The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel

1. Introduction

The year 1968 signaled a change in consciousness for Chinese Americans, as many of the younger generation in college became radicalized around the antiwar and anti-imperialism movements, and began to connect those issues with the cause of domestic racial empowerment. In that year, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino American student activists at San Francisco State College coined the term "Asian American." ¹ As part of their radicalization process, these young Asian American activists during and after 1968 began to see violence as a tool they could use for agency, rather than only as a weapon that targeted them as objects. ² Although violence throughout American history had been used to emasculate Chinese American men by exploiting their labor and excluding them from American society, young Asian Americans discovered that violence could also be used to remasculinize themselves and the historical memory of their immigrant predecessors. Though begun in 1968, this remasculinization of Chinese America continues because the gendered subordination of Chinese American masculinity persists in mainstream culture through stereotypes that have not substantially changed since their creation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. ³ As this essay will argue, recent Chinese American literature has assumed the task of dismantling these stereotypes largely through the assumption of the same violence that was earlier used to subordinate Chinese Americans. More important, this violence, whose features are nationalist, assimilationist, and masculine, becomes a significant method for claiming an American identity that has a long tradition of deploying violence to define itself.

Authors like Frank Chin and Gus Lee, Chinese American writers who emerge after 1968, represent the American and Asian American body politic as a violent one. Through their assertion that the individual male body can be discursively transformed into a representative of the larger ethnic and national community, they mark the male body as a site for a series of activities and movements that will serve to regenerate masculinity through violence. ⁴ Implicitly for Lee and explicitly for Chin, this regeneration of the body personal is also a metaphorical regeneration of the ethnic and national body politic. ⁵ While the metaphor of the body politic has long-standing roots in Western political discourse, it has material, corporeal meanings for Asian immigrants and their descendants, whose political discourse is predicated on biases about their bodies. Chinese American literature is one example of this discourse, and in reading it, this essay treats the literature symptomatically, as both product and rearticulation of the pervasive violence in American culture that finds expression in literature among other, varied American cultural venues.

Ironically, violence and its reenactment serve as key elements of the shared experience between Asian Americans and other Americans; through violence Asian Americans are first marked by others, as aliens, and then marked by themselves, as Americans. Through their familiarity with the varieties of American violence, Asian Americans are able to recognize its legitimate and illegitimate forms, embodied respectively in the regenerative violence that white mythology claims for itself and the degenerative violence that this mythology displaces onto blackness. Violence is an initiation for immigrants, Asian and otherwise, into the complexities of American inclusion and exclusion, mobility and inequality. It is on this unequal terrain of American society that we can identify a juncture between Asian American and American studies. This inequality, defined through the contemporary practice and function of violence and the history of its deployment, has been an object of study for both fields. Scholars such as Susan Jeffords and Richard Slotkin have demonstrated the historical and contemporary functions of violence in American society, particularly the methods by which violence has served to differentiate an American Self from various racial and gendered Others, but have not addressed how these Others in their turn have understood the seeming necessity of practicing violence themselves. The experience of Asian Americans with violence provides evidence to supplement these earlier studies, demonstrating even...