Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance by Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong (review)

104Rocky Mountain Review ambition, depth, and scope in the twentieth century. In an era when totalizing theories are in short supply, the Frankfurt School has a great deal to offer. Perhaps the best calling card for Americans unfamiliar with the Frankfurt School is Foucault's late homage: "If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have saved myself a great deal of work." STEPHEN BROCKMANN Carnegie Mellon University SAU-LING CYNTHIA WONG. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 258 p. In a decade where multiculturalism and diversity, along with their recent backlash, are the catchwords for academic self-scrutiny and canon formation , Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's Reading Asian American Literature is a timely and scholarly work that examines the major stimuli—"necessity" and "extravagance"—of Asian American texts and provides contexts and intertexts for developing a reading strategy for such literature. Wong defines the terms Necessity and Extravagance as signifying "two contrasting modes of existence and operation, one contained, survival-driven and conservationminded , the other attracted to freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism" (13). The book thus explores the reading ofAsian American literature as a critical project within the academy. In the last couple of decades, literature written by the burgeoning Asian American population of the United States has grown in stature and critical acclaim. From being ignored or labeled as "unmarketable," it has begun to attract attention, much as Jewish literature did in the decades following World War II. Recognizing that earlier writers and editors like Elaine H. Kim (Asian American Literature, 1982), Amy Ling (Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, 1990), Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Reading the Literatures ofAsian America, 1992) did the important task of documenting and legitimizing the concept of Asian American literature, Wong has now taken the task of giving it a solid critical framework. Wong raises critical questions like, "How is Asian American literature to be read?" and "Does the study of a marginalized literature require membership in the given group, participation in appropriately typical historical experience, 'insider' cultural knowledge, and a group-specific methodology?" The problematics of the very concept of an Asian American literature are protean. Asian Americans have had very dissimilar immigration patterns and histories. Moreover, Asian American identity is complex because it encompasses peoples of different races, religions, and cultures. Thus to include all Asian American literature in one study can be not only a challenge but an almost impossible task. For instance, in the late 1970s, Elaine Book Reviews105 H. Kim defined Asian American Literature as work published in English by writers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino ancestry. The subcontinent of India and Pakistan, not to mention Burma, did not merit her attention . This instance itself may point out the difficulty faced by any individual scholar who tries to discuss the entirety of Asian American literatures . Such an ambitious project would have to be a collaborative work by many scholars. Nevertheless, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong is to be commended for being as inclusive as possible. Within the confines of a single volume she has included an admirable range of prose narratives because she has examined the works thematically rather than by countries. Her book includes Asian Canadian with "Asian USA" (my term) under the rubric of Asian American literature. Her major mission is to disentangle this literature from Orientalist expectations and establish its American character. Chapter 1 uses alimentary images and eating practices to decode issues of economic and cultural survival and social relationships. Chapter 2 explores the racial shadow, the alter ego, the second self, the double, or the Doppelgänger—not unrelated to the motif of eating—as a very complex and tortuous figure which provides the highly assimilated American-born Asian with a vision of his or her own disowned Asian self. This discovery leads Wong to iterate the need for a more rigorous revision of traditional theories of the double "in the direction of greater sociopolitical emphasis" (92). Chapter 3, "The Politics of Mobility," shows how the mainstream myth of unfettered mobility, a key component in American ideology, does not apply to Asian Americans because of historical circumscription...