Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America by Patricia P. Chu (review)

1 9 2 WAL 3 6 . 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 1 what such interdependence looks like on a daily basis; rather, she demonstrates how this Mormon ideal so fully permeates Fowler’s sense of self that her work as a folk healer, community leader, and poet replicates and extends the value of community. One of the aspects I find particularly compelling about Brady’s work is what we learn about the reciprocal relationships established between Mormon women, in particular between mothers and daughters and between wives and sister-wives. As Brady points out, these women were often alone as their husbands would regularly travel for long periods of time to complete missionary work. Even more than typical nineteenth-century women, Mormon women relied on the existence of a “female community of caring” (61). Women would share their work, their reading material, their personal experiences, as well as their husbands. Fowler learns the value of service by watching her mother’s role in sustaining the community, and she transfers the image of the caring mother to her practice as a folk healer. Dissolving the line between mother and healer, Fowler is able to nurture the larger Mormon family by bringing the sick back into the community with the healthy. Brady shows that her participa­ tion in the Relief Society and the short-lived literary club, as well as her position as a respected poet allow Fowler to use her writing as a way of strengthening con­ nections between the different members of the community. Commissioned pieces marking both public and private events and her talks on motherhood and hygiene also allow her to establish important connections between the local community and the national Mormon community. Interconnectedness is more than a trope for Brady. It is the ideal that binds a community, a church, and the discourses that make up one woman’s life. A highly reflexive researcher, Brady foregrounds in unique ways her own connections to her subject, calling attention to the fact that her book is another contribution to the “matrix of discourses” telling this story (161). One of the most important moves Brady makes is in urging us, as readers, to equally reflect on our own participation in the construction of the woman we come to know as Mary Susannah Fowler. A ssim ilating A sian s: Qendered Strategies of Authorship in A sian A m erica. By Patricia P. Chu. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. 241 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Sarah M . Rudd Utah State University, Logan Patricia P. Chu argues “that one of the central ideological tasks accom­ plished by Asian American literary texts is the construction of Asian American subjects through the transformation of existing narratives about American identity” (3-4). Closely reading texts by numerous Asian American authors, Chu illustrates how they reconstruct the bildungsromane, or “novels of subject BOOK REVIEW S 1 9 3 formation,” to create an American identity for those Asian Americans who have historically been denied that status (6). Chu believes that “the bildungsroman is a central site for Asian American re-visions of American subject for­ mation because it has been accorded a place of honor in literary curricula that are, in turn, used to socialize pupils in approved American values” (11). By look­ ing at the immigrant romance, the mother-daughter romance, at issues of desire, filial nostalgia, abjection, and finally at the Chinese heroic tradition, Chu traces the history of Asian American subject formation in American literature. Chu is careful to contextualize her use of the term “assimilation,” but she also questions the immigrant analogy that includes “an ethnic relations cycle whose stages include contact, competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation” (7). She insists that there are American constructions of Asian Americans that set them apart “as inherently alien, unassimilable, and threat­ ening to the core of American culture and identity,” and these are rooted in earlier constructions that label Asians as “fundamentally different and infe­ rior” (9). From this premise, Chu demonstrates how Asian American authors respond to those notions. The most interesting and, I would contend, valuable aspect of Chu’s read­ ings is her study of how...