“What Can American Studies and Comparative Literature Learn from Each Other?” asked Ali Behdad (2014) in his eponymous article in which he recommends coupling comparative literature’s “multinational and multilingual approach” with American studies’ “nonbelletristic interdisciplinarity” (613). In bridging the two disciplines through an intercultural and bilingual approach to Chinese American writing, this book follows Behdad’s recommendation and answers the call for American studies to become newly transnational. It looks to and from both the United States and China to reveal the multiple engagements of American-born and Sinophone writers. This venture would have been unthinkable, if not roundly censured, in Asian American literary circles in the 1970s and 1980s, when American nativity and Anglophone writing were key to the formation of the field. I seek to expand its scope while maintaining, albeit pluralizing, the original goal of self-definition as self-definitions. I advance a critical strategy that spans languages and national cultures to illuminate the writers’ hyphenated consciousness and bicultural aesthetics. Part I examines gender refashioning, especially “remasculinization” (to borrow Viet Thanh Nguyen’s word), in light of the Chinese dyadic ideal of wen-wu 文武 (literary arts and martial arts). Part II dissects the formal experiments of selected writers, who interweave hybrid poetics with two-pronged critiques of the world.
Common to all the chapters is a fresh look at both American and Chinese mores through an intercultural analysis. Earlier phases of Asian American studies tended to concentrate on anti-Asian sentiment in North America and to downplay troubling Asian legacies, including discrimination against women, laborers, ethnic and sexual minorities; even the stereotype of the “Asian American minority” is not so different from a Chinese model child or citizen whose cardinal virtue traditionally is obedience. Rather than privileging identity politics, “de-nationalized” inquiry, or postmodernist poetics, I demonstrate that local and diasporic poetics and politics are far from incompatible. The writers I examine provide a reflexive lens through which audiences on both sides of the Pacific are beckoned to look homeward and to view the “other” afresh. They draw on transnational resources to devise forms that expose local and global predicaments and open up new vistas in American and Chinese literature.
In approaching their works I have also blurred several lines: as a “gender-bender” in masculinity studies since the 1990s, but less self-consciously so today with the evolution of women’s studies into gender studies; and as an Asian Americanist making forays into transpacific comparative literature, heeding recent summons to track stateside works of art through other continents and to delve into the interstices between comparative literature and American studies. By stretching across linguistic and cultural bounds, I seek to decenter the European American heritage and work toward a bilateral literary analysis.
The “borders” in my title refer to those of gender, ethnicity, and nation; of genre, languages, and disciplines; of poetics and politics; of centers and margins. Back in 1997, I stated in the introduction to An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature that without the initial naming, institutionalization, and contestation over this body of work, the multitudinous strains now being heard might have remained mute; that perhaps the most important reason to retain the designation is not the presence of any cultural or thematic unity but rather the continuing benefit of amplifying marginalized voices, however dissimilar (“Re-viewing” 26). Since its inception, the field has proved a welcoming venue for productive experimentation by both writers and scholars. Therefore, I adhere to the historic labels “Asian American literature” and “Chinese American literature” (instead of using the longer “Asian American and Pacific Islander literature” or the shorter “Third literature”), but with the qualifier “without borders” that simultaneously undermines any barriers, that allows for as many tributaries and confluences as possible.
My study also attends to the inextricability of form and content through historically informed (hence “nonbelletristic”) close reading. Because of an enduring, albeit attenuating, tendency in the literary establishment, and even in ethnic communities, to view creative writing by people of color as ethnography or social history, paying attention to its formal invention is a first step toward overcoming these biases. Literature speaks, especially the unspeakable, through myriad aesthetic measures. To combat invisibility and exclusion, many Asian American writers deploy what Michel de Certeau calls “tactic,” which he defines as “an art of the weak” and as “a form of legerdemain,” using Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as a key example (Certeau 37, xx). Shortly after World War II, Hisaye Yamamoto published a tale in Partisan Review that indicts the Japanese American internment in the guise of a breezy “legend” about a seemingly deranged ballet dancer; a scrupulous close reading of this text is required to unravel its layers of sociopolitical meanings. 1 Oblique critique similarly abounds in the Chinese American archive, though the target is no longer confined to white racism, but is extended to Asian and Asian American ethnocentrism, and other forms of suppression. Every one of us, to use Stanley Fish’s term in a different context, can be “surprised by sin”; the enemy or oppressor can start to look remarkably like ourselves.
Unlike most of the transnational and interdisciplinary enterprises surveyed in the following section on theoretical crosscurrents, which telescope geopolitical connections and contradictions, I zero in on literary convergences and divergences between Chinese America and China. Yet this comparative project, like the literature perused, also has unmistakable (if at times elliptical) geopolitical repercussions. In line with de Certeau’s formulation and with what I argued in Articulate Silences, it is no less important to plot literary ambushes and guerilla actions than to challenge structures of domination head-on, in a world where equal right to speak or freedom of expression still cannot be taken for granted. Literature matters, both inside and outside the charmed circles of academia, because it is sometimes the only vehicle by which dissenting voices can be heard effectively, if at all. Dorothy J. Wang, who observes that overtly political poetry does not sit well with the literary establishment, notes how Marilyn Chin’s “pervasive use of irony” has allowed her to gain canonical recognition notwithstanding her otherwise in-your-face politics against “racism, sexism, and imperialism” (D. Wang 115). The deployment of “slanted allusions,” on which I elaborate in the last chapter, is yet another “tactic” whereby M. Chin can have her impudent say in high poetry societies and gobble up praise in two continents and languages too. 2
Like literature, languages matter, especially in introducing alternative norms and in providing a forum for counternarratives. Some Chinese concepts, such as wen文 (“pattern,” “writing,” “culture,” “humanities,” “the arts”), ren 仁 (“both ‘human-kindness’ and ‘humankind-ness’”) (Levenson and Schurmann 42), and even wu 武 (“martial arts”) have no simple English equivalents, because they carry with them very different values (and therefore valences) in traditional China than in North America. Wen and ren are, for men, two of the highest ideals in Confucian culture, and yet they wane in masculine significance and wax in feminine association in the United States. Wu, by contrast, has ossified into one of the most prominent stateside stereotypes of Chinese males—as kung fu fighters. Moving across languages, therefore, can open our eyes to alternative ways of seeing, being, and becoming. Even more urgently, linguistic code-switching can create an asylum in another tongue. Shuttling between languages and cultures, even transposing languages and cultures (e.g. writing about China in English), can sometimes be the only way for a writer to be heard. By adopting an interlingual and bidirectional interpretive strategy, my study amplifies voices muffled on either shore. I tune in to traditional Chinese norms to examine Chinese American gender reconstruction; I monitor international resonance and dissonance by extending Asian Americanist critique to Asia.
In so doing, I try also to disabuse mainstream literary scholars in America and China of an ingrained prejudice against Asian American literature that it somehow falls short of the literary canons East and West. Before the civil rights movement, hardly any writer of Asian descent was on the American literary radar. As probably the first major publication to include Asian American writers, the Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter et al. and first published in 1990, was revolutionary. Since then, Asian American writers have been present in most American literature compendiums, but they are still absent from many American literature courses and in Asian Studies altogether. Even more reluctant to embrace these writers are academics in the Chinese literary establishment (both English and Chinese departments). In 2000, during an editorial meeting in Hong Kong over the possibility of publishing a version of the Heath Anthology in Asia, the most adamant opponents to including more Asian American texts were scholars from China. 3 In the face of such dual relegation, this book magnifies the variegated tapestry of Chinese American writing to find it at the vanguard of iridescent world literature. Instead of gauging it against Eastern and Western literary heritages, I demonstrate how it revivifies both. Many of the writers discussed are able to cross-pollinate two cultures, loosening deep-rooted assumptions and grafting new semantics and forms to each, thereby melding centers and margins.
Theoretical Crosscurrents
The new millennium has witnessed a transnational turn in American studies, strongly endorsed by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association: “The United States is and has always been a transnational crossroads of cultures…. American studies is increasingly doing justice to the transnational crossroads” (Fishkin 43). Wai-Chee Dimock, who bemoans that “for too long American literature has been seen as a world apart,” makes up for this lack in Through Other Continents by ranging over the terrains of world literature in her examination of canonical writers (Dimock 2). Lisa Lowe, echoing Dimock’s title in The Intimacies of Four Continents, documents the interrelatedness “between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries”; Lowe submits that the social inequities of our time are a legacy of the triages involving blacks and Asians in the name of European and Anglo-American liberalism (Lowe, Intimacies 1, 3).
Nowhere are these pleas for intercontinental inquiries more pertinent than in ethnic studies. What Dimock says of American literature in general roundly applies to Asian American writing: “Rather than being a discrete entity, it is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways … binding America to the rest of the world” (Dimock 3). It is quite impossible to survey Asian American studies outside an international frame. The watershed historical events in the field, such as the Asian Exclusion Act, the Japanese American internment, the ambiguous national status of early Filipino immigrants, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnam War tie the field to other countries in Asia geographically, politically, culturally, and linguistically. Most of the earliest works by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese immigrants are written in Asian languages, and there is also a growing body of literary works by new immigrants scripted in other tongues. Frederick Buell, in National Culture and the New Global System, singles out Asian American literature to show the impact of globalization, listing the following as “circumstantial factors” for his choice: the rapid growth of its literary tradition; its interface with new immigration; and its ties to the world marketplace—“the Pacific Rim” (Buell 177). In fact, as Lowe indicates, Asia was already very much a player, though an upstaged one, in the global theater back in the late eighteenth century.
Asian American literary history has largely followed the trajectory of American studies. Its foremost critical paradigms may be distilled in three catchphrases: “Claiming America,” “Claiming Diaspora,” and “Reclaiming the Hyphen.” 4 The first phase, from the 1970s to the 1980s, was characterized by the rise of cultural nationalism and feminism, the desire to define a collective body of work distinct from its mainstream Chinese and American counterparts, and concern with social justice. There was intense critical discomfort revolving around gender trouble, Orientalism, and white reception. In the influential introduction to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writing (1974), editors Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong decried the notion of a “dual personality” and regarded American nativity (with minor exception) and Anglophone works as crucial to what they considered to be “Asian American sensibility.” They resented the dominant culture’s tendency to regard American-born Asians as outlanders and to expect “some strange continuity between the great high culture of a China that hasn’t existed for five hundred years and the American-born Asian” (xxiv). Their stress on American indigeneity grew out of the frustration, shared by many American citizens of Asian extraction, of being treated as perpetual foreigners. Writing by Asian Americans during this period, as noted by Elaine H. Kim (author of the groundbreaking Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context), coalesced around the theme of “claiming an American, as opposed to Asian, identity” (Kim, “Defining” 88). This imperative accounted for the purposeful omission of the hyphen in most Asian American self-references. “We ought to leave out the hyphen in ‘Chinese-...