The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American by Min Hyoung song (review)

Min Hyoung Song’s The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American engages with formal, thematic, political, and aesthetic concerns in the field of American literature, most especially with the question of just what makes a work “Asian American,” as Song himself writes of the texts in his study: “Surveying these works, this book argues that there is something particularly Asian American about them, even as this literature might slip past such critical boundaries or challenge their configuration” (10). While this argument may be seemingly simple, it is one that contains a history of Asian Americanist critique and intellectual opining, as well as reveals the larger political and social stakes for claiming Asian America, not only for literary critics who are openly and avidly promoting Asian American culture but for the larger field of American literary studies, as Song so presciently observes, “the study of Asian American literature is a study of American literature’s future, not in the sense it somehow leads the way to what’s next but in the sense that it represents what is already imminent to American literature that pulls its creativity forward in time” (10).

Divided into two parts, each with four chapters, and framed by an introduction and conclusion, The Children of 1965 presents an impressive archive, not only in the primary sources of post-1990 contemporary Asian American fiction and poetry that Song analyzes, but in the interviews he has conducted with the artists who crafted these novels, short stories, and poems. Indeed, the inclusion of interviews with various writers such as Alexander Chee, Saher Alam, Sabina Murray, Susan Choi, and Chang-rae Lee is one of the book’s most unique and rich elements. In perhaps a refutation to Barthes’s idea that the author is dead, Song shows the significance of putting into dialogue the thoughts and reflections of writers whom critics would call, “Asian American,” even when these same artists either eschew or have a deep ambivalence to having their works labeled as such. Indeed, Song creates a lively conversation around this issue of what constitutes Asian Americanness in various literary works by including the voices of the creative writers of said texts and through incorporating the theories and observations of various scholars. At its heart, The Children of 1965 is most meaningfully concerned with the question of why race matters in the reading of literature, specifically why it matters that we continue to use the label “Asian American” in application to contemporary American literature.

Chapter 1 explores “theorizing the concept of … how such expectations keep bringing Asian Americans into surprisingly intimate juxtaposition with other discourses about personhood” (30). Here Song delves into the relationship between the turn to poststructural theory and Asian American literary criticism, noting that the fragmentation, self-awareness, and innovation that mark so much of contemporary Asian American literature makes it ripe for such poststructural analysis. Chapter 2 looks at the early 1970s to consider Asian American literature at the height of the Asian American movement when writers like Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, and Maxine Hong Kingston were grappling with questions of what this nascent racial term of solidarity could and should convey. Chapter 3 highlights works by authors of Asian ancestry that seemingly are race-neutral (Ed Park’s Personal Days, Nam Le’s The Boat), arguing that “ethnicity is primarily interested in resemblance, while race is focused on difference, and it is for this reason that thinking in terms of race is the conceptually more challenging. By refusing to be ethnic or even interethnic, these works clear space to talk more directly about race” (84). Chapter 4 considers the meaning of “American” for Asian American works, where Song turns to his deep reading to analyze Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son and Susan Choi’s American Woman. Chapter...