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“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.”
Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
This excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk is easily one of my favourite passages in literature. In beautiful, evocative imagery, W.E.B. Du Bois renders such a lovely vision of the promise and the rewards of belonging to a literary tradition, unrestricted by the accident of birth. Its expansive imagination precedes T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by almost two decades; and Eliot, unlike Du Bois, is unable to perceive the limits and exclusions of his own understanding of tradition.
I recently read Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), which put me in mind at once of this cherished passage from Du Bois. Nothing could have prepared me for the scope of Kang’s imagination. East Goes West is narrated by a young student, Chungpa Han, who has left Japanese-occupied Korea for the blandishments of the big city in New York and Boston.
The novel breaks brilliantly with expectations of realist autobiography and is similar in style to H.T. Hsiang’s The Hanging in Union Square, published just two years earlier (1935). Cultural allusions, both highbrow and low, stud the flights of fancy and introspection that interleave Chungpa’s picaresque episodes.
I was honestly shocked to find out, when I reached the afterword and then read part of Kang’s earlier book (The Grass Roof [1931]), that critics had long received his writing as autobiography.
Per this profile from Harvard University’s Korean Alumni Biographies Project, “While one can reasonably assume that his novels reflect many of Kang’s actual experiences, the fictional nature of these accounts should make us wary of accepting them as fact (as seen in No Yong Park’s own “autobiography”), and it is also important to not simply reduce the novels as autobiographies, as Walter K. Lew has warned.”
You’d think! That’s a crude misreading of narratives that seemed quite clearly to me to be explicitly fictional—but then, Asian writing in the United States has long been seen as simple autoethnography Or, as Stephen Hong Sohn notes, “when the ‘tour guide function’ collapses the Asian American author with certain narrators and with certain narrative perspectives and then commodifies this collapse, fictionality is imperiled.” If nothing else, I would call it a racist projection that denies the creative capacity of Asian and Asian American authors.
This tendency was particularly glaring with the 1975 Norton edition of The Grass Roof. I didn’t take notes, so I don’t have the exact receipts, but I remember how the editorial foreword cast aspersions on Kang’s grasp of English and snidely pointed out turns of phrase that were taken as evidence of his lack of fluency: using “gisha” to mean “kisaeng”; describing the task of herding oxen as a “cowboy” job; or referring to coming of age in his rural village as a “deb-dance” state of life. Come on, I wanted to scream. In the context of Kang’s other writing, the generous and obvious interpretation is that he was a very canny translator speaking back to his white audience in inter-war America. “Buddhists kill neither mouse, louse, nor cows”—here is a writer with such a sound and playful grasp of the musical quality of language.
Back, however, to East Goes West. Despite its episodic start, the narrative does have a linear plot, and its genre turns out to be… romance, in the classic sense of the word: the frustrated lover barred by racial exclusion and anti-miscegenation laws is the same pining, jilted lover standing outside the barred gates of America.
Esther Kim notes in an essay for The Margins:
Before it becameEast Goes West, Younghill Kang called his second novel “Death of an Exile.” Editor Maxwell Perkins and friend Thomas Wolfe suggested cheerier titles, such as “The Americanizing of Younghill Kang,”“Rebirth in America,”and“Yankee Out of Korea.”But “Death of an Exile” referred literally to one of the novel’s central characters, To Wan Kim, a heartsick Korean poet-scholar who lives in Greenwich Village. A product of a lost era and land, Kim dies alone. He serves as a foil to the idealistic Chungpa Han, who has a foreboding dream of his own death by fire. This was the second, symbolic meaning of the title, what Kang called, “the rebirth in the soul of the hero.”
The theme of exile is paired cleverly and bleakly with the other current that runs through the novel: the question of modernisation. In Kang’s narrative, Chungpa uses the term “the machine age” several times in relation to life in the United States, in contexts both positive and negative.
Modernisation had hovered over social changes to agrarian life in The Grass Roof, and that modernisation culminated with annexation by the Japanese empire, where militant modernisation was marked by resentful mimicry.
(That context makes the epigraph from Du Bois even more apt: Chris Suh’s recent book The Allure of Empire found its starting point in the question of how Du Bois, preoccupied with the notion of the global colour line, could end up supporting the violence of Japanese imperialism in East Asia.)
Having left the reluctantly modernised village, Chungpa finds no escape in the United States: East Goes West contains an essentially modernist character—very reminiscent of “The Metropolis and Modern Life”—in the narrator’s awareness of both the allure and the peril of the machine age that has come to fullness in New York City. He correctly diagnoses the dehumanising, atomised, alienating nature of this age.
Model modernity
Appropriately enough, my other recent read was Christopher T. Fan’s Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility, newly released from Columbia University Press. If I’m not wrong, the term “model modernity” [edit: I originally wrote “model minority” on autopilot, and have corrected the text accordingly] comes from Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945; the monograph, from Princeton University Press, is based on her dissertation, which was actually titled “Model Modernity.”
Fan’s new book is also concerned with modernity and modernisation; it offers the novel and very provocative thesis that what he calls “Northeast Asian American” writing—that is, by Asian American authors with mainland Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese heritage—is essentially concerned with the legacy of the doctrine of modernisation imposed on that region after World War 2. Furthermore, Fan argues, Northeast Asian American authors deliver this creative critique through the use of what he calls “science fictionality.”
Of course, the provocation in Asian American Fiction After 1965 lies in the sweeping nature of Fan’s claim. While it is ambitious, I’m not sure that it can be sustained by a thorough survey of the corpus.
One previous published section identifies Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name (2019) as a possible example of science fictionality, which is a surprising case study, to say the least, as he himself admits. In his book, Fan adds the justification that “I include Chanel Miller, whose mother, a writer, emigrated from China and studied literature, as a limit case for understanding how these forms of economic and racial subjectivity exert a force beyond their empirical boundaries.”
Nonetheless, Fan makes a very valiant attempt at defending his broad position through extensive close readings of what is still a solid range of post-1990 Asian American texts. In the end, my chief quibble is that the whole book feels like a build-up to a final chapter on Taiwanese American literature. That “semiperipheral” literature seems to have been what Fan wanted to talk about all along. When he writes in the closing pages of Asian American Fiction After 1965 that “[t]here is much more at stake here than adding a space for Taiwanese Americans within Asian American studies: deeper questions about the field itself, the kind of knowledge it is capable of producing, and the kind of political force it is capable of projecting,” Fan is setting the stage for the sequel, but a part of me would have liked that to be the debut!
Closer to home—well, more relevant to my own project—Fan’s emphasis on the concept of Northeast Asian American literature both illustrates the importance of regional formations in Asian American literature and leaves open, as he acknowledges, room for the study of Southeast Asian American writing.
To justify his region-making approach, Fan explains:
To think of Asian America as the sum of its parts is to succumb to the “fallacy of disaggregation”—Susan Koshy calls this “catachresis”—and, more seriously, to risk reinscribing U.S. exceptionalism. The transnational turn that Eng and others facilitated through their work in the late 1990s and early 2000s has certainly produced a rich and important body of scholarship, but one that primarily pursues a “disaggregated,” nation-based approach that presumes the coherence of Asian America. What is less clear in this work is what the concrete basis of something larger in scope than a nation-specific account of transnationality might be, short of global capitalism itself. The materiality of Asian America can only be found in either idealist enunciations of “Asian America,” or material histories like the “Northeast Asia” I am describing.
Despite his research scope, Fan actually mentions an embarrassing number of my primary texts from Southeast Asian American literature in his introduction, when he explicitly specifies that “Not all Asian American genealogies are immediately commensurable, though they may seem so.”
Among his exclusions: Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart (“oriented to a different transimperial history (Spain-United States) than the one this book tracks”), and Anthony Veasna So’s short story “Human Development” and Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens (“generally confined to naturalistic details rather than posed as the affective and ideological horizon that each work strives to encompass”).
Tellingly, Fan repeats the partition of Filipino American literature from the rest of Southeast Asian American literature. But the question remains: What could be “the concrete basis of something larger in scope than a nation-specific account of transnationality” for this archive?
What, other than science fictional modernity, holds them together? My tentative response: colonialism; the Cold War; and a multiplicitous minorness.
In other news
Just a quick run-down… I have been very busy ☹ I was a victim of my own success! And over-commitments.
Since my prospectus defence on 6 May, I have:
Recalibrated and re-outlined the argument to assuage the dissertation committee’s many well-founded concerns
Conducted a major rewrite of a 9,000-word revise-and-resubmit manuscript
Did minor (“minor”) revisions on a conditionally accepted journal article (Editor: The revisions are modest; The revisions: a saucy stripper)
Presented Work #2 at a conference, which I had signed up for in case I needed more extrinsic motivation (I did not)
Somehow, the hardest part of doing rewrites is still the cover letters.
In between trying to remember the significant changes and summarising them, and realising you didn’t fully address a comment and bullsh*tting your response, you also need to find a thesaurus to support the grovelling: “O honoured reviewer! I trust you will find satisfactory this humble servant’samendments,” etc. My brain was taxed trying to think of synonyms for “significant” (major, substantial, extensive, serious, comprehensive) and “helpful” (constructive, thoughtful, considered)…
Thanks to the sponsorship of a generous patron of this newsletter, I recently had the opportunity to see Hamilton, though I hastened out of the theatre before the ghost of Toni Morrison could spot me. I have nothing much to say about the musical with regard to Asian American literature, except that it is a little uncomfortable to see a touring production where, like the original run, the Tragically Good Sister is played by the one Asian woman, compared with the Feisty Sister and the slu*tty Sister. 🙃 Otherwise my main takeaway is that this is a musical that embodies the energy described by Ta-Nehisi Coates in “My President Was Black.”
It is a musical that could only have been made in 2015.
(Hamilton probably also worked better as a concept album than a full stage production. The set design is technically superb, and the chorus/ensemble are so talented and wonderfully choreographed, but the main characters suffer from somewhat lacklustre blocking in their set pieces, and the overall translation is unsatisfying. LMM has also hamstrung all successive Hamiltons by writing for his own limited range.)
The last month and a half has been a crash course in Korean diasporic literature—I also read Anna Kim’s The Great Homecoming in translation (originally published in German as Die grosse Heimkehr) and finally finished Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student, which was awfully tedious going until the last fifth and then barrelled headlong towards an ending as undeservedly happy as Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl.
Other recent reads include Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, which spoke to me and my culture and my upbringing so hard that I need to recommend it to anyone who is not familiar with the topic—or to anyone who just wants to sit in a puddle of nostalgia and cultural affirmation.
Plus, Bone author and creative writing teacher Fae Myenne Ng’s memoir Orphan Bachelors is a hard, painful read that walks the reader through immigration history and re-evaluates Chinese exclusion as a form of necropolitical denial of reproductive futurity. It’s very good, and also so intense that I had to listen to Amy Tan’s City Arts & Lectures talk about birdwatching and bird-sketching as a palate cleanser.
Whew… My kind Hamilton sponsor (a seasoned newsletter professional) has told me to write less per email or I’ll lose readers’ attention, so I can already hear her tut-tutting at the length of this update.
Anyway, after my madcap May, I can’t wait to be on vacation in July!
