UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Suspended Subjects: The Politics of Anger in Asian American Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kx173md Author Ma, Nan Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Suspended Subjects: The Politics of Anger in Asian American Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Nan Ma December 2009 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Traise Yamamoto, Chairperson Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod Dr. Katherine Kinney Copyright by Nan Ma 2009 The Dissertation of Nan Ma is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project is the culmination of a collaborative effort. Numerous thought- provoking seminars, stimulating texts, rich conversations and discussions with professors, colleagues, friends, family members and students have helped to shape and sharpen my ideas. I am indebted, first and foremost, to my teachers. My heartfelt appreciation goes to my committee members, who approach their teaching and research with dedication and passion and who serve as models for the kind of teacher and scholar that I wish to become. I would not have been able to come to UCR without Professor Traise Yamamoto’s help and encouragements. She has introduced me to the world of Asian American literature and helped me find a sense of home after many years of living in the U.S. Her intellectual verve and commitment to her students will continue to guide and inspire me. Professor Axelrod has always listened to my ideas and concerns, big or small, with attention and care. I treasure the support and encouragement he has offered me over the years. Professor Kinney has taught me the importance of seeing the larger picture and challenged me to take a leap when I lacked courage. I value the many conversations that we have shared. Special thanks to Professors Mariam Lam and Carole-Anne Tyler for serving on my Ph.D. exam committee and for offering me valuable feedback and suggestions on various projects. I thank Professors Erica Edwards, Jennifer Doyle, Lan Duong, Michael Foster, Tamara Ho, Jodi Kim, Vorris Nunley, and Setsu Shigematsu, all of whom have been graciously generous with their time and resources. iv My friends have always been there to share my joy and alleviate my stress. Chingyi Wang encouraged me to pursue my dreams. Amanda White gave me shelter when I needed it the most. Julian Felix read every chapter of this project and was there to listen to all my ideas and concerns. Noemi Ramirez, Que-Lam Huynh and Angela-MinhTú Nguy ễn inspired me to do my best. Chih Lew and Vincent Kong always made sure that I had some fun. I send my love and gratitude to my family. My mother Mu Guizhen and my father Ma Yongming have made many sacrifices to give me the best opportunities and waited patiently for me to find my way. My grandmother Liu Wenqing and aunt Ma Huixin have taught me some of the most important lessons in life by example. Although my grandfather Ma Chaojun did not live to see the completion of this project, memories of him have sustained me for the past few years. Special thanks to my soulmate and best friend, Lei Wang, who makes me laugh even on the rainiest days. I could not have completed this project without his unconditional love and support. He inspires me to become a better person everyday. I look forward to the many new journeys that we will take together. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Suspended Subjects: The Politics of Anger in Asian American Literature by Nan Ma Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2009 Dr. Traise Yamamoto, Chairperson Examining a diverse set of Asian American literary texts, this project explores the ways in which discourses of race, gender, class, sexuality and citizenship shape the articulation of emotions in Asian American Literature. While figures of the angry black man, the Latino gangster, and the Native American warrior abound in dominant American cultural narratives, Asian Americans have been constructed as the polar opposite: subdued, submissive, and accommodating. The figure of the angry Asian American remains a void in the dominant American cultural imaginary. One of the goals of this project is to interrogate and problematize the roots and implications of this absence. Placing anger within the historical, social and political contexts of war, colonialism, immigration and U.S. identity politics, I approach anger as a discourse vi that informs and shapes knowledge production and subject formation. The following questions animate my discussions: How is anger made legible in Asian American texts? What does anger suggest about the ways in which Asian Americans have been formed as subjects? How does anger complicate the notion of Asian American domesticity? Via a comparative study of Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We are All Looking For , chapter one examines the inextricable connection between Asian Americans anger and the model minority myth. Chapter two, by means of discussing David Mura’s memoirs Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity , investigates the relationship between anger and Asian American masculinity. Examining Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt and Susan Choi’s American Woman , chapter three builds on recent scholarship on notions of melancholia and loss to explore anger’s productive potentials. The discussion of anger’s productive possibilities and limitations is extended in chapter four, which traces a genealogy of Chinese American women’s anger in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter , Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands . vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Abstract vi Introduction 1 Chapter One— Anger, the Model Minority Myth and the 9 Father-Daughter Relationship: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For Chapter Two— The Liabilities of Anger: David Mura’s 42 Memoirs Chapter Three—Anger and Melancholia: Monique Truong’s 75 The Book of Salt and Susan Choi’s American Woman Chapter Four— Conflicted Feelings: A Genealogy of Anger in 112 Chinese American Women’s Memoirs Works Cited 157 viii Introduction In her poem “Evacuation,” Mitsuye Yamada poignantly sketches a scene where the emotional state of a Japanese American on her way to the interment camps fails to register to the dominant culture: As we boarded the bus bags on both sides (I had never packed two bags before on a vacation lasting forever) the Seattle Times photographer said Smile! so obediently I smiled and the caption the next day read: Note smiling faces a lesson to Tokyo. 1 As Traise Yamamoto notes, Yamada’s poem “centers on the widespread practice by American magazines and newspapers, which regularly ran photos of the internees with captions that represented their subjects as happily acquiescent or willingly 1 Mitsuye Yamada, “Evacuation,” Camp Notes and Other Writings (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press 1976) 13. 1 laboring in appalling conditions.” 2 Whatever anguish, anxiety, anger and feelings of dispossession (two bags for a vacation that lasts forever) and displacement the narrator may be experiencing as she boards the bus to the camps are suppressed and obliterated by the photographer’s injunction to smile. Her feelings are erased and then re-authored and re-packaged by the dominant culture to circulate as a lesson in obedience and consent. Yamada’s poem serves as an example of the way in which the political space of the U.S. nation-state functions as what Lauren Berlant calls an “affective space,” 3 where the engendering, regulation, management, and interpretation of emotions become instrumental to the constitution and management of subjects and citizens. In Yamada’s poem, the emotional state of the narrator is manipulated and then re- signified by the official narrative of the nation-state as a way to resolve the contradiction between the U.S. government’s discriminatory practices against Japanese American subjects and the ideology of American exceptionalism. By representing Japanese Americans as happily obedient and compliant, the official narrative of the nation allows the U.S. to maintain its democratic image. The contentedly acquiescent figure of the Japanese American internee conjured by the nation-state functions as the prototype of the Asian American as the model minority. It has been generally acknowledged by scholars in Asian American Studies that the construction of Asian Americans as the model minority serves to discipline not only Asian American subjects but other ethnic groups as well. Asian 2 Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999) 208. 3 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press 2008) x. 2 Americans and other ethnic groups are constructed in contradistinction of each other, especially in the realm of affect. While figures of the angry black man, the Latino gangster, and the Native American warrior abound in dominant American cultural narratives, Asian Americans are constructed as the polar opposite: subdued, submissive, accommodating. The figure of the angry Asian American remains a void in the dominant American cultural imaginary. One of the goals of my project, then, is to interrogate and problematize the roots and implications of this absence. Yet, even as expressions of Asian American anger fail to register to the dominant culture, anger as a thematic appears quite prevalently in Asian American Literature.