Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21:1/2 (2000) (review)

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21:1/2 (2000).

Guest editors Linda Trinh Võ and Marian Sciachitano intend this special issue of Frontiers to reposition and complicate more familiar discussions of Asian American and Pacific Islander American women. Moving beyond these women's designations as either "desiring objects" or "working subjects," (3) the issue focuses on the recent "feminization of Asian immigration" and "cast[s] a wide net" over ideas of diaspora, family, militarism, history, pedagogy, pop culture, nation, resistance, and community identity. (1, 2) In fact, the issue's eclectic range of selections contribute to its intellectual appeal while juxtaposing essay, fiction, poetry, and mixed media in a complementary fashion. Somatic themes link several of the categories: Zarah De Leon's "Kalayaan Collection" criticizes the Asian mail-order bride system, and Annu P. Matthews alters Indian Bollywood movie posters ("reflection[s] of the pop culture and the melodrama of Indian life"), illustrating her acerbic commentary on cultural practices like arranged marriages. (152) Reading the theatrics of "local 'ethnic' beauty pageants," Nhi T. Lieu finds that Vietnamese female contestants embody "cultural processes," (146) those grounded in Vietnamese tradition as well as in acceptable forms of femininity that resist (or at least balance) the "Americanization" of an "ethnic self" (136, 142) despite an ironic adherence to Western standards of beauty through plastic surgery. (145)

In Pamela Thoma's interpretation of another cultural event--the 1996 "Comfort Women of World War II" conference at Georgetown University--she borrows Karen Caplan's term "outlaw genre." As an alternative form of autobiography that challenges traditional modes of telling, knowing, author-ity, and history, (33-34) it allows Thoma to regard the oral testimony of former comfort woman Kim Yoon-Sim as a "bearing witness" to the physical trauma afflicted upon her, physically and emotionally, in the Japanese sex slave industry. Giving voice to once-silenced women and offering them new forms of visibility also arises in one of the most interesting articles in the issue, Debbie Storrs' "Like a Bamboo: Representations of a Japanese War Bride." It re-examines the difficult life of the author's mother, Yoshiko, from what Storrs calls "narrative frames" that "assist members within a culture to organize and construct meaning through their life stories." (198) The frames of Yoshiko's Japanese culture and that of her biological and adoptive Japanese families vis-à-vis those encompassing that of her future American husband created situations in which adhering to the tenets/frames of one culture offended or were misread by the other. In attempting to navigate amid obligation, stereotype, and individuality, Yoshiko discovers in hindsight that she has suffered in this "liminal place," referring to herself as a piece of bamboo, harboring layer upon layer of anger, frustration, disappointment. (200)

The topic of war brides is visited in Kai Jo's poem "Center, 1999," but from a mixed-race, "yellow-tinged" daughter's viewpoint in which some of the ideas she covers and the terminology she uses seem too stereotypical for Frontiers' intended purpose of moving beyond such familiar territory: "foreigner, oriental dragon in disguise, suzy wong, asian hyphen american." (84) But Jo's focus on finding stability and "center" amid shifting boundaries is central for Asian American women of the diaspora, where movement and margins become central, as in Lan Duong's poetry; Charlene Tung's essay on the transnational labor of Filipina elderly caregivers who "mother from afar"; (66) Carol Roh-Spaulding's piece about an Asian American outsider who finds references to her relatives written into a history book; and in Wennie Huang's visual conception of female "paper" immigrants, her artwork gracing the issue's cover.

In an extremely insightful article on pedagogy, Piya Chatterjee illustrates the difficulty of discussing what's "out there" or "foreign" as a teacher of color, whose visible difference affects student responses in ways contrasting to those in courses taught by white men and white...