Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art

Abstract

Prior to deciding on Asian American women's literature as a research field, I announced my intention to write on Jade Snow Wong's 1945 autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter , for a 1987 graduate seminar. My professor responded with a less than innocent question, “But, is it good ?” I mustered an earnest, but slightly evasive reply, something along the lines that my interest was not based on what a text “is” as much as what it does. His implied aesthetic judgment was nonetheless more subtle than that offered by an Asian American novelist who, upon hearing the gender focus of my work, dramatically rolled his eyes. A decade later, I continued to encounter issues of reception surrounding my object of study. A physics professor and recent immigrant from mainland China could not parse the descriptor, “Asian American women's literature.” Casting about for an illustration, I resorted to, “If your daughter were to write a novel here, I would read it.” The irony is that were the hypothetical daughter to publish a novel, she herself might very well reject the rubric, “Asian American women writer,” insisting that she writes about the human condition. Or, like novelist Bharati Mukherjee, that she is, in the manner of Bernard Malamud, an “American author in the tradition of other American authors whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island” (cited in Carb, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” 650).