Asian American Literature and Immigration

DEFINITION: Fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and other works written in English by Asian immigrants and Americans of Asian ancestry

SIGNIFICANCE: Through their writing, Asian American authors portrayed the Asian immigrant experience as seen by themselves, rather than through the eyes of American mainstream press and literature. Their early works focused strongly on the Asian American family and communal adaptations to life in America. As the Asian American community matured, its writers moved beyond the immediate immigrant experience, often featuring Asian American characters of many different ethnic backgrounds and often retaining a focus on Asia.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese American immigrants were the first Asian Americans to write about their experience in English. Their primary impulse was to combat negative racist stereotypes held about the Chinese by the popular American press and literature of the day. In his autobiography, When I Was a Boy in China (1887), Yan Phou Leewho converted to Christianity and immigrated to the United States to study from 1872 to 1875sought to show that education could turn a young Chinese into a person suitable to fully participate in American society. A similar goal inspired Yung Wing’s autobiography, My Life in China and America (1909).

Early Asian American Literature

The Chinese American author Edith Maude Eatonwho wrote under the pen name of Sui Sin Farwas the first Asian American writer fiercely sympathetic to Chinese immigrants in Canada and the United Statesthe two countries where she lived after her birth in England. Her short stories and articlesfirst published in 1896painted an accurate picture of the struggles and aspirations of the first Chinese immigrants in America who worked hard, menial jobs, lived in Chinatown enclaves, and endured racist taunts and violence. Her last collection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), was rediscovered and republished in 1995.

Eaton’s younger sisterWinnifred Eatonchose a different path. Adopting the Japanese-sounding pen name of “Onoto Watanna,” she entertained readers with lighthearted and sometimes risqué romance novels and short stories with Japanese American themeswithout focusing on the darker sides of the immigrant experience. From her first novelMrs. Nume of Japan (1899) her greatest bestsellerTama (1910)Onoto Watanna’s Asian-themed fiction proved popular. During the 1920s, she turned to writing screenplays in New York City. After returning to Canada in 1932, she worked as a dramatist until her death in 1954.

EtsuInagaki Sugimoto’s autobiographyA Daughter of the Samurai (1925)introduced her readers to the Japanese American immigrant experience, albeit from an upper-class point of view. Sugimoto’s subsequent fiction chronicled her return to Japan with her two daughters, followed by a return to America for her children’s educationa move not uncommon among some Japanese Americans.

Younghill Kang’s The Grass Roof (1931) was well received, in part because immigration to America was the goal of the novel’s Korean protagonist. As the American public came to sympathize with China in its conflict with Japan, Lin Yutang’s work My Country and My People (1935) became a bestseller. Even H.T. Tsiang’s critical novel And China Has Hands (1936)about the oppressed life of a Chinese laundrymansaw publication.

Mainstream American taste for Asian American literature turned sour when Younghill Kang’s second novelEast Goes West (1937) critical look at European American society from an educated Korean American immigrant’s point of view. Decades later, the work was considered an early Asian American classic.

World War II and the 1950s

Japan’s attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, not only brought America into World War II, but it also brought decisive changes for the Asian American community that Asian American writers reflected in their literature. Pro-Chinese sentiment led to the publication and success of Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1943)a story about a Chinese American father and son published during the same year that US Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945, revised 1950) depicted the daughter of immigrant parents finding her place within American society.

Lowe and Wong’s literary popularity paved the way for the success of Chin Yang Lee’s Flower Drum Song (1957)an insider’s humorous look at San Francisco’s Chinatown. The novel was also adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 1958, followed by a 1961 film version that featured an almost exclusively Asian American castled by Nancy Kwan. Later Asian American critics faulted Chinese American writers of this era for being too accommodating to mainstream tastes, but most critics eventually acknowledged that these early works provided a non-stereotypical view of Asian American life as written by Asian Americans themselves.

Louis Chu’s bitter Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) presented a starkly realistic but sympathetic look at the prewar, urban bachelor Chinese American immigrant community. Chu’s novel initially failed to win a large mainstream readership before becoming a classic.

Japanese American literature was deeply affected by the internment in remote relocation camps of Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast from early 1942 until 1945. This infamous political event, for which the United States formally apologized many years later, became a key subject of Japanese American literature. It also delayed the publication of Toshio Mori’s short-story collection Yokohama, California, from 1942 to 1949. Mori’s stories perceptively and gently chronicle mostly prewar Japanese American life in rural California.

The internment camp experience also influenced the work of Hisaye Yamamoto, who began to publish in 1948. Her best stories were republished in Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1988). The impact of the camp experience on young Japanese American women was also rendered in Shelley Ota’s Upon Their Shoulders (1951) and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953). John Okada’s novel No-No Boy (1957) compared the equally bitter fate of two Japanese American men who said either “no” or “yes” to camp authorities who asked male internees if they were ready to renounce Japan and were willing to join the US armed forces. Subsequent works of Japanese American authors, such as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s autobiographyFarewell to Manzanar (1972, with James D. Houston)continued to describe the camp experience.

Rebellion, Controversy, and Success

During the early 1970s, a group of young Asian American authors rebelled against the style and themes of much classic Asian American literature for promoting subservient immigrant assimilationthe point of cultural self-denial. In their anthologyAiiieeee! (1974), writer-editors Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong presented radical short stories, plays, and poems deeply antagonistic to Asian American conformity with mainstream American values. Chin’s play Chickencoop Chinaman (1974) offered a cynical view of Asian American masculinity threatened by European American racism.

The 1970s and 1980s saw a substantial rise of successful Asian American writers whose focus on immigrant families and first- and second-generation Asian immigrant protagonists captivated an enthusiastic readership. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) became a critically acclaimed bestseller. Readers loved its thinly disguised autobiographical tale of a Chinese American girl growing up in Stockton, California’s Chinatownwho overcomes both outside indifference and Chinese misogyny with her belief in a mythic Chinese heroine. The book won Kingston the National Book Critics Circle Award.

On the stage, David Henry Hwang dramatized the Asian American immigrant experience. His first playF.O.B. (pr. 1978, pb. 1983)alluded to the pejorative term “fresh off the boat” for recent immigrants, particularly Asians. His great critical success, however, came with his play M. Butterfly (pr., pb. 1988), which moved beyond the immigrant experience to dramatize traditional Western views on Asia and Asian femininity.

Since the 1980s, the growing ethnic diversity of Asian American writers has offered readers views of Asian immigrant experiences from quite different national backgrounds. Under the pen name Ronyoung KimKorean American Gloria Hahnwrote Clay Walls (1987), a moving account of a Korean family coming to California during the 1920s. Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) presented a Vietnamese woman’s view of the Vietnam War and the postwar Vietnamese American immigrant experience. Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels told of the Pakistani American experiencefrom The Crow Eaters (Pakistan, 1978; United States, 1982) to A Pakistani Bride (2008).

Amy Tan’s runaway bestseller The Joy Luck Club (1989) told the interwoven tales of four sets of Chinese American mothers and daughters. The book depicts conflicts between first- and second-generation immigrants whose families make the transition from China to America. In 1993, the novel became a successful Hollywood film with an almost entirely Asian cast.

Igniting controversy, Frank Chin criticized Kingston and Tan for what he called an anti-male bias and for pandering to White audiences in their writings. Kingston and Tan rejected his criticisms by pointing out that their works were fiction about individual charactersnot anthropological or literary studies of Asian American immigration. Both Kingston and Tan continued to enjoy success even as their fiction turned away from immigrant themes to issues of world peace, in the case of Kingston’s writings, and to the inhumanity of the Burmese military dictatorship in Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning (2006).

The Immigrant Experience

The 1990s also saw the rise of the poet and critic Shirley Geok-lin Lima first-generation immigrant from Malaysia. Her memoir Among the White Moon Faces (1996) won the American Book Award. Lim also brought further critical attention to Asian American literature through her work as a college English professor. Asian American writer and College professorBharati Mukherjeepublished her first novelThe Tiger’s Daughterin 1971. Her novel focuses on the vaguely autobiographical journey back to India of a Bengali-born Indian girl educated and married in America. Mukherjee later turned to historical fiction, closing a two-volume tale of Indian rebellion against British colonialism in The Tree Bride (2004).

Many mainstream American readers continued to prefer writings by Asian American authors that focused on Asian American experiences or at least on Asian topics. Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings were successful in meeting this demand. Her first collection of short stories about first-generation Bengali immigrantsInterpreter of Maladies (1999)won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. In 2008, her novel about second and third-generation Asian Indian AmericansUnaccustomed Earth (2008)topped the bestseller list of The New York Times the week it was published.

As Asian American literature has matured, some authors have strived to move beyond immigrant themes and autobiographical works. In general, however, Asian American writers who have tried to do this have had limited success. For example, Cynthia Kadohata and Chang-Rae Lee both moved away from celebrated first works that focused on immigrant Asian AmericansKadohata’s The Floating World (1989) and Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) were both successes. In contrast, Kadohata’s science-fiction novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) flopped. However, she regained her audience with Kira-Kira (2004)the story of two Japanese American sisters that won the Newbery Medal. Lee’s novel Aloft (2004)with an Italian American protagonistfailed to attract critics and readers. However, his novel The Surrendered (2010)set during the Korean Warwas a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Lisa Seewho gained literary fame with her family memoir On Gold Mountain (1995)triggered by the rare occurrence of her Chinese great-grandfather marrying a European American, gave her subsequent works Asian—but not necessarily Asian American—themes. Her novel Shanghai Girls (2009) followed her heroines from China to America during the 1950s.

By the early twenty-first century, most Asian American literature still focused strongly on the Asian American immigrant experience and featured many Asian American immigrant characters. Those Asian American authors who sought alternative topics generally retained links to Asia. The crime series of Laura Joh Rowlandwhose sleuth Sano Ichiro operates in seventeenth-century Japanwas a noticeable example. Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyenwho fled to the United States with his family in 1975won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Sympathizer, which deals with both the Vietnam War and exile in the United States. Other Asian American writers of the early twenty-first century include Bryan Thao Worra, who was born in Laos and who has been a recipient of the US National Endowment for the Arts; Celeste Ng, winner of a Pushcart Prize, whose debut novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), deals secondarily with Chinese American issues; and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies (1999) focuses on the lives of Indian immigrants and won the Pulitzer Prize.

In the 2020s, Asian American literature remained an integral avenue for the representation of the diverse Asian American community in the United States. O Beautiful (2021) by Korean American writer Jun Yun, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Chinese American Tom Lin (2021), and The Fervor (2022) by Japanese American Alma Katsu were three examples of new Asian American literature. While the latter two novels touched on themes of colonization and the Asian experience during World War II, O Beautiful investigated the immigrant experience in contemporary America. The historical fiction Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009) by Jamie Ford dealt with a subject many Americans found uncomfortablethe internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II. The book focused on the reconciliation of a Chinese American man with a Japanese American woman whose early romance was one of the countless casualties of the war. Asian American literature such as this remained vital in confronting stereotypes and giving the community its own voice.

In 2024, the United States was the final destination for approximately 20 percent of the world's migrants. An estimated 42 million people in the United States had been born in other countries, including India, China, and the Philippines. This changing aspect of the immigrant experience had its respective impact on literature in America and its immigrant creators. In a 2024 article in Harvard Magazine, author Glenda Carpio argued that "immigrant literature" needs contemplation through a new lens. Instead of customary stories where protagonists overcome assimilation challenges and readers tend toward empathy, Carpio suggests that literature should critically examine the interests of the world's economic superpowers and their role in creating a global environment where widespread immigration is necessary for survival.

Bibliography

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Thang, Patricia. “18 of the Best Asian American Books to Read This Year.” Book Riot, 6 Apr. 2022, bookriot.com/best-asian-american-books-2022. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.