What Does Asian American Literature Mean to You?

No, that’s not a trick question

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

First off, a warm welcome to everyone on the occasion of this newsletter’s debut. To quote the immortal Selena, me siento muy excited, and also nervous.

My grad school applications talked briefly about an interest in learning more about public humanities and alternative fora for knowledge-sharing. I was inspired by the podcast My Gothic Dissertation by Anna Williams, which I thought was just such a creative way to approach both the genre of the dissertation and the genre of Gothic romance. I’ve also been wowed by Surabhi Balanchander’s @surabhi.reading account on Instagram (if you’re here because of her shout-out, thank you so much; and congratulations again, Surabhi, on the TT job!).

But as someone who can neither pod nor gram well – I mean, the pivot to video was a really dark phase in my newsroom career – I figure I ought to play to my strengths. There’s a reason my résumé talks about clean copy, tight turnaround, and creative pitching. 🥲 Which is how, and why, we’re here. Hello!

‘Maximal attenuation’

Asian American literature is literature by Asian authors in the United States… right? Honestly, this is an impossible question to answer, and the attempt is basically set up for failure, tied as it is to the question of who or what an Asian American is.

Take two actors who are most well known for their work in Hong Kong cinema. Is Bruce Lee Asian American by dint of his birthright? By virtue of her roles in CRA and EEAAO, is Michelle Yeoh, in spite of citizenship?

Colleen Lye’s take on this question, in the Representations article “In Dialogue with Asian American Studies” (2007), makes reference to the Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi in 1988, which highlights to the need to include “overseas Asians,” “expatriates,” mixed-race authors, and authors who identify as “regional writers rather than as Asian Americans.”

Cheung and Kogi’s criteria demonstrates “maximal ideological inclusiveness and maximal attenuation of the ‘American’ link,” says Lye, elaborating: “That is, the ‘American’ in ‘Asian American’ can refer either to the residency of the author or to the content of texts by nonresident authors.”

For better or for worse, we’re definitely seeing that with the surfeit of U.S.-published fiction by international students and professionals originally from Asia (think Kirstin Chen or Kyla Zhao). And how would we place works by Asian American authors who write from overseas (Noelle Q. de Jesus, Tiffany Tsao), or authors who have lived in Asia and North America but also have ties elsewhere (most famously, Mohsin Hamid)?

(At the same time, Lye notes “the delineation of that archive by a biologically based definition of authorial identity” – the need to establish some sort of “Asian descent” – which continues to naturalise and reinforce the racialisation of what Kandice Chuh glosses in Imagine Otherwise as the “Asiatic” body.)

Literary imaginAsian

If it wasn’t clear, I’m particularly interested in the transnational element in Asian American writing; after all, I’ve just submitted a form to update my dissertation title to include the phrase “the globality of race.” Coming from Asia – yes, I’m an Asian Americanist who isn’t Asian American – I’m very intrigued by Asian America’s Asia. By that, I don’t mean the history that shadows the framing of, say, The Woman Warrior or M. Butterfly, but the concept inaugurated in works like Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala (1999), which is shaped by an anxious imagination of Asian modernity.

(This is where you ask: Do you want to talk about Crazy Rich Asians? I’m blinking twice for help. I always and never want to talk about Crazy Rich Asians.)

In fact, both Lye’s America’s Asia and David Palumbo-Liu’s “On the Functions of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary” – the subtitle to an essay about Los Angeles 1992 – are deeply engaged in the economics of that modernity. Lye’s argument in America’s Asia is that “a genealogy of Asian American stereotype is discernable in the historical failures of class critique,” and she expressly states: “The initial textual presence of Asiatic racial form as an economic trope helps to explain the primarily economic themes of Asian American racial representation.”

Finally, it’s personally important to me that my research helps to theorise Southeast Asian American literature. Engseng Ho’s “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies” (2017) describes maritime Southeast Asia, my much-beloved home, as a place “where the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and Pacific Ocean meet” and “mobile societies from across Asia have engaged one another on a continuing basis for centuries.” He asks, “What would a thick transregionalism, a spatially expansive yet integrative account of a mobile society, look like?” and I believe some answers lie in the writing.

Looking for Southeast Asian America

That Southeast Asian American literature is marginalised in the field of Asian American literature should be obvious. Long Le-Khac and Kate Hao did some amazing number-crunching for “The Asian American Literature We’ve Constructed” (2021), where they study how canonicity is composed and conclude:

The literatures of ethnic groups aside from the most visible ones hold only a sliver of the field's attention. Meanwhile, the overrepresentation of Chinese and Japanese American literatures persists. We reveal the dramatic ascension of Korean American literature and a reconfigured East Asian American hegemony in the field: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese American literatures, in that order. This reconfiguration has been enabled by a troubling decline in studies of Filipinx American literature, which was once central to the field. Our data indicate that much Filipinx American literature is today studied outside the panethnic Asian American framework entirely. Meanwhile, the conflation of Chinese American literature with Asian American literature as a whole has intensified. The data raise questions about the extent to which the field's rhetoric of diversification has masked persistent and emergent inequalities in our critical practices.

The theorisation of Southeast Asian American literature has been animated by the invaluable contributions of scholars advancing a refugee critique, the centrality of which is evident even from how Fiona I. B. Ngô, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Mariam B. Lam call Southeast Asia “a postcolonial imaginary, a marketizing economy, a tourist destination, a dream of homeland or sometimes nightmare, a neoliberal state, a war or series of wars or a series of images about war, and more” in their introduction to a special issue of positions on Southeast Asian American studies in 2012.

On the other hand, I am concerned about the reduction of Southeast Asian American literature to war and refugee narratives in the American and Asian American imagination. Southeast Asian Americans from various backgrounds have worked to colour outside the lines; co-editor Monique Truong, for instance, reflects on the 1998 anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose as “the first to eschew the Vietnam War or ‘the refugee experience’ as its focus and organizing theme.”

But I find it telling how there have been only two anthologies that attempt to curate Southeast Asian American authors as a bloc: Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Cheng Lok Chua’s Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (2000), and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam, and Kathy L. Nguyen’s Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (2014), which aimed to spotlight “less commonly produced tales and iconography by people who have lived in these regions.” And the latter ultimately struggled with its mission, with its editors acknowledging an eventual absence of contributions from Thai, Burmese, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Singaporean American women.

Through the caesura

Viet Thanh Nguyen points out in “Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique” (2012) that Southeast Asian studies has a flaw lying in a tendency that “recognizes the multiculturalism of Southeast Asian countries while assuming America to be homogenous.” He goes on to say, “In fact, the United States is in Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia is in the United States. Southeast Asian American studies must think through both sides of the caesura at the same time, and by doing so, can prove how US power exerted in Southeast Asia has left witnesses in the United States.”

This essay was the first thing by Nguyen that I’d ever read – it prompted me to pick up his sole academic monograph, Race and Resistance (2002), which I adamantly maintain, The Sympathizer’s Pulitzer notwithstanding, remains his best book – and, as you’ll see, it continues to resonate so much with me.

There is, then, a significant gap in the theorisation of the literature, which cannot be solved by ignoring the importance of refugee critique or excluding other national perspectives. How can an American view of Southeast Asia(n America) and an ASEAN-territorial Southeast Asian view be reconciled, if at all?

So (congrats on hearing me out) that’s what you can expect in this newsletter project. As for you, dear reader, what’s your working definition of Asian American literature?