Asian American Literature Research Articles

Consuming Desires: Melancholia and Consumption in Blu's Hanging

The controversy surrounding the Association for Asian American Studies' decision to award its 1998 fiction prize to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging was a watershed moment in the field of Asian American studies. At issue was Yamanaka's depiction of the novel's libidinous villain, the Filipino American Uncle Paolo, since several members of the Asian American community criticized Yamanaka--and AAAS--for reproducing, rewarding, and thereby reaffirming a stereotypical portrait of a sexually-charged Filipino American predator. Following several protests, AAAS rescinded the prize, a decision that attracted publicity to the dispute and added to the growing debate within the field. In the aftermath of the controversy, however, Yamanaka's novel came to occupy a curious position in Asian American studies. While still criticized for its questionable politics, Blu's Hanging continues to be taught in Asian American studies classes, and both the novel and the dissent it provoked among critics have been discussed in several recent articles and monographs on Asian American literature. (1) Most recently, Crystal Parikh has proposed that alternative readings of the novel might be explored through the idea of racial a concept that focuses on the complex and circular task of negotiating grief; yet she argues that the characters' seemingly uncontrollable of various alimentary and cultural products can only fail to compensate (202) for loss. The relationship between consumption and melancholia, however, is not solely negative, as demonstrated by the divergent ways that the characters' melancholia is informed by consumption and the manner in which this consumption lends itself to a melancholia that can be both socially productive and politically reactionary, or socially conservative but politically subversive. A reading of consumption into Blu's Hanging is particularly salient because the continued consumption and reinterpretation of the novel in Asian American criticism suggests that Blu's Hanging has come to manifest or exemplify an alternately idealized and demonized narrative of a particular image of Asian America--a circular, self-reflexive process that might itself be considered melancholic. Just as the novel contains characters who try to get over their losses and those who cling adamantly to the painful past, its readers (and the Asian American community in general) may be divided between those who consume the book and eagerly celebrate its teleological resolution, and those who remember the pain--whether depicted in the novel or elicited by it--viscerally, and refuse to forget. From the opening lines of the first chapter, Blu's Hanging asserts an explicit link between acts of consumption and the process of mourning. Images of food and eating are juxtaposed with descriptions of the Ogata family's grief at the recent death of wife and mother Eleanor, whose absence causes the bottomless hunger and cravings (12) in her only son, Blu. Although his older sister Ivah unsuccessfully attempts to serve as her mother's surrogate by providing meals for the family, neither the extravagance of Blu's eating nor the resourcefulness exhibited by Ivah's poor cooking can adequately ease the pain caused by Eleanor's death. This pattern of melancholic consumption, repeated throughout the novel, traces the characters' attempts to deal with the inconsolable psychic loss made manifest in both the private dysfunction of the Ogata household and the social breakdown of the larger Kaunakakai community. Yamanaka's depiction of the violence, poverty, and cruelty of this local society works to contradict the myth of the idyllic island paradise and multiculturalist utopia of mainland American (and Asian American) fantasies; (2) in this context, the constant and repetitive consumption of food, medicines, and cultural products reveals the way that the novel's protagonists become consumers as a means of negotiating subjectivity within the boundaries of a society defined by the prior loss of an idealized past. …

Fighting the marginalization of Asian American students with caring schools: focusing on curricular change

Asian American students are marginalized in US schools. Their academic, social and emotional needs are often ignored or misunderstood by school personnel. However, teachers, who have made an ethical commitment to each student and hold an educational philosophy that connects caring along with social justice, work hard to provide an equal educational experience for Asian American students. One approach caring teachers utilize is the inclusion of Asian American content into the curriculum from civil rights role models to the use of Asian American literature. Caring teachers also ensure that each young person develops strong writing and public speaking skills so that they become contributing citizens of democracy. This article suggests the use of a caring‐centered multicultural framework and identifies numerous curricular changes.

Forging a North-South Perspective: Nikkei Migration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Novels

This article assesses the significance of Yamashita's attempts through an examination of three of her novels that focus on Japanese-Brazilian interaction: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), Brazil-Maru (1992), and Circle K Cycles (2001).2 Previously, Asian American literary studies have been largely informed by U.S.-centered historical research and by premises originating in Edward Said's critique of Orientalism. Recent investigations of Asian American literary production, however, self-consciously foreground a transnational perspective, emphasizing the multiple trajectories of Asian diasporas, the transcendental force of commercial market, the fluidity of cyberspace, and the growing impact of Asian capitalisms. Yet many such efforts do not go beyond normative postnational procedures and the larger map of a now reified East- West analysis. Consequently, they often end up affirming the rhetorical underpinnings of a U.S.-inspired imaginary of mobility,3 while they continue to ignore the ongoing soci...

I Hotel: An Introduction for Amerasia

A long time ago in the 1990s, Amy Ling, then Professor of English and Asian American Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, sent me a questionnaire that she hoped would turn into an essay that would be part of a collection of essays by Asian American writers. I sent back the questionnaire with my simple answers, and this disappointed Amy who wanted more, wrote me back, and sent me an example of a more full-bodied essay written by another author. Comparing my simple answers to another author's essay, it seemed to me that we both had answered everything with the same ideas, except my answers were in shorthand. At that moment, I thought, well, maybe I could answer Amy with something she really didn't want at all, something she could reject outright. So I wrote: Siamese Twins and Mongoloids: Cultural Appropriation and the Deconstruction of Stereotype Via the Absurdity of Humor. This piece was a critical article about a work of fiction (Siamese Twins and Mongoloids) that I never wrote. In the ar...

Double agency: acts of impersonation in Asian American literature and culture

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface: On Impersonation and the Nature of the Not-so-secret Agent PART I: IMPERSONATION AND STEREOTYPE Chapter One: Impersonation and Double Agency--Theorizing the Practice, Practicing the Theory Chapter Two: Dissecting the Devil Doctor: Stereotype and Sensationalism in Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu Chapter Three: De/Posing Stereotype on the Asian American Stage PART II: DOUBLE AGENTS, DOUBLE AGENCY Chapter Four: Bodily Negotiations: The Politics of Performance in Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach Chapter Five: Shamanism and the Subject(s) of History in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman Chapter Six: Impersonation and Other Disappearing Acts: the Double(d) Agent of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker Coda Works Cited Index

Form and transformation in Asian American literature

Introduction: Critical Theories and Methodologies Asian American Literary Studies / Zhou Xiaojing Winnifred Eaton / Onoto Watanna: Establishing Ethnographic Authority / Dominika Ferens The Seduction of Origins: Sui Sin Far and the Race for Tradition / David Shih Political Resistance, Cultural Appropriation, and the Performance of Manhood Yung Wing's My Life China and America / Floyd Cheung Reading Ethnography: The Cold War Social Science of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter and Brown v. Board of Education / Christopher Douglas Abraham Verghese Doctors Autobiography His Own Country / Rajini Srikanth Cambodian American Autobiography: Testimonial Discourse / Teri Shaffer Yamada Two Hat Softeners in the Trade Confession: John Yau and Kimiko Hahn / Zhou Ziaojing Beyond the Length of an Average Penis: Reading Across Traditons the Poetry of Timonty Liu / Richard Serrano Decolonizing the Bildungsroman: Narratives of War and Womanhood Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman / Samina Najmi Short Story Cycle and Hawai'i Bildungsroman: Writing Self, Place, and Family Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers / Rocio G. Davis Recasting the Spy, Rewriting the Story: The Politics of Genre Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee / Tina Y. Chen Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again: Literary and Historical Subversion Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World / Pallavi Rastogi Notes on Contributors Index

Warfare, Asian American Literature, and Commitment

For me, the literature written by Asian Americans provides with increasing clarity the devastatingly difficult task of resisting the forces that contract our collective lives, and the absolute necessity to do so anyway. By life, I do not mean the fiction of social success, whether portrayed by the persistent narrative specter of the model minority or our rejection of it. And by resistance, I do not mean the symbolic capital (to borrow from Viet Nguyen borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu) derived from saying no to the siren song of assimilation that masks its racism. Resistance as a practice toward life, is more visceral, more stark, more ordinary, and therefore more profound than what our criticism tries to make out. And life is more than our analytics of intersectionality, and at the same time more than the hermetic fantasy of labelless individuality. To resist the forces that contract life is to acknowledge, on the one hand, the everyday, ordinary ways that we all know have shortened our lives and on the...

Recovered legacies: authority and identity in early Asian American literature

Introduction - Keith Lawrence and Floyd Cheung Early Chinese Autobiography: Reconsidering the Works of Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing - Floyd Cheung The Self and Generic Convention: Winnifred Eaton's Me, A Book of Remembrance - David Shih Diasporic Literature and Identity in A Daughter of the Samurai - Georgina Dodge The Capitalist and Imperialist Critique in H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands - Julia H. Lee Unacquiring Negrophobia: Younghill Kang and the Cosmopolitan Resistance to the Black and White Logic of Naturalization - Stephen Knadler (Im)mobility: Perspectives on the College Plays 1937-1955 - Josephine Lee Toyo Suyemoto and the Landscape of Justice - John Streamas Wounded Bodies and the Cold War: Freedom, Materialism, and Revolution in Literature, 1946-1957 - Viet Nguyen Shades of Absence and Presence in Internment-Themed Literature: Dissent in the West Coast Narratives of John Okada and Toshio Mori - Suzanne Arakawa Richard Kim, Toshio Mori, and Allegories of Masculine Identity and Place - Keith Lawrence Writing Home from the Margins: Memory, History, and Text in Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter - Warren D. Hoffman The Pre-History of an Asian American Writer: N.V.M. Gonzalez' Allegory of Decolonization - Augusto Espiritu Representing Korean Female Subjects, Negotiating Multiple Americas, and Reading Beyond the Ending in Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls - Pamela Thoma

AXISing Asian American Literature: In the Age of War and Empire

On October 9th, 2006, seismologists in Russia, Norway and Vienna detected an earth tremor originating in Northeast Asia with a magnitude of around four. North Korea had detonated its first underground nuclear bomb, albeit a weak one, and the international community including the U.S., Europe, and Japan, reacted in shock, calling for sanctions against the Koreans. Indeed, North Korea had shifted the political/power axis, adding another nation to those who already possessed the bomb: Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the U.S.Nonetheless, for most of us in the West, the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea appears an abstraction, a rhetorical enemy, and part of what the U.S. government has branded an Enemy Nation, part of the Axis of Evil. We live in an era in which ethnic, national, and political lines are more savagely and crudely drawn, dividing nations, peoples, and entire belief systems into good and evil, civilized and barbaric, savior and terrorist.

Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972

On March 22, 1969, in Portsmouth Square, a public gathering place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a group of young Chinese Americans calling themselves the Red Guard Party held a rally to unveil their “10 Point Program.“ Clad in berets and armbands, they announced a Free Breakfast program for children at the Commodore Stockton school, denounced the planned destruction of the Chinese Playground, and called for the “removal of colonialist police from Chinatown.“ The Red Guard Party’s style, language, and politics clearly recalled those of the Black Panther Party, with whom they had significant contact and by whom they were profoundly influenced (AAPA Newspaper March 1969 1; Lyman 20-52). At the rally, the Red Guards performed an Asian American version of black nationalism by adopting the Panthers’ garb, confrontational manner, and emphasis on self-determination. Many years later, the Asian American playwright and critic Frank Chin dismissed the Red Guards’ rally as a “yellow minstrel show“ (Terkel 310). But while Chin rejected the Red Guards’ performance as a vain attempt to imitate blackness, in 1971, just two years after the rally, he offered his own dramatic take on the interplay between Asian Americans and blacks in his play The Chickencoop Chinaman. Widely acknowledged as a germinal work of Asian American literature, Chin’s play explores the relationship between Asian American identity and blackness by featuring Chinese American and Japanese American protagonists who associate with, claim sympathy for, and exhibit speech and dress patterns most commonly associated with African Americans. Set in the late 1960s, The Chickencoop Chinaman chronicles the adventures of Tam Lum, a fast-talking Chinese American, and his Japanese American sidekick, Kenji, as they attempt to produce a film about the career of their childhood hero, the African American boxer

Resisting familiarity: teaching across cultures from between worlds

Drawing on my experience of migration, education and teaching an Asian American literature course, this essay considers the ways in which we can approach the multicultural classroom as an in‐between zone where the logic of identity can be re‐imagined. Migration and exile become metaphors to question and reconsider the problematic of belonging and ‘otherness’ in the now dominant pedagogical paradigm of multiculturalism in the US.

Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life

For many in contemporary culture truth resides in the traumatic or abject subject, in the diseased or damaged body. —Hal Foster, The Return of the Real Doc Hata, the protagonist and narrator of Chang-rae Lee's 1999 novel, A Gesture Life, begins his narrative by describing the typical greeting he receives while strolling around the small town he lives in, Bedley Run. "People know me here," he claims, "whenever I step into a shop in the main part of the village, invariably someone will say, 'Hey, it's good Doc Hata'" (1). Despite Hata's claims, however, his narrative soon becomes riddled with internal contradictions and the novel tells a story quite different from the typical tale of immigration and assimilation Hata wants to tell. Hata's narrative of successful assimilation becomes the story of a profound self-deception, the telling of which is structured around two relationships, each defined by a profound trauma, that haunt Hata despite his attempts to defray their costs by living a life free from affect. These two relationships—one with Kkutaeh (whom Hata calls "K"), a comfort woman he meets while serving as a medic in the Japanese army during [End Page 592] World War II, and the other with Sunny, his adopted daughter—soon overtake Hata's assimilation narrative, exposing the gendered constructions of citizenship on which Hata's masculinist national enfranchisement relies. In the novel, Lee constructs a doubled narrative register in which the stories of Sunny and Kkutaeh consistently undercut Hata's assimilation narrative. This overturning of the novel's primary narrative marks, I shall argue, a shift in perspective from a nationally oriented, patriarchally centered, narrative of immigration and cultural assimilation to a fragmented, transnational narrative driven by the stories of Kkutaeh and Sunny. In spite of Hata's every attempt, A Gesture Life does not narrate the production of a fully constituted national subject, but the failure of that subject to constitute himself within the bounds of hegemonic US citizenship. A Gesture Life marks a significant intervention in the literature of assimilation. In Lee's novel, Doc Hata orients his attempt to write himself into citizenship around the narrative conventions of the bildungsroman. Significantly, however, A Gesture Life cannot be understood as a bildungsroman proper because, despite Hata's attempts to replicate the form through his first-person narration, the novel becomes a traumatic narrative that consistently displaces Hata's tale of successful assimilation. Lee deconstructs the basic form of the bildungsroman and, in doing so, allows us to examine the pernicious logics of race and gender at its core. Lisa Lowe has argued that "the bildungsroman emerged as the primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity, the telos of which is the reconciliation of the individual with the social order " (98; emphasis added). The bildungsroman narrates the incorporation of the individual within the sphere of the nation through the telling of a narrative of the loss of particularity. Because of this, the form has become an important genre in the literature of immigration and assimilation. The identification of the citizen with the nation narrated in the bildung narrative provides agency as the immigrant subject becomes, through this loss of individuation, unmarked and uncontested. To become a citizen is to lose one's uniqueness in the face of a communal national history and character one can take, indeed must take, as one's own. In its refusal of the standard trajectory of the bildung narrative, A Gesture Life continues a significant intervention into American letters by Asian American authors who, as Lowe suggests, often "explore alternative forms of memory, history, and collectivity . . . [by] challeng[ing] the concepts of identity and identification within a universalized narrative of development" (101). In contradistinction to the relinquishing of particularity Lowe describes as the original function of the bildungsroman, Asian American literatures of assimilation [End...

Toward a Postmodern Self: On the Construction and Fragmentation of Identity in Chuang Hua’s Crossings

(Review of Crossings by Chuang Hua, New York: The Dial Press, 1968; reprint, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Northeastern University Press, 1986.) Before the success of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston,1 few readers in America were even aware of the existence of Asian American literature. With rare exceptions, works written by Asian American writers, if they were fortunate enough to get published, would attract little critical attention and go quickly out of print. This was the fate of Chuang Hua's Crossings, published just a few years before the beginning of scholarly activity devoted to Asian American literature, before the civil rights movement and women's movement that awakened mainstream interest in literary treatments of ethnic experi? ence and the lives of women of color. The late Chinese American scholar Amy Ling, who rediscovered the book and reintroduced it to the reader in 1986, hailed Crossings as "a major landmark in Asian American literature" and "Asian America's first modernist novel."2 In the novel, Chuang Hua writes about the emotional pain and suffering of an upper-class Chinese immigrant family that faces crisis in its cultural identity. Unlike more well-known works, such as The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club? which depict the generational conflict in the relationship between immigrant mothers and American-born daughters, the central conflict in Crossings is revolved around the father-daughter relationship. Since its reprint in 1986, the critical attention that Crossings attracted had focused largely on the novel's central theme, the protagonist, Fourth Jane's, search for self-identity.4 In this essay, I am instead, analyzing another, frequently overlooked aspect of the novel, i.e., the father-daughter conflict. I am presenting the father as representative of the modern Chinese-American Man, and the identity he has constructed and as bearing the unique features of Chinese-American modernity in the early twentieth century. Moreover, I see Fourth Jane as portraying a postmodern character who displays the character-traits of irrationality,

Teaching the Politics of Identity in a Post-Identity Age: Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight

Since the early 1990s, I have taught several multicultural/multiethnic literature courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. As a faculty member teaching in a large California regional comprehensive university with a very diverse student body, I faced a number of concerns: How would 1 be able to cover diverse US ethnic literatures in a fifteen-week period'? What approach should I take that would not reduce complex literatures to an academic fast-food menu (it's Tuesday so we will be covering Asian American literature), especially since a number of ethnic studies departments already exist on my campus, and my own English department offers courses such as African American and North American Indian Literatures? Moreover, since nay campus has one of the largest university deaf populations in the country, how would I investigate the complex questions of against changing definitions of cultural groups and the ties that disability studies have to ethnic studies? (1) I decided that my course would concentrate on a theoretical, rather than historical, overview, focusing on shared theoretical concerns about literatures associated with people of color. Such a focus would allow the class to explore questions concerning canon formation, gender, race/ethnicity, class, disability, and sexuality. Examining the complex ways these issues intersect, I raised questions such as the following: What are the consequences of accepting or challenging essentialist definitions of gender and race? How do writers of color confront their often conflicting commitments to multiple subject positions? What are the potential difficulties of constructing an ethnopoetics? How do the current discussions on multiculturalism affect academia and the canon? How do we even decide who are multicultural/multiethnic writers, especially given our increasingly hybrid transnational world? By using such an open-ended approach, I encouraged students to engage in this problem-solving activity with me and to construct additional theoretical questions themselves. More and more, 1 found that one of the fundamental teaching challenges that I needed to confront was how to teach a class on multiethnic literatures in a so-called post-identity age. Initially, multicultural critics, engaging in the early battles of the culture wars, often focused on the expansion of the canon and academic curriculum, attempting to recover and discover writers to incorporate in a more inclusive canon and to give voice to identity-based communities. (2) In more recent decades, feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial critics have raised fundamental questions concerning issues of subjectivity, power, and community, thus challenging the concept of the unitary self. (3) Some critics have asked if such theories, in destabilizing the concept of a unified and coherent identity, have undermined fundamental ways to structure ethnic identity and hence undermined larger political goals toward social advancement for people of color. Other critics have argued that the very anti-foundational process at the heart of the postmodernist enterprise provides a means for an emancipatory politics. (4) More recently, postpositivist realists have argued for a theory that reclaims terms such as objectivity, and realism as a means of invoking social and political judgment. (5) In the midst of this lively debate, I, like many critics and teachers interested in multiculturalism, have examined ways to preserve categories of identities without resorting to an ethnic absolutism and essentialism, and ways to embrace such concepts as multiplicity and hybridity without resorting to a social and moral relativism. At the same time, I understand that these issues extend far beyond academic debates and discourse wars. My students, in going about their daily lives, must contend with the social and political consequences of the material effects of state and national understandings of multiculturalism and diversity. …

The world next door: South Asian American literature and the idea of America

This book grows out of the question, "At this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies, what insights can South Asian American writing offer us about living in the world?" South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples. South Asian American poets, novelists, and playwrights depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book exhorts North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. The world out there arrives next door.

Globalization and "Asian Values": Teaching and Theorizing Asian American Literature

This essay investigates the question of "Asian values" posed by students in Asian American literature classes. In interrogating "Asian values" in both the Asian and American contexts, it argues that they reflect the impact of American capitalism upon Asian America and, as critic Nguyen suggests, the interests of Asian Americans in participating in American capitalism. This understanding of "Asian values" enables us to have a glimpse of the changing reality of Asian America and the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Asian American cultural production. This situating of "Asian values" also convinces students that "Asian values" are not politically neutral but culturally loaded in the interests of the nation-state, dominant culture, and individuals. This examination of "Asian values" finally leads us to reconsider what critic Palumbo-Liu calls "progressive humanism" and understand racial and cultural differences in non-essentialist and historical materialist terms.

Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim

Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim

"A Half Caste" and Other Writings (review)

Reviewed by: “A Half Caste” and Other Writings Steven G. Yao “A Half Caste” and Other Writings. Onoto Watanna. Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii + 184. $34.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). The development and ongoing institutionalization of ethnic studies over the last thirty-five years or so has had a variety of positive, though sometimes controversial, effects across different academic fields. Within literary studies, one of the most interesting of these effects has been the drive to recover, and in some cases reassess, the achievements of writers of color from previous moments in history. Some of these writers, such as Charles Chesnutt, enjoyed a measure of popular success during the time that they wrote. But of course, such popularity typically came at the price of deploying racist stereotypes and confirming prejudiced assumptions and expectations of a dominant audience, at least on the surface. Consequently, their work has often generated a decidedly ambivalent response among more recent critics. On the one hand, there has been a desire to acknowledge these figures as important historical predecessors to contemporary minority writers; but on the other, there has been a simultaneous impulse to disavow the narrative strategies they employed, as well as the implicit cultural politics of their chosen subjects and methods of representation. Within Asian American literary studies in particular, such ambivalence most clearly marks the critical response to Winnifred Maude Eaton (1875-1954), the first writer of Asian ancestry to publish a novel in the United States. Born to an English father and a Chinese mother, Eaton produced numerous novels, short stories and other writings under the pseudo-Japanese pen name Onoto Watanna. Her novels feature such exoticist titles as Miss Numè: A Japanese-American Romance (1899), A Japanese Nightingale (1902), A Japanese Blossom (1906), The Honorable Miss Moonlight (1912) and Sunny-San (1922). Generally they depict melodramatic romantic scenarios between passive Japanese women and boorish American men that follow the outlines of the more familiar tale of the genre, Madame Butterfly, the original version of which was published by John Luther Long in 1898 and subsequently made internationally renowned by Puccini in his opera of the same name that premiered in Milan in 1904. By contrast, Winnifred's sister, Edith Eaton (1865-1914), who chose the Chinese-sounding pen name Sui Sin Far, produced realistic and generally positive depictions of Chinese immigrant communities in the U.S. [End Page 855] In doing so, she openly declared her allegiance with and sought to improve conditions for people of her own ethnic heritage. Unlike her sister, Watanna rarely publicly revealed her half-Chinese ancestry, but rather invented a past to go along with her pen name, claiming Nagasaki (tellingly, the setting for Madame Butterfly) as her birthplace and a Japanese noblewoman as her mother. Consequently, for a long time critics largely ignored Watanna, dismissing her as a kind of ethnic "sell-out" and her work simply as so much pandering to the Orientalist desires of white readers. More recently, however, Watanna has enjoyed something of a resurgence of interest among critics of Asian American literature. Offering greater sympathy and less moralizing judgment, such critics have begun to understand her professional choices more fully in terms of her social and familial context. Thus, in the early 1980s, Amy Ling initiated a reconsideration of Watanna's work by calling attention to the fact that she managed to support herself and four children entirely through writing, as well as by arguing that the Japanese masquerade constituted a valid response to the specifically anti-Chinese racism in the U.S. at the time. Indeed, during the last few years, a spate of publications relating to Watanna have appeared, including at least three critical studies by different scholars and a biography by her granddaughter, as well as reissues of three original works: the autobiography Me: A Book of Remembrance (University Press of Mississippi, 1997), Miss Numè of Japan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and The Heart of Hyacinth (University of Washington Press, 2000). One of the critical studies and the biography have appeared under the University of Illinois Press imprint as part of their impressive and...

Filthy fictions: Asian American literature by women

Filthy fictions: Asian American literature by women

Asian-American Literature and a Lacanian Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey

In his paper, "Asian-American Literature and a Lacanian Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Fu-jen Chen explores the protagonist's subjective progression into the post-Symbolic Real in Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey -- from subject as Demand, through subject as Desire, to subject as jouissance. Tripmaster Monkey records Ah Sing's transformation from a racial paranoiac at the beginning of the novel through a subject as demand to a subject as desire who is learning to target new desires via his engaging in real myth and staging real theater, and finally to a subject as jouissance -- one who is oriented to his own cause of desire and is able to enjoy. As a subject as jouissance, Ah Sing signifies a "New Man" whose racial identity as Asian-American is free from the grip of the nostalgic other (Chinese) or the racist Other (American) but subjected to the hyphen, the rupture as well as the joint that functions as the thing, cause of desire, and object petit a. At the end, Ah Sing finally can act as cause and subjectify the cause of his existence as an Asian-American.