Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
figures for The Joy Luck Club have varied, most scholars and critics agree that the book has sold more than four million copies (Dong 1205).20 Tan’s popularity is singular, in spite of comparisons to Maxine Hong Kingston and other prominent Asian American writers, as evidenced by sales figures from comparable periods.21 To this day, Tan remains one of the few American-born writers of Asian descent to have successfully landed at the top of the New York Times best-seller list.22
In the second chapter of Beyond Literary Chinatown (2007), Jeffrey F. L. Partridge investigates the consequences for writing in the post–Amy Tan era by comparing the book descriptions included on hardcover dust jackets or paperback covers of nine different narrative fictions produced by Chinese American writers, four of which are by Tan.23 Partridge concludes by arguing that literary marketers engender “the tour guide function” (73) promoting an ethnic authenticity. Yet Partridge chooses not to go beyond the Chinese American authors in exploring the tour guide function, which could demonstrate not only an ethnic commodification but a racialized one. Despite Partridge’s focus on one ethnic group, his approach persuasively shows how narratives are marketed in relation to authorial identity. Book-jacket descriptions, back-cover plot summaries, and Internet editorial blurbs describing the Chinese past as “hidden,” “tangled,” and “terrible” (73) call attention to an unassimilable origin point. This narrative heightens the inscrutability long attached to Asian American subjects as the yellow peril. While the American present is embraced and in some cases celebrated within these novels, the Asian ethnonational past is far more treacherous to navigate, so much so that many include various first-generation subjects who die. American identity then depends on a jettisoning of the hazardous past. The success of this kind of narrative demonstrates how Chinese American literature becomes commodified through marketplace practices. Such marketing approaches, of course, target what publishers consider a broad audience who will not likely have much familiarity with ethnic-minority contexts. Thus, the appeal of the tour guide narrative unfolds in the context of readers who look to begin a new and dynamic journey offered, apparently, only by the authentic storytelling voice.
This process can be elaborated more broadly within a racial context, as evidenced by the marketing approaches to several other novels not specific to the Chinese experience. The back-cover description to the paperback version of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997), for example, illustrates how racial authenticity is rehearsed: “Lan Cao’s narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocked stories” involving, among other things, a mother-daughter relationship and “family secrets.” The summary goes on to note that “the haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the ‘luminous motion,’ as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future” (emphases mine). The binary that structures East and West is telling, despite the different ethnic context, in which Vietnam stands in for the threatening Asian past. As Partridge details in the case of Chinese American literature, so many of these mother-daughter descriptions are leveraged on a “secret” often detailed or existing in conjunction with an Asian ethnic heritage. The revelation of the secret enables the main character to undergo a kind of healing (73). In Monkey Bridge, the daughter, Mai Nguyen, one of two narrators, must confront her mother’s past to find out why her grandfather did not join them in the United States. This “secret” propels the novel forward and requires readers to delve into the traumas of the Vietnam War. Monkey Bridge is one of numerous examples external to the Chinese American context wherein the writer is marketed as the tour guide.24 The writer leads readers into the Asian past and then delivers them safely away from it.
The tour guide construct resides in the expectation that the Asian American writer represents his or her ethnic background through the narrative perspective and thus directs the story’s content through his or her position as the storyteller. This parallel is essential because, as Partridge states, “to go into the past to make sense of the present, the Chinese American author must be a part of that past and an emblem of that history” (73). However, if the Asian American author is likened to an “emblem of history,” one is already in danger of conflating the author specifically with historian, autoethnographer, or autobiographer—roles that do not grant the possibility of Asian American creativity and artistry. The storyteller’s ancestry in a novel such as Tan’s The Joy Luck Club or Cao’s Monkey Bridge aligns with the author’s racial and ethnic background. In some cases, the novel’s events can even be corroborated by the author’s own life, therefore invoking elements of autobiography. On another level, the Asian American writer can be called on to provide an account of the past as a sort of layman’s historian. At the same time, the author’s creation often details a larger ethnic community’s characteristics and struggles, with the narrator serving as our gateway into the appropriately authenticated fictional world.
The success of Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and other blockbuster Asian American works that followed, including Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls (2009), Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone (2009) and Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009), helps to strengthen the link between the writer’s Asian ancestry and narrative perspective, thus continuing to fuel the assumption that fiction is a mask for historical, autobiographical, and autoethnographic documentation. What Partridge calls the “literary Chinatown” can be seen as a burden distributed across different ethnic groups that constitute the racial category known as Asian American. I am thus interested in how the literary marketplace helps articulate some of the forces that render the Asian American writer as a native informant and as a hazy double for the narrator and/or protagonist within the fictional world. As we can see, the Asian American fiction writer exists at a complicated historical and cultural nexus. On the one hand, postrace rhetoric implies that the Asian American subject is a mobile entity, free from the bonds of racial prejudice and therefore ostensibly just as free to imagine fictional worlds as devoid of social inequality as his or her own life apparently is. On the other, we have a literary marketplace that openly commodifies the racial ancestry of the Asian American writer as a way to authenticate the fictional world. In the space between the restrictions of the authorial native informant and the apolitical freedoms of the postrace artist, the writers at the center of this study imagine fictional worlds that push cultural critics to expand the scope and methodologies of their analyses. I next consider the ways that the field of Asian American cultural criticism has developed and further outline the unique interventions offered by my book.
The Rise of Asian American Literary Criticism
With the publication of Asian American writing gaining more steam throughout the mid-twentieth century, race and ethnic literary criticism began to surface in the 1970s. In the period following the civil rights movement, Asian Americans enjoyed widespread legislative inclusion for the first time. As ethnic minority histories and cultures gained more social visibility, questions arose as to why American literature syllabi so commonly lacked any representation from people of Asian descent. After all, had there not been Asian Americans living in the United States for more than a century? Had Asian Americans not already been publishing their works? These questions propelled writers such as Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong to put together Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), one of the first works devoted to collecting Asian American literature as a panethnic grouping. The book’s foundational theorizations dovetailed with cultural nationalist discourses that favored domestic-centered narratives, racial resistance, and masculine perspectives, found in novels such as John Okada’s No-No Boy and Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961). At that time, Chin and the other editors limited the bounds of Asian American literature to works produced by three ethnic groups: Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans. Any conflations among Asian American writer, narrator, and the fictional world did not necessarily pose an interpretive problem for these editors or for early critics, precisely because the initial project was heavily invested in the archiving of erased sociohistorical and cultural contexts.25 In other words, it was important in these initial stages to read these texts as forms of nonfictional documents, representational mirrors reflecting particular social inequalities experienced by Asian Americans and perhaps even the lives of the writers