In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America by Chih-ming Wang
  • Wendy Cheng (bio)
Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America, by Chih-ming Wang. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2013. Xi + 208 pp. $46.00 cloth. ISBN: 978-0-8248-3642-9.

In Transpacific Articulations, Chih-ming Wang asserts that “[i]mprinted in the footsteps of American-educated students are the critical stories of Asian America’s transpacific becoming” (20). Wang’s book traces the pathways traveled by ethnic Chinese1—largely from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan—who came to the United States as foreign students and argues that their subjectivity, culture, and politics are important to a more robust and fluid understanding of Asian/American transnationalism. The book highlights a variety of literature produced by Chinese students in the United States, from novels and memoirs to newspaper articles, political magazines, journals, and correspondence. Throughout, Wang argues that becoming Asian American is not a one-way street, nor even a two-way street, but a messy triangulation among “Asia,” “America,” and the conditions of U.S. power and involvement in Asia, particularly during the long Cold War era. [End Page 382]

Some Asian American and Asian immigrant groups, whose lives have been more obviously implicated in U.S. war making, have never been able to ignore that fact.2 For Chinese students the story is a bit more complicated. They seem to fit into none of the dominant paradigms of Asian American identity: the laborer, the war refugee, or even the model minority, since their taint of foreignness was often not leavened by U.S. citizenship. Aihwa Ong has argued that more recent student migrants participate in neoliberal paradigms of global capitalism.3 This notion, however, does not account for the motivations and experiences of a much longer history of foreign student migration.

Wang painstakingly traces this history back to the late nineteenth century. The first chapter discusses the earliest Chinese student migrants, who came first as beneficiaries of British missionary schools, and then in larger numbers as part of a Chinese government-sponsored initiative. Wang points out that this early program set a precedent of “leaving Asia for America,” bound up with colonial histories and based on a presumption that Western liberal education was important to the advancement of Asian countries into global modernity. Some of these early overseas students identified as both Chinese and American, showing both the longtime relevance of diasporic subject formation to Asian/American experience as well as its difficulties in being recognized by either nation. Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of “overseas student literature” as a distinctive genre from the 1920s to the 1980s. Wang discusses the emergence of student organizations such as the Chinese Student Alliance of America and their long-running publication, Chinese Students’ Monthly, which provided a forum for topics concerning Chinese on both sides of the Pacific including education, labor, class, and racism. Wang argues that Chinese student writers—first from China and then later from Taiwan and Hong Kong—expanded the Chinese American literary tradition by critiquing racism and imperialism, and transpacific relations in general.

The next two chapters take up Chinese students’ participation in two political movements: the Baodiao conflict and the Taiwan independence movement (Taidu), and some of the writing they produced along the way. The Baodiao movement—a territorial struggle over the Diaoyutai islands that erupted in 1971—mobilized Chinese students from Taiwan and Hong Kong to protest against Japanese militarism, U.S. support of Japan’s claim to the islands, and the inaction of the Kuomintang government in Taiwan. The Taiwan independence movement, in which Taiwanese students played a significant role, was forged in diaspora and emerged during the same period. Wang argues that the Baodiao movement shared with the Asian American movement an affiliation with radical Third World politics and a critique of U.S. imperialism in Asia; Taidu, however, [End Page 383] began as a revolutionary movement but transmuted over time into what Wang calls “civic transnationalism,” in which Taiwanese students turned American citizens enacted their Taiwanese identity by lobbying the U.S. government to support human rights and various initiatives...

pdf

Share