Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
and discussions with both undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford University. I take time to mention the handful who went on to work with me in more extensive capacities, completing research projects or working with me in instructional capacities: Raechel Lee, Vanessa Seals, Steffi Dippold, Lupe Carrillo, Justin St. Germain, Kathryn Van Arendonk, Vanessa Chang, Vida Mia Garcia, James Matthew Estrella, Michelle Rhee-Weise, Karli June Cerankowski, Allen Frost, Long Le-Khac, Stephanie Otani-Sunamoto, Johaina Crisostomo, Kathryn Marie Frank, Emma Clare Trotter, Thanh Nguyen, Cynthia Liao, Christian Ngo, Alok Vaid-Menon, Sarah Chang, and Lilian Thaoxaochay. My research was supported by a phalanx of diligent and productive research assistants, including Haerin Shin, Trac Dang, Nicole E. Chorney, Allison Sarah de Gorostiza Bayani, Jennifer Hsin-Ting Liu, Samantha Tieu, Stephen Hilfer, Tenyia Iris Lee, and Charles (Charlie) Syms. I have also been lucky to work with those who helped direct and promote Stanford’s first Asian American writers’ group, including Iris A. Law, Henry Leung, and Victoria Yee. The guidance of Stanford’s incredible staff helped propel this book forward in a timely fashion: Dagmar Logie, Alyce Boster, Nelia Peralta, Judy Candell, Katie Dooling, Nicole Yun Bridges, Colleen Boucher, Monica Moore, Cindy Ng, Shelley Tadaki, Chris Queen, Tania D. Mitchell, Michelle Zamora, and Mariatte Denman.
I wanted to take the time to acknowledge the tremendous efforts provided by the editors over at NYU Press—Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, and Alicia Nadkarni—as well as my anonymous manuscript reviewers in helping me hone this manuscript. Tim Roberts: thanks for your flexibility and making the production process streamlined and transparent.
To my close family and friends—Richard Hong Sohn, Joan Chyun, Henry Oh—I very much appreciate your patience, as you all know how long the process of book writing has been. Shawn Lynn Keeler: this book could not have been completed without your love and unquestioning belief in my work. C.S.: thank you for the gift of balance and, of course, for the oranges. John Hong Sohn, it was awesome to have spent my first years up in the Bay with you! My sisters—Julianne Hong Sohn, Krystal Young, and Gina Valentino—you know I could not have made it without your support—I am the luckiest brother ever. My parents, Soon Ho Sohn and Yunpyo Hong Sohn, deserve a special note of gratitude for all that they have given and for all that they have modeled.
Introduction: The Many Storytellers of Asian American Fiction
Asian American literature is traditionally understood as a body of texts written in English that depicts a specific social history in which individuals of various ethnicities have faced discrimination due to perceptions and laws that designated them as aliens.1 Common narratives involve the troubling acculturation process of the Asian immigrant, the intergenerational ruptures between Asian immigrant parents and their more Americanized children, and the challenges of defining identity when an Asian American travels back to a land of ethnic origin.
Critics tend to further delineate Asian American literature through “maximal ideological inclusiveness” (Lye, “Introduction” 4). This “inclusiveness” appears in the way critics embrace particular cultural productions, based on factors such as ancestry, the author’s residency status, and textual content. Most of the works that have achieved canonical status tend also to depict Asian or Asian American contexts. Certainly, critics understand that American writers of Asian descent are often inspired by their personal experiences of racial oppression and racial difference in the creation of their cultural productions, both fictional and otherwise. Bounding Asian American literature in part by the writer’s ancestry leads not merely to a biologically centered notion of textual classification but to an understanding that race produces material effects on bodies, lives, and corresponding acts of creative expression. The most acclaimed texts exemplify these definitional boundaries. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), reputed to be one of most frequently adopted books in college-level curriculums, focuses on the challenges connected to Chinese American immigrant assimilation and acculturation. Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) respectively explore similar issues from the viewpoints of Filipino American, Indian American, and Korean American narrators. John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) reveals the struggles faced by Japanese Americans during the postinternment period from the perspective of a young man named Ichiro Yamada. These now-classic texts, the subjects of numerous critical articles, book chapters, and required reading on many graduate qualifying exams, can reinforce an assumption that Asian American literature is defined by the overlaps among ethnoracial authorial identity, narration, narrative perspective, and cultural scripts that direct our understanding and analyses of the fictional world.
Racial Asymmetries reconsiders this approach. It challenges the tidy links between authorial ancestry and fictional content, and between identity and form, to expand what is typically thought of as Asian American culture and criticism.2 This book is inspired by a persistent phenomenon: works of fiction that trouble critical methodologies through the storytelling perspective. Take Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Toxicology (2011) as one clear example. Hagedorn employs first-person narration to offer readers unobstructed access to the mind and the life of Eleanor Delacroix, an eighty-year-old writer and avowed lesbian who is of Caucasian-Mexican descent. The novel is set in contemporary New York and involves an eclectic set of characters in addition to Eleanor, including a budding filmmaker named Mimi Smith and her daughter Violet. Hagedorn (with Irish, Filipina, Chinese, and French ancestries), like Eleanor, is of mixed-race background, but Eleanor could hardly be called her fictional counterpart or imaginary double. In Toxicology, we see Eleanor Delacroix’s fame dwindling in light of the new modes of art and authorship being promoted in the age of digital cultures and the ubiquity of social media technology. Strikingly, the novel does not contain any characters clearly marked as Asian or Asian American. Toxicology hence moves away from the Filipino American–centered content of Hagedorn’s first three fictional publications and provides us with a meditation on the shifting morphology of cultural production in a media-saturated new millennium. Hagedorn’s novel demonstrates the “racial asymmetry” at the heart of my book: the author’s ethnoracial status is not easily or directly mirrored within the fictional world. A central aim of Racial Asymmetries is to recenter works such as Toxicology within Asian American cultural studies, to challenge the standard narrative perspectives, plots, and devices of the field and to further encourage the development of more expansive social-context methodologies.
Toxicology is assuredly not the only text that pushes the bounds of Asian American cultural criticism through narratorial construction. Indeed, this novel is part of a wide-scale emergence of fictional narratives produced roughly within the past two decades.3 I specifically concentrate on first-person narration to show how Asian American writers engage the invention of dynamic fictional worlds.4 My book reveals that the construction of narrative perspective encourages cultural critics to engage a highly comparative mode of analysis, which opens up a whole range of texts heretofore facing marginalization. Racial Asymmetries examines a selection of such texts, which include Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft (2004), Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry (2004) and Forgery (2007), Sigrid Nunez’s For Rouenna (2001) and The Last of Her Kind (2006), Claire Light’s “Abducted by Aliens!” (2009), and Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (2007). Such fictions ask readers and critics to develop reading practices that move away from an autobiographical or autoethnographic impulse attuned to authorial ancestry. By doing so, readers and critics remain more open to a range of storytellers including a merchant from the Islamic Golden Age, an American antiquities dealer who travels to Greece in the post–World War II period, a Chicano slaughterhouse worker agitating for union reform in the period following civil rights, a sixty-year-old Italian American man, an African American female prisoner, and even a man who purports to be an alien abductee. This analytical approach pushes critics to consider why these storytelling perspectives are featured, why certain geographies and historical periods are represented, and who gets written out of the plot, among other such issues. While the unconventional narrators employed by these Asian American writers might seem to reject the foundational issues of race and racism that first propelled the field into existence, this study reminds us that aesthetic choices are not somehow free from political ramifications. Thus, we must attend to the