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Conclusion. Tell This Silence: Asian American Women’s Narratives, Gender, Nation, and History During one of my first years of teaching, I had a team-teaching experience with the course Introduction to Women’s Studies. I was distressed to witness, from the beginning, the silence of certain students in the classroom . A small cluster of Asian American women students, in particular , sat together and rarely spoke during class discussions. Expressing my concern to my fellow graduate student instructors, I confronted their attitudes that such silence was somehow “normal”—they attributed the silence to cultural differences and argued that there was nothing we could or should do about it. Such terms seem to me problematic when they are conceptualized as though “culture” is somehow an essential, static way of being, and such assertions suggest that Asian American women are inherently silent. Other (non–Asian American) students in the class seemed to interpret the silence of these Asian American students as sigThere is something incendiary in me and it has to do with being female, here, now, in America. —Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live. —Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee. nification that they did not understand the material or could not speak English, neither of which was true. This example made me begin thinking of all the meanings silence may carry—stereotypes of the “inscrutable Asian,” the submissive and obedient “model minority”—at the same time that silence, of any student, can also signify shyness, fear, disagreement , refusal to participate, hostility or in other cases, agreement, respect , and acceptance. It may be related to the content of the class (or lack of content) related to an individual student’s experiences. Silence, like speech, is a form of discourse and can communicate various thoughts or emotions. Speech and silence are, of course, always socially and culturally constructed; they may have less to do with innate cultural values than with current social and cultural contexts. In The Woman Warrior, for example, as noted in my first chapter, Maxine Hong Kingston demonstrates the silences—and silencing—concurrent with that mysterious process of “becoming American” for a young daughter of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Immigration to the United States for Asians has involved an erasure of histories that may never be fully “recovered.” Paralleling the exclusionary practices of U.S. immigration policy have been the exclusions enacted against Asians from full participation in U.S. culture. When Asian Americans claim status as Americans, questions such as Where are you from? act as constant provocations to jar them back into their prescribed roles as foreigners, guests, and “outsiders within.” Always there is the reminder that Asian Americans (and other people of color) are not American, certainly not in the ways that Americans of European descent may be perceived to be. Somehow , the official narratives of North America remain reliant upon principles that equate American identity with whiteness. Such ideologies have effectively maintained Asian Americans within the borders of America’s historical discourse, while also rendering whiteness—as the unmarked, “neutral” racial category—invisible and therefore normative. While Asian Americans and other people of color have been silenced, they have neither wholly accepted this silencing nor necessarily agreed that speech fully represents their primary avenue toward liberation and social justice.1 In addition, Asian Americans have experienced radically shifting relationships to America. For Kingston’s narrator, becoming American is always bound up with white, Western standards of femininity. Gender is thus racialized, while racial, ethnic, and national identities are shaped by gender and sexuality. As Rachel Lee argues, gender and sexuality, 216 c o n c l u s i o n along with race and ethnicity, shape and complicate the ways in which Asian American writers conceptualize “America.” While Asian American cultural nationalist critiques of America have posited a particular form of nationalism that, according to Lee, suggests that America is not commensurate with nationalism (5), such frameworks have also resulted in the pitting of nationalism against feminism (8). As Asian American studies shifts its primary focus away from a domestic cultural nationalism— a critical stance that enabled gender criticism—and toward more transnational and postcolonial emphases, Lee suggests that gender risks being considered irrelevant (10). She writes, “Asian American feminism risks renewed marginalization as Asian American cultural studies defines its more pressing concerns not through cultural nationalism but through alternative postcolonial and transnational convictions...

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