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3 5 The nineteenth-century Anglo-American texts in Chapter 4 invoke Chang and Eng Bunker to reference a union of competing political contingents for an abstracted collectivist good. Whether it is to ease sectional strife after the Civil War or to resolve the tensions of class revolt, Mark Twain and Thomas Nast use the anatomical body to make claims about the body politic. Moving ahead, contemporary Asian American texts taking up this figure of conjoinment see such unions differently. As they explore the significatory potential of Chang and Eng, these texts reveal more skepticism about the promise of national unity precisely because they are aware of power differentials within the nation-state. Multiple conflicting populations are channeled into an imperfectly imagined community of Americans, and this paradox of the nation-state in modernity is what comes to the surface in these invocations of Chang and Eng Bunker. The double as recurring theme in Asian American literature is nothing new. A seminal text in the field of Asian American studies, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, devotes an entire chapter to tracing this trope’s weave through the Asian American literary canon.1 Wong locates her analysis in the field of European and American literature more broadly, especially within scholarship using psychoanalytic frameworks, to show how this figure of the double has been a key component of Western arts and letters from the Romantic period onward. She finds that the motif of the double, alternately referred to as “the alter ego, the shadow, the Doppelganger, the second self, the anti-self, the opposing self, and the secret self,”2 asserts a particular draw for the authors she discusses. The specificity of the Asian American double, however, distinguishes it from most others in ASIAN AMERICANS BARE/BEAR THE HYPHEN Asian Americans Bare/Bear the Hyphen 101 Anglo-American or European literature because rather than functioning as an uncomplicated foil for the protagonist, it is a figure onto which undesirable or troubling aspects of racial identity are projected so that they can be disavowed. Wong convincingly places these sources in the Asian American literary canon within Enlightenment-issued literary traditions—which revolve around conflicts , negotiations, boundaries, and permeabilities between self and other— even as she demonstrates their racial specificity. However, I particularize the doubleness in these direct and indirect references to Chang and Eng Bunker differently. I call attention to how they engage, even if only fleetingly, with medical forms of authority and how their accommodation or resistance to such intervention continues to inform the rhetoric of nation building established by the nineteenth-century white authors discussed in Chapter 4. I provide an examination of Chang and Eng Bunker’s appearance in novelist Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey as groundwork for this chapter ’s analysis of conjoinment in Asian America. Rather than the consensual affiliation or patriotic alliance seen in Mark Twain’s or Thomas Nast’s work, a nation-based unity among disparate social categories is burdensome for these authors. Autobiographer Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, set during the World War II Japanese American internment, shows that within a space where Asian Americans’ national affinities undergo constant scrutiny, to be doubly interpellated —in her case, to hold U.S. citizenship and to track into the category “enemy alien”—is dangerous. She refers to herself as a “two-headed freak” at key moments throughout her narrative to convey this sense of peril. Although Sone’s protagonist describes her dissonant multiplicity by corporealizing it, Hualing Nieh interiorizes this theme of doubling in the face of state surveillance . Her novel, Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, features a protagonist who responds to repeated instances of state policing and violence in Asia and the United States by doubling her personality. Two women, each the other’s professed opposite, share the same body, and the novel’s resolution hints at the impending destruction of one and, therefore, the demise of both of them. Finally, two shorter texts by Cathy Park Hong and Karen Tei Yamashita play wittily with how Sone and Nieh work with the same metaphor. Showing a high level of self-referentiality as participants and interlocutors in the Asian American literary canon, these more recent texts call out that tradition’s gaps, fissures , and possibilities. The Hyphen and the Asian American This chapter’s title, “Asian Americans Bare/Bear the Hyphen,” alludes to a passage from the mock-climactic scene of Maxine Hong Kingston’s...

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