Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

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Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Betsy Huang

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CONTESTING GENRES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION

Copyright © Betsy Huang, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10831–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huang, Betsy, 1966– Contesting genres in contemporary Asian American fiction / Betsy Huang. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–10831–8 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. Asian Americans in literature. 3. Fiction genres. I. Title. PS153.A84H825 2010 813 .609895073—dc22 2010014552 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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C o n t e n ts

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: “Generic” Asian Americans? Troubling the Generic Waters “Regenreing” Fictions of Asian America

1 1 4

1 Generic Sui Generis: On Asian American Immigrant Fiction Genres of Assimilationism le thi diem thuy and The “I” We Are All Looking For Chang-rae Lee and the Counter-Gestures of Life Writing

11 11 17 29

2 Recriminations: On Asian American Crime Fiction Criminalizing Asian America The Offenses of Charlie Chan and Chinatown The Difficult Case of Asian American Crime Fiction Dashiell Hammett’s Chinatown: “Dead Yellow Women” Wayne Wang’s Chinatown: Chan Is Missing Ed Lin’s Chinatown: This Is a Bust Susan Choi’s Radical Recriminations: American Woman

47 47 51

3 Reorientations: On Asian American Science Fiction Alienating Asian America Retooling Asian American Fiction, Regenreing Science Fiction Exemplary Estrangement: Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”

95 95

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55 59 66 72 80

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Contents

Mechanical Aspirations: Greg Pak’s Robot Stories Future Imperfect: Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

113 127

Conclusion: The Genre is the Message

141

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

179

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Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

Heartfelt thanks to the following mentors, colleagues, students, friends, and family, who have had an impact on the completion of this book. My mentors at the University of Rochester, especially Jeffrey Tucker and the late Frank Shuffelton, whose genuine interest in my work and careful guidance through graduate training provided the intellectual foundations for my scholarly interests and research. Colleagues in the English department at Clark University, whose congenial nature, cerebral prowess, and ethical spirit have made the department the kind of academic home one dreams of. I am particularly indebted to SunHee Kim Gertz, whose tireless support and careful reading of this book from beginning to end have greatly improved its quality and scope, and whose truly inexhaustible energy and grace have guided me through many difficult moments; to Virginia Vaughan, Jay Elliott, and Fern Johnson, whose steady mentorship helped me keep my eyes on the prize; and to Lisa Kasmer, Meredith Neuman, and Steve Levin, whose collegial company regularly remind me of the rewards of an intellectually vigorous community. Scott Hendricks, Nina Kushner, Beth Gale, Amy Ickowitz, Jen Plante, Gino DiIorio, Kiran Asher, Lea Graham, and the inimitable Esther Lopez—friends and colleagues at Clark, Rochester, and elsewhere whose individual kindness, collective camaraderie, and riotous mischievousness have prevented my life from becoming the soul-stealing dystopias I teach in my science fiction courses. Jennifer Ho, Sue Kim, Stephen Hong Sohn, Paul Lai—fellow Asian Americanist comrades-in-arms to whom I owe deep gratitude for reading parts of the manuscript in various stages of disarray (and whose uproarious Facebook escapades provided much needed comic relief, especially during dark moments when the contest seemed lost). A more general thanks goes out to new and established Asian Americanists who are making the field such an exciting place to be.

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Martha Cutter, mentor extraordinaire, who has been so influential in my scholarly development, from my very early days as a naïve Master’s student at Kent State University to the post I currently hold as Reviews Editor of MELUS under her leadership. Keen Hahn, Katja Kurz, Nicole Rabin, Joshua Flaccavento, Stephanie Kader, Genie Giaimo, Tracy Walsh, Tali Sachs, Maggie Rabidou, Matt Pettengill, James Kobialka, Marlene McManus, Angela Woodmansee, David Pugh, Rachael Furman, and all students with whom I have had the privilege of working in my years at Clark, whose astonishing intellectual brilliance, social awareness, and pop cultural savviness not only challenge me in my scholarship, but also inspire me every day, inside and outside the classroom. Deepmalya Ghosh and Vivian Lee—lifelong friends, whose devotion and good humor in spite of my indefensible periods of inattention and absence astound and humble me. You guys keep me plugged into the real world. Barbara Huang, Charles Huang, Billy Huang, Sue Logan, Tom Logan, Carole Logan Pence, and the vast network of the extended Huang, Yu, Mao, Yeh, Hsing, and Logan families, whose love and generosity have made it possible for me to pursue my passion in life. Neither this book nor the privileged life I lead is possible without your understanding and support. I dedicate this book to all of you. Finally, a special note to David Logan: between the pages of this book, I hear echoes of your love and sacrifices, without which this book would not even exist.

* * * Special thanks to C. J. Yeh, whose painting “Eternity” graces the cover of this book. Yeh has been exploring the area of new media art, which he has integrated into his more traditional areas of study and expression. The juxtaposition and integration of digital and analog, virtual and actual, natural and cultural, articulate his point of view on the changing perception of identity and reality in the digital era.

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Introduction

“Generic” Asian Americans? Troubling the Generic Waters Genres make possible a legible scene of transformation. —Bruce Robbins

W

hen Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker was published in 1995, it made a proverbial splash in the world of Asian American literature. Among the multitudinous expressions of praise bestowed and scholarship produced on the novel, the imaginative combination of the immigrant novel with the spy thriller is singled out as one of the novel’s most distinctive qualities. Yet it was marketed as an immigrant novel. That Native Speaker is marketed primarily as such should not be surprising; after all, almost all literary productions by Asian Americans, fiction and nonfiction alike, are presumed to carry an immigrant theme until proven otherwise. The infusion of the spy thriller genre into immigrant fiction, however, gave the latter a fresh angle and a new set of tropes with which to tell a familiar story. Tina Chen was among the first to point out Lee’s deft interweaving of “the conventions of genre and of narrative, with racial invisibility and disappearing acts, with linguistic fluency and rhetorical style— on levels both formal and thematic.”1 Crossing the trope of the spy with the storyteller, protagonist Henry Park, is, in Chen’s succinct summary, “a man who is afraid he has lost his identity but also the chronicle of immigrant success and failure.”2 Adding a layer of narrative intrigue, we might say, the spy trope additionally problematizes our conventional classificatory criteria. Is Native Speaker an immigrant novel, as the book’s back cover claims it to be, or is it a spy novel? What

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does it mean for readers and critics of Asian American fiction and for spy fiction if it is both? What seems even more remarkable to me is what Native Speaker has done for genre fiction. One of the most interesting effects genre mixing produces is, after all, the simultaneous emphasis and de-emphasis of genre categories. By simply casting the Asian American as a spy, Lee has put a door in the wall between the genres of immigrant fiction and spy fiction. But does the novel actually occasion more traffic through that door? Would the target audience for each genre—including writers, readers, and critics—be prompted to read more fiction from the other side of the wall? And how might such perforations of genre boundaries generate new representational models for the familiar themes of immigration, assimilation, and subject formation in Asian American literature? In spite of the experimental potentials offered by his novel, Lee’s designation as a writer of immigrant and ethnic fiction remains unchanged. He is still understood as writing in the most familiar genre in which Asian American authors are expected to write. Hence, it is safe to assume that the likelihood of devotees of spy thrillers to pick up Native Speaker is fairly low. Moreover, spy fiction of the Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy sort is likely regarded with scorn and disparagement by the literary circles in which Lee’s fiction is read, written about, marketed, and taught, Has Native Speaker, then, really redefined either genre, destabilized their conventions, or changed their readers’ expectations? Perhaps more apt would be to explore what Native Speaker and genre fiction have not done for one another. These questions pertaining to the implications and consequences of genre experimentation in contemporary Asian American fiction inspire my study. Critical examinations of the motives and effects of crossgenre works are not new; many studies have outlined, dissected, and, in our postmodern moment, valorized their eclectic sensibilities and generative aesthetics. Parallels between the politics of genre identity and social identity have also been drawn. Hayden White, for instance, has always maintained that “the notion of genre purity is a supreme value among aristocratic, conservative, and reactionary social groups and political parties,” and that such a notion “serves much the same function [in literary criticism] as the notion of species purity in racist notions of humanity and history.”3 A more notable recent direction taken in genre criticism, however, is the interrogation of genre’s relationship to knowledge production and ethics, two modes of social constructs that “order”—that is, organize and direct—our actions and

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our understanding of the world. In the introduction to a recent special issue of PMLA devoted to current trends in genre theory, for example, Wai Chee Dimock reminds us that “the membership—of any genre—is an open rather than closed set” and stresses the challenge such openness poses to “systemizing claims”—a challenge that also creates the potential for “[restructuring] humanistic knowledge from the ground up.”4 If, as John Frow observes, genres—in classical Aristotelian or contemporary popular forms—“actively generate and shape knowledge of the world,”5 then a restructuring of genre leads to nothing short of the restructuring of the knowledge it produces about the world and the people it depicts. The tension caused by what Jacques Derrida, with tongue in cheek, calls the “impurity, anomaly, and monstrosity” created by the mixing of genre conventions, then, can destabilize and transform established knowledge.6 Genre experimentation is, by its very nature, a troubling act. For Asian American writers, this generic troubling offers a valuable interventionist strategy for renovating the increasingly genre-focused landscape of Asian American literary production and scholarship. In other words, despite consistent growing market and academic interests in Asian American literature, the representational vocabulary is still very much limited by a set of conventionalized clichés and stereotypes. In the realm of popular culture, Robert G. Lee has convincingly shown that Orientalist figurations in works by Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike have revolved around a fixed catalogue of “the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook.”7 Likewise, in the literary market, marketing and consumption are devoted almost exclusively to life writing genres (autobiography and memoir) and works that feature immigrant and assimilation themes. More critically for this book, concerns have been voiced recently by Asian American scholars about the field’s near exclusive focus on social politics, a trend that subordinates formal analysis to the primacy of the political or elides it altogether. In his 2002 book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, for example, Viet Thanh Nguyen persuasively demonstrates that a “model minority” versus “bad subject” paradigm has long predominated Asian American creative and scholarly productions alike.8 Nguyen specifically takes Asian American critics to task, charging that their “[unwillingness] to read for ideological heterogeneity . . . [betrays] their own ideological rigidity,” and that such rigidity leads to reductive, uncritical evaluations of resistance as positive and accommodation as negative.9 Echoing

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Nguyen’s observation in the introduction to her 2005 essay collection, Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, Zhou Xiaojing notes that Asian American critics have been “constrained by binary positions and confined to a thematically and sociologically oriented approach,” and “tend to evaluate individual texts and authors according to a predominant formula, that is, according to whether the texts demonstrate complicity with or resistance to hegemonic ideologies of assimilation.”10 This contraction, Zhou argues, has led to an unfortunate disregard for “how writers have actively manipulated and reinvented literary conventions,” as well as the unmerited casting of literary genres “into fixed, totalizing, and invulnerable systems.”11 The stakes of such creative and critical constrictions are high, because they run the risk of constraining Asian American literature and scholarship in narrowly generic boundaries that spell thematic predictability, political inertia, and ideological rigidity. For their part, Nguyen and Zhou have offered counsel for new critical directions. Nguyen, for instance, reads Asian American literature for “flexible strategies that concern struggle, survival, and possible assimilation, which means often reading against the rigid assumptions” of institutionalized critical practices.12 Likewise, Zhou urges scholars to locate the agency of Asian American literary endeavors not only in their political trajectories, but also in textual strategies and the formal structures “whereby the articulation of conformity or resistance, and activities of preservation or transformation are made possible.”13 From a similar position, Sue-Im Lee calls for an “[invigoration of] the place of literary aesthetics” by reading Asian American fiction as “aesthetic objects— objects that are constituted by and through deliberate choices in form, genres, traditions, and conventions.”14 The important work these critics have done thus far compels us not only to identify signs of creative and critical inertia more vigilantly, but also to consider more deeply the formal strategies of texts often neglected by the critical lens of social politics.

“Regenreing” Fictions of Asian America The history of genres . . . is above all a reproductive history. —Wai Chee Dimock

My aim in this book is to help redress the current imbalance between formal and sociopolitical analyses by foregrounding genre as the site for developing a transformative Asian American politics

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of form. I believe that the political impact of a work—whether resistant, accommodationist, or ambivalent—is ultimately located in the author’s negotiations with the convention he or she is expected to execute. Therefore, I have focused on a range of established and emergent Asian American writers who self-consciously write in highly conventionalized popular fiction genres to interrogate and manipulate the disciplinary power of genre. I spotlight three highly structured types of genre fiction in particular—immigrant fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction—as the loci where some of the most compelling contemporary Asian American writers contest genre imperatives to disrupt well-worn, “generic” narratives of Asian America. My choice of the three popular prose fiction genres is based on their ambivalent reception by audiences as either “junk fiction” that relies on a limited range of story types,15 or dynamic sites where “the people make their cultures”16 . It is precisely the reputed prescriptiveness of these genres that make them rich sites for assessing the regulatory power of genre conventions and the transformative power of genre experimentation. Whether the writers I examine in this book remain on the beaten path of immigrant fiction—the genre in which Asian American authors are expected to write—or venture into alternative or marginal genres such as crime and science fiction, they subvert entrenched formulas and audience expectations through their restructuring of familiar plots, tropes, and icons. These writers practice what Dimock calls “regenreing,” an admittedly awkward but nonetheless precise term that describes their engagement with genre fiction as “an alluvial process, sedimentary as well as migratory.”17 Each of these genres has produced its own set of knowledge about Asian Americans, mostly through its long Orientalist representational history. This is most apparent in crime fiction and science fiction, whose deep Orientalist legacies (preserved through the enduring images of the likes of Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, and techno-Orientalist tropes such as the computer geek and samurai warriors) reproduce conceptions of Asians as criminal masterminds, fortune cookie – spouting detectives, or inscrutable aliens who simply cannot be assimilated. Equally problematic is the seemingly more “benign” genre of immigrant fiction. While the genre does the important work of illuminating the trials and tribulations of geographic dislocation, cultural reorientation, and other assimilation concerns of the immigrant experience, it nevertheless produces the paradoxical effect of solidifying the status of Asian Americans as perpetually

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“immigrant”—that is, always in the state of becoming American and never in the state of being, to borrow Stuart Hall’s useful formulation. Given the power of genre to reproduce these Orientalist “sediments,” what narrative strategies are necessary to agitate these entrenched alluvial deposits? Yet, even as these genres have posed representational problems for Asian Americans, they ironically share a history of marginalization with Asian American literature vis-à-vis mainstream and academic literary establishments. That is, the politics of “high” versus “low” or mass culture that has characterized the relationship between genre fiction and mainstream literature parallels the marginalization of Asian American literature (and ethnic literature more generally) in academic curricula and literary publishing. Popular genres with “pulp” beginnings, such as mystery, romance, and fantasy/science fiction, developed alongside mainstream literature in their separate and parallel spheres, often cultivating their own generic identities in deliberate contradistinction to “high brow” literature. But, interestingly, each genre also has its patron scholars who have consistently argued for its legitimate place in academic study. The Harlequin romance, for example, has its Janice Radway; crime fiction and mystery have their Tzvetan Todorov, John Cawelti, and Stephen Knight; and science fiction has its Robert Scholes, Fredric Jameson, Marleen Barr, and Carl Freedman. And the patronage finally seems to be paying off. In recent years, there has been a visible growth in scholarly attention to popular fiction genres, particularly in crime fiction and science fiction. This is evidenced by the recent decisions of powerful legitimating institutions such as the Cambridge Companion Series, PMLA, and MELUS, each of which published essay collections and special issues devoted to crime fiction, science fiction, and genre studies more generally.18 For my book, these genres’ easily recognizable conventions are particularly useful for laying bare the master scripts that entrap Asian American representation within a surprisingly narrow but enduring set of narrative models. The laws of these genres—what I identify as a set of formal and social imperatives maintained and enforced by a confluence of genre history and market forces—exert tremendous disciplinary power over the narrative and representational choices of the author.19 But even as I argue that these genres helped produce some of the most perniciously enduring Orientalist stereotypes that still prevail, I also believe that demonstrating Asian American subjectivity as products of generic constructions constitutes a significant socially symbolic act. As Judith Butler has noted, “The reconceptualization of

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identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of ‘agency’ that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed.”20 Writing Asian American identities according to or against generic constructs is a selfreflexive and self-conscious performative act that engenders, through repetition, the possibilities of variation and transformation. To trouble the waters of a body of literature or an established critical ideology, then, is to problematize the knowledge it produces and stabilizes through its conventions about the world and the people it portrays. Thus, while I argue that genre imperatives can function like social imperatives for Asian American writers, I also believe, as Mikhail Bakhtin did, in the dynamic qualities of the novel (the genre of much of the fiction I analyze in this book), and, per Hayden White, that “the theory of genre as essence . . . [can serve] as a goad, rather than a hindrance to creative variation in poetic practice.”21 In each genre, the authors create new palimpsests to lay over the old, as part of what Dimock calls the reproductive process of genre writing. As a form of “cumulative reuse,” such writing can renew and revitalize. “Not fixated on originality,” Dimock observes, writers of genre fiction “give pride of place instead to the art of receiving, and affirm it as art: crafty, experimental, even risk-taking. Through their admixed newness and oldness, they carry on the expressive forms that human beings collectively inherit.”22 Working within the established boundaries of popular fiction genres and the known quantities of audience tastes and expectations, Asian American writers of immigrant, crime, and science fiction can confirm, contest, and, most importantly, rewrite the genericized narratives about Asian American history, culture, and identity. The chapters in this book proceed from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the well-tread terrain of immigrant fiction to the uncanny noir landscape of crime fiction, and finally to the estranging topography of science fiction. I take as my point of departure the myopic readerly presumptions that cast all Asian American fiction as forms of life writing, presumptions that have crystallized into what I identify as the “autobiographic imperative” that has governed much of Asian American literary production and criticism. Thus, in Chapter 1, I establish the prevalence of such presumptions in the literary marketplace, and then demonstrate the ways in which two contemporary writers defy the imperative through selfconscious manipulations of conventions and tropes. My analysis of le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) reads the novel as le’s refusal to comply with the expectation that all immigrant

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fiction is, to some degree, autobiographical and thus confessional. Complementing le, my reading of Chang-rae Lee’s celebrated novel, A Gesture Life (1999), focuses on the ways in which Lee draws on the conventions of the memoir to expose assimilationist “success stories” as romantic fictions, and the suppression of traumatic personal and national histories necessitated by the maintenance of such fictions. These two novels, then, allow us to consider the ways by which immigrant fictions that are read as autobiographies or memoirs can move beyond transparently mimetic forms of life writing and contest the uncritical assumption that an Asian American literary aesthetics must be grounded in personal experience. In the next two chapters, I redirect our critical attention from the familiar site of immigrant fiction to genres in which Asian Americans have just begun to establish a foothold. In Chapter 2, I argue that negative representations of Asian Americans consolidated largely around a criminal/model minority binary produced and sustained by the genre of American crime fiction and its predominantly white authorship and readership. I connect this argument with a broader conception of criminality as both narrative theme and political critique. Asian Americans become most visible when they break the law, and it is precisely at the moment of criminalization when the tenuousness of Asian American access to the rights and privileges of legal and cultural citizenship is laid bare. This moment opens up a critical space for interrogating the assimilational imperatives imposed on Asian Americans through discourses and mechanisms of social and genre laws. Thus, I begin by outlining the Orientalist legacies of the crime fiction genre—most notably in Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan mysteries (1925–1932), Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op series (1923–1930), and Roman Polanski’s film noir classic, Chinatown (1974)—against which Asian American writers of crime fiction must write. I then follow with textual analyses of the ways in which Wayne Wang’s feature film Chan Is Missing (1982), Ed Lin’s detective novel This Is a Bust (2007), and Susan Choi’s historical thriller, American Woman (2003), appropriate familiar crime fiction conventions to expose formal and social laws that enforce cultural misrepresentation and underrepresentation of Asian Americans. Finally, Chapter 3 considers the work of a small group of Asian American writers who tap into the critical power of science fiction—a genre in which Asian American writers are conspicuously absent—to circumvent the imperatives of realism and experiential life writing for more expansive and experimental forms of social fiction. Like Asian

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American writers of crime fiction discussed in Chapter 2, these writers’ decision to write in a genre with a long pulp history, as well as a lengthy Orientalist legacy, marks an important intervention into a literary tradition dominated by white male writers. What awaits them, also, is the double negotiation with genre legitimacy in the literary community, and with authorial legitimacy within the genre community itself. Thus, while writing in this historically marginalized genre is always already a radical act, science fiction written by Asian Americans only makes it doubly so. Significantly, science fiction offers an entirely different narrative toolbox for the Asian American writer. Described by Robert Scholes as a form of fabulation that favors the laws of narrative over the laws of nature for expressing unconscious psychosocial desires and fears, science fiction “is fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way.”23 Moreover, the genre’s core imperative is the narrative act of what Darko Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement,” the process of denaturalizing the familiar to reveal its constructedness.24 As such, the genre not only offers a new set of tropes and metaphors with which to trouble the generic waters of Asian American literary production, the very essence of the genre is its deconstructive impetus. Most importantly, the writers I examine in this chapter stress the material realities of racial politics in a genre that has historically indulged in considerations of race and alterity within the safe confines of imaginary worlds. Within these critical frameworks, I read Ted Chiang’s alien-encounter novella, Story of Your Life (2001); Greg Pak’s techno-fable anthology film, Robot Stories (2005); and Cynthia Kadohata’s dystopian coming-of-age tale, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1993), as exemplary texts that expertly deploy generic tropes—extraterrestrial aliens, robots, and a dystopian future, for instance—to critique the constructedness of racial, cultural, and sexual difference in a once and future America. Like Chang-rae Lee and the other authors I examine in this book, I have opened only a few doors in some of the walls that compartmentalize and stabilize the knowledge that popular fiction genres produce about Asian Americans. By offering in-depth analyses of how these genres have broadened creative and critical strategies for Asian American writers and critics, I hope to problematize conventional knowledge of, and engender more aesthetic and critical possibilities for, Asian American literature.

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G e n e r i c SU I G E N E R I S On Asian American Immigrant Fiction

Genres of Assimilationism Even before opening its covers, there is something always already very familiar about a novel by an Asian American writer. Its reception from both popular and critical audiences is likely to be preceded by presumptions about its writer, its subject matter, its prose style, and, most significantly, the information it will provide about the culture and history of the particular Asian group with which the author is affiliated. For Asian American writers, the “text” that precedes them is the immigrant narrative, for the reigning assumption of the mainstream literary market is that works by Asian American writers are de facto immigrant narratives, whether or not immigration is the principal subject of the works. As a result, Asian American writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, has become a veritable genre with its own set of conventions, exemplifying what Fredric Jameson describes as texts that “come before us as the always-already-read” as well as the “always-alreadywritten.”1 From the writer’s perspective, such audience assumptions and habits in turn translate into implicit but powerful imperatives that shape their narrative choices and strategies. Asian American writers, then, are subject to the demands of what I call the “autobiographic imperative,” an interpretive disposition of readers who habitually read fiction by ethnic writers as autobiography, as testimonies to lived experiences, typically assumed to be those of immigrants. Clear examples of such thematic and autobiographic imperatives permeate mainstream receptions of classic and contemporary Asian

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American writing. Countless dust jacket and back cover blurbs of books by Asian Americans—and by ethnic writers more generally— declare the work a testimony of the immigrant experience or “what it means to be (fill in the appropriate ethnic or racial label).” Such descriptions, along with the dust jackets and paperback covers on which they appear, are part of what Gerald Graff calls the “unofficial interpretive culture”—paratextual materials that “provide a clue not just to the meanings of a single work, but, much more important, to the type of thing that a meaning can be (its intrinsic genre) and the type of talk it is possible to construct about it.”2 John K. Young also points out that “The usual first step in reading books . . . is to orient the enclosed text by the cultural markers contained on its front, back, and inside jacket copy (for hardcovers),” and that a dust jacket functions as an important sign in “the book’s broader bibliographical environment.”3 Such paratextual information precedes, frames, and mediates the reader’s interpretive process, so that, as Jameson observes, “we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself.”4 For works by Asian Americans, such descriptors also make implicit promises to the reader: the text will provide a bona fide account of the Asian American and Asian immigrant experience, the writer serves as a synecdoche for the racial or ethnic group with which he or she is affiliated, and the reader may rely on generic immigrant narratives as an interpretive frame for the account into which he or she is about to enter. Thus, Asian American literature is, we might say, always preceded by established genre imperatives. Reflecting the tastes of the market, such genre imperatives serve a significant regulatory function: they discipline the production of narratives by determining thematic and structural parameters. For Asian American writers, the imperatives can function hegemonically, as instruments of social and literary assimilationism. Like the model minority discourse that regulates Asian American subject formation through socially approved models of citizenship, the autobiographic imperative induces the writer to prove her quality by exemplification. The result is that Asian American writing is rarely sui generis, but always expected to be generic, its worth measured by how capably the writer executes the essential elements of the expected immigrant narrative and how the immigrant protagonist exemplifies “what it means to be an Asian immigrant.” The autobiographic imperative is, not surprisingly, particularly unyielding in American immigrant fiction. Autobiography, Shu-mei Shih points out, is “the genre for ethnic representation fetishized by

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the market as well as by the writers themselves.”5 This is corroborated by the mainstream press in a recent Time article by book reviewer Lev Grossman, in which he declares that the “shared project” of those whom he regards as today’s best young novelists is “the revision of the good old American immigrant narrative,” through which readers could satisfy their newfound interest in “the specifics of [the authors’] racial and ethnic and historical circumstances, where they came from and what made them that way.”6 Implicit in Grossman’s observation, however, is the assumption that writers of immigrant narratives, both fiction and nonfiction, promise to proffer autobiographical information. As Nancy K. Miller notes, “When readers choose a memoir, they make certain assumptions” about “the writer’s relation to the truth”—that is, the “truth” about him or herself as both subject and object of the narrative.7 More than a persistent form of biographical fallacy, the autobiographic imperative’s grip on immigrant writing is held fast by what Miller identifies as “the truth conditions of the autobiographical pact” implied in the relationship between autobiographers and readers.8 Even in a work of fiction, then, the ethnic writer is expected to “tell the truth,” to posit her own perspective as an authentic and reliable episteme for individual and collective ethnic identities. Here, too, lies an irony: even as readers are suspicious of genre crossing, they can also cross generic lines when they impose the laws of autobiography on works of fiction. It is unsurprising, then, that examples abound of ethnic writers who bristle against the persistence of these generic impositions. Many creative writers have undertaken means to address such imperatives explicitly. Julia Alvarez, for instance, directly confronted this matter in “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical” when her debut novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, generated endless speculations on how autobiographical the novel was.9 Alvarez bemoaned the fact that “most reviewers wanted to talk about [her] and not [her] novel.” Similarly, Chang-rae Lee observes in a recent interview that the autobiographic imperative is something “ethnic American writers face because they write about people who look like them and then people automatically assume that it’s people who are them or someone in their family.”10 Those who hold fast to such assumptions thus regard ethnic writers of fiction as confessors or cultural informants rather than as practitioners of art. More generally, the assumptions reflect the popular audience’s fetishization of “the true story” and preference for an “authentic” sociohistorical account over a product

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of the literary imagination. The value of an ethnic writer’s work, then, is more often judged by what it documents than how it tells the story. The one-dimensionality of the evaluative criteria, moreover, is compounded by the preoccupation with genre classifications in mass consumption and marketing of fictional works by Asian American writers. Such classificatory requirements illuminate the constraints that crude understanding of generic conventions can impose on the rich narrative potential of both fiction and nonfiction in Asian American writing and in ethnic writing more generally. Casting this sort of phenomenon as “genre bondage,” Miller dissects the larger problems of genre by tracing a history of authorial irritation about readers’ obtuse and confused efforts to classify texts along the fiction/nonfiction axis.11 While contemporary writers tend to regard genres as historically constructed boundaries that can be crossed, reshaped, and expanded, many readers still rely on clear genre definitions for purchasing decisions as well as for interpretive frames for reading. This is, of course, not surprising, given that the publishing industry regulates the literary market through the production and maintenance of genre identities, creating fans of genres, who make their purchases accordingly. But what burdens do these market-driven genre identities impose on the ethnic writer? How do these writers negotiate the “borderland between fiction and nonfiction,” which, as Art Spiegelman has pointed out, “has been fertile territory for some of the most potent contemporary writing”?12 The demands of the tightly structured generic categories of the marketplace notwithstanding, the competing imperatives of the immigrant narrative and the autobiography pose an even more challenging problem for ethnic writers. The immigrant narrative depicts the life of an exemplary immigrant—that is, an immigrant whose life typifies those of others like him. The autobiography, by contrast, is concerned with the portrayal of a person of singular and extraordinary distinction. Traditional autobiography, then, can be seen as the genre to which the immigrant narrative—fictional or nonfictional—aspires. As William Boelhower has noted, the construction of an extraordinary selfhood for the immigrant relies on a model that has been “rigidly codified” over a century ago by the “foundational” and largely assimilationist autobiographies of the likes of Edward Bok, Mary Antin, and Marcus E. Savage. These texts solidified a set of identifiable conventions that developed a genre identity and created “the received behavioral script of the rhetorically well-defined American self,”13 by which the “American” has come to stand as the liberatory subject in

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opposition to the bounded subjectivity of the immigrant. Thus, early immigrant narratives often stage the figurative death of their immigrant narrator-protagonists as part of what Thomas Ferraro has traced as the process of conversion from alien to American.14 From the perspective of the immigrant writer from non-Western cultures, however, Boelhower’s typology of “foundational” immigrant autobiographies proves problematic. Claiming that the rhetorical strategies he has traced in a variety of European immigrant autobiographies constitute the genre’s “narrative constants,” he goes on to assert that “what is true of one text is true for all.”15 While applicable to a degree, such “constants”—which Boelhower also calls the “macrotext” of immigrant autobiographies—drew Sau-ling Wong’s skeptical eye. Putting his formula to the test through a critical assessment of its applicability to Asian immigrant autobiographies, Wong finds that Boelhower’s Western-based paradigm does not quite work with the rhetorical aims of Asian American and Asian immigrant autobiographies.16 Moreover, Wong concludes that the terms “immigrant” and “autobiography” should be parsed more carefully, because each term registers a distinct social or historical condition. She proposes two separate genre tags: “autobiography of Americanization,” for texts that foreground the assimilation process, and “immigrant autobiography,” exclusively for those written by immigrants for whom the American mythic individual is not the narrative object of desire. This distinction, in my view, elucidates the divergent aims inherent in the immigrant autobiography. The “autobiography of Americanization” aspires toward a sui generis model of self; the “immigrant autobiography,” on the other hand, is indifferent to this mythos and attends instead to the autobiographer’s place within a particular community or social sphere, whether that community is the culture of origin or destination. Whereas the “autobiography of Americanization” aims at the exceptional self, the “immigrant autobiography” aims at the exemplary self. The conflation of the immigrant narrative and autobiography, then, presents a set of competing imperatives for the Asian American writer: he or she must both exemplify and exceed the laws of genre. Wong’s exhortations have also led to more sedulous examinations of the social and political exigencies fulfilled by the life writing genres in Asian American history. Autobiographies and memoirs have been crucial to the formation of not only an Asian American subjectivity, but also an Asian American literary canon. While the constitutive facets of both subjectivity and canon are always highly contested and

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by no means stable and monolithic, the significant role life writing has played in the ongoing debates is uncontestable. Jinqi Ling, Patricia Chu, Rocio Davis, and Sue-Im Lee have all traced the strategic choices of Asian American writers who recognize and deploy these genres’ capacity for exposing repressed histories as well as the social, political, and literary mechanisms that make such repression possible.17 In short, to write about one’s life, one must first make that life legible in a larger sociohistorical narrative, in the way that, as Stuart Hall has reminded us, a recognized and recognizable identity constitutes us as a subject and “thereby enable[s] us to discover places from which to speak.”18 But Ling and others also trace the negative reaction to autobiography’s canonization—largely through the critical and popular success of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts—in a formative Asian American literary tradition by Frank Chin principally and other cultural nationalist-oriented social critics more generally as a complex convergence of concerns about “the literary establishment’s misappropriation and adoption of The Woman Warrior for its own purposes.”19 Such “purposes” are perceived by Kingston’s predominantly male critics to be the dominant culture’s casting of the work as assimilationist so as to gratify its own fantasy of the United States as a liberatory space for immigrants, minorities, and women at the cost of a carefully cultivated, male-defined ethnic pride. While the gendered and generic lines along which the representational battles were fought at the time have been more thoroughly critiqued by writers and critics in the subsequent decades, contentions of whether life writing is assimilationist or anti-assimilationist, whether the autobiographer is an exemplar of a group or an exceptional sui generis (as evidenced by the critical debates surrounding recent works such as Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian and James McBride’s The Color of Water) persist today. Such contentions attest to the competing impulses of the genre that continue to preoccupy and confound readers and critics alike. It is the linked but competing directives of exemplification and exception that drive my investigation in this chapter of how contemporary Asian American writers negotiate life writing’s highly structured narrative terrain and highly complex representational politics. To this end, I read the ways in which two critically acclaimed contemporary Asian American writers, le thi diem thuy and Chang-rae Lee, attend to genre as both decree and device. Both authors put in play a dialectic of generic imperatives that expose and diminish their prescriptive power, demonstrating Hayden White’s belief that “the theory

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of genre as essence . . . [can serve] as a goad, rather than a hindrance to creative variation in poetic practice,”20 where “essence” is doubly intoned as both generic and racial. Undermining audience expectations for both a generic and sui generis account of the “authentic” immigrant, both authors deploy familiar narrative conventions only to show their representational inadequacies. Their self-reflexive generic exercises challenge the Western model of the autobiographical self that is historically situated as logocentric and patriarchal, defined or measured by white norms, and valued by a culture that romanticizes rugged individualism. As Paul John Eakin points out, “Autobiography in the West is itself hardly value-neutral as a literary kind.”21 Arnold Krupat has described the essential characteristics of the Western autobiographical tradition as conveying “egocentric individualism, historicism, and writing,” which apotheosizes the exceptional individual at the cost of recognizing the “individual” as a literary figure forged from dominant national ideologies and the narratives that serve them.22 This “cost” and the traumatic residues it leaves in the ethnic other’s mimetic gestures constitute the subtext, the story underneath the palimpsest of the American liberatory discourse in le’s debut novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), and the model minority discourse in Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999).

le thi diem thuy and The “I” We Are All Looking For I would come to see running as inseparable from living. I would choose falling asleep on rooftops and on the lawns of strangers to lying in my own bed, surrounded by knots of memories I had no language with which to unravel. —The Gangster We Are All Looking For

When le thi diem thuy’s critically acclaimed debut work, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, was published in 2003, it generated a crisis of categorization for readers and reviewers alike.23 Is it an autobiography? Memoir? Fiction? An autobiographical novel, for the compromising lot? Some skirt the difficulty by identifying its narrative type: one reviewer describes it as an interweaving of “the classic coming-of-age story with an immigration narrative.”24 Recognizing its “mixed signals,” another calls Gangster a novel “because the book jacket does,” but stresses that it “reads like a memoir, with fragmentary memories that unfold haphazardly, like real ones.”25 Yet another reviewer points to the red herrings embedded in the book’s title, confessing that she

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expected “a mystery novel or a gangland saga.”26 One critic decided to focus on its aesthetic effect and describes it as “photographic.”27 In focusing on its structure, Publisher’s Weekly calls it a plotless novel, but notes that its five interrelated but anachronistically organized chapters might lead some to call it a short story cycle. Finally, the Lannan Foundation resorts to the broadest, and thus the most vague, category and calls it simply “a book of prose.”28 Classifications of this sort are symptomatic of the unofficial interpretive culture at work, marked by the market’s own framing of the book’s consumption through identifiable genres. But what is interesting about le’s case is that genre confusion reigns in spite of the publisher’s categorization of the book as “fiction,” as if the reviewers decided that “fiction” is an inadequate frame within which to read The Gangster We Are All Looking For. General readers, too, seem to search for firmer ground on which to approach Gangster. In an essay le penned for Powell’s Books, she recounts being asked repeatedly during her promotional book tour: “How autobiographical is this?” and “Are you the girl?”29 Le, a self-professed recluse, has said in the few interviews she has granted that the novel is neither a representative account of Vietnamese Americans nor an autobiography. Yet readers continue to assign both labels to her book. In response to the question of how autobiographical Gangster is, she has replied: I was a boat child, I lost a brother, I ran away. I was born in Phan Thiet and grew up in Linda Vista. Those things are true. I traveled through a similar geography—war and its aftermath, growing up poor in America— but my body is not the girl’s body and my memories are different from her memories.30

To David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, she said: “I’m a very private person, by which I mean I want the focus to be on the work, not on me.”31 She elaborates: “I am trying to particularize three bodies, only three. I don’t think it has been done. In mainstream narratives about Vietnam, it’s usually about the American GI, while the Vietnamese are part of the landscape. They rarely get particularized as characters.”32 Mehegan, however, dismisses the particularity le insists upon and proceeds to ascribe representative status to the book: “Le intends her novel to reveal the Vietnamese spirit and culture through the specifics of one child and her parents.”33 Mehegan’s willful misrepresentation of le’s intent clearly illustrates Fredric Jameson’s description of

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a genre-driven interpretive method, “according to which our object of study is less the text itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to confront and to appropriate it.”34 Any conscious effort to create a unique and subjective narrative is corralled by the interpretive master codes to serve a representational function for the “tribe.” The “I” is, in this case, always already a synecdoche of a larger “we.” It is against the master codes of the “unofficial interpretive culture” that I situate le’s novel. The “cultural informant” the readers are looking for turns out not to be very informative at all. The narrative is rife with holes; information about the narrator, her family, and her father—the titular “gangster” and the ostensible object of our search—is indeed provided, but remains incomplete, frustratingly so for those reading according to generic law or the autobiographic imperative. These narrative lacunae are intensified, as they are also visually represented by gaps of white space that fracture the narrative into imagistic vignettes, controlling the pacing of the narrative and disrupting readerly efforts to assemble a coherent story. It would seem that the author’s intention is to probe or perhaps even to thwart the expectations of the reader’s, so that efforts to learn about the narrator and her family become, oddly, a process of reading the novel against the wishes of the author. Le deploys a range of conventional tropes and devices in the autobiography toolbox to construct a story about a family (not necessarily her own) whose history—familial as well as national—is always already erased in American post-Vietnam War discourse. The narrative, however, simultaneously complies with and sidesteps the autobiographic imperative. Insofar as the audience’s attention—particularly those readers who look for the narrator as cultural informant—will be fixed primarily on the narrator as the object of their gaze, le restructures the relation between the gaze of the dominant culture and the immigrant-refugee as object by appropriating the power of the colonial/assimilationist eye. To that end, le controls the narrative design and the arrangement of Vietnamese immigrant “objects” through atypical autobiographical techniques. The narrative, structured as a series of vignettes, is all show and minimal tell, so that meaning and significance must be inferred and of the reader’s own making. The act of interpretation is strictly the reader’s purview, and yet the author, in providing the material for interpretation, provides no validation of any inferences that might be drawn from the images. Epistemologically, the result is a continually destabilizing process whereby the reader sees, but cannot really claim to know.

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If it is the “real” Vietnamese refugee that readers are looking for behind the narrator and her family in Gangster, then their search is persistently undermined by le’s refusal to offer reliable information. Gangster’s stylized prose and decentered narrative perspectives contravene traditional autobiography’s reliance on a narrator who exudes credibility and a willingness to confess. In contrast to the conventional autobiographical “I,” le’s narrator participates in what Leigh Gilmore identifies as “the discursive legacy of ‘truth’ and ‘lying’ in the ongoing project of self-representation, especially the attachment of ‘lying’ to women’s cultural productions.”35 Informational ambiguities such as the narrator’s namelessness and the uncertainties surrounding her parents’ real names also complicate efforts to construct a complete and coherent story about the narrator and her family. These deliberate narrative gaps may encourage sensitive readers to engage in the kind of creative hearing (to borrow William L. Andrews’s term) necessitated by the deliberate silences of the text.36 But even this approach is fraught with problems for readers wholly naïve of the historical circumstances surrounding U.S.-Vietnam relations; in their cases, what they hear may be only their own constructions of the Vietnamese refugee plight gathered from predominantly Western-based media perspectives on the war and its casualties. In other words, reading the fragmented narrative structure as an aesthetic representation of the damage sustained by the author presents another, more subtle problem. If Stuart Hall is right in saying that identity is “always constituted within, not outside, representation,”37 then the identities of the narrator and her family, as well as the history on which such identities are necessarily built, are not just obscured, but are vulnerable to erasure by dominant regimes of representation. These include post-Vietnam War discourses that, concerned primarily with the effects of the war on Americans, make little room for the accounts of refugees that bring to light American interventionist policies—policies that had a hand in the destruction rather than the liberation of Vietnam. Indeed, Viet Nguyen has likened speaking of Vietnam in American discourses to speaking of the dead.38 Moreover, the way Vietnam is remembered differs vastly between Americans and Vietnamese Americans; “If screen memories from movies like Apocalypse Now or The Deer Hunter are what Americans remember,” Nguyen observes, “they are what I and many other Vietnamese Americans want to forget: peasants massacred on a boat, prisoners playing Russian roulette with the Viet Cong.”39 Yet, despite what Vietnamese Americans remember, what persists in the

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American historical imaginary are not only appalling images of razed landscapes and masses of displaced people, but the cruelty endured by captive American GIs at the hands of the Viet Cong. And so, when Vietnamese refugees began arriving on U.S. shores, they were interpolated into a narrative not of their own making. To reconcile the conflict between the cruel Vietnamese that populated the big screen and the displaced casualties now populating American cities and towns, le alludes to the narrative means by which immigrants from nations that suffer an image problem in the American media are recuperated: the immigrant narrative. Through such a narrative stroke, the palimpsest of the American immigrant replaces the Vietnamese refugee and erases the American interventionist policies that produced her. As a demonstration—and, later, a self-reflexive critique—of such a stroke, le does not begin her novel in Vietnam, but at the moment of the narrator’s landfall in the United States, presumably having already left Vietnam and her historical baggage behind. At the point of the family’s arrival in the United States, its history and identity immediately become the purview of the white American gaze and subject to its authority to erase the refugee from the American historical consciousness. Rather than confront what the refugee says about U.S.’s role in Vietnam, the gaze instead reconstructs the Vietnamese from the perspective of its own liberalist fantasies. The patriarch of the American host family that takes them in, a retired Navy man who was once stationed in the Pacific, is motivated by a misdirected post-World War II guilt and a philanthropic impulse, but he nonetheless remains blithely ignorant of the confluence of U.S. imperialist policies and French colonial histories that precipitated the narrator’s exile: When Mr. Russell heard about the Vietnamese boat people, he spent many sleepless nights staring at the ceiling and thinking about the nameless, faceless bodies lying in small boats, floating on the open water. In Mr. Russell’s mind, the Vietnamese boat people merged with his memories of the Okinawans and the Samoans and even the Hawaiians.40

Inheriting, as it were, the misdirected philanthropic impulse, Russell’s son Mel takes in the family to fulfill his father’s dying wish, even though he clearly resents the family’s presence in his home. This is, of course, an analog to white Americans’ resentment of the refugees on American soil even as they pay lip service to the U.S. rhetoric of asylum, liberation, and aid. Mel makes no effort to learn about the

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family’s history; his perception is shaped solely by the “refugee” label that precedes them: There were things about us Mel never knew or remembered. He didn’t remember that we hadn’t come running through the door he opened but, had walked, keeping close together and moving very slowly, as people often do when they have no idea what they’re walking toward or what they’re walking from.41

The United States’ accommodation of Vietnamese refugees also came with qualifications that often engender abjection rather than liberation. This is dramatized metaphorically through the terms Mel lays down for his Vietnamese houseguests with respect to objects in the house. They are, for instance, invited to look into the precious glass cabinet that showcases glass animals, but they are also duly warned that “the things inside are not for touching.”42 Significantly, while the glass promises transparency, the contact between the two parties is restricted to perception. Thus, the Americans dictate the terms of the refugees’ stay in the United States, maintaining the asymmetrical power relation and limiting it to one of detached philanthropy without mutual exchange. We can look at one another, they seem to say, but we will not touch. In addition to depicting Americans’ ambivalent reception of Vietnamese immigrants as an instance of the unfulfilled promise of transparency, le also relies on the tried-and-true trope of the photograph to organize perceptions of the narrator’s family and reconstruction of her family’s history. Nguyen has remarked eloquently about the ways in which his family’s photographs, “emblematic of a lost time, a lost place, and, in many cases, of lost people,” serve as “universal signs of our place in the world as refugees” and as “keepsakes of memory, hallowed signs of our haunting by the past.”43 Photographs of the narrator’s family back in Vietnam, too, are strewn throughout Gangster, and the weight of their significance as “hallowed signs” of life in Vietnam is keenly conveyed by the narrator and strongly felt by the reader. But while the photographs appear to serve as reliable anchors for the process of what Stuart Hall describes as the “passionate research” for an identity that has been “buried and overlaid,”44 le does not put them to their expected use. Simulating the reader’s own attempt to reconstruct the narrator’s family history, le provides a plethora of unconfirmed anecdotes and decontextualized photographs that casts

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shadows rather than light on her own family history. “A black-andwhite photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard” conjures up for the narrator the possibility of locating within that representational space the roots and foundations of her identity: “When I think of this portrait of my grandparents in their last years, I always envision a beginning. To or toward what, I don’t know, but always a beginning.”45 The photo evokes a link between familial and cultural ancestry, but le is also suspicious of the easy identification with a homeland or “ancestral” culture through the rhetoric of blood and lineage. Instead, she spotlights, once again, the photographs’ lacunae and the objects therein that won’t tell the story: “When my mother, a Catholic schoolgirl from the South, decided to marry my father, a Buddhist gangster from the North, her parents disowned her. This is in the photograph, though it is not visible to the eye.”46 Emphasis is now shifted to what remains imperceptible in the picture, which becomes the governing theme for the rest of the novel as the narrator grapples with narrative breaks, historical ruptures, and the effects of familial, cultural, and national displacement. If the photograph of the narrator’s grandparents is an inadequate representation of the roots of her identity and of Vietnam, then the novel, as a “photographic” account of the narrator’s life in the United States, also draws our attention to the visible gaps in its form and content, selfconsciously highlighting its own inadequacies in its representational mission. The photographs prove inadequate not only for providing a clear portrait of Vietnam, but also for reconstructing a coherent history of the narrator’s parents. Hence, they—and the murky portraits of the parents and grandparents they offer—defy rather than fulfill the autobiographic imperative in immigrant narratives. Parents conventionally represent the “old country” in such narratives, which allows a drama of generational and cultural conflicts to unfold between the immigrant generation and their children. Additionally, the equally conventionalized theme of the children’s reconstruction of their parents’ pre-immigrant lives, often highly sentimentalized, functions as a means to re-territorialize the parents by re-situating them in their native land. Le, however, counters the nostalgic impulse to construct such a romance unspoiled by the tragedies of history. The narrator imagines her parents’ courtship in Vietnam as a “[wandering] in darkness, never finding the clearing.”47 Her father also proves a problematic site for the narrator’s search; her memory of him in the homeland is disturbingly situated in the militarized zone of war-torn

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Vietnam: “My first memory of my father’s face is framed by the coiling barbed wire of a military camp in South Vietnam.”48 This is particularly significant, since the father is the eponymous “gangster” who constitutes the narrative’s main lacuna. The source of the appellation is the network of gossip that encircles him: The rumors about him are mysterious and mundane. [. . .] He was a heroin addict. He was a gangster. He sold American cigarettes on the black market. He cruised girls. He ran away from home. He was part of a select unit trained by the Americans. He jumped out of airplanes and disappeared for weeks into the jungles and hill towns. His friends fell around him, first during the war and then after the war, but somehow he alone managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees, to this life.49

Ultimately, the father’s origins remain frustratingly unknown and impervious even to the narrator’s imagination. “What my father told [my mother] could have been a story,” she tells us. “There was no one in the South to confirm the details of his life.”50 Because all stories are built on layers of unverifiable stories, the author’s identity is, quite literally, a composite of rumors, gossip, and other forms of short pieces of “fiction.” The multiple layers comprising le’s palimpsest also characterize her “photographs” of Vietnam, the country that constantly eludes the narrator’s efforts to establish it as her cultural-national originary, a touchstone that would in turn affirm the authenticity and authority of her account. For the narrator, Vietnam looms in the distance, as inaccessible to the narrator as she is to the reader. The suddenness and violence that marked her departure from Vietnam remains irreparable throughout the novel. When, for example, her American teacher introduces her to her classmates on her first day of school by pointing to Vietnam on a globe, she wonders to herself: “Was that where I had come from?”51 Her first “return” to Vietnam, accomplished vicariously through the family photos, was an attempt to reconstruct her national originary as ascribed to her by the teacher. What she finds, instead, are phantasmagoric images of “origin,” and a multitude of unverifiable rumors about her parents, whose “story”—or bits and pieces of what might be a story—offers no clear answers about her “original” or pre-exile self. Thus, le’s photographs fail as documentations of personal and familial histories because they do not trace a clear path to Vietnam for the narrator or the reader. Instead, le uses photographs to interrogate

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the imperial power of the U.S. gaze and the limits of its perception. Of the photograph’s critical and representational capacities, Susan Sontag writes: “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”52 For le, however, photographs can function as a technology of the dominant regime of representation. Photographic images imply transparency, but they can enforce impenetrability; they allow observation but no contact, perception but no interaction. As Sontag has also warned, colonizing power can be articulated through the act of taking a picture, so that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” and that it “[puts] oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.”53 The narrator keenly feels the objectifying power of the camera and the photographer when, early in the novel, Mel’s grandmother takes a picture of her and her father: We are looking at the camera, waiting for that flash that lets us know something has happened inside the body of the camera, something that makes it remember us, remember our faces, remember our clothes, remember the blurred shape of our hands captured in that second when we shivered, waiting. After the grandmother took this picture, she led us toward the woods.54

Rather than commit their features to memory in this seemingly opportune moment for cross-cultural contact, the camera, wielded by the white American matriarch, preserves the distance between them and engenders an ominous sense of erasure instead. It also produces what Sontag, in her reconsideration of postmodernist photography in Regarding the Pain of Others, sees as a form of depthless “spectacle.”55 Mindful of the “genre laws” of photography, le resists by adopting the perspective of the photographer in order to undermine the photographer’s claims to knowledge. In le’s textual rendering of photographs, the subjects are obscured rather than clarified—an effect that stresses the heavily mediated effect of the representational lens. To see, then, is not the same as to know, le seems to say, and the gap between the two is the crucial fissure that invalidates the gazers’ knowledge claims. This use of a conventional trope as a device that veils rather than illuminates thus produces a paradoxical effect in which the author we are all looking for remains inaccessible in spite of the surfeit of images that populate the narrative. What remains at

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the end of the novel is just a pile of photographs and not the coherent personal and familial histories it supposedly documents. In addition to vitiating the rule of genre with respect to the autobiographic imperative through contraventional uses of photography, le also adopts the Western gaze in the inspection of the photographs as a means to lay bare its racist, objectifying potential and its fetishization of the Vietnamese body and collective trauma. The narrator describes, for example, a photograph of herself in the refugee boat from the perspective of the Americans on the ship that rescued them: The picture was taken by someone standing on the deck of the ship that had picked us up. [. . .] In the picture, our boat looks like a toy boat floating in a big bowl of water. There are little people standing in the boat. We are among the people in the picture but I can’t tell who is who because we are all so small. Small faces, small heads, small arms reaching out to touch small hands. Maybe the Americans on the ship were laughing at us. Maybe that’s why it took them so long to lower the ladder.56

Likewise, the narrator provides a “news” account of a visit to a grocery store that estranges her father and herself from their would-be observers: “A Vietnamese man and a young girl were seen wandering the aisles of the Safeway Supermarket on University Avenue between the hours of midnight and 1 am. According to the store manager, their behavior was ‘strange’ but not in any way threatening.”57 And in a critical move to upset the power dynamics between landlord and tenant, native and immigrant, liberator and refugee, le’s narrator mimics the xenophobic stereotyping of Vietnamese immigrants by inhabiting the perspective of a white landlord, who, looking at the front gate dented by her mother’s inexperienced driving, “suspected each and every one of those living in the building’s sixteen units. They were all capable of having done this. They were people who broke things. . . . And they let their children run wild.”58 Through the appropriation of the landlord’s point of view, the narrator reveals the way Vietnamese refugees are lumped with other Asians in the eyes of Americans, as they had been with Mel’s father, in whose mind “the Vietnamese boat people merged with his memories of the Okinawans and the Samoans and even the Hawaiians.”59 The flattening of all the tenants into one stereotypical cast is familiar; yet, the narrator’s ironic mimicry of the racist gaze diminishes its presumed validity and thus robs it of its injurious capacities. These tactics compel readers to examine not only

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their own potentially reductive perceptions of Vietnamese immigrants, but, more significantly, the genres of public discourse—as exemplified by news reports and photographs, or specious observations and neighborhood gawking—that regulate such perceptions and render abject the racialized bodies of Vietnamese immigrants and refugees. It is this deflection of the imperialist gaze as well as the imperatives of immigrant and autobiographical writing that constitute le’s contraventional narrative ethics. As Nguyen has urged, “the writer and the witness face the ethical demand to speak of things others would rather not speak of, or hear about, or pass on into memory, even if in so doing they may perpetuate the haunting rather than quell it” (9). As a contraventional move, le has taken a different ethical action through her refusal to speak of and for things not spoken of, so that paths of vicarious experience for Americans seeking to revisit “Vietnam” as a site of trauma for Americans and Vietnamese are not forged through her. Insofar as both majority and minority constructions of history rely heavily on selective memory (where, as Nguyen observes, minorities invoke Foucaudian “countermemories” that are dissonant with those memorialized in official histories60 ), le denies each its tendency to mix memory with desire to construct coherent personal, familial, and national histories. Even the narrator’s return to Vietnam 20 years after her exile as well as her visit to the grave of her brother are not recounted with clichéd sentimentality, but mentioned fleetingly and cursorily. Nor does she recover any reliable information in this “homecoming” with which to reconstruct a history: I return after twenty years still expecting my brother to step out of the sea. Though I’m taken to the cemetery the first day back, no part of me believes he is actually beneath the light blue plaster headstone. His name, the years of his birth and his death, all etched in red, do not identify him to me in any way.61

The persistence of fractured histories and identities, le seems to say, is the real and ongoing consequence of colonialism and war, which exert their power over their victims even through the laws of genre and the autobiographic imperative. But where, then, is le’s “I” to be found, if there are no confirmed kernels of history about the narrator’s family on which she can ground both an individual and a Vietnamese identity? Both father and daughter are objects of other people’s rumors and speculations, at once constructed and indecipherable by others. The narrator suggests

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that, for her as it was for her father, all representational devices are in some way merely rumors and speculations, and she imagines herself the object of her own set of rumors: It was known that my parents had a daughter who lived on the East Coast, somewhere near New York. Some people heard that she had run away and some people heard that she had simply gone away. That was many years ago and now the rumor was she was writing stories. No one had read them and no one had met her. They imagined that her English was very good.62

While the narrator suggests that her identity is still steeped in rumor, it is at this moment in the narrative that she shares a wry, tongue-incheek smile with the reader. For if there is one thing that the reader can claim to know about the narrator, it is that, as the novel itself attests, her English is, in fact, very good. At the end, the truth of one rumor—and one only—is confirmed. In her insistent flouting of the autobiographic imperative, le may appear to reify the individualist “I” at the core of American mythologies of selfhood. “Americans,” Boelhower tells us, “pride themselves on being a mobile, no-strings-attached, road people,”63 and the narrator’s running away at the end of the novel can be read as her pursuit of a “mobile, no-strings-attached, road” life. Yet the narrator’s severing of familial ties steers clear of such clichéd romantic individualism. Her flight is an act that shirks rather than pursues a clear sense of identity. “After I had left Linda Vista,” the narrator tells us, I was on the street when I ran into someone from home. I crossed the street when this man called me, called my name. I let that name fall all around me, never once sticking to me, even when he yelled, “You liar! I know it’s you.” I kept moving as the lilting syllables of my own name fell around me like licks of flame that extinguished on contact, never catching.64

Thus, le reveals the uncomfortable convergence of the mythologized tales of individual freedom and the painful narratives of immigrant groups who live a life of involuntary movement: Whereas my father would disappear into himself when haunted, I would leap out of windows and run. [. . .] The point was to get to the street, at any cost. I would come to see running as inseparable from living. I would choose falling asleep on rooftops and on the lawns of strangers to lying in my own bed, surrounded by knots of memories I had no language with which to unravel.65

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Her “life on the run” rejects the romantic palimpsest of a “road tale” characterized by a positivistic portrayal of a voluntary life of mobility, replacing it instead with the disruptive force of a narrative of continual displacement. The rhetoric of le’s fiction, then, engenders a new ethics of interpretation whereby readers are compelled to interrogate the appropriateness of the generic framework within which they have chosen to read the text. Even more importantly, they are encouraged to examine the appropriating power of such interpretive practices. For le, the “individual” for ethnic writers too often asserts the influence of the autobiographic imperative on their works of art, supported by a readership and a literary marketplace too eager to read their work exclusively from that generic lens. Indeed, the autobiographic imperative resembles the concrete that the American landlord pours into the community swimming pool of the apartment complex where the narrator’s family lived—a pool that serves as an amorphous but living symbol of Vietnam as well as the difficult crossing to the United States for the Vietnamese tenants. The landlord’s literal and figurative attempt to concretize the image only leads to erasure, a burial of history. Le counteracts these tendencies by staging self-reflexive uses of conventions and clichés, mixing discourses of fact and fiction, and repositioning observers and the observed. Although Gilmore asserts that “autobiography seems to stabilize ‘truth’ and a subject who may utter it,”66 it would seem that le has done just the opposite. And if it is a definitive Vietnamese we hope we can claim to know by the end of the novel, it would seem, too, that le has urged us to desist from that imperative in The Gangster We Are All Looking For.

Chang-rae Lee and the Counter-Gestures of Life Writing Such is the cast of my belonging, molding to whatever is at hand. —Franklin Hata, A Gesture Life

The power of the autobiographic imperative is evident even in a sophisticated, “insider” audience. In a 2004 interview with UCLA’s Asia Institute, interviewer Kenneth Quan tells Chang-rae Lee that he had “read a little bit on [Lee’s] bio,” and that it seems to him that “this Henry Park [in Lee’s debut novel, Native Speaker] is very similar to Change Rae Lee” [sic].67 He goes on to ask Lee whether Native Speaker is autobiographical, and to what extent Lee’s portrait

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of Henry’s father resembled that of Lee’s own father. With a bit of impatience, Lee explains to Quan that similarities between Henry’s life and his own are superficial at best, and that Henry’s damaged relationship with his father is wholly unlike his very healthy relationship with his father. He refers to a common question posed to him about Franklin Hata, the narrator-protagonist of his second novel, A Gesture Life,68 as another example of the autobiographic imperative: “I can’t imagine how many questions I got about whether ‘Doc Hata was someone in your family or you?’ Well no—I just made him up like every other writer does.”69 Objecting to what he sees as a double standard that underpins such questions, Lee tells Quan: “I really don’t think that white writers get that question that much.” Readers, he insists, “don’t assume it’s someone [the writer] knew unless it’s clearly autobiographical. They don’t make the jump as quickly with Caucasian writers.”70 Like le thi diem thuy, Lee’s retort conveys his frustration with the pernicious insistence of the autobiographic imperative. Of note here, however, is that Lee’s objection is not quite against the burden of ethnic representation typically attached to the imperative. Rather, he bristles against the implicit idea that ethnic writers do not “create” narrative but merely “recount” experience: I think sometimes the implication is that “Oh, you really didn’t have to create that, that was just something that you recounted.” You know, that recounted stories are much more easy and simple to write than stuff that’s completely made up. And I think that’s one of the things that sometimes particularly ethnic American writers face because they write about people who look like them and then people automatically assume that it’s people who are them or someone in their family.71

The distinction between recounting and creating is a crucial one, for it attests to Lee’s privileging of fiction (as a creative endeavor) over autobiography and other forms of life writing. Nancy K. Miller has noted that life writing genres such as autobiography and memoir have long suffered a reputation for their lack of “literary standards, critical objectivity, and philosophical rigor.”72 Lee’s reaction to Quan’s query reflects his subscription to this point of view. In light of this, A Gesture Life can be read as Lee’s response to, and defiance of, the autobiographic imperative through the very use of the conventions of life writing genres. In this story of remembrance by a man who, in taking stock of his life as an immigrant-cum-American after

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his retirement, finds that he has lived a life governed by narratives scripted by others, Lee puts the aesthetics of life writing in service of a politics of resistance. As such, A Gesture Life is a meta-critique of the hegemonic power of the grand narratives and national romances that undergird assimilationism—narratives that, reinforced through genre conventions and reified by compliant authors, function as disciplinary instruments for American subject formation and ethnic reformation. Insofar as autobiography is a genre that typically serves the assimilationist ideologies of the dominant culture, Lee puts a close relative of autobiography to work against the autobiographic imperative: the memoir. While it is not my intent to engage in the futile exercise of taxonomizing the distinctions that separate the autobiography from the memoir, I do wish to draw on several salient similarities and differences between the two for the purposes of this book. Unlike traditional autobiography, the memoir is nonlinear and achronological. Structured by a series of analepses, the memoir is a compilation of subjective memories, reflections, and interpretations that together form a composite portrait of the writer’s sense of selfhood. Thus, the memoir is both formally and figuratively befitting of a narrative that uncovers suppressed or erased aspects of the immigrant’s identity in his project of American self-fashioning. Yet, while its nonlinear structure might lend the genre a deconstructionist bent, it is every bit as susceptible to the coercive power of the laws of genre. Lee reveals that even as the memoir can be deployed to critique the imperatives of autobiography and assimilationism, it is mostly called upon for analeptical purposes—in the restorative sense of the word—in its conveyance of the memoirist’s desire to construct a selfhood that conforms to nationally and culturally sanctioned models. Structurally, A Gesture Life’s narrative of recovery is woven from two seemingly disparate experiences. On the one hand, it is an account of the “comfort women,” Japanese and Korean women conscripted into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army in World War II and subjected to unspeakable degradation and sexual abuse by the soldiers they supposedly “comforted.” Indeed, as the plight of these women gains more visibility in American historical consciousness, the novel is often marketed as a dramatization of this sordid event in recent Japanese military history.73 On the other hand, the novel also portrays an ostensibly assimilated immigrant whose backward glance unveils the suppressed history of the narrator’s entanglement with the comfort women—a history that ruptures the meticulously cultivated success narrative he has wrought for himself in America.

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I shall not rehearse here the excellent critical analyses that have been done on the novel’s treatment of the historical subject of comfort women, the psychosocial subject of trauma and memory associated with assimilationist complicities, and the ideological subject of the constitution of citizenship.74 I turn instead to focus on the nuts and bolts of the memoir genre Lee deploys to expose the coercive power and representational inadequacies of national lore, the most powerful of which, for immigrants and natives alike, is the romance of assimilation. Hamilton Carroll has recently argued that Gesture “marks a significant intervention in the literature of assimilation” through Hata’s unsuccessful effort “to write himself into citizenship around the narrative conventions of the bildungsroman.”75 More specifically, “Despite Hata’s attempts to replicate the [bildungsroman] form,” Carroll observes, “the novel becomes a traumatic narrative that consistently displaces Hata’s tale of successful assimilation.”76 While Carroll rightly reads Gesture as a narrative of trauma rather than success, I contend that Lee structures the novel around the conventions of the memoir, rather than the bildungsroman, as a deconstructive means of unraveling the romance of assimilation narratives. Lee uses the memoir to recover (and recover from) figuratively amputated parts of self and history in the name of assimilation. Such is the dismemberment underneath the façade of wholeness that the narrator-protagonist Franklin “Doc” Hata displays at the novel’s outset. In this sense, we may think of Lee’s use of the memoir as an example of Miller’s proposed notion of “memoir as prosthesis,” an “aid to memory [that] helps you remember,”77 and thus to “recover,” in both senses of the word, the self. The recovery process Hata undergoes also bears out Miller’s view of the memoir as “the most generous of modern genres” in its capacity to help the memoirist “keep alive the notion that experience can take the form of art and that remembering is a guide to living.”78 Wary of placing too much faith in the power of the memoir, however, Paula Fass notes that the “democratization” that comes with the territory of popular prose genres has also formularized the memoir’s narrative structure. Fass reminds us that “the memoir is not a substitute for systematic historical reconstruction”; rather, it provides a “unique individual variation on commonly depicted historical experiences.”79 But it, too, is bound by generic laws that facilitate its widespread popularity. Like the autobiography, the memoir possesses its own generic macropropositions, which consist of revisiting and resolving past trials and tribulations into which a memoirist may insert

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particularized personal information. The genre’s current popularity may further stem from the culture of “trauma talk,” made fashionable by the likes of Dr. Phil and Larry King. More significantly, as Miller has observed, “memoirs from sites of danger provide a safe space for readers to ponder the nightmare of contemporary global relations, even as the pages display the extreme difficulty of living in times of traumatic history.”80 In other words, a memoir can commodify traumatic events from far-flung places for vicarious consumption. The genre, then, is imbued with recuperative/liberatory as well as prescriptive/coercive capacities, both of which may play a deterministic role in the construction of the immigrant subject. Tellingly, a sense of what Fass calls a pervasive “psychotherapeutic perspective” typical in memoirs—that is, “the need to record the personal and to proclaim its meaningfulness”—permeates Hata’s narrative voice in A Gesture Life.81 Indeed, Fass describes the memoir as a genre that accords writers the means by which to “use their reflections to deal with and overcome issues related to the authenticity of the self.”82 From this perspective, Hata’s overly self-conscious and effusive interpretations of his memories demonstrate his effort to validate his self-perception as the town’s (and the nation’s) beloved model citizen. Hata’s memoir, however, betrays the construction of a selfhood underwritten by the ruling class or a dominant culture vested with interpellative authority over its colonial or immigrant subjects. The remembrances of his past lead him through a process of self-unraveling that ultimately achieves the opposite of the intended effect: the invalidation of the “good Doc Hata,” and the devastating revelation of this persona as a self-spun romance cobbled from the conventions of sacrosanct American myths. Intonations of immigrant and American Dream romances reverberate through Hata’s song of himself at the novel’s outset. Hata perceives himself as just the sort of upstanding, law-abiding, hardworking immigrant-citizen he believes that the upscale suburban New York town of Bedley Run, where he has resided since his immigration from Japan, wants to have in its midst. Newly retired from his modest but successful medical supply business in town, Hata—“Doc Hata” as he is affectionately called around town—owns a beautiful, immaculately maintained house; enjoys respect from all; and basks in what he sees as “an almost Oriental veneration” by the townsfolk. “People know me here,” he declares at the beginning of the novel, assuring the implied reader that he not only belongs in Bedley Run, but has also become an ideal member of this community, someone whom

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they don’t simply tolerate, but venerate. The outline of this introductory portrait is already familiar, as well as a recognizable depiction of the immigrant success story in which success is articulated through pronouncements of financial stability and cultural belonging. This depiction, however, is merely the first invocation of a series of sacrosanct national myths to which Hata has aspired throughout his life. Through Hata’s narration, Lee reveals an unreliability that immediately registers by means of a profoundly solipsistic perspective fraught with transparent assimilationist desire as well as sublimations of guilt and grief. The portrait of an immigrant who has “arrived” and assimilated so fully as to have become the ideal citizen of this idyllic American suburb is the fiction that Hata tries to maintain throughout the novel. As he embarks on a postretirement reflection of his life as an exemplary citizen of Bedley Run—the story he wants to construct for himself as a self-congratulatory gesture—it becomes clear that the semblance of equanimity he has carefully cultivated for himself is the product of an elaborate self-deception. As Hata performs, through his guarded narration, gesture upon gesture of presenting the most sanguine profile of selfhood, his narrative compulsions only betray, with increasing clarity, a counter-narrative of deep-rooted ressentiment toward a renounced past. Beneath Hata’s poised exterior churns a confluence of painful memories of his troubled relationships with three women: Kkutaeh, a “comfort woman” for whom he developed romantic feelings while he served as a medic in the Japanese military; Sunny, his estranged adopted daughter in the United States; and Mary Burns, a Bedley Run neighbor with whom he tries unsuccessfully to develop a romantic relationship. As more and more details about these relationships are brought to light, Hata finally confronts the less-than-honorable intentions and the tragic consequences of the self-preserving decisions he has made in life. These memories, revealed through a series of analepses, turn a sanguine chronicle of his life as a model citizen into the most difficult “story” of his life as a model minority, forcing him to confront the witting and unwitting compromises, mistakes, and even crimes from his past on which his present-day successes are built. As one reviewer succinctly puts it, Lee evokes, through Hata, “the collision of unacceptable truth with the illusion of workaday serenity.”83 The “illusion of workaday serenity” proves an apt description for Lee’s appropriation of “comfort” as an ironic trope for Hata’s euphemistic recounting of his painful past. To compensate for his

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sense of abjection as a Korean under Japanese colonial rule in the first part of his life and as an Asian immigrant under U.S. assimilationist imperatives in the second, Hata relies on a variety of national lore underwritten by the cultural elite for his sense of selfhood and social purpose. The shattering of the novel’s opening self-portrait, however, leads to the subsequent collapse of a heap of fictive lore on which it is built. As Hata revisits moments in his past that involve his fraught relationships with Kkutaeh and Sunny, it becomes clear that the damage that Hata wreaks upon each relationship owes much to his almost pathological devotion to the ideals of assimilationist romances. As intimated, the opening scene situates Hata in a sepia-like portrait of the idyllic suburban town of Bedley Run, where he has lived for over 30 years, and where, according to himself, he enjoys respect. The setting is suffused with the stock elements of a Norman Rockwell canvas; it is a visual rendition of what Hata believes to be the object of immigrant aspirations. As the proud owner of a highly valued house in this “up-and-coming” town, he believes that he has indeed fulfilled this emblematic immigrant ambition. Hata has earned a quasi-native status here—“everyone . . . knows perfectly who I am”—and the great pains he takes to maintain a most tidy appearance for his house reflects his pride in having achieved, in his eyes, this status.84 Disrupting the telos of the American Dream narrative, however, are the very insistent efforts of a local real estate agent hell bent on convincing Hata to sell his house. Liv Crawford, the highly persuasive white real estate agent, heaps praises on Hata for his excellent maintenance of the house even as she tries to induce him to sell it. Subtly, the double talk signifies the dominant white culture’s approval of the immigrant’s stewardship of the house even as it attempts to evacuate the immigrant from it. Reminiscent of Henry Park’s white wife, Lelia, the self-proclaimed “standard bearer” of the English language in Lee’s debut novel, Native Speaker, Liv is the uncontestable native of Bedley Run who possesses the authority to declare what the town stands for. As she tells Renny Banerjee, Hata’s Indian American friend, “You come to a place like this; you don’t make it yours with money or change it by the virtuous coffee color of your skin or do anything but welcomingly submit and you’re happy to do so.”85 Hata fully subscribes to this edict: “I’ve always believed that the predominant burden is mine, if it is a question of feeling at home in a place. Why should it be another’s? How can it? So I do what is necessary in being complimentary, as a citizen and colleague and partner.”86 Indeed, there is something unsettlingly persuasive about Liv’s opinions and suggestions, friendly

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but exclusionary at the same time. When Hata was hospitalized after an accidental fire in the house, she took it upon herself to revamp the interior in his absence. Upon his return, he discovers a home from which traces of his habitation seem to have been removed: “As Liv Crawford guides me through the rooms pointing out the distinguishing features of the renovations, I have the peculiar sensation that this inspection and showing is somehow postmortem, that I am already dead and a memory and I am walking the hallways of another man’s estate.”87 Yet such is the depth of Hata’s deference to her authority that, despite his uneasy feeling toward the renovated house as an “oddly unsatisfying museum that she has come to curate,” he stifles such hints of resentment as the unnecessary plaintiveness of an ingrate. “I cannot blame her, for there is nothing to assign blame about,” he reflects, and reassures himself that “if anything occurs to [him] it is deep-felt gratitude” for the work she has done for him.88 The prospect of the sale of the house, however, prompts Hata to inspect the structural soundness of his house carefully. Along with the array of objects he uncovers from the deep recesses of this dwelling, the cracks in the walls and the peeling paint trigger his reluctant confrontations with painful memories long buried. The house, that favored trope of assimilationist success, is thus re-signified thematically as a repository for repressed histories, as well as formally, intimating the structural interventions that undercut the apparent coherency of his narrative. Hata’s frustration with his inability to keep up with the necessary repairs for his house thus functions as a metaphor for, and a displaced expression of, his inability to maintain his carefully wrought success story: I took up general maintenance of the house with the usual care and thoroughness, but as it happened every week something seemed to stall my efforts. Everything would go smoothly until a cabinet door wouldn’t catch, or a hinge began to squeak, or a drain was too slow, and then a vise-like tightness came over me.89

During one repair attempt, Hata cracks a mirror and cuts himself bloody while “trying to rub out a persistent cloudy stain in the vanity”—an act that reflects his failure to maintain authorial control of his self-portrait. Layers of memories slowly emerge from the closed and cracked spaces of the house to reveal crucial information about formative moments in Hata’s past, moments that shaped his compliant character.

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As an adolescent, Hata locates his first sense of personhood at the moment when he was adopted from his Korean family by a Japanese one as a reward for having scored “exceptionally high on several achievement tests.”90 This bit of luck, coupled with personal merit as it is defined by the Japanese, provided an unexpected escape from “the narrow existence of [his] family and [their] ghetto” from which “no one of [his] family’s circumstance could expect to change his station, at least without a lifetime of struggle.”91 The story echoes Western picaresque and “bootstrap” narratives that feature base-born protagonists who ascend the social and economic ladder with sheer aplomb and a bit of fortune on their side. But Hata’s ascent narrative is weighted with the forces of colonialism; the colonial conditions of his birth doubtlessly burnished in his young mind that social mobility and personhood could be achieved only by mimicking the Japanese and disentangling himself from the abject existence of his Korean family. Lee complicates the portrait, as Hata’s description of his relationship with his adoptive Japanese parents betrays a perpetual sense of inadequacy on his part, and perhaps a distant condescension on their part, that led him to seek “comfort” elsewhere, to, subsequently, regard the state—what he calls “the purposeful society”—as his true “parent” and benefactor. “I was more than grateful,” Hata declares, “and I knew even then as a boy of twelve how I should always give myself over to its vigilance, entrusting to its care everything I could know or ever hope for.”92 Held captive by a perpetual sense of indebtedness to the colonizers who lifted him out of a subaltern existence, Hata not only submits completely to the hegemony of their rigid social hierarchy, but also becomes the very instrument of colonial and assimilationist subjection by mimicking the paternalism of the ruling class. He takes it upon himself to act as liberator and redeemer of the debased and the oppressed. His treatment of the two significant women in his life— Kkutaeh, the Korean-born “comfort woman” who becomes his object of affection during his tour with the Japanese army in Burma, and Sunny, his Korean-born adopted daughter in the United States—is guided by his desire to live out his own fantasy of imperial magnanimity, of which he believes he, too, had been a beneficiary. Emulating his understanding of how the “father” state cares for its dependents, Hata’s memories of the women convey a quixotic quality that reflects his desire to play the role of hero. Significantly, Lee bifurcates here the romance of heroism into two competing models. On the one hand, Hata reveres the unassailable

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power that comes with what he sees as the necessary tough love of the Japanese state—represented by the despotic Colonel Ishii and the ruthless Captain Ono, who, in a gruesome scene, carved open the chest and massaged the heart of a living man condemned to death to demonstrate “a possible emergency maneuver in the field.”93 On the other hand, he is captivated by a Western romance of liberation in which the oppressed and downtrodden are emancipated by a benefactor of uncommon moral strength. The sui generis ideal of the liberation romance thus contradicts the exemplary ideal of the “purposeful society”; whereas the former foregrounds an emancipated individual against the tyranny of the state, the latter vests the state with the authority to determine and enforce the roles of its citizens and subjects for the sake and coherency of national identity. The contradiction, while suggesting an Eastern versus Western conception of ideal subjecthood, also lays bare the ways in which both are fully constituted by their own repertoires of nationalistic lore. Nationalistic lore proves crucial to Hata’s constitution of self as an exemplary subject within the “purposeful society,” particularly when his selfhood is persistently assailed as a Korean under Japanese colonial rule and as a lowly medic of a brigade stationed at a far-flung outpost in Japanese-occupied Burma. Indeed, faced with the prospect of inevitable defeat and the reality that no resistance within the social or military structure is possible, Hata’s dependence on the lore is even more steadfast or, perhaps, desperate. Almost predictably, he copes by casting himself in the romance of “the resolve of the Japanese soldier, the lore of his tenacity and courage and willingness to fight in the face of certain death.”94 The lore reinforces Hata’s uncritical veneration of the brutal Japanese officers, particularly the callous Captain Ono, in whom he saw clarity of personhood because, “born into an elite caste,” these officers “seemed the very incarnation of our meticulously constructed way of life.”95 Structure becomes the very sign of power and authority in Hata’s eyes, and critically, it is only through established forms and structures—in life and in the narration of it— that Hata is able to imagine a viable subjecthood. To him, there is no subjecthood outside the tightly structured lore; it is this belief that undergirds how he rationalizes the role of the conscripted women, for “in this schema the commander had his level, the officers theirs, the enlisted men and others yet another, and so on and so forth, until it came to the girls, who had their own. All this was inviolable, like any set of natural laws.”96 Chillingly, Hata confesses to having “like everyone else appreciated the logic of deploying young women to

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help maintain the morale of officers and foot soldiers in the field” and justifies it as a necessary part of the structured lore of the Japanese soldiers “[readying] themselves for suffering and death.”97 Indeed, the constricting national narrative seems to sustain the morale of the soldiers and thus functions as a crucial coping mechanism for soldiers facing inevitable defeat and certain death. The women, regarded as the “final solace and pleasure” given to the men before the troop’s certain destruction, were crucial to sustaining the fiction. But the clean, clear mythic structure ultimately does not withstand the crumbling framework of the brigade, and is, in the end, overcome with the literal and figurative dirt that lies underneath: “There were various scatters of litter about the encampment, and all about the air was the fouled, earthy smell of the far latrines, which had filled up again and needed to be cleared. This was the unheroic state of our far-flung outpost.”98 The entire episode ends in a brutal displacement of the soldiers’ collective angst onto the women, who are variously raped and killed, as a horrific reality that also serves as a metaphor for the consequences of suppressed collective trauma. The cues for reading the brutality as a metaphor for suppressed collective trauma emerge as Hata staunchly adheres to the laws of this nationalist fiction while carrying on a vexed relationship with one of the comfort women known as “Kkutaeh.” Believing himself in love with Kkutaeh, his feelings for her stir up repressed resentment toward the controlling narrative and compels him to imagine an alternate “lore” of his own, a liberation romance for himself and for Khutaeh. While he could never self-consciously imagine emancipation from Japanese hegemony for himself (indeed, hegemony renders him incapable of identifying his complicities or his desires for liberation), he relies on conventional, patriarchal models of romance to position himself as the savior rather than the perpetrator or the victim, displacing his own abjection onto Kkutaeh and aligning himself with the figures of power. Hearing her name uttered by her sister, Hata “thought she was saying ‘Kkutaeh,’ which meant bottom, or last” (my emphasis).99 He takes it upon himself to ascribe the appellation to her, an act that simultaneously vests himself with the power to name and to project his own abjection onto her. Throughout their encounters, during which he learns of her miserable childhood under the care of an austere father and the appalling conditions under which she was conscripted, he imposes a sentimentalized narrative of courtship over her trauma-ridden accounts. Later, he rationalizes his own participation in the sanctioned rape of the women by sublimating his sexual

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encounter with Khutaeh as the innocent act of a young man “in the blush of his first sexual love,” and sanitizing the consummation in his own mind as “quite swift and natural, as chaste as it could ever be.”100 Completing this self-constructed romance, he believes himself ready to “[execute] whatever she asked” and to “help her even to escape,” and tells her: “We can go out of this place together . . . . I will take care of you and protect you no matter where we go.”101 He imagines that they could pretend to be “like figures in a Western novel,” to “somehow exist outside of this place and time and circumstance, share instead the minute and sordid problems of such folks, the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love.”102 The power of Western fantasy enables Hata to imagine himself as both exceptional (a liberatory figure from Japanese tyranny) and exemplary (a heroic type of the Western romance). But the competing ideals of the two romances prove the fantasy unsustainable. Kkutaeh reminds Hata that his fantasy will not prevent the unavoidable rape that awaits her: The doctor will come here tonight. Tonight! Will the war end before then? This afternoon? Will you spirit us away before the dusk falls, Jiro? Because if not there is nothing more to talk about in a real way. There is dreaming and dreaming talk and little else, which is happy enough, and maybe all that remains to us. But please don’t try to make things sound real anymore.103

Ono, too, scoffs at Hata’s delusions of chivalry or bushido: “What do you think you are doing, protecting her honor? I suppose you imagine she’s your maiden, and you her swordsman. You do, indeed.”104 Kkutaeh, too, never indulges in Hata’s fantasies, and tries to compel him to confront the truth: “If you loved me, Lieutenant, if you truly loved me, you could not bear to be with me. You could not see me like this, you could not stand for one moment longer the thought of me even living.”105 She pleads for him to euthanize her because, as she tells him, “there is no escape. I know you dream of one but it doesn’t exist. This time won’t end. It will end for you, but not for me.”106 Yet her pleas go unheeded as he attempts to sustain the liberation romance for himself. Ultimately, his naïve devotion to both the Japanese and the Western lore not only prolongs Kkutaeh’s abject existence, but also precipitates her and her unborn child’s tragic death when she is brutally raped and beaten by a gang of demoralized soldiers. It is through the contradiction between nationalist and liberation romances that Lee reveals their coercive power and competing

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imperatives. Hata’s “love” for Kkutaeh is revealed to be a perverse form of mimetic desire that transparently expresses his reverence for Ono rather than his “love” for Kkutaeh. His mimicry of Ono’s manners and desires is the only means by which he could approach the embodiment of the ideal Ono represents in his eyes. Knowing that Ono has singled out Kkutaeh among the women, Hata not only sublimates Ono’s motives for doing so, but, in a fit of mimetic rivalry, conflates himself and Ono in his description of the nature of their desire for her. Reflecting on Ono having “reserved” Khutaeh for himself, Hata believes that “it was not that the doctor thought her to be simply beautiful. [. . .] It was a more particular interest than that, and one I think perhaps he himself could not (and would not) describe. Like a kind of love, which need not be romantic or sexual but is a craving all the same, the way a young boy can so desire something that he loves it with the fiercest intensity.”107 Such mimeticism, Rey Chow has argued, has tremendous coercive power to “keep [ethnics] in their place,” precisely because the desire to mime the figures of authority in the dominant culture trumps the desire to be free of their influence.108 Hata appears to recognize this in several moments of reflective self-awareness: “I had begun to find myself defending her, at least in my mind, stepping between her and others, or pulling her from faceless danger,” he recounts, “but in truth it was solely the doctor and surgeon, Captain Ono, who ever had any purpose and intention for her . . . and it was his narrowed, severe visage that I could not yet conceive of repelling.”109 Such revealing glimpses into his own intentions, however, do not equip him with the capacity to controvert the power of the lore for which Ono stands. The Japanese lore of “purposeful society” bears a different face in the American context but functions just as powerfully. Here, “purpose” or “subjecthood” is underwritten by the lore of assimilation. Hata’s indulgence in self-constructed illusions of his success in the United States is, quite simply, his consignment of the “tenacity and courage” of a Japanese soldier to a Japanese (Korean) immigrant. But as a subject constituted by both the lore of assimilation and the lore of liberation, the contradictions therein inevitably disrupt Hata’s efforts to construct an exemplary life according to the imperatives of the former. Even as he unconsciously replicates the very assimilationist mechanisms that keep him in his place, he reenacts a liberation romance once again by adopting a young girl of Korean descent from Japan—a relationship doomed to reproduce the abjection of both the consenting male subject and the female subject he hopes to save.

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Positioning himself as an exemplar of the American “purposeful society,” Hata presses Sunny, ward of the state he believes he represents, to comply with the role he has prescribed for her. Endlessly critical of her literal and figurative “performances,” he replicates the mechanisms that compel mimicry from minority subjects through his attempts to induce a persistent sense of “not-quiteness” (to borrow Bhabha’s oft-cited formulation) in Sunny. Recalling her piano performances, Hata qualifies his praise with damning criticism: In competition Sunny was mostly magnificent, but it seemed that there were always a few difficult and even strangely blundering moments in her performances, perplexing passages marring what was otherwise wholesale surety and brilliance. It was perfection—or even near-perfection—that somehow eluded her, and as she grew up, the notion of attempting it seemed to fall farther and farther from her desire.110

Disturbingly, the criticism echoes Captain Ono’s assessment of Hata: “You, Lieutenant, too much depend upon generous fate and gesture. There is no internal possession, no embodiment. Thus you fail in some measure always. You perennially disappoint someone like me.”111 Almost predictably, Hata’s attempts to police Sunny’s sexuality and formative womanhood pushes Sunny to commit sexual and legal transgressions; his obsession with gestures of propriety drives Sunny literally and figuratively to the borders of whitewashed Bedley Run—where she falls in with a company of questionable repute—and compels her to run away from home. When she returns briefly to seek his help with her pregnancy, the only proper action to be taken, in Hata’s view, is a discreet abortion. And even as he exacts disciplinary punishment on Sunny, he chastises himself for failing to embody the inspirational—that is, coercive—ideals of the state: “I should see it as a symbol of my own failure, in inspiring the best in you.”112 Such aspirational devotion reflects a pathology that can only engender a perpetual self-flagellation for failing to reform the flawed Korean immigrant— his daughter as an ostensible reflection of himself—into the successful American subject. Both women’s refusals to carry out the same complicitous gestures that mark Hata’s life reveal his deeply internalized paternalist conception of womanhood in both the Japanese and American contexts. While readers might be seduced to view Sunny’s voluntary exile to the borders of Bedley Run’s whitewashed setting as a form of resistance, Lee does not allow for such a generic interpretive move. Sunny’s exile

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is both resistance and abjection, precisely in the same way that Kkutaeh’s appeals for suicide were. It is thus the actions of women that disrupt Hata’s carefully constructed illusion of serene subjectivity. It is significant to note, too, that the first flashback that sets his memoir in motion is the suicide of a young woman “conscript” escaping the terrible fate that awaits her. Insofar as the memoir posits a distinctive form of mediation, the memoirist is empowered with the reconstruction of history. Aware that the memoir, always a representation of history, could unwittingly sanitize its violence and brutality, Lee aims not at an “authentic” version of history (impossible through representation), but at underscoring the very mechanisms of representation, thus laying bare the “creative” dimension of the act of “recounting.” Indeed, this view is articulated in Hata’s assessment of his own reflections: I’m not sure anymore what I see when I “look out,” if it’s real or of my own making or something in between, a widely shared fantasy of what we wish life to be and, therefore, have contrived to create. Or perhaps more to the point, what ought we see, for best sustenance and contentment and sense of purpose to our days?113 (my emphasis)

Lee suggests that while such contrivances are necessary for survival and perhaps even happiness in a state where nationalist and assimilationist lore reign, they are nevertheless contrivances, wrought by regimes of power to induce individuals to comply with or to resist the imperatives of assimilation. In addition to these tensions, Lee is mindful of the potential for committing his own offense of authorial abjection in his literary intervention into these women’s history. Thus, Lee peels away the veneer of “comfort” that the genre provides through the device of hindsight. Aware that the very language of reflection is prone to sanitization, Lee calls attention to the safety of geographic and historical distances that can further blunt the brutality suffered by the women, and, it should be noted, the brutalities suffered by Hata as well. Powerfully, Hata’s memoir speaks truth against the sterilizing effect of clinical reports and sanitized official history: That there were only five of them seems remarkable to me now, given that there were nearly two hundred men in the encampment, but at the time I had no thoughts of what was awaiting them in the coming days and nights. Like the rest of the men who were watching, I was simply struck by their mere

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presence, by the white shock of their oversized pants, by their dirty, unshod feet, by the narrowness of their hands and their throats.114

The graphic details of the girls “swollen and bruised” with “dried smears of crimson-tinged discharges” lay bare the untidy and appalling realities of history. Hata thus commits an exceptional act through his remembrances of the rapes, “illicit” social and sexual activities, and deaths that occur outside the borders of not only the Japanese army camp, but also Bedley Run and his carefully cultivated, exemplary model minority persona. His song of himself turns out to be not of himself at all, but of the two women who paid dearly for their acts of resistance against his devotion to the power of lore—of nation, of patriarchal authority, of assimilation. It is, then, not the memories per se that disrupt Hata’s romantic gestures, but the practice of the conventions of memoir—of the literary act of remembering—that functions as a deconstructive countergesture. It is the act of remembering against the imperatives of the immigrant success story that precipitates Hata’s rejection of the subjecthood it promises. Toward the end of his reluctant memoir, Hata begins to reevaluate his life in a clearer, harsher light: For isn’t this what I’ve attempted for most all of my life, from entering the regular school with my Japanese parents when I was a boy, to enlisting myself in what should have been a glorious war, and then settling in this country and in a most respectable town, isn’t this my long folly, my continuous failure?115

Thus, Lee’s memoir does not seek to smooth over the kinks of the past as an affirmational narrative, but as a subversive one that by the end re-signifies, or simply dismantles, all the sacrosanct elements of the American Dream narrative. Kandice Chuh has argued that Hata is “subjectless” in the end, without home, without family, and without the burdens of the imperatives of the assimilationist lore.116 But I would argue that the narrative gestures toward a new constitution of subjectivity for its dominant and subordinate subjects, and it does so through the modestly “comic” denouement of Renny and Liv’s marriage, in the tentative steps Hata and Sunny are taking to resolve their past differences, and in Thomas, Sunny’s mixed-race son born out of wedlock, whom Hata comes to see as a crucial element of the new lore he is just beginning to construct for himself.

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A Gesture Life, then, gestures toward the telos of the assimilated, self-fashioned model minority, but ultimately retreats from it. Like le, Lee makes use of memoiristic devices to critique two hallowed narratives that immigrant novels are expected to offer: an “authentic” account of the immigrant-protagonist’s culture of origin as the site of historical trauma, and an assimilationist success story that affirms the idea of American exceptionalism. A Gesture Life provides no comfort story of American Dreams or comfort against Asian nightmares. Rather, it subverts the telos of an American romance where a traumatic ethnic past is traded in for a new American future. “In literature,” Nancy Miller observes, the genealogical tree and the family narrative are crucial, often structural, components of autobiography as a genre. The arc of becoming through selfknowledge is rooted in but never entirely bound to the stories of our familial past. The challenge that faces autobiographers is to invent themselves despite the weight of their family history, and autobiographical singularity emerges in negotiation with this legacy.117

For both le thi diem thuy and Chang-rae Lee, however, it is the inability to recover a familial—and, I would argue, national—narrative, that marks their contraventions of a genre that had become a prescription for the American immigrant subject. That inability to recover, thematized through unconventional uses of generic tropes, redirects readerly attention to the forces of assimilationism and colonialism that fracture and erase such histories.

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Chapter

2

R e c r i m i n at i o n s On Asian American Crime Fiction

Criminalizing Asian America When news broke on April 16, 2007, of a gunman on the loose on the Virginia Tech campus, it marked a significant disruption in popular perceptions of Asian Americans. Cho Seung-hui, the Korean American undergraduate student at Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University who killed 33 people, including himself, on campus on that day, tapped into Americans’ anxieties about the Asians in their midst because the crime was perpetrated by such an unlikely person and in such an unlikely locale. On first blush, Cho seems the very antithesis of A Gesture Life’s Franklin Hata, acting on his deep resentment of social abjection through violence rather than an overcompensated compliance. While their choices do differ radically, however, both perpetrated violence, directly or indirectly, and they do so as a consequence of their subaltern position. Moreover, the shootings forced Americans to confront prevailing views of Asians in the United States, views that have been delineated along the lines of assimilative complicity or shady criminality. Little else points to the power of such binaristic constructions of Asian American identities than the assemblage of photographs of Cho in the media coverage, which consists of two dichotomous types of images—an Asian American model minority and a gun-toting killer. The two most widely disseminated photos of Cho reflect this polarization: one of him, bespectacled, looking placidly away from the camera; the other, without eyeglasses, dressed in black and brandishing guns,

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looking directly and confrontationally into the camera. The first image is a comfortable one to mainstream America; not so the second. That the two types could and did converge in one individual undoubtedly produced in the American public the kind of horror that, per Julia Kristeva, results from the breakdown of clear distinctions. The images of the gun-wielding Cho suggest that he had relied on a visual vocabulary of militant power in popular culture—shaved head; gloved hands; assortment of guns, knives, and other weapons; and an ammunition vest—which he transposed onto his Asian American body, a body type that has long suffered from representational emasculation. When asked how she responded to the news of the shooting and to the references of “Ismael” and “Axe” on Cho’s tattooed arm, novelist Min Jin Lee seems to respond to Cho’s urge to express from this emasculated space, and speculates that he was relying on a biblical narrative as well as a racial narrative to express what he could not say through other expressive models.1 Indeed, Cho’s experiments with a variety of artistic forms and literary genres are well documented: lurid details of the dark and often violent content of the plays and short stories he wrote for literature courses, personal manifestoes, and even the tattoos on his arms suggest that he sought an outlet for his pain through modes of literary and visual culture. Lee hypothesizes that Cho’s deep sense of non-belonging fueled his identification with literary loners and other archetypal figures of alienation. Perhaps, and not surprisingly, these models failed to alleviate his isolation and anger and, even more devastatingly, seemed to have led him to what Sheng-mei Ma has called “the deathly embrace” whereby Asian Americans internalize and replicate images of Asians—models and villains alike—that have been largely scripted by non-Asians.2 Through these liberation performances, however, Cho unwittingly carried out the most complicit act of all: the reification of the very discursive interpellations against which he tried to rebel. His final act, in which he “frames” himself as both victim and victimizer within a television screen and delivers a litany of threats and laments that echo those spoken in revenge fantasies from Rambo to Old Boy, is a chilling demonstration of the deathliness of the embrace. The Virginia Tech tragedy, then, sounded an alarm for Asian and non-Asian Americans alike: that the model minority ideal, underwritten by the dominant culture and internalized by Asian Americans, can prove stifling and oppressive enough to engender deep resentment and lead to violent acts of protest and despair. Media reports that cast Cho’s actions as an isolated incident perpetrated by a “bad

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apple,” however, exonerate and erase the confluence of social conditions and forces that might have contributed to the unbearable conditions against which the “criminal” acts. Such acts are most certainly not isolated expressions of angst; rather, they are piercing comments on the social flaws and injustices that have gone unnoticed. Cho’s act also compels us to reexamine the legal principle of defining a “crime” when the perpetrator is driven by what might be regarded as legitimate grievances. To cast Cho’s actions as a form of violent protest is a politically risky proposition, because it rationalizes his action and makes sense of it. To do so would also threaten to dissolve the clear distinction that separates Cho from his victims, and implicate the whole of society in his criminal act. Hence, an ambivalence persists in public perceptions of Cho. Unlike Rambo, whose transparent and thus understandable motivations elicit sympathy from the audience through racial and ideological identification, Cho remains incomprehensible by dint of his “Asian inscrutability”—a reputation that precedes him through an entrenched ethnic stereotype. The Cho case reveals America’s discomfort with images of Asian Americans that do not correspond with the model minorities long cultivated by mainstream media. The range of photographs chillingly provided a visual account of Robert G. Lee’s inventory of popular Orientalist imageries of “the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook,”3 most notably the striking merging of the deviant/yellow peril/pollutant with the model minority. These images of Cho thus bring to light another equally pervasive, enduring, and pernicious Orientalist stereotype in the mainstream cultural consciousness: the Asian criminal. Like the model minority, the criminal is also the product of literary cultivation. Representations of Asian American “bad subjects,” to use Nguyen’s term, consolidated largely around models of criminality that emerged from the genre of American crime fiction, in which the genre’s predominantly white authorship and readership fashioned some of the most enduring images of Asian criminality. Such figurations run the gamut from Sax Rohmer’s 1912 creation, Dr. Fu Manchu, to the drag-racing urban gangs of the present decade’s The Fast and the Furious franchise, and are revealing indicators of the prevailing Orientalist fears of the time of their creation. The representational vocabularies for these criminal figurations share the genre of crime fiction as their common source. Moreover, they are deliberately characterized in contradistinction to the cultural and political complicities marked by the model minority stereotype. These durable Orientalist archetypes, stemming from the

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noir tradition, have just as powerfully circumscribed the cultural formation of Asian America as the model minority discourse in immigrant fiction. Yet, like the writers of immigrant fiction discussed in Chapter 1 who work within the genre to confront its entrenched conventions, several contemporary Asian American writers and filmmakers are using crime fiction to unsettle its power to sustain Orientalist binaries that have shaped Asian American subjecthood in popular and legal discourses. The robustness of these binaries—variations of the complicitous model minority versus the resistant bad subject—is predicated on an uncomplicated and idealized conception of the Law and its inviolate authority to designate who is a criminal and what constitutes a crime, as made clear by Cho Seung-hui’s case. It is indeed the very act of violating the law that makes visible the vulnerable status of Asian American citizenship. The criminalization of Asian Americans is thus an important moment of visibility through which the interpellative authority of the American legal system can be laid bare and critiqued. More than a moment that merely exposes the social and legal injustices Asian Americans have suffered, it opens up a critical space for interrogating the social imperatives imposed on Asian Americans through discourses and mechanisms of the “Law.” And to the extent that social law is underwritten by the state, and narrative laws are backed by entrenched traditions and conventions, a challenge to the law and to stereotypes is by extension a challenge to established authority and received knowledge. Crime fiction, a genre in which enforcement and violation of the law converge in form and theme, thus proves a rich site for Asian American aesthetic and political critique. My analyses of Asian American crime fiction in this chapter, then, focus on writers who feature social and/or generic lawbreakers, and who defend such violations as necessary means to challenge the regulatory power of the laws of genre over Asian American literary and social representations. In this chapter, I begin by exploring the binary created by the legacies of Charlie Chan and Chinatown—the polarity informing Cho’s troubled transgression—and the imperatives imposed on Asian American crime fiction writers who write in the shadow of the binary. I then follow with a reading of Dashiell Hammett’s 1947 short story, “Dead Yellow Women,” as an exemplary text that, along with Roman Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown, solidified the classic opposition between sinister Chinatown and the idealized hard-boiled detective. In response to the Orientalist figurations of the Chinese and Chinatown “standardized”

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by Hammett, I provide an analysis of Wayne Wang’s 1982 noir classic, Chan Is Missing, a feature film that contests the deeply entrenched textual and visual vocabulary of the Chan/Chinatown binary. This analysis allows me to assess the subversive impact of Ed Lin’s 2007 novel, This Is a Bust, which features an Asian American police officer assigned to the Chinatown beat. The figuration, I suggest, disrupts the white male subject position that has long embodied the hard-boiled tradition, and mediates the competing interests of Chinatown and the police precinct under whose jurisdiction it falls. Finally, I conclude the chapter with a broader consideration of the cultural ambivalence toward radical minority protest in Susan Choi’s 2003 historical novel, American Woman, in which Choi simultaneously adopts and subverts the conventions of fugitive narratives and outlaw romances to expose social misrepresentation of and legal underrepresentation for Asian Americans.

The Offenses of Charlie Chan and Chinatown Cannot see contents of nut until shell is cracked. —Charlie Chan in Paris Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. —Roman Polanski’s Chinatown

Two of the most durable Orientalist figurations in American crime fiction are, indisputably, Charlie Chan and Chinatown. Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers’s smart, polite, deferential, proverb-spouting sleuth has become a veritable American popular cultural icon for his embodiment of the qualities of the exemplary Asian American in the eyes of the dominant white culture. Critical consensus now regards Chan as a transparent figuration of racist white fantasies of the Asian as “a non-threatening, non-competitive, asexual ally of the white man”4 and “a denigrating caricature of obsequiousness and selfeffacement.”5 Indeed, as Charles J. Rzepka has recently noted, Chan is the “very model of a complacent ‘model minority,’ personifying the status assigned Asian American citizens by the dominant culture in its attempt to delegitimize, by contrast, the angry militancy of the African American and Latino equal rights movements of the 1960s.”6 That Biggers’s creation has had tremendous influence in shaping popular perceptions of Asians and Asian Americans seems

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incontrovertible. Witness, for example, the scores of literary rejoinders to Chan’s “enormous racial shadow” (Rzepka 1465) that attempt to deconstruct, mitigate, or reject the power of this Orientalist icon; from Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway to Jessica Hagedorn’s collection, Charlie Chan Is Dead, these works explode the delimiting and debilitating legacy of the Chan-esque model of Asian American literary representation.7 Biggers’s creation emerged from a long pedigree of Orientalist exoticism. In addition to Rzepka’s recent comprehensive study of the Charlie Chan series, Jinny Huh and Tina Chen, in separate studies, have meticulously documented the pervasive Orientalist tropes in the works of the genre’s luminaries such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer.8 While neither Doyle nor Rohmer feature an Asian detective in their fiction, their repertoire of Orientalist characters, motifs, and settings has been influential in shaping popular perceptions of Asians in the West. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Doyle’s famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, infiltrates a Chinese owned and operated London opium den for a case and condemns it as “the vilest murder trap on the whole river-side.”9 Even Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood features its principal villain, John Jasper, as a gentleman opium addict who conceives of and indulges in murderous plots at an opium den.10 Such early characterizations of places in Western cities where the Chinese congregate attest to the subtle but pervasive danger associated with the Chinese as a force of corruption that threatens Western norms. Against this catalogue of negative Orientalist motifs, Charlie Chan’s emergence as a positive (though equally Orientalist) foil predictably generates synecdochic readings of Chan as an exemplar of socially and morally acceptable Asianness. The only other Asian detective created as the bona fide “star” of an entire series is Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee, the eponymous protagonist of a period mystery series that takes place in Ming Dynasty China.11 Charlie Chan and Judge Dee are, quite clearly, manifestations of the white wish fulfillment of the Asian model minority, or a version of what Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan have called “racist love.”12 Chan’s appeal to mainstream audiences lies in his function as a potent instrument of the law, the technology with which the dominant culture’s institutions of authority enforce and maintain the established social order. This is, of course, the chief function and appeal of all detective figures. But what distinguishes Chan is most certainly his racial and cultural difference, coded through his speech and physiology. While many of the genre’s most memorable detectives are also

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social misfits (Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, and Hammett’s Continental Op come to mind), their difference is not racial but attitudinal. Decidedly the antithesis of the genteel British sleuths exemplified by Agatha Christie’s creations, these unruly men present a powerful combination of discipline and transgression. They simultaneously enforce and break laws, inducing reverence because they defy rather than defer to institutions of law and the police. Chan, by contrast, is consistently polite, civil, and refined, his physical and verbal differences mitigated by his deference to and reverence for the law. He is, in manner, closer to Christie’s genteel detectives than to Poe’s and Doyle’s eccentrics. Significantly, however, his racial difference necessitated a kind of domestication from which Holmes and the Op were immune. Thus, Chan, a beloved embodiment of all things the Asian should be in the white American imaginary, has become a persistent thorn in Asian Americans’ side, an instrument of assimilationism that relentlessly reminds Asian Americans of the model minority imperatives by which they are to abide. In stark contrast to these “law-abiding” Asians in the crime fiction imaginary are figurations of Chinatown, a cultural-spatial threat to the realization of that wish. Chinatown achieved its mythic luster—and sinister patina—in the American popular imagination most notably through Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir classic, Chinatown, which sealed its synonymity with crime and corruption. Long before Polanski’s film, however, Chinatowns in the United States bore the negative reputation as an enclave of vice, mystery, and unspeakable crimes. As Viet Nguyen has noted, “American popular discourse, from explicitly racist late-nineteenth-century versions through mutedly racist versions of the late twentieth-century, depicts Chinatown as a geographic and cultural body that is separate from the civil body of the city and as a site where the individual body may degenerate physically and morally.”13 Indeed, the most indelible features of Chinatown cast by the film is its inexplicability, its opacity to the outsider’s gaze, its defiance of Western cultural codes, its irrationality. Its aura of corruption and inscrutable mystique, hearkening back to the descriptions of opium dens in nineteenth-century British crime fiction, has come to serve as a constant reminder of the unassimilability of Asians in the United States. Chinatown’s ill repute did not originate entirely from the Western crime fiction imaginary. It emerged out of a sociological history in which Chinatown is repeatedly painted as a space of social and cultural impenetrability. One of the earliest published portraits of

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Chinatown is Louis Beck’s 1898 sociological account of New York’s Chinatown, in which Beck describes it as “a riddle to the uninitiated observer, suggestive of what must have been the experience when the confusion of tongues occurred at the tower of Babel.”14 Relying on Western social values and cultural standards, Beck’s interpretation of Chinese manners, dress, and cultural practices betrays the ethnocentric biases pervasive in anthropological and ethnographic methods of the time. Indeed, his account had direct material impact on Chinatown residents, instigating discriminatory ordinances that targeted and criminalized many Chinese cultural practices and rituals. Negative press, exemplified by the pamphlets distributed by nativist groups such as the Workingman’s Party declaring Chinatown a public “nuisance” and public health hazard, only served to sustain public antipathy for this very stubbornly foreign space. Beck’s view of Chinatown has been replicated by popular cinematic and literary representations throughout the twentieth century. That his view found expression in the works of crime fiction and noir cinema luminaries such as Hammett and Polanski is hardly surprising, since the portrait of Chinatown as a dirty, crime-ridden space makes it a perfect setting for the genre.15 In Polanski’s film, Chinatown signifies the mystery that cannot be solved, a figurative site of moral sin that continually escapes the explanatory power of the American private eye and the Western rationalist logic he represents. Comparing Chinatown to Hammett’s classic noir novel, The Maltese Falcon, John Belton notes that “while in the proto-noir Falcon the irrational remains in check, in the post-noir Chinatown the delicate balance between reason and passion has gone awry.”16 Hammett, widely acknowledged as one of Polanski’s major influences, highlights uber-detective Sam Spade’s investigative and reasoning prowess through Spade’s final speech, in which he, doing what all good detectives do at the end of a case, “marshals the facts of the case and arranges them in a ledger of moral account-keeping.”17 Unlike Spade, however, Polanski’s detective, Jake Gittes, fails to construct a logical narrative for his case because the real “crime” that precipitated the murder he is investigating—incest—eludes all available explanatory models. Confronted with the tabooed mystique of incest, Gittes likens it to Chinatown, a place where “you can’t always tell what’s going on there.” Through that one analogous stroke, Chinatown becomes a metaphor for psychosocial conditions that elude rational explanation as well as the detective’s ratiocinative prowess.

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Together, Charlie Chan and Chinatown have become two of the most recognized Orientalist icons of American crime fiction. The twin grip of Biggers’s Chan and Polanski’s Chinatown on the imagination of popular audiences is attributable to the dyad’s usefulness in the dominant culture’s indulgence in its own fascination with and fear of the exoticized Asian other. Produced and perpetuated by the genre’s luminaries, they have become the epistemological bases for popular conceptions of Asianness. More significantly, the endurance of these two diametrically opposed Orientalist figurations reflects not only the dominant culture’s ambivalence toward Asian Americans, but also the persistence of the complicity/resistance dynamic in discursive representations of Asian Americans. In this dynamic, Charlie Chan is the quintessential figure of order, while Chinatown, its opposite, is the site of logic-defying mysteries. The stark contrast between the two allows for the maintenance of white fantasies of the “good” Asian, who emulates white values and manners, and the “bad subjects,” who endanger the dominant social fabric through their reputed criminal activities. Pitted against one another, the Chan/Chinatown opposition allows the Orientalist imaginary to be maintained in delicate balance between the transgressive mysteries of Chinatown and the disciplined ratiocinations of Chan.

The Difficult Case of Asian American Crime Fiction Interestingly, efforts to dismantle the robustness of these icons have been largely scholarly, with surprisingly few Asian American fiction writers venturing into the genre to tackle these figurations at their constitutive sources. Indeed, there was little pushback by Asian American writers against the genre’s Orientalist tradition prior to the 1980s. Before Wayne Wang’s 1982 indie classic, Chan Is Missing, a parody of a noir mystery featuring two Chinatown businessmen on an unsuccessful hunt for a missing embezzler named Chan, virtually no detective fiction (or film) had been authored by Asian Americans. Does the dearth of detective and crime fiction authored by Asian Americans suggest that it has become a genre non grata by dint of its inextricable link to Charlie Chan and Chinatown? The absence, I suspect, is either a conscious boycott of a genre that has only promulgated Asian caricatures or—per my argument in Chapter 1—an unconscious neglect effected by the autobiographic imperative, which steers the vast majority of Asian American writers to the life writing genres.

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Only within the past two decades have we seen the emergence of Asian American crime fiction writers. And these emergences have been significant. The modest successes of Leonard Chang’s Allen Choice series (2001’s Over the Shoulder, 2003’s Underkill, and 2004’s Fade to Clear); Naomi Hirahara’s Mas Arai mysteries (2004’s Summer of the Big Bachi, 2005’s Gasa-Gasa Girl, and 2006’s Snakeskin Shamisen); Dale Furutani’s Ken Tanaka series (1996’s Death in Little Tokyo and 1997’s The Toyotomi Blades); and Henry Chang’s Jack Yu series (2007’s Chinatown Beat and 2008’s Year of the Dog), for instance, signal the entrance of Asian Americans into the genre as creators rather than the creation, taking the reins of representational authority as a symbolic narrative act. All feature Asian American sleuths working cases that take place in or involve Asian American communities. For these authors, the process of detection and the unraveling of the plot are useful devices for their role as “cultural informants,” allowing them to depict aspects of Asian American culture and history that may be unfamiliar to the genre’s predominantly white, middle-class fanbase. More significantly, their very choice to write in the genre is an important interventionist act. As Maureen T. Reddy has noted, crime fiction, particularly the figuration of the hard-boiled detective in the noir tradition, is historically defined by and valorizes a “white/male/heterosexual central consciousness.”18 Because “the genre largely is that subject position,” Reddy argues, “writers who shift away from that central consciousness thus revise the form so profoundly that as a group they must be seen as establishing what amounts to a new genre.”19 But to read these novels as gestures of generic contravention proves problematic on several counts. While their Asian American detectives undoubtedly effect a shift in the traditional subject position of the detective figure, their stated appreciation for, and faithful execution of, the conventions of the genre introduce new content, but do not necessarily revise established formal and teleological imperatives. All four aforementioned writers, for instance, adhere to two uber-conventions of detective fiction: the male detective as both the controlling narrative gaze and the organizing figure of the classic serialization formula. Leonard Chang, for instance, points to the genre’s aesthetic and formal features, and the white male detective figures who populate it, as the primary draw for his writing. He recalls his boyhood fascination with Robert Arthur’s Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Series and Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective series as both a welcome panacea to the volatility of his parents’ relationship and a

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way to seek vicarious comfort in the detective’s restoration of social (and domestic) order: “You wish you could, like them, fix a world that has gone awry.”20 Indeed, Chang expresses his desire to exemplify rather than to challenge the genre’s conventions in a romanticized description of his relationship to the genre, and the figure of the detective, in his essay “Why I Love Crime Fiction”: The analyst, whether a private investigator or a rationalist philosopher, seeks within his or her own moral and personal code to discover and articulate what has gone wrong, to right these perceived wrongs, to find a view of the world that is worth living in, to reorder and contain the chaos. What is a private detective but a philosopher in a trench coat?21

The reverential description suggests that Chang writes detective fiction to exemplify the model detective, not necessarily to battle the genre’s Orientalist history. This is not to say that Chang’s novels do not critically engage Asian American identity politics; his Allen Choice series tackles issues of white desire and Asian American masculinity, particularly through detective Allen Choi’s Anglicization of his family name, an ironic gesture on Chang’s part to critique the romance of the sovereign liberal subject associated with the classic noir detective. But in terms of the narrative structure and voice, Chang demonstrates little self-reflexivity in his choices. The series, the according to Tina Chen, “includes all the generic conventions (of plot, pacing, technical execution) that conventional readers of thrillers would expect.”22 Hirahara, too, has said that “the mystery genre chose [her].”23 Unlike Chang, however, she cites women writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey and black male writers such as Chester Himes and Walter Mosley as her main influences.24 But even as this attests to Hirahara’s awareness of black and women writers’ revisions of the genre, her fiction, like Chang’s, tends to exemplify rather than modify its core conventions and teleological imperatives. While her Mas Arai mysteries poignantly thematize the recovery of repressed personal and historical trauma in the Japanese American community, Hirahara nevertheless preserves the conventional repertoire of cryptic clues, elusive witnesses, and baffling crime scenes, including the most quintessential feature of all: the ratiocinative prowess of the male detective. In other words, even as Hirahara—like Leonard Chang—introduces Asian American history and politics to the genre, her adherence to the established conventions ultimately preserves the skeleton frame of a historically patriarchal genre.

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It is not my intention to diminish the importance of Hirahara’s and Chang’s work in the genre. To be sure, even though they do not directly invoke the figure of Charlie Chan, their work poses serious challenges to Chan’s specter by featuring Asian American detectives who bear no resemblance to him. Quite simply, Chang’s and Hirahara’s novels make an important intervention in the genre through their usurpation of representational authority. More significantly, they contravene the established formula of the detective-asloner by demonstrating the importance of community support and investment. Both Chang’s and Hirahara’s fiction also demonstrates what Daylanne K. English observes in the deliberate choices of writers such as Walter Mosley and Barbara Neely: all write in a “past genre” with entrenched conventions as “enacting a kind of literary-generic anachronism in order to comment on a distinct lack of progress regarding race within legal, penal, and judicial systems in the U.S.”25 But could the transformational impact of a narrative’s unconventional subject matter be mitigated, and even neutralized, by its formal complicity? Genre fiction is a fan-driven industry; as such, its established conventions regulate and legitimize narrative themes and structures much in the same way that authenticated members of a community or culture dictate the terms of assimilation and citizenship. The experience of the Asian American crime fiction writer, then, parallels that of an immigrant or ethnic subject who must negotiate the expectations imposed by the bona fide citizens of this community. Like immigrant fiction, Asian American crime fiction is thus always already preceded by layers of imperatives that directly or indirectly impact its production. Hirahara and Chang, one might say, have assimilated into the crime fiction culture because they complied with—indeed, exemplified—generic conventions and imperatives through their deployment of the patriarchal form of the male detective-centered serial. What, then, of the writer who introduces not only new generic content, but also formal changes that strike at the very core conventions of the genre? Such writers, in Tzvetan Todorov’s estimation, would no longer be writing detective fiction per se, but instead would be writing “literature.”26 “The whodunit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of the genre, but the one which conforms to them,” Todorov observes. Along these lines, he argues: “Detective fiction has its norms; to ‘develop’ them is also to disappoint them: to ‘improve upon’ detective fiction is to write ‘literature,’ not detective fiction.”27 This is, of course, a static and an outmoded (and, to see

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it another way, staunchly assimiliationist) perspective on genre classification. And, to be fair, it should be noted that Todorov makes his observation with a tinge of Derridean ironic insurgency against the hard lines of generic laws. But how, then, do we assess the impact of nominal crime fiction writers who appropriate the genre’s conventions to write “literature” (as in Chang-rae Lee’s case), or contest the ideological value of the genre’s defining oppositions and teleologies (as in Ed Lin’s case, whose work I discuss in detail later in the chapter)? To write crime fiction that metacritically challenges the genre’s racist and Orientalist histories through self-reflexive narrative strategies, then, is to be confronted with the competing imperatives of exemplary execution and formal subversion. Structurally, the writer must execute the conventions of the genre with sophistication, to speak the language of the culture figuratively as a means to claim and secure membership. Thematically, she is expected to take up subjects concerning constructions and contestations of ethnic identity—an imperative carried over from the genres of life writing discussed in Chapter 1. Politically, her work is susceptible to critical assessments of generic and ideological complicity. And given the entrenched legacies of Chan and Chinatown in the genre, the Asian American writer must contend with the cast of their extensive shadows. If genre, as Adena Rosmarin says, “has tremendous and finally ineradicable constitutive power,”28 then the only way to diffuse the iconic power of honorable Chan and sinister Chinatown is to return to their constitutive source—namely, the genre that produced them. Two authors, filmmaker Wayne Wang and novelist Ed Lin, explicitly contend with the racial shadow of Charlie Chan and Chinatown. But before we examine the means by which they do so, I turn to Dashiell Hammett’s 1947 short story, “Dead Yellow Women,” as an exemplary text that laid the foundations for the conventionalized antagonism between the classic hard-boiled detective and his recalcitrant arch-nemesis, the mysterious and inscrutable Chinatown.

Dashiell Hammett’s Chinatown: “Dead Yellow Women” I don’t mind admitting that I’ve stopped eating in Chinese restaurants, and that if I never have to visit Chinatown again it’ll be soon enough. —Dashiell Hammett, “Dead Yellow Women”

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Jake Gittes’s inability to bring his case to a logically satisfying close at the end of Polanski’s Chinatown has a literary precedent in Dashiell Hammett’s work. It uncannily echoes the failure of Hammett’s famous private eye, the Continental Op, to solve the mystery of Chinatown. “Dead Yellow Women,” a short story in Hammett’s Continental Op series that predates Chinatown by 27 years, is one of the earliest stories in American detective fiction to feature Chinatown as the primary setting of a murder mystery.29 Significantly, while the Op solves the murder case, he fails to solve the “irrationality” of Chinatown at the story’s conclusion. Assigned to a double murder case in which two Chinese female staff members of wealthy Chinese American heiress Lillian Shan were found dead in her coastal mansion (the eponymous “dead yellow women”), the Op’s investigation leads him to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he uncovers a vast underground arms smuggling network run by Chang Li Ching, a powerful Chinatown kingpin and weapons smuggler. While Chinatown is not the scene of the crime in the story, it is the site of moral degeneracy where the crime was “masterminded,” and as the investigation progresses, it is clear that the mystery to be solved points to it. For Hammett, Chinatown’s mystique sustains the tension between clarity and opacity on which the suspense of the story relies. The Op’s investigation gives him license to penetrate and comb it for clues, a process that elicits and gratifies the reader’s voyeuristic curiosity about this alien environment. Combining the authority of the sociologist and the detective, Hammett positions the Op as the incontestable interpreter of everything he observes. Using the secondperson address, a convention of the travel guide, Hammett presents the Op as a trusty tour guide helping Hammett’s predominantly white readership navigate this unfamiliar and potentially dangerous space: Grant Avenue, the main street and spine of this strip, is for most of its length a street of gaudy shops and flashy chop-suey houses catering to the tourist trade, where the racket of American jazz orchestras drowns the occasional squeak of a Chinese flute. Farther out, there isn’t so much paint and gilt, and you can catch the proper Chinese smell of spices and vinegar and dried things. If you leave the main thoroughfares and showplaces and start poking around in alleys and dark corners, and nothing happens to you, the chances are you’ll find some interesting things—though you won’t like some of them.30

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Hammett pits the reader’s point of view and the Op’s authority and credibility against Chinatown’s impenetrability. Moreover, even as the Op figures out ways to navigate the labyrinthine streets, the strange elements that populate the scene continually challenge his investigative prowess, sustaining a sense of danger and unpredictability. Hammett’s descriptions reinforce perceptions of Chinatown as a Chinese box of layered deceptions. A sinister air permeates even the most ordinary street scene: Waverly Place was a picture of peace and quiet just now. A fat Chinese was stacking crates of green vegetables in front of a grocery. Half a dozen small yellow boys were playing at marbles in the middle of the street. On the other side, a blond young man in tweeds was climbing the six steps from a cellar to the street, a painted Chinese woman’s face showing for an instant before she closed the door behind him. Up the street a truck was unloading rolls of paper in front of one of the Chinese newspaper plants. A shabby guide was bringing four sightseers out of the Temple of the Queen of Heaven—a joss house over the Sue Hing headquarters.31

While the catalogue of minutiae in this meticulous mise-en-scene showcases the Op’s sharp eye for detail (an established convention of the police procedural), it also highlights the blond young man as the punctum of the scene (to borrow Barthes’s term) that calls out the disparity between “yellow” Chinatown and white America. Indeed, the young man in danger of figuratively disappearing into the Chinatown landscape is later rescued by the Op and revealed to be an innocent victim of nefarious Chinese plots. The scene thus conveys the idea that the semblance of normality and ordinariness in Chinatown is a façade for criminal activities, a mask of vice and duplicity. Most notable in “Dead Yellow Women” are the finer distinctions Hammett makes between Chinatown and its inhabitants. While the motives of some of the Chinese criminals are revealed—and some might say “humanized” from a Western ideological perspective—at the end of the story, Chinatown itself remains an enigma for the detective and becomes a symbol of the illicit for the reader. The large Chinese cast of “Dead Yellow Women” runs the gamut of the genre’s stock types, Orientalist archetypes, and racial stereotypes, from the wealthy client to the victims of the crime, from the criminal mastermind to the intellectually challenged muscle. Chang Li Ching, the story’s chief antagonist, is a fusion of the criminal mastermind and the

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archetypal Asian villain Fu Manchu; the two (living) “yellow” women in the story—the client Lillian Shan and the prostitute Hsiu Hsiu— likewise fuse the femme fatale with Orientalist exoticism; Cipriano, the Op’s loyal, Chinatown-savvy Filipino informant is a racialized version of the indigent local mole; and an assortment of muscle, ranging from beefy guards to silent-but-deadly gunmen, whose automaton-like quality only serves to emphasize the inscrutability so often ascribed to Asians. Hammett manages the readers’ sympathy or antipathy for various Chinese characters through the Op’s admiration or contempt for them. The Op’s point of view, then, distinguishes the good Asians from the bad, whereby the “bad” remain incomprehensible to him and are used principally as props for the setting. The two main antagonists proffer a less simplistic index. Chang’s intellectual dexterity and Lillian’s acculturated manner, for instance, garner the Op’s reluctant esteem. But the humanization is merely Westernization; that is, the Op is able to achieve a level of understanding with Chang and Lillian because they possess “un-Chinese” qualities that set them apart from the inscrutable masses. Hammett takes pains to underscore Lillian’s distinctively Western features: That she was Oriental showed only in the black shine of he bobbed hair, in the pale yellow of her unpowdered skin, and in the fold of her upper lids at the outer corners, half hidden by the dark rims of her spectacles. But there was no slant to her eyes, her nose almost aquiline, and she had more chin than Mongolians usually have. She was modern ChineseAmerican from the flat heels of her tan shoes to the crown of her untrimmed felt hat.32

The compliments, however, imply by contrast the socially backward, flat-nosed, and slant-eyed Chinese who live in Chinatown against which Lillian’s Western qualities stand in relief. When her noble pedigree is revealed to the Op later in the story, he even betrays his deference to the power of royalty: “I caught myself weakening. This woman who looked like the queen of something wasn’t easy to handle the way I wanted to handle her.”33 Likewise, Chang Li Ching, the Asian criminal mastermind, stands out in striking relief against the inscrutable Chinatown that surrounds him. Chang’s transliterated name and Chinatown residency invite readers to regard him as a foil to the “modern Chinese-American” Lillian Shan. But while he is unmistakably a composite caricature of the proverb-spouting Charlie Chan and the nefarious Fu Manchu,

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Hammett nevertheless endows him with a self-conscious sense of humor and, most remarkably, a verbal facility that scrambles the Op’s authority through the use of a ludicrous Orientalist diction. He identifies the Op with a string of epithets—“the Prince of Thief-catchers,” “the King of Finders-out,” “the Emperor of Hawkshaws,” among others, in a droll inversion of the denigrating power of name calling. Rather than taking offense, the Op appreciates the wit: “This old joker was spoofing me with an exaggeration—a burlesque—of the well-known Chinese politeness.”34 Chang’s agile tongue and penchant for ironic mockery earn the Op’s admiration: “I liked him. He had humor, brains, nerve, everything. To jam him in a cell would be a trick you’d want to write home about. He was my idea of a man worth working against.”35 The nominally positive portrayals of Chang and Lillian, however, are dubiously underscored because their politics happen to coincide with the pervasive American anti-Japanese attitude of the time. In the final moments of the story, Lillian reveals to the Op that Chang is more than just an arms smuggler and human trafficker, but “one of the leaders of the anti-Japanese movement in China” whose illegal operations in the United States are really part of a clandestine but important resistance movement against Japanese aggression toward China. Lillian invokes patriotic rhetoric in her defense of their illicit operations, making such actions comprehensible and rational within the logic of Western mores: “To a patriot, the death of traitors is a necessary, you can understand that? Your people are like that too when your country is in danger.”36 Such characterizations, however, are ultimately vastly overshadowed by the excess of Orientalist motifs elsewhere in the story. Prior to his discovery of Chang’s motives, the Op expresses his frustration at Chang’s “round, shrewd yellow mask of a face, and hoped that something clear would come of it all. Nothing did.”37 And when he gets trapped in the midst of a group of contraband coolies while on a stakeout at Lillian Shan’s seaside mansion, the Op describes the group as a “struggling, tearing, grunting and groaning mob” with an “unmistakable odor . . . of unwashed Chinese”; repulsed, the Op pleads: “I wanted these people to go away. I didn’t care who or what they were. If they’d depart in peace I’d forgive their sins.”38 The prostitute Hsiu Hsiu, by contrast, engenders an entirely different response in the Op. Patently objectified in every description, she embodies the seductive beauty of the Orient: “She wasn’t four and half feet high— a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval

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of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around her temples.”39 But, unlike Lillian’s mannish—and therefore unthreatening—lack of feminine sexuality, Hsiu Hsiu, whose “red flower of a mouth shaped a smile that made all the other smiles . . . look like leers,” also signifies the dangers of that seduction. Her speech remains incomprehensible, but her beauty is readable via an Orientalist vocabulary: “[Her words] didn’t mean anything to me,” the Op admits, “but they tinkled prettily.”40 The characterizations clearly revolve around two themes: obstruction and diversion. Hsiu Hsiu’s exotic femininity arouses masculinist fantasies of sexual conquest in the Op, and the faceless masses of Chinese gunmen and coolies repulse him. The irony is that even as the Op works to solve a murder committed against the Chinese, Hammett makes clear that it is the Chinese themselves who prove to be the major obstacles to his investigation. Ultimately, the Op solves the mystery of the murder, but not the mystery of Chinatown. While the revelation that Chang’s illegal arms trafficking is motivated by his loyalist and anti-Japanese beliefs briefly evokes admiration for him in the eyes of the Op (and, by extension, the reader), the sympathetic portrait is qualified by the Op’s reflection at the story’s end, in which he once again casts Chang as a threat: “Regardless of his patriotism, I’d have given my right eye to put the old boy away. That would have been something to write home about.”41 The Op is thus motivated by the glory of conquest rather than the desire to understand. For Hammett, Chinatown is a permanent rupture in the American social order, an anomaly that eludes the ratiocinative procedure predicated on Western cultural and moral epistemes; it defies the private eye’s task of moving the narrative toward clarity. It is important to note, however, that while Chinatown proves too formidable for the Op to solve, his heroism is preserved by his ability to resist the contamination of its moral and cultural infirmities, as well as to contain the potential spread of such infirmities beyond its borders. As the “continental” (c)op, the de facto and de jure exemplary American who represents the native perspective and values, he ensures that Chinatown’s vices do not extend beyond its borders. Thus, the Op’s reputation remains undamaged despite his inability to crack the Chinatown nut. His resistance to cultural contamination also accentuates his detached, objective relationship with the object of investigation. While this is a quality for which classic European-style detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are known, for

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Hammett cool objectivity serves not as a precondition for the soundness of the investigation, but as the sign of the detective’s admirable resistance to ethnic contamination. Chinatown’s sinister patina, preserved at the end of the story, is to be replicated again and again by Hammett’s literary descendents. “As a form of knowledge production,” John Belton has observed, “detective fiction attempts to reduce phenomena—the enigma or mystery—to terms which can be readily understood and consumed.”42 The terms “Dead Yellow Woman” arrives at for Chinatown, however, mystify rather than clarify. The Op observes early in the story that in Chinatown, “Chinese passed up and down the alley, scuffling in American shoes that can never fit them.”43 His descriptions reflect his tenuous position on the cusp of knowledge and ignorance, between an excess of details that showcases his observational abilities and a lack of a vocabulary with which to make sense of them. The story’s closing line only seals the mystery of Chinatown in the minds of the readers: “I don’t mind admitting,” the Op says, “that I’ve stopped eating in Chinese restaurants, and that if I never have to visit Chinatown again it’ll be soon enough.”44 The legacy of Hammett’s Chinatown runs deep, and Polanski’s invocation of the place as a metaphor for unspeakable crimes in Chinatown starkly attests to its endurance. Two significant efforts to confront this legacy are Wayne Wang’s 1982 film, Chan Is Missing, and Ed Lin’s 2007 murder mystery, This Is a Bust, both of which attack the Chan/Chinatown binary at its generic source. Both are decidedly genre pieces that feature Asian American detective figures and an investigative narrative that takes place exclusively within the borders of Chinatown. Wang’s Chan Is Missing is a noir parody that brilliantly satirizes the obsessive search for a Chan across the presumed impenetrability of the Chinatown landscape. The “investigators,” two Chinese Americans who believe that Chan has embezzled their money, comb every nook in San Francisco’s Chinatown in search of the elusive figure. The result is a layered exposé of the vacuity underlying Biggers’s and Hammett’s Orientalist figurations of Chan and Chinatown. Lin’s This Is a Bust mounts a similar attack, but takes a different narrative path for its critique. Whereas Wang uses satire to expose Chan and Chinatown as highly contrived generic productions, Lin uses the conventions of detective and noir fiction only to abandon them deliberately through a critical thematic shift in the story, a significant, radical narrative act that declares the old formulas of the genre a failure, a “bust” for Asian American writers.

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Wayne Wang’s Chinatown: C HAN I S M ISSING The problem with me is that I believe what I see and hear. If I did that with Chan Hung I’ll know nothing because everything is so contradictory. —Jo, Chan Is Missing Ain’t nothing to it anymore. The Chinese are all over this fucking city, man. What do you mean about identity? They got their own identity. I got my identity. —Steve, Chan Is Missing

To be sure, to recuperate Chinatown from such an ignominious literary history seems a daunting undertaking. To change this representational vocabulary requires challenging its collective maintenance by all members of the discourse community, including writers, readers, and critics. And to reach all members of the discourse community is, of course, to write within the discourse, to write within the genre. As Lee Horsley has observed, crime fiction writers have long used the genre “to address issues of class, race and gender, to expose corruption, and to explore the nature of prejudice,” and that “there are always elements of ‘subversion’ involved in using crime fiction to put forward an oppositional socio-political agenda.”45 Whereas writers like Leonard Chang and Hirahara faithfully fulfill the imperatives and execute the conventions of the genre, other writers have taken a more self-referential approach as they write against the imperatives. Wayne Wang’s 1982 debut feature film, Chan Is Missing,46 demonstrates just such a self-conscious use of the genre’s technical conventions and Orientalist motifs as part of his subversive aesthetic. It has been noted that Wang had set out to make an “anti-movie,” with the express intent of confronting the very genre responsible for the persistent cachet of Orientalist stereotypes in the crime genre.47 The plot involves two Chinatown cab drivers, Jo and Steve, who are searching for Chan Hung, a potential business partner who disappeared with $4,000 of Jo and Steve’s investment. While Jo and Steve search for Chan’s whereabouts, we are led across the Chinatown landscape, through the streets and alleyways, into residences, cultural centers, restaurants, and business offices. The two men’s investigative odyssey is a process through which Wang violates genre imperatives to prove Chan a vacuous fiction and Chinatown a lively, rich, and varied community. Chan Is Missing is replete with variations on familiar conventions of the crime fiction genre. Jo and Steve’s search for Chan Hung

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throughout Chinatown replicates the familiar device of detectiveas-voyeur, providing the audience an insider look on a reputedly insular enclave. Wang also borrows heavily from the aesthetics of film noir to give visuality to the Chinatown that has existed in American crime fiction, from the use of black-and-white film to a repertoire of stock themes and visual tropes to simulate—and satirize—generic conventions. The mimicry is a symbolic act of both complicity and resistance, and more significantly, mockery through parody. These are evident in the premise of Chan Is Missing: a crime (presumably) has been committed, a body is missing, and private investigators are on the case. The narrative has all the thematic and aesthetic elements of classic noir fiction: surveillance, stakeouts, clues, leads, interviews, and potential suspects, shot in black-and-white film to highlight the genre’s reliance on binary oppositions. But Wang’s variations on the formula also convey self-referentiality in his invocation of the very conventions that fashioned the Chan and Chinatown of crime fiction lore, calling them out as literal and social imperatives he intends to challenge. Wang wastes no time in diffusing Chinatown’s reputed mystique and danger. The opening scene of a cab rolling through the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, set to the familiar upbeat tune of Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” sung in Chinese, suggests a happy Chinese-American, East-West cultural coexistence. Unlike the sense of danger and impenetrability that reign in Hammett’s and Polanki’s Chinatowns, Wang’s Chinatown is bathed in sunshine and bustling with activity. As Stephen Gong, the deputy director of UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, notes, the film expresses Wang’s intent to show a new view of Chinatown that runs counter to the perceptions cultivated by the genre.48 Curtis Choy, the film’s sound recordist, describes much of the film as “descending into real situations in Chinatown,” and Gong describes Wang’s depiction of I-Hotel and the waning bachelor society of Manilatown, as well as other nooks and crannies of Chinatown, as his “true commitment to showing Chinatown in Chan Is Missing that takes you quite far from the needs of the storyline.”49 The only element of mystery Wang retains in this opening shot— the shaded face of the cab driver before he is revealed to be Jo, the narrator of this tale—is also a deliberate stroke on his part to challenge the audience’s assumptions about the narrative point of view and the source of the gaze. Is the cab driver simply a faceless prop in the mise-en-scene of Chinatown? Or does the obscured visage represent

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the obscured visibility of Chinatown residents and Chinese Americans in general? To whom does the point of view belong at this point? Initially, the camera assumes the point of view of a tourist, presumably white, stepping into a cab and asking the driver for “a good place to eat in Chinatown.” In this instant, Wang shifts the point of view from the tourist to Jo, the Chinese American cab driver, whose voiceover usurps the white tourist’s narrative authority—a symbolic shift that privileges the Chinese perspective over that of the white tourist. Before the tourist asks his question, Jo wearily anticipates what is to come, and exploits his presumed expertise as an insider: “There’s a game I play. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. . . . Under three seconds. That question comes up under three seconds ninety percent of the time. I usually give them my routine on the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese food and get a good tip.”50 In one swift stroke, Wang transfers the (white) tourist’s ethnographic authority, reminiscent of sociologist Louis Beck’s and the Continental Op’s scrutinizing eyes, to a Chinatowner. Even more significantly, the shift eliminates the Chinatown outsiders from the story, focusing instead on an exclusively Chinatown-centered mystery that involves only Chinese Americans. Consequently, unlike classic formulas that pit the detective figure against the crime scene to be solved and explained, here the detective figures do not exist in antagonistic relation to the “crime scene” of Chinatown. Rather, they traverse its terrain not with the aim to rationalize it (as the Op tries to do), but as bona fide members uncovering its varied richness. Wang deploys an entire repertoire of genre conventions to diminish their disciplinary power through parody. As Jo and Steve follow leads and collect information from people who know Chan, contradictory accounts of the man they gather do not cohere into a unified portrait. Photographs, newspaper clippings, and other potential clues gathered by Jo and Steve, shot with clichéd shadowy lighting and scored with “suspenseful music,” also add up to nothing.51 An equally tongue-incheek sequence that dramatizes Jo’s descent into paranoia, shot from the point of view of someone stalking him from behind and scored with “chase music, building in excitement,” ends in Jo’s own realization of the absurdity of this contrived mystery: “It’s easy to see how someone can get paranoid. I feel like I’m in the same mess Chan Hung was in, except I’m not even sure what the mess is or how much of it is in my own mind.”52 Wang’s use of places and spaces manipulates one of the most established conventions of the crime fiction genre. Spatial metaphors

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abound in Chan Is Missing. Wang’s use of the taxicab, for instance, highlights the different spaces occupied by Chinatown insiders and outsiders. The cab scene is immediately followed by a scene in the kitchen of Jo’s nephew, Steve. The transitory cab and the transience of its occupants are thereby juxtaposed with the kitchen, an intimate residential space. Steve and Amy, his sister, talk freely in a rapidfire repartee, suggesting that this is the “authentic” space of Chinese Americans, against which the mediated and detached space of the cab is made all the more stark. The cab thus appears even more starkly as a space of limited perspective, a literal and figurative vehicle for seeing only the façades of streets, buildings, and people. Even as Steve and Jo figuratively steer and control what their passengers see, they abandon that highly mediated space—a space that signifies the tourist’s gaze— time and again during their investigation in order to see beyond the façades. In addition to abandoning the Eurocentric gaze of the non-Chinese tourist, Wang shifts readerly attention away from the ostensible objective of this detective story—the search for the presumed criminal, Chan. Instead, he spotlights Jo and Steve’s disagreement over the mode of investigation, a dispute that reveals the cultural and ideological conflicts between Jo’s immigrant “FOB” (“fresh off the boat”) generation and Steve’s native-born “ABC” (“American-born Chinese”) generation . Jo still feels an affinity to immigrants who must negotiate their loyalties to both China and the United States, while Steve believes he is already living in a “post-identity” era. In a climactic scene, Steve, having run out of patience with the increasingly futile search for Chan, angrily asks Jo why he is “tripping so heavy on this one dude.”53 When Jo tells him “it’s hard enough for guys like us who’ve been here so long to find an identity,” Steve erupts in frustration: “Aw, that’s a bunch of bullshit man. That identity shit, man, that’s old news, man. It happened ten years ago.”54 The argument makes clear that the stakes of this investigation differ for each: while Jo is looking for the man, Steve is looking for the money. For Jo, the search is an ideological examination of identity and cultural membership; for Steve, it is a pecuniary matter bound up with the discourse of the American Dream and a broader conception of American citizenship.55 The ideological gap between the two generations, however, is dramatized most clearly by Jo and Steve’s differing opinions on the police. Steve, a second-generationer, believes that they should go to the cops, while Jo, a first-generationer, is adamantly against it, saying

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that “it’s none of their damn business.”56 The conflict raises the issue of access to the law for Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. Jo’s refusal to take the case to the cops reflects the older generation’s cynical view of the authorities, a view that arose out of the historical antagonism between the community and the police that had failed to earn its trust. Steve’s willingness, however, reflects the younger generation’s different perception of the law and the institutions of authority that enforce it. Steve identifies with an American subjectivity constructed in contradistinction to the Vietnamese he fought in the war: “Eh, fuck, when I was in fucking ‘Nam, man, and I was getting shot at by my own people.”57 His time in the military has made him somewhat less cynical about the role of U.S. martial institutions, but he is clearly ambivalent. He expresses cynicism toward the police even as he believes that, as a member of the American civic society, he has a right to demand the police to do its job: “Hey, I ain’t saying the cops are cool—I didn’t say that. All I’m saying is that they’re getting paid by our tax money to do something. That they should follow up on the leads. They’re good at that kind of stuff. They should do it for us. We shouldn’t have to worry about it.”58 When Jo jokingly accuses him of being a bicultural “two-faced schizophrenic Chinaman” plagued with contradictions, Steve’s riposte further expresses the dilemma of cultural liminality: “I’m not two-faced. Eh, two of my ex-partners I used to run with in high school, they’re cops man. Nah, it’s a fine line between a criminal and a cop.”59 Through Steve’s observation, Wang not only sums up the noir genre in a nutshell (“a fine line between a criminal and a cop”), but also deftly links the liminality of the Asian American with that of the hard-boiled detective figure. All of Wang’s contraventional allusions to Charlie Chan are consolidated in Jo, a more complex and fully realized palimpsest for Biggers’s Chan. Described by another character as someone who “don’t look like anybody’s conception of a Charlie Chan,”60 Jo is the point of interpolation for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences alike, through which they could see their own role in the construction of Chan. Through Jo, Wang appropriates Biggers’s and Hammett’s white gaze that drives the perspectives of both Charlie Chan and the Op. When Chan Hung’s daughter returns the missing money at the end of the film, but tells nothing of her father’s whereabouts, Jo self-reflexively calls out the anticipated next step in the generic plot: “If this were a TV mystery, an important clue would pop up at this time and clarify everything.”61 This, of course, does not happen, and the mystery of Chan remains intact. Jo’s concluding monologue also explicitly

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rejects generic imperatives and the Orientalist icon they helped create and maintain. “This mystery,” he reflects, “is appropriately Chinese. What’s not there seems to have just as much meaning as what is there. The murder article is not there. The photograph’s not there. The other woman’s not there. Chan Hung’s not there. Nothing is what it seems to be. I guess I’m not Chinese enough. I can’t accept a mystery without a solution.” This soliloquy captures the essence of Wang’s appropriation of a genre (“this mystery is appropriately Chinese”) that has long objectified the Chinese, as well as his ironic disdain for the genre’s construction of what constitutes Chineseness through the pernicious power of Charlie Chan (“I guess I’m not Chinese enough”). Wang dispels the sinister cast of Polanski’s Chinatown most emphatically in the closing scene of Chan Is Missing. Jo and Steve sit in Jo’s car and reflect on their investigation, in complete and striking opposition to the closing scene of Chinatown, in which the car that holds Evelyn Mulwray and her father, Noah Cross, careens away from Chinatown at top speed. In Chinatown, the damaged and taboo relationship between the pair is projected onto Chinatown; in Chan Is Missing, the pair jokes cheerfully in spite of their disagreements. The noir image of Chinatown is replaced by a mundane portrait of two very different Chinese Americans sitting in an American car, picking an exacta for a horse race, underneath a fog-enshrouded Golden Gate Bridge. The scene reinscribes the Chinese American pair as normative and re-projects the aura of moral corruption implicitly but potently back onto Polanski’s Cross and Mulwray. Actively subverting the Orientalist legacies and teleologies of Biggers, Hammett, and Polanski, Wang renders Biggers’s creation the illogical mystery that defies rational explanation, while Chinatown is thoroughly demystified and made familiar. The closing scene with Jo and Steve is followed by “a montage of sidewalk scenes, Chinese architecture, time-worn buildings, turtles swimming in pans, gung fu posters and giant fortune cookies in store windows,” along with shots of the surrounding city landmarks of “an Italian market” and “skyscrapers of the neighboring financial district.”62 Chinatown is shown in all its quotidian activities, ensconced serenely in the midst of San Francisco. Toward the beginning of the film, a Filipino artist tells Jo and Steve to “look in the puddle” for Chan, and in the concluding minutes, a Chinese scholar tells Jo that he must “think Chinese” in order to solve the mystery.63 This pair of koan-like advice conveys

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Wang’s exhortation to both Chinese and non-Chinese audiences that Chan, like the puddle, merely reflects what the gazer wishes to see, and that Chinatown is not a mystery that defies rationalization, but a composite, ever-shifting portrait rendered by insiders and outsiders alike. Even so, Wang seems to say, such portraits are ultimately inadequate representational devices. The photo Jo produces at the end of the film as evidence of Chan’s existence, like the photos in le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, obscures rather than clarifies. “Here’s a picture of Chan Hung,” Jo says, “but I still can’t see him.”64

Ed Lin’s Chinatown: T HIS I S A B UST When I’m in my civvies, you won’t even recognize me from the other chinks in the streets. —Robert Chow, This Is a Bust

Coming 60 years after Hammett’s “Dead Yellow Women” and 25 years after Wang’s Chan Is Missing, Lin’s 2007 This Is a Bust, a murder mystery set in New York’s Chinatown, has all the elements of a classic Chinatown-based crime fiction in the Hammett tradition.65 The book’s back cover blurb, which designates the novel as “a noir homage,” prepares the reader for a hard-boiled crime novel with all the requisite ingredients. In keeping with the established conventions of the subgenre, the novel features the crime setting, New York’s Chinatown, as one of its principal characters—a feature made famous by writers from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (London) to Chester Himes (Harlem). The novel also features a cast with familiar character functions in the genre: an alienated, alcoholic detective figure, Robert Chow, is pitted against the mystifying and resistant crime setting of Chinatown. Playfully and self-reflexively named “chorus” characters appear as various sources of community wisdom, including the peripatetic “midget,” Law the barber, Chi the cook, and Moy the toy shop owner. There are the principal antagonists, who are aligned with corrupt institutions of power: a wealthy restaurateur, Willie Gee, who carefully cultivates a relationship with the police in order to maintain his exploitative labor practices, and an indifferent, effete group of cops who seem uninterested in or unable to solve the crime. There is also the requisite crime victim, an elderly employee in Willie Gee’s restaurant found murdered in a back alley of Chinatown’s most impoverished quarter. And finally, there is the nominal femme fatale,

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Barbara, an Ivy League-educated former Chinatown beauty queen and an old high school flame of Chow’s who becomes an enabler of his alcoholism. Indeed, all indications point to a noir homage, with Hammett’s prototypical Chinatown mystery “Dead Yellow Women” looming in the background as the textual predecessor. Amidst the faithful inclusion of the genre’s key elements, however, Lin introduces two significant deviations in the figuration of the main characters: the detective figure and the crime setting. At first glance, Robert Chow fits the profile of the classic hard-boiled private eye, described by John Scaggs as “a loner, an alienated individual who exists outside or beyond the socio-economic order of the family, friends, work, and home.”66 But Lin adds several unconventional layers to Chow, both as a detective and a Chinese American. First, Chow deviates from the traditional white male detective model simply by dint of his race, an innovation of ethnic and women crime fiction writers that permanently stretched the outline of how such detectives could look like. Second, Chow, a disaffected loner and insolent alcoholic with a rebellious streak, is a thoroughly unmodel minority and decidedly Charlie Chan’s antithesis. Additionally, he is a native son of Chinatown—a detail that complicates the classic opposition between detective and crime setting. These variations are not entirely novel; Hirahara’s Mas Arai, for instance, is an inveterate gambler who investigates a crime within his own ethnic community, and Chang’s Allen Choi is, like Chow, an alienated, socially detached individual. But unlike Mas Arai and other ethnic detectives such as Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed and Grave Digger who serve the important function of acting as mediators between their local community and the dominant white society at large, Chow does not, at least at the novel’s outset, fulfill this mediatory role. The complications arise chiefly from the police uniform Chow wears. And unlike Himes’s Coffin Ed and Grave Digger whose police status empowers them on both sides of the law, so that they are, as Michael Denning describes, “mediators between black and white, life and death, law and crime,” Chow’s police status is a source of opposing allegiances and psychological abjection, a condition somewhat similar to Franklin Hata’s fraught authoritative role in his army regiment in A Gesture Life.67 Unable to negotiate the competing interests of the police and his community as coolly as Coffin Ed and Grave Digger can, Chow even suffers a psychological breakdown as a result—again, echoing the crumbling of Hata’s world at the end of A Gesture Life. Indeed, for much of the novel,

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Chow seems to epitomize what Daniel Kim identifies as an Asian American version of Nina Baym’s “beset manhood,” with a corresponding narrative which features the plight of a male protagonist “struggling against a social order that attempts to box him into an identity that he experiences as racially inauthentic and emasculating,” and which is structured—or beset—by a melancholy sustained by “psychic longings, thwarted desires, and ambivalent identifications.”68 Such a portrayal of Chow, however, suggests a deliberate stroke on Lin’s part to challenge the highly romanticized masculine stoicism and strength associated with noir detectives. By the novel’s end, Chow overcomes the melancholia, but through an unconventional narrative turn that simultaneously deconstructs the historical opposition between the law and Chinatown and resolves Chow’s crisis of conflicting allegiances. Situated on the thin blue line that antagonizes the relationship between New York’s Chinatown and the police, Chow embodies the central tension wrought by the genre’s oppositional imperative. The merging of the Chinatown native and the NYPD in Chow consequently constitutes an uneasy syncretism of two elements traditionally at odds with one another. Chow’s dilemma arises from his desire to be an exemplary cop, which requires the renunciation of personal ties to and investment in the Chinatown community. The dilemma of having to choose between fidelity to the law or to the native community parallels the dilemma faced by Asian Americans in a society that polarizes the “ethnic” and the “American.” Lin’s use of the law as both a source of empowerment and debilitation for Chow thus stresses the negative consequences wrought on the Asian American subject as a result of constructed competing expectations. At the novel’s outset, Chow has fully adopted the police’s disciplinary gaze in his daily foot patrol through Chinatown, as he monitors the community’s goings on through the filter of suspicion rather than trust. His uniform mediates his relationship with his native community, branding him as a figure of disciplinary authority but also impeding his efforts to gain the people’s trust. When he takes it upon himself to solve the murder of an elderly woman in Chinatown, the uniform becomes the primary obstacle to his investigation because “the way the Chinese felt about it, talking in English to an American cop can only invite misfortune.”69 His estrangement from the community is further compounded by the police mandate that prohibits officers from living within the boundary of the precinct they

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serve. Adding insult to injury, Chow’s role in the community is strictly circumscribed by his commanding officer, who continually pass him up for promotion to detective. Alienated from the community by these visible signs of his allegiance to the police, Chow echoes the Op’s contempt for Chinatown and confesses that “it was the last place in the goddamned world [he] wanted to be.”70 Having internalized the assimilationist view that affiliation with Chinatown and its ethnic and cultural otherness spells social deficits, Chow systematically identifies with groups and institutions aligned with nativist character and ideology to compensate for his difference. A ne’er-do-well adolescent who rebelled against the cast of the model Asian American, Chow ran with a quasi gang called the Continentals as a claim to native identity (and as a nod to Hammett’s Continental Op). He defies his father’s wish for him to attend college by enlisting in the U.S. Army and later, in the police force. When his father expressed displeasure at his career choices and tells him to “apply to some good schools,” he retorts, with a cruel tongue in his cheek, that he “already got into the academy” (my emphasis).71 His desire for an uncontestable American identity culminates in his pursuit of military and law enforcement careers, precisely because little else represents unassailable traditional Americanness as potently as the soldier and the cop. Indeed, Chow’s enlistment in the army testifies to the power of nationalist rhetoric to inspire acts of ethnic disavowal. It coincided with the rise of anti-Asian sentiments during the Vietnam War, a time when dissociation from “gookish” Asians—at home or abroad—was highly encouraged. When the draft hit Chinatown in 1969, Chow regards it as an opportunity to display his patriotism in the way that minorities are pressured to conspicuously display their patriotism when their citizenship status is under suspicion: “I knew how bad it was in China, and how we should be grateful for the better life we had in the U.S. I knew that serving was the best way to prove how much I loved America. We had to stop Communism.”72 Adopting a with-us-or-against-us view of reactionary nationalism, Chow regards draft resisters as “Buddhist vegetarians who believed that ending another creature’s life was against their religion” and parrots hard-line nativist carping against foreigners and immigrants who will not sing the nationalist chorus: “Fuck them, I thought. If you’re not willing to fight for the freedoms of this country, you shouldn’t be allowed to live in it. Hell, your parents shouldn’t have been allowed to come over.”73

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The degree to which Chow uncritically subscribes to nationalist and nativist ideologies chillingly illustrates their hegemonic power in securing the consent of even those whom it implicitly or explicitly demonizes to sustain its appeal. This is a cruder variation on Hata’s plight in A Gesture Life, but Hata’s plight all the same. Ethnically emasculated, for example, during basic training, Chow is singled out by the drill instructor as a visible example of “what a gook looks like . . . the complete opposite of you”74 —a moment that legitimizes the use of violence against those who look like Chow. Rather than becoming demoralized, his drill instructor’s act—recalling the cruel Captain Ono’s coaching of the young Hata—only seems to fuel Chow’s resolve to identify with martial institutions, which he clearly believes to be an ideal combination of strength and dominance as well as a means to avoid a ghettoized ethnic existence (which, in his view, is what life in Chinatown must mean). Upon completion of his Vietnam tour of duty, Chow continues to declare his resolve to ethnically refashion himself, transforming the police uniform into a palimpsest of an exemplary American identity over a Chinese one. The role Chow fulfills in the police department, then, eerily mirrors his role in Vietnam. Like his army uniform, his police uniform interpellates him in contradistinction to an Asian community and positions him antagonistically against those who “look like him.” His commanding officer at the precinct, appropriately nicknamed “The Brow,” links the work they do in Chinatown to the U.S. military’s role in Vietnam: “We are in a fight right now for the hearts and minds of the people. We’re slowly winning them back. And we’re winning them back because of you. The trust is once again, ah, rising between us and the community because of you.”75 While the analogy suggests constructive intentions on the part of the police department, the more subtle and therefore perhaps even more deeply disturbing implication is that Chinatown, like Vietnam during the war, is filled with enemy ‘gooks’ that cannot be trusted. The deep irony ensuing from Chow’s military and law enforcement careers is that these, as acts of rebellion against his father and the paved course of a model minority existence, are in actuality acts of hypercomplicity to the dictates of another set of dominant ideologies. His role in both the police department and in the Chinatown community is restricted, and his white commanding officer has strictly limited his job to walking his beat and attending official functions in Chinatown as “the precinct’s little public-relations poster boy.”76 When Chow

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expresses his desire to earn the gold shield of the rank of detective, The Brow rationalizes the glass ceiling and attempts to convince him to remain at his lowly post: Who wouldn’t want to walk a beat, make friends, and get their pictures taken? Think of all the people you meet and the goodwill you spread. The Chinese people love you, the police administration loves you—you have the best of both worlds. You’ll have the easiest 20 years of anybody. You’ll retire and you’ll have a department pension and probably be named to several community boards.77

The revelation that his rebellion against one set of social imperatives has made him compliant with another set of social imperatives, and, most importantly, that resistance in this instance proves to be an insidious articulation of false consciousness, comes belatedly to Chow. While he believes that he has defied model minority imperatives, he has merely replaced them with other roles that demand even greater degrees of uncritical complicity. “The Law” in This Is a Bust, represented by the military and the police, is thus Lin’s metaphor for the social imperatives, articulated through and enforced by the rhetoric of nationalism, that encourage ethnic disavowal in exchange for a deracinated, idealized Americanness. The Law reforms the resistant ethnic into the compliant American; it instills in Chow the aspirational desire to become a detective—a “ranked” and authenticated American—at the cost of his Chinatown membership. When members of the community tell him that “all the other policemen are on the side of the tourists” and that he is “the only one here for [them],” Chow’s absolutist view of his job makes him shirk the role: “That’s not true. All the police are on the side of the law.”78 The Law in this context sustains reductive either/or identity choices and engenders divisions within the Asian America subject. It also engenders divisions within the Asian American community through the distinctions it makes between the complicit and the resistant. Chow, outfitted with the police uniform that functions as the visible emblem of the law, becomes a visible sign of the state’s disciplinary and, perhaps less visible but equally palpable, punitive power. Even as Chow is figuratively outfitted with the law, however, he is also, as a racialized minority, subject to its disciplinary power; in other words, he is simultaneously empowered and disciplined by the very authority he wears. This engenders a conundrum that is

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instantiated in numerous scenarios where Chow is required to choose between obedience to the law and the interests of Chinatown. Chow is reluctant to challenge The Brow’s authority in spite of his hatred of the commanding officer. When political differences between two Chinatown subpopulations (those from Taiwan versus those from mainland China) cause a rift in the community, The Brow not only fails to mediate the hostilities, he makes indiscriminate arrests that only exacerbate the division. And when The Brow orders the arrest of a Chinatown old-timer who has been providing illegitimate but necessary mail service to immigrants from mainland China, Chow executes his command in spite of his awareness that it would only exacerbate the rifts and resentments in the community. The uniform, in effect, positions Chow as a wedge that maintains rather than repairs the divisions. The outfit of authority ironically ensnares Chow in an impasse between professional aspirations and personal commitments. Chow’s initial compliance with the authority of martial and law enforcement institutions and the nativist ideologies they espouse, then, not only fails to refashion him into an ideal American (as represented by the soldier and the cop), but, on the contrary, renders him abject and paralyzed. The military and police uniforms are incomplete palimpsests that remind us of the impossibility of a total American refashioning for ethnics in a culture that obsesses over visible racial difference. The impossibility translates into a confluence of social and professional impediments that restrict Chow to a bottom rank with no room for movement: no promotional possibilities, no progress on the murder investigation, no investment in the future of Chinatown, and no investment in his own future. His alcohol abuse is thus a manifestation of the psychic damage wrought on the imperfectly reformed subject, as well as an act of attempted escape from the double bind his police uniform has come to signify. Chow’s descent into a despairing alcoholic binge sets up This Is a Bust’s key narrative contraventions. Brought on by the impossibility of sustaining both the lore of American patriotism and the interests of the native ethnic community—again, a dilemma reminiscent of Doc Hata’s difficulties with sustaining the lore of nationalism and the lore of liberation in A Gesture Life—Chow’s breakdown signifies the dire consequences of competing imperatives imposed on the ethnic subject. But while a more traditional narrative arc might effect a personal triumph in which the detective figure prevails over his own personal demons and solves the mystery at hand, in This Is a Bust, it is the Chinatown community that emerges as the crucial recuperative force.

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When Chow finally hits bottom, the midget, with the help of other Chinatowners, organizes an intervention to help him kick the habit until his “mind and body had reconnected.”79 More significantly, the intervention doubles as a metaphor for Lin’s own narrative intervention. As if writing deliberately against the sustained antagonism between the Op and Chinatown, Lin restructures the relationship between the detective figure and Chinatown as a mutually supportive and collaborative one. In stark contrast to Hammett’s sinister Chinatown, Lin refigures it as a source of moral regeneration rather than degeneration. If Chow embodies the fractured, alienated subjectivity produced by the competing imperatives of his job, it is the Chinatown community that nurses him back to health. Here, Chow does not solve Chinatown; rather, Chinatown solves him. Lin’s intervention not only recuperates the split Asian American subject, it also shifts the perspective of authority from the detective figure and the police—the traditional sources of the disciplinary gaze—to the marginal figures in the novel. It is with the help of the midget that Chow is ultimately able to uncover the corruption plaguing the community. As a variation on the local informant, the midget is nevertheless nothing like Hammett’s obsequious Cipriano; as its most informed member, he never informs against the community. With the help of the community’s invisible but watchful members, Chow unveils the collusive relationship between the police and Chinatown’s financial elite. The murder, it turns out, was planned by restaurateur Willie Gee and carried out by one of his employees as a means to silence the victim’s protests over Gee’s exploitative practices, and the case was not actively investigated by the police on account of the relationship Gee has carefully cultivated with them. The detective figure, in this case, was “just an instrument” and “the dummy who made both sides look good,”80 as Chow comes to realize in the end. With this revelation, Chow sheds, literally and figuratively, the police uniform at a function given in his honor—a function that also conspicuously displays the collusion between Chinatown’s moneyed interests and the police. Rather than simply reversing course and renouncing his allegiance to the law, Chow abandons the notion of exemplary membership on either side of the thin blue line and opts for a more self-conscious and continual negotiation of his dual subjectivity. He does not quit the police department, but will operate as a bridge rather than a wedge between it and the community it serves. When The Brow tells him at the novel’s end, “When I see you,

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you’ll get nothing but hate,” he replies, “When I’m in my civvies, you won’t even recognize me from the other chinks in the streets.”81 Chow is “healed” not through a disavowal of his ties to the police or the Chinatown community, but through a self-conscious possession of a liminal position that simultaneously appropriates and defies the authoritative gaze of the police. Translated into narrative terms, Chow’s transformation from a minority subject who mimics institutional power to one who learns to negotiate and manipulate its imperatives is, of course, a metaphor for Lin’s own negotiations with the imperatives of the crime fiction genre. Lin suggests that the Law—in both social and narrative senses of the word—is coercive but malleable, and thus able to serve the interests of the disciplined subject who sees through and learns to manipulate its regulatory functions. Most importantly, the significant point on which the novel concludes echoes that of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing: contrary to its vastly reductivist representational history, particularly in American crime fiction, Chinatown is a real place with a rich and complex history that defies boilerplate portraits.

Susan Choi’s Radical Recriminations: A MERICAN W OMAN I didn’t think that a story about homegrown revolutionaries hating the government and blowing things up was going to be more accessible to average American readers than the story of a hopeful immigrant. I mean, it may not be. We’ll see. —Susan Choi

The military and the police in Ed Lin’s This Is a Bust exemplify the colonial ambivalence Homi Bhabha conceptualizes in The Location of Culture: an ambivalence of the dominant culture toward the colonized or minority subject expressed through its demand for that subject’s adoption of dominant values and beliefs, even as it insistently denies that subject full civil or legal recognition.82 In spite of Officer Robert Chow’s faithful mimicry of the ideal masculine American as it is represented by the soldier and the cop, the “slippage,” we might say, between his physical features and the uniforms he wears constitutes that peculiarly resilient gap that deems any act of mimicry a “partial reform” of the minority subject, to use Bhabha’s terms. Chow’s eventual revelations, with the help of the midget’s interventionist perspective, lead him to reconceive his disciplinary role as a cop with

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a degree of self-conscious irony that calls out “the dominant strategic function of colonial power” and “poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledge and disciplinary powers.”83 His choice at the end of the novel is to remain as a law enforcement agent to effect change from within, to embody the blurred opposition between Chinatown and the law. While we might conclude from this that Chow is ultimately able to construct a legible subjectivity within the bounds of the law, we might also say that the jury is still out on its durability, especially when its recognition is still dependent on an institution whose purpose is to discipline rather than to tolerate various forms of social and cultural noncompliance. Hammett’s Chinatown, after all, must be contained. It is this residue of skepticism toward the viability of Chow’s position that makes Susan Choi’s American Woman an interesting touchstone, precisely because Choi critiques the disciplinary functions of social law and law enforcement institutions from the other side of the law.84 If the question that Lin’s novel poses is whether abidance by the law is the best course toward a visible and legible Asian American subjectivity, the question that Choi poses in American Woman is whether a radical violation of the law might be the better or necessary course. If consent has failed us miserably, is dissent the more compelling, or even the only, course of action that remains? Dissent, of course, has a fraught history in the United States, in which revolutionaries of all kinds have been either deified or demonized. Radical social noncompliance and protest have been romanticized in countless outlaw narratives, a genre responsible for constructing some of the most enduring American cultural heroes. On the other hand, such noncompliance has also been subject to criminalization by the rhetoric of assimilationism, patriotism, and nativism. The radical, as a figure venerated for speaking truth to power and yet feared for threatening that very power, also engenders a deepseated ambivalence on the part of the dominant culture. Moreover, it matters who protests: those whose citizenship status or subjecthood is already vulnerable by dint of racial, ethnic, class, or religious difference are much more susceptible to criminalization. In American Woman, Choi draws a parallel between the outlaw and the radical activist, a parallel intended to expose the ways in which our cultural narratives romanticize or demonize nonconformists, and, more significantly, the racial double standards that inform the way legal and cultural discourses romanticize or criminalize social and ideological nonconformity.

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American Woman can also be read on a meta-critical level as a means for assessing the validity of Viet Nguyen’s argument that Asian American scholarship has been beset with the “bad subject” critical mode, in which readings of literary and cultural productions through the lens of political resistance prevails. To put it in more provocative terms, is Asian American literary scholarship romanced by the lore of social resistance and political protest? Are critical modes that focus exclusively on building a case for textual subversion and rebellion evidence of a kind of false consciousness, in which critical endeavors aimed at diminishing the power of romantic ideologies are unwittingly replicating them? Is Asian American critique reproducing the politics of resistance in the literary texts they read for the sake of resistance, possibly at the cost of recognizing aesthetic innovations at work in the literature? I close this chapter with American Woman precisely because it is a novel that poses these questions and thereby compels readers and scholars to consider them too. It is a novel about an Asian American antiwar activist whose protests and actions against the state are perceived as participatory citizenship on the one hand, and treason—the highest crime against the state—on the other, depending on one’s ideological perspective. Choi’s dramatization of the necessities and costs of activism for Asian Americans, and for minorities in the United States more generally, compels us to reexamine the appeal and the effectiveness of protest in general, the more extreme or “radical” factions of American protest movements in particular, and, most importantly, the romantic narratives we weave about them. The novel asks some tough questions about the appeal of protest ideology and, in its most radical moments, the consequences of its rationalization of militancy and violence in the name of justice. These are, after all, questions we face in our real lives, as Virginia Tech all too graphically reminds us. Choi juxtaposes the hyperbolic rhetoric of radicalist ideology with the insufferable social injustices that engender radicalism in the first place. And while Choi may seem to have delivered a scathing condemnation of radicalism through her largely unflattering portrayal of young radicals, I read American Woman as an ambivalent apology for and rejection of the imperative of protest for Asian American writers. Choi’s ambivalence is reflected in the novel’s multi-generic form: part historical fiction, part fugitive thriller, and part road narrative, the novel stitches together several genres to interrogate the narrative conventions that frame representations of social rebellion and the determination of “justice.” American Woman also reveals the ways in

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which crime fiction, as a popular narrative form of social protest, can function as a romance with tremendous disciplinary power. It shows why victims of social inequality and injustice are drawn to such narratives, and the ways in which they can, paradoxically, inspire the most fervent forms of compliance in spite of their spirit of defiance. Choi draws on two protest movements from recent American history that arose as a result of the wars the United States waged against Asian countries. First, American Woman is a fictionalized account of the notorious 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the activist group the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and, more generally, a composite portrait of the antiwar student organizations active in the 1970s, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weathermen.85 Antiwar activism in the United States reached a fever pitch when Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon escalated the war in Vietnam; fueled by what they saw as American society’s indefensible lack of concern with the mass murders committed by the U.S. government against the Vietnamese, and emboldened by the growing antiwar movement, groups like the SDS, the Weathermen, and the SLA adopted violent means themselves under the logic of meeting violence with violence. Second, American Woman revisits, though less explicitly, the internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II, an event that painfully exposed the stakes of social protest and political activism for Japanese Americans, as well as the precariousness of their citizenship status. One is a highly visible and well-documented movement that came into being as a response to U.S. overreaches in Vietnam, the other a lesser-known domestic policy that unconstitutionally incarcerated the nation’s Japanese American population. Drawing on these two historical “stories” that, in the minds of most Americans, have already been told, Choi challenges the authorial biases of official histories. Rewriting them from the perspective of the excluded, Choi refocuses our attention on what protest—or, even more specifically, radicalism—means for Asian Americans in the 1940s, in the 1970s, and now in our post-9/11 era. Additionally, the juxtaposition of these two historical narratives testifies to the fact that it matters who protests. They reveal the double standards that apply in the determination of cultural, political, and legal protests as a right of citizenship or a high crime of treason, especially in terms of the protesting subject’s racial and social status. While the 1970s antiwar movement carries the luster of outlaw romances to this day, the American Japanese internment camps of World War II are still steeped in the shadows of history and burdened with an

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irreparable rift in the Japanese American community. The former was revered by the youth of the time, for whom organizations like the SLA and the Weather Underground “had become larger-than-life figures, outlaws in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,”86 while the latter systematically demonized all who protested the internment, so that, as Choi reminds us in the novel, “resisting the draft . . . hadn’t ever been a popular or noble position among the interned Japanese,” and that “it lumped you in, however unfairly, with the fanatical Emperor-worshippers, the few real America-haters who made everyone else look so bad.”87 For Japanese Americans, and for Asian Americans more generally, the internment constituted one of the most vexing moments in the discourse of American citizenship, for it simultaneously obscured the terms by which Japanese American citizenship was determined, and yet clarified the fact that, with regard to the right of protest, that right simply was not extended to Japanese Americans regardless of their citizenship status. It revealed the U.S. government’s own stunning capacity to violate the constitutional rights of its citizens by criminalizing the protests of these citizens as treason. Pitting this decidedly grim moment in American history against the more sensationalistic and romantic narratives of the 1970s antiwar protest culture, Choi illuminates the ways in which protest and resistance have vastly different implications for majority and minority subjects. The novel’s narrative point of view—that of a marginal figure rather than one of the principal, well-known figures, and a Japanese American woman to boot—introduces an unexpected angle into official narratives about the 1970s protest movements, in which white or black perspectives predominate. In such accounts, Asians, when mentioned, typically appear as either the enemy (Viet Cong) or the victim (casualties of war)—a binary compression of types against which le thi diem thuy also reacted in The Gangster We Are All Looking For. While the inspirations, guilt, and ambivalences of many of the white activists in the 1970s antiwar movements have been thoroughly explored and documented, they have not been explored in literature from the position of the Asian American, for whom these events must bear special significance. After all, if it is, as one member of the Weathermen has said, the U.S. atrocities in Vietnam during the war that was the prime mover for the movement, where, then, are the Asian American voices? Choi redresses this historical lacuna by casting her protagonist as a Japanese American antiwar activist who is also the daughter of a former camp internee.

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Jenny Shimada, from whose point of view the novel is narrated, is partly modeled on Wendy Yoshimura, a member of the SLA whose involvement with the group and with Hearst’s kidnapping has remained relatively invisible in official historical accounts.88 We might speculate that a reason for Yoshimura’s absence in these accounts might be the media’s inability to reconcile the image of the Japanese American model minority with that of a radical activist, a discomfort, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that has characterized reactions to Cho Seung-hui. In those early years of the civil rights movement, Japanese Americans were singled out by mainstream media as the politically quiet and socially responsible foils to the vociferousness of Black Nationalism.89 In this context, Wendy Yoshimura embodied a contradiction that threatened the validity and thus the potency of the model minority thesis, a thesis deployed by the dominant culture to demonize “unruly” blacks. Choi’s decision to revisit this event through Yoshimura’s eyes is thus a symbolic act of bringing visibility to those who have been sidelined in the construction of official historical accounts. But Choi’s use of Jenny’s point of view serves another function as well. After years of being on the lam, she is asked to help provide safe harbor for the two fugitive activists and their kidnapped captive. Her observation of the threesome’s naive idealism and impetuous actions compels her to reflect on and weigh her own past involvement with radical activism—a reflection that doubles as Choi’s own reconsideration of the importance of protest and resistance for Asian Americans. Thus, Choi dramatizes the contradictory perceptions of protest between the internment generation and the antiwar generation through the strained relationship between Jenny and her father. Demonized for his draft resistance and branded a “No-No” by his own community during his internment at Manzanar, Jenny’s father’s belief in protest has soured, and his history has embittered him toward his daughter’s political activism. For Jenny, who has had no direct experience with the internment, his silence on the entire episode only fueled her curiosity because “it had seemed like a key to understanding him, to knowing him,” and that “her discovery of what he’d endured was the beginning of her discovery of history and politics, of power and oppression, of brotherhood and racism, and finally, of radicalism.”90 Her dawning activism clashed with his waning one, and his desire to bury the sorry experience clashed with her desire to excavate it. It is precisely the buried history of the state’s heavy-handed containment of radical protests during the internment, however, that

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serves as the underlying motivation for Jenny’s turn to radical activism. While the government’s active suppression of Japanese American resistance to the internment is never overtly mentioned in the novel, it is nevertheless the “unspeakable thing unspoken,” to borrow Toni Morrison’s famous phrase, that palpably informs Jenny’s actions.91 Executive Order 9066 mandated the detainment of almost all U.S. residents of Japanese descent; systematically criminalized and incarcerated all resisters at Tule Lake, a special detention center for those deemed potential enemies of America; and rationalized quite unabashedly the government’s own violation of its citizens’ constitutional rights. As such, the Order’s legacy serves as the basis for Choi’s critique of the crimes of the state vis-a-vis crimes against the state. Radicalism’s aim of using whatever means necessary to convert what Anne Cheng calls the melancholy of racial grief to active expressions of grievance thus becomes a powerful draw in the eyes of those for whom nonviolent and peaceful means of protest were ineffective at best and severely penalized at worst.92 In a culture in which voice is tantamount to power, radical activism poses the most vociferous challenge to state power—all in stark contrast to the painful hush of repressed resentment borne by Jenny’s father. Thus, when Jenny runs away from home and into the fold of her boyfriend William’s radical activist group, the move constitutes, for her, a progression from silence to voice, from a state of repression to one of empowerment. The group also provides a palimpsest whereby her boyfriend, the leader of the group, “became her world, [and] his language her language,”93 figuratively replacing her father’s silent grief with his vocal protest. Yet, while Choi’s invocation of the internment as evidence of governmental overreaches seems to rationalize, or even necessitate, radical activism, she ultimately paints a bleak picture of its ethical implications and its long-term viability. The first of the novel’s four parts traces, through roman-à-clef references, the questionable ethics of local- and state-level policies and actions that engender sympathy for protest as a necessary challenge to institutional authorities. Choi presents, for instance, a fictional account of disputes in 1968 over Columbia University’s controversial plan for what was perceived by the local community as a segregated gymnasium, as well as the backdrop of the Watergate scandal as an example of the federal government’s overreaches. Jenny’s conversation with a lawyer about the difference between war as state-sponsored violence and radical activism as democratic protest of that sponsorship also lays bare the legitimizing power

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of the state for its own “criminal” actions. When Jenny consults with the lawyer about the likelihood of a pardon for her bombing of government buildings, citing Nixon’s problematic legitimization of mass killings in the name of war, the lawyer tells her: “You can’t say the executive office did criminal acts, so my criminal acts aren’t important.” And when Jenny challenges the state’s criteria for justifying or criminalizing acts of violence by arguing that “it’s not the so-called crimes, it’s the underlying reasons for them,” and that “you can’t strip our acts of their context and say they were crimes, and at the same time strip something like Vietnam of its crime, and call it a legitimate venture,” the lawyer reminds her of the collusive power of the state and the law, to which the determination of her actions as legitimate or criminal is wholly subject: “Vietnam was a war. A distinct body of law applied to it. [. . .] Your case will be decided on law.”94 Such a blatantly skewed power structure feeds the appeal of radicalism, which relies on the logic of vengeance that rationalizes the idea one character in the novel calls “meeting power on its own terms”95 and promises an inversion of power relations. Choi’s portrayal of the young radicals echoes the narrative conventions of the outlaw romance that often inform popular historiographies of radical antiwar groups. Robert Stone’s 2004 documentary, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, for instance, describes the SLA’s activities as “the romantic fantasies of modern political terrorism.”96 Nancy Isenberg has also documented the ways in which both the prosecution and the defense at Patty Hearst’s trial had relied on “a script of radical romance” that cast the activists as magnetic and quixotic figures in a tragic melodrama.97 In the novel, the male leaders of the activist groups are also depicted as magnetic personalities; William, Jenny’s boyfriend and the acknowledged leader of their activist group, is described as possessing Robin Hood-esque charisma.98 Common to the genre, too, is its capacity to engender readers’ antipathy for the law in their sympathy for the outlaw. The outlaw is also romanced for his ability for self-refashioning; as Jenny observes, “The magical act of ‘going underground” ’ made it possible for “reinvention of the self.99 The voluntary invisibility affords them the sense that they have inverted the power of detection, so that they remain “not merely unscathed but anointed by one enemy after another, who had looked them in the eye and not seen them, and so added more force to their state of enchantment.”100 As a self-reflexive dramatization of romanticized radicalism, American Woman is replete with the conventional elements of detective

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and fugitive narratives. When Jenny and Pauline, Thelma-and-Louiselike, drive across the Southwest while dodging the law, Choi mimics Chandleresque language in her description of their brief visit at the “Outlaw Inn,” which pays clear homage to his hard-boiled prose: In this sort of situation other women always radiated their own distinct coldness, and yet even in very small numbers they could later the charge of a mostly male room. Perhaps she was only reflecting on how much her concerns in these settings had changed. Perhaps she wasn’t having these reflections at all.101

Choi also decorates the bar with “novelty reproductions, in oldfashioned sepia tones, with unlikely pictures of their subjects in defiant postures, waving guns. WANTED: THE OUTLAW JESSE JAMES. WANTED: BILLY THE KID. WANTED: FOR CATTLE RUSTLING IN THE COUNTY OF JOHNSON.”102 The décor positions Pauline among the ranks of the “most wanted”; she has, in effect, joined the Outlaw Hall of Fame, much in the same way that Patty Hearst had joined it in real life. Complicating the romanticization of the outlaw, Choi depicts the crumbling “cult of family” of the radical antiwar and hippie movements that replace blood relations in communes and other alternative social arrangements. When Jenny runs away from home at age 16 and joins William’s antiwar activist group in Berkeley, one member of the group describes it as an “unalloyed excitement about being together, about being a group of friends that felt more like a family, like the sort of dream-family nobody had and that doesn’t exist”103 Even Pauline, who “[lacks] strident beliefs of some kind,” saw radical activism as an expression of passion and ardor and the group as an embodiment of familial devotion.104 Indeed, Choi describes the conditions of Pauline’s Stockholm Syndrome as a form of infatuation, that she had “fallen a little in love” with her captors: Not because they were the comrades she’d sought before knowing quite what she was seeking. Not because they had words for the frightening world, lists of reasons and crucial solutions, power disjunctions and racial disease and the cure for materialism. Not because they were her yet not her, had transcended and so gave her hope. Just because she was nineteen years old, and might have fallen in love with any collection of beings devoted to lofty ideals.105

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Such descriptions articulate Choi’s understanding—and, implicitly, skepticism—of radicalism’s romantic power. In this context, Choi’s prose exhibits a self-reflexivity that simultaneously depicts and demystifies the romance of radicalism. She does so largely by dramatizing the hypocrisies and internal conflicts resulting from the young radicals’ unwitting replication of the very ideologies and social structures it purports to combat. White male privilege and authority clearly still prevail despite the movement’s expressed commitment to gender and racial equality. Roles are still assigned along conventional gender lines; reflecting on the tacitly accepted patriarchal structure of the group, Jenny and Pauline come to realize “the problem of women’s role in the revolution, and had finally opened their eyes to the fact that everywhere in the world, women followed. Even history’s most notable women revolutionaries were helpmeets to more-worshipped men.”106 Women and people of color, regardless of their national or class background, are simultaneously held up as emblems of the group’s progressive ideals while being relegated to subordinate positions in the group’s operations (a kind of tokenization not unlike the police department’s positioning of Officer Robert Chow in the Chinatown community in This Is a Bust). When Juan tells Jenny that “skin is a privilege” and her “Third World perspective’s a privilege,” Jenny tells him, “stop saying I’m from the Third World when I’m from California.”107 Juan’s logic, which merely replaces white privilege with “brown, yellow, black, red” privilege, ultimately sustains the systemic problem of skin privilege. More particularly, Jenny’s doubly marginalized position as a woman of color subjects her to play a doubly subordinate role. Whereas she was the principal “helpmeet” in William’s group, in Juan’s group she has been relegated to the status of the helpmeet’s helpmeet in her role as Pauline’s special aide. She is never the leader or the “mastermind,” but always an accomplice, an abettor, a helper. With William’s group, she executes the plans but does not design them; she is the explosives expert but not the planner of the bomb plots; she is the sign maker for the group’s political banners but not the author of their slogans. It is her scrupulousness for which she is tapped to provide safe harbor for Juan’s group, for which she is expected to serve as a disciplined, compliant helpmeet. Running errands and cooking for them while they author their communiqués and manifesto, Jenny is essentially a glorified butler, like Alfred to

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Batman or Kato to the Green Hornet. This is surely a deliberate design on Choi’s part to illustrate the irony that, even in the business of radical resistance, the Asian American is still the model minority, providing expert labor with quiet compliance and consistent execution. Peeling away layers of the romantic patina, hopes for radicalism’s long-term transformational effects are ultimately dashed when Jenny realizes there are still wide swaths of the United States that remain untouched by its insistent work. The novel, in fact, begins with Jenny’s realization of just how little impact her work with William’s group has had. Working for two old-money septuagenarians in New York’s moneyed Hudson Valley while on the run from the FBI, Jenny comes face to face with the power of unassailable wealth and “transcendent, atemporal money”: For them there was no vivid convulsion in the life of the nation. There was no odor of change on the air. There was not even the melancholy of national shame that the ‘average American’ felt. Theirs was a nation transcending such temporal things. [. . .] That complacence that said, I have no need to watch the strange signs, to scent change on the wind. I have no need to pay any attention.108

The revelation for Jenny is devastating, and not even her later engagement with the impassioned Juan and Yolanda could rekindle her own idealism. She realizes the naivete that informed her belief that “nothing better seized attention than violence, and that the rightness of theirs would be obvious, dedicated as it was to saving lives;” that the echo chamber in which they—and other activists like Juan and Yolanda—“had known only like-minded people” was a jug that sealed them from the world outside, and that “Jenny’s life at Wildmoor was the first time she was ever submerged in that part of the country she and William had meant as their audience, against which they’d fought with such hope, and so little success.”109 Faced with its replication of hierarchical power and the apparent insignificance of its impact, Jenny concludes toward the end of the novel that radicalism “was like Catholicism, with its extreme self-referentiality, its strict liturgy, its all-explaining view of the world, its absolute Satan, and its deadly sins.”110 To Choi, radicalism reinforces its own internal logic of “by any means necessary” and its self-fulfilling teleology of an unavoidable violent end. As Todd Gitlin has noted in his observation of the Weathermen’s botched plot to bomb an officers’ dance at Fort Dix:

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They brought themselves—they were not brought—they brought themselves to that point, to the point where they were ready to be mass murderers. [. . .] They came to this conclusion, which was the conclusion that was come to by all the great killers, whether Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, that they have a grand project for transformation and purification of the world. And in the face of that project, ordinary life is dispensable.111

These were the imperatives of radical protest that Jenny—and Choi, by extension—couldn’t abide. While Choi does not resolve personal and societal ambivalences toward the effectiveness of radical protest, she does intervene in the dominant narratives we tell about them. In Choi’s final analysis of radicalism, the failures and eventual dissolution of the radical protest groups testify to their flawed rationalization of ethically questionable tactics. Reflecting on the bombings of government buildings she helped execute, Jenny concludes: “Perhaps they had been wrong to fight power on its terms, instead of rejecting its terms utterly.”112 The distinction between right and wrong becomes ambiguous when both sides adopt the same means in the name of their cause, echoing what former Weatherman Brian Flanagan has said: “When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things.”113 That this observation easily applies to the U.S. government and the radical activists reveals the same logic on which both rely for justifying their political and tactical excesses. As another former Weatherman Mark Rudd explains, “Americans are taught again and again from a very early age that . . . all violence which is not sanctioned by the government is either criminal or mentally ill. And so, our violence was categorized as that—criminal and mentally ill.”114 He comes to the conclusion, then, that “violence didn’t work.”115 Yet, implied in Rudd’s conclusion is that violence does not work for the protestors, because it not only works for the state, but is often endorsed and rationalized by the ideology of liberatory democracy to which much of the United States subscribes. What Choi effectively problematizes is the state’s power not only to determine what constitutes lawful use of force and what constitutes criminal violence, but also to legalize the use of violence in the name of war because, after all, it is the social body that writes The Law. Most importantly, Choi exposes the ways in which antiwar protest narratives paradoxically exclude Asian figures of resistance in their very fight against anti-Asian U.S. foreign policies. Throughout the last part of the novel that traces a journalist’s investigation of Pauline’s

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kidnapping, Choi’s sardonic authorial refrain, which intones that Jenny and her father are “not the story,” calls out the media’s preoccupation with its self-constructed larger-than-life outlaws, while the causes and people for which the outlaws fight fall by the wayside. In American Woman, however, Jenny and her father are the story. This is evidenced by the novel’s conclusion, in which Jenny accompanies her father to a reunion for ex-internees at the site of the Manzanar Relocation Camp. It is not a resolution, but a reconciliation between two generations of Asian Americans who protested governmental overreaches and suffered terrible consequences as a result. If their protests did little to challenge state power at those particular historical moments, reexaminations of the accounts of these histories—symbolized fictionally by Jenny and her father’s return to Manzanar, and historigraphically by Choi’s rewriting of these two narratives—are still crucial to the project of challenging the official documentations of such protests. Repressed history, of which Manzanar is emblematic, must be revisited and retold, because therein lies the stories omitted by the romances of complicity and resistance. The romance of radical protest, as the reigning narrative of social resistance, can be as powerful as the romance of the American Dream, the all-powerful narrative that engenders consent and complicity. Protest and resistance are necessary means for challenging inequitable laws and governmental overreaches. But, as Choi has shown, they too are susceptible to romanticization by the use of outlaw narratives that rely on the same logic adopted by the state to justify violence. While the lack of distinction between right and wrong makes for exciting crime fiction and intriguing noir worlds, radical social resistance and protest are thorny businesses that often exact terrible psychological, social, and material costs. For minority activists in particular, the consequences of their actions extend to the entire racial, gender, or class group with which they are affiliated. While the entire group stands to benefit from their activism, it also stands to be punished as well. In Choi’s view, radicalism is a romance like the American Dream, and ultimately, the former fails as a redress for the latter. When layers of romance for both complicity and resistance have been peeled away, however, what remains is what has been suppressed or ignored, and, most importantly, the systemic and institutionalized injustices that created the difficult conditions for having to choose between complicity and resistance in the first place. Thus, Choi’s decision to conclude the novel on a historical site where Asian American protest was met with violent repression not only in the moment,

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but in the history books as well, constitutes a key intervention that ruptures our most sacred lore about America’s self-congratulatory embrace of both protest and consent in the name of democracy. In this sense, American Woman as well as Chan Is Missing and This Is a Bust exemplify what Hayden White calls “anomalies of genre” because they self-reflexively contravene the master narratives of both a complicit and a resistant Asian America.

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R e o r i e n t at i o n s On Asian American Science Fiction

Alienating Asian America If immigrant fiction and crime fiction have tended to lock the legibility of Asian Americans strictly within the severely limited paradigms of assimilationist virtues and racialized vices, what might a marginal, subcultural genre like science fiction offer to the representational vocabulary? Asians and Asian Americans, of course, are no strangers to science fiction; indeed, the history of U.S. relations with Asian countries is uncannily reflected in American science fiction’s long Orientalist history. American science fiction, as a genre preoccupied with speculations of the future, has been engaged in a parallel discourse about the roles Asia and Asians will play in Western conceptions of the future.1 It has long entertained this question in explicit and implicit ways through Orientalist figurations that cast Asian culture and people as either oppressively collectivist or singularly iniquitous. Remarkably, it can be said that Asian Americans entered the science fiction imaginary prior to the recognition of science fiction as an identifiable genre in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1881, at the height of the nativist movement after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, Senator John Miller of California identified the Chinese as “inhabitants of another planet.”2 Arguing before Congress for a bill he had just introduced that would soon become the Chinese Exclusion Act, he described the Chinese as “machinelike . . . of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron; they are automatic engines of flesh and

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blood; they are patient, stolid, unemotional . . . [and] herd together like beasts.”3 Chinese laborers, who began coming to the United States mainly to fill the labor need generated by projects for western expansion, had been in the country for only about 30 years when they found themselves the target of Miller’s nativist vitriol. When it became clear that some of the Chinese intended to remain in the United States, furor over their cultural and physiological differences and challenges to their assimilability into U.S. society erupted everywhere, from the sandlots of San Francisco to the halls of Congress. Underlying the debate over the particularities of their legal and social status is the very question of their humanity in the eyes of the Westerners: are the Chinese even human? Particularly striking about Miller’s description is its uncanny invocation of a figure that did not yet exist in his time: the robot. In spite of the fact that Miller’s portrait predates the popularization of science fiction, a largely twentieth-century literary phenomenon, his reference to the Chinese as “machine-like” and “automatic engines of flesh and blood” that are “patient, stolid, unemotional” unquestionably call to mind images of robot armies in the Star Wars universe, the Borg collective in the Star Trek universe, and other variations of mechanized, affectless robots that populate popular science fiction. The word “robot,” coined by Karel Capek in his 1912 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning “drudgery” or “servitude.”4 As such, it has become a familiar symbol of servants, slaves, and laborers, who are regarded, either sympathetically or contemptuously, as ersatz, “almost but not quite” human. Given this origin, correspondences between Miller’s perception of the Chinese in the nineteenth century and the symbolic function of the robot in the twentieth century are immediately evident. Thus, it is in Miller’s description of Chinese laborers that Asian America and science fiction strangely converge. Miller’s description articulated the fear and anxiety about the Chinese, and indeed, about Asians, and the “yellow peril” is echoed in the figurations of science fiction’s most notorious Orientalist villains, including Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon and Khan of the Star Trek universe.5 A broader pan-Asian Orientalism has also developed in science fiction throughout the twentieth century alongside ongoing immigration concerns about the unassimilability of the Chinese, hatred for the “Japs” and the “gooks” that emerged from the two major U.S. wars against Asian countries, and anxieties about the “rise” of Japan in the 1980s and

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now China in the twenty-first century. But the East has been romanticized as much as it has been demonized; one only needs to look to the positive or even idealized portrayals of Asian cultures and peoples in the works of luminaries like Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick for Orientalist depictions of the East as remedies for Western imperialism.6 Variously demonized or idealized, representations of the “Orient” in American science fiction express the West’s enduring ambivalence toward Asians as friend or foe in its conceptions of the future. Yet, like their conspicuous absence in crime fiction, Asian Americans have rarely authored science fiction in spite of having always been in it. As a genre historically dominated by white male writers, who long held the authority over representations of racial and ethnic others, it has not always welcomed minority writers with open arms, and its exclusionary publishing practices have been well documented by black and women writers. Moreover, the presence of nonwhite writers in the early days of the genre’s history may have been underreported— an effect, in black science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s eyes, of the ways in which the genre has functioned as a racist system that encourages racial, ethnic, and gender erasure in authorial identities, especially in its early pulp days through the use of pen names. Noting that early pulp writers “conducted their careers entirely by mail—in a field and during an era when pen-names were the rule rather than the exception,” Delany points out that “among the ‘Remmington C. Scotts’ and the ‘Frank P. Joneses’ who litter the contents pages of the early pulps, we simply have no way of knowing if one, three, or seven or them—or even many more—were not blacks, Hispanics, women, native Americans, Asians, or whatever.”7 Delany also cites the pernicious “market logic” used by editors in their rejections of work by minority writers as a key mechanism of the genre’s systemic racism. This was the explanation Delany received for a rejected submission from John W. Campbell, Jr., the renowned editor of Analog. Recalling that Campbell had said that he “didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character,” Delany remembers that moment as “one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand.”8 If the number of black writers in science fiction has been few and far between before the entrance of Delany and Octavia E. Butler in the 1960s and 1970s, the dearth of Asian American writers in the genre is even more patent. Even so, and perhaps because of this

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visible absence, Orientalist tropes flourished in the work of white writers from the early pulp days to the postwar years. More importantly, while premodern and postmodern techno-Orientalisms in the genre have undergone meticulous critical scrutiny by Asian American literary and cultural critics in recent years, their prevalence in the genre goes largely unchallenged by Asian American fiction writers themselves.9 We may speculate that Asian American writers have avoided the genre for the same reasons that they have avoided crime fiction: that it, too, has become a genre non grata in the eyes of Asian American writers for its Orientalist legacy. Other likely reasons may be that Asian American writers dismiss or devalue the genre as a form of mass culture unworthy of serious literary and academic study, or that, like black science fiction writers, they have been met with publication obstacles on grounds of the aforementioned “market logic.” Even as minority writers have had to fight the battle of racial marginalization within the genre, science fiction itself has had to fight the battle of genre marginalization within mainstream and academic literary establishments. Like crime fiction, science fiction has always catered to a small but highly devoted fanbase; thus, the stakes for writing science fiction are as high as writing crime fiction, given the challenges regarding genre expectations, audience reach, and literary legitimacy that seem to come with the territory. Roundly dismissed by the literary establishment as “junk fiction” (Noel Coward’s term) and marginalized under the disparaging designation of “genre fiction” in the marketplace, science fiction could nevertheless provide an interesting critical space for marginalized writers. Indeed, writing in as recently as 2003, Sven Birkerts declared in his review of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake that science fiction “will never be literature with a capital L.”10 Only until very recently has science fiction gained legitimacy in the academy and with mainstream literati, as evidenced by the powerful legitimating establishments of the Cambridge Companion Series and the PMLA, both of which published special editions and issues devoted to science fiction.11 Indeed, in the introduction of the PMLA’s special issue, guest editor Marleen S. Barr recounts the “textism” she routinely encounters as a symptom of what she calls “a pathological, knee-jerk science fiction aversion that automatically denigrates all examples of the genre.”12 What awaits the minority writer who writes science fiction, then, is the inevitable double-layered negotiation with authorial legitimacy within the genre community and with genre legitimacy within the literary community.

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Yet there is much that science fiction can offer the Asian American writer. Scott McCracken has said that “at the root of all science fiction lies the fantasy of the alien encounter,” and that “the meeting of self with other is perhaps the most fearful, most exciting and most erotic encounter of all.”13 But lest we paint too rosy a picture of the genre’s explorations of alterity, Adam Roberts reminds us of the demands of its predominantly young white male fanbase, its history of “retrograde examples . . . that introduce difference only to demonise it,” its tendency to “[rely] on stock types of character and plot that are often flat and two dimensional”—all of which, Adams points out, “surely limit its engagement with any meaningful comprehension of the marginal, of otherness.”14 White science fiction writers, more often than not, unwittingly adopt a colonizing gaze even in the most ideologically subversive works; as Damien Broderick charges, science fiction often merely “writes . . . the narrative of the same, as other.”15 Only with the interventions of black and women writers in the 1970s and 1980s—Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia E. Butler, to name a few—has the hegemonic white male gaze, and the prevailing Western ideologies it promotes, been radically decentered. Roberts, too, recognizes that while science fiction has shown “strong attachment . . . to its own canonical conventions and the tendency . . . tacitly to accept dominant ideological and political belief systems,” it also has a record of demonstrating “sympathies with the marginal and the different.”16 Arguing that the genre has “demonstrated remarkable sensitivities on the subjects of gender and racial diversity and contact,” Roberts ultimately argues, quite convincingly, that science fiction opens up a space through which representations of the Other can critically deconstruct the naturalized norms of the dominant culture.17 Even as black and women writers have made significant contributions to the genre, however, interventions by Asian Americans have been rather slow in coming. Indeed, the number of Asian American writers remains curiously low, while figurations of Asians, both complex and reductive, continue to be featured in contemporary science fiction. Orson Scott Card, Karen Joy Fowler, and Maureen McHugh have all written first-person narratives from the perspective of an Asian or Asian American, while Butler, Delany, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson have all featured Asian Americans in their novels.18 Only within the last decade have several Asian American writers emerged onto the scene, some writing in the genre specifically to confront its deeply ingrained Orientalist tropes, others to tap into the

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genre’s unique thematic and fabulatory capacities to create alternative narrative models for a transformational Asian American literary aesthetics.

Retooling Asian American Fiction, Regenreing Science Fiction In this chapter, I argue that science fiction affords the Asian American fiction writer unique narrative tools for destabilizing the generic and social imperatives that have governed Asian American literary production. This may seem like a counterintuitive argument, to be sure, given the critical and popular consensus that the genre is one of the most convention bound, its plots and themes so frequently repeated that they have become powerful disciplinary forces in the production of a work of science fiction. In a 1975 seminal structuralist essay on science fiction, John Huntington identifies a “paradox that lies at the heart of [the genre]”—that is, the conflict between its subversive politics and its highly conventionalized narrative forms: “It may seem inconsistent,” he observes, “that the genre, which one might expect to explore the possibilities of fictional styles and forms, has traditionally conformed closely to a clear and powerful set of stylistic and narrative conventions.”19 But he also stresses the genre’s capacity to “escape nature’s rules and make its own.”20 This observation echoes Robert Scholes’s structuralist analysis of the genre in “The Roots of Science Fiction,” in which he argues that the genre is a form of “fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way.”21 The discontinuity is produced through the creation of an alternate world, a different place; Scholes lists “Heaven, Hell, Eden, Fairyland, Utopia, The Moon, Atlantis, Lilliput” as just a small sampling of such worlds and places in classical literature.22 The purpose of such radical discontinuity, Scholes explains, is “to get a more vigorous purchase on certain aspects of that very reality which has been set aside in order to generate a romantic cosmos.”23 In other words, the constructed fantasy world is actually, and quite paradoxically, an effective deconstructive instrument for unmasking the sociopolitical desires and fears in the “real” world that motivated the creation of the alternate world in the first place. The appeal of science fiction for writers and readers thus resides in its capacity for social and material critique through the deliberate use of nonrealist, nonempirical, highly representational and metaphoric

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literary devices. As Scholes puts it, in very similar terms to Huntington’s observation about “nature’s rules,” “one way [to represent the dislocation between the world of romance and the world of experience] has been to suspend the laws of nature in order to give more power to the laws of narrative, which are themselves projections of the human psyche in the form of enacted wishes and fears.”24 The genre, Scholes suggests, gives the writer license to dispense with the imperatives of verisimilitude and realism, precisely because the genre’s raison d’etre is founded on an emphasis of the not-real, of fabulation. Fabulation in science fiction is usually triggered by a novum, a term coined by Darko Suvin in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction as the “new thing” that does not yet exist in our world, the main formal device that distinguishes a work of science fiction from “realistic” fiction.25 Running the gamut from objects and peoples such as spaceships and extraterrestrial aliens to imaginary places and times such as future settings or alternate histories, the novum is the very thing that makes a work of fiction science fiction. The novum precipitates the process of what Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement,” a concept Suvin developed from the nonnaturalistic works of the Russian Formalists as well as Brechtian theater.26 It was Bertolt Brecht, Suvin explains, who defined the concept of estrangement in his 1948 Short Organon for the Theatre: “A representation which estranges,” Brecht writes, “is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.”27 For Suvin, cognitive estrangement and its key device, the novum, constitute the very ars poetica of the science fiction genre. Thus, science fiction offers Asian American writers a unique way to engage in subversive political and ideological critique not by contravening genre conventions, but by using them to rewrite the rules of the genre. Creative uses of the novum instigate the processes of cognitive estrangement and dissonance that unmask entrenched ideological assumptions about the familiar self and the uncanny Other. Metaphorical encoding of various forms of alienness—alien settings, beings, social institutions, and ideological apparatuses—engenders new understandings of racial, cultural, sexual, and other forms of difference. If immigrant fiction and crime fiction are eminently concerned with the social politics of yesterday and today, then science fiction re-creates and reimagines the social politics of tomorrow. While science fiction can retool Asian American literary aesthetics, Asian American writers can reciprocate by “regenreing” science fiction, Wai Chee Dimock’s term for writerly acts that challenge the

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“systemizing claims” of genre categories.28 I wish to stress, too, that while the idea of retooling Asian American literary production with the instruments of a genre so historically steeped in Orientalist representations and exclusionary publishing practices may be regarded as a misdirected or even futile exercise to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, I see the exchange as mutually transformative at the aesthetic, political, and epistemological levels. In their reappropriation of science fiction, Asian American writers retool the genre as well, providing different narrative lenses for revising generic imperatives and epistemologies. Thus, this chapter examines works by three Asian American science fiction writers who appropriate three of science fiction’s most conventional subgenres: the alien encounter, the robot fable, and the future dystopia. Ted Chiang’s alien encounter novella, Story of Your Life, traces a linguist’s acquisition of an entirely new worldview as she works to establish communications with a visiting alien race. Greg Pak’s anthology film, Robot Stories, links four short robot fables together to dramatize the human costs of assimilationist prescriptions and socioeconomic aspirations. And Cynthia Kadohata’s dystopian novel, In the Heart of the Valley of Love, paints a pessimistic portrait of a future America deeply divided along racial and economic lines. Through the deployment of each of these subgenres’ chief novum—the alien, the robot, and the future, respectively—the authors broaden the narrow social and generic imperatives that have limited Asian American aesthetic experimentation and political representation for too long.

Exemplary Estrangement: Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? —Louise Banks, “Story of Your Life”

Among the widespread critical acclaim that Ted Chiang’s sparse but illustrious science fiction oeuvre has generated, there seems to be a consensus that Chiang, in the words of reviewer Paul Raven, “writes ‘proper’ science fiction.”29 Chiang’s stories, produced between 1990 and 2002, were published in the omnibus Stories of Your Life and Others in 2002. China Miéville, one of the most critically acclaimed young science fiction and fantasy writers today, has also described Chiang as a “traditional science fiction writer”: “In Chiang’s hands,”

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Miéville writes, “SF really is the ‘literature of ideas’ it is often held to be, and the genre’s traditional ‘sense of wonder’ is paramount.”30 While Chiang has produced only ten short stories and novellas in his almost two-decade long writing career, he has nonetheless already garnered 24 award nominations and won three Nebulas and a Hugo—the genre’s most prestigious awards, testifying to Chiang’s unique ability to win the hearts and minds of both critics, who award the Nebula, and fans, who award the Hugo. Chiang’s prominence in a genre in which Asian Americans have been notably absent makes him a tempting figure for Asian Americanists to claim as one of their own, as an Asian American making significant contributions to—and interventions into—a genre historically closed to them. Chiang, however, does not actively affiliate himself with an Asian American literary tradition or social identity. Chiang’s literary fidelity is to the genre first; for him, the genre is primary, its forms and conventions determining the choice and presentation of the subject matter. A freelance technical writer with a degree in computer science, Chiang received his only formal training in fiction writing and literary studies from the famous Clarion Writers Workshop for science fiction writers. But his traditional training is marked by a significant anomaly. With the publication of Stories of Your Life and Others, he has, in a manner, “skipped a grade” by having avoided the genre’s favored form, the novel (and its attendant trilogies and sometimes interminable series). This is no small detail; while he is now widely “considered by some readers and critics to be one of the genre’s best short-form writers,” he has also defied what Miéville has noted to be the unspoken generic “rule that says you can’t get a short-story collection out until you’ve published a novel or two.”31 Structurally and thematically, the short stories in Stories of Your Life and Others also exemplify science fiction as the “literature of ideas” through each story’s sophisticated exposition of a single idea into a complex drama. Their structural conventionalities are, however, balanced by their deconstructionist impulse, through which Chiang interrogates constructions of naturalized ideologies, such as the presumed linearity of chronology and history, standards of beauty and morality, and the structures and functions of human language. Chiang’s work is both exemplary and exceptional; Miéville would agree, having noted that even as “one reads [Chiang’s collection] with a kind of thematic nostalgia for classic philosophical SF such as that of Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon,” the stories do not invoke “the naïve 50s dreams of the genre’s golden age” nor replicate the

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conventional conflict between humanism and rationalism that governed so many of those texts.32 Thus, we might be inclined to liken him to the other authors discussed in this book, who make important generic interventions through a combination of exemplification and exception. But here we run into a problem. If we have thus far located an author’s interventionist aesthetics in the ways he or she has exceeded—that is, resisted, defied, or changed—the conventions of the genre, we cannot make the case on the same grounds for science fiction. Huntington parses the competing impulses of “science”— broadly understood as practiced science and the Enlightenment tradition of the scientific method—and “fiction” at work in any science fiction text: “Whereas science deals with necessities, fiction offers freedoms. Whereas science explores and explains what absolutely must happen, fiction creates its own sequences and consequences.”33 From this central tension, Huntington lists a series of related tensions that together comprise what he identifies as the “paradox that lies at the heart of SF”: “Unlike conventional fiction, which accepts the necessities of experience as given and fantasizes from there, SF sets up fictional necessities and then obeys them. SF closely resembles pure fantasy in that it escapes nature’s rules and makes its own.”34 In other words, while science fiction can dispense with the logic of realism by creating its own premises and textual logic, it is still bound by the laws of that self-created textual logic. All of this structural parsing reveals, once again, the paradoxical claims of creative freedom and generic regulation that constitute the genre’s core imperatives. In light of this generic “paradox,” the narratological and ideological experiments that we might be inclined to identify as a radical subversion of conventions in other genres would be merely an expected, indeed, a required gesture in science fiction. Indeed, Huntington’s observation complicates our conventionalized critical evaluations of a text in terms of its generic complicity or resistance. On the one hand, we might take the paradox as evidence of the genre as an ideologically totalizing system, in which no truly radical or subversive narrative act is possible. Our tendency to characterize Chiang’s work as formally or ideologically revolutionary, for instance, is checked by the fact that the deconstructionist impulse does not work against the genre, but is in fact essential to the genre. And so the standards by which we typically evaluate authorial negotiations with generic imperatives, along with the political intents we attribute to them, do not apply in the same fashion in a critique of a science

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fiction text. On the other hand, the paradox can be taken to make the very point that science fiction, as a genre, is always already subversive at the very least, and radical at most, by dint of its core imperative of cognitive estrangement. That is, a text simply would not be science fiction if it did not do the work of estrangement via a novum. This debate is still very much alive and ongoing in science fiction criticism; Huntington, in fact, sees the paradox as the very element that keeps the interest in science fiction alive: “The SF addict wants to feel the tension of the paradox of freedom within a structured imperative. It may be the desire for this paradox that accounts for the repeated attempts of writers and readers of SF to define prescriptive rules for the genre.”35 What all this means for our discussion of Chiang is if and how the structure and politics of his fiction, as well as his identificatory stances as an author (Asian American, American, or a passive disaffiliation with any category), exemplify or disrupt the paradox as the organizing imperative of the genre. In light of Huntington’s observations, the radical potential of Chiang’s work—which features some of the most dazzling exercises of cognitive estrangement—runs the risk of being mitigated by what we might call the taming effects of the genre’s core imperatives. The exceptional quality of Chiang’s fiction, by which I mean the challenges it poses to the genre’s structural and thematic conventions, is ultimately—and ironically—a narrative act that fulfills the genre’s highest expectations. I make this point, however, not as an evaluative gesture—that is, whether his fiction is “good” or “bad” because of its generic complicities—but as an argument for the disciplinary power of the laws of genre, and, more significantly, for the paradoxical power of science fiction as a genre of both liberation and constraint. To illustrate the simultaneity of generic exemplification and exception operating in Chiang’s work, I focus on the eponymous story of his omnibus collection, the 1998 Nebula-winning novelette, “Story of Your Life.”36 There is much that “Story of Your Life” achieves in terms of narratological experimentation and philosophical imagination. In the notes for the story, Chiang cites Kurt Vonnegut’s idea of “remembering the future” as the seed for his own story: Stephen Hawking . . . found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired

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or dead now. . . . To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, ‘Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.37

The idea that the future does not have to be conceived in strictly linear terms, that it can be conceived in relation to various moments in the past rather than to the present, might not be a novel one to a physicist, but it can sound like a radical reconception of time to the layperson. For Chiang, the idea is clearly not simply an intellectual experiment, but one that can have enormous social implications. Linear time is the most fundamental, and the most conventional, structural component in the way we construct narratives and thus in the way we understand the world. If we can restructure time, then we can restructure history—that is, the narratives we create from the events in our lives that constitute our identities, both personal and societal. In “Story of Your Life,” linguist Louise Banks and physicist Gary Donnelly are commissioned by the U.S. government to decipher the language of a group of visiting aliens in order to establish communication with them. The aliens are named “heptapods” for their distinctive physiology, a body that “looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs” and “radially symmetric [so that] any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg.”38 Structurally, the story is told through two separate but entwined narratives, the first of which traces Louise and Gary’s efforts to learn the heptapod languages, while the second documents Louise’s memories of the conception, birth, life, and death of her daughter. As Louise, the narrator, learns the alien language system, which is based on a conception of time wholly different than that of humans and envisions a life holistically through the simultaneity of past, present, a future (a heady concept that I will explain in more detail later), the process enables her to gain a radically different worldview that complements her understanding of the significance of her work, but also the most traumatic event of her life—the death of her daughter. Throughout the story, Chiang circumnavigates the core ideological and teleological imperatives of the alien encounter/first contact narrative, one of the most familiar subgenres of science fiction. For one thing, “Story of Your Life” does not rely on the subgenre’s reigning humanistic conceit; that is, it does not privilege a liberal humanist ideological perspective as the de facto “human” standard against which alien cultures are evaluated. It is not concerned with evaluations of otherness and alterity with which the genre is typically

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preoccupied—whether the aliens are benign or malevolent, primitive or modern, assimilable or utterly foreign, and, most importantly, whether they can or should be treated as “human” and thereby given the rights and privileges accorded to humans. More akin to Steven Spielberg’s science fiction mystery Close Encounters of the Third Kind, than his romance E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, or classic alien invasion narratives such as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and contemporary political parables such as Graham Baker’s Alien Nation, Chiang focuses on the effort to establish communication rather than the sociopolitical—and, more often than not, military—consequences that follow first contact. Chiang steers clear of the macrotext of alien encounters, which typically consists of a requisite struggle for dominance between humans and aliens. Unlike most alien encounter narratives, the initial meeting between Louise, the story’s narrator/protagonist, and the aliens produces no horror, only some minor “gawking” that she overcomes with relative ease. Suggestions of militaristic responses loom in the background, but are staved off by the scientists’ level-headed focus on information sharing rather than a struggle for power. But lest we romanticize the human-alien collaboration and the very notion of a conflict-free first encounter, Chiang also denies easy sentimentalization by stripping the encounter of emotional qualities. The exchanges between the human scientists and the heptapods, mediated by a transparent but impenetrable wall, are entirely academic. The aliens in the story remain “flat,” to borrow E. M. Forster’s formulation of characters who serve specific functions in the story and demonstrate no mental or emotional development.39 On a thematic level, then, the story circumvents the typical conflict-driven alien encounter narrative, opting instead for, at least on the surface, a strictly academic collaborative exercise in language acquisition and exchange. The narrative involving the heptapods might thus seem like a recipe for an exceedingly dry, affectless, purely intellectual exercise. But the emotional dimension of the story is developed through its second narrative strand, in which Louise recounts, in emotionally charged language and future perfect tense, the life and death of her deceased daughter. At the story’s outset, the two structurally interwoven plotlines appear to have little in common other than the fact that Louise narrates both, each of which documents a different aspect of her life— one personal, the other professional. As the story progresses, however, the interlocking relationship between the two becomes increasingly clear, since an episode from one narrative strand always serves as a

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thematic prelude for the subsequent episode from the second narrative strand. By the story’s end, the plots of the two narratives become completely entwined, double helix-like, highlighting the interrelatedness of the most seemingly disparate aspects of one’s life. Chiang’s technical brilliance is thus demonstrated by his integration of two distinctive types of SF—the academic exercise of “hard” SF with the human interests of the “soft” variety.40 Much of the story appears devoted to a metacritical examination of how narrative structures shape our epistemological and ontological theories, as well as our emotional responses to life, love, and death. The aliens instigate a profound estranging process through which everything we take for granted in a communicative exchange is denaturalized and revealed to be linguistic conventions or constructs. The novum, therefore, performs its function of cognitive estrangement in exemplary fashion. In the human-heptapod encounters, all human assumptions about what constitutes communication are called into question. In their effort to learn heptapod languages, Louise and Gary meticulously document a range of basic and high-level language acquisition issues. The process reveals the universals in structuralist linguistics to be merely human-centric constructions. For instance, the very effort to uncover the intents and purposes of a communicative gesture raises the question of whether “intent” and “purpose” are even part of the aliens’ linguistic culture. Moreover, the heptapod spoken language “didn’t follow the pattern of human languages, as expected,” because it followed a “free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language ‘universal’ ”41 Even their “formulation of physics was . . . topsy-turvy relative to ours,” Louise explains.42 Louise distinguishes between the two worldviews in clear terms: humans and heptapods “perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently. . . . Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived the relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all.”43 Neither language is privileged over the other, however; rather, Chiang stresses the validity of both in their particular explanation of the world: “The physicists were ultimately able to prove the equivalence of heptapod mathematics and human mathematics; even though their approaches were almost the reverse of one another, both were systems for describing the same physical universe.”44 The result is an expanded

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conception of the world enabled by two disparate systems of language and thought. “Working with the heptapods changed my life,” Louise declares at the end of the story. “My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod.”45 The story fulfills New Critical imperatives, too, at once sustaining ambiguity (literalized through the enduring mystique of the aliens) and achieving a sense of unity (figured through the holistic language system of the heptapods) in both structure and theme. Thus, the methodological difficulties Louise and Gary encounter in their analyses of human and heptapod languages mirror the communicative difficulties that will eventually fracture their relationship. Gary readily accedes that he is “just no good at languages,” giving up on learning Heptapod B because he thought it “might be more like learning mathematics than trying to speak another language, but it’s not.”46 Louise, too, confesses that she has “given up on trying to learn the mathematics.”47 Their mutual incapacity to learn each other’s language, literally and figuratively, foreshadows the eventual failure of their marriage, a revelation made by the story’s concluding line. Because “Story of Your life” exemplifies the technical virtuosity prized by science fiction traditionalists, its political position runs the risk of being overshadowed by its formal character. While Chiang does not explicitly frame his story in a racial or colonial context, I contend that it clearly espouses an anti-imperialist politics. Subtle cultural coding in the interactions between the humans and the heptapods implies the potential of a colonial scenario fraught with the complexities of asymmetrical power relations. But Chiang establishes the potential only to circumvent it at every turn. Deliberately rejecting the inevitability of violence in alien encounter narratives, Chiang endorses diplomacy and fair trade over confrontation and exploitation. Colonel Weber, the representative of the military perspective, regards the language exchange in terms of the jostling for a strategic upper hand. “The State Department,” Louise explains, “instructed us to reveal as little as possible about humanity, in case that information could be used as a bargaining chip in subsequent negotiations.”48 The logic of such encounters, it seems, does not allow for acceptance of the idea that visiting aliens of any kind would come only “to see” and “to observe,” as the heptapods claim.49 Thus, protocols are implemented to prevent the scale from tipping toward the heptapods’ favor; Louise and Gary, for instance, are under orders to learn the heptapods’ language without teaching them English, and Louise must compile daily reports that “include estimates on how much English [she]

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thought the aliens could understand.”50 Louise, however, sees this as an inequitable treatment of the heptapods, who “were completely cooperative” and “readily taught us their language without requiring us to teach them any more English.”51 Unlike the military, Louise does not see the information-sharing sessions in economic or tactical terms. When the heptapods propose an exchange, Louise explains to Colonel Weber on behalf of the heptapods that “it’s not a trade. We simply give them something, and they give us something in return. Neither party tells the other what they’re giving beforehand.”52 These are, of course, not the terms of exchange the military is accustomed to, and the colonel immediately tries to seize what he perceives to be tactical advantage, asking Louise whether they could ask for the kind of “gift” they would get, and if they could influence its “value,” in spite of Louise’s repeated reminder that she “does not know if this transaction has the same associations for the heptapods that gift-giving has for [humans].”53 Chiang sets up the ideological disagreement between Louise and Colonel Weber and clearly establishes Louise’s point of view as the more ethical one. Chiang’s progressive views on alterity are articulated through Louise, who demonstrates a remarkable capacity for accepting difference on its own terms, whether that means the seeming incomprehensibility of the literal alienness of the heptapods or the irrational behaviors of the figurative alienness of her daughter. Indeed, her most durable memories of her daughter are primarily those in which her daughter baffled her. When her daughter took a job as a financial analyst, Louise reflects: “I won’t understand what you do there, I won’t even understand your fascination with money, the preeminence you gave to salary when negotiating job offers.”54 But she is able to accept what mystifies her without making a value judgment: “I would prefer it if you’d pursue something without regard for its monetary rewards, but I’ll have no complaints. My own mother could never understand why I couldn’t just be a high school English teacher. You’ll do what makes you happy, and that’ll be all I ask for.”55 “What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me,” Louise says of her daughter, and reminds herself that her daughter “won’t be a clone of [her].”56 Louise’s words also resound with an anticolonialist view that opposes the egocentric—and Eurocentric—notion of reforming the racial/cultural Other in the image of the colonial Self. This is reflected in her dealings with the heptapods; initially concluding the heptapods’ system of written language from her Eurocentric perspective to be “reminiscent of primitive sign systems,” she quickly abandons

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this retrograde anthropological thesis, theorizing instead that “it was unlikely that the heptapods developed their level of technology with only an oral tradition.”57 Her cultural sensitivies implicitly but powerfully repudiate the Western humanist conceit that has underwritten so much of classical anthropology’s flawed theories of non-Western cultural primitivism and inferiority. More significantly, embedded in the story’s anti-imperialist politics is its subtle use of Asian—and one might argue, Orientalist— philosophies and cosmologies as a critical foil for Western metaphysics. The alien in a work of science fiction is rarely without a real-world referent, and is often the coded version of a known racial or cultural Other in the real world. In “Story of Your Life,” the radical physiological differences of the heptapods do make it difficult to draw such correspondences, on physical grounds, between them and a particular human race or culture. But physiological resemblance is simile, not metaphor, and the heptapods—their languages, in particular—serve as metaphoric representations of what Chiang conceives as an Eastern cultural and ideological ethos. Aspects of the heptapod languages clearly draw on a variety of Eastern language and belief systems. Structural and aesthetic aspects of the heptapod written language, called Heptapod B by the scientists, are particularly evocative of Eastern written language systems—especially Chinese writing. Heptapod writing is described as “semasiographic” because, as Louise explains, “it conveys meaning without reference to speech,”58 calling to mind Chinese ideograms, which function separately from spoken Chinese. Unlike English, in which the alphabetbased written form phonologically reflects the spoken form, Chinese writing and speech are related only by the arbitrary assignment of “sense” or “meaning” to ideogram. Louise goes on to explain Heptapod B’s resemblances to Arabic written and pictorial languages: “The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams. I had seen a similarly high degree of integration before in calligraphic designs, particularly those employing the Arabic alphabet.”59 She comes to a realization that “the semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas.”60 The realization throws Louise into “a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no ‘train of thought’ moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence.”61

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The allusions to mandalas, along with contemplative practices, evoke Heptapod B’s Asian referents. And so, while the story does not feature or spotlight Asian or Asian American characters, it does replicate a familiar thematic convention of the genre: the deployment of the East as a tool of cognitive estrangement for deconstructing the West. The Buddhist-inflected heptapod languages are evocative of Eastern mysticism, here pitted against the Western rationalist thought that informs the two scientists’ perspectives at the story’s outset. Louise’s experience, then, would be something akin to a Westerner’s reconception of her life after she has been exposed to and influenced by Eastern philosophical thought— a familiar theme that hearkens back to the Daoist-inflected works of Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin.62 What we might initially find to be radical, then, is merely exemplary. Chiang’s aliens, in other words, are generically conventional, fulfilling what Miéville identifies as the “traditional ‘sense of wonder’ ” paramount to any good work of SF.63 The thematic “détente” between human and heptapod languages, through which Chiang simultaneously fulfills and flouts the core imperatives of the alien encounter narrative, aptly exemplifies the generic paradox outlined by Huntington. The characterization of the heptapods also sustains a racialist/colonialist reading as well as a structuralist/linguistic one. Heptapod languages, patterned on a central “hub” where all aspects of a thought or expression meet (or from which all radiate, depending on your perspective), defy Saussurian structuralist readings by dint of their nonlinearity and absence of binarisms. Politically, they challenge the oppositional thinking that frames encounters with otherness only in terms of conflict and power. It is worth noting, however, that Chiang’s fidelity to scientific realism prevents him from conducting thought experiments on the complexities of racial politics. In “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” another critically acclaimed story from Stories of Your Life and Others, a new technology called calliagnosia disables the human capacity to recognize the markers of beauty on a human face, so that, as a neurologist in the story explains, a person can distinguish among various facial features, but “simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.”64 When asked by an interviewer whether the story is an implicit commentary on our desires for a race-blind society, Chiang insists that the issue is outside the scope of his story: While I agree that race blindness is an interesting idea, I didn’t think there was any way to make it even remotely plausible in neurological terms. Because

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there are just too many things that go into racism. It seems to me that to eliminate the perception of race at a neurological level, you’d have to rewrite the underpinnings of our social behavior.65

Striking about Chiang’s reply is his belief that addressing race is too complex a task for the technology in the story, but, more tellingly, for the kind of science fiction he writes. While we can appreciate his acknowledgment of the complexities of racism as an issue that cannot be easily solved with a technological novum, his reluctance to flex the genre’s imaginative muscles to dramatize such complexities, as many writers of SF who openly tackle the nettled issues of race have done, reflects a guarded adherence to the conservative techniques of the genre, perhaps at the cost of its radical political potentials.

Mechanical Aspirations: Greg Pak’s R OBOT S TORIES I want to be real. —John, “Clay” (Robot Stories)

If Ted Chiang’s science fiction shies away from overt treatments of the political bramble bushes of race, Greg Pak’s science fiction feature film, Robot Stories, confronts them head on.66 Chiang’s explanation that, for him, making racial blindness “plausible in neurological terms” in his novelette “Liking What You See: A Documentary” is too tall an order because “to eliminate the perception of race at a neurological level, you’d have to rewrite the underpinnings of our social behavior,”67 reflects his exacting abidance by the laws of science—that the concept would be impossible given his knowledge of the current state of neurological science. But as Huntington points out in his theory of the SF paradox, concomitant with the generic restraints are the generic freedoms not found in other forms of fiction. “Paradoxically,” Huntington contends, “SF is one of the least scientific of fictions because it owes hardly anything to the facts of experience. [. . .] SF closely resembles pure fantasy in that it escapes nature’s rules and makes its own.”68 Where Chiang does not want to tread, then, is where Greg Pak boldly ventures. Deploying one of the genre’s most familiar icons, the robot, as the principal novum of four fables about the “programmed” subjectivities of Asian Americans, Pak demonstrates the genre’s self-reflexive capacity to critique the constraints of “generic” identity formation and fulfill the genre’s imperative of estrangement through one of its most recognized nova.

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A young, biracial director and recent New York Film School graduate who self-identifies as Asian American, Pak wrote, produced, and directed his 2003 anthology film, Robot Stories, after having written and produced a number of short films devoted to Asian American social politics. Pak has explicitly said in interviews about Robot Stories that his robots are deployed for politically subversive rather than generically compliant purposes. Undaunted by the disciplinary power of genre imperatives, Pak sees the science fiction genre more in terms of the thematic and market possibilities it affords rather than the formal constraints it might impose. For him, genre categorization, particularly its signification in cinema (as opposed to literature), makes possible a kind of “back door” didacticism for addressing sociopolitical issues in films that cater to politically un-inclined crowds. Genre writing appeals to him as an Asian American filmmaker, he says, because he had always been “compelled by the potential power of movies to break down stereotypes,” and that “a story with Asian American protagonists might get a much wider audience if it happened to include genre hooks like aliens or androids.”69 “Genre elements,” he writes, “could provide new ways to evoke deeper consideration of social or political questions. [. . .] Political subtext, emotional story, and genre inventiveness can work hand in hand, each enriching the other and drawing wider audiences as a result.”70 The one-line synopsis of Robot Stories on the film’s official website reads: “Winner of over 30 awards, ‘Robot Stories’ is science fiction from the heart, four stories in which utterly human characters struggle to connect in a world of robot babies, robot toys, android office workers, and digital immortality.”71 The description’s saccharine language, which emphasizes “the heart” and the “utterly human,” is clearly intended to cushion the strangeness of the robot for mainstream viewers. It also highlights Pak’s reliance on the robot and the sentimental human-interest plot—one an established icon for science fiction fans, the other a conventional dramatic element for the general audience. But, as Huntington has noted, “once the field of convention is strong enough, the skillful writer can create the feeling of the unknown simply by breaking the conventions.”72 As conventional as Robot Stories may appear at the outset, particularly through its marketing pitch, Pak’s deft twining of the robot narrative with stories of Asian American assimilation adds additional layers of representative and critical possibilities to both narrative genres. Through four fables woven around the precept of the robot, Pak lays bare what I call the “mechanical aspirations” of Asian

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American model minority narratives—assimilationist imperatives that invisibly but palpably prescribe the life choices of contemporary Asian Americans. It is not surprising that the robot is Pak’s metaphor of choice for his critique of the social challenges faced by Asian Americans past and present. Conceived during the Industrial Revolution in Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), and developed through Isaac Asimov’s extensive oeuvre of robot stories, the robot has become an expression of the human desire for cheap or free labor as well as the fear for the potential mechanization and artificialization of humans.73 As a technology created to serve humans, it has also become a symbol for the enslaved, the oppressed, the exploited, and other abject members of the underclass. Concurrent with the characterization of robots as un-human beings created, according to Asimov’s famous laws of robotics, for the sole purpose of serving humans, is the development of the aspirational robot narrative.74 A variation of Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein, the robot—and its more postmodern relatives such as the cyborg and the android— aspires to be human.75 As such, the robot is a fitting metaphor for the minority subject, whose quest for social and legal personhood is aptly allegorized by the robot’s quest to be human. One of the most common themes in robot narratives is the robot’s mimicry of human traits and behavior in order to prove its humanity—a theme that parallels those of immigrant, colonial, slavery, or related narratives in which minority subjects mimic dominant cultural manners and norms for social and political recognition. As such, it runs the metaphoric gamut from the uncanny to Baudrillard’s simulacrum to Bhabha’s colonial difference. Like the colonized subject, the robot produces the colonial ambivalence of which Bhabha speaks, its imitations of presumed “human” qualities and essences “continually [producing] its slippage, its excess, its difference.”76 The robot is thus a potent interventionist device that unmasks the conceits of humanism, exposing its maintenance of systemic inequities even as it valorizes sovereignty, agency, and universal equality. Pak’s robots, cyborgs, and digital avatars serve as metaphors for the ways in which Asian Americans’ relentless pursuit of social aspirations “programmed” by the dominant culture has transformed them into robot-like mimics. More significantly, the robot analogy reveals the costs of such aspirational lore and unmasks the constructedness of what constitutes “real” social subjecthood and success. The robot thus holds special valences for Asian Americanist critique because of the

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parallels that can be drawn between the “aspirational romances”—and the attendant assimilationist imperatives—that drive narratives about robots and Asian Americans. The reductive representations of Asian Americans as either model minorities or criminals (as I have shown in Chapter Two) also bear striking parallels to the popular SF paradigm of the good versus the evil robot. If, as Roberts notes, “the robot is the dramatization of the alterity of the machine, the paranoid sense of the inorganic come to life,” then narratives of robot revolutions become emancipatory fables that allegorize the awakening of Asian Americans’ political consciousness.77 In Robot Stories, then, “robot politics” converges with Asian American politics; each story can be read as a parable of the Asian American protagonist’s negotiations with generic and social imperatives. As Pak states in his introduction to the script, he intends the film to “subliminally challenge the way both Asians and robots are frequently stereotyped as inhuman, emotionless, hyper-efficient aliens” through science fiction’s “genre potential.”78 The robots in Robot Stories embody the mechanization of Asian Americans in their uncritical acceptance of assimilationist expectations, particularly in their dogged pursuit of socioeconomic success in compliance with those expectations. The stories feature the three major varieties of what Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin has outlined in their distinctions of “imaginary beings” that populate science fiction: “androids (constructions or artificial growths of protoplasmic materials), robots (construction of metal and plastic), and cyborgs (constructions combining protoplasmic and mechanical parts).” The distinctions are salient, for the focus on the materiality or immateriality of the body is significant to the film’s critique of the body as the site upon which subjection, discrimination, and abjection are made visible. In other words, the degree of enslavement or discrimination often depends on the type of body one possesses. The robot in the first three stories serves a fairly conventionalized purpose as mirrors that engender critical self-reflection in the Asian American protagonist. The final story, “Clay,” deploys a more abstract form of the artificial life form—a digitized avatar in virtual reality—as a metaphor for the horrors of a deterritorialized life stripped of anchoring materialities and yet condemned to endless replication in cyberspace, and thus a skeptical view of cyberspace as a form of humanist incarceration rather than posthumanist liberation. The first story, “My Robot Baby,” thematizes the psychological costs incurred by competing imperatives of career and motherhood for Asian American women. Marcia Ito, a successful corporate executive,

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must care for a “robot baby” with her husband, Roy, in order to adopt a real baby. The radical shift in her role from a job that requires a ruthless efficiency to one that requires a nurturing sensitivity leaves her emotionally unmoored. Things take a turn for the worse when she unexpectedly finds herself the sole caretaker of the robot baby when Roy is called out of town on a job. Overwhelmed with a sense of maternal incompetence, she seeks the help of her computer programmer father, who automates the robot baby to feed and look after itself. The automation frees Marcia from the constant care and enables her to return to work. When Marcia returns from work one day to find the robot baby hiding in the closet after having broken loose from its programmed routine, her own emotional breakdown in that moment powerfully captures the debilitating effects of the impossible demands she faces. As a dramatization of the difficulties of negotiating the demands of family and career, this story has widespread appeal for women and men, Asian Americans and non-Asians alike. But Pak also directs the story’s critique specifically at representational problems that have historically plagued Asian Americans, including the tired but persistent stereotypes of the model minority, the dragon lady, and the technophilic and inscrutably “automated” Asian American. The opening scene, in which Marcia, in a polished business suit, bursts out of her office while authoritatively delivering a litany of orders to her male assistant, sets up a false sense of optimism about the breaking of the proverbial glass ceiling. Marcia is, at this point, the image of the successful businesswoman, visible evidence of a world in which gender equality in the workplace is commonplace. That she has become the new feminine model of success is expressed by the female assistant in the scene, who “gazes after [her] with starry-eyed admiration.”79 But this optimistic image quickly unravels. Pak undercuts the image of success with several subtly embedded details that indicate the costs exacted by the veneer of success, particularly within the context of Asian American representation. Most obvious is the dragon lady stereotype that Marcia’s entrance invokes. Attired in a polished business suit and barking instructions, she is decidedly masculinized, and, more significantly for the ensuing adoption plot, utterly un-maternal. Her inability to form any emotional attachment to the robot baby, and her clear preference for her job over motherhood, also undermine the initially established image of the successful woman. Other details suggest that she has not quite made it to the top. Her title, emblazoned on her office door, reads “Vice President of Marketing”

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(my emphasis), suggesting that she still has one more rung to climb on the corporate ladder. Despite her own reluctance, she yields to her husband’s wish to adopt because, as he tells her, the nuclear family is the ultimate ideal toward which they should aspire. In spite of her professional aspirations, then, she defers to the wishes of her husband in this domestic decision. Looking at a wall full of baby photos, Roy says to Marcia: “We’re gonna be real people, you know, a real family.”80 What is “real” here, however, is a set of socially and patriarchally constructed ideals that hold prescriptive sway over Asian American womanhood. The “real people” Roy speaks of conforms to a socially determined and enforced idealization of the nuclear family. But to conform to this model of “reality” ironically requires falsification of sentiments. Caring for the robot baby is, after all, merely a performance of the script that accompanies the portrait. Marcia and Roy go through all the motions and the rituals of feeding, changing, and the like, ritualistically joking about “looking domestic” and “baking cookies.” But the rituals do not produce genuine responses and feelings of affection toward the robot baby. Moreover, the robot functions as a disciplinary device. The caseworker at the adoption agency tells Marcia and Roy that the robot records everything they do, and their capacity to become “real” will be determined by an evaluation of how well they perform. Only when they prove themselves capable of performing the role as it is scripted—or programmed—will they be given the prize: a “real” baby, and with it, an ideal family. Marcia’s inability to emotionally connect with the robot baby is thus less of a judgment on her un-maternal character and more a comment on the contrived nature of the maternal ideal as a socially prescribed aspiration. Only when the robot baby literally undoes his programming, does it figuratively release Marcia from hers. The concluding scene, in which Marcia cradles the robot baby she finds cowering in the closet, humanizes both of them and completes their “connection” not only as mother and child, but more importantly, as two versions of the abject, mechanized Asian in the dominant American discourse of the American Dream. Problematic in the ending, however, is its apparent privileging of domestic and maternal responsibilities over professional aspirations. When Marcia rocks the robot baby in her arms and cries “I’m so sorry,” the undisputed message is the proper return of the woman from the workplace to the home, where she belongs. But this is not the note on which Pak intended to end for “My Robot Baby.” Both the DVD and the shooting script include an additional scene originally intended to be the conclusion—a scene that explicitly repudiates the

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idealized portrait of the perfect American family. The scene depicts Marcia as a single mother of a robot toddler waving to a remarried Roy, who is now the father of two “real” children. Marcia, visibly softened around the edges in her relaxed attire and her gentler delivery of instructions over the phone to her assistant, has managed to balance the demands of career and child rearing; it is her marriage that apparently failed to weather the test. Excised from the happy family scene is the patriarchal authority that had underwritten and enforced the nuclear family ideal, thereby conveying a much more progressive feminist message. Since Pak did not provide an explanation for its omission from the final theatrical version, we can only speculate that the decision may have been made to cater to the more traditional views of the mainstream audience. The robot as a trope of mechanized social aspirations is carried forth into the next two stories, “The Robot Fixer” and “Machine Love.” In “Robot Fixer,” Pak shifts the critique to Asian American parents who reify model minority imperatives by imposing them on their children. When Bernice’s estranged son Wilson slips into a coma after being struck by a car, her discovery of a chestful of broken toy robots while cleaning out his apartment leads her to the revelation that both she and Wilson have lived mechanical lives. The toy robots, which Wilson had saved from childhood and which Bernice has always regarded as trash, triggers memories of her son as an affectless and socially detached child. The memories, revealed through a series of analepses, depict Wilson flying a particular robot figure, a one-winged female robot called “Angel Command,” through the air, and evoke Bernice’s perplexity and annoyance at Wilson’s inexplicable love for the robots. As her daughter, Grace, reminds her, Wilson “loved these things—it’s all he ever wanted for his birthday and stuff.”81 The memories induce Bernice to look on the robots as a possible conduit to her estranged—and now comatose—son by restoring the “ragtag army of robots and space ships, most of which are missing a couple of parts.”82 Her attempt to fix the broken robot toys is thus a figurative means for her to reconnect with Wilson, to reconstruct his broken body as well as their severed relationship. Here, the robot signifies not only the stereotypical perception of “robotic” Asian American men, but also, more implicitly, the “robotic” adherence to model minority imperatives by Asian American parents and its ramifications on their children. Kept nominally alive on life support after the near-fatal accident, Wilson is a virtual robot to Bernice, affectless and lifeless, once again unreadable and

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unresponsive to her. Yet, like Marcia’s robot baby, he is the reflexive mirror that reveals the costs of social imperatives by which Bernice has uncritically abided, and how the unconventional life choices Wilson seems to have made repudiate rather than reify those imperatives. That Bernice has been disappointed with Wilson throughout his life is clear. His bachelor untidiness and interest in collecting what she perceives as useless and valueless toy robots (“There’s no excuse for this. Someone as smart as he is? Just a waste!”); his job as a “robotic” data-entry temp in spite of a Stanford Master’s degree, a particularly mortifying discovery for her (“all that work . . . for nothing!”); and his failure to avoid being hit by a car (“Look both ways. How hard can that be? Stupid”) all add up to his failure to live up to her expectations.83 Her eventual revelation that her expectations have been driven largely by the aspirational model minority narrative is prompted by her growing appreciation for the value of the robot toys as she tries to restore them, and by a sensitive, observant, and charitable Grace, who, as an obvious foil to Bernice’s rigidity and Wilson’s opacity, points out the robotic resemblance between mother and son through the same gesture she uses to describe both: passing a hand in front of her face and saying, “Nobody home.”84 Finally, Wilson’s death and Bernice’s failure to restore the missing wing of Wilson’s favorite Angel Command robot merge to deliver the story’s ostensible message: an uncritical subscription to aspirational imperatives produces damaged, robotic lives. More complexly, however, “The Robot Fixer” is also a commentary on the mechanization or technologization of the Asian body. As I have mentioned earlier in the chapter and elsewhere, the Asian body is most susceptible to technologization in the Western imagination, its “inscrutability” a point of vulnerability for its refiguration as a mechanical object. Bernice’s discovery that Wilson’s nickname at work is “G9,” a future generation of the Apple G-series processors, is unnerving because it suggests that he has been essentially reduced to a program, his job of “database management” entailing little more than a series of mechanical tasks and his supposed exceptional intellectual prowess (a Master’s degree from Stanford!) merely a set of programmable circuitry. As one of his coworkers observes, Wilson “basically [looked] at data on this side of the screen and [made] sure it matches the stuff on that side of the screen.”85 Yet that is not what makes Wilson robotic; rather, it is the fact that he was, according to the coworker, “real serious about it.”86 The cultural perception of Asian American men as technophilic “geeks” can also be seen in “My Robot

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Baby,” in which the robot baby responds only to the male characters’ attention and care. Whereas Marcia is unable to connect with the robot baby, the men have little trouble. Roy, the husband, easily makes the leap between an ersatz and a real baby; likewise, Marcia’s father deft reprogramming of the robot baby’s needs literally and figuratively fixes its “malfunctions.” To this extent, both “My Robot Baby” and “The Robot Fixer” also subtly problematize generic and discursive representations of Asian American men as either computer-savvy techno-geeks, or as the very technology itself. The perception of the Asian American-as-technology informs the third installment in the anthology, “Machine Love,” which features the narrative point of view of an Asian American android. Here, Wilson’s “robotic” job is literalized in the figuration of Archie, a “Sprout G9 iPerson” android coder-for-hire, complete with a user’s manual and advertised as “the perfect coworker.” Archie’s presence in the office provokes a range of responses from contempt and disparagement to curiosity and sympathy, serving once again as a reflexive tool that shifts our critical attention from him to his human counterparts. Pak contrasts Archie’s visibly “nonhuman” attributes with those of his human coworkers to emphasize the distinction between android and human; a notable example is the juxtaposition of a scene in which he types with great efficiency with a scene in which his manager (which turns out to be Bernice from “The Robot Fixer”87 ) plays Pac Man with a passionate intensity. The contrast highlights not only the distinction between the human (passionate and emotional responsiveness) and the nonhuman (affectlessness and insensitive machines) on which much of conventional science fiction, as well as broader discourses of humanism, relies. But Pak sets up this distinction in order to blur it, to destabilize the neat distinctions between human and nonhuman. Robots, androids, and cyborgs (the latter two of which more accurately describe Archie) provoke anxiety and fear because they threaten rather than maintain those distinctions. Citing the phenomena of electronic facsimiles and replication in Walter Benjamin’s “age of mechanical reproduction,” Vivian Sobchack observes that it is the unique status of the human being that is challenged by technological transformation.88 And as Katherine Hayles has noted, via Donna Haraway’s feminist cyborg manifesto, “cybernetics intimates that body boundaries are up for grabs.”89 Indeed, countless robot, android, and cyborg narratives demonstrate this erosive potential, the most remarkable and potent of which is the android production company’s motto, “More

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Human Than Human,” in Ridley Scott’s 1983 tech-noir classic, Blade Runner.90 Reframed within an Asian American political context, the eroding distinction between the human and the robot is an apt analogy for the slippery distinction between the American and the Asian. Archie’s figuration as an obedient, blank-faced, hyper-efficient “tech support” consolidates a variety of Asian stereotypes and invokes, once again, the “inscrutable” model minority aiming to please through hard work and quiet dedication. Indeed, he embodies Hayles’s perception of the android or cyborg as “the stage on which are preformed contestations about the body boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic, and cultural differences.”91 Not surprisingly, the only person who befriends him is his “geeky” human counterpart, Bob the technical support clerk, who takes interest in Archie both as a technological marvel and as a fellow outcast. The affinity between the two is visually affirmed in a number of scenes that show the uncanny similarities between them, from their attire (both are dressed in a light blue shirt and khakis) to their physical carriage and gestures. Archie’s mimicry of Bob’s desire for one of the office’s female employees, a pretty but arrogant and mean-spirited flirt, also reflects the mimetic desire that drives the kind of white desire prevalent among Asian Americans. When Bob tells Archie that he was “out with the big boys”—that is, the female employee and her “clique,” it is inflected with the minority subject’s desire for acceptance and belonging among members of the dominant culture. Bob sees through the vacuousness of this aspiration with a degree of self-consciousness, but also acknowledges its coercive force: “It’s like high school all over again. Buncha jerks. But if you get invited, you go.”92 And so when he tells Archie that “life isn’t just about work” and that “sometimes you gotta just live a little,” what appears to be a good piece of advice is mitigated by his compliance with socially prescribed forms of desire and reward.93 Ultimately, it is Archie’s mimicry of Bob’s aspirations that exposes the very flaws of such aspirational imperatives. Seemingly replicating Bob’s desire for his coworker, Archie “feels” desire for a female G9 iPerson, named Lydia, working in an adjacent office building whom he has been observing through the window when both are left “on” to work overnight. His desire for her grows as he observes and internalizes expressions of desire and physical acts of human intimacy (flirting, kissing, and the like) carried on among his human coworkers, most notably Bob’s unconcealed yearning for his love interest, and the

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sexual activities his coworkers engage in without regard for his presence. The observations culminate in his abandonment of his job in reckless pursuit of the female iPerson. When his human colleagues trail him to the office where Lydia works to watch the interaction between the two, their performance of what they witnessed, heard, and recorded in their respective offices, “play back” to the humans their appallingly insensitive behavior. Archie and Lydia replay the indiscretions of their coworkers in the form of their bigoted, sexist, and exploitative acts, from Lydia’s male coworkers’ sexual abuse and violation of her “inhuman” body to the offensive slights and slurs Archie endured in his office: Lydia: I have completed— Archie and Lydia: —all of my assigned tasks. Lydia: Do you call it a she or an it? Archie: People don’t quite get you. Lydia: Creepy. Archie: Freaky. Lydia: They coulda put a bigger rack on her. Archie: Ken had fantastic shoulders. Lydia: Don’t worry, it’s just— Archie and Lydia: —the Coder. Archie: Laying the groundwork, baby Lydia: Hey, sunshine. Archie: Whoa, tiger— Lydia: Omigod, omigod. They embrace, strangely and awkwardly. Her fingers sink deep into his back. He presses his cheek against hers. He shudders. His face wrenches up, then relaxes. His face wrenches up again. He sobs. She sobs. They weep, clutching each other tightly.94

The impact of the performance, however, does not register with the humans, who do not miss a beat in their “programmed” behaviors, as the man who harassed Lydia makes a pass at Bob’s object of desire. The android “love scene,” too, is so fraught with a parodic sense that it completely undermines the possibility of a sentimental ending. While the story’s message is not explicitly articulated in spoken dialogue, the shooting script, interestingly, concludes with a line of authorial commentary: “So this is love.”95 This ironic line, coupled with the title of the story, “machine love,” thus articulates Pak’s rejection of the vapid sentimental humanistic conceit—and cliché—that the ability to love is a precondition to being human.

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The humans’ treatment of Lydia and Archie also reflects Pak’s critique of the exploitable body of the laborer, particularly immigrant, gendered, or racialized labor. Archie’s labor, unappreciated and unacknowledged, makes possible the moments of leisure in the office for the manager to play computer games and others to engage in nonwork-related activities. The receptionist’s reaction to Archie is one of apprehensive skepticism; the manager’s demand for maximum efficiency and minimal “human” interaction reflects her perception of him as strictly a machine; and two coworkers’ frivolous, mocking commands to test his obedience reflect their insensitive treatment of “temporary” labor like Archie and Bernice’s own son, Wilson. The treatment of Lydia by her male coworkers, who grope her with impudence and impunity, also testifies to the vulnerability of women in these positions.96 Archie, though gendered as male, is vulnerable to a similar form of sexual objectification, his body rendered literally and figuratively exploitable when Bob leaves him topless in order to keep him plugged in, and two female coworkers gaze at, talk about, and touch his naked torso as though he were an inanimate object. Yet, it is precisely the literal and figurative baring of labor’s body that disrupts, albeit briefly, the highly ritualized structure of the workplace. It reveals, too, the ways in which social aspirations and sexual desire have been mechanized and ritualized by the logic of productivity, and the technologized role Asian Americans have been cast to play in these narratives. “Clay,” the final piece of this anthology film, takes the trope of the robot to its more evolved figuration: the digitized virtual human. In “Clay,” John, an accomplished, elderly sculptor, must make a crucial decision concerning his mortality. Diagnosed with a terminal infection that spells certain death in a year’s time, John has been scheduled by the doctor to be “scanned” into digital form. The doctor’s expressions of encouragement and envy suggest that this is a socially sanctioned and desirable procedure. John’s son Tommy also stresses to him that to reject the procedure would be both immoral and illegal.97 In spite of familial wishes and societal decree that he fulfill this existential teleology, however, John refuses to be scanned on the grounds that he wishes to remain “real.” The story’s main tension, then, rests on the implied opposition between reality and virtuality. The former is defined in terms of a classic humanist conception of a singular, corporeal existence in the “real” or material world; the latter, by contrast, indicates a distributed and ubiquitous cognition-based existence in virtual space that has no need for a corporeal carapace. The virtual existence is an allusion to William Gibson’s conception

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and coining of “cyberspace” as a place where one can live in “bodiless exultation,” where the body is contemptuously considered by some as merely “meat.”98 Pak, however, repudiates such “bodiless exultation” in “Clay,” highlighting instead the ways in which the body is still significant and significatory. Countering the derogatory view of the body as “meat,” Pak captures the pleasure and pain of its tactility through the clump of clay John continually kneads and “worries.” When Tommy explains the benefits of the scanning process to him, “Once you’re scanned, you just visualize stuff, ya know? It shows up on screens, in the databases. They get instant blueprints and whatnot,” John replies scornfully, “Not for me. I have to feel it, have it in my hands. I have to experience it, goddammit!” Pak, then, is decidedly anti-Cartesian in his refusal to privilege mind over body, and thus a skeptic of the posthumanist exuberance for a purely cognitive mode of existence. More concretely, John’s refusal to be scanned articulates the anxiety and fear of the loss of the body as the primary site of identity and existence. John’s anxiety about the loss of his body expresses cultural anxieties resulting from posthumanist discourse’s deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject. Defined by Katherine Hayles as a conceptualization of the “human” that “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation,” posthumanist views of human subjectivity mark “no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”99 Posthumanist thought challenges the unifying and universalist claims of liberal humanism by “doing away with the ‘natural’ self” and reconceiving that “self” as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”100 But Hayles points out that even as posthumanist thought contests the liberal humanist subject’s claim to universality, “a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity,” it, too, makes its own claims to universality through the erasure of the body and a persistent “emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment.”101 John’s “virtual” wife, Helen, a young black woman who was ostensibly scanned at a young age and visits him whenever he summons her through a box switch, tells him that she can be many places at once. This ubiquity, made possible through the “mechanical reproduction” of digital information, is a posthumanist literalization of humanist universality. But, for John, such universality is a form of loss. John tells Helen that he is jealous, not of her new mode of existence, but of

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the ubiquity of her replicated love, made platonic by the process and thus no longer intimate. As Hayles argues, “The erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman”; thus, it seems that there is no room for the body—and all its material specificities—in a humanist or posthumanist future, because the former idealizes a post-racial, post-ethnic, or even a post-gender subject, while the latter reaches for a bodiless, distributed, and endlessly reproducible state.102 Hence, Hayles poses the crucial question to her study, which, it seems to me, is also the governing question in Pak’s “Clay”: “What to make of this shift from the human to the posthuman, which both evokes terror and excites pleasure?”103 Indeed, “Clay” articulates concerns about the reproducibility of corporeally determined identities in virtual space. For John, the shift clearly evokes terror. But while that terror ostensibly stems from a sense of the loss of “the real,” which, for him, is defined by mortality and materiality, I see a more implicit layer of anxiety informing that terror: the transcoding of a bounded identity or subjectivity that “immortalizes” it at the moment of its digitization, like a solidified clump of clay no longer receptive to change. More obliquely, “Clay” also instantiates Lisa Nakamura’s observation in her 2002 book, Cybertypes, of how racial and ethnic stereotypes are transcoded into and replicated in cyberspace. She points out that the cyberpunk genre, for which online or digitized personae is the chief novum, has always emphasized “machine-enabled forms of consciousness” that “glorify, at times, the notion of the posthuman, which is also coded at times as the postracial.”104 Citing the 1999 blockbuster film The Matrix as an example, Nakamura illustrates the ways in which cyberpunk fiction appears to promote “what looks like a postmodern multicultural future,” in which racial and ethnic virtual bodies appear to commingle in happy disregard of those physiological registers.105 She argues, however, that “race is all over cyberpunk’s future terrain,” and that “this ostensible diversity is as much a ‘consensual hallucination’ as is cyberspace itself.”106 John’s Asianness and Helen’s blackness are, after all, still visible after the scans and, in our decidedly un-post-racial moment, still significant. In “Clay,” then, John’s refusal to move from a bodily existence to a computer simulation can be read as Pak’s rejection of a posthumanist “consensual hallucination” of an unbounded post-racial or post-material condition. Significantly, this ideological rejection is accomplished through a teleological twist at the story’s end. In what appears to be the

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concluding scene, John has apparently escaped the clutches of Matrixlike agents from the scanning agency and dies contentedly on a river bank, surrounded by its “natural” splendor. But Pak effects a symbolic rude awakening in an unexpected ensuing scene, in which a young and presumably digitized John tells his digitized wife, Helen, that he dreamt he had died, to which Helen replies, “How nice.” The scene potently evokes a sense of terror through our recognition of the “consensual hallucination” made real, of John’s entrapment in a virtual posthuman future in which the clay of their bodies is solidified at the moment of their deaths, so that a space of virtual potentialities becomes, for John and Helen, a kind of personalized evolutionary dead end. Metacritically, “Clay” discourages us from indulging in what Nakamura has called the “fantasies of cyberspace as a utopic ‘raceless place.’ ”107 In spite of the humanistic sentimentality of his marketing pitch for Robot Stories, Pak’s depictions of the materiality of the robot and the deceptive immateriality (literal and figurative) of the digital avatar in the entire “Robot Stories” collection underscore the ways in which bodies of difference—raced, technologized, artificialized—will still matter in our most optimistic imaginations of the future. As Nakamura cautions, “Even as the Internet makes it increasingly difficult to police the line between the virtual and the ‘real,’ it is vitally important for cyberculture studies to ‘keep it real’—to remember that while race may be, in some sense, ‘virtual’ or at the very least culturally and discursively constructed as opposed to biologically grounded, racism both on- and offline are real.”108 Postracial futures cannot be achieved by a nifty novum (as Pak has tried to show with the scanning technology in “Clay,” for instance) or by narrative strokes of historical elision (the egalitarian utopia of the USS Starship Enterprise crew in the Star Trek franchise, for instance, which does not provide historical detail of how such egalitarianism was achieved). To speculate on the future of racial representation in material or cyberculture, one must extrapolate from an honest assessment of the current state of such representations. This is precisely what Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love strives to do.

Future Imperfect: Cynthia Kadohata’s I N THE H EART OF THE V ALLEY OF L OVE I felt strangely enthralled with the brutality of the world I had to face. —Francie, In the Heart of the Valley of Love

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Futuristic writing in Huntington’s estimation is inherently a conservative subgenre of science fiction because the writer must extrapolate or “reason” from the past in order to posit what might happen in the future. “This process of looking ahead, as the writers themselves insist, is not visionary,” Huntington observes, because “in one way or another it must enforce some pattern from the past on the future.”109 This may be true for a select group of SF writers whose dystopian visions, informed by fears and anxieties of the industrial and cyber ages, are clearly underpinned by a nostalgic desire for an idealized, unsullied past. The technophobic fiction of early canonical writers, such as Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), as well as more recent popular cultural versions such as the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix trilogy come to mind. But Huntington’s assessment seems invalidated by writers whose dystopian visions are not driven by a regressive desire, but by a progressive one that accepts the inevitability of change, and at the same time cautions against the particular directions in which change is occurring. Cynthia Kadohata’s 1992 novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is arguably one of the earliest contributions by an Asian American to the science fiction subgenre of the future dystopia.110 Kadohata deploys the novum of the future setting as the primary device for interrogating present-day racial, economic, and environmental politics. Set in the year 2052, the novel depicts a Los Angeles on a slow but sure path of social and ecological disintegration, where water and fuel sources are on the verge of total depletion, where artificial vegetation has replaced the real, where jobs are scarce and education is a privilege for the ruling class, and where law serves only the interests of the ruling class and order exists only in “richtown,” a predominantly white enclave of the wealthy voluntarily segregated from the rest of the impoverished city. In this world, the odds are stacked against Francie, the teenaged, mixed-race narrator, who, as a member of the racialized underclass, ekes out a living with a host of odd jobs and a knack for resourceful scavenging. Orphaned at an early age, Francie faces a bleak future in which the prospect of a better life—in terms of material improvements and vocational opportunities—is not even a faint glimmer. As such, Valley echoes an established body of L.A.-based dystopian fiction, reminiscent of, among others, Ridley Scott’s 1982 production of the now-classic Blade Runner, and, more recently, Octavia

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E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and its sequel, Parable of the Talents (1997). These authors saw Los Angeles as a microcosm of a U.S. society deeply divided along class and racial lines, divisions that negatively impact social relations as well as environmental sustainability. Butler’s Parable series, for example, is a direct response to a confluence of negative socioeconomic and environmental trends in the early 1990s. The unprecedented rise in homelessness in the aftermath of 1980s Reaganomics, the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, and the Los Angeles riots in 1992 all engendered a Zeitgeist of despair in the nascent years of the decade. Like her contemporaries, Kadohata also paints a grim portrait of a future Los Angeles as a means of what Philip K. Dick describes as responsible science fiction writers’ proclivity for “crying doom.”111 Noting Valley as “one of the few examples of Asian Americans writing sci-fi,” Min Hyoung Song rightly points out the genre’s capacity for Kadohata’s “fictive exploration of a crisis of capitalism that simplifies a crisis of racial ordering just beginning to become visible by the early 1990s.”112 Valley typifies in many ways what contemporary science fiction critics call a “critical dystopia.” Coined by Lyman Tower Sargent, the critical dystopia is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced by eutopia.”113 Feminist and cultural science fiction critics, however, have modified the term with more formal, historical, and political specificity. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, for instance, distinguish the critical dystopia from the traditional “bleak, depressing genre with little space for hope within the story” in which “utopian hope [is maintained] outside their pages, if at all.”114 In their reformulation, critical dystopias “maintain a utopian impulse” by “[allowing] both readers and protagonists to hope by resisting closure.”115 Unlike classic dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, which feature totalizing systems that provide no room for escape for its characters, critical dystopias “[reject] the traditional subjugation of the individual at the end of the novel” and thus “opens a space of contestation and opposition for those ‘ex-centric’ subjects whose class, gender, race, sexuality, and other positions are not empowered by hegemonic rule.”116 This ideological openness, according to Baccolini and Moylan, is reflected in the ways in which critical dystopian texts “resist genre purity in favor of an impure or hybrid

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text that renovates dystopian sf by making it formally and politically oppositional.”117 While Valley certainly exemplifies the key characteristics of the critical dystopia defined by Baccolini and Moylan, several distinguishing features set Valley apart. First, unlike texts such as The Matrix or The Terminator, which Constance Penley has cited as examples of critical dystopias that “suggest causes rather than merely reveal symptoms,”118 the specific causes of the social divisions in Francie’s world remain largely unnamed and difficult to identify for Francie and her cohorts. This achieves a sense of realism in several ways, for it not only reflects Francie’s young and politically naïve perspective, but also simulates the ways in which conditions of abject poverty usually come about through a confluence of visible and invisible sources. The reader can piece together the fact that it is the collusive forces between the state and the wealthy white ruling class that have created and exacerbated class divisions and the severely uneven distribution of wealth and resources, but specific events or individuals cannot be pinpointed as the sole cause. The novel also departs from popular critical dystopias’ treatment of solutions. Structured in the form of a picaresque-like montage of the practices of Francie’s everyday life, individual chapters can stand alone as discrete commentaries—parables of sorts—on various aspects of Francie’s life on the margins. Collectively, the chapters provide a comprehensive portrait of Los Angeles’s underclass that depicts, in stark realism, its destitution and deprivations, even though Francie never seems to regard her existence in those terms. The means that the underclass undertakes to obtain resources not available to them—means that are criminalized by the state—serves as a strong indictment of the potential overreaches of state authoritarianism. Francie’s resourcefulness might lull the reader into a complacent reading that the underclass is “making do,” or even a sentimental interpretation of the daily triumphs of “little people” against an overbearing government. But such readings surely miss Kadohata’s larger cautionary message: it is precisely the repressive hand of the state that entraps the underclass in perpetually precarious socioeconomic conditions. John Fiske’s formulations of “imperializing power” and “localizing power” in his 1993 Power Plays, Power Works provides a useful critical framework for unpacking the relations of power in Valley among the authoritarian government, the white ruling class, and the predominantly nonwhite underclass to which Francie belongs.119 Drawing from Foucaudian theories of power, Fiske defines “imperializing

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power” as “strong, top-down power” that aims to “extend its reach as far as possible—over physical reality, over human societies, over history, over consciousness.”120 By contrast, “localizing power,” exercised by subordinated classes, is not concerned with expanding its terrain but interested in strengthening its control over the immediate conditions of everyday life. These conditions comprise thoughts, feelings, beliefs and actions; they include social identity and social relationships as they are made material in the places, temporalities and routines of daily life. The function of this power is to produce and hold onto a space that can, as far as possible, be controlled by the subordinate who live within it.121

Dramatizing localizing power in constant negotiation with imperializing power, Valley documents the multiple ways Francie converts her marginal existence into a meaningful one by exercising the former against the seemingly unassailable authority of the latter. Kadohata thus valorizes localizing power as not only a means of speaking truth to imperializing power, but also as a means by which the subjugated defers defeat through the refusal to defer to the dictates of an imperializing white hegemony. The symptoms of societal disintegration in Kadohata’s Los Angeles are extrapolated from the social, economic, and environmental crises already evident in the present day. Ubiquitous sounds of sirens and alarms in mechanical voices echo today’s hyper-securitization of private property. Regular brownouts roll through the city as evidence of an ongoing energy crisis that plagues current-day California, and basic resources such as water and gasoline (which, in L.A., is very much a basic necessity) are strictly rationed. Further, privatization of public services, such as the Postal Service, has limited accessibility to those who can afford them. Most chillingly, the news is, according to Francie, “twenty-four hours a day of riots and shortages, of the dissolution of the only world I’d ever known.”122 Kadohata also speculates on the geoeconomic implications of the 1990 census projection of a nonwhite majority in the United States by the year 2050, in which “nonwhites and poor whites made up sixty-four percent of the population but made only twenty percent of the legal purchases.”123 The projection of a nonwhite majority alarms those who have always aligned majoritarian power with whiteness, and it is this sense of alarm that informs Kadohata’s depiction of “richtown”—the defensive concentration of white power and wealth—as a growing response to this

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demographic trend.124 To stem the tide of a potential nonwhite political dominance, an apartheid state has been created in which the newly minoritized whites have concentrated their wealth and power via the formation of the exclusive enclave. Valley’s “richtown” is, of course, a futuristic extrapolation of today’s gated communities, predominantly white enclaves whose borders—whether visible or invisible—keep out the less economically privileged, predominantly nonwhite subaltern class. Francie is well aware of the fact that she “lived in a section of town largely abandoned by anyone who mattered to the country’s economy.”125 The partitions between “richtown” and Francie’s habitus are invisible, but their exclusionary function is nevertheless palpably felt. As sociologist Saskia Sassen has observed, “The gated community is, in a way, the most extreme form [of the weaponized urban space].”126 Sassen sees a future riddled with such walls that will be invisible, “but if you cross them, you will know it, and they will know it.”127 This is evident in the few instances when Francie crosses the richtown “walls” into their midst. Passing by students from the elite UCLA in a richtown enclave, she saw them as inhabitants of “such a different world from me that I barely noticed them. We were like different species.”128 While scavenging for useful parts of an abandoned house there, she becomes hyper-conscious of her racial and class difference: “There was really only one moment when I felt fully aware of our surroundings—girls and boys with tank tops, tanned arms, and blond hair, majoring in psych or poli-sci or business. And here we were carrying pink doors” (59). The power of these invisible walls heightens Francie’s sense that she is trespassing and encourages her departure. Such is the panoptic effect of imperializing power: it quite efficiently patrols and enforces borders without overt forms of coercion. The stark contrast between life inside and outside richtown reflects the sociohistorical link between poverty and ethnic communities. Those who live outside of richtown, made up predominantly of nonwhites, constitute a population that has been categorically left out of the state’s plans. “In richtowns,” Francie notes, “marquees were all in English, except when a European film was playing at an art film house. Downtown, writing on the marquees was all in either Spanish or Korean.”129 The multiethnic population in Francie’s world calls to mind what Lisa Lowe (via Gramsci) describes as “prehegemonic, not unified groups ‘unrealized’ by the State, whose histories are fragmented, episodic, and identifiable only from a point of historical hindsight.”130 Kept out of the privatized spaces and resources of

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richtowns, this segment of the population is left to fend for itself in sectors with severely underfunded public services. Public transportation is the only means of mobility for this population: “There was not a white face on the bus” in Los Angeles, Francie observes.131 Commercial investments are also in short supply; Francie’s own neighborhood “wasn’t affluent enough to support a supermarket, so there were only a few groceries and carnicerias where the goods were overpriced.”132 Capital, concentrated in richtowns, does not trickle down to these communities, nor is it invested in public projects that improve infrastructure for all. “Back at the beginning of the century,” Francie reflects, “the government had started to build something in Southern California called the Sunshine System, an ambitious series of highways and freeways that would link the whole area and eliminate traffic jams. They never finished the Sunshine though, and the truncated roads arched over the landscape like half of concrete rainbows.”133 The increasingly wobbly socioeconomic infrastructure resulting from the growing gap between white wealth and the nonwhite poor engenders resentment among the have-nots, which in turn justifies the state’s authoritarian policies. The government micromanages the everyday practices of its subjects via “creds”—credits for basic necessities such as water and gasoline. The multiple metaphoric valences of the term “cred” are clear. First, it functions as a technology of the state apparatus for controlling the allocation of goods and services, regulating everything from sanitary practices (how often one can “wash,” how much time one can spend in the shower, etc.) to mobility (how often and how far one can travel). As such, the rationing system, more loosely enforced in richtowns, is a disciplining mechanism imposed exclusively on those deemed by the state to be less deserving of the basic necessities. But secondly, “cred” is also a metaphor for the legitimizing and legislative power of the state. Those with creds are made legible in the eyes of the state and can claim staterationed resources, while those without creds must seek illicit means to obtain these services. Predictably, those arrested for engaging in illicit black market commerce lose their “cred” or legibility under state law and are incarcerated at undisclosed locations. Likewise, the state violently suppresses all forms of social protest under the rationale of maintaining social order. Not surprisingly, the most serious crimes in this authoritarian state are designated as crimes against the state; due process appears to be a thing of the past, and the average citizen has little recourse to contest arrests or lodge complaints. As Francie tells it, even “murder, unlike black-market buying and selling, or violence

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by political protestors, was considered a crime against individuals, not against the state,” and therefore prosecuted with more leniency than theft of rationed goods or political protest.134 Kadohata’s dystopia thus pinpoints two key causes of its crumbling society: the concentration of wealth and power in an increasingly oligarchic social structure, and the unassailable authority of an increasing repressive state. The former extrapolates from symptoms already visible in current-day Los Angeles, thereby targeting the extremely uneven distribution of wealth at the hands of powerful corporate entities. The latter, however, invokes a fear that predominated in the dystopian fiction of the post – World War II era: state authoritarianism. Whereas material deprivation is easily visible, state authoritarianism functions “invisibly” because, in nearly perfect circular logic, what the state asserts is law because the law is the state. Thus, even as its law enforcement apparatuses deny the underclass any semblance of privacy by incessantly patrolling its social spaces, it remains safely enshrouded in authoritarian secrecy from the underclass’s gaze, its operations kept under wraps and immune from public accountability, because it is accountability. As symbols of the unassailability of state authority, endless caravans of government trucks move in and out of the city, their cargo and destinations never revealed. The trucks conjure up images of a Kafkaesque state whose intents and purposes remain beyond the reach of its subjects. Searching for clues to Rohn’s whereabouts outside the city limits, Francie and Mark manage to find their way onto the “truck highway” only by literally (and figuratively) driving offroad, with the help of a sympathetic truck driver. The driver, who is kept in the dark about the cargo they transport, tells them that the prisons are extremely remote, that “it’s all government land” and “they won’t sell you gas along the way.”135 He asks them what weapons they possess, but then tells them: “Whatever you have, it’s not enough.”136 The narrative of complete authoritarian control is utterly effective; no material walls are necessary for the State’s stringently secured boundaries to perform their function. When Francie tells Mark: “I feel like if I could just figure out what was going on here, we could find Rohn, or figure out where he is, or figure out something,” Mark, the more pragmatic of the two, replies: “I feel like if we could find out what was going on, we would have figured out one piece of a puzzle. But then there would be another piece after that.”137 If Kadohata identifies imperializing power as the cause of her L.A. dystopia, then one of the solutions she suggests is for the subordinated

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classes to exercise localizing power. Francie and Mark, for example, demonstrate great resourcefulness in creating work and finding alternative sources of income in spite of their lack of access to conventional jobs. They are the “social agents” in Fiske’s formulation, highly adaptive and “creative not so much in the production of resources as in the use to which they put those that are available to them.”138 For work and for play, they create opportunity where none exists. Mark does not just eke out a living by buying and reselling discarded or unused furniture and supplies, but demonstrates entrepreneurial inventiveness by turning obsolescence into profit. Hardly the kind of work with any future, let alone aspirations of upward mobility, Francie nevertheless regards Mark’s resourcefulness as evidence of his ingenuity: “I admired how he was always finding ways to make money, how he wasn’t like everyone else. He was always alert for a new opening, and if there was an opening he filled it.”139 Francie proves equally creative in devising alternative means for engaging in bourgeois practices that are out of her financial reach. In a particularly poignant instance of making use of resources conspicuously wasted by others, Francie gratifies Auntie Annie’s desire to go on a “shopping spree” by taking her to a salvage job at an abandoned richtown estate. Diminishing the power of aspiring to wealth in so many of our ragsto-riches romances, Kadohata instead focuses on the means by which the poor convert their materially impoverished habitus into sites of tremendous social, political, and cultural richness. The point Kadohata makes here is that richtowns are not solutions, but rather the causes of massive economic inequities and societal disintegration; they are not the proverbial El Dorados to which the poor should aspire. Valley, then, is a wholesale repudiation of the desire for upward mobility that underpins liberation narratives for the working poor. Indeed, Francie harbors no Gatsby-like yearning to gain entrance into a richtown; rather, she and her friends enact various forms of localizing power that “[strengthen their] control over the immediate conditions of everyday life”140 and horizontalize top-down distributions of goods and services. Francie’s communities are also formed and sustained by organically forged relationships among their members. Orphaned at an early age, Francie finds surrogate families with Annie and Rohn, with the staff of the campus newspaper where she works, and with Mark. These communities resemble what Fiske (borrowing from Victor Turner) describes as communitas, “a social formation whose main, if not only, purpose is to produce identities and relationships that are in control of its members by means that are denied

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by the dominant social order.”141 The community college Francie attends—an institution whose primary function is to serve the educational and cultural needs of the community—is an ideal model of a lively, culturally and politically active communitas: “Every day, something was happening on the quad: marches or demonstrations, clubs selling baked goods, petitioners screaming at you like preachers.”142 As one of the principle sites of localizing power in the novel, the city room of the campus newspaper for which Francie works represents the communitas that is held together by what Lisa Lowe calls “horizontal affiliations” among the staff. The staff comprises a motley crew of individuals with some form of perceived social or physiological deviance that consigns them to the margins: Mark, whose family name, Trang, suggests Vietnamese descent, has “glowing deep-beige skin”; his friend Lucas, a former gang member; and Jewel, the office manager who “resembled a worn, toughened version of those blond, heavy-lashed dolls children have, except the doll had been dragged around and broken and fixed again.”143 While the squalor of the city room’s crammed space reflects the college’s underfunded infrastructure, the staff has forged tight bonds and created a meaningful purpose (the newspaper) for the existence of their communitas. Identity is thus constituted and mutually validated within the communitas, and interpellation is shifted from the state to the members of the communitas. Within the group, signs of cultural and physiological difference are normalized as marks of individual distinction. Francie describes Jewel as “kind of great looking” even though “her blouse was buttoned wrong, and her nose was crooked.”144 Indeed, Francie’s scarred arm, previously a sign of pain, shame, and deformity, becomes the part of her that draws Mark’s attention and love. In spite of its material deprivations, then, the city room is a utopia within a dystopia. Writing on Valley, Viet Nguyen rightly points out that the novel “demonstrates the basic irony found in the discourse of the bad subject, namely, that even as the discourse of the bad subject rejects the interpellative ‘hail’ of dominant ideology that demands the subject conform to a particular identity, it also engages in a hailing or naming of its own.”145 But it is precisely the latter phenomenon—the mutual “hailing” among the “bad subjects”—that armors them against negative interpellative assaults by the State. Thus, Francie and her friends “name” each other in terms that counter those ascribed to them by the dominant culture. Kadohata thus suggests that individuals who are more tightly socialized are less vulnerable to the ruling class’s negative interpellations. Indeed, Francie, Mark, Carl, and even Teddy,

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Jewel’s abusive boyfriend, all demonstrate a certain self-possession, bolstered by the strength of their horizontal affiliations that guard them against derogating interpellative forces. Their resilience, too, is expressed through each character’s own formulation of a commonsense wisdom by which he or she lives, forming a kind of primer for localized power. Teddy’s mantra for survival is entirely based on a dogged determination to ignore the power of external and societal forces: “You have to focus on not getting diseases, and then you don’t get them. I myself take care of myself . . . and I don’t have any skin disease. You have to focus on being healthy and you’ll be healthy.”146 Teddy’s reference to skin is particularly salient because skin is too often the principle sign of the State’s interpellation. Skin, for Kadohata, is not only a signifier of interpellated racial identity, but also a metaphor for the border on which the interpellatory authority of imperializing and localizing powers are negotiated. In an interview with Hsiu-chuan Lee, Kadohata explains: “For me skin connects us to the world. It is something like a threshold that links up us and not-us. In a sense the world affects us by first affecting our skin since skin forms our bodily boundary.”147 As a multiracial subject, then, Francie is a composite of the nonwhite Other against which the dominant class defines itself. Skin can be, importantly, both negatively and positively interpellated. The skin disease—the “derma-what-do-youcall-it” that afflicts Francie is a psychosomatic manifestation of the unhealthy social, economic, and environmental conditions in which she lives.148 It is a literalization of the figurative contamination of a sick society getting under one’s skin: The light from the yellow-tinged sky shone on my smooth skin, and I noticed a bump on my forearm. I took a safety pin from off my bra and pricked my skin, watched the small black pearl fall to the ground and settle in the dirt. The sight of that made me feel tired, too tired to reach down to pick up the pearl or examine my skin further. The disease was harmless, like acne, but I felt so tired I could scarcely move.149

Kadohata describes the disease as “the first warning to the world [and] symbolizes to us that something is going wrong.”150 As Nguyen has noted, the “black pearls” that emerge on the skin surface of the afflicted “mark the bodies of the nonwhite as political, as different, as poor and marginalized.”151 In this vein, Francie produces more pearls on days when she feels especially dejected. Nguyen also points out that

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the black pearls can be “resignified with resistant political meaning” because “the fact that there is something lovely and valuable about the pearls demonstrates their contradictory meaning for Francie and the other outcasts.”152 Notably, the most significant means by which Francie reclaims the meaning of her skin is tattooing. As a socially symbolic act of self-inscription, tattoos are a means by which any individual can take command against the interpellative power of the State. Thus, Mark and Francie tattoo themselves not only to ascribe meaning to their bodies on their own terms, but also to highlight their difference against dominant cultural standards of beauty. In contrast to ephemeral, superficial forms of adornment (such as Jewel’s gold eyeshadow, which Francie sees as “a richtown affectation”), tattoos represent a more radical form of self-fashioning precisely because it is as permanent as the shade of one’s skin. As Carl the tattooist tells Francie, “It’s not against the law to make yourself ugly in the eyes of the majority. It’s not against the Constitution, although some people seem to think it is.”153 As liberating as they can be, however, tattoos nonetheless render someone more vulnerable to negative interpellation. Akin to being raced, it is a permanent marker of difference that distinguishes the tattooed body from the un-tattooed majority, and can have negative implications for the individual. Carl concedes that the interpellative power of the State is not to be underestimated: “When someone comes to me and says he or she wants a face tattoo, I say they don’t know whether they do or not, since they’ve never had one. [. . .] They don’t know what it’s like to be ugly in the eyes of the majority.”154 Nonetheless, for Francie and Mark, being tattooed by Carl instantiates an intimate process of emotional and physical contact among members of a communitas, and attests to the power of identities forged out of horizontal affiliations. Complex as it all is, negotiations between imperializing and localizing powers at times, understandably, create moments of moral and ethical confusion for Francie. Moral certitude is rarely realized in a world in which standards of moral behavior defined by the State often necessitates the violation of those standards by the destitute in order to survive. Thus, Francie is loathe to draw clear lines between “good” and “bad,” because she understands that the duress of survival calls into question the applicability of conventional morality. To her, Rohn is a con man, a black market dealer, a good surrogate father, a generous soul, a funny clown, and “somehow all his faults and conning added up to a great guy. Maybe it was because he cared so much about

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the things and people he cared about. Or because he was an outlaw and a family man at the same time.”155 About Carl, she says: “There was something both kind and hard about him, both intellectual and feral.”156 Mark allows for even wider latitude and espouses an ethics of survival. He raises ethical questions about pursuing an expose on the college president’s alleged “solicitation of student prostitutes,” because he knows it would spell the end of the man’s career, and perhaps his life. “There are things that transcend right and wrong,” he tells Francie. “If he was with that student last night . . . he wasn’t there because it was right or wrong, he was there because he had to be there.”157 Importantly, Francie aligns with the underlying decency of his moral relativism: I think he didn’t believe anything was inherently good or bad, but he believed you should live your life as if you did believe that. Or maybe what he thought was that each world did have a moral order, but there were a lot of different worlds. Sometimes I think the difference between Mark and me was that there was a region of shadows existing between different people’s moral orders, and he understood that reason better than I did.158

Mark’s moral compass points to an understanding of the necessity of doing whatever one “had to do” to carry on, to endure. Such an ethics is motivated by necessity rather than by the impulse to dominate. As such, Mark’s ethics stands in contradistinction to more absolutist delineations of morality, which mete out “justice” without regard for the unequal socioeconomic statuses of the presumed offenders. Lest we begin to entertain Kadohata’s depiction of Francie’s communitas as utopian, it is important to note that Kadohata consistently counterbalances instances of hope, communicated in the localizing power of the communitas, with the pessimistic understanding that the hegemony of white wealth, in collusion with the state, cannot and will not be challenged in any significant way in this world. Localizing power provides strategies of survival and even subversion, but it does not provide any means of curtailing or dismantling imperializing power. The actions of the individuals in this group may be counter-hegemonic in spirit, but the individuals are not consciously nor sufficiently allied to form a “counterhegemony.”159 Rather, the spaces they inhabit more closely resemble what Lowe describes as a “social field” that is “not a totality consisting exclusively of the dominant and the counterdominant,” but “an open and uneven terrain of contesting antagonisms and signifying practices, some of which are

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neutralized, others of which can be linked together to build pressures against an existing hegemony.”160 It is a diverse populace that makes up what Stuart Hall had called “diasporic realities,” consisting of “mixes,” “blends,” “crossovers,” and “cut-and-mix” identities that defy unification.161 Thus, there are no organized or large-scale resistance movements in the novel, but only small-scale resistance tactics. It is diffuse, amorphous, subject to multiple, ever-changing affiliations. It allows for social agency in the sense of “making do with what one has,”162 but it does not facilitate large-scaled, systemic changes or reform. This is the larger dystopian frame of Francie’s utopian communitas, and the ongoing hegemonic collusion of white wealth and repressive state apparatuses is a stark reminder that localizing power can subvert and redistribute power, but it cannot ever unseat imperializing power. As a critical dystopia, Valley has certainly fulfilled the key imperatives of the genre by maintaining the delicate balance between hope and pessimism in the face of an unassailable Leviathan, between what Moylan describes as “texts that are emancipatory, militant, open, and ‘critical’ and those that are compensatory, resigned, and quite ‘anti-critical.’ ”163 But Valley also steers clear of the kind of solutionbased critical dystopia that features messianic figures or entities that promise to mend the despoiled world. Penley regards such endings as “solutions that are either individualist or bound to a romanticized notion of guerilla-like small-group resistance”164 —solutions underpinned by a nostalgic, illusory belief in our ability to return to an unsullied past. Future dystopias such as Francie’s Los Angeles, Kadohata suggests, can be averted if more resources—economic as well as social—are diverted to efforts that ensure equitable access and sustainability. Philip K. Dick had said that “all responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind; but science fiction writers more so, since science fiction has always been a protest medium.”165 Kadohata has, in a manner of speaking, put the futuristic dystopia to responsible use. Her ethics, as it is demonstrated in Valley, is to cry doom in order to avert it.

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Conclusion: The Genre is the Message

A man cannot withstand a story, even if the man is remarkable and the story is simple. The story always wins. —Junot Diaz

In an assessment of President Barack Obama’s performance one year after he took office, Junot Diaz emphasizes the importance of story in strategies of self-representation. “A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation,” Diaz writes, “but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story.” He goes on to conclude that “ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.”1 From a strategic standpoint, Diaz is quite right in pointing out that in the noisy arena of partisan politics, visibility is made possible by the story and not the individual. But story can all too often subject one to defamatory, denigratory visibility in equal measure. This is powerfully dramatized by Chang-rae Lee in his debut novel, Native Speaker, in which it is the injurious story of scandal that wins. In the novel, New York City councilmember John Kwang falls from political grace because he fails to provide a counter-narrative to check proliferating stories that questioned the legality of his financial entanglements and exposed his extramarital affairs. The media had cast him in two familiar models of personae non grata: the brazenness of the hubristic rising politician caught with his pants down, and the immigrant interloper engaged in illegitimate money-making schemes. Kwang’s inability to construct an alternative narrative made him a victim of the genres that propagate such types, from the countless real-life sex scandals of male politicians to the fictional financial exploits of immigrant-gangsters.

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But most significantly, within an Asian American context, we might attribute Kwang’s fall and eventual expatriation to the idea that there is no room for such a figure in the story of American politics. Kwang’s “effortlessly American, effortlessly Korean” character simply does not square with the established social and fictional typologies of Asian Americans precisely because much of classic immigrant and ethnic literature in which they have been depicted relies on the structural integrity of the American/ethnic binary opposition. For Kwang, the story had indeed won. As we have seen throughout this book, social visibility for ethnic individuals or groups, whether positive or negative, is a consequence of a combination of discursively constructed and internally cultivated stories. For le thi diem thuy, it is the stories of abject Vietnamese refugees, compiled through news accounts as well as popular autobiographies (such as Le Ly Hayslip’s 1989 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places), that establish writerly and readerly expectations for consumption of novels like The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Le thi diem thuy, however, contravenes such generic precedence by disrupting America’s collective clinging to entrenched images of the “gook” perpetrators and fleeing South Vietnamese refugees gathered from classic Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. For Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, it is the power of the immigrant success story, as a variation of the assimilationist narratives of ascent that encourage the reformation of immigrant or colonized subjects in the likeness of members of the dominant culture, that proves difficult to challenge. Franklin Hata’s thorough and uncritical internalization of the values of Japanese imperial ideals and Anglo-American assimilationist values for much of the novel, sealed by the twin sense of indebtedness and inferiority instilled in the colonial/immigrant subject, testifies to the power of such narratives in enforcing the limited range of subject formation for and by Asian Americans themselves. Like le thi diem thuy, Lee self-reflexively demonstrates the ways in which conventional elements in life writing genres—most notably the traditionally assimilationist modes of autobiography and the memoir—encourage an adherence to the familiar literary formula of the conversion narrative (from ethnic to American) and thus satisfy market and institutional desires for reformed immigrant and ethnic subjects. Both writers reject the dictates of the genre, and in doing so, they do not let those stories win. Yet stories—especially those responsible for creating fetishized Asian icons in the popular imagination—continue to win. Charlie

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Chan, Fu Manchu, and the sinister noir of cinematic Chinatown might be receding in contemporary pop culture as quaint artifacts of a less socially aware period in cinematic history, but their influence on the genres of crime and detective fiction has not waned. Even as contemporary Asian American writers are diffusing the power of these icons by writing new characters and plots in the very genre that produced them, the struggle between the steadfastness of these figures’ iconic status and the pushback from Asian American communities persists. As recently as March 7, 2010, Pradnya Joshi reported in the New York Times that the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences organized a screening of a recently discovered 1968 documentary of Charlie Chan, along with the publication of a companion volume, Quotations from Charlie Chan, a collection of kitschy aphorisms uttered by Chan in the films.2 Without careful historicization, the story of Charlie Chan, as a kind of Asian American uber-model minority, will continue to dominate cultural and literary imaginations of Asian Americans. Self-reflexive and satirical treatments of Chan and Chinatown in contemporary works by Ed Lin and Wayne Wang are, then, vital deconstructive interventions that contest what Adena Rosmarin describes as the “tremendous and finally ineradicable constitutive power” of genre.3 Lin’s and Wang’s methodical invocation and deflation of these icons effectively diffuse their aura in a genre that has served as a primary vehicle for the maintenance of the Chan and Chinatown “stories.” The good, genteel Chan/sinister, noir Chinatown binary provides a problematic form of visibility because it encourages either/or extremities in popular perceptions of Asian Americans as either model or criminal subjects. Equally problematic, however, is the invisibility engendered by the straddling of the opposition. Take, for instance, the response to Virginia Tech killer Seung-hui Cho in comparison with that for Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Against the protracted public obsession with the Columbine, the attention paid to the Virginia Tech killings seems surprisingly fleeting—this despite the fact that Virgina Tech’s death toll is more than double that of Columbine’s. In drawing this comparison, I am not sounding a perverse complaint about the lack of recognition or notoriety for Cho. I am, however, suggesting that a possible reason for the relative post-Virginia Tech hush compared with the media saturation of theories about Klebold and Harris may be attributed to the difficulty of reconciling the contradictory images of Cho in the popular imagination. While the photos of Klebold and Harris,

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like the photos of Cho, also chillingly juxtapose youthful innocence and cynical anger, the story of Klebold and Harris that emerged from the post-event assessment is a familiar and comprehensible one of the bullied-turned-bullies enacting a familiar revenge narrative. In Cho’s case, however, the same story, which seems to provide an explanation for his actions (supported largely by a similar history of being bullied and a fascination with cathartic revenge narratives such as the Korean film Old Boy), ultimately remains exceedingly fragile and unverifiable by dint of the dearth of information about Cho, as well as his family’s tenacious silence. The few in-depth profiles of Cho attempted by journalists show an immigrant adolescent alienated both domestically and socially, a boy not only estranged from his parents, but also with a history of being bullied in high school as a result of his accented English. But the details fail to solidify into a story legible to an American public that steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the pervasiveness of racially motivated bullying, which Cho’s profile would compel the public to confront. Instead, the public throws up its hands and resorts to the more familiar story of Asian inscrutability, rendering Cho and his family inexplicable and unreadable.4 Invisibility resulting from the failure to conform to familiar narratives is most remarkably instantiated by the obscurity of Symbionese Liberation Army member Wendy Yoshimura in historical as well as popular accounts of the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst. Susan Choi, however, converts the obscurity into generative storytelling in American Woman. The history of Asian American political activism is a story rarely told because it jeopardizes the model minority thesis that was just beginning to take hold during the Civil Rights era and has now solidified in the popular consciousness. More specifically, Choi exposes the ways in which accounts of the 1970s antiwar movement, which protested the United States’ anti-Asian foreign policies, paradoxically excluded Asian Americans who were involved in the movement. Moreover, such accounts of radicalism often reveal a reliance on the formulae of romances that, like those of the American Dream, veil ideological complicity through the mask of individual agency and selffashioning. As such, they not only fail to contravene the imperatives of the latter, but also render Asian Americans illegible in stories of social and political resistance. Yoshimura and her fictional counterpart, Jenny Shimada in American Woman, are effectively the casualties of our collective need to organize the entire Patty Hearst incident and the larger context of radical activism under the familiar rubrics of the outlaw romance or the captivity narrative. American Woman, then,

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constitutes a key intervention that ruptures America’s romanticized tales of dissent in crime fiction and in the history of radical activism, particularly in its exposé of the racialized standards for framing dissent as patriotism or crime. As a genre that has defined itself against the conventional tastes of the mainstream, science fiction’s self-cultivated identity as a body of literature perennially concerned with the fantastic, the strange, and the Other appears to promise narrative potentialities unbounded by the demands of romance or realism. But, as I have discussed in Chapter 3, the history of the genre does not necessarily bear out this assumption. It is, after all, a highly conventionalized genre with an immediately recognizable repertoire of elements such as extraterrestrial aliens, spaceships, robots, and alternate realities. The adherence to the conventions of romance in canonical and popular works, particularly in the subgenres of space operas and messianic liberations, is also well documented by the historians of the genre. More unsettling is the genre’s extensive history of problematic racial coding in representations of alienness from a predominantly white, colonialist, and assimilationist lens that, as Damien Broderick succinctly puts it, merely “writes . . . the narrative of the same, as other.”5 For Asian Americans more specifically, the genre has relied on an established catalog of premodern and techno-Orientalist tropes from Daoism to samurai warriors to Asian computer aficionados.6 Aesthetically and politically, there is, without a doubt, a decidedly conservative strain that underpins the genre’s avant-garde veneer. Yet science fiction is, in many ways, a vanguard genre that has unique potentials for “regenreing” fiction precisely because it licenses the writer to dispense with the imperatives of romance, realism, or the conventions of any other established narrative mode. The genre’s raison d’etre is, after all, predicated on the process of cognitive estrangement that emphasizes the representational layers of what appears merely natural. Thus, the radical potentials of the genre reside in the endless possibilities of what its principal formal device, the novum—the “new thing” that does not yet exist in our world (such as androids, extraterrestrials, and spaceships)—could be in a work of science fiction. Recognizing the genre’s potential for dislodging entrenched assumptions, most significantly those that have cast Asians as various forms of the social and ideological Other, recent Asian American writers have put the novum to great use in reconfiguring Asianness in the genre. The deliberate choices by Ted Chiang, Greg Pak, and Cynthia Kadohata to write in a marginalized

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genre broaden the aesthetic and ideological perimeters of not only Asian American writing and science fiction, but most importantly, that highly contested territory of so-called mainstream fiction. Irving Howe once said that “it’s hard to organize literature.”7 The observation rings true to those of us whose work, after all, revolves around the ceaseless process of organizing and dismantling literary categories. But my project has led me to conclude that the task of organizing Asian American literature has been made too easy by the genre constraints and imperatives that have restricted literary production to a narrow set of predictable themes and ideological positions. Genres organize stories, and stories organize identities; thus, if we seek to broaden the vocabulary of Asian American identity and representation, we must make it more difficult to superimpose old stories on new subjects and genericize them into old, familiar categories. In Junot Diaz’s assessment of President Obama with which I began this final chapter, Diaz concludes that “ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.”8 My variation on Diaz’s observation would be that “people are complex, but when they are couched in a familiar story, they can do nothing.” As I peer into the future of Asian American literary aesthetics, I see surprising narrative mixes that will have emerged from the reorganization of representational vocabularies, genre identities, and social subjectivities initiated by the writers examined in this book. This, to me, is the state of the art of Asian American writing today, and will be for the years to come.

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N ot e s

Introduction 1. Tina Chen, “Impersonation and Other Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (Fall 2002): 638. 2. Ibid. 3. Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34.3 (November 2003): 599. 4. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122.5 (October 2007): 1378. 5. John Frow, Genre (London: Routledge, 2006): 2. 6. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 57. 7. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999): 8. 8. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 7. 9. Ibid. 10. Zhou Xiaojing, “Introduction,” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005): 4. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Nguyen, 5. 13. Zhou, 5. 14. Sue-Im Lee, “Introduction,” Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Rocio G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006): 6. 15. The term “junk fiction” is Noel Coward’s, which, as Deborah Knight summarizes, constitutes “the sorts of best-sellers that line the stalls at airport gift shops as well as things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies.” Deborah Knight, “Making Sense of Genre,” Film and Philosophy 2 (1995): 58–73.

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16. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989): ix. 17. Dimock, 1380. It is Dimock who, while coining the gerund “regenreing,” acknowledges the awkwardness of the term. 18. See The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); PMLA 119.3 (May 2004), a special issue titled “Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millenium,” edited by Marleen S. Barr and Carl Freedman; PMLA 122.4 (October 2007), a special issue on “Remapping Genre,” edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins; and MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008), a special issue titled “Alien/Asian” on Asian American science fiction, edited by Stephen Hong Sohn. 19. The phrase “law of genre” is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s “The Law of Genre,” but I will provide my own delineations of genre “laws,” which I call “imperatives” in my book. 20. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 147. 21. White, 601. 22. Dimock, 1380. 23. Robert Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976): 47–48. 24. Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 57–71.

Chapter 1 1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981): 9. 2. Gerald Graff, “Narrative and the Unofficial Interpretive Culture,” Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989): 7. 3. John K. Young, Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006): 155. 4. Jameson, Unconscious, 9. 5. Shu-mei Shih, “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction,” PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1357. 6. Lev Grossman, “Who’s the Voice of This Generation?” Time, July 10, 2006 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 1209947,00.html.

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7. Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 539. 8. Ibid., 544. 9. Julia Alvarez, “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical,” New England Review 21.4 (Fall 2000): 165–166. 10. Kenneth Quan, “Interview with Chang-rae Lee.” Asia Pacific Arts, UCLA Asia Institute. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article. asp?parentid=11432. 11. Miller, “The Entangled Self.” Miller provides numerous examples of writers who have had to contend with genre confusion over their work, as well as some new tongue-in-cheek terms coined to encompass the presence of multiple genres in a single work (e.g., Lynda Barry’s “autobifictionalography”). In Asian American writing, the genre confusion generated by Maxine Hong Kingston’s landmark work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), in which Kingston famously blends experiences both real and imagined, underscores the problem of reception that results from the mixing of genres, and, more significantly, the ways in which genre identity and social identity are linked. Kingston’s genre experiments drew excoriation from fellow Asian American writers such as Frank Chin, who attacked her for what he saw as her overly liberal infusion of Chinese myths and folklore into the political and historical realities of the Asian American experience. The blurring of the real with the mythic, in his view, compromises her authenticity and therefore her credibility as both an Asian American writer and a literary spokesperson for Asian Americans. For a thorough account and analysis of the notorious debate between Kingston and Chin, see David Leiwei Li’s Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), particularly the chapter “Can Maxine Hong Kingston Speak? The Contingency of The Woman Warrior.” Chin infamously described The Woman Warrior as “another in a long line of Chinkie autobiographies by Pochahontas yellows blowing the same old mixed up East/West soul struggle” (qtd. in Li 45). In response, Kingston identifies Chin’s writing as “political/polemical harangue,” a “genre . . . [she] dislikes” (qtd. in Li 45). Significant here is each writer’s understanding of the inextricable relationship between genre politics and identity politics. 12. Quoted in Miller, “The Entangled Self,” PMLA 122.2: 539. 13. William Boelhower, “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 125. 14. Thomas Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in TwentiethCentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 1.

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N ot e s 15. William Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self (Verona, Italy: Essedue Edizioni, 1982): 32. 16. See Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 142–170. 17. For thorough discussions of Asian American writers’ appropriations and revisions of the generic characteristics of life writing, see Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Rocio Davis and Sue-Im Lee, Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and Rocio Davis, Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007). 18. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 237. 19. Ling, Narrating Nationalisms, 114. 20. Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34.3 (November 6, 2003): 601. 21. Paul John Eakin, “Introduction,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press): 10. 22. Arnold Krupat, “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 171. 23. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). 24. UC Riverside “First Book” Program for incoming freshmen, 2006. http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:MtBSxOP_EE0J: www.chass.ucr.edu/news/newsletter/Fall2006.pdf+gangster+we+ are+all+looking+for&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=30&gl=us 25. Adair Lara, “A Girl’s Flight to a Bright, Harsh Land.” Review of le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For. The San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/18/RV262885.DTL. 26. Chau Nguyen, “In Search of the Gangster,” Asia Pacific Arts, April 9, 2004. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=9955.

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27. Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, “Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s ‘The Gangster We Are All Looking For’: The Ekphrastic Emigration of a Photographic,” Critique 48.1 (Fall 2006): 3–18. 28. “le thi diem thuy,” Lannan Foundation June 21, 2007. http:// www.lannan.org/lf/res/past/P80/198/ 29. le thi diem thuy, “Tear the Pages Out: Fragments from the Gangster Tour,” Original Essays, Powell’s Books, May 15, 2008. http://www. powells.com/essays/thuy.html. 30. Ibid. 31. David Mehegan, “Refuge in Her Writing,” Boston Globe, June 2, 2003. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/153/living/Refuge_ in_her_writing+.shtml. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Jameson, Unconscious, 9–10. 35. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): ix. 36. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of AfroAmerican Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Champaign-Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1986): 36. In his discussion of Andrews’s notion of “creative hearing,” Paul John Eakin goes on to say that such a reading—or hearing—would enable a recovery of “something of the nature of the identities of the oppressed, their own view of self and life story” (Eakin, “Introduction” 9). 37. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993): 392. 38. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 7–37. 39. Ibid., 13. 40. le, Gangster, 4. 41. Ibid., 8. 42. Ibid., 23. 43. Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead,” 8. 44. Hall, “Diaspora,” 393. 45. le, Gangster, 78. 46. Ibid., 79. 47. le, Gangster, 81. 48. Ibid., 82. 49. Ibid., 103. 50. Ibid., 83. 51. Ibid., 19. 52. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977): 3.

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N ot e s 53. Ibid. 54. le, Gangster, 13. 55. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003): 111. 56. le, Gangster, 29. 57. Ibid., 110. 58. Ibid., 41. 59. Ibid., 4. 60. Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead,” 13. 61. le, Gangster, 154. 62. Ibid., 148. 63. Boelhower, “Ethnic Autobiography,” 131. 64. le, Gangster, 100. 65. Ibid., 117. 66. Gilmore, Autobiographics, xv. 67. Kenneth Quan, “Interview with Chang-rae Lee,” Asia Pacific Arts Magazine, UCLA Asia Institute, April 12, 2004. http://www. asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=11432 68. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life (New York: Riverhead, 1999). 69. Quan, “Interview.” 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Nancy K. Miller, “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 422. 73. Nora Okra Keller’s novel Comfort Woman, published in 1997, introduced the plight of these women to a mainstream American readership. In 2003, Congress introduced House Resolution 226 that called for “Expressing the sense of Congress that the Government of Japan should formally issue a clear and unambiguous apology for the sexual enslavement of young women during colonial occupation of Asia and World War II, known to the world as ‘comfort women’, and for other purposes” (http://thomas.loc. gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.+Con.+Res.+226:). The resolution did not pass. 74. For astute analyses of Lee’s treatment of the comfort women, see Kandice Chuh’s “Discomforting Knowledge, Or, Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian Americanist Critical Practice,” JAAS 6.1 (2003): 5–23, and Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s “Conjuring ‘Comfort Women’: Mediated Affiliations and Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality,” JAAS 6.1 (2003): 25–55. For insightful readings of Lee’s treatment of trauma, memory, and the constitution of the citizen/subject, see Hamilton Carroll’s “Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” MFS 51.3 (2005): 592–616, and Anne Anlin Cheng’s “Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure: Ethics of Survival

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75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

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from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan,” American Literary History 17.3 (2005): 553–574. Hamilton Carroll, “Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” Modern Fiction Studies 51.3 (2005): 593. Ibid., 593. Miller, “Memoir,” 432. Ibid., 432. Paula Fass, “The Memoir Problem,” Reviews in American History 34 (2006): 111. Miller, “Entangled,” 542. Ibid. Ibid., 108. Andrew O’Hagan, “Recovered Memories,” New York Times, Sept. 5, http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/05/reviews/990905. 05ohagt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Lee, Gesture, 1. Lee, Gesture, 136. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 138–139. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 162, 163. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 263, 260. Ibid., 260, 258. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 301. Ibid., 182. See Rey Chow, “Keeping Them in Their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and Cross-Ethnic Representation,” The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 95–127. Lee, Gesture, 255.

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110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 205. Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 106. 117. Miller, “Entangled,” 543.

Chapter 2 1. Interview with Min Jin Lee, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, NPR June 27, 2007. 2. Sheng-mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 3. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999): 8. 4. Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982): 18. 5. Charles J. Rzepka, “Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan,” PMLA 122.5 (October 2007): 1464. 6. Ibid. 7. Frank Chin, Gunga Din Highway (Minneapolis: Coffeehouse Press, 1995); Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1993). 8. See Huh, “Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)Detection,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (Fall 2003): 550–580; Tina Chen, “Dissecting the ‘Devil Doctor’: Stereotypes and Sensationalism in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu,” Re/Collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002): 218–237. For a discussion of the legacy of Fu Manchu and the language of homosexuality as a means of Asian American emasculation, see the chapter “The Legacy of Fu Manchu: Orientalist Desire and the Figure of the Asian ‘Homosexual,’ ” in Daniel Kim’s Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2005). 9. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Adventure VI, The Strand, Volume 2, 1891. See http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/ exhibits/wilde/8opium.htm.

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10. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870). 11. Van Gulik, a China scholar and a Dutch diplomat from 1935 to the time of his death in 1967, spent much of his career in Japan and China. He found his inspiration for his Judge Dee in an obscure eighteenth-century Chinese detective novel, Dee Goong An, which he translated into English under the title The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. He then wrote a series of detective novels featuring the same Judge Dee. Van Gulik’s series never achieved the same level of popularity as Biggers’s Chan, and thus cannot be said to have had a significant impact on the shaping of popular perceptions of Asians in the United States. Virtually no scholarship on van Gulik’s work exists. 12. Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, “Racist Love,” Seeing Through Shuck, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972): 65. 13. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 97. 14. Louis J. Beck, New York’s Chinatown (New York: Bohemia Publishing Co., 1898), 26. 15. Chinatown as a synecdoche for “The Orient” is a recurrent trope in American cinema and literature. For a discussion of Orientalist tropes in modernist and postmodernist imaginings of urban spaces, see Timothy Yu, “Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer,” MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008): 45–71. 16. John Belton, “Language, Oedipus, and Chinatown,” MLN 106.5 (December 1991): 941. 17. Ibid. Interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, Hammett, a left-wing politico who participated in civil liberties activism for much of his life, was not immune to the pervasive racism, sexism, and homophobia of his time. As Hans Bertens and Theo D’Haen point out, “Sam Spade is pitted against a homosexual oriental, a foreign moneyshark— British but with a German-Jewish name—an Irish immigrant hussy, and a low-class gangster punk.” “In spite of his political sympathies,” they conclude, “[Hammett] presents a negative picture of what conservative middle America thought of as ‘undesirables.’ ” Hans Bertens and Theo D’Haen, Contemporary American Crime Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 176. 18. Maureen T. Reddy, Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003): 41. 19. Ibid. 20. Leonard Chang, “Why I Love Crime Fiction.” March 3, 2009. http://www.thrillingdetective.com/non_fiction/e005.html.

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N ot e s 21. Ibid. 22. Tina Chen, “Recasting the Spy, Rewriting the Story: The Politics of Genre in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee,” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005): 262. Chen compares Chang’s novels with Chang-rae Lee’s debut novel, Native Speaker, which Chen describes as “more reluctant” in its gratification of readers’ conventional expectations. 23. Joe Hartlaub, “Interview with Naomi Hirahara,” Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-hirahara-naomi.asp. 24. Ibid. 25. Daylanne K. English, “The Modern in the Postmodern: Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and the Politics of Contemporary African-American Detective Fiction,” American Literary History 18.4 (2006): 772. English makes a persuasive case for Mosley’s and Neely’s conscious infusion of political commentary against the genre’s conventions and imperatives even as they deploy them. 26. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977): 43. 27. Ibid. 28. Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 12. 29. Dashiell Hammett, “Dead Yellow Women,” The Continental Op, ed. Steven Marcus (New York: Vintage, 1975). 30. Ibid., 207. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 198. 33. Ibid., 242. 34. Ibid., 212. 35. Ibid., 215. 36. Ibid., 244. 37. Ibid., 213. 38. Ibid., 220, 221. 39. Ibid., 227. 40. Ibid., 228. 41. Ibid., 249. 42. John Belton, “Language, Oedipus, and Chinatown,” MLN 106.5 (December 1991): 936. 43. Hammett, “Dead Yellow Women,” 208. 44. Ibid., 249. 45. Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 158. 46. Chan Is Missing, DVD, directed by Wayne Wang (1982; KochLorber Films, 2006).

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47. “The Making of Chan is Missing,” Chan Is Missing, DVD, directed by Wayne Wang (1982; Koch-Lorber Films, 2006). 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Wang, Chan Is Missing. 51. Screen notes are taken from the published transcription of the film in Diane Mei Lin Mark’s Chan Is Missing (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1984). 52. Ibid., 61. 53. Wang, Chan Is Missing. 54. Ibid. 55. For a reading of the ways in which Chan Is Missing dramatizes the circulation of capital as a driving force in reconceptions of Asian American identity formation, see Victor Bascara’s Model Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 59–68. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Mark, Chan Is Missing, 75. 63. Wang, Chan Is Missing. 64. Ibid. 65. Ed Lin, This Is a Bust (New York: Kaya Press, 2007). 66. John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2005): 59. 67. Michael Denning, “Topographies of Violence: Chester Himes’ Harlem Domestic Novels,” The Critical Response to Chester Himes, ed. Charles L. P. Silet (New York: Greenwood Press, 1999): 160. 68. Daniel Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 160. Kim’s reference to Baym’s formulation of “beset manhood” is derived from her influential essay, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 69. Lin, Bust, 21. 70. Ibid., 14. 71. Ibid., 77. 72. Ibid., 54–55. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 54. 75. Ibid., 58. 76. Ibid., 41.

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N ot e s 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 301. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). Ibid., 327. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 86. Susan Choi, American Woman (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Correspondences between documented accounts of the kidnapping and Choi’s novelist account can be readily identified if readers consult two recent documentaries on the Hearst kidnapping and the rise and fall of the Weathermen group—Robert Stone’s Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004) and Sam Green’s The Weather Underground (2002). The roman a clef elements of American Woman with respect to the Hearst kidnapping are immediately clear: the two young fugitives, essentially composite portraits of the members of the SLA who kidnapped Hearst, and their captive, modeled after Patty Hearst, is a fictionalized version of the kidnapped heiress. Generally, the plot of American Woman reflects the events of the documented account of the SLA and Hearst: the two young radicals kidnap the heiress of a wealthy California media mogul, escape the clutches of the police during a raid on their group, and hide out in a remote farmhouse in upstate New York under the care of a former member of another antiwar activist group. Choi’s dramatization of the group’s internal dynamics, thought processes, and training rituals provides us with a fictionalized character study of these highminded idealists, whose naïve impetuosity and unwitting replication of the very things they sought to fight—violence, exploitation, and repression—prove to be a destructive formula for themselves as well as for their professed enemies. Their eventual capture and the fate each meets with also expose the double standards of American law, particularly in its contradictory designation of social protest as a right of citizenship or as the high crime of treason, and which types of protestors it chooses to exonerate or convict. The Weather Underground, DVD, directed by Sam Green (2002; New Video Group, 2004). Choi, American Woman, 161. The roman a clef correspondences between Jenny and Wendy Yoshimura are clear. For instance, FBI evidence shows that as an SLA member, Yoshimura tried to correspond with her former lover and SLA member Willie Brandt, who was incarcerated at Soledad, about her concern with the tension among SLA group members (though the letter, later discovered by the FBI, was apparently never

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89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

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sent). She was also arrested with Patty Hearst when the FBI captured them in September 1975 in their hideout at 625 Morse, in San Francisco’s Outer Mission District. For more information regarding Yoshimura’s role in the kidnapping, see the official site for Robert Stone’s documentary, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/guerrilla/filmmore/ps_ yoshimura.html. The term was first attributed to Japanese Americans in a 1966 New York Times article by sociologist William Petersen. See William Petersen, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” New York Times, January 9, 1966. Choi, American Woman, 163. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The AfroAmerican Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (Winter 1989): 1–34. Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Choi, American Woman, 165. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 168. “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” official website. January 25, 2009. http://www.guerrillathemovie.com/home.html. Nancy Isenberg, “Not ‘Anyone’s Daughter’: Patty Hearst and the Postmodern Legal Subject,” American Quarterly 52.4 (2000): 660. Choi, American Woman, 277. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 284. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 283. The Weather Underground, DVD, directed by Sam Green (2002; New Group Studio, 2004). Choi, American Woman, 198. The Weather Underground. Ibid. Ibid.

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Chapter 3 1. For an extended discussion of the pervasiveness of what I call “premodern” Orientalist tropes and motifs in American science fiction, please see my “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions,” MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008): 23–43. 2. Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (New York: Penguin, 2003): 130. 3. Ibid. 4. Karel Capek, R.U.R. and The Insect Play (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). 5. For a more comprehensive history of the evolution of “yellow peril” images in science fiction, see Stephen Hong Sohn’s introduction to the special issue of MELUS on Asian American science fiction, “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future,” MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008): 5–22. 6. See my “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions” for analyses of what I identify as premodern techno-Orientalist tropes in Ursula K. Le Guin’s and Philip K. Dick’s novels, particularly The Lathe of Heaven and The Man in the High Castle, respectively. 7. Samuel R. Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction,” New York Review of Science Fiction 120 (August 1998). http://www.nyrsf.com/racismand-science-fiction-.html. 8. Delany, “Racism.” 9. Many have laid the groundwork for a significant and growing body of scholarship and criticism on Orientalism and Asian American literary and cultural representations in science fiction and cultural discourses of science more generally. See, for instance, Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002); David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic,” Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995): 147–173; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,” Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberculture, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003): 3–36; Chun, “Othering Cyberspace,” The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998): 243–254; Kumiko Sato, “How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.3 (2004): 335–355; Toshiya Ueno, “Japanimation: Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes, and Rave Culture,” Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt (Sterline: Pluto, 2002): 94–110; and the entire volume of the special “Alien/Asian” issue of MELUS 33.4 (Winter

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

161

2008), particularly guest editor Stephen Hong Sohn’s introduction, “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future.” Sven Birkerts, “Oryx and Crake: Present at the Re-Creation,” New York Times, May 18, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/ 18/books/review/18BIRKERT.html Marleen S. Barr and Carl Freedman, PMLA: Special Topic Issue: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millenium, 119.3 (May 2004); Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Marleen S. Barr, “Introduction: Textism—An Emancipation Proclamation,” PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 429–441. Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press, 1998): 102. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006): 17–18. Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1995): 51. Roberts, Science Fiction, 17–18. Ibid. See, for instance, Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide, Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary, Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, Samuel L. Delany’s Babel 17, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and much of William Gibson’s fiction. John Huntington, “Science Fiction and the Future,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 161. Ibid., 160. Robert Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 47. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 57–71. Bertolt Brecht, “Kleines Organon fur das Theater (“Short Organon for the Theatre”),” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (1948; New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 192.

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N ot e s 28. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007): 1378. 29. Paul Raven, “Book Review: ‘Stories of Your Life and Others,’ ” Velcro City, July 15, 2009. [URL] 30. China Miéville, “Wonder Boy: China Miéville revels in Ted Chiang’s High-Concept Collection, Stories of Your Life,” The Guardian, April 24, 2004. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Huntington, 161. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” in Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Tor, 2002). 37. Chiang, “Story Notes,” in Stories of Your Life and Others, 328. 38. Chiang, “Story,” 124. 39. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927; New York: Harcourt, 1955). 40. Distinctions, and indeed, even the usefulness of the two terms are highly contested in the field, but in general, “hard SF” refers to fiction that features scientific or technical detail and emphasizes scientific accuracy, while “soft SF” refers to works that feature themes and issues in the social sciences and the humanities. For definitions of the terms and the debates surrounding them, see Peter Nicholls and John Clutes, New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Orbit, 1999). 41. Chiang, “Story,” 143. 42. Ibid., 150. 43. Ibid., 165–166. 44. Ibid., 150. 45. Ibid., 173. 46. Ibid., 154. 47. Ibid. 48. Chiang, “Story,” 143. 49. Ibid., 143. 50. Ibid., 123. 51. Ibid., 134. 52. Ibid., 171. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 141. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 136. 57. Ibid., 135. 58. Ibid., 137.

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N ot e s 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

163

Ibid., 153. Ibid., 158. Ibid. See my “Premodern Orientalist Science Fiction.” Miéville, “Wonder Boy.” Chiang, “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” Stories of Your Life and Others, 283. Jeremy Smith, “The Absense of God: An Interview With Ted Chiang,” Infinityplus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/ inttchiang.htm, August 18, 2009. Robot Stories, DVD, directed by Greg Pak (2003; Kino Video, 2005). Quoted dialogue and page citations are from the published shooting script, Robot Stories and More Screenplays (San Francisco: Immedium, 2005). Jeremy Smith, “The Absense of God: An Interview With Ted Chiang,” Infinityplus, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/ inttchiang.htm, August 18, 2009. Huntington, 160. Pak, Screenplays, 110–111. Ibid., 111. Robot Stories Official Site. May 14, 2009. http://www.robotstories. net/synopsis.html. Huntington, 162. Karel Capek, R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920; Penguin, 2004); Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950; Spectra, 1991). Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, articulated in his 1942 short story, “Runaround,” states: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” I, Robot. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; New York: Norton, 1995). Ibid. Roberts, 118. Pak, Robot Stories, 112. Pak, Robot Stories, 169. Ibid. Pak, Robot Stories, 143. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 140, 153, 139. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 151.

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86. Ibid. 87. It should be noted that the shooting script originally called for “Machine Love” to precede “The Robot Fixer.” In this order, Bernice’s dismissive treatment of Archie the “G9 iPerson” returns to her consciousness in “The Robot Fixer” as a potent source of regret for the way she had treated her own office’s equivalent of Wilson. But the order was changed during shooting to support the logical development of tonal and thematic structures, so that in the theatrical release, “The Robot Fixer” comes before “Machine Love.” According to Pak, while “rhythmically and tonally, it felt right to have the lightest film (“Machine Love”) lead, followed by a heavier film (“The Robot Fixer”)” he and the film editor decided during postproduction that “there might be a better arrangement.” Swapping the places of “Machine Love” and “My Robot Baby” for the sequence of “My Robot Baby,” “The Robot Fixer,” “Machine Love,” and “Clay,” Pak explains that “the progression of technology made sense—the science began with the clunky robot baby, developed into the android Archie, and ended with the super-advanced implementation of digital immortality” (114–115). 88. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987): 237. 89. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 85. Also see Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991): 149–181. 90. Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Brothers, 1982). 91. Ibid. 92. Pak, Robot Stories, 127. 93. Ibid., 128. 94. Ibid., 136–137. 95. Ibid., 138. 96. The revelation that one of these male coworkers is Roy from “My Robot Baby” also mitigates whatever sympathies the reader may have developed for him, and compels us to question his capacity to love and nurture his robot baby. 97. Pak, Robot Stories and More Screenplays, 209. 98. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984): 12. 99. Hayles, Posthuman, 3. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 5. 102. Ibid., 4.

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103. Ibid. 104. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002): 61. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 61–62. 107. Nakamura, Cybertypes, 144. 108. Ibid., 145. 109. Huntington, 165. 110. Cynthia Kadohata, In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 111. Philip K. Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Vintage, 1996): 54. 112. Min Hyoung Song, Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 63. Song also provides in the first chapter of Strange Future, “Racial Geography of Southern California,” a persuasive account of the confluence of environmental degradation and racial and class divisions that precipitated the 1992 L.A. riots and the plethora of pessimistic fictional and nonfictional speculations of the future. 113. Lyman Tower Sargent, “US Eutopias in the 1980s and 1990s: SelfFashioning in a World of Multiple Identitie,” Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Paola Spinozzi (Bologna: University of Bologna, 2001): 221–232. 114. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories,” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2003): 7. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia,” Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2004): 126–135. 119. John Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (London: Verso, 1993). 120. Ibid., 12. 121. Ibid. 122. Kadohata, Valley, 29. 123. Ibid., 33. 124. See Hsiu-Chuan Lee’s interview with Kadohata for Kadohata’s discussion of the social implications of the 1990 Census projections. Hsiu-chuan Lee, “Interview with Cynthia Kadohata,” MELUS 32.2 (Summer 2007): 165–186. 125. Kadohata, Valley, 33.

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126. “The Possibility of Hope,” Children of Men, DVD, directed by Alfonso Cuaron (Universal, 2007). 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid., 58. In her interview with Lee, Kadohata recounts that, as a student at City College before being admitted to UCLA, she had held similar perceptions of UCLA students. See Lee, “Interview.” 129. Ibid., 211. 130. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996): 69. 131. Kadohata, Valley, 88. 132. Ibid., 120. 133. Ibid., 2. 134. Ibid., 54. 135. Ibid., 198. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid., 197. 138. Ibid., 21. 139. Ibid., 147. 140. Fiske, Power, 12. 141. Ibid., 68. 142. Kadohata, Valley, 55. 143. Ibid., 33, 35. 144. Kadohata, Valley, 35. 145. Nguyen, Race, 152. 146. Kadohata, Valley, 92. 147. Lee, “Interview,” 168. 148. Kadohata, Valley, 12. 149. Ibid., 16–17. 150. Lee, “Interview,” 168. 151. Nguyen, Race, 151. 152. Ibid. 153. Kadohata, Valley, 200. 154. Ibid., 200–201. 155. Ibid., 46. 156. Ibid., 126. 157. Ibid., 86. 158. Ibid., 147. 159. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 69. 160. Ibid., 203. 161. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 401. 162. Fiske, Power, 21.

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163. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (New York: Westview Press, 2000): 188. 164. Penley, 126. 165. Dick, “Pessimism,” 54.

Conclusion 1. Junot Diaz, “One Year: Storyteller-In-Chief,” New Yorker, News Desk, January 20, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ newsdesk/2010/01/one-year-storyteller-in-chief.html#ixzz0hb43r0tx. 2. Pradnya Joshi, “A Charlie Chan Film Stirs an Old Controversy,” March 7, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/business/ media/08chan.html. 3. Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 12. 4. A special issue of JAAS: Journal of Asian American Studies devoted to the Virginia Tech shootings, guest edited by Min Hyoung Song, offers a thoughtful and insightful collection of essays on the implications and effects of the shootings, particularly in response to Song’s organizing question: “Does this tragic event occasion a change in scholarly conversations about the topic of race and violence because it forces us to think of Asian Americans as the perpetrators of violence, as well as its objects?” Min Hyoung Song, “Communities of Remembrance: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Shootings and Race,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11.1 (2008): 1. 5. Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1995): 51. 6. For a more comprehensive history of the evolution of “yellow peril” images in science fiction, see Stephen Hong Sohn’s introduction to the special issue of MELUS on Asian American science fiction, “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future,” MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008): 5–22. Also see my “Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions” for analyses of what I identify as premodern techno-Orientalist tropes in Ursula K. Le Guin’s and Philip K. Dick’s novels, particularly The Lathe of Heaven and The Man in the High Castle, respectively. 7. Quoted in Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 1. 8. Diaz, “One Year: Storyteller-In-Chief,” New Yorker.

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——. “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam.” CR: The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 7–37. O’Hagan, Andrew. “Recovered Memories,” New York Times, September 5, 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/05/reviews/990905. 05ohagt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Oldboy. Dir. Park Chan-wook. United States: Tartan Video USA, 2005. Pak, Greg. Robot Stories. DVD. 2003. Kino Video, 2005. ——. Robot Stories and More Screenplays. San Francisco: Immedium, 2005. Penley, Constance. “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia.” In Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. Ed. Sean Redmond. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. 126–135. Petersen, William. “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” New York Times, January 9, 1966. Phelan, James. Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. Polanski, Roman. Chinatown. DVD. 1974. Paramount, 1999. Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Quan, Kenneth. “Interview with Chang-rae Lee.” Asia Pacific Arts, UCLA Asia Institute, April 12, 2004. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp? parentid=11432. Raven, Paul. “Book Review: ‘Stories of Your Life and Others.’ ” Velcro City, July 15, 2009. http://www.velcro-city.co.uk/book-review-stories-of-yourlife-and-others-by-ted-chiang/. Reddy, Maureen. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: New York: Routledge, 2000. Robot Stories Official Site. May 14, 2009. http://www.robotstories.net/ synopsis.html. Rose, Mark. Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Rosmarin, Adena. The Power of Genre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Rzepka, Charles J. “Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan.” PMLA 122.5 (October 2007): 1463–1481. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “US Eutopias in the 1980s and 1990s: SelfFashioning in a World of Multiple Identitie.” In Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: A Comparative Perspective. Ed. Paola Spinozzi. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2001. 221–232. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge, 2005. Scholes, Robert. “The Roots of Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976. 47–48.

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Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. New York: Norton, 1995. Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction.” PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1347–1362. Smith, Jeremy. “The Absense of God: An Interview with Ted Chiang,” Infinityplus, August 18, 2009. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/ inttchiang.htm. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Sohn, Stephen Hong. “Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future.” MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008): 5–22. Song, Min Hyoung. “Communities of Remembrance: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Shootings and Race.” Journal of Asian American Studies 11.1 (2008): 1–26. ——. Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1977. ——. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003. Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. New York: Bantam Books, 2000. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst. Dir. Robert Stone. DVD. New York: New Video Group, 2005. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. ——. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” In Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976. 57–71. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” In The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. UC Riverside “First Book” Program for Incoming Freshmen, 2006. http:// 209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:MtBSxOP_EE0J:www.chass.ucr.edu/ news/newsletter/Fall2006.pdf+gangster+we+are+all+looking+for&hl= en&ct=clnk&cd=30&gl=us. Van Gulik, Robert. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: An Authentic EighteenthCentury Chinese Detective Novel. New York: Dover Publications, 1976. White, Hayden. “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres.” New Literary History 34.3 (November 6, 2003): 597–615. ——. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 142–170.

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Young, John. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Yu, Timothy. “Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer.” MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008): 45–71. Zhou, Xiaojing. “Introduction: Critical Theories and Methodologies in Asian American Literary Studies.” In Form and Transformation in Asian American literature. Ed. Xiaojing Zhou and Samina Najmi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 3–29.

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Index

Note: The letter ‘n’ followed by the locators refer to notes. Accidental Asian, The (Liu), 16 Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Series (Arthur), 56 Alien Nation (film), 107 Alvarez, Julia, 13, 149n9 American Dream narrative, 33, 35, 44–5, 69, 92, 118, 144 American Woman (Choi), 8, 51, 80–93, 144n82 Andrews, William L., 20, 151n36 Antin, Mary, 14 Apocalypse Now (film), 20, 142 Arthur, Robert, 56 ascent narratives, 37, 142 Asimov, Isaac, 103, 115n73–4 assimilationism, 8, 12, 14, 16, 19, 31–7, 41–5, 53, 75, 81, 95, 102, 115–16, 142, 145 Atwood, Margaret, 98 autobiographic imperative, 7, 11–13, 19, 23, 26–31, 55 autobiography, 3, 8, 11–20, 27–32, 45, 142 see also memoir Baccolini, Raffaella, 129–30, 165n114 “bad subject” paradigm (Nguyen), 3, 49–50, 55, 82, 136 Baker, Graham, 107 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7 Barr, Marleen S., 6, 98n18, 161n11–12 Barry, Lynda, 149n11 Bascara, Victor, 157n54–60 Baudrillard, Jean, 115

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Baym, Nina, 74, 157n67 Beck, Louis, 54, 68n13 Belton, John, 54, 65n15–16, 156n41 Benjamin, Walter, 121 Bertens, Hans, 155n16 Bhabha, Homi, 42, 80, 115n79–80 Biggers, Earl Derr, 8, 51–2, 55, 65, 70–1, 155n11 see also Chan, Charlie, character of Birkerts, Sven, 98, 161n10 Blade Runner (film), 122, 128 Boelhower, William, 14–15, 28n13, 150n15, 152n63 Bok, Edward, 14 Brandt, Willie, 158n88 Brave New World (Huxley), 128–9 Brecht, Bertolt, 101, 161n27 Broderick, Damien, 99, 145n15, 167n5 Butler, Judith, 6–7, 148n20 Butler, Octavia E., 97, 99, 128–9, 161n18 Campbell, Jr., John W., 97 Capek, Karel, 96, 115, 128n4, 163n73 Card, Orson Scott, 99, 161n18 Carroll, Hamilton, 32, 152n74, 153n75–6 Cawelti, John, 6 Chan, Charlie, character of, 5, 8, 50–5, 58–9, 62, 70–3, 143 Chang, Henry, 56 Chang, Iris, 160n2 Chang, Leonard, 56–8, 66, 73n19–20, 155–6n20

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Chan Is Missing (Wang), 8, 51, 55, 65–72, 80, 93n54 Chan, Jeffrey Paul, 52, 155n12 Charlie Chan Is Dead (Hagedorn), 52 Cheng, Anne, 86, 152n74, 159n92 Chen, Tina, 1, 52, 57n1–2, 154n8, 156n22 Chiang, Ted, 9, 102–13, 145, 162n36–8, 162n41, 163n64–5 Chinatown: Beck on, 53–4 binary of, 50–1, 55, 65, 67, 143 Hammett’s, 54, 59–65 icon/trope of, 50–1, 53, 55, 59, 143n14 Lin’s, 72–80, 143 Polanksi’s, 8, 50–1, 53–5, 60, 65, 71 Wang’s, 66–72, 143 Chinatown Beat (Chang), 56 Chinatown (film), 8, 50–1, 53–5, 60, 65, 71 Chin, Frank, 16, 52n11, 154n7, 155n12 Choi, Susan, 8, 51, 80–93, 144n81–2, 158n84, 158n87, 159n90, 159n93, 159n98, 159n112 Cho Seung-hui, 47–50, 85, 143–4 Chow, Rey, 153n107 Chrisman, Laura, 151n37 Christie, Agatha, 53 Chuh, Kandice, 44, 152n74, 154n115 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 160n9 Chu, Patricia, 16, 150n17 Clancy, Tom, 2 “Clay” (Pak), 113, 116, 124–7, 164n87 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 107 Clutes, John, 162n40 cognitive estrangement, 9, 101, 105, 108, 112, 145 Color of Water, The (McBride), 16 Columbine shootings, 143 Comfort Woman (Keller), 152n73 comfort women, 31–2, 34, 37, 39n74 communitas, 135–6, 138–40 Continental Op, The (Hammett), 53, 59–65, 68

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“countermemory” (Foucault), 27 Coward, Noel, 98, 147n15 crime fiction, 5–9, 49–59, 66–8, 72–3, 80, 83, 92, 95, 97–8, 101, 145 “critical dystopia”, 129–30, 140 Cuaron, Alfonso, 166n126 Cubitt, Sean, 160n9 cyberpunk, 126 Cybertypes (Nakamura), 126 Davis, Rocio, 16, 147n14, 150n17 “Dead Yellow Women” (Hammett), 50, 59–65, 72–3 Death in Little Tokyo (Furutani), 56 “deathly embrace” (Ma), 48 Deer Hunter, The (film), 20, 142 Delany, Samuel R., 97, 99n7–8, 161n18 Denning, Michael, 73, 157n66 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 147n6, 148n19 D’Haen, Theo, 155n16 Diaz, Junot, 141, 146n1, 167n8 Dickens, Charles, 52, 155n10 Dick, Philip K., 97, 112, 129, 140n6, 165n111, 167n165, 167n6 Dimock, Wai Chee, 3–5, 7, 101n4, 148n17–18, 148n22, 162n28 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 52–3, 72n9 Dystopian narratives, 9, 102, 128, 134, 136, 140 see also critical dystopia Eakin, Paul John, 17, 149n13, 150n16, 150n21–2, 151n36 Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective series (Sobol), 56 English, Daylanne K., 58, 156n24 E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (film), 107 Fade to Clear (Chang), 56 fantasy fiction, 6, 100, 102, 104, 113 Fass, Paula, 32–3, 153n79 Ferraro, Thomas, 15, 149n14 Fiske, John, 130–1, 135n16, 165n119, 166n140, 166n162 Flanagan, Brian, 91 Flash Gordon, 96 Fleming, Ian, 2

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Index Forster, E. M., 107, 128n39 Foucault, Michel, 27, 130 Fowler, Karen Joy, 99, 161n18 Frankenstein (Shelley), 115 Freedman, Carl, 6, 148n18, 161n11 Frow, John, 3, 147n5 Fu Manchu, character of, 5, 49, 62–3, 143n8 Furutani, Dale, 56 Gangster We Are All Looking For, The (le thi diem thuy), 7, 17–29, 45, 72, 84, 142 Gasa-Gasa Girl (Hirahara), 56 “genre bondage” (Miller), 14 genre fiction see specific genres genre laws, 8, 25 Gesture Life, A (Lee), 8, 17, 29–45, 47, 73–4, 76, 78, 142 Gibson, William, 99, 125n18, 164n98 Gilmore, Leigh, 20, 29n35, 152n66 Gitlin, Todd, 90–1 Gong, Stephen, 67 Graff, Gerald, 12, 148n2, 167n7 Gramsci, Antonio, 132 Green, Sam, 158n85–6, 159n111 Grossman, Lev, 13, 148n6 Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta, 151n27 Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (documentary), 87 Gunga Din Highway (Chin), 52 Hagedorn, Jessica, 52, 154n7 Hall, Stuart, 6, 16, 20, 22, 140n18, 151n37, 151n44, 166n161 Hammett, Dashiell, 8, 50–1, 54, 59–65, 67, 70–5, 79, 81n16, 156n28–40, 156n42 Haraway, Donna, 121, 164n89 Harris, Eric, 143–4 Hartlaub, Joe, 156n22–3 Hawking, Stephen, 105–6 Hayles, N. Katherine, 121–2, 125–6, 164n89, 164n99 Hayslip, Le Ly, 142

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181

Hearst, Patty, 83, 85, 87–8, 144n82, 158n85 Himes, Chester, 57, 72–3 Hirahara, Naomi, 56–8, 66, 73 “horizontal affiliations” (Lowe), 136–8 Horsley, Lee, 66, 156n44 Howe, Irving, 146 How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez), 13 Hugo award for science fiction, 103 Huh, Jinny, 52, 154n8 Huntington, John, 100–1, 104–5, 112–14, 128n19–20, 162n33, 163n68, 163n72, 165n109 Huxley, Aldus, 128 immigrant fiction/novels, 1–2, 5–8, 12, 45, 50, 58, 95, 101 “imperializing power” (Fiske), 130–4, 137–40 In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Kadohata), 9, 102, 127–40 Isenberg, Nancy, 159n97 James, Edward, 148n18, 161n11 Jameson, Fredric, 6, 11–12, 18–19, 148n1, 148n4, 151n34 Japanese internment camps, 83–6 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 83 Joshi, Pradnya, 143, 167n2 “junk fiction”, 5, 98n15 Kadohata, Cynthia, 9, 102, 127–40, 145n109, 165n122–4, 165n125, 166n128, 166n131, 166n142, 166n144, 166n146, 166n148, 166n153 Kang, Laura Hyun Yi, 152n74 Keller, Nora Okra, 152n73 Kim, Daniel, 74, 154n8, 157n67 Kim, Elaine, 154n4 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 16, 149n11 Klebold, Dylan, 143–4 Knight, Deborah, 147n15 Knight, Stephen, 6 Kostelanetz, Richard, 155n12 Krupat, Arnold, 17, 150n22

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Index

Lara, Adair, 150n25 Lathe of Heaven, The (Le Guin), 160n6, 167n6 “law of genre”, 148n19 Lee, Chang-rae, 1–2, 8–9, 13, 16–17, 29–45, 59, 141–2, 152n74, 153n84–106, 153n108–9, 154n110–14, 156n22 Lee, Horsley, 156n44 Lee, Hsiu-chuan, 137, 165n124 Lee, Josephine, 154n8 Lee, Min Jin, 48, 154n1 Lee, Rachel C., 160n9 Lee, Robert G., 3, 49n7, 154n3 Lee, Sue-Im, 4, 16n14, 150n17 Le Guin, Ursula, 97, 99, 112n6 Le Ly Hayslip, 142 le thi diem thuy, 7–8, 16–30, 45, 72, 84, 142n23, 151n29–30, 151n40–2, 151n45–51, 152n54, 152n56–9, 152n61–2, 152n64–5 Li, David Leiwei, 149n11 “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (Chiang), 112–13 Lim, Imogene L., 154n8 Lin, Ed, 8, 51, 59, 65, 72–81, 143n64, 157n68–78 Ling, Jinqi, 16, 150n17, 150n19 Liu, Eric, 16 “localizing power”, 130–40 Location of Culture, The (Bhabha), 80 Lowe, Lisa, 132, 136, 139n129, 166n159 “Machine Love” (Pak), 119, 121, 164n87 Machine Stops, The (Forster), 128 Maltese Falcon, The (Hammett), 54 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 160n6, 167n6 “Man with the Twisted Lip, The” (Doyle), 52 Mark, Diane Mei Lin, 157n50–1, 157n61 Ma, Sheng-mei, 48, 154n2 Matrix, The (film), 126–8, 130 Matsukawa, Yuko, 154n8 McBride, James, 16 McCracken, Scott, 99, 161n13

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McHugh, Maureen, 99, 161n18 Mehegan, David, 18, 151n31–3 memoir, 3, 8, 13, 15–17, 30–3, 43–5, 142 see also autobiography Mendlesohn, Farah, 148n18, 161n11 Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Suvin), 101 Mieville, China, 102–3, 112n30–2, 163n63 Miller, John, 95–6 Miller, Nancy K., 13–14, 30, 32–3, 45n7–8, 149n11–12, 152n72, 153n77–8, 153n80–2, 154n116 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 160n9 Morley, David, 160n9 Morrison, Toni, 86, 159n91 Mosley, Walter, 57–8, 73n24 Moylan, Tom, 129–30, 140n113–16, 167n163 “My Robot Baby” (Pak), 116–19, 121, 164n87, 164n96 Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens), 52 mystery fiction, 6, 18, 52–7, 60–80, 107n15 Nakamura, Lisa, 126–7, 160n9, 165n104, 165n107 nationalism, 38–41, 43, 75–8, 85 Native Speaker (Lee), 1–2, 29–30, 35, 141–2, 156n22 Nebula award for science fiction, 103, 105 Neely, Barbara, 58, 156n24 New Criticism, 109 Nguyen, Chau, 150n26 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 3–4, 20, 22, 27, 49, 53, 82, 136–7, 147n8–9, 147n12, 151n38–9, 151n43, 152n60, 166n145, 166n151 Nicholls, Peter, 162n40 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 129 Nixon, Richard, 83, 87 novum/nova, 101–2, 105, 108, 113, 126–8, 145 Obama, Barack, 141, 146 O’Hagan, Andrew, 153n83 Old Boy (film), 48, 144

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Index Orientalism, 3, 5–9, 49–52, 55, 57, 59, 61–7, 71, 96–9, 102, 111n9 Orientalist tropes, 52, 98–9, 155n14, 160n1 see also techno-Orientalist tropes Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 98 Over the Shoulder (Chang), 56 Pak, Greg, 9, 102, 113–27, 145n66, 163n69, 163n78–79, 164n87, 164n92, 164n97 Parable of the Sower (Butler), 129 Parable of the Talents (Butler), 129 Penley, Constance, 130, 140n117, 167n164 Petersen, William, 159n89 Phelan, James, 148n2 photographs, 22–7, 47, 49, 68, 71 Poe, Edgar Allen, 53 Polanski, Roman, 8, 50–1, 53–5, 60, 65, 71 Posthumanism, 116, 125–7 “postracial”, 126–7 Power Plays, Power Works (Fiske), 130–1 Priestman, Martin, 148n18 “psychotherapeutic perspective” in memoirs, 33 pulp fiction, 6, 9, 97–8 Quan, Kenneth, 29–30, 149n10, 152n67, 152n69–71 Quotations from Charlie Chan, 143 Rabkin, Eric, 116 Radway, Janice, 6 Rambo (film), 48–9 Raven, Paul, 102, 162n29 recounting, 30, 43 Reddy, Maureen T., 56, 155n17–18 Redmond, Sean, 165n118 refugees, 19–22, 26–7, 45, 142 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), 25 “regenreing”, 4–5, 100–1, 145n17 Robbins, Bruce, 1 Roberts, Adam, 99, 116n14, 161n16, 163n77

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183

Robins, Kevin, 160n9 “Robot Fixer, The” (Pak), 119–21, 164n87 “robot” origin of the word, 96 robot stories, 9, 96, 102, 113–28, 145n74, 163n81, 164n97 Robot Stories (film), 9, 102, 113–28 Rohmer, Sax, 49, 52n8 romance fiction, 6, 8, 33, 35, 45, 51, 57, 107, 144–5 “aspirational romance”, 116 Harlequin, 6, 147n15 “liberation romance”, 38–41 “outlaw romance”, 51, 83, 87, 144 romance of radicalism, 92 “Roots of Science Fiction, The” (Scholes), 100 Rose, Mark, 148n23–4, 161n19, 161n21 Rosmarin, Adena, 59, 143n27, 167n3 Rudd, Mark, 91 “Runaround” (Asimov), 163n74 R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (Capek), 96, 115, 128 Russ, Joanna, 99 Rutherford, Jonathan, 150n18, 166n161 Rzepka, Charles J., 51–2, 154n5–6 Sardar, Ziauddin, 160n9 Sargent, Lyman Tower, 129, 165n113 Sassen, Saskia, 132 Savage, Marcus E., 14 Sayers, Dorothy L., 57 Scaggs, John, 73, 157n65 Scholes, Robert, 6, 9, 100–1, 116n23, 161n21 science fiction, 5–9, 95–116, 121, 128–9, 140, 145–6, 160n1, 160n5, 160n9, 162n40, 167n6 science fiction “paradox”, 100 Scott, Ridley, 122, 128n89–90 Shelley, Mary, 115, 163n75 Shih, Shu-mei, 12–13, 148n5 Short Organon for the Theatre (Brecht), 101 Showalter, Elaine, 157n67 Silet, Charles L., 157n66

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Index

Smith, Jeremy, 163n65, 163n67 Snakeskin Shamisen (Hirahara), 56 Sobchack, Vivian, 121, 164n88 Sobol, Donald J., 56 Sohn, Stephen Hong, 148n18, 160n5, 161n9, 167n6 Song, Min Hyoung, 129, 165n112, 167n4 Sontag, Susan, 25, 151n52, 152n53, 152n55 specific genres, 99 Spiegelman, Art, 14 Spielberg, Steven, 107 Spinozzi, Paola, 165n113 spy thriller genre, 1–2 Star Trek, 96, 127 Star Wars, 96 Stephenson, Neal, 99, 161n18 Stockholm Syndrome, 88 Stone, Robert, 87, 158n85 Stories of Your Life and Others (Chiang), 102–3, 112 “Story of Your Life” (Chiang), 9, 102, 105–11 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 83 Sturgeon, Theodore, 103 Summer of the Big Bachi (Hirahara), 56 Suvin, Darko, 9, 101n24, 161n25–6 Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), 83–5, 87, 144n82, 158n85 Taiwan, 78 techno-Orientalist tropes, 5, 145n6, 167n6 Terminator, The (film), 130 Tey, Josephine, 57 This Is a Bust (Lin), 8, 51, 65, 72–80, 89, 93 Todorov, Tzvetan, 6, 58–9, 156n25–6 Toyotomi Blades, The (Furutani), 56 Turner, Victor, 135

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Ueno, Toshiya, 160n9 Underkill (Chang), 56 “unofficial interpretive culture” (Graff), 12, 18–19 Van Gulik, Robert, 52, 155n11 Vietnamese refugees, 19–22, 26–9, 45, 142 Vietnam War, 19, 24–9, 70, 75–6, 83–4, 87, 142 Virginia Tech shootings, 47–50, 82, 85, 143–4, 167n4 Vonnegut, Kurt, 105 Wachowski, Andy, 128 Wachowski, Larry, 128 Wang, Wayne, 8, 51, 55, 59, 65–72, 80, 143n45–7, 157n48–9, 157n52–3, 157n62–3 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 107 Weathermen, 83–4, 90n82 Wells, H. G., 107, 128 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Hayslip), 142 White, Hayden, 2, 7, 16–17, 93n3, 148n21, 150n20 Willett, John, 161n27 Williams, Patrick, 151n37 Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, The (Kingston), 16, 149n11 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 15, 150n16, 160n9 World War II, 21, 31, 83n73 Year of the Dog (Chang), 56 “yellow peril”, 3, 49, 96n5, 167n6 Yoshimura, Wendy, 85, 144n85 Young, John K., 12, 148n3 Yu, Timothy, 155n14 Zhou Xiaojing, 4, 147n10–11, 147n13, 156n22

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