politics of representation in Asian American literature, The

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Lape, Noreen Groover

Yin, Xiao-huang. 2000. Chinese American Literature Since the I 850s. The Asian American Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $34.95 hc. 307 pp.

Ma, Sheng-Mei. 2000. The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $42.95 hc. $16.95 sc. viii + 208 pp.

Eng, David L. 2001. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Perverse Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. $54.95 hc. $18.95 sc. 290 pp

Since the 1970s, Frank Chin's infamous "war of words" with Maxine Hong Kingston, as one writer puts it, has become a "literary battle for the soul of Asian America" (Iwata 1990, 1). While the Chin-- Kingston debate pits the masculinist Chinese heroic tradition against Chinese American feminism, the arguments raise a broader theoretical point regarding what Chin terms "the real and the fake": the extent to which literature should (and can) represent life. For Chin the "real" demonstrates fidelity to "the truth of the Chinese culture and history that has been carried and developed into Chinese American institutions by the first Chinese Americans" (xii-xiii). Wishing for a pure, essential, and unmediated Chinese experience in America, he deems "fake" any representation tainted by western or Christian culture. Writers like Amy Tan, Jade Snow Wong, and, most notably, Kingston are summarily damned. Chin accuses Kingston of exhibiting "white supremacist arrogance"(27) when she depicts Chinese women in The Woman Warrior as "victimized and trapped in a hideous Chinese civilization" (3). Jealously guarding "the truth of the Chinese culture," he finds intolerable her mythic revisioning of "The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan" in The Woman Warrior. Further, Chin criticizes writers like David Henry Hwang who portray Asian American men as "emasculated and sexually repellent" (12), as "effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan," or as "homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu" (xiii). Many find Chin's criticisms of contemporary Chinese American writers, most of whom are women, to be misogynistic and homophobic.

Chin's perspective has become so basic to the field of Asian American literary criticism that few critics disregard it, and the issue of representation as framed by the debate informs the methodologies of the three books under review. Xiao-huang Yin's pioneering survey Chinese American Literature since the 1850s examines Chinese American literature in the context of the social and historical experiences of Chinese American life. Sheng-Mei Ma's The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity posits that Asian American self-representations can never be free of the "deathly embrace" of Orientalism. David L. Eng's Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America looks specifically at representations of Asian American masculinity to argue that Asian American males are "materially and psychically feminized within the context of a larger U.S. cultural imaginary" (2).

In a cogent chapter from Chinese American Literature since the 1850s,Yin analyzes Chin's "war of words" with Chinese American women writers. He reveals that there are larger issues of representation at stake: namely, to what extent "creative activities in literature" can be "individually" as opposed to "ideologically" oriented (240). Yin finds that Kingston asserts her right to "individual artistic expression," quoting her claim that "I am not a sociologist who measures truth by the percentage of times behavior takes place" (241). He notes that Tan also rejects Chin's prescriptive demand for cultural accuracy when she states, in a similar vein, that she is bothered by Chin's "tendency to interpret literature as a representation of life" (242). Kingston and Tan seek to free themselves from the bind of representation, holding that whereas false representations in the form of ethnic stereotypes tend to delimit art, all representations are misrepresentations to some extent. Chin's consistent push for authenticity raises an important question: in the words of Wong, "What are exactly Chin's criteria for categorizing the 'real' and the 'fake' Chinese American writers?" In reply, Yin remarks, "it is baffling and even absurd to think that there can be an adequate and unitary standard by which to measure the literary sensibility produced by a vastly diversified and rapidly changing Chinese American reality" (244).

Yin's literary historical survey ranges from previously unknown to very well known Chinese American writers, detailing a spectrum of vastly diversified Chinese American literary sensibilities. Thanks to scholars like Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century works of Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna (Edith and Winnifred Eaton) are familiar to many these days.Through extensive archival research, including editorial letters and autobiographical sketches,Yin traces Chinese American literary history back half a century before Sui Sin Far entered the literary scene. In his first two chapters, he uncovers the earliest voices of Chinese working class immigrants, students, and scholars and demonstrates that despite their different positions in society, writers from these groups all evince a concern for social justice and frustration at America's failure to live up to its own ideals. AsYm moves to second generation writers, he shows how Chinese American literary sensibility evolves. For writers like Wong, Pardee Lowe, Virginia Chin-lan Lee, and Monfoon Leong, the focus shifts from social inequity to the struggle to assimilate into mainstream culture, expressed in themes like "conflicts between East-West cultural values, views on interracial marriages, the generation gap, the pursuit of the American dream, the nativeborn's imperative to assert Americanness, and the anxiety to demonstrate patriotism as a `loyal minority"'(119).The final chapters round off the survey by concentrating on the debate between Chin, Kingston, and Tan in order to illustrate how contemporary writers struggle to define a Chinese American subjectivity.