History of Asian American Literature

from Chinese American Writers (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002).

1. History of Chinese American Literature

AN OVERVIEW OF CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Chinese American literature is a relatively new area of study that can be dated from the publication of the first anthologies of Asian American literature in the 1970s. During the period 1882 to 1948 strict immigration laws explicitly prohibited Chinese immigration to the United States in any significant numbers. Consequently, it is not until the post-war period that Chinese American literature began to appear as a major genre within American literature. Even so, at first Chinese American literature was subsumed under the heading of “Asian American literature” and was not clearly distinguished from works by writers of Japanese American and Korean American ancestry. Early collections such as Asian American Authors (1972), edited by Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas, and David Hsin-fu Wand’s Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974) brought Asian American literary texts together to form a new category of literature. Within these anthologies the clustering of Chinese American authors made obvious relationships among the texts that united them into a Chinese American literary tradition. However, Chinese American creative writing predates these anthologies by almost a century. In 1887 Yan Phou Lee, a Chinese student who graduated from Yale in 1897, published the first English-language book in America: When I Was a Boy in China. This autobiographical work, while it was published in the United States, represented only the author’s experiences in China and neglected his years lived in America. Thus, the book itself may be classified as a work of Chinese American literature but its content is Chinese rather than American. The first literary texts written in English and published in America for an American readership date from the late-nineteenth century. There is some uncertainty as to exactly when the first Chinese American literary text was produced because the relationship between the two key terms in the definition – “Chinese” and “American” – remains uncertain.

The “Chineseness” of this body of literature is usually defined according to the ethnicity of the author, rather than Chinese literary subjects or settings. The distinction between Chinese and Chinese American depends in part upon the language in which literary texts are written; generally, Chinese texts are expressed in Chinese while Chinese American texts are created in English. However, there is a body of “immigrant” writing which is composed in Chinese but was written in America. Poetry was quite literally written in America in the case of Chinese immigrants detained at the Angel Island immigration center in San Francisco Bay at the beginning of the twentieth century, who carved into the wooden walls of their barracks poems that expressed their loneliness and bitterness at the harsh reception they had received in the United States. These poems were written in Chinese and were translated only in the 1970s by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung for publication as Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (1980). The writer often held up as the first Chinese American writer, Edith Maude Eaton who published under the pseudonym of Sui Sin Far, was actually Eurasian, born of an English father and a Chinese mother. During the decade of the 1880s her essays, stories and works of journalism first appeared; her short story “The Gamblers” was published in February 1896 in the journal The Flyleaf, and this story has the distinction of being the first creative work to represent the experience of the Chinese in North America, written by an author of Asian descent. These kinds of complications have produced a situation in which the definition of Chinese American literature remains fluid.

The editors of one of the most significant early anthologies of Asian American literature – Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Shawn Wong, and Lawson Fusao Inada, who edited Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) – defined Chinese American writing according to the cultural sensibility represented by individual writers. In their introduction, they argued that this sensibility can be developed only by virtue of being American-born of Asian parents, though they made some exceptions in order to include in the anthology some writers who were not born in America but who migrated in their early childhood, when they were still young enough to become Asian American rather than either Asian or Caucasian American. The requirement that Chinese American writers must be born in America excludes from the genre of Chinese American literature writings by the first generation of immigrants who travelled from China to the United States and who wrote in Chinese; it also excludes those like Sui Sin Far who was born in England in 1865 and in 1872, at the age of seven, migrated with her family to New York, initially, and then to Montreal where the family settled permanently. Indeed, a writer such as Sui Sin Far may well belong to Chinese Canadian rather than Chinese American literature, if the latter is to be closely identified with residency or nativity in the United States.

In her survey of Chinese American literature, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong observes that the term “Chinese American” is problematic not only as a term applied to Chinese Americans, but also as a term of self-description. Early Chinese immigrants, from the first wave during the Gold Rush of 1848, were subject to racial stereotypes that cast Chinese American as foreigners who were so different from white Americans that they could never be assimilated into the mainstream of American society. Consequently, these immigrants did not think of themselves as “Americans” and instead referred to themselves as huaquiao meaning “overseas Chinese.”[1] In Louis Chu’s 1961 novel, Eat A Bowl of Tea, the protagonist Ben Loy travels from New York to his mother’s village in China to find a wife. He is considered very eligible by the women in the village because he is an “overseas Chinese” or gimshunhock: “’Nowadays every girl goes to school,’ laughed the matchmaker, ‘because she wants to marry a gimshunhock.’”[2] He is neither American nor Chinese but occupies a space between the two. The repeal in 1943 of the Chinese exclusion laws that were introduced in 1882 made possible Ben Loy’s visit to China and his return with his bride. Before 1943 immigration restrictions prevented the reunion of married Chinese couples in America; naturalized American citizens were liable to lose their citizenship if they married a Chinese spouse; Chinese men who left the United States were uncertain whether they would be allowed to re-enter, even if they were American citizens. The main plot of Chu’s novel, therefore, could not have been conceived before 1940, though the effect of the immigration laws was significantly eroded only after 1965 when restrictions were further loosened.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that the definition of Chinese American as a term to describe a class of American citizens became the subject of debate. Maxine Hong Kingston has contributed to this debate her thoughts about the difference between the term “Chinese American” (without a hyphen) and “Chinese-American.” Commenting on the racial stereotypes that were invoked by early reviewers of The Woman Warrior, she reflects, “I have been thinking we ought to leave out the hyphen in ‘Chinese-American,’ because the hyphen gives the word on either side equal weight, as if linking two nouns. It looks as if a Chinese-American has double citizenship, which is impossible in today’s world. Without the hyphen, ‘Chinese’ is an adjective and ‘American’ a noun; a Chinese American is a type of American.[3] Kingston’s observation must be interpreted in the context of the Oriental stereotypes used by reviewers to describe the nature of her achievement. Her work is not treated as that of an American author; indeed she complains that reviewers failed to notice the American setting, idiom, and characterization of The Woman Warrior. She is treated as an exotic Oriental author, with all that the stereotypical view of “Oriental” entails. It is for this reason that Kingston claims a place within American literature for writers working within a Chinese American (without the hyphen) literary tradition.

The shape of the Chinese American literary tradition is profoundly influenced by the historical and political conditions that have determined the nature of the Chinese community in America since the mid-nineteenth century. As a consequence of American legal restrictions upon who could emigrate from China to the United States, two kinds of writers emerged in the nineteenth century. The distinct kinds of writing they published have produced two sub-traditions within Chinese American literature which continue to fuel debate about the “true” character of Chinese American literature. Privileged Christianized Chinese who traveled to America as scholars, merchants, or diplomats were exempt from the exclusion laws and were received in the United States with relative tolerance. However, immigrant peasant laborers who worked in railroad construction, mining, and on sugar plantations struggled against discrimination and poverty.

Many factors contributed to the emigration of Chinese men to America in the mid-nineteenth century. The reparations imposed upon China by the Treaty of Nanking at the end of the Opium War against Britain (1840-1842), for instance, led to the introduction of a punitive taxation regime in Guangdong Province in southern China, which in turn required that families sell their land in order to pay their tax bill. The economic situation in southern China deteriorated as the opening of the port of Canton to foreign trade brought cheap European goods into the region and undermined local industries which could not compete with the quality and price of European imports. Bankruptcy was widespread. The violent turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) displaced many peasant communities as fighting between rebels and government forces spread along the Pearl River to Guangdong. It is not surprising then that the majority of male laborers who traveled to the United States at this time came from Guangdong Province. Xiao-huang Yin explains that “[u]ntil after World War II, more than 80 percent of the Chinese immigrants to America were from a region consisting of eight counties in the Pearl River Delta around Canton.”[4] They were charged with earning sufficient money in the Gold Mountain, as they termed the United States, to support the families they left behind in China. An aspect of the Chinese stereotype to which critics such as Frank Chin have objected is the notion that these early Chinese immigrants were “sojourners” – travelers who never intended to settle permanently in America but were intending to stay only long enough to make their fortunes and then take that wealth back to China. Chin argues that the establishment of the first community association or “tong” in 1851 is evidence of the immigrants’ intention to settle permanently in the United States.[5] Displacement and relocation were the experience of many Chinese immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Refugees in China, they did not necessarily intend to return to China from the United States. The first immigrants from China arrived in California early in 1848 and by the middle of 1852 the official estimate of Chinese immigrants stood at 12,000. However, the rate of immigration was such that at that time it was predicted more than 20,000 Chinese would be living in California by the end of 1852. It was in 1852 the first contract laborers arrived in Hawaii from China. Substantial Chinatown communities have since developed in Honolulu, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York and Seattle. At the end of the twentieth century, it is estimated that the population of Seattle’s Chinatown is more than 2,000; San Francisco’s Chinatown numbers more than 14,000; and the population of the largest Chinatown in the United States, in New York City, is more than 100,000.

Little written record has been left by these early immigrant laborers; the early history of Chinese American literature is disproportionately influenced by the few educated Chinese who were able to travel to the United States after 1882 when the first of the Chinese Exclusion laws were enacted. Yan Phou Lee, the author of When I Was a Boy in China, mentioned above, was one of these writers. Like him, many of the Chinese in America in the late nineteenth century were Christian – some were even sent from China by Christian missionary organizations to study in America – and all reacted to the anti-Chinese prejudice they encountered in the United States by writing autobiographical texts explaining the true nature of life in China. These early Chinese American autobiographies gave rise to a tradition of autobiographical writing to which later writers such as Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston notably contributed. Amy Ling describes the conditions that produced this situation:

The large number of books by diplomats, students, and travelers is easily explained by a brief look at the history of the Chinese in the United States. The earliest immigrants were drawn in the late 1840s by the discovery of gold in California. In the 1860s Chinese laborers, hardworking and cheap, were imported by the thousands to complete the difficult western portion of the transcontinental railroad; these men remained in America in sufficient numbers to be a glut on the labor market. Subsequently, laws were passed prohibiting them from owning land and from working at nearly everything except employment that white men disdained — women's work —hence the tradition of Chinese restaurants and laundries. Still, anti-Chinese sentiments rose to such a fever pitch in the 1870s and 1880s that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and renewed repeatedly until 1943. Since this act prohibited immigration by all Chinese except a small number of diplomats, businessmen, professors, and students, the earliest books, of course, were written by these people and their children, or, in other words, by Christianized upper-class Chinese. My Life in China and America (1909) by Yung Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854) is one of these works. Lin Yutang, his daughters Adet and Anor (Anor has published six fine novels), Mai Mai Sze, Helena Kuo, Hazel Lin — all belong to this category. Their backgrounds are Chinese, as are often the settings of their books; however, their theme of straddling two cultures finds a resonance today in the work of American-born Chinese Americans Maxine Hong Kingston and playwrights Frank Chin and David Henry Hwang.[6]

It is to this tradition of Chinese American writing that Frank Chin has vociferously objected. In the introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, Chin and his co-editors explain their vision of two kinds of Chinese American literature: the “real” and the “fake.” “Fake” Chinese American literature belongs to the Christianized autobiographical tradition:

Every Chinese American book ever published in the United States by a major publisher has been a Christian autobiography or autobiographical novel. Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909: Henry Holt); Leong Gor Yun’s Chinatown Inside Out (1936: Barrows Mussey); Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1943: Little, Brown); Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950: Little, Brown); Virginia Lee’s The House That Tai-Ming Built (1963: Macmillan); Chuang Hua’s Crossing (1968: Dial Press); Betty Lee Sung’s autobiographical pseudo-sociological Mountain of Gold (1972: Macmillan); Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976: Alfred K. Knopf), China Men (1980: Knopf), and Tripmaster Monkey (1989: Knopf); and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989: G. P. Putnam) all tell the story that Will Irwin, the Christian social Darwinist practitioner of white racist love, wanted told in Pictures of Old Chinatown (1908) about how the “Chinese transformed themselves from our race adversaries to our dear subject people. …” The China and Chinese America portrayed in these works are the products of white racist imagination, not fact, not Chinese culture, and not Chinese or Chinese American literature.[7]

The apologetic nature of early autobiographies, which sought to counteract the effect of Chinese stereotypes by explaining the true character of Chinese and Chinese American experience is seen as a false motivation underlying a “fake” literature. What Frank Chin sees as the “true” tradition of Chinese American literature arises out of the Chinese fairytale, Cantonese opera, and the Confucian heroic tradition. However, the oral sources of this tradition are difficult to retrieve, as Chin admits while regretting the erasure of “the stories the old folks, the busboys, and the immigrants told to describe the shrines, the posters, and the knickknack porcelain and clay figures of animals, babies, and warriors found on the shelves and walls of Chinatown … shops and restaurants.”[8] The work of which Chin writes, retrieving the early sources of the peasant tradition, occupies contemporary scholars as they seek to establish the beginnings of Chinese American literature.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE

In The Woman Warrior and China Men Maxine Hong Kingston claims to re-tell the stories, told to her as a child by her parents and other older people, which belong to what she calls “a talk-story tradition.”[9] This is the oral peasant tradition of the emigrant Chinese. Two translations have appeared of the folk rhymes that would have been known to the early Chinese immigrants. Chen Yuanzhu’s Taishan geyao ji (1929) and Hu Zhaozhong’s Meizhou Guangdong huaqiao liuchuan geyao huibian (1970) respectively collect Taishan and Cantonese folk rhymes.[10] Sau-ling Cynthia Wong describes these folk rhymes as exhibiting “characteristics of oral compositions: formulaic opening lines, simple prosodic structures, directness of language, anonymous authorship, and depictions of rural life. Many pieces speak of the harsh conditions that forced young men to emigrate, the pain of leave-taking, and wishes for success in ‘Gold Mountain.’”[11] Complementing the collections edited by Chen and Hu is the selection of poems translated by Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (1987). These poems are not transcriptions of oral works but were written by members of Chinatown poetry societies. Membership of these societies was composed primarily of educated merchants, though the authors of the poems are anonymous. According to Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “[t]he poets’ voices are unpretentious, exuberant, and candidly patriarchal; they cover topics ranging from American hardships to fantasies of triumphant return to China, from the pain of family separation to the allures of Chinatown prostitutes, from support of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Revolution (1911) to outrage at the un-Confucian ways of ‘emancipated women.’”[12]

The writings gathered in these collections all originated in the Chinese language, the influence of their American context is seen in the Songs of Gold Mountain in the use of Cantonese slang, which is a departure from the standards of poetic decorum observed in China. In the view of Elaine Kim, it was the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the mainstream of American society that accounts for their linguistic separation: “since they were segregated from the mainstream of American social and economic life and prevented by law from becoming naturalized American citizens with voting and civil rights, many early immigrants did not learn English and did not consider the culture it represented as something that belonged to them or to which they could contribute.”[13] From the 1840s through to 1924 Chinese immigration to America was largely the result of the active recruitment of workers for railroad, mining, sugar plantation and fieldwork; in these occupations, immigrants were segregated in field camps or urban ethnic ghettos.

In China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston describes how her great-grandfather, Bak Goong, was approached in his home village by an agent of a Hawaiian sugar plantation. This agent made promises about the kind of work Bak Goong would be required to do and the handsome remuneration he would receive in recognition of his effort. The agent presents himself as the representative of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society who is seeking skilled workers for the sugar industry. He sets out attractive terms: “’Right now,’ said the agent, ‘we’re offering free passage, free food, free clothing, and housing. In fact, we’re advancing you six dollars. … Couldn’t you use six dollars before you’ve even begun to work? You repay it with just six weeks’ work. After six weeks, clear profit.’.”[14] The agent entices these prospective workers to sign contracts in order to protect these jobs for three or five years. The benefits seem to accrue only to the contracted Chinese workers. The reality is however, that Bak Goong is reduced to a slave laborer, engaged in the hard manual labor of clearing wilderness so that the plantation might be established. There is no need for skill in the growing of sugarcane or the production of sugar and until payday comes around Bak Goong fears he might be in a slave labor camp. When he is paid, he is fined for talking at work, sick men are docked for days spent in bed, others are charged for food and lodging, some are docked for breaking work tools.

Many of the workers recruited from their villages in China found themselves detained by immigration authorities as soon as they arrived in the United States. Restriction placed upon Chinese immigration prompted strategies by which immigrants could circumvent these restrictions. The sale of fraudulent birth certificates by Chinese who had become naturalized American citizens gave rise to the phenomenon of “paper sons”: young immigrants who claimed the right to enter the United States as the offspring of American citizens. These prospective immigrants were detained while the accuracy of their claims was investigated. It was not uncommon for individuals to be held for periods of weeks or months in conditions that were perceived to be punitive. Most Chinese immigrants were held at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. One wooden barracks building, divided into separate sections for men and women, held the detainees. “All immigrants had to prove themselves to be related by blood to a current United States resident. All immigrants underwent long and sometimes repeated interrogations from United States immigration officials whose questions were detailed, if not clever entrapment: ‘How many steps lead to your front door?’ many remember being asked, and laugh.[15] Detainees wrote poems by carving the words into the wooden walls of the barracks. In the 1930s, two detainees transcribed the poems and when, in the 1970s plans were made to demolish the building, the efforts of the Chinese community of San Francisco saved the building which is now a historical site.[16] The collection Island: Poems from Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910-1940 was published in 1980, making these poems accessible for the first time. The following poem is typical of this kind of immigrant writing:

So, liberty is your national principle;

Why do you practice autocracy?

You don’t uphold justice, you Americans,

You detain me in prison, guard me closely.

Your officials are wolves and tigers,

All ruthless, all wanting to bite me.

An innocent man implicated, such an injustice!

When can I get out of this prison and free

my mind?[17]

Poems such as this indicate that the immigrants did not consider themselves so much Chinese sojourners as individuals who expected to be treated as Americans and in accordance with American principles of justice, democracy, and liberty. The desire for American citizenship expressed by these early immigrants directly contradicts popular opinion that the Chinese were only “sojourners” who came to America in order to get rich quickly and then return to China, with no intention of settling permanently in America.

In 1905 Chinese protesters mounted a boycott of American goods to protest against the restrictive immigration laws that had been enacted against the Chinese and this anti-Exclusion movement also generated a body of literary work. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong describes one of the works arising from this movement, a novella entitled Kuxuesheng (The industrious student), as the first narrative to express the “doubleness of vision” characteristic of Chinese American sensibility.[18] This story concerns a student who travels to the Gold Mountain where a wealthy Chinese immigrant assists him as he strives to gain the knowledge necessary to save his country from foreign interests and the corruption of the Manchu dynasty. It is his concern with American racism as well as the fate of China that generates the double vision noted by Sau-ling Wong.

Foreign students were among the few categories of Chinese exempt from the exclusion laws; also exempt were scholars, diplomats, and merchants who wrote apologetically about the relations between East and West. They explained China in idealized exotic terms that tried to reverse negative Chinese stereotypes. Often writing autobiographically, these writers distanced themselves from the laboring classes of immigrant Chinese and appealed for racial tolerance on behalf of their own educated, privileged class. Autobiography was used to explain the lifestyle, traditions, and culture of upper-class Chinese who could be seen to share a common humanity with the American readers to whom the writing was directed. For example, Lee Yan Phou’s autobiography, When I was a Boy in China (1887), was commissioned by the D. Lathrop Publishing Company. Lee wrote largely in response to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and attempted to correct the distorted image of the Chinese represented in American popular culture. Lee, like Yung Wing the author of My Life in China and America (1909) and Huie Kin the author of Reminiscences (1932), was sent from China to study in America. These are among the early immigrant writers attacked by Frank Chin for creating a tradition of Christian autobiographical writings that take racial stereotypes on their own terms and attempt to provide reasoned counter-examples to the stereotypical images of Chinese as either uncivilized savages or scheming villains. Some critics refer to these writers as “ambassadors of goodwill,” following Elaine Kim’s lead.[19] Also included in this category of writing are Wu Tingfang’s America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914), Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948), and Chiang Yee’s Silent Traveler series. Elaine Kim characterizes these writers as follows: “Their writing is characterized by efforts to bridge the gap between East and West and plead for tolerance by making usually highly euphemistic observations about the West on the one hand while explaining Asia in idealized terms on the other. Since many of these early Asian writers in English felt that they themselves understood two points of view and, in some cases, two epochs – to them the West stood for modernity and the East for tradition – they viewed themselves as straddling two worlds. Since they found that elements from two vastly different cultures could be combined within themselves, they concluded that there could be points of compatibility between other people of the two cultures. They saw themselves as ambassadors of goodwill to the West. Most of them, however, did not believe that social class distinctions could be bridged.”[20] These educated and privileged Chinese saw themselves as quite distinct from the laboring classes of Chinese immigrants upon whom racist stereotypes were often based.

Popular opinion was molded by stereotypes of an inferior oriental race that could not be assimilated into American society and this popular feeling fuelled the anti-Chinese prejudice that promoted exclusionary immigration legislation. Excluded from the mainstream of American culture, Chinese immigrants were perceived to be incapable of assimilating. Early writing by Chinese immigrants is not only a defense of Chinese culture against charges of inferiority but also an appeal for tolerance and an opportunity to become part of American society. This same prejudice excluded Chinese from most jobs so that laundry became associated with the Chinese not because it was a traditional occupation but because it was one of the lowly jobs Chinese were permitted to do. In China, laundry was women's work but many immigrant men found themselves forced to take it up as a trade. Contemporary Chinese American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and David Wong Louie register their reactions to the stereotype of the Chinese laundryman. In David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians are Coming the protagonist Sterling resents his father in part because he lived as the stereotype dictates: working ten-hour days in the laundry and sleeping in a cramped back room. In The Woman Warrior, however, Kingston’s protagonist recalls how angry she would become as a child hearing white Americans make comments that reveal their assumption that the family lives in the back of the laundry, even though they own their own house. Kingston is angered that she is perceived through the stereotype even when her family does not fit those terms.

It is within the context of pervasive racial stereotyping and anti-Chinese hostility that the achievement of Sui Sin Far must be measured. She produced images of Chinese that resisted the predominant stereotypes at a time when no other writer was doing so. Unlike upper-class immigrant authors who described their lives as part of China’s cultural elite, Sui Sin Far chose to write about life in America’s Chinatowns. In her work, for the first time, Chinese American characters became the subjects of literary expression. It is also significant that Sui Sin Far chose to write not only about the Chinese American community but also to write as a person of Chinese ancestry herself. Given the hostility expressed toward Chinese, this was a surprising and courageous decision. Sui Sin Far was a Eurasian with a British father and a Chinese mother. She wrote under the pseudonym of Sui Sin Far but her real name was Edith Maude Eaton. Her sister, Winifred Lillie Eaton, chose to deny her Chinese background and published stories under the Japanese pseudonym of Onoto Watanna. In the latter part of the nineteenth century through to the outbreak of World War II, Japanese were the preferred Oriental race in America. Where Chinese were stereotyped as barbaric, uncivilized, and unassimilable, Japanese were seen as everything the Chinese were not: a race compatible with Western values, civilized and cultured. This view changed abruptly with the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. Winifred can be credited with publishing the first novel by an Asian American, Miss Nume of Japan (1899) though this novel is set in Asia and does not address the Asian American experience. It was Winifred’s sister Edith who produced the first stories about Chinese American life. Her only published book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance appeared in 1912 and gathers many of the stories she published in magazines and newspapers. The themes of these stories focus upon the characters of early Chinatowns and represent the women and children who were omitted from depictions of the Chinese “bachelor societies” that formed when women were prohibited by the Chinese Exclusion Act from traveling from China to join their husbands in America. Other themes include the conflict between tradition versus modernity experienced by immigrants and the change of lifestyle many were forced to make in a new country, the difficulties faced by the children of mixed-race marriages – an issue close to Sui Sin Far’s own experience – and the prejudice against these marriages expressed by both the Chinese and white American communities.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, partly in recognition of the fact that China was America’s ally in the war, and formal restrictions on the kinds of employment available to Chinese were relaxed. In the 1940s, a small group of Chinese American women began publishing: Helena Kuo, Lin Yutang’s daughters Adet and Anor Lin (or Lin Tai-yi), Mai-mai Sze, and Han Suyin. During this time, the second-generation of Chinese Americans, those who were American-born of Chinese immigrant parents, began to write and publish. Jade Snow Wong and Pardee Lowe are the most prominent of these second-generation writers. Their work is characterized by Sau-ling Wong as “autobiography as guided Chinatown tour.”[21] By using this term, Wong suggests how these writers adopt the stance of a cultural guide who describes and explains to a white American readership the significance of Chinese American customs, rituals, and cultural practices. Works like Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) appeal to a new interest in Chinese American lifestyles. As Sau-ling Wong writes of Lowe’s work, it “abounds in descriptions of Chinatown customs and rituals, such as tong banquets, Chinese New Year festivities, celebration of the father’s ‘Great Birthday,’ preparation of unusual (by Western standards) foods, and funeral practices.”[22] Jade Snow Wong similarly describes in detail the family’s annual purchase of a stock of rice; she gives detailed instructions about the preparation of Chinese dishes such as egg foo young; and she explains something of the theory of Chinese herbal medicine.

However, these works also represent the conflicts that characterized this transitional period in Chinese American community life. Both Pardee Lowe and Jade Snow Wong depict their changing attitudes towards their elders and the traditional values enforced by their fathers in particular. Conflicts center upon the shift from tradition to modernity, from conformity to individualism. This is particularly true of Jade Snow Wong’s account of growing up in a traditional Chinese family. She shares some of the expectations of a modern Americanized woman, especially her desire for education. Her father refuses her request for financial support while she continues her studies, though he readily grants this to her brother. Jade Snow Wong must find a way to support herself throughout her college education. Other Chinese American women writing at this time expressed their ambivalent experience of Western culture as liberation from the oppressions of Chinese patriarchy. The value accorded women in American culture was twinned with oppressive anti-Chinese racism. So while women were valued as women, they were marginalized because they were Chinese. Helene Kuo’s autobiography, I’ve Come a Long Way (1942), Su-ling Wong’s Daughter of Confucius (1952), and Katherine Wei’s Second Daughter (1984) all express this ambivalence.

Both Fifth Chinese Daughter and Father and Glorious Descendant are written as autobiographies, following the nineteenth-century American tradition of Chinese writing in English. Autobiography was not a traditional Chinese genre but one adopted by Chinese writers from the American literary tradition. The implied egotism of writing about oneself and one's own life runs directly counter to the Chinese Confucian tradition. Even in Ha Jin’s recent novel Waiting (1999) one of the conservative characters is asked to read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and give an opinion of its literary qualities. He reflects, “the celebration of the poet’s self seemed to verge on a kind of meglomania that ought to be condemned.”[23] The same is true of the generic nature of the autobiographical writings of the American immigrant Chinese community. Fifth Chinese Daughter betrays its American context not only in terms of its genre. Wong adopts the stance of a “cultural guide,” describing in detail Chinese food and cooking, rituals and celebrations, family duties, values, and beliefs. This is a narrative designed to appeal to a white American readership. Jade Snow Wong’s father is an ambiguous character who is initially represented as a force for Chinese traditionalism. However, as the narrative progresses and Jade Snow’s achievements become the pride of the family, her father reveals his commitment not only to inherited Chinese values but also to his Christian beliefs. The Americanized daughter challenges her father to realize his Christian beliefs by changing his behavior towards her. This introduces a conflict between the two cultural perspectives, focussed upon the destiny of the young woman who is partially assimilated into white American culture. She seeks to reconcile Chinese filiality or family duty with American individualism, her desire to do her duty to her parents with her own desire for personal advancement. The narrative ends with a provisional statement of success on these terms. Her father tells Jade Snow about a letter he had written years before to a cousin back in China; he quotes from memory the words he used to inform his cousin: “ ‘You do not realize the shameful and degraded position into which the Chinese culture has pushed its women. Here in America, the Christian concept allows women their freedom and individuality. I wish my daughters to have this Christian opportunity. I am hoping that some day I may be able to claim that by my stand I have washed away the former disgraces suffered by the women of our family.’ Then Daddy turned and looked at her kindly, ‘And who would have thought that you, my Fifth Daughter Jade Snow, would prove today that my words of many years ago were words of true prophecy?’”[24]

Education also proves to be a point of contention between Pardee Lowe and his father. Lowe’s father is represented as a Westernized Chinese who nevertheless enjoys a powerful position within the Chinese community. His sons, for example, are named after American politicians, and are educated at Ivy League colleges. Pardee Lowe’s experience is that despite his high level of educational achievement, he is unable to obtain a correspondingly responsible job after graduation. He resists his father’s advice that he must return to Chinatown and make his career there, in the Chinese community. An important element of the background of Lowe’s narrative is the system of Chinese benevolent associations or tongs that ensured the internal regulation of Chinatown society. These Chinese secret societies, known as the tong organizations, are represented by Lowe in contrast with stereotypical popular images of "Chinese hatchetmen."[25] Tongs thrived in the "bachelor society" created by the exclusion laws by providing a sense of community to immigrant men who otherwise had no family and no means of acquiring a wife and family in America. Under the terms of the exclusion laws, American citizens lost their citizenship upon marriage to a partner who was not eligible for naturalization.

As a kind of counter-culture to the established Chinese community, tongs offered protection when conventional means of protection failed. And during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese in America were a vulnerable ethnic group in need of strong leadership. The tongs originated in San Francisco in the formal co-operation of the elders of the Four Families in the building of a temple consecrated to their ancestors. This fraternal organization provided a model that was copied by other groups to deal with the social welfare requirements of their members. Frank Chin describes how “[t]hese associations, like the Four Families, cared for their own sick, fed and housed their own unfortunate, buried their own dead. They banded together to fight discriminatory legislation against the Chinese. They arbitrated in legal questions. All of these organizations, in spirit and practice, were akin to the pattern of the Four Families’ blood brothers in helping each other and the Chinese people.”[26]

The protagonists of Louis Chu’s novel Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) are created in the image of these Chinatown characters and they have recourse to the tong to resolve their social and cultural problems. When the father-in-law of a disgraced wife assaults her seducer and is charged by the police with the offence, his friends turn to the powerful senior members of the tong to reach a settlement. The family wishes to keep Mei Oi’s disgrace private, even though her adultery is the main topic of gossip throughout Chinatown. The power of the tong is revealed when her seducer, Ah Song, is required by the tong to withdraw the charges of assault and is ostracized from New York for five years. Although he is outraged, Ah Song quickly realizes that he has no choice but to submit to this punishment; if he were to stay in New York, he would have no access to people and entry to all the places he would want to frequent would be barred to him.

The changes brought about in the Chinese American community by the impact of the Second World War are reflected in Louis Chu’s novel. After the war, an influx of Chinese women immigrants and Asian war-brides transformed the male-dominated bachelor societies created by the exclusion laws into thriving communities. This novel focuses upon anxieties surrounding Asian male sexual potency that have been identified by critics such as the editors of the landmark anthology, Aiiieeeee (1974). Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong have challenged the stereotype of the Chinese American man as delicate and effeminate. They attack the racial image of the Asian man as being emasculated, as they point out: “At worst, the Asian American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity.”[27] Louis Chu’s novel deals with the newly married protagonist’s impotence, a private problem that quickly becomes a matter of concern for the community as well as for the young couple.

The narrative is set in New York’s Chinatown and according to critics such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim, it marks the beginning of the tradition of realism in Chinese American literature. Chu explores the darker side of the bachelor societies that were created by exclusionary immigration laws that prevented Chinese men from bringing their wives from China to join them. Some of these men were “sojourners” who intended to stay in America only long enough to make their fortunes and then return to China but were caught by the outbreak of the Revolution and found themselves stranded in a culture into which they have no desire to assimilate. The action of Eat a Bowl of Tea takes place after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, at a time when Ben Loy is able to return to his mother in China where his arranged marriage is to take place. Ben Loy brings his new wife, Mei Oi, back to Chinatown, to a community that seems alien to her because of the lack of women and not because it is a Chinese community within white America. Indeed, little of white America penetrates this community. As Shirley Geok-lin Lim describes,

The depictions of Chinese men without women, spending their days in endless rounds of mah-jongg, the absence of communication between generations, the tyranny of the older over the younger, the oppressive presence of judgmental relatives, provide a corrective perspective to the conventional glowing picture of close kinship in the Chinese community and convey without exaggeration and with an insider’s understanding the contradictions within the family. In this Chinatown drama there is hardly any intrusion of the white, English-speaking world; the characters are all Chinese immigrants operating in the framework of the parent society. The arranged marriage, the approved assault of the aggrieved father-in-law on the marriage breaker, the couple’s isolation amid Chinatown gossips, and the political arrangements through which the Tong, the informal communal association, takes over the criminal justice system occur in a relentlessly closed-off Chinese society.[28]

Louis Chu’s work differs from earlier writings in that he does set out to explain or justify the society of Chinatown for a white readership. He does not gloss over the seamier side of bachelor life – the novel opens with a prostitute attempting to gain entry to Ben Loy’s apartment. Indeed, Ben Loy’s problem is the memory of his sexual encounters with a succession of prostitutes during his bachelor days; these memories render him impotent with his new wife. The language, characterization, and setting are all realistic, in particular Chu’s evocation of Chinatown slang and the peculiar idiom of Chinatown. In contrast to Chu’s achievement, other writers persisted in representing a sanitized version of Chinese American culture that would appeal to white stereotypes while representing a sympathetic portrait of Chinese American life. For example, Virginia Lee’s The House that Tai Ming Built (1963) uses Chinese stereotypes to present a positive image of Chinese culture. The narrative is sentimental and lacking in analysis of the characters’ motivation; rather, it focuses upon the artefacts that surround the characters in order to create an exotic and tasteful milieu in which they can move. Shirley Geok-lin Lim argues that Lee’s is

a reverse racism that robs her fiction of reality and inherent significance as surely as negative prejudices do. Her description of Lin’s family is composed of sentimental clichés: the grandfather is warm, serene, diligently playful, while the father embodies ‘all the virtues expected of a man’ (4). The novel’s first section gives a simpering portrait of the grandfather; the second and third sections deal half-heartedly with the increasing conflicts between the parents. When, finally, Lin has an affair with Scott, the white hero, the dramatic denouement, in which she wishes she ‘had been born an O’Malley or a Smith’ (191), is lost in the welter of conventional romancing. Triteness of plot (girl meets boy, girl loses boy) is not as damaging as the triteness of language. The influence of racist and sexist ideology on Lee’s choice of language is all too apparent, for example, in her use of jade images to represent Chinese identity. Female characters are described by words and images such as sweet, perfumed, lilacs, lavender, fragrance, graceful, lovely, exquisite, luminous, and so on.”[29]

The contrast between Virginia Lee’s language and the Chinatown idiom of Louis Chu is continued by Frank Chin’s attempts to create a “Chinaman” language that expresses the particularity of Chinese American life by combining Cantonese slang with urban black idiom (inspired by the Black Power movement), and English. This attempt alienated some reviewers of Chin’s early play Chickencoop Chinaman (1972). The protagonist of this play, Tam, in the first scene answers Dream Girl’s question about where he was born with a tirade: “Born? No! Crashed! Not born. Stamped! Not born! Created! Not born. No more born than the heaven and earth. No more born than nylon or acrylic. For I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic!”[30] Tam refuses to be identified as either Chinese or American; instead, he is a new creation and a hybrid of both. Not only the language of Chin’s work but the cultural context he creates is also highly hybridized, combining the heroic Chinese tradition with American popular culture. Frank Chin’s writing in drama and prose is a form of protest literature. Chin attacks those Chinese Americans he calls “racists,” who adopt inauthentic ethnic identities by acting according to stereotypes of Chinese Americans. In Chin’s 1991 novel Donald Duk he explores the experience of a young boy who hates his Chinese ancestry, symbolized by his name (Donald Duk), but who comes to understand that his heritage is an ancient and heroic culture that has been obscured by the power of American racial prejudice. Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) recounts the adventures of Chinese American playwright Wittman Ah Sing as he prepares to stage a performance that will reverse racial stereotypes and reunite the entire Chinese American community through the myth-making power of art. Wittman has been claimed by some critics to be a fictional representation of Frank Chin, though Kingston denies that this is the case.

The difficulty of being Chinese American – neither Chinese nor American -- and the search for an authentic identity occupy many post-60s writers. David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly caused controversy when it was first performed in 1988 because of the way in which Hwang explores the cultural forces exerted upon Oriental identity. As Sau-ling Wong explains:

Although not set in Asian America, M. Butterfly was immediately hailed by some as a central text in Asian American literature because, in fusing this story to the outlines of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, it works to deconstruct sexism, Orientalism, and imperialism, which are ongoing concerns in the literary tradition. Yet applause for this deconstruction is countered by bitter criticism, especially from Asian American men, against the play’s restaging of Orientalist stereotypes (the wimpy man, the sneaky spy, and so on). Finally, because the relationship depicted is in fact a homosexual one, M. Butterfly raises questions about how sexual orientation intersects with race and gender in Asian American identity and cultural politics.[31]

This concern harkens back to the issue of male sexuality in Eat a Bowl of Tea but also points to the increasing concern with the relationship between sexual identity and personal and ethnic identity among contemporary writers. For example, Catherine Liu’s novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance (1997) explores the complex interplay between sexual and ethnic stereotypes as the protagonist attempts to come to terms with her bisexuality and her hybrid Chinese and American cultural identity.

Contemporary Chinese American writers reject racial stereotypes and represent instead the pursuit of alternative self-images. However, racial stereotypes are part of the cultural terrain that they must navigate in their writing. The response to stereotypes and the impact of racial prejudice upon the formation of personal identity becomes an important dimension of their writing. Many of these writers are the children of immigrant parents who are seeking to come to terms with the different cultural pressures to which they are subject in America. So Maxine Hong Kingston writes about the difficulties she encountered dealing with her mother in The Woman Warrior and her father in China Men. Like Kingston’s work, David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians are Coming explores the complications encountered by the children of immigrant parents who grow up American but in a traditional Chinese family. This novel focuses on the relationship between Sterling Lung and his father and his sons – the three generations of males trying to find an authentic way of relating to each other. The immigrant parents represented in Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996) represent a departure from the Cantonese historical context that informs earlier Chinese American literature. Ralph is not an immigrant laborer from Canton but a student from Shanghai who finds himself isolated in America by the outbreak of the Communist Revolution in China so he cannot return home. He becomes Chinese American by accident and these circumstances affect the relationship he is able to forge with his American-born children.

Following the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, influential books have appeared exploring the relationship between Chinese-born mothers and American-born daughters: Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981), Alice Lin’s Grandmother Gad No Name (1988), Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993), and Amy Tan’s blockbuster novels The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) focus upon this theme. Fae Myenne Ng’s novel represents the trauma of a family dealing with the death by suicide of their middle daughter. This tragedy leads all the family members to examine the reasons why Ona should have taken her own life but it is the eldest daughter Leila, the narrator, and her relationship with her mother that is the focus of the narrative. Ng, like Kingston, explores the inherited difficulties of immigrant life from the perspective of the American-born daughter. Amy Tan, however, retells the story of her mother’s life in the novels The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), a theme she first explored in The Joy Luck Club (1989). In her first novel, Tan juxtaposes the narration of mothers and their daughters, giving each generation equal opportunity to express feelings of separation from, betrayal of, and loyalty to, the other. What emerges from these stories is a sense of struggle to survive combined with powerful affections and loyalties.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior transformed the literary options available to Chinese American writers by creating a subject for literature of her subjective life. Rather than explain how she lives as a Chinese American woman, Kingston describes what it is like, what it feels like, to be a Chinese American woman. Writers such as Ng, Tan, and Liu also explore the inner landscapes of their protagonists’ minds rather than offer a “guided tour” of the social and cultural world in which they live. The anthropological interest of earlier writers such as Pardee Lowe and Jade Snow Wong is replaced by this psychological analysis of Chinese American experience. However, Kingston’s work is rooted in Chinese American literary history. Kingston has pointed out that until she read Fifth Chinese Daughter she had not appreciated the possibility that a Chinese American woman could be the protagonist of her own story.[32] It was Wong’s example that enabled Kingston to write the story of her relationship with her mother, and to use the medium of narrative to analyze her ambivalent relationship with the China of her parents and the America of her own childhood and adolescence. Even as Chinese American literature advances, then, still it looks back to the history of Chinese writing in English as it has developed over the course of the past century and a half.

from Chinese American Writers (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002).

1. History of Chinese American Literature

AN OVERVIEW OF CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE

THE EVOLUTION OF CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE

NOTES