Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance (review)

The title of this collection prompts the question: Hasn't Asian American literature always been international given the Asian context of its Americanization and vice versa? Editors Rocío G. Davis and Sämi Ludwig illuminate the complicated terrain articulated by such an inquiry as they address internationalization in multiple ways in this volume: contributors hail from Europe and America, and they discuss works whose characters and themes are international. But more importantly, the editors promise to "be international" and to promote "truly intercultural debate." Their agenda challenges mere talk about internationalization that unfortunately has replicated an existing hegemony in Asian American criticism, one that privileges U.S. scholars and their critiques. Such a shortsighted paradigm, they suggest, moves toward "dangerous provincialist tendencies" following "narrow fashions of intellectual interest."

The first essay by Carol Roh-Spaulding tackles such a prevalent view, noting how Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far's identity has been unfortunately cemented as Chinese American, politically shaping acceptance of and criticism about her work within restrictive avenues. In contrast, Roh-Spaulding suggests Eaton's identity indeterminacy in her adoption of several positions unhinged from her Chinese Americanness, including acting as a non-Chinese "interpreter" in her journal articles, and becoming a "Chinatown insider of indeterminate ethnicity" in her fiction. She explodes Eaton's designation as solely a Chinese American writer and dismantles similar critical constraints containing the work of Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna.

Similarly, Ludwig condemns culturally complicit criticism about Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior wherein allusive "American" references in Kingston's fiction have been conveniently coded as "Chinese," inviting certain stereotyped readings by predominantly non-Chinese American audiences. Ironically, those phrases regarded as wholly "Chinese" are viewed as astoundingly "American" by critics from China. In such "cultural [mis]appropriation," Ludwig warns, we "celebrate access to the Other when [such allusions] actually merely reflect a subtext of Western understanding," allowing Kingston to garner praise "for the wrong reasons." Tripmaster Monkey, he concludes, is Kingston's answer to "such appropriative" readings surrounding Woman Warrior. In Tripmaster, she better manages the intercultural meanings her work incurs.

Zhou Xiaojing and Dorothy J. Wang intelligently resist accepted readings of two Asian American poets, refreshing views in a paucity of criticism about Asian American poetry. Zhou finds Marilyn Chin's poetry straining against "the conventional Western 'lyric I,'" itself informed by divisions between modern and postmodern, individual and community, author and text. Chin's poetic images do not reconstruct such divisions, but rather rely on intertextuality by linking China-past with America-present. For example, Chin's appropriation of China—in references to Basho—are less for "nostalgic sentiment" than to "intervene in the dominance of Eurocentric culture in American poetry." Wang's essay on John Yau delineates two misreadings of Yau: Wang corrects critics who claim that Yau's Chinese American ethnicity is not reflected in his earlier work (an interesting point in light of Ludwig's essay on Kingston's over-ethnicization), and she de-Orientalizes other criticism that has deliberately sidestepped the ethno-political gestures in his poetry in order to embrace the quaint (or what critics have deemed "opportunistic") cultural ones. In both readings that Wang illuminates to be misreadings, Yau's critical reception seems schizophrenic.

The collection boasts similar, refreshing angles on Asian American criticism that resist fashionable avenues of interpretation. Rocío Davis analyzes Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni's unique use of second person perspective in "Arranged Marriage." References to bi-cultural experiences by ethnic authors, Davis suggests, often spill beyond traditional narrative form and result in challenging the reader, or the text's you. Kirsten Twelbeck's essay expresses "irritation" at how Writing Self, Writing Nation has become "the legitimate interpretation" of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée. Now canonized, it speaks for and...