Asian American Lit - Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature
Asian American Lit - Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature
Asian American Lit - Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature
Page 1 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Any discussion of “Asian American literature” must address the inadequacy of the term to
describe the array of writings that spring from a multiplicity of cultures and experiences.
Ultimately, the phrase has come to encompass writers of Asian heritage living in, writing
about, born in, or having sojourned to America. This set of definitions is not limited to
written literatures or those originally created in the English language; it can also be
extended to transcribed Chinese oral narratives, narratives written in Vietnamese and
translated into English, or Chinese characters carved into walls. The term Asian
American literature also prompts questions regarding national boundaries. “America”
need not be limited to the United States; the fluid concept of nation can spill over
geographical boundaries to reach neocolonies where complex constructions of
“America”—economic and cultural—significantly affect other countries.
The conditions under which Asian American writers labor are connected to a number of
recurring issues running throughout this enormous body of work: loss of homeland,
alienation in a new country, cultural conflicts, issues of identity, family, gender relations,
class differences, hope in America, anger against America, memory, longing, history. The
recent proliferation of Asian American literature has been accompanied by an ever-
broadening range of scholarly studies on these texts. Literary approaches to these works
include analyses of class, gender, and sexuality; postcolonialism and neocolonialism;
transnationalism; and cultural studies. Controversies have arisen in the field, most
notably in the prioritization of racism over sexism and the question of who may write
about and therefore represent “the Asian American experience.” Rather than rely on the
concept of the “native informant” of impossibly pure origins, scholarly studies have
shifted toward recognizing hybrid identities and multiple representations that defy
homogenizing descriptions of human experience.
Page 2 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Among the injustices suffered by Chinese immigrants was their detention in holding
centers like Angel Island, where they were forced to wait off the coast of California—
sometimes for years—while officials perused their paperwork and subjected them to
interrogation. The barracks walls at Angel Island (the center operated from 1910 to 1940)
bear Chinese characters registering that experience; these poems have been translated
and collected in Island (edited by Mark Him Lai et al, 1980). The period immediately
Page 3 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
preceding World War II saw the publication of Huie Kin's Reminiscences (1932), which
describes his experiences as a Christian minister in America, and H. T. Tsiang produced a
wealth of writings throughout the 1930s, including the novel And China Has Hands
(1937).
With the onset of World War II, anti-Asian discrimination shifted toward Japanese
Americans, and China became an ally of the United States. The resulting change in
atmosphere contextualizes works by Chinese American writers like Helena Kuo, whose
autobiography I've Come a Long Way (1942) details her career as a journalist. U.S.-born
writers Pardee Lowe (Father and Glorious Descendant, 1943) and Jade Snow Wong (Fifth
Chinese Daughter, 1945) depict San Francisco's Chinatown, while on the opposite coast,
Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) confronts the emasculation of Chinese men in
America. The 1950s saw the appearance of Su-ling Wong's Daughter of Confucius (1952)
as well as Diana Chang's autobiographical novel The Frontiers of Love (1956), which
describes the life of a young Eurasian girl growing up in China.
As the civil rights movement exploded in the 1960s and students on American campuses
demanded the inclusion of ethnic studies in university curricula, Chinese American texts
found new venues for expression. In 1974 the playwright Frank Chin, together with
Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong (Homebase, 1979;
American Knees, 1995), published the seminal anthology of Asian American literature
Aiiieeeee! (1974). In 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston's debut novel, The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, created a sensation with its genre-subverting style
and its representation of a Chinese American girl's coming of age. The Woman Warrior
and Kingston's later works, China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
(1989), echo with a unique Chinese American cultural history drawn from Chinese and
American myths and sensibilities. The novels of Amy Tan share with Kingston's work an
attention to mother-daughter relationships; Tan's most famous book, The Joy Luck Club
(1989), enjoyed particular success as an established best-seller and a Hollywood film.
More women's perspectives are offered by Louise Leung Larson, whose autobiographical
Sweet Bamboo (1989) recalls the life of her immigrant family in Los Angeles at the turn of
the century; Gish Jen, whose multiethnic experiences growing up in New York are
reflected in A Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996); and Fae
Myenne Ng, whose novel Bone (1993) depicts a family with three daughters growing up
in San Francisco's Chinatown. Chinese American writers who create representations of
strong women are Ruthanne Lum McCunn (Thousand Pieces of Gold, 1981; The Moon
Pearl, 2000), Alice Murong Pu Lin (Grandmother Had No Name, 1988), and Katherine
Wei (Second Daughter, 1984). Fiona Cheong's novels re-create her native Singapore:
Scent of the Gods (1991) reconstructs the political upheaval following the country's
independence in 1965, and Shadow Theatre (2002) channels a little girl's ghost who
follows around a young unwed mother.
Page 4 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
In 1972, Aiiieeeee! editor Frank Chin, whose works also include the novels Donald Duk
(1991) and Gunga Din Highway (1994), saw his Chickencoop Chinaman become the first
Asian American play to be performed on the New York stage, signaling the beginnings of
a flourishing Chinese American drama scene. The celebrated David Henry Hwang wrote
his first play, FOB, in 1978, and a decade later his M. Butterfly (1988), based on the true
story of a twenty-year affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese transvestite opera
singer, garnered a Tony award for best play of the year. Laurence Yep's Pay the Chinaman
(1990) reveals a group of Chinese immigrants' struggles with identity in Northern
California at the end of the nineteenth century; the journalist and playwright Elizabeth
Wong comments on the boycott of Korean stores by African Americans in Kimchee and
Chitlins (1990); and Paper Angels (1991), by the poet, performance artist, and playwright
Genny Lim, portrays Chinese immigrants in Angel Island's detention center. The Chinese
Filipino playwright Paul Stephen Lim's Figures in Clay (1989) subverts heterosexism with
his portrayal of an Asian American writer and his two homosexual lovers, and Ping
Chong's multimedia performances such as Nuit Blanche (1981) explode genre boundaries.
Among a wealth of Chinese American poets is Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, whose early verse
has been characterized as imagistic (Summits Move with the Tide, 1974) and whose later
work weds poetry and medical terminology in images of the body (Four-Year-Old Girl,
1998). Marilyn Chin's collections of poetry, such as Dwarf Bamboo (1987) and The
Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1994), reveal the melding of Eastern and Western
poetic forms, and New York–born Arthur Sze (Dazzled, 1982; The Redshifting Web, 1998)
is celebrated for his striking poetic evocations of nature. The prolific Chinese Malaysian
writer and literary scholar Shirley Geok-lin Lim has won a number of literary honors
including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems
(1980) and the American Book Award for her memoir Among the White Moon Faces
(1996); Lim's first novel, Joss and Gold (2001), challenges stereotypes of Asian American
women and gender relationships. Also noteworthy for its attention to women's issues is
Nellie Wong's The Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), and the writers Kitty Tsui (The
Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire, 1983) and Merle Woo (Yellow Woman Speaks,
1986) espouse a specifically lesbian sensibility. Gay sexuality and politics provide the
focus for Timothy Liu's poetry collections Vox Angelica (1992) and Say Goodnight (1998).
Page 5 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Wishes (1978) and Last Days Here (1990) speak of the poet's lifelong experiences of
Hawaii; other poets who evoke the islands are Wing Tek Lum (Expounding the Doubtful
Points, 1987) and John Yau (Radiant Silhouettes, 1989).
Among numerous other voices in Chinese American literature are the poets Fay Chiang
(In the City of Contradictions, 1979), Alexander Kuo (Changing the River, 1986), Alan
Chong Lau (Songs for Jadina, 1980), Li-Young Lee (The City in Which I Love You, 1990),
George Leong (A Lone Bamboo Doesn't Come from Jackson Street, 1977), Russell Leong
(The Country of Dreams and Dust, 1993), Amy Ling (Chinamerican Reflections, 1984),
Stephen Liu (Dream Journeys to China, 1982), the Chinese Malaysian poet Chin Woon
Ping (The Naturalization of Camellia Song, 1993), and John Yau (Radiant Silhouette,
1989). Fiction writers include Adet Lin and Lin Taiyi, who published in the 1940s (their
father, Lin Yutang, published Chinatown Family in 1947); Virginia Lee (The House That
Tai Ming Built, 1963); Betty Lee Sung (Mountain of Gold, 1967); and sojourner Yung Wing
(My Life in China and America, 1909).
Page 6 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Page 7 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Linda Ty-Casper began her prolific writing career in 1963 with the appearance of The
Transparent Sun and Other Stories; however, political censorship prevented the
publication of her novel Awaiting Trespass (1985) in the Philippines, and the book became
her first American publication. Political circumstances also inform the work of Ninotchka
Rosca (State of War, 1988), who came to the United States as an exile after martial law
was declared under Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s. Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn has
pursued a multifaceted career that includes singing, performance art, and writing fiction,
plays, and poetry. Danger and Beauty (1993), a collection of poetry and prose published
between 1968 and 1992, offers a sampling of her work; her 1990 novel Dogeaters
garnered a nomination for the National Book Award.
Writers who also present Filipina perspectives include Sabina Murray, whose 1990 novel
Slow Burn portrays the downward slide of a Manila party girl, and Marianne Villanueva,
who explores family and gender relationships in her collection Ginseng and Other Tales
from Manila (1991). The impacts of American cultural and military presence upon women
in the Philippines are inscribed in Michelle Cruz Skinner's stories (Balikbayan, 1988;
Mango Seasons, 1996), while M. Evelina Galang's Her Wild American Self (1996) features
women's perspectives deriving mainly from the experiences of a U.S.-born generation of
Filipino Americans living in the Midwest. Filipino American narratives published at this
time also include Peter Bacho's novel Cebu (1991), which recounts the story of a Filipino
American priest and issues of identity, religion, and morality, and Cecilia Manguerra
Brainard's Song of Yvonne (1991), which evokes Filipino myth while simultaneously
revealing the horrors of Japanese occupation. Brian Ascalon Roley's novel American Son
(2001) portrays the cultural conflicts of a U.S.-born generation, specifically of two
brothers living in Southern California with their Filipino mother. Other Filipino American
voices in fiction include Gina Apostol (Bibliolepsy, 1997), Tess Uriza Holthe (When the
Elephants Dance, 2002), Lia Relova (Sacred Places, 1997), Sophia G. Romero (Always
Hiding, 1998), Lara Stapleton (The Lowest Blue Flame before Nothing, 1998), and Sam
Tagatac (The New Anak, 1974).
The “Flip” writers of the San Francisco Bay Area presented selections from their poetry
in the anthology Without Names (1985), edited by Al Robles, whose volume Rappin with
Ten Thousand Caribou in the Dark appeared in 1996. Among the poets in Without Names
are Virginia Cerenio (Trespassing Innocence, 1989), Jeff Tagami (October Light, 1987),
Shirley Ancheta, Oscar Peñaranda, and Jaime Jacinto. The ingenuity and vision of Filipino
American poetry is also evident in work from Nick Carbó (El Grupo MacDonald's, 1995;
Secret Asian Man, 2000); Eileen Tabios, whose Beyond Life Sentences (1998) won the
Philippines' National Book Award for poetry; Myrna Peña-Reyes (The River Singing Stone,
1983); Maria Luisa B. Aguilar Cariño (In the Garden of the Three Islands, 1994); Gémino
H. Abad and his daughter Cyan Abad (Father and Daughter: The Figures of Our Speech,
1996); Fatima Lim-Wilson (Crossing the Snow Bridge, 1995); Nerissa S. Balce; Jean
Vengua Gier; Karina Africa-Bolasco; Mila D. Aguilar; Carlos A. Angeles; and Catalina
Page 8 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Cariaga. Many of these poets are published in the anthology Returning a Borrowed
Tongue (1995), edited by Nick Carbó.
Filipino American dramatists have drawn upon tales of immigration, family histories, and
regional connections in their theater pieces. The playwright Jeannie Barroga has written
dozens of plays, including Talk-Story (1990), which portrays the relationship between an
immigrant father and his U.S.-born daughter, and The Bubble-Gum Killers (1999), based
on the true story of a Filipino immigrant gang leader. Han Ong has authored over thirty
plays including Bachelor Rat (1992) and Middle Finger (2001); Ong's first novel, Fixer
Chao, was published in 2001 to critical acclaim, and in 1997 he became the first Filipino
American to be awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Balangiga (2002), by
Ralph B. Peña and the Korean American playwright Sung Rno, exposes the horrors of the
Philippine-American War, and other Filipino American artists bringing Filipino cultural
scenes to the stage are Louella Dizon (Till Voices Wake Us, 1992) and Linda Faigao-Hall
(Americans, 1987).
An extensive body of Filipino American writing is dedicated to exploring gay and lesbian
sexualities. R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's (1995) deploys pidgin English and 1970s
popular cultural references to portray a group of teenagers coming of age in Hawaii; in
his novel The Umbrella Country (1999), Bino A. Realuyo depicts a family tormented by
domestic violence and poverty in the Philippines; and Chea Villanueva's lesbian erotica is
collected in Jessie's Song (1995). Anthologies include Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine
Gay Writing (1994) and Ladlad 2 (1996), both edited by J. Neil, C. Garcia and Danton
Remoto, as well as Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian (1998), edited by Anna Leah
Sarabia.
Page 9 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
mainland. Miss Numé of Japan (1899) by Onoto Watanna is considered by some the first
Asian American novel to be published in the United States; other early Issei literary
figures include Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, a critic, writer, and artist working at the turn of
the century, known particularly for composing haiku in English. Etsu Sugimoto, raised
and educated in Japan, sought to describe her culture for American audiences through
four novels and an autobiographical narrative, A Daughter of the Samurai (1925); poet
Bunichi Kagawa's Hidden Flame was published in 1930.
The internment during World War II of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans raised
questions of national loyalty and identity, particularly for the Nisei (second-generation
Japanese Americans); consequently, internment literature often reflects Japanese
Americans' ambivalence toward the United States. John Okada's No-No Boy (1957)
directly confronts the loyalty oath that Japanese Americans were forced to sign; Monica
Sone's autobiographical account of internment in Minidoka, Idaho, Nisei Daughter (1953),
is also among works that portray life in the camps; and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's
narrative of conditions at Manzanar, California, Farewell to Manzanar (1973, cowritten
with James Houston), was made into a television film in 1976. In 1949 Toshio Mori
published his collection of short stories, Yokohama, California. Although Mori was
incarcerated at Topaz, Utah, his work leans away from internment themes to envision a
community of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans living in the San
Francisco Bay Area of the 1930s. Hisaye Yamamoto, who was interned at Poston, Arizona,
wrote a number of short stories collected in Seventeen Syllables (1988). Her fiction
reflects camp life but delves into other experiences, such as jobs as a reporter and as a
cook in Massachusetts. Mitsuye Yamada's poetry and fiction (Camp Notes, 1976; Desert
Run, 1988) confront crises of racism and sexism during World War II and within the
camps; her work also reaches back to ancestral forms, as in her translations of her
father's senryu poems. In 1982 Yoshiko Uchida published her war and internment
memoirs, Desert Exile (1982), but such literature is not limited to the United States; Joy
Kogawa's novel Obasan (1981) weaves recollections of the camps in Canada.
Japanese American writers drawing upon their parents' lives as immigrants include
Akemi Kikumura (Promises Kept, 1991) and R. A. Sasaki (The Loom and Other Stories,
1991). Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World (1989) portrays a Japanese American
migrant-worker family driving through the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and
David Mas Masumoto's short-story collection Silent Strength (1984) focuses on California
farming communities in the 1930s. In 1988 the journalist and fiction writer Gene Oishi
expanded Asian American investigations of racism to reference discrimination by whites
against African Americans and Native Americans in his book In Search of Hiroshi, and in
1989 Tooru J. Kanazawa's Sushi and Sourdough appeared, an account of Japanese
Americans living in Alaska from the late 1890s through the early 1920s. Lydia Minatoya's
memoir Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey was published in
1992; her first novel, The Strangeness of Beauty (2001), depicts three generations of
Japanese and Japanese American women as they reunite in pre–World War II Japan. The
Page 10 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
filmmaker, poet, playwright, and performance artist David Mura has produced the book
Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991); a multimedia performance titled
Relocations: Images from a Sansei (1990); and a poetry collection, The Colors of Desire
(1995).
Early Japanese Americans rendering literary visions of Hawaiian culture include Shelley
Ota (Upon Their Shoulders, 1951), Margaret Harada (The Sun Shines on the Immigrant,
1960), and Kazuo Miyamoto (Hawaii: End of the Rainbow, 1964). Edward Sakamoto's
plays (In the Alley, 1961; Aloha Las Vegas, 1998) create characters whose use of pidgin
English helps them carve out identities from their positions among several cultures.
Milton Murayama's novels All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) and Plantation Boy (1998)
also experiment with pidgin to present stories of Japanese Americans working and living
on Hawaiian plantations. Sylvia Watanabe's short-story collection Talking to the Dead
(1992) evokes the islands' natural and cultural phenomena, and Juliet S. Kono's volume of
poems Hilo Rains (1988), haunted by Pearl Harbor and internment, sketches family
dynamics with special awe for the maternal. The award-winning poet Garrett Hongo
(Yellow Light, 1982; The River of Heaven, 1988) draws landscapes of Hawaii and the
American West Coast, asking questions regarding identity and place and connecting with
ancestors and their cultural mythos.
The injuries of racism, war, and internment also emerge through Japanese American
poets such as Lawson Fusao Inada, whose jazz-influenced verse reflects the political
sensibilities of the 1960s and 1970s; his collections include Before the War (1971) and
Legends from Camp (1992). Janice Mirikitani's poetry is gathered in Awake in the River
(1978), We, the Dangerous (1995), and her ferocious volume Shedding Silence (1987),
which calls up racism and internment in association with scenes of sexual violence. The
National Book Award–winning poet Ai, born in Arizona of Native American, African
American, and Japanese heritage, presents visions that intertwine the personal and the
political, particularly in terms of racist historical atrocities (Cruelty, 1973; Fate, 1991).
Notable Japanese American poets also include Kimiko Hahn (Mosquito & Ant, 1999),
Geraldine Kudaka (Numerous Avalanches at the Point of Intersection, 1979), James Mitsui
(Crossing the Phantom River, 1978), Yasuo Sasaki (Village Scene/Village Herd, 1986), and
Ronald Tanaka (Shino Suite, 1981).
Japanese American playwrights include Wakako Yamauchi, who was interned at Poston
with Hisaye Yamamoto and whose drama often centers around her childhood
observations of Issei women, as in And the Soul Shall Dance (1973) and The Music
Lessons (1977). Philip Kan Gotanda's plays (Yankee Dawg You Die, 1988; Floating Weeds,
2001) have been produced internationally, and Dwight Okita's The Rainy Season (1996)
portrays the relationship between a mother and her gay son. Velina Hasu Houston's Asa
Ga Kimashita (1981) reflects her experiences as the daughter of an African American
serviceman and a Japanese mother, and the critically acclaimed play Tea (1987) depicts
Japanese American women in Kansas in the 1960s. Other dramatists offering
performances of culture and identity are Amy Hill (Tokyo Bound, 1990), Momoko Ito
Page 11 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
(Gold Watch, 1970), Denise Uyehara (Hiro, 1994), and Karen Tei Yamashita (Godzilla
Comes to Little Tokyo, 1990).
Page 12 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Richard E. Kim's novel The Martyred (1964), set in the North Korean city of Pyongyang
during the Korean War, remains the only Asian American book to be nominated for a
Nobel Prize. Kim's next novel, The Innocent (1968), renders a sympathetic portrayal of
South Korean military officers during a coup, and his Lost Names (1970) recounts his
boyhood in Korea under Japanese occupation. Other immigrant Korean American writers
include Ty Pak, author of two volumes of short stories (Guilt Payment, 1983; Moonbay,
1999) and a novel (Cry Korea Cry, 1999). Sook Nyul Choi, who emigrated to the United
States in 1968, has crafted a number of works for young readers, including Year of
Impossible Goodbyes (1991), which portrays Japanese occupation and Soviet invasion
from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl, and Gathering of Pearls (1994). Ahn Jung-Hyo
originally wrote his novel White Badge (1989) in Korean and then translated the text into
English to present his experiences in the Korean army during the Vietnam War to an
American audience.
Writers who base their art on their immigrant families' experiences include Margaret K.
Pai, whose The Dreams of Two Yi-Min (1989) is an autobiographical account of her
parents' immigration from Korea and their attempts to settle in America. Like Pai's work,
Mary Paik Lee's Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990) describes the
struggles of Lee's family upon arriving in the United States. Clay Walls (1986), a novel by
Ronyoung Kim (a.k.a. Gloria Hahn), shows how U.S.-born children are influenced by their
immigrant parents' culture. Other depictions of young people navigating their parents'
cultures are Marie G. Lee's Finding My Voice (1992) and If It Hadn't Been for Yoon Jun
(1993); Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996), which fictionalizes the
author's experiences as the child of a white American soldier and a Korean mother in a
military camptown in South Korea; and Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (1997), which
Page 13 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
intertwines the narratives of a mother, previously a comfort woman, and her mixed-
ethnicity daughter.
Gary Pak's fiction (The Watcher of Waipuna, 1992; A Ricepaper Airplane, 1998) explores a
multiplicity of ethnicities and sexualities and draws upon Hawaiian plantation history and
narrative traditions such as talk-story and pidgin English. Native Speaker (1995), by
Chang-rae Lee, deals with a Korean American protagonist who feels caught between
cultures; the novel garnered great critical praise, which led to Lee's inclusion in The New
Yorker magazine's list of the twenty best writers under the age of forty. Other Korean
American writers include Leonard Chang (Over the Shoulder, 2000), Susan Choi (The
Foreign Student, 1998), Sun-Won Hwang (The Descendants of Cain, 1997), Peter Hyun
(Man Sei!, 1986), Nancy Kim (Chinhominey's Secret, 1999), Frances Park and Ginger
Park (To Swim across the World, 2001), Therese Park (A Gift of the Emperor, 1997), Mira
Stout (One Thousand Chestnut Trees, 1998), and Mia Yun (House of the Winds, 1998).
The poet Willyce Kim, whose work espouses lesbian Asian American sensibilities replete
with humor and play, has published two volumes of verse, Eating Artichokes (1972) and
Under the Rolling Sky (1976), as well as two novels, Dancer Dawkins and the California
Kid (1985) and Dead Heat (1988). Myung Mi Kim's poetry takes on more somber tones:
Under Flag (1991) portrays immigration, national identity, and the legacy of war; The
Bounty (1996) invokes the maternal; and Dura (1998) wields fragments of haunting
natural imagery. Other writers representing Korean American experiences in verse are
Debra Kang Dean (News of Home, 1998), Chungmi Kim (Selected Poems, 1982), Won Ko
(The Turn of Zero, 1974), Priscilla Lee (Wishbone, 2000), Yearn Hong Choi, and Moon
Hee Kim.
Page 14 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
The term “South Asian American,” like the term “Asian American,” inevitably
homogenizes a group of people who derive from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh,
Nepal, and the Maldive Islands, or who have sometimes arrived in the United States or
Canada by way of East Africa and South America. Early South Asian immigrant laborers
arrived on the American West Coast between 1904 and 1924; their narratives represent
some of the earliest records of South Asian American lives. This literature today often
reflects influences of Western literary traditions as well as South Asian classic and folk
literatures; many South Asian American writers have lived or live now in Canada or
England, demonstrating the vestiges of British colonization also apparent in the
proliferation of English-language South Asian literature.
Prolific among South Asian American writers is Ved (Parkash) Mehta, who came from
India to the United States to attend the School for the Blind in Arkansas. A writer for The
New Yorker, his numerous works include the autobiographical narrative Face to Face
(1957), a novel (Delinquent Chacha, 1966), and a book of short stories (Three Stories of
the Raj, 1986). Raja Rao, whose writing is deeply rooted in Brahmanism and Hinduism,
has published a number of works, including The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a narrative
of the search for spiritual truth, and Cat and Shakespeare (1965), in which a cat
symbolizes karma. Bharati Mukherjee, a fiction writer who immigrated from Calcutta to
Canada and then to the United States, claims identity as an American writer while
acknowledging her roots in Indian culture. Her books The Wife (1975), The Tiger's
Daughter (1972), and Jasmine (1989) allude to the experiences of upper-class women
moving from Calcutta to the United States, their displacement and alienation, and their
disillusionment with the “American Dream.” Bapsi Sidhwa, a Pakistani diasporic novelist,
reveals attention to women's issues and her own childhood exposure to storytelling: The
Crow Eaters (1979), Cracking India (1991), and An American Brat (1993).
Other South Asian American writers have found voice through verse. G. S. Sharat
Chandra began a career as a lawyer and turned instead to poetry; he has published
numerous collections, including Family of Mirrors (1993), which was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize, and Immigrants of Loss (1994), which won nominations for the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Agha Shahid Ali has composed five
volumes of poetry, including In Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979) and A Nostalgist's Map
of America (1991). Ali's work is particularly inscribed by the loss of and longing for home;
his own wanderings from Kashmir, India, to New Delhi and then to the United States are
revealed in his work's vision of regional history and geography. Zulfikar Ghose, from pre-
partition India and Pakistan, moved in 1969 to the United States. His work demonstrates
attention to identity issues such as religious affiliation; his oeuvre includes The Triple
Mirror of the Self (1992) and Veronica and the Góngora Passion (1998).
South Asian American women have also forged writing careers throughout the 1980s and
1990s. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Vine of Desire (2002), the sequel to her novel Sister
of My Heart (1999), continues the narrative of two women's friendship in India and the
United States; her collections of poetry include Black Candle (1991). The poet, fiction
writer, and essayist Meena Alexander has published several volumes of poetry, a novel
Page 15 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
(Nampally Road, 1991), and a memoir (Fault Lines, 1993); her work details the nuances
of women's perspectives of family, migration, and memory. The Pakistani American
literary critic and writer Sara Suleri depicts her relocations between Pakistan, England,
and the United States in the narrative Meatless Days (1989), and Indira Ganesan created
a bildungsroman of a young Indian girl who has an affair with an older American man in
Inheritance (1998). Tanuja Desai Hidier's novel Born Confused (2002) presents the story
of an aspiring woman photographer encountering questions of cultural authenticity
against the backdrop of the New York nightclub scene.
Santha Rama Rau's prolific writing career has yielded cookbooks, travel books, fiction,
and poetry, including the novel The Adventuress (1971) and a theatrical adaptation of E.
M. Forster's A Passage to India. Anita Desai's works are infused with the cultural
divisions that she witnessed and experienced with an Indian father and a German mother,
including In Custody (1984), which was made into a motion picture, and Fasting, Feasting
(1999), which also focuses on women's experiences within Pakistani culture. Vikram
Seth's books of poetry include Mappings (1982) and Three Chinese Poets (1992), and his
critically acclaimed A Suitable Boy (1993), at 1,349 pages, is the longest single-volume
novel published in English. Shashi Tharoor has written several novels, including Riot
(2001), India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), and Show Business (1992), a
rollicking look at the Indian filmmaking industry that was made into the film Bollywood.
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh's novel about a young man seeking a childhood love
against the backdrop of a politically unstable Burma, appeared in 2000.
Not limited to English-language texts, South Asian American literature also encompasses
poets writing in other languages. Panna Naik, whose work has been described as Indian
feminist, has written several volumes of poetry in Gujarati; Usha Nilsson (Priyamvada)
composes poetry in Hindi; and A. K. Ramanujan composes in English and Kannada
(Speaking of Siva, 1973). South Asian American literature is further highlighted by the
works of the poet Indran Amirthanayagam (The Elephants of Reckoning, 1993); the
novelist Boman Desai (The Memory of Elephants, 1988); the memoirist and writer Kartar
Dhillon, whose granddaughter Erika Surat Andersen adapted Dhillon's work for the short
film Turbans (1999); the Pakistani American short-story writer and translator Tahira
Naqvi (Attar of Roses 1995); the novelist Kirin Narayan (Love, Stars, and All That, 1994);
and the playwright Bina Sharif (My Ancestor's House, 1992). South Asian Canadian
writers include Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, 1992), the poet Rienzi Crusz (The
Rain Does Not Know Me Anymore, 1992), and Uma Parameswaran (The Door I Shut
Behind Me, 1990).
Page 16 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
More writing that draws upon experiences of war includes Lan Cao's novel Monkey
Bridge (1997), which portrays the strain within a mother-daughter relationship as the
pair flee Vietnam for Virginia in 1975, and Mong-Lan's Song of the Cicadas (2001), a
collection of poems and drawings that garnered the Juniper Prize. Truong Tran's
collection Placing the Accents (1999) intertwines food and family dynamics with
Vietnamese and French phrases, layers of language that reveal multiple national
influences. Linh Dinh, who also writes as a poet (Drunkard Boxing, 1998) and translator,
returned in 1999 to Vietnam after spending twenty-four years as a refugee in the United
States. Half of the short stories in his collection Fake House (2000) take place in America;
the other half are set in Vietnam. In The Book of Salt (2003), the literary critic and writer
Monique T. D. Truong evokes Paris between the world wars, as seen from the viewpoint of
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas's male Vietnamese cook.
Page 17 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
The performance artist and writer Le thi diem Thuy transforms her memories of Vietnam
into theater in Mua He Do Lua (Red Fiery Summer, 1994), and Vietnamese American
histories and narratives are further traced in the works of Jackie Bong-Wright (Autumn
Cloud, 2001), Nancy Tran Cantrell (Seeds of Hope, 1999), Duong Van Mai Elliott (The
Sacred Willow, 1999), and Mai Nguyen (Little Daisy, 1993). Other Vietnamese American
literary figures include Bao-Long Chu, Maura Donohue, Lan Duong, Elizabeth Gordon, Lai
Thanhha, Andrew Lam, Trinh T. Minh-ha (also an important critic and theorist), Bich Minh
Ngyuen, Minh Duc Nguyen, Dao Strom, and Barbara Tran.
The Burmese American writer Wendy Law-Yone, born in Mandalay and raised in Rangoon,
published her first novel, The Coffin Tree, in 1983 and a second book, Irrawaddy Tango,
in 1993. The Coffin Tree reflects the painful experiences of the narrator and her half-
brother as they flee the volatile situation in Burma after a violent political coup in the
1960s. In America they suffer such discrimination and poverty that the narrator is driven
to a suicide attempt and her brother to death. The Cambodian American writer Loung
Ung's autobiographical account of her childhood, First They Killed My Father (2000),
describes the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge regime under which Ung and her family were
sent to forced labor camps. The book garnered the 2001 Asian Pacific American Award
for Literature in adult nonfiction, and Ung currently continues her vocation as an activist
working to increase awareness of the global consequences of landmines.
Further Reading
Asian Women United of California, eds. Making Waves: An Anthology of Writing by and
about Asian American Women. Boston, 1989. A collection of prose and poetry from Asian
American women; includes historical and sociological essays.
Chan, Jeffery Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. The Big
Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. New
Page 18 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
York, 1991. The follow-up volume to the first; focuses exclusively on Chinese American
and Japanese American writers.
Cheung, King-kok, and Stan Yogi, eds. Asian American Literature: An Annotated
Bibliography. New York, 1988. References to numerous primary and secondary sources
for literary research.
Chin, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong, eds.
Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Literature. Washington, D.C., 1974. A
collection of novel excerpts and short stories by Asian Americans; includes introductory
essays on various literary histories.
Chock, Eric, and Darrell H. Y. Lum, eds. Pake: Writings by Chinese in Hawaii. Honolulu,
1989. A broad selection of writers conveying their various perspectives on Hawaiian
culture.
Fenkl, Heinz Insu, and Walter K. Lew, eds. Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean
American Fiction. Boston, 2001. Comprising book extracts and short fiction from sixteen
noteworthy Korean American writers.
Francia, Luis H., and Eric Gamalinda, eds. Flippin': Filipinos on America. New York, 1996.
Literature from Filipino American artists; includes English-language writers and poets in
the Philippines.
Hara, Marie Murphy, and Nora Okja Keller, eds. Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa
Women in Poetry and Prose. Honolulu, 2000. A collection of writing by women of mixed
Asian and white backgrounds and their representations of their experiences living
between ethnic categories.
Page 19 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Hongo, Garrett, ed. The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America. New York, 1993. Thirty
poets are collected in this anthology, which features contemplations of identity and
culture.
Houston, Velina Hasu, and Roberta Uno, eds. But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise: New Asian
American Plays. Philadelphia, 1997. A selection of recent plays by Asian American
dramatists; includes a foreword by Uno.
Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their
Social Context. Philadelphia, 1982. A seminal literary study of a range of Asian American
writers from Younghill Kang to Carlos Bulosan; historically contextualizes authors and
works.
Lew, Walter, ed. Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry.
New York, 1995. Anthologizes seventy-three poets, descended from a multitude of Asian
regions, writing in traditional and experimental forms.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, and Mayumi Tsutakawa, eds. The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian
American Woman's Anthology. Corvallis, Oreg., 1989. This American Book Award–winning
anthology encompasses poetry, prose, and visual art (including photographs of art pieces)
by Asian American women.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, and Amy Ling, eds. Reading the Literatures of Asian America.
Philadelphia, 1992. A collection of essays discussing issues portrayed in Asian American
literature, such as gender and nationality.
Lim-Hing, Sharon, ed. The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific
Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women. Toronto, 1994. A collection of Asian American and
Asian Canadian lesbian and bisexual women's writing.
Rustomji-Kerns, Roshni. Living in America: Poetry and Fiction by South Asian American
Writers. Boulder, Colo., 1995. A gathering of verse and prose with introductory material
from the editor and Rashmi Sharma.
Srikanth, Rajini, and Esther Y. Iwanaga, eds. Bold Words: A Century of Asian American
Writing. New Brunswick, N.J., 2001. Memoirs, poetry, and fiction from an impressive
range of Asian American writers; includes a general introduction.
Tran, Barbara, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, eds. Watermark: Vietnamese-
American Poetry and Prose. New York, 1998. Represents a group of Vietnamese American
artists writing on themes of war and beyond.
Page 20 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).
Page 21 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (literature.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University
Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy
Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy).