Transpacific Worlds: Visualizing Asian America inChan is MissingandDim Sum

Abstract

In a 1990 interview for the Bill Moyers television series AWorld of Ideas, the Asian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee assessed the cultural experiences of Asian immigrants in the Americas. Playing on the rhetoric of 19th-century Manifest Destiny, she asserted that Asian immigrants should come to America to “conquer” it, to possess the nation and make its ideals their own. After all, she argued, many of the original Euro-American pioneers and settlers had been “hustlers” capable of great violence in their westward conquest of the land and native peoples. Arriving from the East, Asian immigrants metaphorically would have to do battle to make the nation more inclusive, and actively overthrow their colonized images as “outsiders” or “Orientals” that have dominated American culture to this day. Doing so, however, requires that these newcomers to the West also “murder” their old selves. In her novelJasmine(1989), Mukherjee elaborates: “There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams.” Because America represents a “stage for transformation,” as she tells Moyers, these dreams of hope, of having choices and opportunities, are being claimed and reinvented continuously as different waves of new arrivals modify or challenge the rules of interaction. Asian immigrants must therefore cast off their stifling Old World traditions, ones that perpetuate “cynicism, irony, and despair” when reconstructing and negotiating through a cultural order now altered by their very presence in the United States.