Filthy Fictions: Asian American Literature by Women (review)

Filthy Fictions is a nimbly-argued, interdisciplinary, and idiosyncratic study of Asian American literature by women. Monica Chiu combines literary criticism with anthropology, migration studies, gender studies, performance studies, and of course Asian American studies to establish that Asian American women's writing is not merely about the mother-daughter relationship or the quest to define one's identity as an Asian American woman in the United States but also about filth or dirt, albeit broadly understood. "Dirt," says Chiu, "is disjunction," which "interposes in literature and theory in radical and fascinating ways" (8). Ultimately, Filthy Fictions argues that Asian American women writers represent and trouble notions of what is dirty and what is clean, among other binaries, in order to represent and trouble what it means to be a subject, at once marked by intersecting registers of identity including race, class, gender, sexuality, and location.

Chiu accomplishes this by drawing from and building on two main theories. She begins by expanding upon anthropologist Mary Douglas's theory of dirt. While Douglas describes dirt as "matter out of place," Chiu explains that "culturally defined dirt can be bound up in exactly the spaces where it does not belong, thus clear-cut divisions of what constitutes dirt and not-dirt are ultimately more complicated than Douglas's construction allows" (2).¹ At the most basic level, this idea refers to the fact that over the years and in uneven ways Asian Americans have been considered as both dirty and clean, outsiders and insiders, undesirable and desirable in the United States. Asian Americans have thus been both "out of place" and "bound up in" America. To interrupt and interrogate this binary structure, Chiu builds upon the theory of the slash, developed by David Palumbo-Liu and others. Rather than a hyphen or a space between the terms "Asian" and "American," Palumbo-Liu proffers a slash, which "at once instantiates a choice between two terms, their simultaneous and equal status, and an element of undecidability, that is, as it at once implies both exclusion and inclusion, 'Asian/American' marks both the distinction installed between 'Asian' and 'American' and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement."² Throughout Filthy Fictions, Chiu identifies multiple binaries in works by Asian American women writers and then demonstrates how a slash represents a "tenuous border" in each case and how "strict binaries are eventually eroded within the slash (/) of ambiguity" (16, 150).

After providing a brief history and theoretical analysis of how Asian Americans have been represented and treated in the United States as both belonging and not belonging, clean and dirty in Chapter 1, Chiu explores in Chapter 2 the binary Asia/America through a consideration of Chuang Hua's 1968 novel, Crossings. The main character, Fourth Jane, finds herself not quite belonging in Asia or America and hence becomes "unmoored in both body and psyche, crossing and recrossing international boundaries" (26). If dirt is "matter out of place," this chapter serves as a good opening for Chiu's extended argument, since it represents and questions the meaning of displacement. Chapter 3 continues Chiu's pattern by examining the binary clean/dirty in Ginu Kamani's 1995 collection of short stories entitled Junglee Girl. Chiu explains how Kamani's short stories trouble readers' assumptions about what is clean, healthy, socially appropriate, normative, feminine, and Asian American. In the end, Chiu reveals that it is often through strictures on female identity and women's bodies themselves that societies work to define what is literally and metaphorically clean or dirty. Chapter 4 turns to the liminal space of Hawai'i in order to investigate the "tenuous border[s]" between Asia and America, humans and animals, insiders and outsiders, as they are represented in the novels of Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Chiu is particularly interested in how Yamanaka represents, plays with, questions, and sometimes overlooks distinctions between what is local, native, and foreign in Hawai'i. Chapter 5 argues that most of the binaries raised in the previous chapters...