ABSTRACT This article explores the contemporary Asian American neo-frontier narrative, focusing on two conflicted features of this emerging subgenre. First, the neo-frontier narrative signals Asian America’s resistance to the idea that history requires embodied presence or a recoverable past. This questioning of the relationship between Asian figures and history is important because of the way that Asians have traditionally been racialized as foreigners with no place in the nation. That resistance meets its limits, however, in the second characteristic of the neo-frontier narrative: the absence of Native American figures in these stories or any kind of meaningful reckoning with the nation’s settler colonialism.