Editor's Preface

I am delighted that, in this issue, we are able to present our readers with four intriguing, intelligent, and insightful essays that delve into some of the sensitive areas of Asian American experiences.

Western influences and the Eastern responses have been a prevalent approach of Western scholarship in understanding the socioeconomic and intellectual developments of East Asian countries since the mid-nineteenth century. Postcolonial scholarship, however, displays more sensitivity to non-Western responses to encroaching Western modern ideas and institutions. In this issue, Genzo Yamamoto and Daniel Kim present an intimate look at how a prominent Korean American navigated the multiple intersocietal modernities of the early twentieth century as well as competing intrasocietal domestic visions with implications for our understanding of both international history and Asian American history. Soon Hyun, a Korean American in the first half of the twentieth century, spent time in Japan, China, and the United States; participated as a significant figure in the Korean Independence Movement; and worked as a successful Christian minister in Korea and in the United States. Soon Hyun's biography suggests the applicability of the multiple modernities framework for immigration history as an insightful alternative to the Western-influence—Eastern-responses approach.

This volume also explores the sensitive issue of Asian American masculinity in U.S. popular culture. Celine Parreñas Shimizu's essay deals with [Begin Page v] Asian American men in pornography through two fantasy-productions, Yellowcaust and Masters of the Pillow. The author not only looks at how these productions describe Asian American masculinity in terms of the characteristics, traits, and qualities that describe how one is gendered male, but more the manhood itself, "the inner life of being and becoming male as well as the performance of maleness," by examining "representations of Asian American men engaged in intimate sexual acts to map multiple manhoods."

While Shimizu's project analyzes and theorizes Asian American male pornography, Grace I. Yeh's essay tackles another understudied aspect of Asian American experiences, the counterpublic construction of an infamous Japanese American woman in the 1970s. Wendy Yoshimura was a fugitive from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who was charged with conspiracy to bomb a Berkeley naval building and was eventually convicted of three counts of illegal possession of weapons. Yeh assesses the kind of culture, social relations, and forms of citizenship that could be elaborated in the counterpublic formed around Yoshimura and through the discourse of familial intimacy.

Maire Mullins's essay presents intriguing scholarship through her analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto's 1949 short story "Seventeen Syllables." The primary agent of the story, Tome Hayashi, is a farmworker, wife, mother, and haiku poet. "Triply-marginalized (female, Japanese, and immigrant)," Tome is able to write haiku, publish her work in one of the best Japanese American newspapers, and become the winner of a prestigious haiku contest. The story culminates with the destruction of Tome's vocation as a haiku writer and with her decision to share her life story with her daughter, Rosie. While most studies of "Seventeen Syllables" have focused on the mother/daughter relationship, or on the developing cross-cultural relationship between Rosie and Jesus Carrasco, or on the story's climactic moment of violence and abuse when Rosie's father burns the haiku prize that her mother has won, Mullin focuses on the significance of language and literacy in the story as a means of disrupting and transforming modes of apprehension. [Begin Page vi]