Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
engaging Asian American fictionality requires a serious reconsideration of narrative perspective. By depicting the lives, viewpoints, emotions, thoughts, and voices of imaginary characters, Asian American fiction writers in this study create anthropomorphic storytellers who encourage cultural critics and readers to engage why the story is told from this particular perspective. Because we cannot assume that the writer is sympathetic to or identifies with the storyteller he or she constructs, we must analyze how the storyteller functions as one nodal point within a larger representational power matrix. With such great responsibilities given to the narrator who directs our access to the fictional world, other issues begin to emerge: which characters become central and which are placed at the peripheries, what historical circumstances frame the plot, and what spatial contexts ground the construction of fictionalized settings, to name a few.36 Here, the narrator’s telling of a story arcs out into a variety of concerns that must be considered to explore the extensive bounds of the novel’s racial asymmetries.
I use the phrase “racial asymmetries” to describe two interlocking levels of this book: the first to describe a particular phenomenon and the second to describe a critical reading practice. “Racial asymmetries” first describes the incongruities that emerge between the Asian American writer and narrative perspective, where the writer undermines the alignment between ethnoracial background and the narrator. This first level grants an explicit space for thinking about Asian American literature through its fictional qualities, as a writer’s ancestry does not directly mirror that of the narrator’s. The first-person storyteller is an imagined life, one that might have existed but actually does not and should not be assumed to be the double for the Asian American author.
In this way, the fictional landscape is bound up with the second level of racial asymmetry, which involves the aesthetics and the politics engaged within and offered by the representational terrain. Racial Asymmetries thus finds traction at the complex juncture between fiction and nonfiction. On the one hand, Asian American writers enhance the imaginative aspects of their creative publications by locating narrative perspective in characters whose ethnoracial backgrounds differ from their own. On the other, these characters travel through a fictional world enmeshed in larger social contexts and historical frameworks. These characters thus find their individual lives entangled amid structural inequalities, such as colonial conquest, class immobility, racial oppression, sexism, and homophobia, among other systemic issues. Asian Americanist critique offers a unique intervention at this intersection because the field has been so highly influenced by historicist and materialist analytical methodologies. As I attend to the dynamics of narrative perspective, I also employ the data and research offered by many disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, and American race and ethnic studies, to closely examine the fictional world’s complex relationship with external referents. While this book clearly pushes the Asian Americanist critique into radically new territories, it also parallels developing scholarly trends within cultural studies.37 Here, I refer to calls to make American studies increasingly intersectional, whether through the framework of globalization, hemispheric approaches, or analytics of comparative race and ethnicity.38
Charting Our Racially Asymmetrical Course
I begin my study with texts that reflect some of the more traditional concerns of the field but move increasingly toward those that seem to have little to do with Asian American racial formation. Chapter 1 explores how Asian American-ness might be structured in relation to the psychic interiority of a white narrator. I focus my reading on Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft, in which the Italian American narrator disrupts any clear overlap between author and narrative perspective. The novel attends to the racial asymmetries of Asian American fiction by forefronting how a white narrator perceives the issue of racial difference as it unfolds in an exclusive Long Island community. In chapter 2, I shift from analyzing a white storytelling perspective to a Chicano viewpoint. In Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, the narrative models how a Chicano narrator comes to terms with a broadened class consciousness, one that involves a multiracial union of his slaughterhouse-factory workers. Foster also employs a speculative alternate reality that becomes a useful analogy to convey the Chicano subject’s fractured self, as a political organizer and social activist as well as a potential agent of destruction.
The second half of the book focuses on writers whom critics have almost completely ignored because their fiction remains difficult to categorize. While Sigrid Nunez’s first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), contains clear autobiographical valences, two subsequent publications do not. Chapter 3 critiques Nunez’s For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind, both of which complicate any clear link between the author’s ethnoracial background and the novels’ protagonists. But this chapter progresses the book further by emphasizing the process of narrative construction. In each novel, the storyteller is an individual who looks to reconstruct the life of another character but in the process calls attention to other individuals on the peripheries and pushes the biographical form to expand. Though neither novel employs the narrative perspective of an Asian American character, each shows measured attention to pressing social issues, whether related to the plight of female veterans who fought in the Vietnam War or the failures of the American prison system.
Directing Racial Asymmetries to its most transnational dimensions, chapter 4 investigates a selection of Sabina Murray’s publications, concentrating on A Carnivore’s Inquiry and Forgery. The narrators of these cultural productions open up perspectives that convey how violence and brutality advance various colonial projects. They trace the paths of international conquest through various countries—the United States, Mexico, Spain, the Philippines, Greece—and, in this regard, illuminate racial formation as a comparative colonial construct. The final chapter explores the ways two speculative fictions function through racial analogies. Claire Light’s “Abducted by Aliens!” and Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, though narrated by characters who exist in fantastical landscapes filled with alchemy, time traveling, or alien invaders, can be interpreted through their oblique relationship to external social contexts and historical archives. “Abducted by Aliens!” demonstrates how the alien-abduction narrative can be analogized to the experience of Japanese American internees, while Chiang’s novelette shows how an oriental tale set in the Islamic Golden Age can be analogized to American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era. Both works provide dramatic examples of the Asian American writer who makes imaginative use of narrative perspective but whose fictional worlds can be firmly tethered to material and historical contexts.
Though this study primarily focuses on a select number of fictions, another aim is to cast light on the larger archive of works penned by Asian American writers in which narrative perspective and its connection to authorial ancestry cannot be clearly linked. In this respect, Racial Asymmetries seeks not only to supplement the critical methodologies that we employ in the analysis of Asian American cultural studies but also to complicate and to expand the kinds of social contexts and historical circumstances that characterize the field as it continues to burgeon in the new millennium. In this process, we find that an incredible multitude of subjects and storytellers constitute this so-called subfield of literary study, thus revealing the elastic bounds of the fictional world.
1. White Flight, White Narration: Suburban Deviancies in Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft
Racial Asymmetries begins with one obvious starting point for Asian American studies: the experience of racial exclusion under the guise of white hegemony. The large-scale racial rubric constituting the Asian American as an outsider has been in place at least since 1917, when the US Congress passed some of the first major federal laws restricting immigration.1 The exclusion period officially ended in 1965 when Asian immigrants were allowed to enter the United States under the quota system. Under the “model minority” designation that emerges in 1966, Asian Americans occasionally assume a different racial status, something that Mia Tuan provocatively terms as “honorary whites” (31). Yet racial exclusion retains an insidious influence for contemporary Asian Americans. This chapter explores the complicated nature and effects of that influence for both Asian Americans and whites in the post-1965 era through the way that it is depicted in Chang-rae Lee’s novel Aloft (2004).
Aloft,