Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, and: Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, and: Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa D. N. Deluna Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ix + 258 pages. King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xvi + 198 pages. The emergence over the past few decades of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Warrior Woman (1976), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Hisaye Yamamoto’s newly appreciated “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951), David Hwang’s Madame Butterfly (1989), Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989), and Frank Chin’s epic Gunga Din Highway (1994) has helped establish a creditable Asian American presence in the world of contemporary letters. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong suggests that these literary benchmarks share structural affinities with the whole of twentieth-century Asian American literature, affinities that can ultimately be traced to collective experiences of Asians in white racist America. King-Kok Cheung claims that although multiculturalists have welcomed Asian American literary talents as pertinacious political voices of their communities, the subject of Asian Americans “speaking up” should be reassessed in light of Japanese and Chinese cultural norms that value reticence. Such a reassessment, Cheung argues, is carried out by Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa—whose major works are the focus of Articulate Silences. Wong’s book is a welcome sequel to Elaine Kim’s pioneering book Asian American Literature (1982). Cheung’s takes scholarly discourse in the field to a new level of virtuosity and intellectual rigor. Wong aims to conjure a substantial and coherent Asian American literary tradition. As she states in her book’s introduction (entitled “Constructing an Asian American Textual Coalition”), such a tradition would be raised on the model of a political interest group and should function to ensure that Asian American voices are more generously accommodated within college humanities curricula. Reading Asian American Literature examines descriptions, images, and scenes from a wide variety of twentieth-century Asian American fiction and autobiography by such familiar figures as Tan, Chin, and Kingston, and by such lesser-known writers of differing generations and backgrounds as Pardee Lowe (Father and Glorious Descendant [1943]), Monica Sone (Nisei Daughter [1953]), the Pinovian Bienenido Santos, Bharati Mukherjee, and Hawaiian Darrell Lum. In this literary corpus, Wong claims [End Page 996] to find recurrent and distinctive versions of motifs that exist in tandem with the key themes of Necessity and Extravagance, defined as “contrasting modes of existence and operation, one contained, survival-driven and conservation-minded, the other attracted to freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism” (13). Separate chapters are devoted to fictive representations of food and eating, character doubles, mobility, and the artist. Wong’s commentaries on her select materials are typically brief, but richly detailed and consistently interesting. Especially stimulating is her discussion of the intense eating of uninviting food in Obasan and The Woman Warrior, which she reads as symbolic renditions of Asian American immigrants’ survival-obsessed determination to endure and even extract sustenance from hardships experienced in America. Her treatment of Frank Chin’s trademark heroizing representations of Chinese American males as roaming bandits, boxcar willies, and highway speedfreaks is also highly engaging. In these depictions Wong finds submerged images of disabled mobility and traces them to the history of white racist exclusions of Asian Americans from the practice and ethos of expansionistic land settlement in the Old West. While Wong’s exegetical skills are evident, her claim for a distinctive tradition in Asian American letters based on unique versions of familiar literary motifs is unconvincing. Her descriptions of “Asian American motifs” seem to encourage comparativist perspectives that she disallows. For example, her identification of the motif of the “big eating” of gross food and “quasi-cannibalism, (28–44),” might invite Americanists to recall familiar, parallel representations in the coeval work of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane: in Norris’ portrait of the violet-eating “Brute” and in his grotesque depiction of the wedding celebration dinner in McTeague, and in Crane’s poem “In the Desert,” which features that squatting, naked creature who, “heart in his hands,” “ate of it” and...