Reading Asian American Biracial Autobiographies of Childhood: Norman Reyes’ Child of Two Worlds and Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted

Abstract

Biracial autobiographies of childhood evidence particular processes of hybridity and liminality through a rewriting of an established Euro-American literary genre. The manner in which Reyes’ Child of Two Worlds and Nguyen's The Unwanted engage biraciality highlights the intersection of genre and theme. Issues of indeterminacy, location, identification, and affiliation are central, as the protagonists negotiate a process of racial ambivalence that exhausts the supposed fixity and impermeability of racial boundaries. They transform biraciality into a literary strategy by their enactment of a revisionist agenda: by appropriating and subverting the prescribed model for the Childhood, they revise generic prescriptions, stress multilayered positioning, and problematize uncritical inscriptions of identification as Americans.