Lost in Lima: The Asian-Hispanic Fiction of Siu Kam Wen

Abstract

In Garc?a M?rquez's international best-seller, El amor en los tiempos del c?lera (1975), the narrator relates the consternation of Cartagena's populace when a literary prize, galard?n m?s codiciado de la poes?a nacional le fue adjudicado a un inmigrante (253). The public's response to this event in the novel is unequivocal: nadie crey? que el autor fuera el chino premiado (253). For Peruvian immigrant Siu Kam Wen, fact mirrored such fiction in the mid 1980s in Lima. Responding to Siu's first published collection of short stories, a critic for La Prensa commented on relato de un improbable chino, while a reviewer for El Observador questioned Siu's very existence: sabemos si en verdad existe, ya que est? de moda inventar escritores orientales para encubrir autores conocidos (qtd. on the dust-cover of El tramo final). In Race, Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, commenting on Enlightenment interest on whether or not Black Africans could produce works of literature, provides a cogent parallel and rationale for expressed doubts by Peruvian critics regarding Siu Kam Wen's existence: writing, no repeatable sign of the workings of reason, of mind, could exist. Without . . . mind, no history could exist. Without history, no humanity . . . could exist (11). Besides highlighting the ignorance of his critics, the questioning of Siu's very existence as a writer points also to an overall lacuna in Hispanic criticism regarding both literary works and biographical information on Asian-Hispanic writers. Although in the past three decades many scholars have refocused their critical lenses in order to reflect the image of women, native Ameri? cans, and several ethnic minorities in Latin American literature, only one work to date, Julia Kushigian's 1991 Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition has attempted to examine in detail the image of Asians in Spanish American literature. In exploring the representation of Orientals and the Orient in selected works of Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (himself of Chinese descent), Kushigian's landmark study adds a specific Spanish-American perspective to a subject dealt with in broader terms in works such as Robin Winks and James Rush's Asia in Western Fiction (1990). The present study follows the lead of such investigations by presenting a review and analysis of China-born Siu Kam Wen's two short-story collections published in Peru, El tramo final (1985), and La primera espada del imperio (1988), from a postcolonial theoretical perspective. The Chinese have been present in Peru since the Colonial period. Eugenio Chang-Rodriguez notes that Filipinos of Chinese descent arrived as sailors on the Spanish flotilla galleys in the sixteenth century, and that the 1613 Lima census lists thirty-eight of their numbers in residence (404). Significant Chinese immigration to Peru did not begin, however, until the 19th century,