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The Literary Case of Wen Ho Lee
- Journal of Asian American Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 14, Number 2, June 2011
- pp. 249-282
- 10.1353/jaas.2011.0012
- Article
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Lye's essay produces an important dialogue between historical and literary approaches to the term "Asian American." Comparing two treatments of the Wen Ho Lee story, the "autobiographical" My Country vs. Me, co-written with Helen Zia, and Susan Choi's "historical" novel A Person of Interest, Lye argues for the necessity of historicizing "Asian American" by considering its political and literary senses as non-homologous. Her contrapuntal reading shows how literature supplements history by constructing a post-1965 Asian American professional middle-class subject, and how history supplements literature in an "epistemology of racial formation."