Eat a Bowl of Tea: Asian America in the Novels of Gish Jen, Cynthia Kadohata, Kim Ronyoung, Jessica Hagedorn, and Tran Van Dinh

Abstract

'Passage to India', for sure, affords one port of entry. But Whitman's 'myths Asiatic', from the outset, have been seamed into virtually all the American literary mainstream. Emerson's Transcendentalism, whatever its borrowings from Kant and Coleridge especially as reflected in Nature (i836), 'The Divinity School Address' (1838), and 'The Oversoul' (184) also shows a most striking inwardness with notions of karma. Thoreau's Walden (1854), if it draws from doctrines of Yankee self-reliance, draws equally from zen and yoga. In Moby-Dick (1851) Melville deploys a near pointcounterpoint of Western and Eastern myth, two overlapping cultural genealogies and belief-systems. Whitman himself, throughout Leaves of Grass (1855-91), makes no secret of his affinities with 'worship ancient and modern', the 'Shastas and Vedas'. Thus, even at America's first cultural efflorescence, Asia already serves as a marker, an ethos, which both contrasts with and yet complements Western life and values.