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Una Chung
Asian America was invented in a moment of self‐determination among the many calls and cries of the world historical moment of 1968. Yuji Ichioka coined the term “Asian American” for the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at the University of California, Berkeley. This speech act transformed the racist act of “lumping all Asians together” into a new pan‐Asian political identity (Ishizuka 2016: 61–62). As Black Panther member Richard Aoki states, from that point on “We were Asian American.” The Los Angeles Free Press – the major newspaper of the New Left – recognized the birth of Asian America as it declared in 1969, “Yellow Power Arrives!” It was thus as a form of power both political and rhetorical that Asian America appeared (Ishizuka 2016: 61).
The decision to define Asian America as a “political alliance” would forever mark the fate of a literary form that aspired to recuperate the inchoate past as well as invent a new Asian American future. “Aiiieeeee!” was the phoneticized cry that became the name of a literary anthology collected by a group of writers who staged the coming into collective self‐consciousness of “the first generation of Asian‐Americans to be aware of writing within an Asian‐American tradition” (Chin et al. 1974: xxi). Gathering for the first time in San Francisco, after a “140‐year history of Asian America” that had resulted in “fewer than ten works of fiction and poetry,” the editors of Aiiieeeee! declared, “We know each other now. It should never have been otherwise” (Chin et al. 1974: xlviii). This particular moment of Asian American emergence provides a paradoxical reference point for historicizing Asian American literature. The before and after of Asian America signifies more than a fixed historical date. How one reads Asian American literature becomes a way of participating in the cultural activity of shaping American views on its own histories of race and immigration.
Before Asian America, “The Autobiography of Mao Tse‐Tung, as Told to Edgar Snow” in 1937 and Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth (1931) shaped the American public’s perceptions of “real people of China” to resemble a “proxy American presence in China” (Lye 2005: 206, 240). Buck’s novel was so successful in its appeal to Depression‐era American readers that it was even produced as evidence at a Supreme Court hearing on the exclusion of Chinese immigration (Lye 2005: 226). Through their own identification with these characters and the “iteration of the myth of self‐made man,” the American public began to imagine a proto‐Asian American presence. After Asian America, we will have to reconsider those whom Elaine H. Kim calls the “earliest Asian American writers” – the foreign students, scholars, diplomats, merchants – even as she casts doubt on their viability to stand in the ancestral role, for they “were not representative of the general population of Asian Americans” and were “marked by dissociation from the Asian common people, whether in Asia or in the West” (Kim 1982: 24). The complex histories of travel, exile, and migration do not necessarily fall in line with the discourse of political alliance. The “Asian‐American tradition” to which Chin refers in 1974 is thus one that will have to be constructed by his contemporaries (and later authors, critics, and readers) in retrospective manner, yet the reference to a tradition seems to insist that we recognize a preexisting cultural form. This temporal knot is what emerges as the “origin” of Asian American literature, which tenuously holds (and holds off) the challenge of integrating history with the new political consciousness by linking a literary form to a new sense of self. The political awakening of Asian Americans, in this sense, thus provided the occasion for the birth of a literary form. The emergence of a “new subjectivity” might be seen as both defining trait of the form and its most significant material condition.
John Okada’s No‐No Boy, published in 1957, is a novel about young Japanese American men who were imprisoned during World War II due to their two negative answers (no‐no) to the loyalty questionnaire. (An answer of yes‐yes masked the possibility of ending up stateless.) The book had “gone practically unnoticed” until it was discovered in a bookstore in San Francisco in 1970 by Jeff Chan and passed on to Asian America as its founding text in 1974 by the editors of Aiiieeeee!, who dedicated their first Anthology of Asian‐American Writers to John Okada and Louis Chu (Okada 1986: iii). The Aiiieeeee! collective recognized themselves as Asian American not only in the contingent, fraught space of political alliance (“Yellow Power!”) but also with the “belated” discovery of an author whom they had just missed meeting “before ‘Asian‐America,’” as Chin puts it, “when a Jap was just a Jap” (Chin et al. 1974: v). We might read the line – “So John was really there with us, all along” – in the belated temporal structure of a traumatic realization, where the missed threat is the possibility of the non‐birth (or silent death) of Asian America (Caruth 1996). The annihilative dimension of exclusionary immigration laws is brought forth here in ways that suggest the violence of what did not occur. The self‐determination that initiates the birth of an Asian American as new literary subject revolves around the discovery of a particular kind of loss. It is in the moment of becoming Asian American that the editors of Aiiieeeee! look to John Okada and are able to see his existence as a sign of a much greater loss. The first turn to the self – that is, its self‐originating gesture – discovers the lost Asian American (before Asian America) at its origin. Following Judith Butler, we might say that Asian American literary forms emerge through an “act of substitution [that] initiates the ego as a necessary response to or ‘defense’ against loss” (Butler 1997: 69). By becoming Asian American and looking to the past, one sees that there was no absolute guarantee for one’s own “belated” existence. The tenuousness of this political condition joins with the existential terror of ego formation.
To arrive at the calculation of fewer than 10 in their assessment of 140 years of writing by potential ancestors of Asian American literature, the Aiiieeeee! editors deploy a precise type of artistic criteria for demonstrating what is not Asian‐American. The introduction to Aiiieeeee! begins with a negative definition – “Asian‐Americans are not one people” – and goes on to elaborate the sensibilities between two negations – “distinctly not Chinese or Japanese and distinctly not white American” – which join as “exclusively Asian‐American” (Chin et al. 1974: vii). The alliance is conceived through a logic of exclusion rather than any identification or inclusion based on universals of culture, ethnicity, or language. The blank space of the hyphen indicates a site of profound negativity. The editors use the notion of exclusivity to name not a social group but a particular technology of the self, which they identify as the animating force of a literary form:
Our anthology is exclusively Asian‐American. That means Filipino‐, Chinese‐, and Japanese‐Americans, American born and raised, who got their China and Japan from the radio, off the silver screen, from television, out of comic books, from the pushers of white American culture that pictured the yellow man as something that when wounded, sad, or angry, or swearing, or wondering whined, shouted, or screamed ‘aiiieeeee!’ Asian America, so long ignored and forcibly excluded from creative participation in American culture, is wounded, sad, angry, swearing, and wondering, and this is his AIIIEEEEE!!! It is more than a whine, shout, or scream. It is fifty years of our whole voice.
(Chin et al. 1974: vii–viii)
Even as the added exclamation marks seem to borrow the vocal force of yelling “Yellow Power!” Asian Americans speak as a whole voice only to the extent that Asian American texts give readers new capacity to perceive the invisible traces of a historical exclusion experienced as absence and loss.
The editors of Aiiieeeee! describe Okada’s novel as “an act of immaculate conception” rather than what I am here calling a traumatic or tropological turn of subjectivity (Chin et al. 1974: xxxvi). The distinction between immaculate and traumatic may be illuminated by the context of early twentieth‐century controversies on the politics and aesthetics of literary realism and modernism. No‐No Boy nearly succeeds in achieving the difficult formal accomplishments of realism that Georg Lukács valued, one which balances the realm of subjectivity, wherein the lyrical “I” takes flight in abstract potentiality, with objective reality, in which “the concrete potentiality of a particular individual [could] be singled out from the ‘bad infinity’ of purely abstract potentialities, and emerge as the determining potentiality of just this individual at just this phase of his development” (Lukács 2005: 399). The dangers of subjectivism that Lukács saw in modernist literature is akin to what the Aiiieeeee! editors fear in autobiography at the moment of the inception of a new literary movement. Borrowing from Lukács, we might state that the Aiiieeeee! editors reject autobiography for its mimetic naturalism, the “writer’s fatalism,” which indicates a “capitulation before capitalist inhumanity” where the “poetic necessity of the pathological that derives from the prosaic quality of life under capitalism” is simply utilized to reproduce without engendering clarifying vision (Lukács 2005: 402). Lukács was critical of modernist writers’ obsession with the pathological: “These writers are not wholly wrong in believing that psychopathology is their surest refuge; it is the ideological complement of their historical position” (403).
For the editors of Aiiieeeee!, the dangers of Orientalism’s form of abstract potentiality could be countered by the rigors of form. By writing – “writing well” – one could demonstrate something fundamental about one’s existential condition and defuse the “myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality” and prove that “we were neither one nor the other,” nor “were we half and half or more one than the other” (Chin et al. 1974: viii). Writing was seen as a site of completion for the traumatically interrupted process of becoming Asian American. If the loyalty questionnaire doomed one to the fate of a split and therefore potentially treasonous character, then expressing that total social situation in true realist mode would be both means and proof of becoming a whole person. This power of writing is immaculately conceived in that it is not a redeeming product of dominant US culture but arrives despite its own impossibility. Only in the crucible of political awareness can the constant friction with racism spark a new perceptual capacity. Turning neither toward nor away (neither no nor no), one writes to generate vision of this entanglement.
The double helix structure of “no‐no” articulated in Okada’s No‐No Boy could be seen as the fundamental pivot contained within the hyphen of Asian America that makes possible the turn of Asian America into dynamic political, psychic, and aesthetic forms, beyond the fixed polarities of racial logic in US society. Okada’s novel combines realist narration with interior monologue, thus locating literary form as the place for the particular dilemma of the “no‐no boy.” The pressure to embody an impossible reality – “to discover suddenly that being American is a terribly incomplete thing if one’s face is not white” – is captured in the narrative tension between the objective third‐person narrator of realism and the stream of consciousness first‐person monologues of modernism (Okada 1986: 54). Reading the text does not produce the jarring effect of a cognitive split but rather gives us the rhythmic intensity of affective shifts – an amplification from “aiiieee!” to “AIIIEEEEE!!!.” “The style itself is an expression of the multivoiced schizophrenia of the Japanese‐American compressed into an organic whole. It’s crazy, but it’s not madness” (Chin et al. 1974: xxxix). The optimistic editor‐activists of early Asian America hoped for a kind of writing that could tell histories of racism without fixing the author as one of its victims, yet the “immaculate conception” of such an author would continue to provoke an ongoing fascination with where Asian Americans really come from. What makes political awakening possible?
If we accept that the power of Asian American self‐invention has its source in the very nature of self‐reflexivity at the heart of subject formation, following Butler’s insight, then it seems that the autobiographical mode has a particularly intimate link to Asian American literary form. Within the introduction to Aiiieeeee! appears a strange little fragment of an interview of Virginia Lee by Frank Chin, which reveals this paradox. Chin is referred to in third person and quoted as saying, “I don’t want to be measured against the stereotype anymore” (Chin et al. 1974: xxix). He interrupts himself in the midst of establishing his own editorial authority in order to make this personal expression of discomfort. Chin’s assessment of autobiography lacks recognition of the paradoxical nature of his own historical position at the origin of Asian America and the ways in which this subjective turn – initiated by the motivation of a political alliance – will come to shape the contradictions of Asian American literature to come.
It comes as no surprise then that it is to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) more than any other text that the baton has been passed from No‐No Boy as the Asian American text par excellence. Laura Kang insightfully notes that the “autobiographical fixation of the book has been crucial to this canonization by affirming the socially inclusionary capacities of literary studies,” even as the category of “Asian woman” has been deployed by feminist critics in a retroactive fabrication that effectively claims the unnameable marginality of women as “‘the marginalized woman’ among women” (Kang 2002: 63, 45). What was for Chin a distorted representation of Asian Americans becomes for some feminist critics a text with the power of realist critique in its representation of women. As Kang observes, however, the feminist recuperation of Kingston’s texts has at times involved the simultaneous repression of the specificity of Asian American women’s experiences. Kingston herself seems more interested in the notion of ancestors than in individual self‐creation in her use of the autobiographical mode. Far from an idealization of the “immaculate conception” of Asian Americans, Kingston looked deeply into the potential sources of ancestral knowledge that might be culled from the same 140‐year history, and she finds a vast array of cultural objects including martial arts movies, family secrets, fragments and ephemera found in the lived experiences of Asian Americans and within these the entangled stories of trauma, madness, heroism, haunting, fantasy. For Kingston, the question is about “ancestral aid” rather than legitimization. Furthermore, Kingston does not define Asian Americans but repeats the call, addressing them directly in her text: “Chinese‐Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese …” Perhaps it is Kingston who understands best how the linkage between the self‐production of a new identity and a new aesthetic had resulted in the uncanniness of a literary form that would come to be naturalized as ethnic. Kingston is less concerned with birth than with transmission. She experiments with the strangeness of Asian American form by opening a direct channel of address to Asian Americans, that is, a conduit for ethnic subjects newly ushered into an aesthetic form, as if to suggest that it is possible to locate Asian Americans in their “aesthetic existence” within the fabric of a text.
Kingston’s later work more explicitly demonstrates her treatment of literature as a site for collective psychic work: “Healing. I avoid that New Age word. It implies that something’s wrong, that they’re unwell, and need fixing” (Shulman 2003). Rather than the trope of healing, she reveals a more matter‐of‐fact commitment to engaging loss in the long years after her third novel was published in 1989. Her fourth novel, The Fourth Book of Peace, was lost in the Oakland fires of 1991 and after many difficult years of attempts at recovery, she published The Fifth Book of Peace in 2003. A review in the New York Times comments that it is surprising to see Kingston’s “failure to integrate the sections of the new book” – the 172 new pages – with the 156 lost ones (Shulman 2003). However, it is not integration but a different mode of literary recovery, operating at simultaneously spiritual and political registers, that Kingston utilizes in addressing loss, ambivalence, and melancholy. In Art and Artist (1932), Otto Rank reflected on the fact that while psychology had made much use of the artist as source of information it had not provided him with a full psychological understanding of his own artistic process. Kingston’s longtime attentiveness to the entanglement of creativity and neurosis, from The Woman Warrior to her most recent work, may be the singular gift of Kingston’s writing – a literary form that indeed offers writers the psychology of their own artistic process.
Asian American literature has continued to reveal the loss that occurs with the inception of a hyphenated identity. We might call this loss – borrowing from Saidiya Hartman – “lose your mother” (Hartman 2007). In Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), a novel about the relocation of Japanese‐Canadians to the interior of Canada during World War II, the protagonist’s mother hides the fact that she had survived the bombing of Nagasaki. The girl grows up believing that her mother is dead, as the mother chooses a permanent second exile under the pretense of death rather than return disabled and disfigured to Canada. The injunction “lose your mother” is a prohibition from recognizing what one has lost, resulting in a perpetual haunting. The lost mother is not merely biological mother but resembles the primordial loss constitutive of ego‐formation. Butler explains, “there is a part of the individual that cannot successfully pass into the subject, an element of pre‐ideological and pre‐subjective material prima that comes to haunt subjectivity once it is constituted as such” (Butler 1997: 120). If the emergence of modern Asian America resembles subject‐formation, then the haunting of the ego by what it must first lose seems also to describe the social life of ethnic subjects. It is not a matter of what the hyphenated subject chooses as second home but rather the compulsory loss that disappears from view once an ethnic subject appears on the scene. The kernel of the self around which the turn to the self revolves is an empty place inhabited by two kinds of losses. The double negation (no‐no) that was intended to be transformed into protection for the Asian American subject through the cry of “Yellow Power!” turns into a double injunction/prohibition: lose Asia, lose (white) America. As in Kogawa’s novel, the situation of relocated Japanese‐Canadians may be politicized as a Canadian problem worthy of general attention, but the mother lost in Japan under the sign of the bomb is difficult to acknowledge as an absent source of Asian American cultural tradition. Unlike earlier waves of immigrants who eventually passed (however incompletely) into whiteness, such as Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, Asians were abruptly asked to turn into Asian Americans at the historical moment of the 1960s, due to a recognition that 140 years of immigration had had little to do with assimilation and much to do with the contradictions of race in North America. The birth of Asian America cannot help but carry the weight of those embryonic 140 years as a wordless loss which can only be grieved surreptitiously in the ambivalence of the cry, AIIIEEEEE!!!. “[T]here is no ambivalence without loss as the verdict of sociality, one that leaves the trace of its turn at the scene of one’s emergence” (Butler 1997: 198).
Asia was not to be one of the mythic mothers of American immigrant culture; rather the political alliance that grew out of 140 years of life under exclusion in the United States was to be claimed as our Asian American tradition. It was a radically new idea born of 1968: a purely political existence embodied as a total subjective form. Not surprisingly, this complex idea of Asian America did not easily find resonance in the groundswell of American culture. Furthermore, the effects of changing immigration laws and forces of globalization would occlude this important originary moment of Asian America, even as its formal designation as a demographic and sociological category (Americans of Asian origin) would become more common in everyday language.
The hyphen would eventually be dropped from “Asian‐American” and a tactic of modulation would transform into the space of “Asian America” as it acquired its own cultural territory. With frequent use, the term gained a tenuous hold on the common lexicon as a convoluted history of absence, exclusion, and loss receded from view. The Chicago Manual of Style states:
Whether terms such as African American, Italian American, Chinese American, and the like should be spelled open or hyphenated has been the subject of considerable controversy, the hyphen being regarded by some as suggestive of bias. Chicago doubts that hyphenation represents bias, but since the hyphen does not aid comprehension in such terms as those mentioned above, it may be omitted unless a particular publisher requires it. (16th ed. 8.38)
The hope of Aiiieeeee! editors that Asian American writers would offer the world an aesthetic that excludes racism has instead produced its own seemingly innocuous double: a style manual that would guide us in avoiding “bias” in our syntax. For the editors of Aiiieeeee!, on the other hand, the possibility of excluding racism from language was to be demonstrated by the lucidity of a realist style that could capture one’s own intact capacity to write well, because the deformations wrought by racism could be maintained at a sufficient distance to allow for their communicability as human experience. Note how the editors of Aiiieeeee! describe the literary accomplishments of Hisaye Yamamoto: “Instead of crudely illuminating the ignorance of the old man from Japan, she illuminates a whole linguistic process” (Chin et al. 1974: 176–177). In light of writing such as Yamamoto’s, Aiiieeeee! dreams of a new language for Asian America. “A new language is not merely new letters that form new words. It brings with it a brand‐new and surprisingly fresh way of looking at things around you, a new childhood, a rebirth whether you like it or not, a new pair of eyes” (Chin et al. 1974: lii). However, “from these beginnings,” as Susan Koshy observes from a later vantage point, “the term ‘Asian American’ has passed into academic and bureaucratic, and thence into popular usage” (Koshy 1996: 321). A flicker of Chicago’s institutional “doubt” is all that appears to disrupt the long passage of waiting for a new world order whose reality was to have been presaged by the opening of new eyes. Yamamoto herself may have sensed the threat of yet another deferral, as the very storytelling of Asian Americans serves merely to pass the time of detention and suspension of political right. In a story about the US detention camps during World War II, Yamamoto writes: “Well, if Miss Sasagawara was not one to speak to, she was certainly one to speak of, and she came up quite often as topic for the endless conversations which helped along the monotonous days” (Yamamoto 1988: 22).
At the heart of “no‐no” was a demand for real dialogue. Mikhail Bakhtin distinguishes the “subject of a deeply serious, real dialogic mode of address” from the “subject of a rhetorically performed or conventionally literary one” (Bakhtin 1984: 63). The crux lies in a “profound consciousness of their own unfinalizability and indeterminancy” (59). Bakhtin writes: “A man never coincides with himself. One cannot apply to him the formula of identity A=A. […] the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non‐coincidence between a man and himself” (59). Thus he “always seeks to destroy that framework of other people’s words about him that might finalize and deaden him” (59). This conflict does not lead to a solitary subjectivism but rather a necessary polyphony. “He cannot merge completely with himself in a unified monologic voice simply by leaving the other’s voice entirely outside himself […] for […] his voice must also perform the function of surrogate for the other person” (235). In this sense, Asian American discourse, even in its self‐reflexive mode, even within autobiography, can never truly be a monologic voice. The dialogue that embroils Asian America involves a serious contestation of the origins of America and challenges the simple notion that the ethnic wields the power of “ultimate semantic authority” granted by self‐reflexivity alone.
In 1941 Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, wrote an editorial entitled “The American Century,” in which, as Cynthia Tolentino points out, he “placed a corps of ‘engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators’ at the heart of his vision of the twentieth century as a period of U.S. global dominance” (Tolentino 2009: 49). Luce’s vision of an emergent globally oriented technocracy had a specific purpose for a subjective form linking Asia and America. The “elevation of a liberal discourse on race helped to legitimate the critical turn to a professional citizen‐subject in U.S. cultural politics” and inadvertently provided Carlos Bulosan with a means of resignifying the “Filipino race problem” into the making of one of “America’s experts” (Tolentino 2009: 68). Bulosan’s own narrative about becoming an author – both represented in and actualized by the publication of his book America Is in the Heart – does not express “liberal humanist epiphany” but rather demonstrates “how he adopted a specific set of knowledge practices that enable him to analyze a situation in which he had before been only the object” (Tolentino 2009: 59). The annexation of the Philippines and of Hawaii in 1898 retrospectively might even come to appear as mere phantasms of an Asian American past in the making. In the postwar period, James A. Michener saw Hawaiian locals as a “unique medium of communication and understanding with Asiatic people,” who would facilitate the conceptualization of Asia as an “exploitable resource.” The resignification of Asian Americans rationalizes American imperialism as the development of a globally oriented technocracy. If the self‐determination of Asian America is truly an invention at its core – the condition of its subjectivity born within the Nietzschean “condition of the possibility of fiction, fabrication, and transfiguration” – then it is one that is necessarily caught up in American conventions of self‐invention and its vision of global dominance (Butler 1997: 67).
Grasping the double strands of the Asian American paradox, we could reach even further into the past to revisit Ernest Fenollosa in 1898. According to Haun Saussey, Fenollosa’s momentous article, “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” offered a “curious mixture: a repudiation of racism together with an endorsement of empire, a setting of China at the center of future world history and an unquestioning adherence to Japanese policy goals. And yet these positions make up a possible coherent attitude, the American conjuncture of 1898 serving to mediate the contradictions” (Fenollosa and Pound 2008: 29). The conjuncture of 1898 exerts spectral presence in the early struggle over canonization of Asian American literature, which would later be critiqued by scholars of “other Asias” (Spivak 2008). Saussey notes that Fenollosa’s “text shifts from geopolitics to spiritual struggle at just the point where a concrete political initiative would have been expected” (Fenollosa and Pound 2008: 27). Even as we peek over Fenollosa’s shoulders – “I know you are pining for hieroglyphs and ideographs” – we remember how narrowly Asian Americans saved the stone walls of Angel Island’s detention center on which poetry had been engraved in Chinese characters by the hands of early twentieth‐century detainees en route to be exploited as the labor force for building the infrastructure of the “American Century.” Orientalist fantasy and Asian American historical recovery meet in this haunted place.
Gayatri Spivak finds the notion of the aesthetic indispensable for it is what allows “an attempt at the bridging of the gap, always in a mode of uncertainty and anteriority” (Spivak 2008: 230). The gap allows for the non‐coincidence fundamental to dialogue. The force of social contestation emerges in the differential spacing that gaps allow. Asian American form as real dialogue raises a new problem of legibility in that the space of self‐reflexivity itself is posed as the site for dialogue. Self‐modulation must then be understood as dialogic, in this context, for the tropological emergence of Asian America was always a paradoxical weaving together of different political visions (the American Century versus the political alliance of Yellow Power).
Around the time that Asian Americans were protesting the American/Vietnam War and writing down the cry of becoming – “AIIIEEEEE!” – South Vietnamese were leaving Vietnam to disappear into a transitional gap, potentially reappearing as Asian Americans. Would their particular form of the slash prove to be capturable by the Asian‐American hyphen? At a reading of her novel The Lotus and the Storm (2014) at the Asian American Writers Workshop in 2014, Lan Cao, who left Saigon – before it was Ho Chi Minh City – by air in 1975 and is currently a law professor in New York, will say that she picked up the writer’s pen for the first time since 1997 because of the pressing need for there to be more writing about wars by women in general and a novel about the American/Vietnam War in particular by a South Vietnamese woman. Each chapter of Cao’s novel has a title, a character’s name, and one or two dates in years (1945, 1963–1978, 2006). This structure mobilizes a narrative that passes through dislocations in time and space as well as dissociations in personality structure. A complex series of betrayals and attachments lead to the differential losses of an American soldier, a South Vietnamese army general father, a Viet Cong uncle, a mother, a sister, a bird, a self. What emerges as narrative voice is a twining of lotus and storm, Mai/Bao, which must be understood as much more than an internally split self, for it is the articulation of a capacity for endlessly crossing back and forth in geographic and historical space that cannot be captured as the simple past of an Asian American.
I am keenly aware that time is passing. I see myself and I see my child, sometimes as Mai, sometimes as Bao, and sometimes as both at the same time, if that is possible. It doesn’t matter who is out and who is in during these visits. There are ghosts inside each of them. They both have devotions to a world that lives somewhere among the headstones, that floats somewhere under the waters of the South China Sea.
(Cao 2014: 310)
Between Asia and America is Cao’s spectral world of the dead and a floating place that moves beneath failed attempts at escape and oceanic crossings. This is not only before but outside Asian America. For a moment in the midst of her reading in 2014, Lan Cao interrupted herself with several minutes of heaving silent tears that broke out across the body in muscular contractions too large for the subtle vibrations of speech to ride. The words of the text could not be heard during those moments that the audience silently watched the traces of words passing through body. Will the writing of Asian America realize the incompleteness of social being and bring it to fruition in the sphere of art? Or will this new literary form continue to extend the transition of that “terribly incomplete thing” that, as transition, can only end with its own vanishing in the dark of night, an untimely death, that we call the very end of war?
The years traversed within Lan Cao’s novel are difficult to reconcile within the historical framework of Asian American literature. In 1996, Susan Koshy incisively addresses the state of the nation of Asian America in terms of the “radical demographic shifts produced […] by the 1965 immigration laws […] that cannot easily be contained within the models of essentialized or pluralized ethnic identity” (Koshy 1996: 315). “Moreover, we have entered a transnational era where ethnicity is increasingly produced at multiple local and global sites rather than, as before, within the parameters of the nation‐state. This dispersal of ethnic identity has been intensified, in the case of Americans of Asian origin, by dramatic geopolitical realignments under way in the Pacific” (Koshy 1996: 315–316). Gayatri Spivak speaks with cautious gravity of the “death of a discipline,” referring to comparative literature in 2003. The vanishing of South Vietnam is in danger of being forgotten or even celebrated by both sides of a Cold War divide precisely as the end of war. Yet where, we must ask, can we remember not only the lives of human beings but of a moment of national identity that gave meaning to those lives, without hypostatizing its necessarily ephemeral historical status as our transition? Where, that is, except within the very impossible rubric of Asian American literature itself, which must, as Koshy argues, rehearse “the catachrestic status” of its own formation (Koshy 1996: 342)?
Koshy thinks of the intervening years since the self‐inception of Asian American literature as a time of “deferred questions about its founding premises” (Koshy 1996: 351). We might also think again in Butler’s terms that “the ego is a poor substitute for the lost object, and its failure to substitute in a way that satisfies (that is, to overcome its status as a substitution), leads to the ambivalence that distinguishes melancholia. The turn from the object to the ego can never quite be accomplished” (Butler 1997: 169). The aesthetic and rhetorical form of the subject of Asian America cannot be completed. The leaders of AAPA seem to intuit this paradox of tropological becoming, as they point out in their newsletter of 1969: “AAPA is only a transition for developing our own social identity” (Ishizuka 2016: 61). If Ishizuka’s cultural history of the Asian American movement began with a gloriously ambiguous origin (somewhere between 1882 and 1968), then her narrative ends rather more melancholically with a “winding down in 1976” (Ishizuka 2016: 225).
The editors of Aiiieeeee! had only claimed “[f]ewer than ten” literary ancestors in defiance of a demographic definition of Asian American. However, their tactics of exclusion will fail to ward off an even greater loss with the coming ideology of inclusion. The emergence of a multicultural form of ethnic literature, based on a naturalized notion of ethnicity, will in many ways supplant the rigors of political alliance. The specificity of an Asian American literary form will broaden into a sociological rubric. Many artists will in fact resist the very category of ethnic in relation to artist for they rightfully hear the echo of the threat of exclusion in the very terms of inclusion, yet that refusal may come with its own cost in the avoidance of one of the primary art ideologies of the late twentieth century. If in 1968 it had seemed clear that Asian Americans had to be invented, then the problem that comes to the fore by the end of the twentieth century is that of multiculturalism which manages rather than represses polyphony without fostering true dialogue. The protocol of multiculturalism merely interpellates cultural ambassadors. Furthermore, social life increasingly demands a constant performance of self‐identity through mechanisms of reflexivity inherent in surveillance and endless processes of authentication and security.
Caught in the throes of the complexities and contradictions of the transition of the postcolonial world into global capitalism, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) opens explosively onto a scene of mid‐air dual becoming of angel and devil – the former soaring into the idealism of global pop media consumer nationalism and the latter sinking to the ground of territorial borders and violent migration patrol. The first reminds us of the foreclosure of attachment to a possible ancestral land which one never lost because one never belonged to earth, and the second hits hard as we fall, again, into a denial of citizenship marked by the structural inequities of racialization whose constant demand is for us to embody revolt by repeatedly becoming the enemy. Rushdie gives us in 1988 a dizzying vision of the consumer nationalist and biopolitical options for cultural belonging offered to individuals as a fight/flight response to the panic of a swiftly tilting planet.
Inderpal Grewal reminds us in timely fashion that “9/11 does not mark a break, but a fulfillment of some of the directions taken by neoliberal American nationalism, in particular the articulation of a consumer nationalism, the link between geopolitics and biopolitics, and the changing and uneven gendered, racial, and multicultural subjects produced within transnational connectivities” (Grewal 2005: 197). In the face of such world historical forces, Amitava Kumar suggests the necessary fiction of studying World literature as World Bank literature in order to “work toward another, alternative globalization” by forging new connections with “new coalitions and emergent subjectivities” (Kumar 2003: xxiii). Kumar hears the dialogic voice of World more clearly from within World Bank, which thus provides a more literary approach to literature than the conventional affordances of cosmopolitan readership. As Spivak insists: “My call for integrative pedagogy must not be confused with these lines of trade and finance, haphazardly opposed by global social movements, although they designify a major arena of cultural transformation” (Spivak 2008: 231). With the redrawing of biopolitical borders and the erasing of old lines, the Asian American will no longer know where to cross into being.
Perhaps it is in 1992, with the Los Angeles Uprising that arose in response to the failures of justice and US state governance which the Rodney King verdict signaled, that something singularly Asian American – poised to take flight since 1968 – dies. In her attempt to write a response to US media’s “using Korean Americans and tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans to divert attention from the roots of racial violence in the U.S.,” Elaine H. Kim writes to the “My Turn” section of Newsweek magazine. In reply, she receives a comment from the editor, which she describes thus: “he told me my writing was not crisp enough and that as an experienced journalist, he could help me out” (Gooding‐Williams 1993: 222, 220). The esteemed Asian American scholar is rejected as an inadequate writer in need of assistance to enter the US public sphere and is returned in 1992 to Okada’s insight of 1957 – “being American is a terribly incomplete thing.” She wonders, in the suspension of this new iteration of no‐no, “Perhaps the legacy is not one carried across oceans and continents but one assumed immediately upon arrival, which requires that Korean Americans take on this country’s legacy of five centuries of racial violence and inequality, of divide and rule, of privilege for the rich and oppression of the poor” (Gooding‐Williams 1993: 220). US society’s inability to mourn and reckon with its own centuries of violence is haunted by many itinerant ghosts who appear again and again on its shores.
In Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), Anna Deveare Smith assembles a diverse set of testimonials from a wide cast of people situated at different proximities to the LA Uprising (from the streets of East/Central Los Angeles to the Beverly Hills Hotel) and delivers each person’s voice herself. She offers us her own individual woman’s body as a medium for collective haunting, performing the power of the sound that comes before the word. The performance is about presence. She changes costumes before us to make us see the surface of the character change that also includes gesture and voice. We see again and again that it is she who shows up for everyone there. The same person has stayed with the calamity and made possible any number of individuals to appear and give voice. Smith delivers one line phonetically in Korean, which disturbs some people, and in fact it is disturbing to hear a person’s words as a cry, an animal sound, a bare body, rather than social discourse in a communicative realm. Anne Cheng suggests that “the discomfort of Smith’s art is being made to watch conflicted views and to view them as all occupying one space: one stage and one body,” thus “allegorizing the impossibility of the democratic body politics” (Cheng 2001: 189). Cheng continues, “Many people have called her work ‘healing’; I would say it is the opposite. Smith’s art reveals all that cannot be healed, all that cannot be made commensurate, all that must remain complicit yet disunited” (189–190). In order to deliver phonetically Mrs. Young‐Soon Han’s Korean words (which interrupt her testimony at a moment when an English word does not come to mind), Smith must interrupt her own language and voice in order to allow a gap for the untranslated transmission of “the fire is re‐igniting.” This disruption is where Asian America reappears as transient event.
In contrast to the desire for total exclusion of racism, there may have to be instead a different form of wholeness or what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the Open: “if the whole is not giveable it is because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure” (Deleuze 1997: 9). Asian American endurance battles the deathly prospect of perpetual transition. To solidify Asian American identity is to bind oneself to an unending transition. Rather than transition, we might think of the Open as indeterminacy and non‐coincidence, which are also the ground for real dialogue. Dialogue may be more usefully conceptualized not as an exchange between two fixed positions but as the passage between states (voices) within a single body. Perhaps the Open is what truly lies in the middle of no‐no.
Will Asian America have to let go its newly won hold on territory in the American century and return spectral conglomerates of nation‐states back to continents and planetary plates? The challenge to write “the intimacies of four continents” finds luminous life in the literary language of Amitav Ghosh’s magisterial Ibis Trilogy (Lowe 2015). The Opium Wars provide the plot for narrating the intimacy of four continents, while a doubly transoceanic ship that crosses both Atlantic and Pacific gives name to the trilogy, Ibis. Ghosh takes on a literary project much more difficult than that of working with multiple languages through the mode of translation, which is also a part of his work. He envisions the ephemeral constellation of the spoken language of the Lascars – compiled and imagined out of “various creoles, pidgins and slangs that have arisen in India and the Asian seaports since the 18th century,” “colonial‐era dictionaries and lexicons for nautical speech, barrack‐room slang and all sorts of thieves’ and whores’ argot” and Sir Henry Yule’s Hobson‐Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo‐Indian Words and Phrases (1886) – and transmits it phonetically into English (Buchan 2008). What we are hearing as we read are the movements of tide and land, the quick tilting of a ship, the lost syllables of a man thrown overboard, the soil entering floral perfume breathed in by travelers across many lands. The complexities of the language and how Ghosh caught sound of it and transmitted it into writing cannot be accounted for solely through the textual comparison of minor languages. The very becoming‐minor of language, sociality, travel are all bought forth in the writing of Ibis.
Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines (1993) also travels across four continents while invoking a different kind of intimacy – not simply through an autobiographical mode but specifically through the rigors of an embodied style of writing which forces our encounter with her own body:
I cannot write when I sit square, athwart my body, in a simple chair. It is only when I start to lift myself up that it flows. Sometimes I fear that this book of childhood will be a series of field notes. My notebook is littered with scribbled prefatory notes: M4, M66, A train, B train, C train. Each of them moving vehicles, buses, trains in which I write, black tracks, indecipherable on paper.
I write as I enter the subway. The train jerks away from the platform and starts its race in darkness. On thoroughfares I hold my notebook and pen close to me as I scribble and start to cross. At Thirty‐fifth and Fifth, right in front of the building where I teach, I am almost knocked down by some passing bicycles. Three of them come straight out of the mist.
(Alexander 1993: 235)
The trope of the turn at the heart of Asian America’s self‐invention is thus modulated into the endless dance of writing inseparable from living itself, from the embodied and sensual modulation of the writing body. Migration is not to be captured once and for all as a migrant’s text but activated and actualized as life beyond biopolitical management. As we attempt to cross four continents in a single lifetime and across difficult historical borders – such as 1842, 1945, 1968, 1978, 1992, 2001 – without the prosthetic of the hyphen and into volatile new social spaces, it seems that we are required to enter discourses in much more bodily form. This body is not the possessive individualism conferred by US citizenship but a coming to terms with the potentiality of Asian America as concrete presence of sensation, sensuous knowledge, and sensual writing. This turn to the affective must be situated within the world‐historical forces of transformations of labor that have overtaken the ambitions of the “American Century.”
Acceleration has unleashed the Asian American double helix with the “whiplash of a furious charioteer” and “however terrible this line may be, it is a line of life that can no longer be gauged by relations between forces, one that carries man beyond terror” (Deleuze 1986: 122). As much as the editors of Aiiieeeee! had wished to banish the specter of the Orient, it had too long been the strange unspeaking companion of the Asian American, whose future appearance it presaged in hauntological form. Unconnected to real ontological status yet a vital part of American discourse throughout the twentieth century and much earlier in other parts of the world, Orientalism manifested its own non‐organic life through its capacity to attract the lenses of so many machines of vision, reproduction, and circulation. Edward Said has repeated many times that the “methodological failures of Orientalism cannot be accounted for […] by saying that the real Orient is different from Orientalist portraits of it” (Said 1994: 322). It is the “simple copula is” that we must watch. What he does claim is “the right to some emotional force, the right to be moved, angered, surprised, and even delighted” at this inhuman response to human experience (Said 1994: 340). The force of non‐organic life that Orientalism seems to hold cannot simply be accounted for through a series of negations but only captured and reutilized as a part of the force of fabrication that enabled Asian America’s own “immaculate conception.”
Orientalism belongs to the machine and increasingly to the machinic assemblage of hyper‐mediated societies where Orientalism thrives, and as such, is itself an inextricable part of the figural coming into being of the Ethnic. If it is an artist of subsumption that the world needs today, it may have any number of faces at a time when the human has acquired so many new names – world, planetary, ecological, posthuman, transhuman, machinic, anime, affect, and countless others – all seeking the “whatever‐singularity” (“being such that it always matters”) that is at the heart of what is sought in human experience in all their “incommensurable temporal modalities” (Butler 1997: 14). It is a new appearance of the East – beyond East and West – without literal referent and more luminous than a ghost, a master of joining the abstract potentiality of heaven with the concrete reality of earth, a sovereign of a land lying East by East that we await in the afterlife of Asian America.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 16 (THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT AND THE RACIAL DIVIDE).