Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America(New Americanists)

One of the central tasks of Asian American literature, argues Patricia P. Chu, has been to construct Asian American identities in the face of existing, and often contradictory, ideas about what it means to be an American. Chu examines the model of the Anglo-American bildungsroman and shows how Asian American writers have adapted it to express their troubled and unstable position in the United States. By aligning themselves with U.S. democratic ideals while also questioning the historical realities of exclusion, internment, and discrimination, Asian American authors, contends Chu, do two kinds of ideological work: they claim Americanness for Asian Americans, and they create accounts of Asian ethnicity that deploy their specific cultures and histories to challenge established notions of Americanness. Chu further demonstrates that Asian American male and female writers engage different strategies in the struggle to adapt, reflecting their particular, gender-based relationships to immigration, work, and cultural representation. While offering fresh perspectives on the well-known writings-both fiction and memoir-of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Frank Chin, and David Mura, Assimilating Asians also provides new insight into the work of less recognized but nevertheless important writers like Carlos Bulosan, Edith Eaton, Younghill Kang, Milton Murayama, and John Okada. As she explores this expansive range of texts-published over the course of the last century by authors of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian origin or descent-Chu is able to illuminate her argument by linking it to key historical and cultural events. Assimilating Asians makes an important contribution to the fields of Asian American, American, and women’s studies. Scholars of Asian American literature and culture, as well as of ethnicity and assimilation, will find particular interest and value in this book.

Table of Contents:
Acknoweldgments ix Introduction: "A City of Words" 1 ONE. Myths of Americanization 1 America in the Heart: Political Desire in Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, Milton Murayama, and John Okada 27 2 Authoring Subjects: Frank Chin and David Mura 64 3 Womens' Plots: Edith Maude Eaton and Bharati Mukherjee 90 TWO/ Constructing Chinese American Ethinicity 4 "That Was China, That Was Their Fate": Ethnicity and Agency in The Joy Luck Club 141 5 Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition 169 CODA. "What We Should Becomoe, What We Were" 188 Notes 191 Bibliography 217 Index 299

About the Author :
Patricia P. Chu is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University.

Review :
"Chu brings social theory and literary analysis together with smart and elegant readings. Hers is one of the first works of Asian American literary criticism to foreground the gendered aspects of narratives of assimilation." -Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form "Bringing fresh perspectives to much-discussed work, Assimilating Asians is a fine book."-Elaine Kim, University of California, Berkeley