing, the narrator is shown sticking her tongue out at one of the “disloyal,” whose refusal to adhere to the patriotism of “loyal” internees is marked off by a military-­ looking hat (fig. 8.3). If so, it is the space the narrator and her fellow internees occupy, one dominated by its placement in the desert, that cuts through such outcroppings of trees. The swirl of the sand in particular illustrates how the landscape infiltrates their bodies, becomes their constant companions, and sticks to them even after they have left. In more recent works, the same “offshoots of rhizomes” can be found, ways of thinking about the internment that operate horizontally across vectors of familiar meanings and expectations, so that, for instance, the narrative of the internment that When the Emperor Was Divine conveys emphasizes a keen awareness of the assemblage Desert–Orient–Nomad. This novel, by Julie Otsuka, is told from five different points of view, and Desert–Orient–Nomad • 215

yet Otsuka presents each (except the last) as unproblematically true. The reader has no reason to consider any of the narrators unreliable; their stories match up. Memory is not part of the basic narrative structure, especially as much of the story is told in the present tense, and thus the vagaries of memory, which the memory boom so thoroughly explored, have difficulty discrediting anything that happens in the story. Furthermore, as opposed to the few earlier works explicitly and narrowly concerned with memory, Otsuka’s novel fills the inability to know what actually happened with a willful nothingness. Some of the early internment narratives unequivocally focused on memory contemplate the possibility of retrieving lost memory, suggesting that if only lost memory could be discovered or placed in the right context, it would fill the void that organizes the present’s relationship to the past and heal the resulting injury for later generations. In response to Sansei questions about the internment, Uchida in Desert Exile advises, “They were right to ask these questions, for they made us search for some obscure truths and come to a better understanding of ourselves and of those times. . . . It is my generation, however, who lived through the evacuation of 1942. We are their link to the past and we must provide them with the cultural memory they lack. We must tell them all we can remember, so they can better understand the history of their own people.”40 The same might also be said of Citizen 13660, with its heavy emphasis on witnessing and documenting, which is implicit in how the work’s prose reports only what the narrator has seen and how its drawings place the narrator in every scene as a visual referent of witnessing. Against the heavy weight of this injunction to remember and bear witness, Otsuka suggests, most camp memories are profoundly mundane. Perhaps so many Nisei internees remember only baseball games and dances from camp, as the father does in David Mura’s short story “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son,” because the rest of the time was so uneventful and dull.41 In When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka thus flirts with a heresy against arborescence by aligning herself with the short-­term memory of the rhizome against the long-­term memory figured by trees. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “Short-­term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-­ term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but its translation continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an ‘untimely’ way, not instantaneously.”42 For a historical narrative, When the 216 • Chapter Eight

Emperor Was Divine is oddly uninterested in history. It is written in the present tense and stripped of specific content and memories, and it designates its central characters by their social position, rather than by their formal names. As such, it brings its narrative into the diegetic present of its own narration. Otsuka’s novel skillfully represents the tedium of camp life and the slow passage of time, which in its own way is “untimely,” but only because it doesn’t so much seek to recall a past time as to make time itself operate in estranging, non-­Euclidean ways. On one day at the camp, the little boy’s biggest accomplishment is licking a stamp. Indeed, he often seems to be busy and idle simultaneously: “Summer was a long hot dream. . . . The boy tossed pebbles into the coal bucket. He peered into other people’s windows. He drew pictures of airplanes and tanks with his favorite stick in the sand. . . . It was June now. Or maybe it was July. It was August.”43 By suggesting that forgotten memories are probably memories of boredom, Otsuka downplays the emphasis on absent memories that some critics have suggested can help bridge gaps in history.44 By not focusing on a void that can be filled with plenitude, a making whole through discovery of an injury’s origins, Otsuka does not grant memory the power to give greater meaning to the story of internment. As if to further undercut the importance of concrete memories, Otsuka portrays reality as illusory. Whether in the camps or outside of the camps, memory does not always determine truth. In the camps, time ceases to exist. It’s always six o’clock. They are in the middle of the desert. The heat and the boredom can distort everything. Children know too much, and parents don’t know enough. While in the camps, the characters have difficulty remembering what their old life was like. The girl can’t remember her father’s face; the mother can’t remember if she wore pearls. The mother can’t seem to remember her kitchen, either: “And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?” “You always turned off the stove.” “Did I?” “Every time.” “Did we even have a stove?” “Of course we had a stove.”45 This conversation between the unnamed boy and the unnamed mother illustrates not only the eerie reversal of parent-­child roles, but also how Desert–Orient–Nomad • 217

the outside world has become more and more of a dream. What was this society like in which the family had once lived? What kind of society was it where something like this could happen? Even once they have been released, the outside world remains unreal to them. The first-­person plural narrator of the fourth chapter says that it’s like a dream to be walking down the streets of their home after having been released from their camp, and in the same chapter tells the reader that the mother questions the authenticity of the letter they had received from the father: “‘What if it’s not real?’ she asked us. Or had been delivered to our house by mistake? Or sent to us, as a joke, by the same man who called up in the middle of the night to tell us where we could go?”46 Otsuka also asserts a certain truth about the camps through lies and rumor. The reader often catches the girl indulging in both. She tells a stranger she meets on the train into the desert that her father never writes her, even though he does, and she tells her brother rumors that she hears: “She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.”47 Such retelling of lies and rumors could challenge the girl’s credibility, as well as that of the entire novel: if she is capable of lying and spreading rumors, how is the reader to know whether there is any truth to the entire section that she narrates? This question is made moot, however, because Otsuka does not present the camp as a place in which lies or rumors are punished. It is as if all actions have ceased to have consequences. This occurs from the beginning of the novel, when the family is about to leave for camp and the girl asks her mother if she has to practice piano. The mother thinks about it and then says, “No.” Later on, in their camp, the girl doesn’t get into trouble for smoking, and the mother doesn’t have to act like a mother. There is the sense that nothing really matters. In conjuring this mood, Otsuka suggests that the rumors, the sex, the abortions, the smoking, and all the “real stuff” were simply as much part of what happened as the quiet dignity of many of the internees and the open expressions of protest they engaged. The last section of the novel, the father’s, is where Otsuka most powerfully insists that the story her characters have told is as valid as any personal memory, by subverting easy assertions of truth. The father begins with the claim, “Everything you have heard is true.”48 This line can be read in two ways: if it refers to the previous four chapters, the father is stating that his wife, daughter, and son have accurately narrated their ex218 • Chapter Eight

periences; if the line is read as part of the ensuing monologue, it is then a lie that the father is telling authorities because they want to hear his confession. The father’s cutting anger and sarcasm reveal that his statement is completely ironic, as he realizes that for his interlocutors it does not matter whether he is guilty or not. Indeed, truth and deception came to seem beside the point after General John Dewitt, who was in charge of the Western Defense Command, infamously opined that the “very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date” was a “disturbing and conforming indication that such actions will be taken.”49 Otsuka’s novel as a whole suggests that, contra earlier works, it doesn’t matter whether memories are recorded or remembered. What matters more is that a story can be told in a meaningful way. It is helpful to think of such fictions in the terms articulated by Tina Chen, in her warning against the dangers of an empathic reading practice that comes too easily. Otsuka’s last chapter, Chen asserts, “challenges” such “mastery and identificatory pleasure.”50 She argues that students can learn from not being able to identify too easily with characters and situations. It is not a question of knowing intimately and bodily and psychically what it was like to be in the desert, but more the sense that the desert itself remains an abiding part of the reader’s experience, a rhizome that courses not only through space but also through time—a desert time. In modeling for its readers how such a desert time might operate, Otsuka challenges settled ways of thinking about the past. She clears space for occupying a present that cannot simply look to the past as a possible source of healing or as something long past, unrelated to current struggles or aspirations for the future. Past, present, and future are conventional, normalizing ways of making sense of a time that is immanent. The past and the future are always one with the present, each casting shadows on the other, and none nearly as far off as it may seem.

Desert–Orient–Nomad • 219

Conclusion

World-­Making

The names of writers admired by the writers I interviewed were easy to elicit. The names of writers they didn’t like were impossible to get. More often than not, they claimed to have been greatly influenced by canonical English authors, many from the Victorian era; famous Russian writers, especially Nabokov (which is actually pretty interesting); and less well-­ known authors from all over, whose names I had to look up later. Few thought to name other Asian American writers they liked unless prompted, although once prompted most of them proved familiar with the work produced by their fellow Asian Americans. The funniest moments occurred when I asked, point blank, what writers they did not like. Laughter and awkwardness generally ensued, as my conversation partners explicitly refused to criticize the work of another writer. The humor arose from an understanding that my question was absurd. It put my interlocutors in an awkward spot, for naming the writers they did not like could poison relationships and even endanger careers. It certainly wasn’t nice to the person being named. In this, writers aren’t much different from professors of literature, who in general also hesitate to make such judgments public. At a conference, I asked members of a panel on contemporary poetry if they considered their role as critics to include taste-­brokering. That is, do they ever explicitly set out to suggest that some poems are worth reading and that others are not? I asked this question because I had just read Jim Collins’s account of the rise of literariness in American popular culture, from the apparent ubiquity of chain bookstores, book-­oriented cafés, and Amazon to Mira-

max films and Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. Given the massive availability of literary titles and “the radical devaluation of the academy and the New York literary scene as taste brokers,” Collins argues, a whole infrastructure of taste has emerged: “New reading authorities had to emerge from within the mass media in order to reach a mass audience of readers in hot pursuit of the right book, just as a wine connoisseur like Robert Parker or a home-­keeping diva like Martha Stewart exploded on the scene as national experts.”1 In asking my question, which may have felt out of left field to the panelists, I was trying to learn how they as literature professors felt about their “radical devaluation” as taste brokers. Underlying my question were a number of follow-­ups that I didn’t have the time to ask: Did they feel remorse that they weren’t considered experts who could fill the role that figures like Oprah Winfrey and Nancy Pearl (book critic of National Public Radio) have occupied in recent years? Did they have any interest in trying to reclaim some of this cultural authority? What role did they see for themselves as professional critics of literature? Although I did not pose these questions, the answers were often implicit in the panelists’ responses to my original question. One panelist flatly rejected the idea that she was competent to take on such a role, saying, “I’m the last person who should ever do that.” Another responded with greater savvy, saying that there was always an implicit judgment of value in her work, to the degree that she wrote about works she liked. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the works she doesn’t write about are in her opinion bad. When it comes to matters of literary taste, it seems, both creative writers and academic critics are careful to say either that they will refrain from making judgments or will do so only in a positive manner. While it may be obvious why creative writers might be so careful, it may not be so obvious why academic critics would follow suit. The reason for this, at least in part, has much to do with changes in our reading practices in the academy, which have shifted dramatically in the past thirty years away from confirming a consensus of taste toward studying the literary text as caught in vectors of cultural, social, political, psychological, and economic forces that exceed it, contain it, and make it possible. Since Asian American literary studies became a part of the academy as this shift was taking place, no debate about the advisability of such a move within the field took place. Indeed, scholars in the field were unapologetic partisans who

World-­Making • 221

pushed as hard as they could to make this shift, for these changing reading practices were what made it possible in the first place for Asian American literature to be accepted as a legitimate object of study. As the field’s organizing racial concern has become more difficult to sustain—because of increasing hostility toward discussion of race in any form, suspicion that the term Asian American has failed to live up to its political aspirations, the term’s inability to recognize the burgeoning heterogeneity of the population it purports to signify, and the fact that many writers themselves express reluctance to be described as such—critics have started to foreground formal considerations in the literature they study and to explore the idea that it might be time to let go of the term Asian American altogether. In literary studies in general, there is also increasing frustration with the reading practices that have grown more or less dominant. Terry Eagleton, of all people, whose introductory book to literary theory has been a primer for a generation of students on the fundamentals of these reading practices, states categorically: “The golden age of cultural theory is long past.”2 What is up for debate in both Asian American literary studies and in literary studies as a whole, then, is the question of how reading practices will change again. Before I lay out what I believe to be at least one necessary response to this question, building very much on what others have already said, I want to discuss my own deep personal investment in the changes that have already taken place. This turn to the autobiographical is meant to make crystal clear that I do not make my remarks about our profession’s changing reading practices lightly. Namely, what I am coming around to as an important project for literary studies is the need for us to get over our hang-­ups about making aesthetic judgments. It seems to me now, after much self-­debate, that we need to be more assertive about making our preferences for some literary works over others more explicit and to be able to articulate what guides these preferences. That is, we need to be up front about what we value in the literature we read and what’s at stake in the questions we ask of it. The reason to do this is not to reclaim some lost cultural authority, although it wouldn’t be a bad thing for our profession if we could do so. It is, rather, to turn to literature as a source for potential itself, a capacity to make worlds rather than simply to reflect or comment on the world as it is.

222 • Conclusion

Great Books

When I started college, I was taught to celebrate an elite set of literary texts. How elite was suggested by the name of the course that was required for all first-­year honors students: “Great Books.” Many papers I wrote in my first two years essentially justified the greatness of the work I was told to write about. However, I made a terrible faux pas in a freshman creative-­ writing seminar when I said that I thought the assigned reading, Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” was bad, opining that it had flat and predictable characters, too much emphasis on story, and was just plain boring to read. The other students spent several minutes criticizing me while the professor remained silent. On a paper I wrote for another class, the professor made a long comment in the margins refuting my suggestion that Faulkner’s first novel, A Soldier’s Pay, had wooden dialogue that frequently worked against the effect the author seemed to be after. I enjoyed the good grades my literature papers received after this inauspicious start, and the work itself was not challenging, since I was following a formula: this work of literature is great because it plays with form, or respects tradition, or understands that one doesn’t have to choose between playing with form and respecting tradition. How did I know the work was great? Because it was on the syllabus. All I needed to do was formulate a clever argument for why it remained great when I read it. After a while, the formula grew stale. Couldn’t I choose any work at random, more or less, and make the same argument? Wasn’t there something else I could say about a poem or a novel other than how it might attain proximity to some abstract ideal of what literature should be? Were formal considerations the only measures of a work’s worthiness for study? Was this all studying literature was good for? (The idea of literature I rebelled against continues to thrive, strong and unrepentant. For instance, here is Helen Vendler venting about what she perceives as Rita Dove’s overly generous inclusivity as the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-­ Century American Poetry: “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?”3 What appears to guide this kind of pronouncement is the assumption that literature is apart from the world and hence a sanctuary for values that the world daily desecrates.) When, in the fall of my junior year, I took an introductory course on literary theory and another one on Asian American literature, I felt liberated. I doubt I’d be writing these words if I hadn’t taken those courses when I World-­Making • 223

did. What I most loved about literary theory was that it taught me to ask different kinds of questions, not simply to assess what made a work great, but rather to turn the work inside out, so that it could lead to the world beyond. Looking at Jane Eyre, we might ask: What is the significance of the fact that this novel was written at the center of a worldwide empire? Where does Rochester get his wealth? How does where he gets his wealth enable the kind of social relationships the novel details? Who is that crazy woman in the attic, anyway, and how did she get there? Such questions had been asked for a long time before I could begin to articulate them in a literary theory course in the year 1990. It also occurred to me belatedly, after I had started to ask such questions, that some of my professors, not all of them young, had actually been trying to point me in this direction. After the incident in my freshman seminar, the professor, an old man who fell down for no apparent reason while we were walking together after class and had trouble getting up again, became an important mentor for me, someone with whom I spent a lot of time talking informally out of class that semester. In retrospect, he may have been the first of my college professors to encourage me to think self-­consciously about what I wanted out of literature. During my first two years of college, I could not see how bored my teachers must have been while they read my formulaic essays—certainly, they must have been as bored as I had been writing them—because I had been so blinded by my own assumptions about what was expected of me. In any case, my formula kept working. Unlike in my other courses, which suffered greatly from inattention (my overall grade point average plummeted with each passing semester), I continued to receive good grades in my English classes. There was also, as is still too often the case, a gap between what professors and graduate students concerned themselves with and what undergraduates were taught. Only when I took the literary theory class did I feel like I was being treated like an adult by being included in such conversations. It made all the difference. Starting that first semester of my junior year, I began to do well in classes other than English, and in all of the coursework that followed I found the material meaningful and exciting in a way I hadn’t before. My improved grades reflected my changing attitude toward academia in general. The other pivotal course I took that semester also fueled a change in my attitude toward my education, and further cemented my newly acquired attitude toward aesthetics. What I most loved about Asian American lit224 • Conclusion

erature was that many titles we read did not fit familiar criteria for what makes a literary work good, never mind great. Their worth was inextricably tied to the kind of questions that lead a reader beyond the story or its artistry. Take, for instance, the work of Sui Sin Far, the pen name of Edith Maude Eaton. By the conventional measures I had been learning in my other courses, she is not an especially good writer. To this day, I find her characters flat, the dialogue as wooden as something a young Faulkner might write, and there isn’t much complex plot development. Partly these traits can be explained by the fact that she wrote in such a short form, no doubt necessitated by her living situation, which was highly constrained and did not allow her the space or time to develop characters, settings, or plots. As a result, her work doesn’t invite us into a world where we might want to linger. Instead, her stories are so compact that if we want to linger we must do so forcibly, willing ourselves to pay close attention to the text and its multiple possible meanings. I took this approach in an article, deliberately lingering over a very short story of hers to show the ways in which its ambiguities of meaning lent richness to the experience of reading her work, and to consider how her work might resonate in the present in satisfying ways. As a result, the article ended up being much longer than the story itself. I have written a lot about Sui Sin Far in the past because I was drawn to her work on a visceral level. I admired the fact that she wrote what she called “Chinese-­American stories” at a time when the Chinese in America were being systematically abused, excluded, and oppressed. I also admired the fact that she wrote with little support. Given that she was a single, working woman of biracial ancestry from a large, and largely penniless, family (she was one of fourteen siblings!), her decision to take up writing as a profession was a ridiculously presumptuous and courageous act. Most of all, I admired how well she was able to write in these circumstances, especially if we add to the many hurdles getting in the way of her publishing a single word the lack of models for what she was trying to do. Asian American literature as we understand it today would not exist for at least another half century after she passed away. The fact that she wrote at all felt to me like a miracle. And a gift. Her writings connected me to issues that felt alive in a way that few approved Western canonical works had: the experience of racial exclusion, the genteel culture of remaining silent about prejudice and injustice, the promises and the disappointments of liberalism, the ways in World-­Making • 225

which gender and class and sexuality clash against boundaries of racial difference, the operations of regimes of meaning that regulate the ways in which certain raced bodies can be seen or not seen at all, and the particular features of bodies raced as Asian. There was something important for me in the fact that her stories about Asians in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were actually written at that time. They provided an index of a physical and material existence, in the way visiting Angel Island and the buildings that once jailed immigrants from Asia can do—or in the way in which visiting the site of the fallen World Trade Center can symbolically connect us with an event that most of us experienced from a distance.4 Reading the stories in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and the small collection of essays she left behind provided me with an opportunity to think about these issues in a new way and to consider their continuity across time. Although she lived a century before I did, she seemed to understand something about my existence in a way that many of the living writers I had read did not and perhaps could not. Or, from a less anachronistic perspective, she said something about her own existence that shed new light on my own. Sui Sin Far’s ability to cut across time made me believe in the potential of Asian American literature. Hers was not the pursuit of literary greatness, if by greatness we mean a stultifying formal expertise and a historical accumulation of critical reverence. Hers was, rather, the pursuit of stories that were more lively and more germane to the reader, a gift-­giving to a future stranger who might not even know what he is looking for. While I deeply admire craft, and the writers who practice their trade with care and self-­consciousness, I also find that focusing on craft in isolation takes me back to my undergraduate years, when all I was expected to admire—or thought I was expected to admire—was how formally impressive a writer was. The following feels, as I write it down, like sacrilege: literary work that lacks attention to craft can be better than a work that is focused on craft alone. Prioritizing content can lead to writing that might be rough and formally ungainly, as Sui Sin Far’s writings are, but precisely because of this can provide the raw material for producing a work of literature of stunning creativity. A finely crafted work without anything to say, however, is a soulless enterprise. Another way to put this is that, with all due respect to Yeats, the dance can in fact be known from the dancer, and in separating the two an even fiercer, more vital form of dance might be 226 • Conclusion

made possible. Craft will never be lost, of course, for if we have something to say, we will find a way to say it, and given enough time and practice, we will develop a way to say it in as aesthetically pleasing a way as possible. It might also be the case, though, that what becomes aesthetically pleasing would not have seemed so before. Only the formal restlessness produced by having something inchoate and urgent to say, something ill-­suited for the forms already in circulation, makes a new dance possible.

Stepping Outside the Flow of Time

Among other things, literature is an unmooring from time. In our nonliterary lives we are frequently presented a choice, although it’s not always clear what the choices are or what the consequences will be, and we necessarily make decisions that lead to an irresistible unfolding. Do I go to sleep early to get some much needed rest or stay up late to finish writing this book? Do I take a day off to play with my children or is my career more important? Should all my time be taken up by family and career or do I have an obligation to concern myself with what’s happening in the world and seek in some small way to participate? Even refusing to decide is a decision, because we cannot stop the flow of time in which we are always and already engulfed. In literature, however, we—who are lucky enough to have the leisure and the opportunity and the training and the safety to do so—are able to imagine what it might be like to go one way, to see how it might unfold, and then close the book. The story lives on in our minds as part of the lives we have met and encountered and maybe felt as if we have experienced. But there is also a remove, a pastness that quickly settles over the memory of a book, so that we do not ourselves have to live with the consequences of the actions and the sequence of choices the story has narrated. We can think deeply about how the words we are reading conjure a complex set of social and material relationships where such consequences will have rippling meaning. We might analyze and ponder and even seek to find ways in which the world of the book might comment on the world we live in. There is not, however, the sense of urgency that what we have read matters greatly to the immediacy of our own lives. As the novelist Edwidge Danticat reminds us, however, this is a privilege—an incredibly rich one!—that only some of us enjoy. Someday, no matter how secure we might feel now, we readers might also find ourselves struggling with a treacherous world already in motion. In her native counWorld-­Making • 227

try of Haiti, when Danticat was young, people could disappear or be murdered for something as simple as having the wrong book on their shelves. The experience of growing up in such a milieu has greatly influenced what it means to her to be a writer: “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. . . . Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture.”5 For those of us who have not grown up in such dire circumstances, where reading a book can be a matter of life or death, Danticat’s injunction to “create dangerously” might seem overly romantic. We are not in danger. The stakes are not so high for us. We expect the future will be similar to the present. In response to this consideration, Danticat reminds us that “while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in make-­shift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sound of military ‘aid’ helicopters. And still, many are reading and writing, quietly, quietly.”6 Keeping in mind that we live in a precarious, unequal, and ever-­shifting world, even if some of us are lucky enough to be shielded from its full force, what makes literature special is its capacity to make worlds. More precisely, world-­making is a process of stepping outside the flow of time in order to see what potential exists beyond the constraints of the possible and its always accompanying shadow, the impossible. Literature has the capacity to make worlds that might seem otherwise not to be possible, and in showing in concrete detail what such a world looks and feels like, literature can point to ways of being and becoming that we haven’t yet considered. Print literature is excellent in making us see and feel things that aren’t there. This is perhaps why reading and writing become so important, so urgently necessary, so dangerous, exactly at those moments when we are most vulnerable, trapped in a world not of our choosing, one that constrains the workings of our imaginations even as it puts the well-­being of our physical bodies in jeopardy. At such moments, we are as invested as we may ever be in seeing what is not right before our eyes, in believing that another world is possible. This aspect of literature makes it for me inseparably political and aesthetic, and is why I am resistant to any turn to the aesthetic that might end 228 • Conclusion

up prising these two terms apart. Although, having said this, it’s now also self-­evident to me that I am again trying to ask different questions about literature than I have been in the habit of doing, and in doing so developing a different set of criteria for deciding what makes some works valuable to me as a reader. I find myself increasingly frustrated by the very questions that once felt to me so exciting, the ones that led me beyond the literary text to consider its embedment in a greater, often unjust, unequal, terrifying political and social and economic world. What is frustrating about such questions—even as I would never begrudge those who continue to ask these questions the right to ask them and even as I often continue to ask them myself—is that they can render literature an epiphenomenon of the hard and unchanging world that contains it. The study of literature can slide all too easily into being just one more way in which we seek to study this world as it is. As a result, the attempt to connect the literary text to the world threatens in the process to overwhelm the literary text. From such a perspective, it is not much of an intellectual jump to want to dispense with the literary all together. In order to preserve what I think is unique about literature, I would respond to my own question about literary study and taste-­brokering by saying that I am not interested in returning to a mode of thinking that I find suffocating, the judgment of a work of literature as great, minor, or of no consequence. Such a judgment would necessarily be based on a strict attention to form and to a tradition that had already decided, before I came along, what is great. My job as a critic would then be to reaffirm what has already been deemed a great work of literature and to evaluate all new work based on this cultural template. The purpose of such cultural work would be for the critic to preserve and pass down a set of almost sacred texts to another generation of readers, the texts themselves unchanged, untouched, vulnerable to turning into dust if not handled gingerly, and cut off completely from the world. I feel grateful that I live in a time when this is not what is expected of me. If this means giving up some of my cultural authority to someone like Oprah Winfrey or Nancy Pearl, then I can live with such a bargain. This does not mean, however, that I am not interested in making judgments about aesthetics. I have been making such judgments throughout this book, often in ways more explicit than those of my peers. Indeed, I do not see how we can write about literature without making judgments. What I am specifically opposed to is blindly following the judgment of World-­Making • 229

others. For this is exactly what the study of literature felt like to me when I was in college. I was told what to like and why it would be good for me to like it, and when I tried to make my own judgments I was criticized for it—not for my tastes specifically, which were in any case based on the same criteria I had been taught, but for my nerve in making them known. Those who insist on this form of literary study seem to believe that they know what is good for all of us and that they are therefore called on to make us follow. Like most of my contemporaries, I strongly dissent from this view of literature. But I must also add that our work as critics is not very meaningful if we do not admit that we have values, many of them explicitly political, which guide our work and strive to show others how we have arrived at them. We need to make our aesthetic judgments more assertively than we have become accustomed to; we should be willing to interrogate the criteria we use for making such judgments openly and transparently; and we should do all of this always with an eye toward considering how the study of literature can be made more relevant to the world we would like to live in. In stressing the world-­making capacity of literature, what I hope to do is to ask a different set of questions than the ones that used to concern me: What vision of the future can a literary work offer us that can’t be found elsewhere? What inspiration can it provide? How can it move us to be different, to want to alter our way of life, especially when doing so is incredibly hard and inconvenient, and to engage unsettling visions of what we are always, ceaselessly, becoming? How can it show us potential when all there seems to be is possibility? These new questions determine for me what is valuable about literature and what about it fails to interest me. And these questions have urgency for me because I find the alternative too difficult to bear—that the stories we tell about ourselves can tell us nothing about futures we might all somehow, miraculously, care to nurture into being because the present we know is the only world we can know. If world-­making is my criterion for judging the aesthetic worth of a work of literature, none of the works I’ve come across in the writing of this book—indeed, none of the works of literature I have ever read—can be considered successful. Almost by definition, no one work can accomplish all the things I am looking for in reading literature. But when I think of these works together, as what I have described as a self-­perpetuating machine, they stand out for me as brilliant and even thrilling. There is much stellar writing, the kind that deservedly wins awards or undeservedly gets 230 • Conclusion

overlooked. These writings, which I encountered in researching this book, stand out as some of the very best that American literature, or even contemporary literature as an international phenomenon, has to offer by any measure. There are also a lot of promising writers who are turning out works that aren’t polished or likely to garner much attention, but provide nonetheless something original, even if in some cases only as a glimmer. There are also writers that could benefit from spending more time in writing workshops. Politically, I find the work of all of these writers to be wide and often contradictory, frequently challenging my own assumptions and commitments and occasionally outraging me by what seems to be expressions of misguided beliefs. The most accomplished and the still struggling and the ones destined for obscurity—although this doesn’t seem to faze the authors I spoke with, many of whom seem unconcerned about fame or riches, so long as they can write—work together to create new horizons of possibility, pushing past what has been repeatedly claimed as impossible to show their readers that life is ever more strange, mysterious, full of heartaches and pain and hope than could have been imagined ­before. Becoming, deterritorialization, lines of flight, involution, rhizomes: I find myself having to twist words around to capture the unique and invigorating ways in which Asian American literature as a literary endeavor performs cultural work. When intentionally read side-­by-­side, even the works that don’t seem to have anything in common and that certainly manifest little interest in a shared racial preoccupation start to resonate with each other. This suggests that describing this body of literature with a racial moniker that is more bloodless bureaucratic invention than poetic inspiration continues to serve an important purpose. The purpose these works serve when read together is to give expression to Asian America as a promise more than an existing reality, a made-­up category that celebrates its artifice-­in-­the-­making and that says whatever future we might have together will be equally made up. Avery Gordon tells her readers to imagine otherwise, and Kandice Chuh responds that Asian American literature already does exactly this (even if there is also temptation to think likewise).7 To this discussion I add, not yet. That is, Asian American literature, like all literature, has the potential to offer the ready reader a means for imagining alternative pathways, novel ways of being in the world, and concepts of personhood that values individuality’s obligation to otherness. Because we are talking exWorld-­Making • 231

plicitly about potential, however, we must say that this is work that by definition can never be finished. Literature in general, and Asian American literature specifically, is at its best a literature of the not-­yet. Such literature constantly aspires to a being that is endlessly deferred, but the positing of that being, which promises euphoria and utopia, is as important as the critique of horizons that are both dysphoric and dystopic.

The Future

The reasons why I value Asian American literature are the same reasons why I believe there isn’t anything wrong with contemporary American literature as a whole, except perhaps for an overly modernist faith in craft. Indeed, given how broad, diverse, and multitudinous this category of creative expression is, it seems odd to me that so many—and there are many—would want to make such a blanket condemnation. I am even willing to state, first, that although there are many works that I have read which I dislike, I think contemporary American literature is often pretty good and on rare occasions great. For instance, among the works directly consulted for this book, I find myself still savoring the following: the surprising leap in time between the second and third stories in the Hema-­ and-­Kaushik story cycle, the black-­and-­white drawing of a monkey on the last page of American Born Chinese, the opening chapter of The Surrendered, the depiction of the lost year in American Woman, the concluding image of raised fists in Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, the mall scene in American Son, the description of a Sikh ceremony in Sacred Games, the scene of betrayal in Funny Boy, the sun-­kissed feel of a Greek island evoked in Forgery, two or three stories in Stories of Your Life and Others, two or three stories in We Should Never Meet, the first chapter of A Feather on the Breath of God, Olivia and Ben’s story in I-­Hotel, and the scene at Narita Airport in Catfish and Mandala, where the author chases a stranger on a bicycle in driving rain. Many of the authors of these works are mfa graduates and teachers of creative writing, and being thus products of a creative-­writing program does little to prevent these writers from producing such moments of literary richness. It may even help make such moments possible. And at such moments contemporary literature does not suffer from comparison with past works that have for a long time been considered great. Second, I assert that the voguish ways in which contemporary American fiction in particular is so often roundly dismissed are suspect, because 232 • Conclusion

such dismissals so exactly coincide with the increasing racial diversity of the writers who are now writing it. In a review of Mark McGurl’s Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, published in the London Review of Books, Elif Batuman makes this disparaging remark about the fiction produced by mfas: “I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun. Moreover, if I wanted to read literature from the developing world, I would go ahead and read literature from the developing world.”8 In other words, what is wrong with “programme fiction” is that it reads like ethnic literature— and what makes this literature ethnic and what makes analogies to it such a put down is that the authors, coming “from the developing world,” are themselves barely literate, much less literary. It’s also noteworthy that in his book McGurl explicitly argues that ethnicity is an important model for postwar American fiction, even for those works that don’t on their face seem to be. Running across this passage, I felt as if a drunken character from the introductory story of Nam Le’s The Boat had just come to life and started publishing commentary about ethnic literature: “It’s a license to bore.” If you want to call such dismissals racially motivated, or even simply racist, I wouldn’t object. Indeed, the more I think about this passage, the more I am troubled by it. What nation has “no literary tradition”? What position of blind privilege and patronizing authority must one occupy to insist on such a possibility? Complaining about contemporary American literature is a lot like complaining about the young, who are always somehow failing to live up to the examples of their elders. It also just so happens that the young in the United States are now, as elsewhere in the Western world and beyond, much more racially diverse than they used to be.9 More important, the young, and in particular young writers, are engaged precisely in the kind of cultural work I am looking to literature to provide, the imagination of the future that isn’t just a replication of the thinking that gives shape to the present. More specifically, what I have found especially moving about the literary works I read in the writing of this book is their unusual ability to offer moments of immense generosity that are all the more marvelous—I hesitate to say miraculous for fear of overusing the word—because unexWorld-­Making • 233

pected. I started this book by discussing one such moment in Tomine’s Shortcomings, when Ben tells Alice not to put down his former girlfriend because “we all have our reasons.” Similarly, in Free Food for Millionaires, Min Jin Lee has her heroine realize something incredibly generous: “None of them would ever starve, her refugee father would’ve said quickly. Americans were goddamn lucky. . . . Casey peeked at Scott, the guy who’d just had the baby [and was being let go at a financial firm where she worked]. He was trying to be brave—be a good fucking sport about it. Her father was wrong, she thought. Suffering was that—it sucked not to get what you want. No one wanted to fail publicly, and tragedies came in an assortment of sizes.”10 What is appealing about the last passage is how it reframes Danticat’s comments, making us consider what the stakes are in reading a novel or a poem at a moment when we are not ourselves in extreme circumstances. Living in a safe neighborhood, having a fulfilling job, being blessedly healthy (knock on wood), surrounded by a loving family, I might feel unable to claim that what I am doing when I read a work of literature is as significant as what those who met in their backyards and basements were doing when they enacted a play, or read from a book, that in context was such a bold affront to the then current political regime, as Danticat recalls occurred in Haiti during her childhood. Nevertheless, the struggles I might be faced with, the dissatisfaction I admittedly feel about the ways things are in the world, and especially the keenly felt fears I have about a near future that seems unswervingly to be bearing down on all of us, so that each passing year feels more full of ominous threat, do give urgency to my reading practices. Maybe my concerns about the near future are just projections of dissatisfaction at the present which, clothed in its mundaneness, would otherwise seem trivial to me and others. Or maybe my concerns are really displacements of childhood troubles I suffered, which I am now projecting, enlarged, into a future of uncertain turmoil. As shrewd as such observations might be, I don’t think that they are all that is the case. The urgent necessity of turning to the future is becoming more urgent with each passing year, partly because imagining the future as a time we would care to live in is becoming harder and harder to do, and partly because 9/11 has exacerbated an already unhealthy preoccupation in the United States with the past that threatens the present. Mohsin Hamid captures the complexities of this preoccupation with unusual clarity when he has the mono234 • Conclusion

loguing Pakistani American narrator of The Reluctant Fundamentalist observe: “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me—a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know—but that they were scrambling to don the costume of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era was fictitious, and whether—if it could be animated—it contained a part written for someone like me.”11 Contrast this image of a backward-­looking gaze with a poem entitled “1977” by Ishle Yi Park, which exemplifies another moving aspect of contemporary Asian American literature that I have been fixated on in the writing of this book—its sense of futurity. In this poem, the speaker recalls the year of the title as not only the year of her birth but as one imbued with the promise of all that the following years would witness: I mark this: strange rhythm of years that still excites me, makes me wonder about death, my mother’s ears, and the shape of her waist before I was born, nights she spent drinking shots of soju in Daegu bars, building mud huts on Surak-­san, before homework and recitals and cooking three meals burdened her days before 2nd grade before American capitalist tooth fairies before fist fights before me.12 The imagery is not always happy, often evoking labor, hardship, emotional distress, and death. But in addition to the negativity that such imagery provokes, these lines sharply convey a feeling of excitement. The terseness of the lines speeds the tempo of the verse, prompting the reader to read with a quick pace and a lively interest in what all these years will contain. World-­Making • 235

Ending with “me” does not regurgitate the fascination with the Child as a hackneyed trope for the future. The “me” seems to have a more complex meaning, one that—like the notion of desert time—is part of a future that is already a part of the past, so that to look backward to the year of one’s birth, as this poem does, is not, as the Americans in The Reluctant Fundamentalists do after 9/11, to retreat into the past. It is, rather, to see the past as already anticipating the future, as being forward looking. To look out for with hope and dread—this is what Park’s poem does. It does not seek, or wait for, an easy or a happy life. It finds in a difficult life a life that is worth living. Similarly, the poem “Postcard from Kashmir” by the late Agha Shahid Ali recognizes what many people who have come to live elsewhere learn about their past, that it is lived through a “memory” that is “a little / out of focus,” its contents “a giant negative, black / and white, still undeveloped.” That is, one is forced to recognize that the past is not perfectly recallable, that one is not likely to return to it, so that the experience of looking at the past is like looking at a photograph of something sublime contained, to its disadvantage, in a postcard: “I have always loved neatness. Now I hold / the half-­inch Himalayas in my hand.”13 We know when we look at this photograph that the actual experience was much grander, as presumably someone who, like the speaker of this poem, has spent his childhood in Kashmir would know all too well, that it cannot be contained by its miniaturized replica. Unfortunately, this is not what many leaders in the United States believe. They see the past as only what can be contained in a postcard, something that can be perfectly replicated, manipulated, and sanitized. They consider this past a roadmap for the future, the future being itself a road that leads back to that more perfect past, a past we can relive in the present, a past we can conjure in the present as a way to dispel the future. The road to the past leads away from a future that such leaders do not want, and that they fear. But as Ali’s poem asks us to consider, the future will not be like the past, nor can it, as Park’s poem reminds us, be warded off. The future can only be imagined into being, and be something we would want, when we have the courage to admit this. The future is an invention that ever looms before us, just beyond our reach but always close by. It speaks to our deepest longings, even those we do not feel comfortable speaking plainly about, and to our deepest fears. And most important, it broadcasts that it is coming, whether we like it or not, whether we fight it or embrace it. It is always 236 • Conclusion

coming. Our agency lies in how we respond to its approach, and make of it in the exercise of the imagination the raw material for producing worlds we care to dwell in. To discover the potential of this agency, we need what Asian American literature can offer, what contemporary literature can give, what all literature might be able to provide. We need a literature that appreciates the differences we must learn to live with and that doesn’t seek to reduce such differences into instances of the same. We need a literature that is formally restless. We need a literature that never ceases to ask, what is its purpose?

World-­Making • 237

Acknowledgments

The thoughtful responses to my many questions provided by the writers I interviewed have left me in awe of their willingness to share so much of themselves with me. I hope this book partially reciprocates their generosity. Although I mentioned their names in the introduction, I want to mention them again just because I think it’s so cool to say I talked with them: Saher Alam, Alexander Chee, Susan Choi, Lawrence Minh-­Bùi Davis, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-­rae Lee, Min Jin Lee, Gerald Maa, David Mura, Sabina Murray, Ed Park, Brian Ascalon Roley, Ricco Siasoco, Monique Truong, and Karen Tei Yamashita. Special thanks to those who provided commentary on different chapters of this book at difference stages of their development: Andrew Hoberek, James Kim, Anita Mannur, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kevin Ohi, Chrystal Parikh, Frances Restuccia, Rachel Smith, Pam Thoma, and Christopher Wilson. Mary Crane and Robert Stanton helped guide my reading on allegory. Gordon Hutner encouraged me to think about the importance of reading many works. Kyoo Lee invited me to share my work at City University of New York, as did Linda Võ at the University of California, Irvine, and Cathy Schlund-­Vials at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. The discussion of Japanese American internment narratives in chapter 8 began as a paper I co-­authored with a former graduate student; I thank Kristin Ito for letting me incorporate some of what we wrote into this chapter when it no longer seemed to work as a standalone article. I cannot thank Courtney Berger enough for reading early drafts of the introduction, encouraging me to keep working on this book, and being an all-­around great editor. It has been an amazing pleasure to work with her. Her assistant Christine Choi was immensely helpful in moving the process along, as was the rest of the staff at Duke University Press. Nita Sembrowich did a wonderful job transcribing interviews, and Phi Su did an equally wonderful job culling through

census data to create the charts that appear in chapter 1. The staff at Boston College’s Media and Technology Services department helped with the design of these charts, and prepared all other illustrations that appear in this book in high-­quality electronic files. Boston College also provided me with research money in various forms along the way, which helped make the preparation of this book for publication possible. I also want to thank Lisa Young of the Museum of Northwest Art for allowing me to reproduce one of Frank Okada’s paintings in their permanent collection as well as for permission to use another painting on the cover, and Seiko Buckingham for giving me permission to reprint images from Citizen 13660. An earlier version of chapter 4 originally appeared in Mosaic 43, no. 1 (March 2010): 73–92. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Twentieth-­Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 345–70, and the discussion of the rise of ethnic literature during the program era in chapter 3 was also adapted from this article. Chapter 7 appeared in American Literary History 23, no. 3 (July 2011): 555–73. Part of chapter 3 appeared as “Race and Racelessness in Ed Park’s Personal Days,” Post45 website, 10 June 2011, http://post45.research.yale.edu. As always, my thoughts turn in gratitude to Grace, who is so aptly named for what she brings into my life and into the lives of so many others, and to Yohan and Alexandra, who every day amaze me. I also feel the need to fess up to something completely embarrassing, a consequence and an inerasable trace of my immigrant upbringing: in the acknowledgments to my first book, I misspelled my father’s name! So, thanks once again to my father, Tae Keun, this time spelling double and triple checked. And thanks to my mother, Hye Kyung, and my sister, Min. I hope they know how important they are to me, and how lucky I feel to have grown up in their company and with their guidance.

240 • Acknowledgments

Appendix

Contemporary Asian American Literature 101

I am often asked what works of Asian American literature I would recommend. The following is my answer, which will no doubt change as I read more and as the criteria for my preferences continue to shift. I make no claim that they are the best of their cohort. They are, rather, a good set of texts for gaining entry into an ever evolving literary endeavor. The reason I include this list in an appendix is to provide a concrete demonstration of the breadth and ambition of a capaciously defined contemporary Asian American literature. Although this book is focused on fiction, comics, and poetry, it feels overly restrictive to limit this list to just these categories. Hence, this list also includes memoirs, autobiographies, and works that are sometimes called creative nonfiction. Plays have been excluded because they lie beyond my competence to evaluate effectively, with one exception (I loved watching it in the theater). The list is kept to works published since 1990, an arbitrary date but one that has the advantage of training attention on the enormous expansion of titles that has occurred in a little over two decades. This is also why publication dates skew to more recent years. To be sure, there are many works that should be on this list, and many more—some glaring omissions—that I simply haven’t had the opportunity to read. My apologies to the authors. Still, to be effective a list needs to be manageable, and the number I have selected (101) seems to be the outer limit of manageability. Even a list such as this must restrict itself so as to spotlight what is impressive about these works and to leave one aware that so many more works could also have been included. Where I have not restrained myself is in choosing works that provide a broad cross-­section of what might be considered contemporary Asian American literature, with some works pushing against and even past familiar definitions of this category.

Saher Alam, The Groom to Have Been (2008) Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (2009) Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998) Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (2006) Samanatha Lan Chang, Hunger (1998) Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of Hip-­Hop (2005) Leslie Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008) Alexander Chee, Edinburgh (2002) Lisa Chen, Mouth (2007) Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010) ———, Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) Susan Choi, A Person of Interest (2009) ———, American Woman (2003) ———, Foreign Student (1999) Sonya Chung, Long for This World (2010) Heinz Insu Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996) Sesshue Foster, World Ball Notebook (2009) Luis Francia, The Eye of the Fish (2001) V. V. Ganeshananthan, Love Marriage (2008) Amitav Gosh, Hungry Tide (2006) ———, Glass Palace (2001) ———, In an Antique Land (1993) Philip Kan Gotanda, Sisters Matsumoto (2005) Jessica Hagedorn, Dream Jungle (2004) ———, Dogeaters (1991) Kimiko Hahn, Unbearable Heart (1995) Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008) Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution (2007) Gish Jen, Who’s Irish? (2000) ———, Mona in the Promised Land (1996) Cynthia Kadohata, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) Derek Kirk Kim, Good as Lily (2007) ———, Same Difference and Other Stories (2011) Patty Kim, A Cab Called Reliable (1997) Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from a Divided Country (2003) Maxine Hong Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace (2003) Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) ———, The Namesake (2003) ———, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) Chang-­rae Lee, The Surrendered (2011) 242 • Appendix

———, Aloft (2004) ———, A Gesture Life (1999) ———, Native Speaker (1995) Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin (2009) ———, Country of Origin (2005) ———, Yellow: Stories (2002) Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires (2007) R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s (1995) David Wong Louie, The Barbarians Are Coming (2000) ———, Pangs of Love (1994) Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere (2009) David Mura, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (2008) ———, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991) David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1996) Sabina Murray, Forgery (2007) ———, A Carnivore’s Inquiry (2004) ———, The Caprices (2002) Fae Myenne Ng, Steer toward Rock (2008) ———, Bone (1993) Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls (2010) ———, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2008) Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995) Han Ong, Fixer Chao (2001) Julie Otsuka, Buddha in the Attic (2011) ———, When the Emperor Was Divine (2003) Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats (1999) Gary Pak, A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) Ed Park, Personal Days (2008) Ishle Yi Park, The Temperature of This Water (2004) Shailja Patel, Migritude (2010) Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-­Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999) Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet (2005) Bao Phi, Sông I Sing (2011) Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2008) Nina Revoyr, Age of Dreaming (2008) ———, Southland (2003) Brian Ascalon Roley, American Son (2001) Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (1997) Contemporary Asian American Literature 101 • 243

Beau Sia, A Night without Armor II: The Revenge (1998) lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings (2007) ———, Summer Blonde (2003) G. B. Tran, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2011) Jane Jeong Trenka, Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (2009) ———, The Language of Blood (2003) Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth (2010) ———, The Book of Salt (2004) Abraham Verghese, The Tennis Partner (1998) ———, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1995) Chea Villanueva, Jessie’s Song (1995) Marianne Villanueva, Mayor of the Roses (2005) Shawn Wong, American Knees (1995) Karen Tei Yamashita, I-­Hotel (2010) ———, Tropic of Orange (1997) ———, Brazil Maru (1992) ———, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (2006) ———, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks (2004) Paul Yoon, Once the Shore: Stories (2009) Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011) Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (2000)

244 • Appendix

Notes

Introduction

1 Tomine, Shortcomings, 9. 2 Ibid., 13. 3 Sia, A Night without Armor II. 4 Linmark, Rolling the R’s. 5 Yamashita, I-­Hotel. 6 Huang, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction, 82. 7 Wood, “Keeping It Real.” 8 All unattributed quotations are from original interviews specifically conducted for this book. They were mostly conducted on the phone, recorded, and transcribed. Quotations from interviews have been edited for grammar and clarity. Both the recordings and the transcriptions are on file with the author. The one interview that has not been transcribed is the one with Min Jin Lee, which was conducted for a pilot show on National Public Radio titled As I Am: Asians in America. The show can be downloaded at http:// www.iaas.umb.edu/AsIAmFinalMin.mp3. For more information about the show, visit the website As I Am: Asians in America, http://www.asiam.us. 9 As Rajini Srikanth puts it at the start of her award-­winning study on South Asian American literature, “It is my conviction that reading this body of literature must be more than just an act of aesthetic or narrative pleasure. Rather, it must be a just act—doing justice to the contexts from which the writing emerges and challenging one’s imagination to encounter the texts with courage, humility, and daring” (The World Next Door, 1). 10 Sue-­Im Lee, “Introduction,” 6. 11 Christopher Lee, “Asian American Literature and the Resistances to Theory,” 26.

12 Gary Okihiro made this point sharply in a recent introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies: “The Third World Liberation Front, we know, was inspired by the anticolonial, antiracist strivings of the majority of humankind in what W. E. B. Du Bois memorably termed ‘the problem of the twentieth century’—a momentous transnational project that aspired to undo over 400 years of world history. By contrast, ethnic studies was a field conjured by the Chicago school of sociology specifically and U.S. sociology generally, involving a turn from race to ethnicity, centering on the process whereby European immigrants become Americans—assimilation, an early-­twentieth-­century concern” (“Preface,” 167–68). 13 This is a point most closely associated with Viet Thanh Nguyen. See especially the conclusion to Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance, 143–71. 14 Tomine, Shortcomings, 13. 15 Ibid. 16 Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, 3. 17 Thanks to Solmaz Shariff, a former managing director of the Asian American Writers Workshop, for these figures, and Ken Chen, the director, for the invitation to judge the 2009 prize in fiction. Unfortunately, numbers of nominees for earlier or later years were unavailable. 18 For an excellent and compact discussion of these movements and why they have emerged within literary studies, see Wilkens, “Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers.” Also see the discussion on “distance reading” in Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees. 19 Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 221–22. 20 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 159. 21 The line of thought developed here is suggested by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Those interested in reinvigorating a critical conversation about aesthetics both within and outside Asian American literary studies have notably followed his lead. One problem with this approach is that aesthetics itself becomes an epiphenomenon of more basic economic and other structural forces. See especially Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies, and Guillory, Cultural Capital. Also see Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. 22 Tomine, Shortcomings, 29. 23 Ibid., 101. 24 Ibid., 107. 25 Ibid., 106. 26 Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” 6. 27 Ch’ien, Weird English, 3–4.

246 • Notes to Introduction

1. Theorizing Expectations

1 Bloom, Asian-­American Women Writers, xv. 2 For more on comparisons between Jewish and Asian Americans, see Schlund-­Vials, Modeling Citizenship. 3 Many scholars have written with great care about the history leading up to the passage of this law and all that followed. Anyone interested in learning more should consult their exemplary work. Excellent starting places for an understanding of Asian immigration history are Takaki, Stranger from a Different Shore; Chan, Asian Americans; Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy; Ngai, Impossible Subjects. For a thorough overview of the many changes to immigration laws since 1965 affecting Asian Americans, see Park and Park, Probationary Americans. It should also be noted that the 1965 law did not go into effect until 1968, and the changes discussed in this chapter took longer still to be noticeable. 4 Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams. 5 For an especially cogent discussion about empire and Asian Americans, see Maira, Missing. 6 Stockton, The Queer Child, 13. On “haunting,” see Derrida, Specters of Marx. 7 Stockton, The Queer Child, 30. 8 Ibid., 31. 9 Tomine, Shortcomings; Jen, Mona in the Promised Land; Roley, American Son; Lahiri, The Namesake; Chang-­rae Lee, Native Speaker; Truong, Bitter in the Mouth; Eugenides, Middlesex; Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story; Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp. 10 Lisa Chen, Mouth, 22–23. 11 Mun, Miles from Nowhere, 226. 12 Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, 267. 13 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 176. 14 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 7. 15 Ibid., 1. 16 Ibid., 3. 17 Ibid., 48. 18 Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 9. 19 Ibid. 20 Massumi, Deleuze, and Bergson are all also working with ideas that in large part originate with Spinoza. A more complete genealogy would seek to trace the ways in which these thinkers build on each other. 21 Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” 1. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 238–39. 23 Ibid., 238. 24 Ibid., 239. Notes to Chapter One • 247

25 See Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature”; Lowe, Immigrant Acts; Palumbo-­Liu, Asian/American. 26 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 9. 27 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 4. 28 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 149. 29 Ibid., 151. 30 Lim, Gamber, Sohn, and Valentino, Transnational Asian American Literature, 4. 31 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 10. 32 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 151. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 28. 34 Grosz, The Nick of Time, 2–3. For a succinct and cogent discussion of the “cultural turn,” see Armstrong, “Who’s Afraid of the Cultural Turn?” 35 Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 467. 36 Ibid. 37 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 331. 38 Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 51. 39 Hayot, “The Asian Turns,” 907–8. 40 See especially Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered.” 41 For a cogent discussion about the aesthetic turn in Asian American literary studies, see Lim Gamber, Sohn, and Valentino, Transnational Asian American Literature. 42 Song, Strange Future, 3. Also see Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance, 144. 43 Jade Snow Wong herself went on a tour of Asia for the State Department in 1953 to promote the idea that racial inequality in her home country had been grossly exaggerated. 44 For instance, Mark Chiang makes much of the differences between the literary celebration of Okada’s No-­No Boy and his “crude realism” inaugurated by the editors of Aiiieeeee! and the later appreciation for the “high modernism” of Cha’s Dictee as ushered in by the publication of Elaine Kim and Norma Alarcon’s edited collection of essays, Writing Self, Writing Nation. See Chiang’s “Autonomy and Representation,” 25. 45 Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon, 6. 46 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 6–7. 47 Cha, Dictee, 56. 48 Hagedorn, Dogeaters, 7. 49 Cusset, French Theory, 30. 50 Derrida, Of Grammatology. 51 See Cha, Apparatus. 52 Trinh, Woman, Native, Other. 53 Christopher Lee, “Asian American Literature and the Resistances to Theory,” 37. 248 • Notes to Chapter One

2. The Trope of the Lost Manuscript

1 Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace, 4. 2 Okada, No-­No Boy, 257. 3 Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, 288. 4 Ling, Between Worlds, xv. 5 Yamashita, I-­Hotel. 6 For more discussion of the Yamanaka controversy, see Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 2–4. Also see Mark Chiang, Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies, 93–94. 7 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 5–6. 8 Ibid., 37. 9 Ibid., 42. 10 Ibid., 50. 11 Ibid., 51. 12 Ibid., 53. 13 Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 8. 14 Ibid., 493. 15 Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, 180. It is noteworthy that Takaki quotes generously from Bulosan’s book in his description of early twentieth-­century Filipino American life. 16 Thanks to Judith Wilt for questioning this distinction. 17 Bulosan, “How My Stories Were Written,” 109. 18 Frank Okada, “Oral History Interview with Frank S. Okada.” Thanks to Jim Lee for information about this interview. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 A look at Asian American Art, by Gordon Chang, Mark Johnson, and Paul Karlstrom, reveals how much Asian American visual artists from the mid-­ nineteenth to the late twentieth century emphasized the political nature of their work. Also noteworthy is how contemporary artists also think of their work in political terms. Indeed, they may have a much less complex relationship to the political than do creative writers, which would invert the relationship between painting and writing that Okada insists on. For more on contemporary Asian American art, and especially its connection to politics, see Kim, Machida, and Sharon, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes; Machida, Unsettled Visions; See, The Decolonized Eye. 22 Chin, Aiiieeeee!, 10. 23 Ibid., 35. 24 Ibid., 36. 25 Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies, 146. 26 Ibid., 147. Notes to Chapter Two • 249

27 Iijima, “Pontifications on the Distinctions between Grains of Sand and Yellow Pearls,” 6. 28 Ibid., 12–13. 29 McGurl, “The Program Era,” 117. 30 Ibid., 111. 31 Ibid., 117. 32 See McGurl, The Program Era. The focus here is on the earlier article, which predates the publication of the book, because it concentrates attention much more sharply on the importance of ethnicity in the organization of contemporary American fiction. 33 McGurl, “The Program Era,” 120; McGurl, The Program Era, 41. 34 See Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature, xv; and Yoonmee Chang, Writing the Ghetto.

3. Not Ethnic Literature

1 Rody, The Interethnic Imagination, 5, 8. 2 Ibid., 10–11. 3 Le, The Boat, 9. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 24. 6 Ibid., 27. 7 Ibid., 10. 8 In “‘Ethnic Literature’s Hot,’” Donald Goellnicht offers a more forgiving appraisal of the middle stories in this collection. While his argument is persuasive, it nevertheless does not fully account for the pressure that the first story places on the collection as a whole, and it also gives the final story more aesthetic appeal than this author, at least, felt when reading it. 9 Park, Personal Days, 5. 10 Ibid., 40. 11 Ibid., 199. 12 Ibid., 17. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Ibid., 14. 15 This is also true of Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth. This novel revolves around an extended narrative conceit that leads the reader to think the narrator’s race is different than what it turns out to be. 16 Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others, 134. 17 Ibid., 127. 18 Huang, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction, 113. 19 Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 138. 250 • Notes to Chapter Three

20 21 22 23

Ibid. Ibid., 144. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 12. Ibid., 27.

4. American Personhood

1 Roley, American Son, 189. 2 Morrison, Playing in the Dark. 3 Yoshino, Covering, 21. 4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 116. 5 Roley, American Son, 85. 6 Ibid., 88. 7 Ibid., 179. 8 Ibid., 182. 9 Ibid., 24. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid., 30. 12 Ibid., 52. 13 Ibid., 179. 14 Yoshino, Covering, 93. 15 Ibid., 191. 16 Ibid., 190. 17 Roley, American Son, 215. 18 Ty, “Abjection, Masculinity, and Violence,” 149. 19 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 442. 20 Readings, The University in Ruins, 188–89. 21 Butler, Precarious Life, 23. 22 Parikh, An Ethics of Betrayal, 3. 23 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 460. 24 Choi, American Woman, 359, emphasis added. 25 Ibid., 253. 26 These observations build on a point that Nancy Abelmann explores with thoughtful care in an ethnography about Korean American college students: “Asian Americans offer, by many counts, the one color that does not count” (The Intimate University, 2). 27 Choi, American Woman, 319. 28 Ibid., 350. 29 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 441. 30 Ibid. 31 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 7. Notes to Chapter Four • 251

32 Leslie Chang, Factory Girls, 192. 33 Choi, American Woman, 140–41. 34 Economists refer to rent-­seeking as a way of “getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort” (Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, 32). 35 Choi, American Woman, 369. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 253. 38 Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation.” 39 Choi, American Woman, 343. 40 Ibid. 41 For more discussion of savior thinking, see Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire.

5. Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race

1 Lye, America’s Asia, 1. This phrase is a clever twisting of Luce Irigaray’s memorable phrase. 2 See the documentary Sentenced Home for a gripping account of the impact this change to immigration law has on several individual Cambodian American men and their families. Also, see David Cheng, “Émigrés of the Killing Fields.” 3 See especially Tram Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now; Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?; Maira, Missing. 4 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 179. 5 Ibid., 181. 6 Brand, “Education.” 7 Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 84. 8 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 130. 9 Liu, The Accidental Asian, 34. 10 Brand, “Education.” 11 For an important discussion of the use of the word excellence in contemporary university settings, see Readings, The University in Ruins. Readings argues that excellence has become an empty, nonideological placeholder for an educational system that no longer has a clear mission. Hence, whereas the university was once dedicated to culture, and as such served as part of a national project, the university has increasingly become dedicated to excellence, which is to say dedicated to nothing in particular. 12 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 8. 13 Butler, “Endangered/Endangering,” 17.

252 • Notes to Chapter Five

14 Shute and DeKoven, “Introduction,” 767. 15 Royal, “Introduction,” 16. 16 The status of comics is quite different in Western Europe and Japan, mainly because there they are less closely associated with childhood, and thus they have not elicited the kind of terminological debates there that academic discussion in the United States has engaged. See Sabin, Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels, 217. 17 Quoted in Royal, “Introduction,” 15. 18 Oh, “Sight Unseen,” 144. 19 Also well worth noting here is the work of the Asian Australian artist Shaun Tan, who has excelled in creating riveting narratives with surreal and detailed drawings that contain no text. Most notably, see Tan, The Arrival. In addition, Lynda Barry stands out as a pioneering figure in the world of alternative comic strips. See Barry, One Hundred Demons. For a discussion of Barry’s importance to “Filipina American feminist (peminist) writings and to contemporary Filipino American cultural production in general,” see de Jesús, “Liminality and Mestiza Consciousness in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons.” 20 Yang, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks, 23. 21 Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order picks up where Gordon Yamamoto ends, with equally interesting results. The Eternal Smile, co-­written by Derek Kirk Kim, also explores the tension between realism and genre fiction in three discrete vignettes. The first two directly address the dangers of genre fiction as escapism and as corporate fantasy respectively, while the final, more ambitious, vignette stresses the ways in which genre fiction can play a healthy role in a person’s life when it is understood self-­consciously as engaging in fantasy. 22 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 94–117. 23 Quoted in Choy, Dong, and Hom, Coming Man, 91, emphasis added. The image originally appeared in the Wasp, May 20, 1881, 322. 24 Yang, American Born Chinese, 43. 25 Ibid., 48. 26 Ibid., 50. 27 Ibid., 111. 28 When the website Myspace chose American Born Chinese as a featured book, many expressed outrage at the figure of Chin-­Kee. As Yang points out in a blog response to this controversy, Chin-­Kee is an explicit amalgamation of racist ways of seeing Asians and Asian Americans that spans more than a century. Thanks to an early anonymous reader of this chapter for calling attention to this incident. Also worth noting is that while American Born ChiNotes to Chapter Five • 253

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

nese is suitable for and geared toward young readers, the presence of Chin-­ Kee does not make it suitable for the very young. Even for older readers, Chin-­Kee requires extended discussion about what he satirizes. Fu, “American Born Chinese [review],” 275. Yang, American Born Chinese, 15. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 191. Lye, “Introduction,” 2. Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 74. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 84. Michaels has also gone out of his way to scorn Asian American studies publicly, labeling it, along with African American studies, a form of “blackface” in a Chronicle of Higher Education column (“Why Identity Politics Distracts Us from Economic Inequalities,” B10). Inspired by Kenneth Li’s “Racer X,” published in Vibe magazine in 1998, the original Hollywood film The Fast and the Furious greatly increased the popularity of the Japanese import car scene, but at the same time placed at the center of its narrative a white male lead. As Mary Beltrán observes, the film “privileges a white-­centrist perspective and notions of natural white superiority. Perhaps most notably, white characters are posited as dominant within a subculture in which they are often absent or marginal” (“The New Hollywood Racelessness,” 61). Rodriguez and Gonzalez, “Asian American Auto/Biographies,” 254; Kwon, “Autoexoticizing,” 3–5. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 130. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 37. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 66. Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 18. Sue et al., “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” 271. Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, 136. Ibid., 144. Dower, War without Mercy, 86. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 36. Readings, The University in Ruins, 189. Yang, American Born Chinese, 20. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Von Eschen, Race against Empire; Klein, Cold War Orientalism; Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam. Brandzel and Desai, “Race, Violence, and Terror,” 63.

254 • Notes to Chapter Five

6. Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

1 Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 223. Compare with Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, a novel set completely in what it calls Mumbai. The spelling of the city’s name serves as a shibboleth that marks the difference between a South Asian American perspective and a South Asian perspective. Chandra himself resides in the United States for at least most of the year. 2 Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, 223. 3 Ibid., 291. 4 Ibid., 310. 5 Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 5. 6 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 122. 7 Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 14. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 3. 10 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 45. 11 Grewal, Transnational America, 65. 12 Ibid., 67. 13 Lahiri, The Namesake, 23. 14 Srikanth, The World Next Door, 51. The critiques of Mukherjee’s fiction referenced here should also be tempered by Srikanth’s observation that “whatever her shortcomings, there is no denying that Mukherjee’s vision is vast, that she sees the interconnectedness between nations and follows the repercussions of actions in one sphere of globe upon peoples in another” (ibid., 185). 15 Lahiri, The Namesake, 49–50. 16 Ibid., 5–6. 17 Edelman, No Future, 8. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 127–88. 20 Edelman, No Future, 3. 21 Ibid., 27. 22 Ibid., 28. This argument is not without controversy. See Caserio et al., “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” This forum on the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory published in the pmla features pieces by Paul Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean. Muñoz’s critique is especially sharp as he points out how Edelman’s argument might squeeze out people of color with his definition of queerness, even if they themselves also identify as queer. 23 Liu, The Accidental Asian, 37. 24 Brown, States of Injury, 61. 25 Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk, 6. Notes to Chapter Six • 255

26 Lahiri, The Namesake, 199. 27 Respectively, Edelman, No Future, 9; Stockton, The Queer Child, 158. 28 Stockton, The Queer Child, 30–33. This is similar to the way the term strange is used in Song, Strange Future. 29 Edelman, No Future, 83. 30 Regarding the importance of children in Lahiri’s fiction, Michael Cox points out that in three stories in Interpreter of Maladies children occupy center-­ stage as “observers, untainted by the effects of prolonged enculturation” (“Interpreters of Cultural Difference,” 120). 31 Lahiri, The Namesake, 40. 32 Ibid. 33 Edelman, No Future, 82. 34 Lahiri, The Namesake, 129. 35 Ibid., 142. 36 Ibid., 146. This quotation contains the chapter’s only reference to the fact that Gogol has a sister. In this, the chapter follows the novel’s almost exclusive preoccupation with its male protagonist. If there were more space and proper occasion, it would be worth discussing Sonia’s marriage to a Chinese American man at the end of the novel, which suggests another possible allegorical position between nation and ethnos not considered here. 37 Ibid., 191. 38 Ibid., 220. 39 Ibid., 214–15. 40 Respectively, Kipnis, “Adultery,” 321; Lahiri, The Namesake, 322. 41 Kipnis, “Adultery,” 322. 42 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 228–29. 43 Ibid., 229. 44 Lahiri, The Namesake, 287. 45 Ibid., 16. 46 Ibid., 21. 47 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 560. 48 Lahiri, The Namesake, 157. 49 Mathew, Taxi!, 35. 50 Park and Park, Probationary Americans, 3. 51 Lahiri, The Namesake, 281.

7. Becoming Planetary

1 Srikanth, The World Next Door, 37. 2 Adams, “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism,” 268. 3 Ibid. 256 • Notes to Chapter Seven

4 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise; Gordon, Ghostly Matters. 5 Murashige, “Karen Tei Yamashita,” 321. 6 Rachel Lee, “Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-­Pacific Perspective”; Chuh, “Of Hemisphere and Other Spheres”; Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 91–115. 7 Rody, The Interethnic Imagination, 126–44; Gordon, Ghostly Matters; Palumbo-­Liu, “The Occupation of Form.” In addition, Mark Chiang responds to the argument put forth by David Palumbo-­Liu by questioning some of the libratory claims the latter makes, and by extension questions many of the claims that others mentioned here make (“Capitalizing Form”). Unfortunately, there has been no similar interest in Yamashita’s fascinating second novel, Brazil-­Maru. 8 Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 16. 9 Ibid., 17. 10 Ibid., 18. 11 Ibid., 80. 12 Ibid., 151. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 154. 15 Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 12. 16 Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 18. 17 Ibid., 98. 18 Yamashita, Brazil-­Maru, 22. 19 Chung, Long for This World, 170. 20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 293. 21 Ibid., 291. 22 Ibid. 23 Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 321. 24 Ibid., 295. 25 In an informal conversation, when asked if anything Asian American affected his writing, something suggested by the many references to Japanese popular culture and the sly inclusion of an Indian American as one of Oscar’s friends in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz candidly responded that in fact Asian America was very much a part of his growing up; that for a studious Dominican like himself going to grade school in New Jersey, the persons he felt closest to socially were Asian American students. In another conversation, he said he wouldn’t be at all opposed to being called an Asian American writer. This does not, of course, take away from the ethnic specificity of his work. 26 Chung, Long for This World, 181. 27 Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, xv. Notes to Chapter Seven • 257

28 This point draws from the argument Amitav Ghosh makes in an essay entitled “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.” See Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances, 138–51. 29 Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 198. 30 Ibid., 201. 31 Ibid., 207. 32 Ibid., 99. 33 Ibid., 100. 34 Ibid., 101. Also see Weisman, The World without Us. 35 Yamashita, Tropic of Orange, 121. 36 Ibid., 240. 37 Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 184. 38 The term the Anthropocene was introduced by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (who won a Nobel Prize for his work on identifying the hole in the ozone layer). In an article that appeared in Nature in 2002, Crutzen argued that human activity has propelled the earth into a new geological epoch. See Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”; Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” 39 Yamashita, Tropic of Orange, 191.

8. Desert–Orient–Nomad

1 Severson, “Los Angeles Stages a Fast Food Intervention.” 2 Grescoe, Bottomfeeder, 185. 3 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 16. 4 Ibid., 17, 33. 5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 381. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Morrison, Beloved. 9 Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach, 165. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 16. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 7. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Ibid., 381. 15 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 232. 16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20. 17 Baudrillard, America. 18 Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 28. 19 Ch’ien, Weird English, 3–4. 258 • Notes to Chapter Eight

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8–9. Ch’ien, Weird English, 4. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 19. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 109. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 143. Hong, Dance Dance Revolution, 72. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 81. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 113. James Kyung-­Jin Lee, “The Transivity of Race and the Challenge of the Imagination,” 1550. Creef, Imaging Japanese America, 83. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 119. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 287n42. Ibid., 286. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 120. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 177. Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine, 147. Mura, “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son,” 394. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 16. Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine, 103. See for example Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory.” Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine, 80. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 140. Murray, What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean?, 7. Tina Chen, “Making Things More Difficult,” 191.

Conclusion

1 Collins, Bring On the Books for Everybody, 7, 80–81. 2 Eagleton, After Theory, 1. 3 Vendler, “Are These the Poems to Remember?” 4 For a riveting discussion about the tensions between haptic closeness and mediated distance in cultural representations of 9/11, see Tanner, “Holding on to 9/11.” Notes to COnclusion • 259

5 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 11. 6 Ibid., 18. 7 Gordon, Ghostly Matters; Chuh, Imagine Otherwise. 8 Batuman, “Get a Real Degree,” 3. 9 As I was writing this, I came across a letter to the editor of the New York Times written in response to a piece by David Brooks that lambasts the young for an “erosion of shared moral frameworks.” The author of the letter, Valarie Kaur, observes, “My generation is the most open-­minded in history. Nearly half of us are nonwhite or multiracial; most of us support interracial dating; and the majority of us, including conservatives, accept gays and lesbians” (“The Moral Values of America’s Youth,” New York Times, 15 September 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/the-­moral-­values-­of -­americas-­youth.html). 10 Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires, 549. 11 Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 115. 12 Ishle Yi Park, The Temperature of This Water, 3–4. 13 Ali, The Veiled Suite, 29.

260 • Notes to COnclusion

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Index

Abelmann, Nancy, 251n26 able-­bodied, 107–8 Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, The (Liu), 129, 166–67 Adams, Rachel, 179–80 adoptee (Asian), 35, 38, 94, 161 adultery, 171, 173 aesthetics, 4–8, 54–55, 228–32, 246n21 African Americans, 75 Agamben, Giorgio, 212 agency, 117, 123, 172, 237 Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-­American Literature (ed. Chin et al.), 69, 71, 248n44 Alam, Saher, 25, 63, 77–78, 242 Ali, Agha Shahid, 236, 242 allegoresis, 156, 159–60, 162–64, 169, 173–74 allegory: in America Is in the Heart, 160–61; cultural significance of children and, 155–56; etymological roots of, 156; multiple definitions of, 156–57; in The Namesake, 155–56, 162–64, 168–74, 178; personification and, 164–65; in Unaccustomed Earth, 152–56, 158–60; in The Woman Warrior, 154, 157 Aloft (Chang-­rae Lee), 37–38, 99 Althusser, Louis, 43 Amazon, 220

Amazon River, 186 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan), 66–67, 104, 144; allegorical reading of, 160–61 American Born Chinese (Yang), 23, 104, 131, 135–47, 148–50, 253n28; details from, 139f, 148f, 150f American in Disguise (Okimoto), 104, 208–9 American Knees (Wong), 104 American literary globalism, 179–80, 191– 92. See also Long for This World; Through the Arc of the Rain Forest American literature, 40, 75–76; Asian American mark on, 7–8, 10; organizing principles of contemporary, 75–76 American Son (Roley), 23, 104–5; individuality and nationhood and, 105–17 American Woman (Choi), 3, 23, 104–5; personhood in, 118–23 Angry Asian Girls (L. Lee), 133 Anthropocene, 196, 258n38 arborescent systems. See rhizomes and arborescence Arendt, Hannah, 115, 212–13; on inner freedom, 119–20; on miracles, 116–17 Armstrong, Nancy, 248n34 Ashima (The Namesake character), 162, 167, 170

Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (Zia), 244 Asian American literature and literary studies, 6, 12–15, 80, 100–101, 221–22; American literature and, 7–10; Asian American as term, 5–7, 58; author recommendations, 241–44; author’s love of, 224–26, 232; convention refusal in, 11–12; critical theory and, 52–58; as departure from deconstruction, 49–50; dissolving of differences in, 81; ethnic bildungsroman and, 160–61; ethnicity versus interethnicity in, 81–82, 182; formal restlessness of, 3–4, 6–8, 11, 227; generosity in, 26, 234–35; of 1990s, 82–83; politics and aesthetics in, 4–8, 54–55, 228–32, 246n21; post-­1965, 55–56, 75; race versus ethnicity in, 80, 83–85, 182; as source of potential, 231; subjectivity and, 47–51; titles of, signifying preoccupation with Americanness, 23, 103. See also becoming; critics and critique; future; Japanese American internment narratives; racial formation, visual representation as Asian American movement, 61–62, 66, 68–73, 122 Asian Americans: Asian ancestry in the United States, 23; becoming and, 189; identification as, versus by ethnic group, 11–13; impoverishment of, 127; increased visibility in film, 98–99; redefinition of, 14; representations of, 80–81, 134–35, 141–42, 144–51; status of as racial minority, 23, 127–31; as whiz kids, 128–30, 166. See also Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) Asian American writers: expanding productivity of, 10, 74; interviews with, 25–26, 68–69, 84, 221–22, 245n8; literature awards won by, 8–10; 1990s authors, 82–83; post-­1965 authors, 55–56, 75; pre-­1965 authors, 55; use of non– Asian American characters and perspec272 • Index

tives and, 82–103; wariness of Asian American label by, 12–14, 61–63. See also creative writing and expression Asian diaspora, 12 Asian North American, 12 Asian Pacific Islander American, 12 Asterios Polyp (Mazzuchelli), 40 authenticity, 112–13 autopoetics, 75 Awake in the River (Mirikatani), 209 “bad subjects,” 55 Barbarians Are Coming, The (Louie), 243 Barnard Women Poets Prize, 8–9 Barry, Lynda, 253n19 Batuman, Elif, 233 Baudrillard, Jean, 204 Bayoumi, Moustapha, 252n3 Bechdel, Alison, 132 becoming, 21–22, 44–51; agency and, 117; being in becoming, 203; Deleuze on, 22, 46, 189; in Long for This World, 187–90, 192; planetary becoming, 24, 181, 185, 192 Before the War: Poems as They Happened (Inada), 209 Bellow, Saul, 75 Beloved (Morrison), 200 Beltrán, Mary, 254n38 Bengali immigrants, 24 Ben Tanaka (Shortcomings character), 1–6, 11, 17–21, 39–40, 234 Bergson, Henri, 44–46, 150 bildungsromans, 141, 160–61, 166 bisexuals, 41–42 Bitter in the Mouth (Truong), 244 Bloom, Harold, 29 Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka), 62 Boat, The (Le), 84, 87–91 Boggs, Grace Lee, 242 Bone (Ng), 243 Book of Salt, The (Truong), 244 Boston Globe, 60 boundaries: between human, animal, and

machine, 101–3; as source of creativity, 10–11, 15, 22 Bourdieu, Pierre, 246n21 bp Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 195 Brandzel, Amy, 254n52 Brazil, 180–87 Brazil-­Maru (Yamashita), 187 Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The (Díaz), 191–92 Brontë, Charlotte, 224 Brown, Wendy, 167 “browning faces” and “whitening of characters” in print literature, 98–99, 101 Buddha in the Attic (Otsuka), 243 Buell, Frederick, 185 Bulosan, Carlos, 55, 66–68, 160–61 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, 165 Butler, Judith, 115–16, 131 Cambodian Americans, post-­9/11, 127 Camp Notes and Other Poems (Yamada), 209 Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of Hip-­Hop (J. Chang), 242 Caprices, The (Murray), 86 Carnivore’s Inquiry, A (Murray), 83, 86 Carson, Rachel, 193 Carver, Raymond, 76 Caserio, Robert, 255n22 Catfish and Mandala: A Two-­Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (Pham), 243 cautionary tales, 154 Census (U.S.), 31–36 Cha, Theresa Hak-­Kyung, 56 Chan, Sucheng, 247n3 Chandra, Vikram, 242 Chang, Gordon, 249n21 Chang, Jeff, 242 Chang, Leslie, 242 Chang, Samantha Lan, 242 Chang, Yoonmee, 77, 250n34 characters, non–Asian American, 22, 82–103 Chee, Alexander, 25, 62, 74–75, 242

Chen, Lisa, 40, 242 Chen, Tina, 219 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 207, 259n26 Cheng, David, 252n2 Chiang, Mark, 71, 248n44 Chiang, Ted, 23, 84–85, 99–102 Chicago School of Sociology, 5 Chicano/as, 75 Chickencoop Chinaman, The (play, Chin), 56 Ch’ien, Evelyn, 204 children, 30–31, 43, 165–66; adoptees from Asia, 35, 38, 94, 161; Asian American, as whiz kids, 128–30, 166; Jhumpa Lahiri and, 155–56, 256n30; “Platonic ideal of the neutral American child,” 107; of post-­1965 Asian immigrants of professional background, 166–67, 177; as trope of the future, 58, 236; view of Asian Americans as child-­like, 38–42 Chin, Frank, 56, 60, 69 China, Cultural Revolution in, 65 Chinese, stereotypes of in nineteenth century, 137, 140 Chinese Americans, 64, 69, 71, 224–25 Chin-­Kee (American Born Chinese character), 137, 138f, 139–42 Cho, Frank, 133 Choi, Susan, 3, 14, 23, 25, 79–80; on experiences of biracial identity in college, 104–5. See also American Woman Choy, Philip, 137 Chuh, Kandice, 47–49, 105, 181, 231 Chung, Sonya, 24, 181. See also Long for This World Cisneros, Sandra, 75 Citizen 13660 (Okubu), 211–15; details from, 212f, 214f, 215f class. See social position close reading, 16 Clowes, Daniel, 132 colleges and universities, 38, 115, 129, 166, 252n11 Collins, Jim, 221–22 colorblindness, 49, 96, 100–101 Index • 273

comics as literature, 19, 253n16; discussion of, in literary journals, 132; genre fiction versus graphic narratives, 132–33; as visual history of race thinking, 23, 134–35. See also American Born Chinese; Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks; Shortcomings; Yang, Gene Luen Coming Man: Nineteenth Century American Perceptions of the Chinese, The (Choy, Dong, Hom), 137 consumerism, 114, 120 cosmopolitanism, 42, 188 counter-­body social position, 109–14, 123; Sikhs use of turbans and, 128 Country of Origin (D. Lee), 243 Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (Yoshino), 107–8 Cox, Michael, 256n30 creative writing and expression, 11–12, 49; during Asian American movement, 61–62, 66, 68–73; boundaries and restrictions and, 10–11, 15; construction and destruction in, 49–50; craft of, 226–27, 232; as engagement, 68, 71–72; involution and, 46–47; for its own sake, 68–69; as political act, 65–67, 74, 78, 249n21; race as perceived creative limitation, 10, 51, 74–79; with race in mind, 62–63; racial designations and, 14–15; writers versus other cultural producers and, 71–72, 249n21 creativity. See creative writing and expression Creef, Elena, 211, 259n32 criteria: for author interviews, 26; for literary value, 221–25, 229, 241–42 (see also literature: as world-­making) critical reading, 16–17; language of, 53 critics and critique, 13, 23, 42–52, 81, 84, 129, 141–44, 151; on graphic narratives and genre fiction, 131–33; language of, 53; New Critics, 55; of pre-­1965 authors, 55; reading practices and, 4–7, 15–17, 219, 229–31; taste brokering of, 220–21; 274 • Index

theory and, 52–58; of Yamashita’s fiction, 181–82 Crutzen, Paul, 258n38 “cult of ethnicity,” 76 cultural indeterminacy, 11, 41 Cultural Revolution (China), 65 Cusset, François, 56 Dallas, Sandra, 210 Dance Dance Revolution (Hong), 24, 199, 204–8 Danny (American Born Chinese character), 135, 137, 139–42 Danticat, Edwidge, 227–28, 234 Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The (Prashad), 243 Davis, Lawrence Minh-­Bùi, 25 Day of Remembrance, 121 deconstruction, departure from, 49–50 deep reading, 15–17 de Jesús, Melinda, 253n19 DeKoven, Marianne, 132–33 Deleuze, Gilles, 31, 49–50; on becoming, 22, 46, 189; on difference, 102; involution and, 46–47, 50, 52; rhizomes and arborescence system philosophy of, 199–205; theory and, 52–54. See also deterritorialization and reterritorialization; Thousand Plateaus, A demographic changes, 29, 31–38, 58; in colleges and universities, 38, 115, 129, 166 Derrida, Jacques, 39, 57, 116 Desai, Jigna, 254n52 Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family (Uchida), 209, 216 desert landscapes as trope, 24, 203–4; in Citizen 13660, 212–15; in Dance Dance Revolution, 204, 207–8; of dystopic future, 197; as place of illusion and artifice, 204, 208; racial discourses of the Orient and, 198–99; in When the Emperor Was Divine, 216–19 deterritorialization and reterritorialization,

49, 53–54, 121–22, 189, 191; migrants and nomads and, 198–99 Díaz, Junot, 180, 191–92, 257n25 Dictee (Cha), 56 Dogeaters (Hagedorn), 56, 242 Dong, Lorraine, 137 Dove, Rita, 223 Dower, John, 145, 149 Dream Jungle (Hagedorn), 242 Dubai, 204 Dudziak, Mary, 149, 254n51 Eagleton, Terry, 222 Eaton, Edith Maude. See Sui Sin Far Edelman, Lee, 155, 163–65, 168, 175–76 Edinburgh (Chee), 242 Eliot, T. S., 55 Ellison, Ralph, 75 empire, 36 environmental degradation, 24, 193–96 environmentalism and ecological thinking, 53–54, 180–87, 193 Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (Masumoto), 200, 243 Erdrich, Louise, 75 ethnic literature, 75–76, 80, 84, 93, 233; ethnic as commodity, 75; ethnic bildungsromans, 135, 160–61, 166; focus on resemblance versus racial differences, 83, 102–3; interethnicity versus concept of the ethnic and, 81–82; resisting expectations of ethnic labels, 86–91; Sabina Murray on, 85–87; writing of, 22–23 Eugenides, Jeffrey: Middlesex, 40 Eunice (Super Sad True Love Story character), 40 expectations, 19, 22; contending, on writers, 19–21; future and, 42–43, 58; potential and, 50–51. See also racial expectations Eye of the Fish, The (Francia), 242 Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Chang), 120, 242

Faerie Queen (Spenser), 157 Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (Mura), 243 Farewell to Manzanar (Wakatsuki Houston), 82, 209 fast food restaurants, 197 Faulkner, William, 223, 225 Feather on the Breath of God, A (Nunez), 243 Fenkl, Heinz Insu, 242 Ferrell, Monica, 83 “Fiction of Asian American Literature, The” (essay, Koshy), 51 “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son” (Mura), 216 Fifth Book of Peace (Kingston), 22, 59–60 Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong), 55 Filipino American literature, 62, 79–80, 160–61 film and filmmaking: increased visibility of nonwhite faces in mainstream, 57, 98–99; Miramax films, 220–21; in Shortcomings, 2, 6, 18–19, 217 Fixer Chao (Ong), 243 Forgery (Murray), 83, 86 Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale (Yang), 133 form, 46, 177, 182, 223, 229; high cultural pluralism, 75; of post-­1965 authors, 55–56; unconventional, of 1990s authors, 82–84. See also comics as literature; poetry formal restlessness, 3–4, 6–8, 11, 227, 237 Forster, E. M., 55 Foster, Sesshue, 242 Foucault, Michel, 173–74 Francia, Luis, 242 freedom, 115, 117, 119–21 Free Food for Millionaires (Lee), 234, 243 French intellectuals, 57 Fu, Bin Bin, 140 Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (Trenka), 244 Fukushima, nuclear accident at, 195 Fun Home (Bechdel), 132 Index • 275

Funny Boy (Selvadurai), 243 future, 11, 29–30, 51, 234–37; children as trope of, 42, 58, 236; expectations and, 42–43, 58; reproductive futurism, 165– 66. See also temporality Gabe/Gabriel (American Son character), 40, 106, 108–11, 114–15, 117 Gamber, John Blair, 248n41 Ganeshananthan, V. V., 242 Gangster We Are All Looking For, The (thúy), 244 gays, 41–42, 165 generosity, 26, 234–35 genre fiction, versus graphic narratives, 132–33 geography, 200–203; of internment camps, 211–12 Ghosh, Amitav, 242, 258n28 Ghost World (Clowes), 132 Gila River, 213 Gilroy, Paul, 143, 149 Glass Palace (Ghosh), 242 globalization, 24, 54, 180, 191–92. See also American literary globalism; deterritorialization and reterritorialization Goellnicht, Donald, 250n8 Gogol, Nikolai, 175–76 Gogol (The Namesake character), 40, 162, 164, 167–78, 256n36 Gonzalez, Vicuna, 254n39 Good as Lily (D. Kim), 242 Gordon, Avery, 181, 231 Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks (Yang), 134–35; detail from, 136f Gore, Al, 199 Gotanda, Philip Kan, 242 graphic artists and narratives, 133–34, 249n21; graphic narratives versus genre fiction, 132–33. See also comics as literature; Yang, Gene Luen Grescoe, Taras, 197 Grewal, Inderpal, 161 Groom to Have Been, The (Alam), 77, 242 276 • Index

Grosz, Elizabeth, 50 Guattari, Felíx, 31, 49–50, 199–203; on becoming, 189; involution and, 46–47; rhizomes and arborescence system philosophy of, 199–205; theory and, 52–54. See also Deleuze, Gilles; Thousand Plateaus, A Guillory, John, 246n21 Hagedorn, Jessica, 56, 180, 242 Hahn, Kimiko, 242 Hamid, Moshin, 234–36, 242 Hana (Asterios Polyp character), 40 Harvey, David, 120 Hasbro (toy company), 141 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 158–59 Hayot, Eric, 54 Heise, Ursula, 54 Hema (Unaccustomed Earth character), 152–55, 158–59 Henry (Native Speaker character), 40 heteronormative, 107–8 high cultural pluralism, 75–76 Highsmith, Patricia, 4 Hing, Bill Ong, 247n3 history, 66, 131–32, 151, 207; historical variability, 142–44. See also Immigration and Nationality Act; Japanese American internment narratives; racial formation, visual representation as Hom, Marlon, 137 homonormativity, 48 homonyms, 158 homosexuality, 41–42, 108 Hong, Cathy Park, 24, 199, 204–8. See also Dance Dance Revolution “honorary whiteness,” 42 “How My Stories Were Written” (essay, Bulosan), 67 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Yu), 83 Huang, Betsy, 3, 100 humanities, 31, 58; attacks on, 52 Hunger (S. Chang), 242

Hungry Tide (Ghosh), 242 Hurricane Katrina, 195 identity and identity politics, 115, 210; identification as Asian American versus by Asian ethnic group, 11–12; wounded attachments and, 167 I-­Hotel (Yamashita), 3, 61 Iijima, Chris, 72–73, 76 Ika (American Son character), 106, 108–11, 114–15, 117, 130 immigrants and immigration, 29–30, 83, 88–91, 198–99, 247n3; Bengali immigrants, 24; children of post-­1965 Asian immigrants, 166–67; immigrant authors, 180; in Long for This World, 187–90; in The Namesake, 170–71, 177; as threat to national security, 127, 177, 226, 234, 236 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 31–38, 247n3; view of Asian Americans as childlike and, 38–42 Inada, Lawson, 69, 209 In an Antique Land (Ghosh), 242 Inconvenient Truth, An (documentary), 199 individuality. See personhood Inscrutable Americans, The (Mathur), 104 interethnicity, 81–82, 182. See also ethnic literature intermarriage, 39, 208 international families, 39 interpellation, 43 Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri), 155 In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Kadohata), 242 involution, 47, 50, 52; defined, 46 Iraq War, 193 Jacobs, Seth, 149 James, Henry, 55 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 224 Japanese American internment narratives, 24, 199, 209–19. See also Citizen 13660; When the Emperor Was Divine Japanese Americans, 69, 71

Japanese import car scene, 142–44 Jasmine (Mukherjee), 161–62 Jen, Gish, 25, 83, 104, 180, 242 Jenny (American Woman character), 117–19, 121–23 Jenny (Personal Days character), 93, 97 Jessie’s Song (C. Villanueva), 244 Jewel, 3 Jewish Americans: ethnic succession of Asian Americans and, 29–30, 247n2; writers, 75 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), 132 Jin Wang (American Born Chinese character), 135, 141–42, 150–51 Johnson, Mark, 249n21 Jonah (Personal Days character), 93–94 Journey to the West (Wu), 135 Julie (Middlesex character), 40 Kadohata, Cynthia, 210, 242 Kafka, Franz, 96 Kang, Younghill, 55 Karlstrom, Paul, 249n21 Kaushik (Unaccustomed Earth character), 152–55, 158–59 Kelley, Robin, 98 Kim, Derek Kirk, 77, 133, 242 Kim, Elaine, 77 Kim, Jodi, 252n41 Kingston, Maxine, 16, 22, 56, 63–66, 154; lost manuscript trope and, 59, 74. See also Woman Warrior, The Kipnis, Laura, 173 kitsch and personhood, 6–7 Klein, Christina, 149 Kogawa, Joy, 209 Korean immigrants, 187–90 Koshy, Susan, 51 Kwangju Uprising, 206–7 Kwon, Soo Ah, 254n39 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 57, 163, 204 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 23, 83, 152–56. See also Interpreter of Maladies; Namesake, The; Index • 277

Lahiri, Jhumpa (continued) Unaccustomed Earth; “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” language, 71, 189–90; allegory and, 156– 57; as rhizomatic, 204–5; of theory, 53; “weird English,” 24, 204–5 Language of Blood, The (Trenka), 244 Las Vegas, 204 Latino/as, 95, 129, 192 Le, Nam, 23; resisting expectations of ethnic labels by, 88–90. See also Boat, The; “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” Leatherneck (U.S. Marine magazine), 145, 146f, 149 Lee, Chang-­rae, 4, 25, 37–38, 76–77 Lee, Christopher, 5 Lee, C. Y., 55 Lee, Don, 77, 243 Lee, James Kyung-­Jin, 210 Lee, Lela, 133 Lee, Min Jin, 25, 77, 234, 243 Lee, Rachel, 257n6 Lee, Sue-­Im, 5 legal rights suspension, 127–29, 212–13. See also Japanese American internment narratives; September 11 lesbians, 41–42 liberalism, 114–15; liberal personhood, 106, 119–21; of Platonic ideal, 105 Liberty Meadows (Cho), 133 Lifecycle of Software Objects, The (Chiang), 101–2 Lilia (“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” character), 161–62 Lim, Shirley Geok-­Lin, 248n41 Linda (Bitter in the Mouth character), 50 lines of flight, 23, 199, 231; individuality and social position and, 105–7, 113, 121, 123; involution and, 47 Ling, Amy, 60 Linmark, R. Zamora, 3, 243 literariness, rise of in American popular culture, 221–22 278 • Index

literature (general): author’s rejection of logic of literary canonicity and great books, 25, 221–24, 228–30; change and, 22; Deleuze on, 46; as engagement, 71–72; politics and aesthetics in, 4–8, 228–32; purpose of, 4–7, 236; savoring of, 16–17; as world-­making, 25, 228, 230 Liu, Eric, 129, 166–67 logophobia, 173–74 Long for This World (Chung), 181, 187–92 longing, 30, 104–6, 111, 114–15, 119 Los Angeles, 194–95, 197 lost manuscript trope, 22–23, 59–61, 72–73 Louie, David Wong, 243 love and connectivity, 191 “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (short story, Le), 23, 87 Love Marriage (Ganeshananthan), 242 Love Wife (Jen), 83 Lowe, Lisa, 131, 160 Lowe, Pardee, 55 lower middle class, 76, 130 Lye, Colleen, 23, 141 Maa, Gerald, 25 Machida, Margo, 249n21 machine: Asian American literature as self-­ perpetuating, 11, 230; boundaries between human, animal, and, 101–3 magical thinking, 173–74 mainstream: Asian American, 35–37, 42; idealization of American, 130, 166–67 Maira, Sunaina Marr, 247n5 Mané (Through the Arc of the Rain Forest character), 182–84, 185 Manzanar, 213 margins, 35–36, 104, 180, 208; Asian American characters and, 82–83 Massumi, Brian, 45, 203 Masumoto, David Mas, 200, 243 Matacão (Through the Arc of the Rain Forest substance), 182–86, 193–95

materiality, 50 Mathew, Biju, 256n49 Mathur, Anurag, 104 Matrix, The (film), 198 Maus (Spiegelman), 132 Mayor of the Roses (M. Villanueva), 244 Mazzuchelli, David: Asterios Polyp, 40 McCloud, Scott, 135, 145 McGurl, Mark, 75, 233 meanings, 65–66; in allegory, 156–60; creation of through reading practices, 15–17; deterritorializing and reterritorializing, 203–4. See also racial formation, visual representation as melus (literary journal), 132–33 Memories of My Ghost Brother (Fenkl), 242 memory, 131–32, 216–18; “memory boom,” 209–10 Metz, Christian, 57 Michaels, Walter Benn, 23, 129, 142, 144, 151 middle class, 24, 38–42, 78, 95, 143, 167 Middlesex (Eugenides), 40 migrants. See immigrants and immigration Migritude (Patel), 243 Miko Hayashi (Shortcomings character), 1, 6, 18–20 Miles from Nowhere (Mun), 40–41, 243 miracles, 116–17 Miramax films, 220–21 Mirikatani, Janice, 209 model minorities: model minority authors, 55, 161; wounded attachments of, 167 Modern Fiction Studies (literary journal), 132–33 Momaday, N. Scott, 75 Mona (Mona in the Promised Land character), 40, 242 Mona in the Promised Land (Jen), 242 Monkey King (American Born Chinese character), 135, 141–42, 144, 147, 148f monkeys, representations of Asian Americans as, 141–42, 144–51

monogamy, 171, 173 Moretti, Franco, 246n18 Morrison, Toni, 75, 107, 200 Moushumi (The Namesake character), 171–73 Mouth (Chen), 242 Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Sui Sin Far), 226 Mukherjee, Bharati, 161–62, 255n14 multiracial, 35, 38, 260n9 Mun, Nami, 40–41, 243 Muñoz, José Esteban, 49 Mura, David, 25, 216, 243 Murashige, Mike, 257n5 Murray, Alice Yang, 259n49 Murray, Sabina, 22, 26, 84–87, 100 My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (Verghese), 244 My Year of Meats (Ozeki), 180, 243 Nabokov, Vladimir, 220 Namesake, The (Lahiri), 162–65, 167–78. See also Gogol Nam (The Boat character), 88–90, 159 National Book Award, 8–9 National Book Critics Circle Award, 8–10 National Public Radio, 221 Native Americans, 75 neoliberalism, 23, 120–21 New Critics, 55. See also critics and ­critique Ng, Fae Myenne, 243 Ngai, Mae, 247n3 Nguyen, Bich Minh, 243 Nguyen, Tram, 252n3 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 55, 105 Night without Armor, A (Jewel), 3 Night without Armor II: The Revenge, A (Sia), 3 “1977” (poem, I. Park), 235 Nisei Daughter (Sone), 209 nomads, 198–99, 202–3 No-­No Boy (J. Okada), 60, 209, 248n44 Norris, Frank, 95 Nunez, Sigrid, 243 Index • 279

Obasan (Kogawa), 209 O’Brien, Tim, 76 O’Connor, Flannery, 76 Oh, Sandra, 253n18 Okada, Frank, 68–69, 70f Okada, John, 22, 55, 60, 209 Okihiro, Gary, 35, 246n12 Okimoto, Daniel, 104, 209 Okubu, Miné, 211. See also Citizen 13660 O’Malley, Brian Lee, 133 Omatsu, Glenn, 122 Omi, Michael, 23, 141–42, 149, 151 Once the Shore (Yoon), 244 Ong, Aihwa, 41 Ong, Han, 3, 37, 243 On Grammatology (Derrida), 57 Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, 121 Optic Nerve (Tomine), 133 Orientalism (Said), 202 otherness, 115–16 Otsuka, Julie, 24, 210, 215–19, 243 “Overcoat, The” (Gogol), 175–76 Ozeki, Ruth, 180, 243 página en blanco, 204 painters, 68–69 Pak, Gary, 243 Pakistan, 162 Palestine (Sacco), 132 Palumbo-­Liu, David, 47, 257n7 Pangs of Love (Louie), 243 “Parachute Girls” (Chen), 40 Parikh, Crystal, 116 Park, Ed, 23, 84 Park, Ishle Ye, 235–36, 243 Parker, Robert, 221 Patel, Shailja, 243 Pearl, Nancy, 221 Pearl Harbor, 210 Pekar, Harvey, 132 pen/Faulkner, 8, 9t pen/Hemingway, 8, 9t Persepolis (Satrapi), 132 Personal Days (E. Park), 23, 84, 90–98; 280 • Index

racial differences deemphasized in, 92–98 personhood, 23; agency and, 117; in American Son, 105–17; in American Woman, 118–23; consumerism and, 114; expectations and, 30; inner freedom and, 119–20; kitsch and, 6–7; longing for American, 104–6, 114–18; neoliberalism and, 120–21; responsibility in relation to Others and, 115–17, 123 Person of Interest, A (Choi), 242 perspectives and nonlinear storytelling, 24, 82–84, 190 Pham, Andrew X., 243 Phan, Aimee, 243 Phi, Bao, 243 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 165 planetary becoming, 24, 181, 185, 192 “Platonic ideal of the neutral American child,” 107 poetry, 3, 25, 40, 223, 235–36. See also Dance Dance Revolution political acts, 4–7, 17–18, 54–55, 249n21 polysemy, 157–58 “Postcards from Kashmir” (poem, Ali), 236 Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy), 143 postcolonial theory, 80 postmodern fiction: American literary globalism and, 179–80; The Woman Warrior as, 63 Poston, 213 poststructural theory, 55–57 potential, 51; expectations and, 45, 50–51; literature as source of, 222–23, 227 Prashad, Vijay, 167, 243 pregnancy, 162–64 Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (McGurl), 233 Puar, Jaspir, 105, 128 Pulitzer Prize, 8–10 puns, 157–58 queers, cultural understandings of, 30–31, 166, 255n22; childlikeness of Asian

Americans and, 39–42; reproductive futurism and, 165 queer theory, 41, 255n22 Quilligan, Maureen, 157, 165 race, 10; in Asian American literature, 6–7, 23, 82–84; colorblindness, 100–101; debates on open discussions of, 5; ethnicity and, 82–87; as involution, 50; as a perceived creative limitation, 10, 51, 74–79; race-­based movements, 69, 122, 149; racialization of Asian Americans, 30, 50–51, 134–35; racial microaggression, 144; racial success, 37–42, 95, 107– 8, 128–30, 143–44, 167; racial valuation, 19–20; wariness of racial designations for Asian Americans, 12–14, 61–63. See also ethnic literature racial discourses of the Orient, 201–3; desert landscapes as trope and, 198 racial expectations, 10, 19, 29, 50–51; Bergson and, 43–44; ethnic succession of Asian Americans and, 29–30; of future, 29–30, 43, 58; versus potential, 45; racial and ethnic expectations as limiting to writing, 74, 76; racialization of Asian Americans and, 50–51; romantic relationships and, 19–21; stereotypes and, 42–43 racial formation, visual representation as, 131, 134–35, 141–42, 144–51 Racial Formation in the U.S. (Omi and Winant), 149 racialized differences, 83–84, 100–101; deemphasizing of, in Personal Days, 92–98; versus ethnicity, 83, 102–3; marking of, 106–9 racial minority, Asian American status as, 23, 35, 127–29; versus African American minority status, 129; as cultural insiders and outsiders, 131; as socially located as white, 129–30 reading practices, 4–7, 15–17, 53, 219, 221–22, 229–31

Readings, Bill, 115, 147, 252n11 realism, 154; graphic narratives and, 132–33 reason, 44–46 Reed, Ishmael, 75 regression, 46–47 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid), 234–36 representations, 80–81; of Asian Americans as monkeys, 141–42, 144–51; individual worth and, 6 reproductive futurism, 165–66, 177 Revoyr, Nina, 210 rhizomes and arborescence, 200–205; in Japanese American internment narratives, 211–16 Ricepaper Airplane, A (Pak), 243 Rodriguez, Robin, 254n39 Rody, Caroline, 81 Roley, Brian Ascalon, 23, 62, 79–80 Rolling the R’s (Linmark), 3, 243 romantic relationships, 17–22, 169–73 Rosenberg, Emily, 209 Roth, Philip, 75 Royal, Derek Parker, 132 rule of law, 24, 212–13. See also Japanese American internment narratives; September 11 Sabin, Roger, 253n16 Sacco, Joe, 132 Sacred Games (Chandra), 242 Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–95 (Sacco), 132 Said, Edward, 53, 201 Same Difference and Other Stories (D. Kim), 242 Satrapi, Marjane, 132 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 76 Schlund-­Vials, Cathy, 247n2 science fiction, 83, 99–102 See, Sarita, 249n21 self-­identifications, 12 self-­reflexivity, 162 Index • 281

Selvadurai, Shyam, 243 September 11, 127, 177, 226, 234, 236 setting, 24, 99–100, 133, 180–87, 194–95. See also desert landscapes as trope Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (Yamamoto), 209 “Sexy” (Lahiri), 82 Sharon, Mizota, 249n21 Shortcomings (Tomine), 1, 4, 6, 11, 17–18, 133, 234; details from, 2f, 7f, 21f; ending of, 20–22, 21f; pornographic films in, 18–19; racial valuation in, 19–20. See also Ben Tanaka; Miko Hayashi Short Girls (B. Nguyen), 243 Shteyngart, Gary: Super Sad True Love Story, 40 Shute, Hilary, 132–33 Sia, Beau, 3 Siasoco, Ricco, 26 sideways existence, 39–40 Sikhs, 128 Silko, Leslie Mormon, 75 Sisters Matsumoto (Gotanda), 242 Slaying the Dragon (documentary), 80 Slaying the Dragon, Reloaded (documentary), 98, 101 smooth being, 150, 184 social change, 22, 44, 149. See also demographic changes; environmentalism and ecological thinking; future; Immigration and Nationality Act; planetary becoming; racial formation, visual representation as social position, 35–42, 107, 128–31, 142– 44, 166–67, 216; counter-­body, 109–14, 123, 128; lower middle class, 76, 130; middle class, 24, 38–42, 78, 95, 143, 167; in The Namesake, 170–71, 177; privileged, 36–37, 40–41, 107–8, 131, 177 social relations and experience, 109–14, 123, 128, 173, 181–87, 196. See also pregnancy; romantic relationships Sohn, Stephen Hong, 248n41 Soldier’s Pay, A (Faulkner), 223 282 • Index

Sone, Monica, 55, 209 Sông I Sing (Phi), 243 South Asian American, 12 Southland (Revoyr), 210 Spenser, Edmund, 157 Spiegelman, Art, 132 Spivak, Gayatri, 57 Sprout (Personal Days character), 93–94, 96 Srikanth, Rajini, 162, 179, 245n9, 255n14 Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (B. Nguyen), 243 Steer toward Rock (Ng), 243 Stephenson, Neal, 76 stereotypes, 112–13, 137, 140; expectations and, 42–44 Stewart, Martha, 221 Stiglitz, Joseph, 252n34 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 39 Stories of Your Life and Others (Chiang), 100 storyteller as belletristic artist, 17–19 Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian America (Takaki), 65–66 striate, 150, 184 Sturken, Marita, 259n44 subjectlessness, 47–51 Sue, Derek Wing, 254n44 Sui Sin Far, 22, 55, 60, 225–26 “Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career,” 60 Summer Blonde (Tomine), 133 Super Sad True Love Story (Shteyngart), 40 Surrendered, The (Chang-­rae Lee), 4 Takaki, Ronald, 65–66, 80 Tallgrass (Dallas), 210 Tanner, Laura, 249n4 taste brokering, 220–21, 229 technicity, 76 Temperature of the Water, The (I. Park), 243 temporality, 44, 46, 51, 144, 227–31; of becoming, 188–89; in The Namesake, 174, 177; time-­space compression in narratives, 181, 188, 190, 192; in When the Emperor was Divine, 216–19. See also future

temptation, 48, 62 Tennis Partner, The (Verghese), 244 Teskey, George, 156–57 theory, 52–54, 58; Asian American literature and, 54–55; language of, 53; postcolonial, 80; poststructural, 55–57 third-­person critical voice, 24, 55 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 46, 50, 53, 199; rhizomes and arborescence system philosophy in, 199–205 Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Yamashita), 82, 180–87, 192–95 thúy, lê thi diem, 244 Tomas (American Son character), 40, 111, 114–15, 117 Tomine, Adrian, 1, 133. See also Shortcomings Topaz, 211, 213 “Tower of Babylon, The” (Chiang), 99–100 Tran, G. B., 133 transgendered, 41–42 trees, 199–200 Trenka, Jane Jeong, 244 Trinh, Minh-­ha, 57–58 Tropic of Orange (Yamashita), 194–96 Truong, Monique, 3, 26, 51, 53, 244 Tsiang, H. T., 55 Tule Lake, 213 turbans, 128 Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Mura), 243 Ty, Eleanor, 213 Typical American (Jen), 104 Uchida, Yoshiko, 209, 216 Unaccustomed Earth (Lahiri), 152–56, 158– 60; epigraph by Hawthorne in, 158–59. See also Hema; Kaushik Unbearable Heart (Hahn), 242 upward mobility, 41 Valentino, Gina, 248n41 Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems, The (Ali), 242 Vendler, Helen, 223

Verghese, Abraham, 244 Vietnamerica (Tran), 133 Vietnamese Americans, 88–91 Villanueva, Chea, 244 Villanueva, Marianne, 244 visual representation as racial formation in literature, 129–31, 134–35; of Asian Americans as monkeys, 141–42, 144–51. See also American Born Chinese; comics as literature; Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks von Eschen, Penny, 149, 254n51 Wakatsuki Houston, Jeanne, 82 Ware, Chris, 132 War Machine, 202 Wasp (weekly magazine), 137; detail from, 138f Watanna, Onoto (Winnifred Eaton), 55 Weedflower (Kadohata), 210 Wei-­Chen (American Born Chinese character), 135, 141–43, 150–51 “weird English,” 24, 204–5 Weisman, Alan, 194, 258n34 We Should Never Meet (Phan), 243 Wharton, Edith, 77 “What Is Freedom?” (essay, Arendt), 115 “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” (Lahiri), 161–62 When the Emperor Was Divine (Otsuka), 24, 210, 216–19 white majority, 31, 58 whiteness, 42, 106–7, 123, 129–30; white characters, 82–83; “white writing,” 75 whiz kids, 128–30, 166 Who’s Irish? (Jen), 242 Wilkens, Matthew, 246n18 Winant, Howard, 23, 141–42, 149, 151 Wolf, Maryanne, 15–16 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Trinh), 58 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 16, 63–66; allegory in, 154, 157; ambivalence in, 64; rise of Communist China in, 64–65 Index • 283

Wong, Jade Snow, 55 Wong, Sau-­Ling Cynthia, 8 Wong, Shawn, 104 Wood, James, 4 World Ball Notebook (Foster), 242 World without Us, The (Weisman), 194 wounded attachments, 167 Wrack and Ruin (D. Lee), 243 Wu, Ch’êng-­ên, 135 Yale Younger Prize, 8–10 Yamada, Mitsui, 209 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 55, 209 Yamanaka, Lois Ann, 62 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 3, 24, 61, 82. See also Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

284 • Index

Yang, Belle, 133 Yang, Gene Luen, 23, 131; balance between genre fiction and realism in work of, 133–35. See also American Born Chinese; comics as literature Yeats, W. B., 226 Yellow: Stories (D. Lee), 243 Yoon, Paul, 244 Yoshimura, Wendy, 117 Yoshino, Kenji, 107–8 Yu, Charles, 83 Zalasiewicz, Jan, 258n38 Zia, Helen, 244 Žižek, Slavoj, 198

Min Hyoung Song

is an associate professor of English at Boston College.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Song, Min, 1970– The children of 1965 : on writing, and not writing, as an Asian American / Min Hyoung Song. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5438-­3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5451-­2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Asian American authors. 2. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. I. Title. ps153.a84s664 2013 810.9′895—dc23  2012044770