Asian American Literature Research Articles

"Do They See Me as a Virus?": Imagining Asian American Environmental Games

"Do They See Me as a Virus?":Imagining Asian American Environmental Games Edmond Y. Chang Night Flyer. By Mike Ren Yi. 2020. Even The Ocean. By Melos Han-Tani and Marina Krittaka. 2016. Pandemic 2020. By Chanhee Choi. 2020. Given the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the national racial reckoning and spike in anti-Asian hate, and the ever-present consequences of climate change and environmental precarity, three recent independent games—Night Flyer (2020) by Mike Ren Yi, Even the Ocean (2016) by Melos Han-Tani and Marina Krittaka, and Pandemic 2020 (2020) by Chanhee Choi—engage the interactions and intersections of game studies, environmental studies, and Asian American studies. All three games demonstrate the power and potential of video games as environmental worldbuilding, environmentalist interventions, and ecocritical play; they imagine and engage players' relationship to and even problematic exploitation of their environments, both natural and built, embodied and virtual, utopian and dystopian. As Alenda Y. Chang argues in Playing Nature, these games are "environmental texts," referencing Lawrence Buell's criteria in The Environmental Imagination, and therefore an environmental game: "the ideal environmental text [and game] produces involvement. It brings the nonhuman world into equal prominence with the human, exposes humanity's moral responsibility to and participation in the natural world, and portrays the environment as fluid process, not static representation" (32). Moreover, beyond the ecocritical values and ideals [End Page 145] that frame and underpin each, these three games raise additional questions and provocations concerning other norms, identities, structures, even feelings that interact or intersect with their obvious and thematic environmental concerns. These designers and games provide an opportunity to contingently conceive of a growing body of Asian American games to 1) highlight Asian American contributions to environmental studies and game studies, 2) make legible Asian American games as part of environmental literature and media writ large, and 3) creatively articulate what I am calling an Asianfuturist imagining of the environment that points to critical utopian possibilities. The close readings and close playings of the following games and responses from the game-makers themselves contribute to the growing body of Asian American game studies already underway such as the recent work by Tara Fickle, whose The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities addresses the "ludo-Orientalist" infrastructures of literature, games, citizenship, and nation. Fickle defines "ludo-Orientalism" as the "design, marketing, and rhetoric of games" that "shapes how Asians as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced" (3). An extension of techno-Orientalism,1 ludic Orientalism not only engages the digital, computational, or mechanical aspects of video games but also foregrounds the ways that "gaming, both digital and analog, is used in everyday life to provide alternative logics and modes of sense making, particularly as a means of justifying racial fictions and other arbitrary human typologies" (9). In other words, Fickle and the work of others like Christopher Patterson and Dean Chan deploy games as theory in order to examine the ways that games not only render race as mere pixels and representation, but they also enact and are embedded with racialized norms, logics, and mechanics. Night Flyer, Even the Ocean, and Pandemic 2020 and their respective designers theorize their own work, their relationship to their identities and positionalities, and the potential for Asian American games. Moreover, the games and designers presented below bridge more traditional environmental studies, Asian American ecocriticism, and the recent environmental turn in video games studies. Robert T. Hayashi, in his essay "Beyond Walden Pond: Asian American Literature and the Limits of Ecocriticism," argues for understandings of nature that are not centered on or by whiteness, to expand the definitions of the environment that does not replicate the "historical assumption that nature is equivalent to environment," and most importantly, to consider "how ethnic/racial minorities have defined, experienced, apprehended, and represented" nature and the environment (61). Hayashi reimagines "how the study of Asian Americans relates to dominant notions of the natural world" (Hayashi "Environment" par. 7). He calls for a consideration of "a wider range of texts, disciplinary approaches, and epistemological assumptions" (Hayashi, 61) regarding the links between social and natural domains, particularly...

Refusing the Will to Health: Neoliberal Wellness Culture and Asian American Literature

Refusing the Will to Health: Neoliberal Wellness Culture and Asian American Literature

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang Klara Loc-Ling Boger (bio) The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form, by Caroline H. Yang. Stanford University Press, 2020. Ix + 280 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN 9781503612051. Explicitly evoking Saidiya Hartman's articulation of "the afterlives of slavery," Caroline H. Yang's The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form compellingly argues that one such afterlife, the minstrel form, informed representations of Chinese "coolie" labor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Yang emphasizes minstrelsy's origins in American chattel slavery and its antiblack logics that resulted in jovial depictions of enslaved Black people as "naturally" subservient to whites. Minstrelsy's specifically proslavery antiblackness affirmed whiteness as the only legitimate claim to personhood and citizenship even after Emancipation, and as the nation expanded westward, this sense of white national identity had to contend with other subordinated racialized labors. Coolie labor, at once seen as a replacement for slave labor and as a challenge to the standard of "free" American labor, perpetuated white anxieties about who can claim "legitimate" labor and citizenship. Using Robin Bernstein's definition of repertoire as a set of practices and gestures that inform everyday life, Yang asserts that blackface minstrelsy was one such repertoire that formed a "state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness" in nineteenth century America (37). Yang's turn to the minstrel form's manifestation in literature after Emancipation is significant as she demonstrates the ways pervasive and quotidian antiblackness set the terms of representation for the Chinese "coolie" laborer. Literary minstrelsy during Reconstruction was a venue for the forging of a national cultural identity that upheld white supremacist definitions of personhood and political enfranchisement, "recalibrating" antiblack racism through the coolie figure (19). "Coolie" minstrelsy continued proslavery logics through representations of nonwhite figures as subhuman as it attended to anxieties about racialized labor that was nonwhite yet also not enslaved. In "Part I: 'Earliest Pioneers' of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction," Yang explores work by white writers, namely Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce, who, in spite of their "progressive" politics, still perpetuated racist depictions of Chinese laborers by deploying popular minstrel tropes and gestures. Thus, these writers intertwined the antiblack logics of slavery with US imperialism. These writers began their literary careers in California and were central in crafting or "pioneering" the space of the West as an American national space. For example, Yang argues that Harte's best-selling 1870 poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," later renamed "Heathen Chinee," refigures Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a character that employs minstrel gestures, into the language and gestures of the Chinese laborer Ah Sin. Twain's early [End Page 510] representations of the Chinese, such as in the play Ah Sin (1877) co-written with Harte, demonstrates his appreciation for minstrel shows; in many of his early writings that feature Chinese people, Twain directly borrows from minstrelsy and employs a mixture of the stock characters the "interlocutor," a straight man character, and "end men," two joke-telling characters nicknamed Tambo and Bones. Bierce's representation of the Chinese in his early short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871) at first glance seems to be most critical of minstrelsy, yet ultimately fails to point to the form's origins in slavery. The westward extension of a minstrelsy cognizant of Chinese labor was a crucial mechanism that made the "external" space of the frontier internal to the nation. Yang's readings of these texts importantly underscore slavery, colonization, and imperialism's intertwined relationship. In "Part II: 'Pioneers' of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Yang examines how "Eurasian" writer Sui Sin Far and African American writer Charles Chesnutt offer critiques of minstrelsy. Whereas the aforementioned white writers were "pioneers" of the colonial space of the West during Reconstruction, Far and Chesnutt wrote after Reconstruction and can be seen as "pioneers" of their respective minority American literary traditions. Still, Yang argues, Far fails in her critique to acknowledge minstrelsy's roots in slavery, such...

Silence with Teeth: The Operations and Implications of Silence in Gish Jen’s Typical American

Silence has been viewed by critics of Asian American literature as either a means of resistance or accommodation, but I argue that silence is a flexible strategy to heighten the presence of racism. Specifically, in Gish Jen’s Typical American, the narrator’s silence about the character’s thoughts and emotions toward racism raises the readers’ awareness about racism. Silence about racism in the text functions as a cautionary device, highlighting its potential as both resistant and accommodative, and therefore, strategic. As such, the silence in Typical American operates with flexibility. By examining and extending the arguments of King-Kok Cheung and Patti Duncan’s conceptualization of silence, this study navigates the manner in which silence can be unearthed from its traditional perception of being a sign of accommodation, a stereotypical portrayal of Asian Americans. Simultaneously resistant and accommodative, the silence in the text is both a reflection of the reality and a means to convey the unfathomable impacts of racism. Without being explicitly narrated, the silence of the narrator operates on different levels.

It is More than a Bunch of Numbers: Trauma, Voicing and Identity in Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy

This paper explores how Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy (2013) recaptures the buried hi/stories of the 228 Massacre with a trauma narrative about Silk’s deep-kept secrets. It first delineates the evolution of trauma theory and trauma fiction highlighting the significance of articulating trauma and its relevance in healing, hi/storytelling and identity construction. This demarcation shall frame a critical lens to illustrate how Chow innovates distinct insulated narratives on the protagonists to mimic intergenerational ramifications of trauma in the Lu family, to represent their psychological healing and to express the association between silence-breaking, remembering and identity construction. This critical endeavor will also demonstrate that Silk’ story of survival promises the survival of hi/story. Thus, the novel proper not only portrays the traumatic impact, a nightmarish “legacy,” of 228 but also renders Silk’s trauma narrative as the “legacy” to connect with Taiwanese heritage and construct Taiwanese American identities. Given Chow’s innovative form and unique themes about trauma and Taiwanese American diaspora, the article situates her novel in the emerging Taiwanese American literature, Asian American literature, contemporary American diasporic literature and trauma fiction.

Nation, Diaspora, and Asian American Literature

AbstractRead together, Patricia Chu’s Where I have Never Been (2019), Jinah Kim’s Postcolonial Grief (2019), Sze Wei Ang’s The State of Race (2019), and Janna Odabas’s The Ghosts Within (2018) allow for a review of the state and meaning of diaspora and diasporic frames of analysis in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. Approaching these books through the 1990s debate on minority nationalism in Asian American studies shows one prominent direction that critical engagements with transnationalism have taken. While postcolonialism’s place in the 1990s debate on transnationalism and Asian America was tenuous at best, these books suggest that it has become a crucial part of envisioning the critical work diasporic Asian American culture can do. In these books, diasporic frames of analysis lead to recognizing Asian American culture as a site where the unresolved and unaccounted for violence of US nationalism and globalization surfaces and challenges to dominant ideas of race and nation appear. Both as method of inquiry and as historical understanding of twentieth-century US–Asian relations, postcolonialism in these books shows the critical potential of diaspora for Asian America.

Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

AbstractSince 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.

Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’sHomebaseand Viet Thanh Nguyen’sThe Sympathizer

AbstractThis article introduces the concept of a transpacific settler colonial condition, a term which captures the interconnected nature of Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism across the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, given shared histories of American empire and military violence. In order to historicize the transpacific settler colonial condition's coarticulation with Asian American political subjectivity, ever since the Asian American Movement of the Long Sixties, this article turns to two works of Asian American historical fiction: Shawn Wong's Homebase (1979), one of the first self-identified works of Asian American literature, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015), a contemporary best-selling novel. Both texts call attention to the interconnected nature of Indigenous sovereignty struggles across the continental United States, Guam, and Vietnam and grapple with the vexed positionality of Asian American subjects who at times uphold transpacific settler colonialism and at other times resist it. The article ends with a call for transpacific decolonization via a feminist refugee epistemology.

Object-Oriented Diaspora Sensibilities, Disidentification, and Ghostly Performance

Object-Oriented Diaspora Sensibilities, Disidentification, and Ghostly Performance

Can You Tell by Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature

Abstract This essay identifies a need for a postvisible definition of Asian American literature. Traditionally Asian American literature has been identified by the racial descent of the writer and recognizable “Asian American” content, but such qualifications are no longer sufficient and prompt the question, “But is it Asian American?” In order to theorize a postvisible definition, this essay engages twentieth-century philosophy of art to delineate three distinct approaches to definition in Asian American literary history: a “real” definition in its founding period that pursued exactitude and empiricism in substantiating a new category of art called Asian American literature, to an anti-definition in the 1990s, and to the pluralist, nonnormative definition since 2000 in which identifying a text as Asian American is an exercise in persuasively situating the text within the Asian American literary artworld, not in identifying visibly “detectible” properties.

Food as Storied Matter in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

As food narrative plays an essential role in Asian American literature and Asian Americans and Asian immigrants depicted in these texts have overwhelmingly been marked by their foodways,1 the relev...

Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park; Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism by Amy Tang

Review Article| March 01 2020 Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park; Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism by Amy Tang Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature, by Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 320 pages.Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism, by Tang, Amy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 240 pages. Elda Tsou Elda Tsou Elda Tsou is associate professor in the Department of English at St. John’s University. Her first book, Unquiet Tropes: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature, reconceived Asian American literature as a set of classical rhetorical tropes figuring specific historical problematics. Her next book argues that the special affinity defining the relationship of the Asian American subject to whiteness articulates an alternate model of racialization that she calls a “politics of proximity.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2020) 66 (1): 147–156. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-8196751 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Elda Tsou; Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park; Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism by Amy Tang. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2020; 66 (1): 147–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-8196751 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The new formalism may no longer be so new, but its call to reinvigorate the study of form continues to be heard, as two recent books on Asian American literature can attest. While it is true that Asian American studies has traditionally favored historical or sociopolitical approaches to literature, the formal turn of the last decade or so has produced a growing body of scholarship to which we can now add Josephine Park’s Cold War Friendships and Amy Tang’s Repetition and Race.1 The new formalism has unevenly pursued questions of race and racial formation as compared, for instance, to its scrutiny of gender, sexuality, or class. Park and Tang make significant contributions to that scholarship by dint of their subject matter alone, but more than this, they sketch out something like a distinct Asian American epistemology—an inquiry into how Asian American literature might... © 2019 Hofstra University2019 You do not currently have access to this content.

Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min

Reviewed by: Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min Jeanette Roan (bio) Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art, by Susette Min. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 272 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814764305. Asian American art is a relatively new topic of scholarly inquiry. Works such as Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art (1998), Fresh Talk / Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (2003), Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (2008), Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (2009), Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (2017), and other contributions to the field have made visible a broad range of Asian American artists, offered compelling insights into their lives and works, and created a rich discourse of Asian American art history. Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art complements this body of work by asking us to consider the utility of the name “Asian American art.” The book begins by looking back at racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions of the 2000s, in particular One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (2006), curated by Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette Min. In an essay included in the exhibition catalog, Min wrote of the necessity of “identity-based exhibitions” alongside the delimitations of existing curatorial frameworks. Unnamable expands upon these earlier reflections, situating the multicultural exhibitions of the 1990s [End Page 299] and the racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions that followed in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Min concludes, “The politics of naming art ‘Asian American’ at this historical juncture within an ethnic-specific exhibitionary framework subjugates or constrains the work, burdening it with a ready-made set of interpretations already embedded in the collective imagination” (27). While acknowledging the continuing underrepresentation of artworks by Asian Americans, Min seeks to move away from a “politics of recognition” to a “reformation of perception, reorienting the futurity of Asian American art” (18). Unnamable thus sets out to explore a “supplementary” way of showing and engaging with “Asian American art.” Min’s focus on curatorial strategies brings a new perspective to familiar questions of identity and difference, race and representation. The introduction asks, “How does one weigh a call and desire for inclusion against the very logic of neoliberal multiculturalism that will co-opt this inclusion?” (13). She looks to French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his theory of aesthetics and politics as a way of “foregrounding aesthetics to reconceptualize Asian American art” (20). Although Rancière has been prominent in discourses of contemporary art theory and criticism for at least the past decade, his work will likely be less familiar to scholars in Asian American studies. However, Min takes care to explicate key concepts, joining his thought to Lisa Lowe’s work to bring in a more familiar set of ideas. She also situates her work within a recent interest in the aesthetic in Asian American literary and cultural studies. Notably, Rancière also figures prominently in Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019). Chapter 1 demonstrates how exhibitions can shape the reception of artworks and offers insight into the challenges of showing work by Asian American artists within prevailing art world conventions and expectations by examining The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Asia/America (1994), and Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents (2008). The remainder of the book, conceived as “mini-exhibitions on paper and case studies,” presents critical analyses of the work of a handful of established artists: Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Nikki S. Lee, Simon Leung, and Mary Lum (6). Each chapter is organized around themes that are familiar to Asian American studies even as the works themselves, selected for their conceptual richness and aesthetic strategies, do not directly “represent” these topics. Chapter 2 considers labor and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece) and One Year Performance, 1980–1981 (Time Piece), Byron Kim’s Whitney Philip Morris: Wall Drawings (1999), and Simon Leung’s Squatting Project/Berlin (1994). Chapter 3 emphasizes space, history, and memory in selected works by Mary Lum alongside Simon Leung’s Surf Vietnam (1998). Unfortunately, the book does...

The Role of Anthologies in Developing Approaches to The Study of Asian American Literature

The article reviews the role and position of the first anthologies of American literature written by writers of Asian descent, due to which the outlines for what are now commonly known as Asian American literary studies were defined. A close analysis of these anthologies enables to realize why the existence of a unified collective Asian American identity, which was proclaimed in the second half of the 20th century, is being questioned at the milestone of the 20th and 21st centuries. It gives reason to state that the anthologies did not only emphasize the status quo of literature created by American writers of Asian descent, but also formed fracture lines along which at the end of the 20th century efforts were made to deprive Asian-American literature of the status of marginal, secondary and present it as a full-fledged component of American literary continuum. The first one can be described as “beyond the hyphen”. The second trajectory of the search for a way out of ethnic shelter at the end of the 20th century is aimed at “reconfiguring the canon”. It involves not only a demand of being fully involved into the American literary tradition, but also a search for its role in shaping, if not generating contemporary American literature. The anthologies that hold the primacy in the discovery of American writers of Asian descent, as a literary fact on one side, were both a continuation and rethinking of the tradition of Eastern (Chinese/Japanese) anthologies. On the other hand, despite the extremely compressed theoretical foundation for the essence of this wing of American literature, they show the extent and dynamism of its understanding and interpretation as an integral part of Western literary discourse.

"On the Perpetual Motion of Search": The Transpacific Networked Poetics of Craig Santos Perez and Theresa H.K. Cha

This essay examines Craig Santos Perez's poetic series from unincorporated territory on Guam alongside Theresa Cha's Dictee on the modern Korean diaspora. Thinking through a minor encounter between these two texts, this essay articulates a "transpacific networked poetics" that connects Pacific Island and Asian American literatures in a collective decolonial vision. At their core, both experimental texts use fragmentation as an aesthetic strategy for remapping literary geographies across the Pacific. Rather than only signaling poetic resistance or reflexivity, the fragment operates as a relational and networked form. The essay first explores how the fragment captures the island ontology of a "tiny dot," exposing the cartographic imaginary of empire. Second, it theorizes the submerged life of the fragment that extends beyond textual borders in order to illuminate new decolonial expressions. The fragment aestheticizes relational epistemologies and is a key formal element in transpacific poetics, as disparate Pacific sites have been networked due to overlapping histories of imperialism.

From the Asian American Literature Festival

From the Asian American Literature Festival Jennifer Chang (bio) and Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis We associate lectures with dull erudition and cold, sterile lecture halls. Our associations with history are hardly different: history, we think, exudes importance with broad-shouldered publicity, such pomp. But for marginalized communities, our cultural knowledge has come with far less fanfare. When Juan Felipe Hererra was finishing his first term as US Poet Laureate, he gave a closing lecture on Chicano poetry at the Library of Congress. Rather than a general historical survey, it was an inside, loving look at poems that moved him, poets who’d been forgotten, snapshots lost to time. It was an “intimate” lecture, “intimate” indicating the kind of history: connective rather than individual, away from the public eye, away too from the noisy markers of awards, acclaim, critical attention. The Secret Histories series, launched as part of the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival, borrows the spirit of Hererra’s lecture. By attending to quiet interludes, off-to-the-side exchanges, and personal relationships, we strive to remake what we think of as the ground of American literary history into a more complex and human landscape. Through sharing lost histories and secret knowledge, we might bind the Asian American literary community more tightly together. Secret Histories begins with, opens through the eyes of, mid-career Asian American poets and writers and the question of where they fit in a matrix of inheritance, of veneration, of portaging the things we need to live from one place to another, one time to another. The first commissioned talks from Kazim Ali, Jennifer Chang, Ching-In Chen, and Cathy Park Hong, three of whom you’ll find collected in the pages that follow, take a focus on the lost, the quiet, the under-attended to, those we’ve neglected to honor. These essays trace an imperative the scholar Juliana Chang once signaled in her introduction to the anthology Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970 : “I was constantly confronted with the spec-tre of lost history: how many copies of these fragile, dusty books were left in the world? How could we begin to find out about some of the more obscure poets, whose books were published by small presses that have long since vanished? How are these pieces relics of a now-gone life and history? How do we read, in the present, these remains of the past?” [End Page 102] Jennifer Chang Jennifer Chang is the author of two books of poems, The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her essays on poetry have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New Literary History, the Volta, and in books on Asian American literature and culture and the Harlem Renaissance. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and teaches at George Washington University and at Bennington College’s MFA in Writing program. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications

Reading Vocabulary for the Naturalization Test, and: Find a Naturalization Test Word

Reading Vocabulary for the Naturalization Test, and: Find a Naturalization Test Word Sun Yung Shin (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Reading Vocabulary for the Naturalization Test, accessed 10/22/19.. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Office%20of%20Citizenship/Citizenship%20Resource%20Center%20Site/Publications/PDFs/reading_vocab.pdf [End Page 76] Find a Naturalization Test Word C U T H A N K S G I V I N G P E O E A L I N C O L N I E F E Y S N L C I T Y V D O R Z I R N R U G P I P M E E T E I R E A E A O R O R P R I G H T S H M S H L H E E E N D N T I T W G R H W L N S P M C I A C B H E O S M D O I S E A H F O I I O L A E P D D X N P S S U L T R O N M N N E W T I A E N L E G C I O O A N V H T W T T A M E G C R V O T E M A H A R B A D E T I N U S O T L T T Y O N S H G A L F L A R G E S T R T C C O L U M B U S S O U T H H ABRAHAM AMERICA BILL CAPITAL CITIZEN CITY COLORS COLUMBUS CONGRESS COUNTRY DOLLAR FATHER FIRST FLAG GEORGE GOVERNMENT HOUSE INDEPENDENCE LABOR LARGEST LINCOLN MANY MEET MEMORIAL NAME NORTH ONE PEOPLE PRESIDENTS RIGHT RIGHTS SECOND SENATORS SOUTH STATE STATES THANKSGIVING UNITED VOTE WASHINGTON WHAT WHEN [End Page 77] Sun Yung Shin 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is a poet, writer, artist, and independent curator. She is the author of poetry/ essay collections Unbearable Splendor (Minnesota Book Award); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (Asian American Literary Award) (all published by Coffee House Press). She is the editor of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Her bilingual (Korean/English) illustrated children's book is Cooper's Lesson. She is the co-director with Su Hwang of the literary organization Poetry Asylum, which recognizes poetry as a human right. She lives in Minneapolis. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

From] The Hour of the Rat (We arrive), [from] The Hour of the Rat (a rainbow), [from] The Hour of the Rat (The persimmon)

[from] The Hour of the Rat (We arrive), [from] The Hour of the Rat (a rainbow), [from] The Hour of the Rat (The persimmon) Brandon Shimoda (bio) from The Hour of the Rat We arrive on the islandwalk into the nearest rockresound with inkv Holes in the earth, isall the crying caveslike lions islandsmasksconcealing the rapid evolutionof a newborn facecycling through the var. temptationsof how to settleand fit and not relapsethe bad habits of ancestorsdying by being misremembered The water ate our kneesThe fish were hanging on [End Page 91] from The Hour of the Rat a rainbow races across a field people are gathered above They know each other’s faces not each other, the familiarity they feel is a suture I know the people’s shadows, not their facestheir faces dis , orflatten as if a chemicalpassing. This is the advantage of passing:centering a new existencethat sharpenswhere the field ends. [End Page 92] from The Hour of the Rat The persimmon is a grandmotherin the body of a childancient, ageless, made of sunand sea, the parting of the continentsto rest a single cell of lifenot yet manifested, Deference is to hang a portrait of the persimmonhigh on the wall, angled slightly downso it can watchthe comings and goings + We pass each hour in grassand watch the laureled skeletons walk past, why isn’t every dayof the dead [End Page 93] Brandon Shimoda Brandon Shimoda’s recent books are The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018). He is currently—maybe always— writing a book on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, passages from which have appeared in The Asian American Literary Review, Lit Hub, The Nation, and The New Inquiry. He lives in the desert. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades Press

Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire by Cynthia Wu

Reviewed by: Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire by Cynthia Wu K. Ian Shin (bio) Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire, by Cynthia Wu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017. Viii + 194 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1582-0. In Ray Yeung’s 2016 indie romance Front Cover, Ryan, an openly gay Chinese American stylist in New York, meets Ning, a closeted film star from China. In one scene, Ning asks Ryan whether his parents know and approve of his homosexuality. “They’re not Chinese in that way,” Ryan replies. The dramatic tension behind Ryan and Ning’s eventual coupling as “sticky rice”—a colloquialism used by LGBTQ Asians who prefer sexual and romantic partners that are also Asian—trades on the conflict between “traditional” Chinese culture, which supposedly avoids overt displays of queer sexuality, and “modern” Asian American sensibilities that have accepted it. Cynthia Wu suggests that “sticky” stories like Front Cover have a deeper genealogy. In her aptly titled book, Wu interrogates the politics of intraracial same-sex desire through queer readings of five key works of Asian American literature and drama. Wu sets out to demonstrate that intraracial and intraethnic same-sex desire hold the potential to resolve conflicts and build coalitions within the Asian American community—though not without problems. She makes clear at the outset that Sticky Rice is not a “recovery project,” but rather one that “shows how a slice of the existing canon has always been queer” (19). Wu supplements close textual analysis of each work with attention to the histories of their publication and reception. The book engages broadly with questions about Asian American sexuality and masculinity that scholars like David L. Eng, Daniel Y. Kim, and Nguyen Tan Hoang have debated. In particular, it urges a reconsideration of characters that are typically portrayed as alienated or homophobic, as “agential envoys of queer thinking” (19) and queer connection instead. Following an introduction that discusses Nguyen’s 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven (1997), each of the book’s five chapters examines a different set of conflicts. Chapter 1, on John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), explores reconciliation between draft resistor Ichiro Yamada and Army veteran Kenji Kanno. Wu reads Ichiro’s homoerotic desire for Kenji as signaling an embrace across the divisions among Japanese Americans created by the U.S. government’s loyalty oaths during World War II. Chapter 2 centers on Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003). Wu contrasts the unsatisfying and problematic liaisons between the protagonist, Binh, and two non-Asian characters, against Binh’s idealized encounter with another Vietnamese man. She argues that Binh’s relationship with his compatriot—later revealed to be Ho Chi Minh—is a call for reunion between South Vietnamese refugees and the Vietnamese state, as well as between pro- and anticommunist camps in the diaspora. Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (1988) is the subject of chapter 3. The relationship between [End Page 302] two Asian American actors resolves intergenerational tensions between the younger Bradley’s cultural nationalism and the elder Vincent’s willingness to play stereotypical roles in order to earn a living. Wu problematizes this resolution by showing that Bradley’s attempts to connect with Vincent by looking past Vincent’s homosexuality risks an apolitical multiculturalism that is dangerous right at the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s. Chapter 4 pairs H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands (1937) with Paul C. P. Siu’s classic sociological study of Chinese laundry workers. The conflict to be reconciled here is an economic one. Wu analyzes passages depicting homosocial intimacy and figurative sexual contact between Tsiang’s protagonist and working-class Chinese men and finds that they pave the way for a “rejection of consumer capitalist fantasies for a labor movement that . . . mobilizes through a same-sex encounter within ethnic lines” (116). The final chapter examines Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s controversial novel Blu’s Hanging (1997). Wu argues that the seemingly progressive pairing of two Japanese women, Big Sis and Sandi, masks the structural advantages of being East Asian in Hawai‘i, and elides the effects of settler colonialism on the islands...

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans: Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Asian American Literary ProductionEast-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans: Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Asian American Literary ProductionEast-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison