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Journal of Asian American Studies 4.1 (2001) 85-88



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Book Review

Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts


Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts. Edited by Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

In the introduction to Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts, published in 1999 shortly before her death, Amy Ling gives a lively account of her life and the personal and academic choices she made along the way. By charting the trajectory of her growing understanding of the Asian American condition, Ling also sketches the more recent shifts in academia that progressed from a dismissal of Asian American literature as unworthy of scholarly pursuit to an accepted flourishing field that has its own history, method, and canon. This flowering of [End Page 85] Asian American literature and arts is the subject of this volume that contains interviews and personal responses usually followed by creative essays, fiction, and poetry by Asian American writers and artists. The collection includes novelists and poets such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Diana Chang, Garrett Hongo, Meena Alexander, and Kim Yong Ik; playwrights and performers such as Genny Lim, Dan Kwong, Nobuko Miyamoto, Slant, Jon Jang, Garrett Wang, and Tou Ger Xiong; and filmmakers such as Renee Tajima-Pena, Christine Choy, and Eric Koyanagi.

Ling solicited responses from forty Asian American artists from different regions, ethnic backgrounds, and generations working in different media by sending them a set of questions about themselves and their relationship to their work and Asian America. She asks basic questions such as "What are the origins/genesis of your work?" (5) to more polemical queries such as "What happens to a writer whose very identity is defined by his/her marginality when s/he becomes 'canonized' or 'central' and is no longer on the periphery? Does s/he lose this identity?" (6) Part one ("The Written Word") consists of responses from writers; part two ("Images, the Spoken Word, Dance, and Music") highlights artists and performers.

The strength of this book is in hearing the artists' voices through not only their creative work but also their answers to Ling's questions. Some respond to the questions more or less matter of factly but others use the questions as departure points for more musings on the state of Asian American creativity. One memorable piece is Karen Tei Yamashita's hilarious faux review of a novel supposedly authored by herself about a pair of overachieving conjoined Japanese American twins. Her tongue-in-cheek parody of academese in this satire as well as her penchant for magic realism showcase her success in "deconstructing stereotypes with her pen of absurdity." (135) In another response, Kirin Narayan interrogates the labels that often identify us; she writes that "it is more useful to acknowledge that we all carry multiple identities that are evoked in different contexts, positioning us in a panoply of ways. Race, class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, profession, sexual orientation are only a few of these tangled threads of identity that can be tugged into view depending on where one is and with whom one is interacting." (151)

The artists featured here formulate their definitions of Asian American art. They range from considering it in a global context--Peggy Choy notes that "if there is an 'authentic' Asian American sensibility, it is not a concrete phenomenon as much as it is a process of empowerment in a changing national and global landscape" (336)--to the national --for Ping Chong, "[t]he role of Asian American artists is as varied as American society itself" and goes on to declare tersely that [End Page 86] "[o]nly a bigot would say an artist can't express themselves any way they want. He or she should be dunked in concrete"(205)--to the regional--Ling notes that Darrell Lum's work "explores the formation of a 'local' identity . . . formed by grandmothers who arrived in Hawaii as children at the end of the nineteenth century[,] . . . by a grandfather who wrote classical Chinese poetry . . . and by all the stories that continue to weave...

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