Psychology and Asian American Literature: Application of the Life-Story Model of Identity to No-No Boy

While most of us recognize the interdisciplinary nature of Asian American studies, the limited number of publication outlets and the conservatism of many academic departments make it difficult for scholars to cross disciplinary borders to collaborate on the study of Asian Americans. When collaborations do occur, they sometimes involve the teaching of a course with a colleague. For the past two years, the authors of this paper have team-taught a first-year seminar entitled "Asian American Identities." We examined this topic from psychological and literary perspectives. In class we paired relevant psychological essays with literature, not to psychoanalyze characters but rather to examine how insights from psychologists and creative writers contradict, illuminate, and otherwise enliven our understanding of the personal and cultural identities of Asian Americans.

The first time we taught the class, we noted how the psychological theories provided students with a common language useful for understanding the complex issues and problems faced by Asian Americans in society and by Asian American protagonists in literature. The second time we taught the course, we focused students' attention on one psychological theory in particular, Dan McAdams's (1988) life-story model of identity. The model is intuitive to students and crosses interdisciplinary grounds on its own. McAdams conceptualizes human identity in terms of a story. That is, identity is the story that an individual tells about him or herself with a beginning, a middle, and an anticipated end. In developing his theoretical ideas, McAdams draws heavily upon the work of Erik Erikson (1950), a disciple of Freud who expanded psychoanalysis in important ways. Erikson's (1968) work is notable in psychology for emphasizing adult identity development and for focusing attention on mutually constitutive aspects of individual identity: soma, polis, and psyche—that is, the somatic order (one's body as it is understood to have qualities such as race, gender, or age), the social order (the social forces associated with a time and place that delineate ideologies of race, gender, and age, for example), and the personal order (one's idiosyncratic way of understanding and relating to the world and oneself).¹ Building on Erikson's work, McAdams developed a model of identity development that made sense to students and to us. In class we found ourselves returning to his vocabulary again and again as we discussed topics including immigration, generation, sexuality, popular culture, and racism. One text that we taught both semesters was John Okada's No-No Boy. As we and our students were discussing Okada's novel the second time, we realized that McAdams's theory provides a coherent model for understanding important issues in Okada's book. After describing McAdams's theory from the perspective of a psychologist, we will use it to understand key moments and characters in No-No Boy that remain in contention by literary critics. At the end of our essay, we provide brief examples of how the life-story model might be applied to other Asian American literary works.

The Life-Story Model of Identity

The life-story model of identity contains four major components: ideological setting, nuclear episodes, imagoes, and generativity scripts. The ideological setting provides the backdrop for the emergence of an individual's life story. However, McAdams means much more than just the stage where the drama unfolds. Individuals occupy geographic terrains; however, human identities are also grounded in "ontological, epistemological, and ethical suppositions which situate the story within a particular ideological time and space" (McAdams 1988, 215). Thus, individuals grow up in physical locations embedded within social and historical circumstances. For our purposes, these sociohistorical backdrops are important because they put constraints on the type of identity an individual might realize. For example, what kinds of identities were available for Japanese American youth coming of age in internment camps during World War II? A person's ideological setting generally forms during adolescence: "Before adolescence, the individual's thinking is bound to the concrete and immediate world"; in contrast, "the adolescent's mind expands to consider...