Defiant Asymmetries: Asian American Literature Without Borders

Dear Colleagues,

In Orphan Bachelors (2023), Fae Myenne Ng traces her heritage—broadly defined—back to the Chinese ancestors who built the Transcontinental Railroad (1863-1869) under racist duress and low wages. “The Chinese made up 90% of the workforce on the Transcontinental Railroad and helped build it ahead of schedule and under budget”, Ng remarks. “This changed the economic landscape of America” [1]. Indeed, the First Transcontinental Railroad slashed continental travel from “months to days” and “helped pave the way for Western migration” [2]. Despite their monumental contribution to the U.S. nation-building and their creating a bridge between the Atlantic and the Pacific, these early Chinese migrants faced a barrage of systemic discrimination and exclusion, including the 1875 Page Act that excluded Chinese women and the 1882 Exclusion Act that excluded all Chinese. The Immigration Act of 1924, which severely limited entrance into the U.S. through a quota system, entirely barred Asian immigration for years to come [3].

Mindful of the history of exclusion perpetrated against peoples of Asian descent, this Special Issue of Literature wishes to break the silence—and silencing—of Asian-Pacific Islander American communities. We take the theme of breaking silence from the title of the first anthology of Asian American poetry, Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets (1983). We take issue, however, with the initial impulse of this and other anthologies to “Claim America,” a rallying cry that galvanizes a surge of Asian American voices, revealing not one but multifarious Asian American sensibilities and imposing new constraints. This initial coalitional attempt has tended to privilege Far-East Asian voices through overrepresentation. Recalling the (in)famous Frank Chin–Maxine Hong Kingston feud, it also has replicated the hegemonic establishment gatekeeping role in prescribing what’s real, authentic Asian American Literature and what’s fake. And this unfair burden of representation imposed on Asian Americans in turn reinforces the mainstream tendency to read Asian American literature as ethnography. Thus, enters this Special Issue’s second theme: defiant racial asymmetries. Coined by Stephen Hong Sohn, “racial asymmetry” refers to attempts by ethnic authors to defy the ethnographic expectations of the reading public by casting central characters who are not in racial/ethnic symmetry with the author’s own.

This Special Issue advances an inclusive Asian Pacific Islander American coalition by defying the narrow parameters of what constitutes Asian American literature. We therefore commit racial asymmetries wherever possible and promote the heretofore silent/silenced voices of writers of Asian extraction. With Viet Thanh Nguyen, we pinpoint Palestine in Asia; with Saree Makdisi and King-Kok Cheung, we confront the degrees of our complicity in a world with no “post” to smugly precede colonialism—no post for Makdisi while genocide rages on in Palestine; and for Cheung, there is a belated reckoning with the attempted linguicide of her mother tongue. Robert Kyriakos Smith explores the racially asymmetrical novel of the Indo-Trinidadian author vs. Naipaul whose central characters are White and Black. Both Hannah Nahm’s and Li Junhao’s articles challenge the color coding by scholars and critics. Brandi Underwood tunes in to the sonic aspects of both Asian American (Karen Tei Yamashita) and non-Asian (Paul Beatty) writers who set their respective novels during the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising that pitted two vulnerable communities—Korean and Black—against each other. Ruqi Li anticipates “Asian American Literature Beyond Borders” by comparing futuristic novels penned by Asian and Black writers.

Our Special Issue begins with Russell Leong’s “Dance Askance” where he implores, “As Asian and Pacific writers, we must become more mindful of the undercurrents and overtures of our intertwined destinies, dreams, and desires as they play out in . . . the U.S. and across and within the Pacific.” This Special Issue is an answer to that call.

References

1. https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/stories-can-migrate-another-landscape-author-lecturer-fae-myenne-ng-speaks-about-her-book.
2. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/04/giving-voice-to-chinese-railroad-workers.
3. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.

Prof. Dr. King-Kok Cheung
Dr. Robert Kyriakos Smith
Dr. Hannah Nahm
Guest Editors

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• heritage
• western migration
• systemic discrimination
• Asian-Pacific Islander American communities
• Asian American literature
• ethnography
• ethnic authors
• Asian American literature beyond borders