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5 books match the query 'Chinese Americans in literature'

cover of Chinese American Literature since the 1850s

Chinese American Literature since the 1850s

Xiao-huang Yin

University of Illinois Press, 2000

The writings of immigrants from China and their descendants in the United States reflect the changes and continuity in the Chinese American experience. Xiao-huang Yin combines literary and historical scholarship to trace the origins and development of this extensive, neglected body of literature. 

Chinese American Literature since the 1850s covers representative works from the 1850s to the present. Selections include journalism and autobiography by nineteenth-century Chinese authors; writings on the walls of Angel Island, the main Asian immigrant arrival point on the West Coast; writings of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century "cultivated Chinese," students and scholars who came to America to advance their educations; important writing by immigrants such as Chen Ruoxi, Yu Lihua, and Zhang Xiguo; and the works of more recent authors like Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan. 

An essential introduction and guide to the field, Chinese American Literature since the 1850s enlarges the available body of literature and provides new insights into the Chinese American immigrant experience and the writing inspired by it.

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cover of Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature

Crossing Cultures

Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature

Judith Oster

University of Missouri Press, 2003

In this important new study, Judith Oster looks at the literature of Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans in relation to each other. Examining what is most at issue for both groups as they live between two cultures, languages, and environments, Oster focuses on the struggles of protagonists to form identities that are necessarily bicultural and always in process. Recognizing what poststructuralism has demonstrated regarding the instability of the subject and the impossibility of a unitary identity, Oster contends that the writers of these works are attempting to shore up the fragments, to construct, through their texts, some sort of wholeness and to answer at least partially the questions Who am I? and Where do I belong?
            Oster also examines the relationship of the reader to these texts. When encountering texts written by and about “others,” readers enter a world different from their own, only to find that the book has become mirrorlike, reflecting aspects of themselves: they encounter identity struggles that are familiar but writ large, more dramatic, and set in alien environments.
            Among the figures Oster considers are writers of autobiographical works like Maxine Hong Kingston and Eva Hoffman and writers of fiction: Amy Tan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Lan Samantha Chang, and Frank Chin. In explicating their work, Oster uses Lacan’s idea of the “mirror stage,” research in language acquisition and bilingualism, the reader-response theories of Iser and Wimmers, and the identity theories of Charles Taylor, Emile Benveniste, and others.
            Oster provides detailed analyses of mirrors and doubling in bicultural texts; the relationships between language and identity and between language and culture; and code-switching and interlanguage (English expressed in a foreign syntax). She discusses food and hunger as metaphors that express the urgent need to hear and tell stories on the part of those forging a bicultural identity. She also shows how American schooling can undermine the home culture’s deepest values, exacerbating children’s conflicts within their families and within themselves. In a chapter on theories of autobiography, Oster looks at the act of writing and how the page becomes a home that bicultural writers create for themselves. Written in an engaging, readable style, this is a valuable contribution to the field of multicultural literary criticism.
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cover of Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative

Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities

The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative

Heidi Kim

Temple University Press, 2021

In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high.

Kim explores how writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee, among others, addressed issues of history, family, blood purity, and law through then-groundbreaking novels and memoirs. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities also uses legal cases, immigration documents, and law as well as mass media coverage to illustrate how writers constructed stories in relation to the political structures that allowed or disallowed their presence, their citizenship, and their blended identity. 

Kim illuminates the rapidly shifting political and social pressures on Chinese American authors who selectively concealed, revealed, and reconstructed issues of citizenship, belonging, and inclusion in their writing.

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cover of Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America

Marginal Sights

Staging the Chinese in America

James S. Moy

University of Iowa Press, 1994

Since the beginning of the Western tradition in drama, dominant cultures have theatrically represented marginal or foreign racial groups as other—different form "normal" people, not completely human, uncivilized, quaint, exotic, comic. Playwrights and audiences alike have been fascinated with racial difference, and this fascination has depended upon a process of fetishization. By the time Asians appeared in the United States, the framework for their constructed Lotus Blossom and Charlie Chan stereotypes had preceded them. InMarginal Sights, James Moy dismantles these stereotypes in an unrelenting attack on Anglo American institutions of racial representation.
Reading the Chinese stereotype through several media, Moy notes the consistency of Anglo America's construction of what he terms Chineseness. He rejects the dominant cultural assertion that stereotypes contain a germ of truth, arguing instead that this so-called germ of truth is itself a construction the serves the evolving social and material concerns of an often sinophobic white America. Through time the stereotypes have taken on a life of their own, and those who sought to overturn them have often failed, thus seemingly validating them. Moy, on the other hand, spotlights the constructed Orientals so brilliantly that the real Asian Americans behind them can become visible at last. Consisting of ten readings of Chineseness in America, this sophisticated text reveals the source of representational racial oppression in America. Moy examines diverse sites of representation from museum displays, cartoons, and plays to early photographs, films, circus acts, performance art, and pornography. His persuasive assault on the responsible institutions is uncompromising. However, with surprising insouciance, Moy juxtaposes wit with the often grim details of America's representational legacy.
While Marginal Sights focuses on Chineseness in America, Moy makes explicit its applicability to all institutionally managed representations, racial and otherwise. Anyone interested in Anglo-American and Asian American studies, cultural and film studies, theatre history, communication, and psychology will need to read this book.
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cover of The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China

The Mouth That Begs

Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China

Gang Yue

Duke University Press, 1999

The Chinese ideogram chi is far richer in connotation than the equivalent English verb “to eat.” Chi can also be read as “the mouth that begs for food and words.” A concept manifest in the twentieth-century Chinese political reality of revolution and massacre, chi suggests a narrative of desire that moves from lack to satiation and back again. In China such fundamental acts as eating or refusing to eat can carry enormous symbolic weight. This book examines the twentieth-century Chinese political experience as it is represented in literature through hunger, cooking, eating, and cannibalizing. At the core of Gang Yue’s argument lies the premise that the discourse surrounding the most universal of basic human acts—eating—is a culturally specific one.
Yue’s discussion begins with a brief look at ancient Chinese alimentary writing and then moves on to its main concern: the exploration and textual analysis of themes of eating in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth period through the post-Tiananmen era. The broad historical scope of this volume illustrates how widely applicable eating-related metaphors can be. For instance, Yue shows how cannibalism symbolizes old China under European colonization in the writing of Lu Xun. In Mo Yan’s 1992 novel Liquorland, however, cannibalism becomes the symbol of overindulgent consumerism. Yue considers other writers as well, such as Shen Congwen, Wang Ruowang, Lu Wenfu, Zhang Zianliang, Ah Cheng, Zheng Yi, and Liu Zhenyun. A special section devoted to women writers includes a chapter on Xiao Hong, Wang Anyi, and Li Ang, and another on the Chinese-American women writers Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan. Throughout, the author compares and contrasts the work of these writers with similarly themed Western literature, weaving a personal and political semiotics of eating.
The Mouth That Begs will interest sinologists, literary critics, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and everyone curious about the semiotics of food.


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