Old Landmarks, New Landscapes

Abstract

In his introductory story to The Piazza Tales (1856), Herman Melville’s narrator needs to decide the best geographical orientation for the piazza he intends to add to his house in the Berkshires. Mesmerized by the majesty of Mount Greylock, lying among the northern hills like Charlemagne among his peers, he weighs the pros and cons of east, west, and south, but after listing the presumable advantages of each, he goes back to the same refrain: “But, to the north is Charlemagne.” This episode kept coming to my mind as I was trying to determine which Asian American text I should choose as the indispensable one. Over the years, I have read, enjoyed, and taught many, by authors as diverse as Hisaye Yamamoto and LoisAnn Yamanaka, Chang-rae Lee and Fae Myenne Ng, Jessica Hagedorn and R. Zamora Linmark, David Henry Hwang and Gish Jen, Monique Truong and Nam Le. Some of these authors’ books are among those that, over the last few years, I have more deeply loved and admired as a reader, and have been more intrigued and stimulated by as a scholar. Indeed, my shortlist for this essay included Ng’s Bone (1993) (as well as her recent Steer Towards Rock [2008]), Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), and Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003) as books deserving, or rather demanding, mention as the Asian American novel to be reckoned with in a course. All three, each in its own way, share a thrust that I find especially generative in contemporary Asian American literature (and indeed, in contemporary literature as a whole): a capacity to create the complexity of structure, richness of texture, subtlety of signification, and evocativeness of prose that produce a nuanced, multilayered, and deeply involving reading experience in aesthetic terms, while simultaneously sustaining a relentless investigation of the Asian American condition both in its historical and social specificity and in its potential capacity to stand for numberless other alienations and self-alienations. Additionally, each of these novels conducts a self-aware interrogation of the very literary tradition from which it draws, and brings to Asian American literature a new twist that changes, so to speak, the rules of the game, widening and complicating the received image of the field, and creating new and exciting possibilities. And yet, while both my tastes as a reader and my convictions as a scholar lean towards the most ambitious and innovative works of the last couple of decades, when faced with the choice of only one text, I find myself almost automatically endowing Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) with the same landmark function in the Asian American landscape that Mount Greylock acquires in Melville’s “The Piazza.” This may have something to do with my own personal history: a gift from a very dear friend, received and read at a special juncture in my life, when I was going to give birth to my son, that book spoke to me not just as an American literature critic and teacher, whom the book was introducing to a whole new and up to that point unsuspected field, but also as a feminist, as a daughter and a would-be mother, and as part of a supportive female continuum capable of addressing my frailties and of evoking my strengths in new and empowering ways. My copy of the old 1977 paperback—its pages yellowed by age and heavily marked, its cover deplorably gnarled by the traumas of an overly adventurous life—still carries to this day a wealth of affective overtones, which it is capable of eliciting at sight. Quite apart from these intimate resonances, though, my choice of The Woman Warrior as the sine qua non of an Asian American syllabus is also grounded in a number of wider considerations that can be argued in scholarly rather than in personal ways. The first consideration is general and historiographic: while certainly not the first, and possibly not the best, text of Asian American literature, The Woman Warrior is the book that inaugurated it as a recognizable field, intervening in the pre-existing literary space in ways that gave it visibility and established its reputation, as much by its nation-wide success as through the polemics it originated within the Asian American community. In many ways, the Asian American literary field has defined itself around The Woman Warrior, whether by imitation, competition, or opposition—in “orthodox” or “heretical” ways, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it—with the effect of reinscribing its landmark function even while it tried to subvert it or leave it behind. In other words, The Woman Warrior has an unassailable canonical status within both Asian American literature and contemporary US literature as a whole. This very circumstance endows it with an added value: in its successful crossover to the general reading public and to a diversity of syllabi unrelated to Asian American concerns, The Woman Warrior stands as a reminder both of the potentialities and of the dangers of a racially unmarked effect. By standing at the intersection of the “ethnic canon” with the canon tout court, it marks the site both of a confluence and of a contradiction. But then, the notion of canon is of course highly suspicious, and a text’s canonical status can hardly be taken as sufficient ground for inclusion in a syllabus. Why should we reinscribe the canon in our teaching, thus embracing and reproducing the assumptions that have produced it, with an inevitably immobilizing effect? Let me proceed, at this point, from the more general to more specific makes between Japanese Canadians and First Nations people, in particular the use of Rough Lock Bill as a guide and mentor to Naomi. The portrayal here is one of sympathetic understanding and mutual respect between two persecuted, racialized groups, although there is a tendency towards romanticizing First Nations people, which Kogawa develops further in Itsuka (1993), the sequel to Obasan. There is in the novel no consideration of Asian Canadians as possible settlers who have participated in the displacement of First Nations from their land, a topic that develops in later texts like SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) in a Canadian context and in a number of texts by Asian American writers in Hawai’i; but that discussion, so pressing in the current moment, can profitably be introduced. It is for the range of issues it raises and the Canadian perspective it brings to Asian (North) American literary studies that I still find Obasan a compelling and “essential” text to teach.