Early in Kevin Kwan’s work of contemporary Asian American literature, Sex and Vanity, the half-Chinese, half-Old Money WASP Lucie Tang Churchill is confronted with (yet another) request to explain her identity. Lucie is in Capri alongside her equally WASPy (but not Chinese) cousin Charlotte when a tour guide mistakes Lucie for a friend rather than a relation.
“Oh? Your cousin?” Paolo glanced reflexively at Lucie in surprise, but Lucie simply smiled. She knew that within the next few seconds, Charlotte would automatically launch into the explanation she had always given since Lucie was a little girl.
“Yes, her father was my uncle,” Charlotte replied adding, “her mother is Chinese, but her father is American.”
So is Mom. She was born in Seattle, Lucie wanted to say, but of course, she didn’t.
While nothing further comes of it and Paolo leads the cousins to their rooms, it’s an early example of Kwan addressing microaggressions against Asians, particularly within one’s own family. Charlotte can’t recognize that her aunt with Chinese heritage is indeed American. Paolo needs an explanation as to why two cousins don’t look similar to one another. Lucie holds her tongue so as not to be accused of “overreacting”.
The backdrop for Kwan’s more reflective moments is, of course, the flamboyant characters, jaw-dropping settings, and insider snark that propelled Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy to the bestseller list and into Jon M. Chu’s 2018 blockbuster and groundbreaking Hollywood film. Yet, in both stories, there was nary a model immigrant to be found. Crazy Rich Asians and Sex and Vanity don’t center around the immigrant struggle and instead show a full cast of Asian characters just going about their daily lives, even if those lives entail private jets and remote tropical islands.
That we’re even talking about private jets and microaggressions seems to suggest a widening of a lens on an “Asian-American” story. It wasn’t so long ago that English-language readers interested in stories by and about Asian Americans had limited choices. What they found was mainly focused on immigration and the “model immigrant” story. Louis Chu’s 1961 best-selling novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea, for example, portrayed the bachelor society in New York’s Chinatown after World War II and was adapted into a film by Wayne Wang in 1989.
At the same time Eat a Bowl of Tea was released in cinemas, Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, was published to best-seller status. Her book tells the story of four Chinese women, their immigration to the US and the cultural differences with their American-born daughters. In the decade between the publications of Eat a Bowl of Tea and The Joy Luck Club, Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior, a true account of her immigrant family in California. Although it was a memoir, Hong Kingston wove Chinese mythology into her story, giving the book a hybrid feel of non-fiction and fiction.
To be clear, such stories have been and remain important: racism is overt in America, immigrants are demonized and scapegoated, and children of immigrants carry a heavy burden to succeed. These stories can help readers understand the histories, experiences, and communities of Asians and Asian Americans. However, there has also been an evolution from the immigrant story to something more nuanced and varied — something that is perhaps more reflective of the varieties of “Asian Americaness” in the US today. A problematic issue can arise if non-Asian Americans only read stories as immigrant narratives.
There are many recent examples about what it means to be Asian in America told through a different lens than that of the model minority immigrant. In 2020, for example, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, tells the story of a Chinese family in the American Wild West at the time of the transcontinental railroad construction. Sam and Lucy are young sisters, perpetually on the run from violent bandits and other settlers. Not only is the Wild West wild, but Sam is persecuted for dressing as a boy and Lucy will do anything to protect her.
Susie Yang received critical acclaim for her debut novel, White Ivy (2020), a modern take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with overtones of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). Yang ventures into upper-crust New England with her dark tale of belonging, which in the end has as much–or more–to do with the White characters as it does Chinese American Ivy Lin.
Alexandra Chang’s Days of Distraction (2020) is about a young Chinese American woman who follows her boyfriend from the US West Coast to Ithaca, New York, and what it means to be a trailing partner. Along the course of the story, the main character, also named Alexandra, tries to teach her boyfriend the troubled and often violent history of Asians in America, yet he fails to read the articles she emails him and doesn’t take to heart her concerns about the way in which she’s treated differently from him.
Young Adult literature novels such as Kelly Yang’s Parachutes (2020) centers around sexual assault and harassment in a California high school, with a wealthy protagonist who “parachutes” into the school from Shanghai. Jenny Lee’s Anna K. (2020) is a Korean American take on Leo Tolstoy’s epic Anna Karenina, set on Park Avenue in New York and filled with drug-fueled parties.
These stories feature Asian, Asian American, and non-Asian characters but don’t necessarily involve some of the struggles typically seen in immigrant stories. Rather than breaking free from parents with high expectations or building lives in a new land, these are stories of the American Wild West, rape culture, and rich kids gone wild — all topics that authors have addressed with non-Asian characters for decades and yet, until very recently, have been absent in stories featuring Asian American characters.
While the publishing landscape has changed, some authors still have difficulty shedding the “struggle of” and “model immigrant” storytelling methods. If the typical stories continue to dominate with non-Asian American readers, how is it possible to see nuance and variance not only in stories but in experiences of being Asian American? How do these works influence racist assumptions?
Interpretating Asian American Literature
Although difficult to answer and perhaps impossible to be definitive about, the question bears consideration. Over the years of reviewing books authored by Asian Americans for a pan-Asian publication, we have come across a number of small- even tiny- frictions between the way a story is presented and the way it’s received. This may not mean anything in itself, but perhaps collectively, it adds up to something more troubling.
Does it matter, for example, that a (very short) review of Yang’s Parachutes mentions Yang’s observations about culture clashes, race, and racism, but does not mention sexual assault and rape culture and ends with a verdict of “tart, fizzy and fun”? Likely not.
But layer that with, for example, Jean Kwok’s 2019 novel Searching for Sylvie Lee, which is presented as an immigrant story on the book jacket. Kwok structures her story around two sisters, one who grew up in the Netherlands and the other in New York City, and a family drama that goes back to their parents’ years in China decades earlier. While immigration occurs when a young Sylvie is sent to live with relatives in the Netherlands, the reference on the book jacket is not to Sylvie but to the parents’ immigration.
Some of the reviews of Kwan’s Sex and Vanity follow the theme of style over substance — as though an heiress can’t experience racism because she’s in a privileged position or that microaggressions don’t count as something “substantive”. (If Kwan conveyed this issue successfully is a different argument.)
The above examples pre-date the recent COVID-19-era violence against Asians in the United States. In a recent Foreign Policy article, Emily Couch discusses how issues of identity aren’t necessarily served by terms used to describe Asian American in the US. Couch concludes that the “lack of words matters too. Neither the United States nor the United Kingdom has fully developed the language or the paradigms to come to terms with, or respond to, racism against East Asian people. The heterogeneity of Asian experiences should be acknowledged and celebrated.” Couch writes that describing Asian Americans “is a matter of fervent debate”. Indeed, American’s difficulty with defining the Asian American experience carries over to defining the experiences written and published in Asian American fiction.
Professor Min Hyoung Song of Boston College warns against defining Asian American literature as a single genre. “As the number of literary works by American writers of Asian ancestry, their aspirations, and their critical successes bloom all around us, their sense of purpose has also grown more diffuse and more difficult to categorize. The immigrant narrative is one story among many that they are telling.” While people often bring preconceptions to their readings and analysis, the tendency to assume that Asian American stories follow a single type of narrative can obscure the author’s point.
It’s not only texts that are mislabeled as immigrant stories. The reverse happens as well when subverting the “traditional” immigrant narrative. Chang-Rae Lee tells an Asian immigrant story in his 2020 novel, My Year Abroad, but flips the narrative; rather than framing the story within the dominant white culture of the United States; he shows how Asia plays a central role in global commerce and culture. His protagonist, “⅛ Korean” Tiller Bardmon, travels to China with his mentor, Chinese-American Pong Lou, and thinks back on the people he grew up with in New Jersey, “who are certain they live at the very center of the world, and who have no idea that the center has already shifted.” And yet, My Year Abroad has been called one of the “most obsessive food novels yet written”, clearly minimizing how Lee has reshaped the traditional immigrant story.
The problem in literature isn’t only with immigration stories. Charles Yu recently won the National Book Award for Interior Chinatown (2020), which looks at how Asian Americans have been marginalized in Hollywood since the days of silent movies. Yet his book has been called “darkly hilarious” and “lacerating” funny, discounting the possibility that it wasn’t written to humor readers but to show in caricature certain stereotypes in their true ugliness.
When examining contemporary Asian American fiction, it is essential to acknowledge the challenges faced by Asian American authors, including the expectations placed on them by publishers. Kathy Wang wrote about the pressure she faced to rewrite one of her characters in her novel Imposter Syndrome (2021) as Asian to conform to the idea of making her story a “minority” one. Wang is clear on this line of thinking: “I am writing a novel about spies, and I am Chinese, thus the book should be about a Chinese spy.” Indeed, there’s an expectation of the characters Asian American authors should be writing — they must be Asian, of course, but they must also be “engaging in appropriately Asian things: being cartoonishly wealthy, struggling under extreme poverty, practicing mysticism and overall suffering (to be clear, I have read and loved novels with all these themes). Your minority protagonists should not do bad things, or — that most damning of all traits in commercial fiction — be an unlikeable narrator.”
Simon Han addresses this dilemma in his essay, “Shortcuts to Identity: How We Tell Asian American Stories”. He worries and wonders about readers reacting to mentions of the “American Dream” and “model immigrants”, for he had written his recent novel without “any thought of them at all”. However, he writes, those broad themes are present in Nights When Nothing Happened (2020) or, “maybe it tackles the failure of these themes to tell the full story of everyday people who happen to be Chinese immigrants.”
The concept of a “full story” is crucial for understanding the nuanced and diverse perspectives that emerge from various Asian American experiences. It is essential to engage with diverse perspectives and experiences in our reading. Seemingly more so with increasing violence against Asian Americans.
Works Cited
Couch, Emily. “We Don’t Have the Words to Fight Anti-Asian Racism”. Foreign Policy. 7 April 2021.
Han, Simon. “Shortcuts to Identity: How We Tell Asian American Stories”. Literary Hub. 12 February 2021.
Song, Min Hyoung. “Asian American Literature within and beyond the Immigrant Narrative”, in C. Parikh & D. Kim (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 3-15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Wang, Kathy. “Author Kathy Wang Faced ‘Pressure’ to Write Only Asian Characters ‘Engaging’ in ‘Asian Things’”, People Magazine. 8 April 2021.
Chang, Alexandra. Days of Distraction. Ecco. 2020.
Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. University of Washington Press. 2020.
Han, Simon. Nights When Nothing Happened. Riverhead. 2020.
Hong Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior. Picador. 2015.
Kwan, Kevin. Crazy Rich Asians. Doubleday. 2013.
Kwan, Kevin. Sex and Vanity. Doubleday. 2020.
Kwok, Jean. Searching for Sylvie Lee. William Morrow. 2019.
Lee, Chang-Rae. My Year Abroad. Riverhead. 2021.
Lee, Jenny. Anna K.: A Love Story. Flatiron. 2020.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Putnam. 1989.
Yang, Kelly. Parachutes. Katherine Tegen. 2020.
Yang, Susie. White Ivy. Simon & Schuster. 2020.
Yu, Charles. Interior Chinatown. Pantheon. 2020.
Zhang, C. Pam. How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Riverhead. 2020.