Abstract
By focusing on Asian American return narratives as a symbolic indicator of a shift in transpacific relations, this article attempts to address two questions: first, how will a focus on return experiences engage and reframe transpacific imperial geopolitics thatcreated and sustainedAsian American literature, and second, how will a focus on the “post/Cold War”rather than on globalization as a temporal frame challenge the transpacificimagination in American studiesas a cultural and economic narrative of immigration, integration,and salvationthat purports to transcend Cold War divisions.Thearticleanalyses Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life(2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad(2021)to consider how post-1990s Asian American return narratives rearticulatecontemporary geopolitics. It will conclude with a reflection on the Orientalismof Asian Americanliteraturein the treacherous imaginaryof transpacific futures.
Highlights
By focusing on Asian American return narratives as a symbolic indicator of a shift in transpacific relations, this article attempts to address two questions: first, how will a focus on return experiences engage and reframe transpacific imperial geopolitics that created and sustained Asian American literature, and second, how will a focus on the “post/Cold War” rather than on globalization as a temporal frame challenge the transpacific imagination in American studies as a cultural and economic narrative of immigration, integration, and salvation that purports to transcend Cold War divisions
Considering how Lee conceived On Such a Full Sea to be a “response to American anxiety about China and about American decline” and an imagining of “America’s future and China’s influence and presence in America”, Fan—through a careful rereading of Alexandre Kojève’s vulgar Orientalism that posits the end of history on an opposition between human and animal—argues that tarrying with the negativity of Orientalism “might lead us to an understanding of our shared status as animacies at the end of history” (Fan 2017: 691)
US Orientalism should be interpreted as the projection of the American anxiety of communism, and as the deeper worry that the apocalypse that China is 108| Wang said to represent is the American future to come, which must be resisted by resisting China and the Chinese
Summary
Concerned with what return enables in the Asian American literary imagination, how it exposes the myth of immigration to the desire for return, where triumphant globalization may be re-scripted as the prolongation of Cold War trauma that Yoneyama and Xiang identify as transwar and trans-imperial, and where Asian Americans in Asia confront their own Americanness through twisted “minor feelings” (Cathy Hong 2020), this article will unfold the arguments above in three sections: a brief survey of the return motif in Asian American literature and scholarship since the 1990s to highlight the post/Cold War conundrum it is embedded in, most potently represented by the rise of China as both an opportunity for and challenge of US hegemony, to be followed by an analysis of two examples—Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad (2021) that feature China-bound journeys.
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