Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds by Stephen Hong Sohn (review)

Stephen Hong Sohn begins Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds by identifying a special problem when dealing with contemporary Asian American fiction: how we read literary works “when the author’s ethno-racial status is not easily or directly mirrored within the fictional world” (2). The racial asymmetries of such a situation are two-fold. First, the “particular phenomenon” (21) of an Asian American writer employing a non-Asian American narrator frustrates the tendency to read minority literatures with an “autobiographical or authoethnographic impulse attuned to authorial ancestry” (3). For example, Chang-rae Lee’s white narrator in Aloft (2004) presents a challenge to traditional publication and interpretive practices that either encourage or demand a strict relationship between a writer’s racial status and her/his narrator or narrative interests. Second, Sohn asks us to examine how fictional narratives present “world[s] enmeshed in larger social contexts and historical frameworks” (22). Analyzing fictional narratives in this way allows for a more “intersectional” and interdisciplinary understanding of Asian American literary production as it relates to a wider variety of disciplines and methodologies (22). With the proliferation of works by Asian Americans who are transnational/first-generation or multiracial and who publish in genres not normally associated with Asian American literature, the current challenge of criticism is to expand “social-context methodologies” (3). In doing so, Sohn argues that we will move “beyond the limits of cultural nationalist models” in order to foreground a “deconstructive critical methodology” (4). Racial Asymmetries is at its best when staking out new ground for Asian Americanist critique, especially in helping redefine the kinds of narratives we should seek out and work to understand in relation to the political dimensions of difference. At the same time, the promise of offering interdisciplinary techniques and methodological revisions is not quite fulfilled in this ambitious and welcome piece of criticism.

The wide variety of literary texts and issues discussed in Racial Asymmetries is impressive. Sohn examines three speculative/science fiction texts: Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), Claire Light’s short story “Abducted by Aliens!” (2009) (from the collection Slightly Behind and to the Left: Four Stories and Three Drabbles), and Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (2007). While he begins with Lee’s more traditional, suburban narrative, he also draws our attention to texts with colonial backgrounds and extremely particular concerns (such as cannibalism). By including works such as Singrid Nunez’s For Rouenna (2001) and The Last of Her Kind (2006), as well as Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry (2004) and Forgery (2007), Sohn provides a varied focus strengthening the central argument about “radically widen[ing]” (3) Asian American literary studies in order to reimagine the field and its concerns.

Further, the focus on complex social contexts presents readers with productive ways to engage nontraditional narratives in interdisciplinary contexts. At times, the reader must work beyond the argument in order to understand the implications of such an approach. For example, Sohn’s discussion of Levittown, New York, develops a sense of “white spatial supremacy” in Lee’s Aloft (46). Sohn examines whiteness and its relation to organizing and regulating our communities in order to situate the narrator’s concerns, character, and rhetorical position in the novel. Most of these passages on context are informative, but there is some interpretive intervention. This can be seen in the chapter when Sohn discusses Daisy, the first-generation Korean American wife of the narrator. Over the course of four pages, Sohn examines Daisy’s mental health and suicide in relation to medical discourse and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. While the links between her mental health needs and her white husband’s neglect of wider racial concerns are helpful in establishing the structural problems many Asian Americans face, it is unclear why such a close connection has to be drawn between scientific discourse and a fictional character; Daisy...