politics of representation in Asian American literature, The

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Lape, Noreen Groover

Non-Chinese-speaking scholars of Asian American literature will appreciate the two chapters on Chinese-language literature in America.Yin finds that "Chinese-language writers deal more [than American-born Chinese] with compelling issues grounded in an immigrant sensibility, such as the agony of displacement, the dilemma of assimilation and alienation, and the hardship and struggle of daily life in a strange land" (167). He discusses, for example,Yu Lihua's The Ordeal, a story of a Chinese American physics professor's confrontation in the tenure review process with racial discrimination and academe's glass ceiling;Yi Li's "Abortion," a critique of class and gender issues played out in a story about an impoverished woman who cannot raise enough money either to feed her family or to pay for the abortion she desires; and Zhang Xiguo's "Killing Wife," a black comedy about a Chinese man who fantasizes about killing the upwardly mobile wife who abandons him for another man.

While Yin analyzes a wide range of Chinese American writers and genres, his literary criticism is, at times, limited by a too-strict mimeticism. He states in his introduction that he will adopt a sociohistorical approach as he addresses the following question: "To what extent is the writing a product of the experience of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the `Gold Mountain' throughout history?" (1). Restricting himself to illustrating how the Chinese American experience is manifested in the literature, Yin concludes, for example, that Sui Sin Far "fell prey to the stereotypes of the day and unwittingly repeated the racial pattern established by mainstream writers" (109). Using Chin's terminology, Sui Sin Far would be a writer who succumbs to "Orientalness" as she reproduces the "fake" (interestingly Chin has written that Sui Sin Far "fought the rampant stereotype and antiyellow racism" [12]). Compare Yin's interpretation to a more forgiving reading of Sui Sin Far by White-Parks-one that takes into consideration how a marginalized writer might need to manipulate the "fake" in the interest of constructing the "real" for a mainstream audience.White-Parks argues that Sui Sin Far "satisf[ies] popular formulas" in order to be accepted by her Anglo readers, "disturbing the stereotypes embedded in those formulas as the writer pursues her own personal and ideological themes" (5).Whereas Yin views Sui Sin Far's writing through an almost anthropological lens,White-Parks considers the literary techniques a marginalized writer adopts to manipulate a mainstream audience.

Yin states in the introduction that "the literature [he will survey] is by no means merely historical documentation or anthropological writing .... Its qualities as literature are equally enlightening" (4). At times, though, his remarks about the literary qualities of the works are too prescriptive, as when he states of Wu Tingfang's America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat: "His otherwise interesting comments were thus often spoiled by a constantly tentative, apologetic tone" so that "the essence of the American system receives less attention and criticism than it deserves" (69). Further, in his discussion of the Angel Island poetry, he makes several provocative comments about "allusions to famous heroic figures in Chinese history" and "images and diction" from "classical Chinese poetry" encoded in the poems (41-42). Unfortunately, his analysis stops there.