Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (review)

From its recent beginnings in the 1960s, Asian American history has mined literary sources for insights into the experiences of this once overlooked group of immigrants. Yin's monograph falls squarely within this approach. By focusing on the writings of one ethnic group during the course of 150 years, Yin is able to offer important insights that trace transformations in immigrant mentalities over time and under varying conditions of law, economic opportunity, and social acceptance, as well as across differences in class, gender, and immigration status.

In seven thematic, and roughly chronological, chapters, Yin examines issues of authorial positionality, writing style, literary influences, and targeted audience to demonstrate their effects on representations of Chinese American life. He gives historical perspective for texts that have become classics in Asian American studies, such as the autobiographies of Wong, Lowe, and Sui and the novels and plays of Kingston, Tan, and Chin. ¹

The first chapter, which focuses on nineteenth-century merchant and working-class Chinese, includes letters to political leaders and selections from a Chinese-English phrase book that many would not consider literature but require attention for their historical significance and the paucity of surviving written records.

The main contribution offered by Yin's discussion of English- language sources is not the discovery of new sources but the provision of an overview of how Chinese American understandings of their identity and possibilities in the United States have varied with time and with changing degrees of social and political acceptance. He finds that Chinese American writing has evolved from the legally informed protests against discrimination of the nineteenth century to the marketing of Chinese American exoticism of the mid-twentieth century and the shedding of specifically ethnic content since the 1970s. ²

Yin's greatest contribution is his analysis of Chinese-language fiction since the 1950s. Few Asian American studies scholars are equally fluent in both English and an Asian language. Yin is able to employ his skills to reveal the striking contrasts that language and intended audience can produce in reflections on immigrant lives in the United States. Unfettered by the need to attract Euro-American audiences (and publishers), writers in Chinese frankly address some problems of racism and violence in American society and retain some diasporic consciousness of an ethnic Chinese readership throughout the world.

Only a few problems mar this significant study. In light of the systematic feminization of Asians as a race, Yin should have grounded the Chin/Kingston conflicts of the 1970s in the varied successes of earlier twentieth-century writers, such as Wong and Lowe, and discuss how gender affected their reception among audiences and critics. Moreover, Yin does not take full advantage of his language abilities, largely ignoring the large body of Chinese-language writings on the United States published before the 1950s. Moreover, his claims that "[Chinese Americans'] complaints about racial prejudice are rarely seen in writing of other immigrant groups" comes almost surely without due consideration for the output of Latin American writers, among other immigrants of color (256). Overall, however, this monograph provides newcomers to Asian American history with a lively and wide-ranging introduction to its main themes and some of its most important primary sources, while developing illuminating comparative insights for more informed scholars.