World-making as Vocation

One of the most efficient putdowns to emerge in recent years is to use #firstworldproblems as a rejoinder. Those dismissive 19 characters have the power to defang grievances, rendering a complaint as its opposite. And so laments about, say, the disappointing performance of a waning electronic gadget become instead whining expressions of privilege. What starts out as outrage can then come across as ingratitude and self-pity, when put into a broader context. #first-worldproblems is another way of saying: “Well, at least you have a gadget to disappoint you.”

In the early twenty-first century, Asian American cultural production, when considered without an appreciation for Asian American critique, risks such a putdown. Susceptibility to #firstworldproblems may well be the mark of an emergent literature in decline. Thus, justifiable complaints—even rather well-written ones—about, say, the quiet struggles of a suburban stay-at-home parent who gave up a promising professional career get rightly pushed aside by more pressing urgencies of a world sorely in need of decolonization, adequate housing, health care, environmental justice, meaningful sovereignty, and other global redistributions of wealth and power. Such urgencies have long been and continue to be central to the significance of Asian-American cultural politics and to the very emergence of “Asian American” as a meaningful complex modifier for communities, constituencies, critique, histories, and literature. And yes, even the story of the formerly professional Asian American parent in the suburbs can become a point of access for critically expressing those urgencies, when put in a broader context.

Two recent studies of the literature and culture of Asian America, Min Song’s The Children of 1965 and Joshua Chambers-Letson’s A Race So Different, usefully remind us of traditions of critique and genealogies of struggle that have made Asian American literature and culture a viable site for apprehending those urgencies. Asian American, as Song notes with concern, may be on its way to becoming “a bureaucratic category” rather than something more “dynamic,” and this predicament motivates Song’s project, which is to “locate Asian American creative expression in the struggle itself, something already encoded in its formal restlessness” (11). That restlessness can get lost when texts are subjected to reductive, decontextualizing reading practices. It is quite likely that Song’s concerned observation also holds true for any emergent literature that becomes integrated into the dominant literature, especially via one of its most conspicuous, and likely well-intentioned, forms of representation: a curriculum. Both having and recognizing bureaucratic categories that disappoint are then important conditions for the interventions of Asian American critique and of Asian American cultural production.

To take stock of Asian American literature today, Song’s analysis strategically explores Asian American literary works since 1990 that have achieved measurable commercial, critical, and/or curricular success. Song’s deep reading analyses and his framing of Asian American literature as a coherent body of writings explicitly interrogate the bureaucratic imperatives of an identity-based literature, which is perhaps to say, any literature. The category “Asian American” provides a framework of intelligibility and intervention for the writings, but the modifier also potentially invites narrow, dubiously interested interpretations—progressive, reactionary, or otherwise—that Song cautions us against adopting uncritically. A pivotal consideration for Song’s approach is an engaged consideration of demographic and cultural shifts testing the coherence and function of Asian American literature, and indeed the very idea of Asian America. 1965 is a watershed, for it was the year of the momentous immigration and naturalization reforms of the Hart-Celler Act. That year has become shorthand for identifying a demarcation point that charts where today’s Asian America began to undergo changes that its literature has, in more recent years, been putting into affecting and illuminating discourse. Even before that moment and certainly afterward, popular perceptions, as Song critically notes, have tended toward the “whiz kids” image, as exemplified by a 1987 Time cover story, and...