Asian American Literature

Unit-5.-Asian-American-literatur...
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La pluralidad en la literatura norteamericana
4º Grado en Estudios Ingleses
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Universidad de Málaga
Reservados todos los derechos.

No se permite la explotación económica ni la transformación de esta obra. Queda permitida la impresión en su totalidad.
Unit 5. Asian-American Literature
Background: Angel Island (1910-1940)

Immigration Station to process Chinese Immigrants claiming citizenship and exempt
statuses.
Alexander Weiss preserved the testimonies he found on the barracks in the book Island:
Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, (1910-1940) published in 1980.
Were mistreated and discriminated against: 1882 - Chinese Exclusion Act

Impressions of immigrants of their voyage to America, longing for families, outrage and
humiliation at the treatment America accorded them. California Gold Rush, building of the
transcontinental railroad, developing the shrimp and abalone fisheries, the vineyards,
reclaiming swamplands, and California’s agriculture industries.
Early Chinese American Poetry

Immigrants were locked up in barracks for years, some committed suicide, others vented
their frustrations and anguish by writing or carving Chinese poems on walls. Mostly
Cantonese villagers. Poems are undated and unsigned. Feelings of anger, frustration,
uncertainty, hope and despair, self-pity, homesickness, and loneliness.
Poems are written in a classical style, with frequent references to famous literary or heroic
figures in Chinese legend and history. Many poems exhibit resentment at being confined and
bitterness that their motherland cannot help them. Many poems violate rules of rhyme and
tone required in Chinese poetry.
W.E.B DU BOIS (1868-1963)

- Double Consciousness.
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – An American, an – two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals”.
Bu Bois re (conceptualizes) the Hegelian understanding of consciousness into a sociological,
psychological and philosophical double consciousness that seeks to reconcile itself with its
antagonistic yet connected and often similar other.
Carved on the Walls

1) What themes do these poems cover?
Misplacement, loss, questions of identity, loneliness, a lot of frustration. The legends who
help them to wait.
2) To what purpose do writers make reference to heroic figures/gods from Chinese
tradition?
Not to forget them and remember them. Keep their identity. Their perseverance of the
culture. They want to preserve their pride, attachment to positive values.
3) What type of images do we do in the poems? Can you give examples of metaphors?
China is not taking care of them, they are not in China, they are not in America -> they are
lost in the middle of nowhere.
The image of the cage is a cage no matter how big it is -> tiny cage into a beautiful cage which
is the city.
a64b0469ff35958ef4ab887a898bd50bdfbbe91a-7196897
Reservados todos los derechos. No se permite la explotación económica ni la transformación de esta obra. Queda permitida la impresión en su totalidad.
The streams of tears -> the image of sadness
Images of nature, for example, the birds, the moon -> to communicate some emotions and
feelings.
The Writing on the Wall by Camile T. Dungy.
"On a long voyage I travelled across the sea.
Feeding on wind and sleeping on dew, I tasted hardships.
Even though Su Wu was detained among the barbarians,
he would one day return home.
When he encountered a snow storm, Wengong sighed,
thinking of by gone years.
In days of old, heroes underwent many ordeals.
I am, in the end, a man whose goal is unfulfilled.
Let this be an expression of the torment which fills my belly.
Leave this as a memento to encourage fellow souls."
Comparison of this everyday man, somebody who knows very little of the world, going
through a very powerful deal, in order to gain strength, he makes references to this ‘Su Wu’
person. According to him, the barbarians are the Americans that have detained him. He
wishes to go back to his house one day. It is about endurance, perseverance, and hope. And
in the last lines, if it was not easy for these heroes, it’s not going to be easy for me. There is a
practical message in this poem.
"...Do not treat these words as idle words.

Why not let them deport you back to China?
You will find some work and endure to earn a couple of meals."
He is referring to if you go back to China, this is what you will have. If you stay here you will
have more than a couple of meals and hard work. There’s nothing back there.
The insects chirp outside the four walls.

The inmates often sigh.
Thinking of affairs back home,
Unconscious tears wet my lapel.
‘Inmates’ are in prison, a prison-like life. This person is obviously crying because his
situation is so bad. A community of suffering, everyone is having a hard time.
These writers turned to the ancient tradition of public poetry to reconstruct their sense of
self:
The west wind ruffles my thin gauze clothing.

On the hill sits a tall building with a room of wooden planks.
I wish I could travel on a cloud for away, reunite my wife and son.
When the moonlight shines on me alone, the night seems even longer.
Self-pity, melancholy, he’s cold. All he can see is a building that he doesn’t know.
At the head of the bed there is wine and my heart is constantly drunk.
There is no flower beneath my pillow and my dreams are not sweet.
To whom can I confide my innermost feelings?
I rely solely on close friends to relieve my loneliness.
si lees esto me debes un besito

La pluralidad en la literatu...
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Asian American Literature
Circumstances of war has infected these writings: the Philippine-American War, World War
II and the Japanese occupation of Asian countries, the internment of Japanese Americans,
wars in Korea and Vietnam, these conflicts are corded throughout Asian American Literature
Recurring issues running throughout this enormous body of work: loss of homeland,
alienation in new country, cultural conflicts, issues of identity, family, gender, relations, class
differences, hope in America, anger against America, memory, longing history -> EXAM
Lee Yan Phou When I was a Boy in China was published in 1887, and in the late 1880s short
pieces by Sui Sin Far (aka Edith Eaton) began appearing in American periodicals. Some of
Sui SIN Far's writings were collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), which was noted for
its non stereotypical Asian and American characters.
Other early works documenting the lives of Chinese immigrants include Songs of Fold
Mountain: Cantonese RHymes from San Francisco Chinatown (edited by Marlon K. Hom,
1987) which were originally published in 1911 and 1915.
In 1974 the playwright Frank Chin, together with Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lwson Fusao Inada, and
Shawn Hsu Wong (Homebase, 1979; American Knees, 1995), published the seminal
anthology of Asian American literature “Aiiieeeee'' (1974) In 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston’s
debut novel, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood among Ghosts, created a
sensation with its genre-subverting style and its representation of a Chinese American girls
coming of age. The Woman Warrior and Kingstn’s later works, China Men (1980) and
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), echo with a unique Chinese American cultural
history drawn from Chinese and American myths and sensibilities.
In 1972, Aiiieeeee! editor Frank Chin, whose works also include the novels Donald Duck
(1991) and Gunga Din Highway (1994). saw his Chickencoop Cinaman become the first
Asian American play to be performed on the New York stage, signaling the beginnings of a
flourishing Chinese American drama scene.
The celebrated David Henry Hwang wrote his first play, FOB, IN 1978, and a decade later his
Madame Butterfly (1998), based on the true story of a twenty-year affair between a French
diplomat and a Chinese transvestite opera singer, garnered a Tony award for best play of the
year.
Japanese American Literature

First generation immigrants known as Issei, arrived toward the end of the 19th-century,
when the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the easing of Japanese emigration laws spurred male
Japanese Immigrants to Hawaii.
Miss Numé of Japan (1899) by Onoto Watanna is considered by some the first Asian
American novel to be published in the United States.
The internment during World War II of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans raised
questions of national loyalty and identity, particularly for the Nisei (Second generation
Japanese-Americans); consequently, internment literature often reflects Japanese

Americans ambivalence toward the United States. John Okaada’s No No Boy (1957) directly
confronts the loyalty oath that Japanese Americans were forced to sign.
Hisaye Yamamoto, who was interned at Poston, Arizona, wrote a number of short stories
collected in Seventeen Syllables (1988). Her fiction reflects camp life but delves into other
experiences, such as jobs as a reporter and as a cook in Massachusetts. Mitsuye Yamada’s
poetry and fiction (Camp Notes 1976; Desert Run, 1988) confront crises of racism and
sexism during World War II and within the camps.
The injuries of racism, war and internment also emerge through Japanese American poets
such as Lawson Fusao Inada, whose jazz-influenced verse reflects the political sensibilities of
the 1960s and 1970s; his collections include Before the War (1971) and Legends from Camp
(1992)
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

Her novel, The Woman Warrior received the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best
book of nonfiction in 1976. Time Magazine proclaimed it one of the top ten nonfiction works
of the decade.
In 1977 Kingston won the Mademoiselle Magazine Award. In 1978 the Anisfield-Wolf Book
Award. In 1980 Kingston was proclaimed Living Treasure of Hawaii
The book is a collage of fiction and fact, memory and imagination – a hybrid genre of
Kingston’s own devising.
Through the Chinese Legends and family stories that marked her childhood and the
mysterious old-world customs that her mother enforced but did not explain, through
Kingston’s own experiences and her imaginative poetic flights.
TWW details the complexities and difficulties in Kingston’s development as a woman and as
a Chinese American, It focuses on a difficult and finally reconciled mother/daughter
relationship. Her second book, China Men focuses on men and is shaped by a rather
uncommunicative father/daughter relationship. Its purpose is to claim America for Chinese
Americans by showing how indebted America is.
To the labor of Chinese men, her great-grandfathers and grandfathers, who cleared jungle for
the sugar plantations in Hawaii, who split rock and hammered steel to build railroads, who
created fertile farmland out of swamp and desert, yet faced fierce discrimination and
persecution. In this text, too, Kingston blends myth and fact, autobiography and fiction,
blurring the usual dividing lines.
No Name Woman
The mother-women relationship is important for Maxime. Whenever her mom has
something important to communicate with her, what is the tone?
Maxime follows her rule once her mother gives the piece of information, but she retells the
story with a different message.
Discussion Questions
1. What family secret is disclosed at the beginning?
“You must not tell anyone” -> she had an aunt that committed suicide, jumped into a well
and also killed her baby.
2. Why were men in the village in a hurry to get married?
“In 1924 [...]” Those who had migrated to America and were not married, were sent a picture
from China to America in order to get married. The idea was not to stay, go for a little bit and
then go back to China. And if they could get their wives pregnant was better because they
were sure that they would have to go back to take care of their children.
3. What is the Chinese name for America? Why?
The gold mountain. Because it was the place to get money for home and sometimes to bring
the wives.
4. What was wrong with the narrator’s aunt?
She was pregnant by someone who was not her husband. The right thing is to think that is
the son of the man that has left her.
5. How did the villagers react to this pregnancy? What they reacted the way
they did it?
The men in the villager entered the house with violence, they destroyed everything they
could have, they were very violent, you have a very strong distracted masculine energy here.
They suspect to react this way because they think that she has conceived that baby outside
marriage, that she cheated on her husband and that the baby is not her husbands.
6. What does the narrator have to learn from her aunt?
They think that she has been sleeping around and she was pregnant by another person.
Adultery. The reader is never sure if it is something that her husband did or someone else
did. She had to learn to not get pregnant
7. What do the terms “invisible world” and “the unspeakable” refer to?
How is this important? For whom?
On the one hand, it is a relationship between mother and daughter. On the other hand,it
refers to the bad things that happened to women in that Chinese tradition, the forbidden
stories are unspeakable, and the suffer of women in that society
8. At what times do Chinese American children feel “guilty”? For what
reason?
They feel guilty because their parents have to waste money on them. She compares adultery
with having a cake in your hands.
9. What does the writer suspect happened to her aunt? And her aunt’s
husband?
It is a story of adultery, but there is something else, the writer realizes that her aunt has been
a victim of rape, it was not adultery, so she feels very guilty. Her aunt’s husband was never
there because he was in America. Her husband left her totally alone knowing that Chinese
women have no power over herself or her body. The family blames her as much as the rapist.
So, Maxime is saying that they are crazy at the expense of women.
10. What do we learn about traditional ways concerning the beauty practices
of Chinese-American women?
eyebrows, elaborate way of plucking the eyebrows. which is painful.Feet bands
11. What is her aunt's ultimate sacrifice for the sake of tradition?
Killing herself and kill the baby
12. What does the writer learn from her parent’s conversations at night?
She learns that women were mistreated by those who supposedly have to protect them
(family)
13. How do traditional Chinese women relate to issues of beauty?

How does this affect Chinese American girls?
On the one hand, the story says that women who pay attention to their beauty are the
unspeakable. However, in America, she was introduced to some practices, for example,
having little feet, and depilatories techniques.
14. How does the family react to the raiding of the house and lands? What
does the narrator’s aunt do?
Her aunt becomes a very specific figure in this invisible world for the family. A ghost. The
moment she does what she does and their house is raided,she becomes a ghost, because no
one will ever speak with her or about her. She runs into the fields not knowing what to do.
15. What did her aunt do in an act of love?
She gives birth to the baby and then in an act of love she kills the baby.
16. What turns out to be the second unspeakable act of the story?.
Rape, adultery, suicide and sex. Maxime is very upset with this.
17. What is Maxime at the very end of the story thinking that is going to
happen if she doesn’t tell?
My aunt haunts me. She offers retribution for her aunt, but also personally, that she will
commits suicide, that the story will begin again.
18. How can you explain the aunt’s final action?
First, killing the baby, then herself.
19. What is the real punishment of the story?
Being forgotten by your family, in this case, her aunt was forgotten by everyone,
20. How does her aunt receive retribution? By whom?
The telling of the story by Maxime, she tells the story of her aunt.
21. Why was she afraid at the end of her aunt?
A ghost can take revenge and she is the one who knows the story. So, Maxime could commit
suicide. The mother says to Maxime that she has to be careful because she can get pregnant.
Maxime decides that her aunt was reaped by someone closer to them in order to reflect the
thoughts of Chinese people -> invisibility of women.
“Lawson Fusao Inada” “Introduction to All Persons” (1992)

Call and response of African American tradition in its structure.
Solidarity with other ethnic minorities such as African Americans (black church) . The poem
redefines and questions the dominant ideological positioning of exterior and interior space.
Revealing racist practices at the cost of the freedom of the racial other. Inada made a lot of
efforts in order to recover all these writers that have been forgotten. For a lot of people, this
event would be a very traumatic experience.
The poem engages and transforms dominant discursive meanings through citation and
reiteration.
The assumption of racial treachery on the Japanese American subject. The response by racial
formation by the state is realized in the poem through repetition and configured from
instructional sentence to a call and response structure, transformed into percussive and
dialogic form.
Taking the form of a ritual: a repeated enactment of what has come before, contesting
dominant meanings and transforming this text of punitive racialization into an occasion for
racial community building -> shame, guilt, they could not understand that they were doing it
because Americans were punishing them for being Japanese.

Jazz poetics of repetition and improvisation claiming that power is not deterministic, for the
subject can rearticulate power and turn it against itself -> it is not just obeying those norms,
he is questioning those norms, saying that Americans have to be ashamed for what they are
doing.
Four stanzas with more or less the same beginning. At the bottom, two stanzas with
variations.
Verbal time of the beginning: they are going on a trip “Let us take what we can for this
occasion” -> a movement is going to begin; they are getting their things for the departure.
They see the journey and the palace they are going to.
Ancestry: the first thing that they need, they need to know where they come from, in order to
know themselves, who they are because if you know who you are, you can achieve
subjectivity and you can say to the government that you are not the other, that you are the
subject and you know who you are and who your parents are.
Ancestry is repeated at the beginning and at the end of the poem -> circular structure.
Americans on the west and Japanese on the east, so they do not get in touch -> “with the
boundary”. Isolation of the US government.
“Let us bring what we need for the meeting” -> they are already in the camp. Once inside the
camp, who says the rules in the camp? The American people. The last thing they need ->
family because for Americans it is potentially dangerous for security.
“Let us have what we have for the gathering” -> there is nothing else, there is a disaster but it
is what we have, so we have to make the best of this disaster. So, the grammar category of the
words of this stanza is noun.
Grammar category of civil, ways, services, respect, management, kinds, goods, all -> they are
nouns.
The poem shapes history and time. Variability, changes in human history, nothing reminds
the same forever. A black critic (African American) that includes repetition in musical notes,
poetry that is not linear, it is circular, ideas move -> the static of change.
The poem is written from a point of view that reflects the changes of place and status. The
foundation of the poem is totally opposite of what we find -> home versus the life in the
camp -> the opposite of the city (home) and the camp. Our world is built around opposites in
order to explain our material world.They are a source of full citizens.
Racing & (E) racing Language: Living in the Color of Our Words. Juliana Chang
's: L. Inadas Jazz Poetics”

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Unit-5.-Asian-American-literatur...

La pluralidad en la literatura norteamericana

4º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Reservados todos los derechos.

Background: Angel Island (1910-1940)

Were mistreated and discriminated against: 1882 - Chinese Exclusion Act

Early Chinese American Poetry

W.E.B DU BOIS (1868-1963)

Carved on the Walls

"...Do not treat these words as idle words.

The insects chirp outside the four walls.

The west wind ruffles my thin gauze clothing.

si lees esto me debes un besito

Japanese American Literature

si lees esto me debes un besito

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

si lees esto me debes un besito

“Lawson Fusao Inada” “Introduction to All Persons” (1992)

si lees esto me debes un besito

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