Teaching Asian American Literature
by Amy Ling
Next, I explore the rather fluid boundaries of the terms Asian, American,
and literature. Asia, as the world's largest continent, stretches from
what used to be the U.S.S.R, west of the Ural Mountains, as far east as the
Bering Strait, and as far south as the Indian Ocean; it is separated from
Africa by the Suez Canal, includes all of the Middle East as well as the
islands of the South Pacific. However, the boundaries of Asia as employed by
scholars of Asian American literature have been much more limited, focused
primarily on writers of so-called East Asian origins. [East Asia is only east
in relation to Europe, of course; from an American perspective, China, Japan,
and Korea are the Near West.] Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas, editors of the
first anthology in the field, Asian American Authors
(1972) brought to light two generations of American writers from three Asian
traditions: Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino, giving priority to American-born
authors. Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong,
editors of Aiiieeeee!. An Anthology of Asian
American Writers (1974) included the same three groups and
selected on the basis of what they claimed to be an authentic but undefined
Asian American sensibility. David Hsin-fu Wand, editor of another anthology
Asian American Heritage (1974), extended the field to
include Koreans, South Pacific islanders, and writers whose sensibilities had
been formed in Asia. As South Asians and Southeast Asians are beginning to be
recognized as writers, the boundary of Asian American literature is
stretching.
The term American has been defined by Elaine Kim, author of the first
book-length scholarly study, Asian American Literature:
An Introduction to the Writings and
Their Social Context (1982) as the requisite setting of an
Asian American text. Writers of Asian ancestry living in the United States,
like Richard Kim and Sook Nyul Choi, but writing books set in Asian countries
would be excluded by her definition. This seems to me an unfortunate exclusion
that cuts off important sources of history, culture and memory. Since Asia is
an inherent part of an Asian American's past, whether distant or more
immediate, it should be acknowledged. Writers whose sensibilities were shaped
in Asia, those who write of American experiences in Asian languages or of Asian
experiences in English have been designated immigrant or emigré
writers, but should also be included under the rubric Asian American.
There is always a surplus of humanness, as Bakhtin says, (Dialogic
Imagination, 37) and several questions tease us as we try to put people
into categories. At what point does an immigrant become an American? Should
American citizenship be the sole criterion? Can't a lengthy residency
Americanize an immigrant even if his/her citizenship has remained unchanged?
Where do mixed-race people fit into these designations and how much Asian
ancestry is necessary for the Asian American appellation? What about an author
who is racially Asian and nationally American but who chooses not to write of
his/her own ethnicity? Is Asian American literature defined by the ethnicity
of the author or by its subject matter? These questions seem answerable only on
a case by case basis, depending on the scholar or critic tackling them. In
brief, for me the ethnicity of an author should be Asian and the subject matter
Asian or Asian American to fit my definition of an Asian American text.
Finally, what is literature? By what criteria do we decide which texts are
works of art and which are not? Feminists and ethnic scholars have been
calling into question singular points of view that claim universality and
putting in their stead alternate versions of history, of beauty and truth. We
have begun to ask whose criteria we are using for inclusion into the canon
and for what purposes. We are looking at autobiography, work songs, and
diaries as literary texts worthy of study. We are urging everyone to admit to
a perspective and to grant the validity of other perspectives. We are
realizing that there are large gaps in history, many stories which have never
before been heard by the populace at large, stories by those who are powerless,
working class, and peoples of color.
Thus, Asian American literature has several purposes: to remember the past, to
give voice to a hitherto silent people with an ignored and therefore unknown
history, to correct stereotypes of an exotic or foreign experience and
thus, as Hong Kingston says, to claim America for the thousands of Americans
whose Asian faces too frequently deny them a legitimate place in this country
of their birth. This literature cannot be read without some grounding in the
historical and cultural contexts of Asians in the United States. Nor can the
term Asian American be understood as a monolithic unity, for it contains
hosts of nationalities and languages, dozens of religions, and a multitude of
races as originating sources.
Though the Heath Anthology includes only ten Asian American authors out
of several possible hundreds, it does present a chronological and a somewhat
representative sample from a field growing in two directions as new writers
become published and as scholars uncover writers of the past. Edith Maud
Eaton (Sui Sin Far) ( 2, 884-901) is one of these discoveries. Like Harriet
Jacobs, she has the distinction of being a pioneer, the first Asian American
writer of short fiction; her younger sister Winnifred Eaton (who used a
Japanese pseudonym, Onoto Watanna, and is not included in the Anthology)
was the first Asian American novelist.
As contemporary reviewers wrote of Edith Eaton's work, Leaves from
the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian, her autobiographical essay sounded a new
note in American literature, spotlighting the between-worlds plight of Chinese
Eurasians during a period of virulent sinophobia.
Sinophobia, which extended to all Asians, remained strong for nearly a century
from the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1870s until the
immigration reform act of 1965, which ended discriminatory quotas favoring
Europeans and equalized quotas worldwide. Consequently, much of the Asian
immigrant experience has been a painful one. Sui Sin Far's short story
In the Land of the Free recounts the high cost paid in anguish when unjust
immigration restrictions are enforced without regard to human feelings. The
events in the story emphasize the irony of its title, and the estrangement of
the child from his mother at the story's end foreshadows his future
assimilation into the dominant culture and the attendant loss of his motherland
and mothertongue. The selection from Younghill Kang's autobiography
East Goes West (2, 1747-1754), recounts the comic mishaps
when a newly arrived Korean student of Shakespeare attempts the work of
domestic servant in an American home, but the subtext exposes the limited
choices open to an Asian immigrant in a land which prides itself on being a
haven for the persecuted and a land of opportunity. Still another subtextual
layer is the feminization of alien young men who themselves express male
chauvinist views of their own women at home.
Carved on the Walls: Poetry by Early Chinese Immigrants (2, 1755-1762) and
Silence by Filipino-American Carlos Bulosan (2, 1840-1843) continue to iterate
the gulf between the rhetoric of America and the reality of living here. Having
saved for the passage across the Pacific Ocean, would-be Chinese immigrants
dream of entering the Gold Mountain but find themselves imprisoned on an
island, for weeks, months, even years, tantalizingly within sight of the
buildings of San Francisco. Instead of golden opportunities, they sleep in
three tiered bunks two hundred in a room and wait for the interrogations which
will determine their fate: permission to enter the U.S.A. or an ignominious
return to China. Or, like the protagonist in Bulosan's poignant story,
they dream in lonely rooms of warm human contacts which evaporate like mist.
In the latter half of this century, Asian American writing hasachieved new
levels of maturity, artistry and emotional depth. Hisaye Yamamoto's
beautifully achieved story Seventeen Syllables, (2, 1871-1882) written from
the perspective of an adolescent and
thus told obliquely, delineates the tensions in a Japanese American
family where each of the three family members' life trajectories lead them
painfully in opposing directions. The traumatic Relocation experience,
attendant upon Executive Order 9066 which uprooted 110,000 Japanese Americans
from their west coast homes and sent them to live behind barbed wire in inland
desert camps, has
much of the writing from this group. John Okada's No-No Boy
(2, 1900-1912) traces the the psychological scars of the war at home in the
efforts of a draft resister, Ichiro, to come to terms with his decision and
contrasts his tension-filled home with the love-filled family of Kenji, a
Japanese American veteran who returns from war with a gangrenous wound that
continues to take inches off his leg and eventually takes his life. What price
glory, the text seems to be asking, and what land is this where everyone seems
to be filled with hatred for someone else?
The work of Maxine Hong Kingston (2, 2094-2115) and Janice Mirikitani (2,
2501-2509) reflect the ramifications of the Civil Rights and Women's
Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 1970s: affirmation and assertion of the
self as an amalgam of the specificities of race, culture, gender and class.
Kingston in The Woman Warrior finds a meaningful model in
a classical Chinese heroine, Fa Mulan, the woman warrior, whose story she
embroiders on, while Mirikitani gives voice to the unvoiced struggle of her
parents to survive in a hostile environment and to her silent daughter who
denies she is like her mother. Both writers speak of the gulfs of silence and
incomprehension between generations of mothers and daughters, gulfs that cry
out to be bridged.
Finally, Garrett Hongo (2, 2550-2562) and Cathy Song (2, 2585-2593), two
accomplished and acclaimed Hawaiian-born poets, through the use of striking,
sensuous details render beautiful and extraordinary such everyday incidents as
coming home from work, cooking, and bathing.
Students who have had no previous contact with Asian Americans, who know only
the model minority stories in the media and the distorted Hollywood images of
orientals, are generally surprised to learn, after reading Asian American
literature, that Asians are just people after all. If they have come to this
realization, as small a step as it may seem to some of us, they have made a
giant leap towards greater understanding. And perhaps, one day, authors like
Hong Kingston and English professors with Asian features in the United States
will no longer be complimented on their good English but will be accepted
without raised eyebrows as belonging here.
I find it useful to begin my Introduction to Asian American literature classes
with a discussion of terminology. First, I deconstruct the term oriental,
explaining that as a signifier of someone or something of Asian origin it is no
longer viable since it is burdened with all the negative connotations of
inferiority, irrationality, and exoticism that Edward Said clearly delineated
in his groundbreaking cultural history Orientalism. (NY: 1978) By
contrast, the term Asian is a neutral geographical designation and
therefore more acceptable.