Introduction 1
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Notes Introduction 1. Tina Chen, “Impersonation and Other Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (Fall 2002): 638. 2. Ibid. 3. Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and His- tory for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34.3 (November 2003): 599. 4. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122.5 (October 2007): 1378. 5. John Frow, Genre (London: Routledge, 2006): 2. 6. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 57. 7. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999): 8. 8. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 7. 9. Ibid. 10. Zhou Xiaojing, “Introduction,” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005): 4. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Nguyen, 5. 13. Zhou, 5. 14. Sue-Im Lee, “Introduction,” Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Rocio G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006): 6. 15. The term “junk fiction” is Noel Coward’s, which, as Deborah Knight summarizes, constitutes “the sorts of best-sellers that line the stalls at airport gift shops as well as things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies.” Deborah Knight, “Making Sense of Genre,” Film and Philosophy 2 (1995): 58–73. 148 Notes 16. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989): ix. 17. Dimock, 1380. It is Dimock who, while coining the gerund “regen- reing,” acknowledges the awkwardness of the term. 18. See The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priest- man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendle- sohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); PMLA 119.3 (May 2004), a special issue titled “Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millenium,” edited by Marleen S. Barr and Carl Freedman; PMLA 122.4 (October 2007), a special issue on “Remap- ping Genre,” edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins; and MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008), a special issue titled “Alien/Asian” on Asian American science fiction, edited by Stephen Hong Sohn. 19. The phrase “law of genre” is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s “The Law of Genre,” but I will provide my own delineations of genre “laws,” which I call “imperatives” in my book. 20. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 147. 21. White, 601. 22. Dimock, 1380. 23. Robert Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976): 47–48. 24. Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 57–71. Chapter 1 1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981): 9. 2. Gerald Graff, “Narrative and the Unofficial Interpretive Cul- ture,” Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989): 7. 3. John K. Young, Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006): 155. 4. Jameson, Unconscious, 9. 5. Shu-mei Shih, “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction,” PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1357. 6. Lev Grossman, “Who’s the Voice of This Generation?” Time, July 10, 2006 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 1209947,00.html. Notes 149 7. Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 539. 8. Ibid., 544. 9. Julia Alvarez, “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical,” New England Review 21.4 (Fall 2000): 165–166. 10. Kenneth Quan, “Interview with Chang-rae Lee.” Asia Pacific Arts, UCLA Asia Institute. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article. asp?parentid=11432. 11. Miller, “The Entangled Self.” Miller provides numerous examples of writers who have had to contend with genre confusion over their work, as well as some new tongue-in-cheek terms coined to encom- pass the presence of multiple genres in a single work (e.g., Lynda Barry’s “autobifictionalography”). In Asian American writing, the genre confusion generated by Maxine Hong Kingston’s landmark work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), in which Kingston famously blends experiences both real and imagined, underscores the problem of reception that results from the mixing of genres, and, more significantly, the ways in which genre identity and social identity are linked. Kingston’s genre experiments drew excoriation from fellow Asian American writers such as Frank Chin, who attacked her for what he saw as her overly liberal infusion of Chinese myths and folklore into the polit- ical and historical realities of the Asian American experience. The blurring of the real with the mythic, in his view, compromises her authenticity and therefore her credibility as both an Asian Amer- ican writer and a literary spokesperson for Asian Americans. For a thorough account and analysis of the notorious debate between Kingston and Chin, see David Leiwei Li’s Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stan- ford University Press, 1998), particularly the chapter “Can Maxine Hong Kingston Speak? The Contingency of The Woman Warrior.” Chin infamously described The Woman Warrior as “another in a long line of Chinkie autobiographies by Pochahontas yellows blowing the same old mixed up East/West soul struggle” (qtd. in Li 45). In response, Kingston identifies Chin’s writing as “political/polemical harangue,” a “genre ...[she] dislikes” (qtd. in Li 45). Significant here is each writer’s understanding of the inextricable relationship between genre politics and identity politics. 12. Quoted in Miller, “The Entangled Self,” PMLA 122.2: 539. 13. William Boelhower, “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 125. 14. Thomas Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth- Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 1. 150 Notes 15. William Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self (Verona, Italy: Essedue Edizioni, 1982): 32. 16. See Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 142–170. 17. For thorough discussions of Asian American writers’ appropriations and revisions of the generic characteristics of life writing, see Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian Ameri- can Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Rocio Davis and Sue-Im Lee, Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Author- ship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and Rocio Davis, Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Auto- biographies of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007). 18. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 237. 19. Ling, Narrating Nationalisms, 114. 20. Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34.3 (November 6, 2003): 601. 21. Paul John Eakin, “Introduction,” American Autobiography: Retro- spect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press): 10. 22. Arnold Krupat, “Native American Autobiography and the Synec- dochic Self,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 171. 23. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). 24. UC Riverside “First Book” Program for incoming freshmen, 2006. http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:MtBSxOP_EE0J: www.chass.ucr.edu/news/newsletter/Fall2006.pdf+gangster+we+ are+all+looking+for&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=30&gl=us 25. Adair Lara, “A Girl’s Flight to a Bright, Harsh Land.” Review of le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For. The San Fran- cisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/18/RV262885.DTL. 26. Chau Nguyen, “In Search of the Gangster,” Asia Pacific Arts, April 9, 2004. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=9955. Notes 151 27. Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, “Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s ‘The Gangster We Are All Looking For’: The Ekphrastic Emigration of a Photographic,” Critique 48.1 (Fall 2006): 3–18. 28. “le thi diem thuy,” Lannan Foundation June 21, 2007. http:// www.lannan.org/lf/res/past/P80/198/ 29. le thi diem thuy, “Tear the Pages Out: Fragments from the Gangster Tour,” Original Essays, Powell’s Books, May 15, 2008. http://www. powells.com/essays/thuy.html. 30. Ibid. 31. David Mehegan, “Refuge in Her Writing,” Boston Globe, June 2, 2003. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/153/living/Refuge_ in_her_writing+.shtml. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Jameson, Unconscious, 9–10. 35. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): ix. 36. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro- American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Champaign-Urbana, Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 1986): 36. In his discussion of Andrews’s notion of “creative hearing,” Paul John Eakin goes on to say that such a reading—or hearing—would enable a recovery of “something of the nature of the identities of the oppressed, their own view of self and life story” (Eakin, “Introduction” 9).