This Book Reflects a Changing World and My Own Vicissitudes As an Intellec- Tual Migrant

CODA This book reflects a changing world and my own vicissitudes as an intellectual migrant. While a graduate student of English specializing in Renaissance British literature at Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was unable to use Chinese (my mother tongue) to fulfill the second language require- ment of the doctoral program: only Indo-European languages qualified. (I took an intensive Latin workshop.) As the first Asian faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) English department, I struck my colleagues then as the ideal candidate to tackle emerging Asian American literary studies, an interloper though I might have been in a field that considered American nativity as requisite credential. Because of the Anglophone emphasis in this field (and American studies generally) at the time and due to my institutional affiliation, none of the books I edited (Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers) lingered on the crossroads between Asia and Asian America, let alone included works penned in other tongues. But I have never veered from the inclusive principle adopted while compiling the book-length bibliography. The transnational turn in American studies, the diasporic expansion in Asian American studies (and in Sinophone studies particularly), and the increasing mutual engagement of the United States and China have brought about significant curricular changes. This turn has allowed me to bring together many loves: Cantonese opera, Chinese poetry and novels, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Romantic poetry, and translation. © The Author(s) 2016 295 K.-K. Cheung, Chinese American Literature without Borders, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44177-5 296 CODa It has also brought to full circle my academic odysseys (including two appointments as faculty director of UC Education Abroad Programs in China). My understanding of the writers covered in this book has been enriched by the research of scholars in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. Just as linking transpacific writers can generate new insights into Asian American literary studies, so greater intellectual exchanges between (Asian) Americanists across oceans can be mutually invigorating. While this book focuses on the intersection between Chinese and Chinese American literature and cultures, this does not imply that such a locus is the most important area of inquiry in Asian American literary studies. It is, however, an index of my personal engagement with some of the seminal formulations about the field over the last few decades, as briefly outlined in the introduction: (1) theAiiieeeee! editors’ insistence on a radical separation between Chinese (or Americanized Chinese) and Chinese American culture; (2) the same editors’ attempt, 17 years later, to reclaim a so-called Asian American heroic tradition as the most reso- nant inspiration (and by implication also the guiding principle) of Asian American literature; (3) the debate over whether it is more important for the field to go diasporic or remain US-centered; and (4) the crystalliza- tion of a “Third” literature that calls for alternative hermeneutics and that incorporates immigrant and Americas-born writers using different linguistic mediums and expressing geopolitical concerns a world away. The radical division of Asian and Asian American literature at the outset has led to a certain skepticism against the incorporation of Asian material in Asian American writing, thereby giving short shrift to inventive bicultural poetics. I have tried to make up for this neglect by illuminating the artful deployment of Chinese sources by Frank Chin, Marilyn Chin, Ha Jin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Russell C. Leong. At the same time, I caution against indiscriminate ancestral boosterism. My ambivalence toward F. Chin’s unequivocal endorsement of the Asian heroic tradition grows out of his association of heroism and masculinity with belligerence and domination. I use works by Kingston, Bing Xin, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, M. Chin, and Ruthanne Lum McCunn to shuffle feminine codes; works by Younghill Kang, Gus Lee, David Wong Louie, Li-Young Lee, William Poy Lee, Leong, Anchee Min, and Shawn Wong to discourage replicating machismo and to present viable alternatives. With regard to the seemingly divergent routes taken by Asian Americanists who adhere to the original mission by working toward social CODa 297 justice in North America, or chart heterogeneous concerns in the diaspora, or brave a polyglot “Third” trail—my readings of McCunn, Bing Xin, Jin, M. Chin, Leong, Min, and Xu suggest that a transnational purview can trigger a reflexive social critique, glancing both homeward and across the shore. “The Photograph” by Bing Xin is set primarily in China, but it anticipates many key theoretical insights in Asian American studies vis-à- vis Orientalism, “racist love,” and the model minority. M. Chin alludes to Tang and Song poetry to lay bare the gender and racial inequalities in both China and the United States; Leong addresses homophobia and exploita- tion of migrant laborers across the Pacific Rim. McCunn uses Chinese, white, and black narrators to implicate Sinocentrism, Eurocentrism, and bilateral xenophobia. Finally, I bring out the contrapuntal sensibilities of Chinese native speakers such as Xu, Shen, Bing Xin, and Jin, reflecting the confluences of Chinese literature and Third literature. Xu was a precursor of today’s diasporic Chinese intellectuals who feel at home in disparate worlds. As a cultural mediator, he was the counterpart of Pearl Buck: both viewed their native countries critically as a result of their sojourns abroad. Shen, a Chinese author of partial Miao/Hmong descent, evinces an ethnic con- sciousness not unlike that of hyphenated Americans. Both Bing Xin’s “The Photograph” and Jin’s A Free Life take on both China and the United States. Bing Xin’s story about a white woman in China mirrors the isolation felt coevally by Asians stateside; Jin’s metafiction draws on both Chinese and American pastoral to envision an ideal environment for a writer. Though it can be readily classified as an American immigrant novel, it contains pointed critiques of the Chinese political climate. This book thus stretches the contours of Asian American literary studies by introduc- ing Sinophone and “Third” writers, along with interpretive strategies that unravel multiple geopolitical engagements. There have been and will be myriad fruitful ways for Asian American literary studies to traverse borders. Compelling studies abound that cut across race and ethnicities, range over disciplines, and span continents, nations, and oceans.1 From its inception as perhaps one of the most exclu- sive Anglophone niches, Asian American literary studies has evolved into one of the most inclusive hubs, with archival, linguistic, disciplinary, tem- poral, religious, continental, and oceanic crossings. We sail in weather foul and fair. Welcome aboard! 298 CODa NOTE 1. Studies that cut across race and ethnicities include those by Leslie Bow, Jeannie Yu-Mei Chiu, Daniel Y. Kim, Stephen Knadler, Julia H. Lee, Colleen Lye, Christina Nagao, Crystal Parikh, Vijay Prashad, Chandan Reddy, Caroline Rody, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Min Song, Elda E. Tsou, and Caroline H. Yang. Works that range over disciplines include the imbricat- ing of literary studies and food studies by Allison Carruth, Robert Ji-Song Ku, Anita Mannur, and Wenying Xu; explorations of cultural legacies and colonial histories of the Pacific Islands by Keith Camacho, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and Erin Suzuki; the braiding of history, legal studies, and cultural studies by Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Monica Chiu, Kandice Chuh, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, and Richard Jean So; the interfacing of biopolitics, psychoanalysis, and disabilities studies by Juliana Chang, Ann Anlin Cheng, James Kyung-Jin Lee, and Rachel C. Lee; and the interlocking of ethnic studies and postco- lonial studies by Victor Bascara, Alan Punzalan Isaac, Jodi Kim, Susan Koshy, Malini Johar-Schueller, and Stephen Hong Sohn. Other works that span continents, nations, and oceans include Wen Jin’s comparison of US and Chinese multiculturalisms, Belinda Kong’s examination of Chinese emigrant writers in the USA and the UK, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s chronicle of how the so-called Vietnam War is remembered multifariously by different countries, and Rajini Srikanth’s exploration of South Asian American global connections; the extension of Asian American studies to the Americas by Donald Goellnict, Jennifer Ann Ho, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Jinqi Ling, Eleanor Ty, and Lisa Yun; and the scrutiny of transpacific femi- ninities and sexualities by Denise Cruz, David L. Eng, Tamara Ho, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Sean Metzger, and Tan Hoang Nguyen. INDEX1 A AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Abe, Frank, 43 Aiiieeeee!, 6, 34, 43, 44, 50, 80, 81, Achebe, Chinua, 252 141, 152, 157, 211, 217, 229. Achilles, 45, 54, 57 See also The Big Aiiieeeee! adoption. See transracial adoption Althusser, Louis, 48 aesthetics American Dream, 90, 235, 237, and politics, 2–5, 38, 189, 238, 239–41, 243, 247, 276 264, 265, 291 Americanese (film), 167n2 aesthetics, bicultural or intercultural, American Federation of Labor (AFL) 1, 14, 15, 17, 48, 53–60, 112, brochure 122, 229, 234, 244, 246, “The American Gulliver and 263–65, 291 Chinese Lilliputians,” 69 affective labor, 203–8 “Meat vs. Rice,” 69, 84 affiliationvs. filiation, 17, 161–62, American

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