Asian American Identity in Literature

Introduction

Although East Asia has been subjected to the challenges and influences of Western civilization, including pressures of modernization and of capitalism, it did not succumb, as did other regions of Asia, to the colonization efforts of the West. Contacts between East Asia and the West resulted, however, in political, economic, military, and ideological conditions that have contributed to mass emigration, through displacement and recruitment, from China, Japan, and Korea.

The United States of America, emerging as a world power in the late nineteenth century and as an increasingly dominant world power in the twentieth, became one of the main destinations of East Asian emigrants. This historical pattern has resulted in an impressive literature. Asian immigration has followed a pattern of labor shortages followed by legal restrictions. Recruited as laborers during different periods (the Chinese, 1850-1882; the Japanese, 1885-1924; the Koreans, 1903-1905), East Asians often came first to work in the fields of Hawaii or in the western areas of the United States mainland. Many of the Hawaiian Asians later moved to the mainland, but as a result of Asian immigration, Hawaii in the 1990 census was the only state of the union where Asian Americans constituted the majority of the population. Until after World War II, Asian Americans were subjected to many discriminatory practices and laws. Their property rights and civil rights were often limited or violated, and citizenship was often no protection. Dramatic increases in the Asian American population resulted from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and subsequent legislation, which eased certain restrictions on immigration. Late twentieth century Asian immigrants to the United States also found their settlement ameliorated by the improved social climate that resulted from the Civil Rights movement. Asian American identity has always featured great diversity of geographic origins, linguistic and economic backgrounds, and perceptions. There have long been interethnic tensions and alliances among Asian Americans and other groups.

The experience of East Asian immigrants has often been distorted in the literature and mass media of North America. The stereotypes that abound in European American portrayals of Asians dominated the literary world until late in the twentieth century. Stereotypes served the purpose of exclusion and discrimination. In the late 1980’s, many Asians found that even an apparently positive image could create trouble for them. The portrayal of Asians, especially East Asians, as a model minority placed a divisive wedge among different ethnic groups of America.

The points of view of East Asians themselves, rather than those of others, have become available thanks to the writings of Asian American authors. During much of the history of East Asians in North America, their writings and testimonies have been ignored or selectively endorsed and exploited. The success of writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Cynthia Kadohata, and David Henry Hwang, however, has done much to change this situation. The success of such writers, however, does not mean that many East Asian Americans do not have to continue to struggle to define themselves.

Some common themes of literature by Americans of East Asian descent are the hardships of immigrant life, the negative treatments that East Asian immigrants and their descendants have received, struggles to find a place in a country dominated by whites, connections to and conflicts with the past, the problem of coming to terms with being both American and Asian, and critiques and appreciations of American society and culture. These themes have remained popular in the twenty-first century, but there are other, previously rarer, narratives that have become prominent as well, such as tensions within interracial relationships and the ways that the children of such relationships navigate their culturally mixed identities, as seen in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You (2014), and stories of East Asian Americans born in the United States returning, permanently or temporarily, to the country of their parents or grandparents and reconnecting with their roots, such as Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Some works combine these two themes, such as Emily X. R. Pan's The Extraordinary Color of After (2018), whose protagonist, the child of a Taiwanese mother and a white American father, travels to Taiwan after her mother's death to forge her own relationships with the family and culture that her mother rarely spoke of. Another issue that has begun to appear in Asian American literature is that of transracial and transnational adoptions—that is, Asian children, whether born in Asia or in the United States, being adopted by white American parents. Transnational adoptions, particularly, reached their peak in the United States in the late twentieth century, and as the adopted children reached adulthood, their experiences began to be reflected in literature. Works dealing with this theme include Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (2017) and Matthew Salesses's The Hundred-Year Flood (2015).

Anthologies

Anthologies of Asian American literature, which feature a wide perspective on the Asian American experience, include Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), Asian-American Authors (1976), Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets (1983), Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women (1989), and Home to Stay: Asian-American Women’s Fiction (1990).

Bibliography

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Chin, Frank, et al., eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.

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