Twelve Asian American Writers: In Search of Self-Definition

Abstract

As part of macrocosm, Asian-American writing exhibits variety of voices, forms and genres which marks mainstream American literature.1 At same time, one finds in it certain psychological and philosophical perspectives inextricably Asian in cast. A strong Confucian patriarchal orientation is a dominant element and with that corollary of female inferiority, themes which are overtly or unconsciously struck in narratives as disparate as Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973) and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1977). Another major motif is urge to find a usable past; specifically, for writers to come to terms with immigrant experiences of their race. Asian-American writing, from its earliest expressions in first decade of twentieth century to most recent plays by David Hwang, shows a strong concern with its immigrant history.2 Unsurprisingly, therefore, it draws heavily upon resources of autobiography, biography, and history, provinces in which writing reflects more faithfully personal experiences, social observations, and memory. Works as varied as Lowe's and Sone's autobiographies, Mori's short stories, Okada's and Chu's novels, and Houstons'and Kingston's histories share a concern with sociological texture in their attempts to rewrite past; as such, they exhibit in different degrees a burden of referentiality in which texts demand to be read for their relevance to an outside of historical meaning. Recent studies on genres of biography and autobiography claim that the patterns of modern fiction and contemporary biography have close connections .... For a fact to exist in a biography it needs an imaginative as well as referential dimension which process of writing provides (Nadel 9-10); the modernist movement is away from representational discourse towards self-enacting, self-reflexive verbal structures and critical theories that have been devised to explain this movement conspire to make very idea of literary modernism seem