The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American by Min Hyoung Song

Abstract

The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American by Min Hyoung Song Duke University Press, 2013. 284 pages Min Hyoung Song's The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American is a book of remarkable ambition. Unmatched in scope since Elaine Kim's 1982 study Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context and David Palumbo-Liu's broader 1999 history (which foregrounded literary forms), Asian/America: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, The Children of 1965, like its predecessors, offers a comprehensive assessment of important trends and critical concerns by a leading mind in the field, and charts a course for future inquiry. If we can imagine such a genre, it is a watershed book. It presents a wide view of Asian American literary production by writers who were born after the mid-1960s and began gaining prominence in the 1990s, contextualizing their texts within the broader traditions of both Asian American writing since the nineteenth century and Asian American critical thought since the late 1960s. While this task has become impossible to complete in the encyclopedic model that Kim's 1982 study adopted, given the explosion of literary production in the past few decades, what is notable here is the number and range of examples Song offers as part of his attempt to read as capaciously as possible. The widely divergent texts that Song chooses span multiple literary forms (including fiction, poetry, graphic novels) and genres (including memoir, science fiction, and avant-garde writing); he even includes an appendix that lists 101 contemporary Asian American literary texts as a recommended reading list. As comfortable with arcane literary forms as he is with ethnographic charts, Song deftly appropriates from a number of theoretical traditions, including queer theory, formalism, sociological historicism, and continental philosophy. Finally, an added bonus of Song's study is its integration of material from a series of interviews that Song conducted with prominent Asian American writers. Song, to his credit, treats these interviews not as oracular pronouncements, but as texts that require analysis and as opportunities to probe questions of racial identification that complicate the authors' statements. As capacious as its coverage of the field is, the book pitches its stakes on three, for the most part interwoven, levels: a historical argument about the specificity of literary production in the wake of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act; a theoretical argument about the rhizomatic logic of reterritorialization in contemporary Asian American literary production; and a plea for the continuing value of creative literature, often formulated in (vexed) formalist terms. As Song argues in the book's first chapter, which serves as a kind of second and perhaps more useful introduction, the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act had a profound effect on Asian American immigration patterns and subsequently created the particular conditions under which Asian American literary production flowered. Citing Harold Bloom's prediction that Asian Americans in the first few decades of the twenty-first century would succeed the children of Jewish immigrants as the driving force for a new phase in American literature, Song tracks the effects of the bill from the demographic shifts it put in motion to the literature that resulted. Before 1965, Asians in America, generally speaking, were mostly male, American born, concentrated on the west coast of the US with small pockets in other major urban centers, and part of an unseen underclass of laborers and service workers. After 1965, in addition to the dramatic increase of the Asian American population in general, Asians in America were more foreign born, diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, geographically dispersed across the US, and upwardly mobile, with many serving in technobureaucratic capacities in fields like engineering, science, medicine, and computer technology. …