In August of 1972, the Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was working on an article about theatre in New York’s Chinatown. He was focussing on the challenges faced by performers who had recently emigrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They were shut out of mainstream productions, and the grassroots theatre scene was still maturing. Blumenthal’s editor asked a colleague named Frank Ching, who presumably knew a bit more about that part of town, to look the piece over. Ching felt that Blumenthal cast the broader Chinese-American population as foreign. He recommended some more interesting artists to Blumenthal, who ended up including a parenthetical mention of an up-and-coming playwright named Frank Chin. Ching likely believed that he was doing a favor for Chin, whose “Chickencoop Chinaman” had opened at the American Place Theatre months earlier. At the very least, Ching must have felt that he had helped sneak an edgier name into an otherwise drab roundup. But Chin was furious to be included at all.
Chin, who considered himself a fifth-generation Chinese-American, wrote Ching a letter complaining about seeing his name in Blumenthal’s piece alongside the “Chinese from China.” Ching didn’t understand why Chin felt so aggrieved, and responded that “the average person’s” conflation of newer immigrants with those who had been in America for generations was “understandable,” a reflection of ignorance but not of outright racism. Their interest in Chinatown was something to work with. Chin disagreed. “As far as I’m concerned,” he replied, “Americanized Chinese who’ve come over in their teens and later to settle here and American born Chinaman [sic] have nothing in common, culturally, intellectually, emotionally.” Ching reprinted their back-and-forth in Bridge, a magazine based in Chinatown that he helped oversee. As its title suggested, Bridge set out to explore the diasporic bonds of the Chinese in America. Although Chin had explored Chinatown in his plays and in a documentary, he also wanted to be recognized as something different. He and his friends were sketching out the contours of a new identity that had emerged in the late sixties: Asian-American.
Identity politics offers a voluntary response to an involuntary situation. Power structures beyond our grasp sort us according to categories not of our own choosing, predestining us to be seen in a certain way by (as Ching might put it) “the average person.” Choosing to call oneself an Asian-American, rather than answering to “Oriental,” makes the most of an imposition. It offers some people a ready-made sense of purpose, short-circuiting the power of an epithet imposed from without. Students and activists in California invented this term in the late sixties, inspired by Black Power and similar movements among Native Americans and Chicanos, and those involved in Third World Liberation. They ultimately emphasized what connected different Asian-immigrant communities and their struggles: efforts to resist gentrification and alleviate poverty, the antiwar movement, stereotypes about Asians as passive or perpetually foreign. The term implied a set of shared historical conditions. Where to go next was an open question.
Chin and Ching weren’t the first people to debate the merits of Asian-American assimilation, though Chin might have been the first to put this debate in such colorful terms. He felt that many Chinese-American writers were interested in being “prizewinning poodles” answering the beck and call of “the master race.” What’s more, he thought the literature that Bridge occasionally published was “shit.” “If the purpose of BRIDGE is to bind me to the immigrants,” Chin wrote, “I’m not interested in being bound.”
Chin felt bound, instead, to other writers who were eager to explore this new identity. One of his early advocates was the black writer Ishmael Reed. Chin had befriended Jeffery Paul Chan and Shawn Wong, and, in 1970, the three met Lawson Fusao Inada at a party that Reed hosted. Chan and Wong wrote fiction; Inada was a poet. Alongside their own writing, they dug for older works, scouring libraries and used-book stores for predecessors. They felt as though American culture had wrecked their brains, leaving many of their peers awash in self-contempt. In the process of excavation and creation, they were testing out their own theories of what this new identity could mean. Reed called them the Four Horsemen of Asian-American literature. Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong founded the Combined Asian American Resources Project in order to preserve the literary history that they were piecing together. They soon felt that they had found as much as anyone had.
Besides, they were less interested in uncovering historical precursors than in starting something new. In the fifties and sixties, writers like C. Y. Lee and Betty Lee Sung had tasted success, becoming models of hardworking Asian-Americans dealing with identity crises. They took for granted the task of successful assimilation; they did not ask why, or on whose terms. The Chinese writer Lin Yutang, who first lived in the U.S. as a graduate student at Harvard, had experienced American success in the thirties as a kind of spokesperson for Chinese manners and civilization. In 1948, he published “Chinatown Family,” one of the first novels about Chinatown written by someone of Chinese descent. Yet he actually knew very little about the Chinese-American experience. His editor, a white man, fed him details that he plugged into his domestic drama. Successes like these embodied what Chan and Chin termed “racist love,” their lively framing of the model-minority myth. American readers accepted Asian authors, Chan and Chin argued, as long as they conformed to stereotypes of social passivity.
The Four Horsemen had no interest in being loved, especially by white people. Chin, in particular, was sensitive about grammar and the gatekeepers’ ideas of “good English.” When an editor asked to tidy some grammatical errors, he called her the “great white bitch goddess priestess of the sacred white mouth.” To follow the guidance of mainstream American culture, he thought, was to accede to self-hatred. He wanted the freedom to write in a “badmouth” style full of slangy extravagances, the frenetic energy of someone forging armor out of junk.
Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong shopped an anthology to major publishing houses. “It isn’t enough to celebrate it (the writing) merely because it is by Asian American writers,” one publisher told them, suggesting that they keep only the “least ethnic” pieces; the collection wasn’t “commanding” enough. Others expressed interest in terms that felt condescending. Reed offered them a chance to approach Asian-American culture with the irreverence he brought to the black experience. He published them in his “Yardbird” anthologies, and in 1974 his friend Charles Harris, the head of the newly established Howard University Press, published “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.” “Asian America,” Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong wrote in the book’s preface, “so long ignored and forcibly excluded from creative participation in American culture, is wounded, sad, angry, swearing, and wondering, and this is his aiiieeeee!!!” This sound was “more than a whine, shout, or scream. It is fifty years of our whole voice.”
Anthologies offer us previews of how society is changing. A community has consolidated; a movement has distinguished itself from what came before. Perhaps this emerging cohort of writers stands in for a social wave that’s about to crest. “The New Negro: An Interpretation,” edited by Alain Locke and published in 1925, captured the excitement, possibility, and complexities of the Harlem Renaissance by offering a cross-sectional taste of all the work being produced under its banner. Decades later, the Black Arts Movement became synonymous with the anthology “Black Fire,” published in 1968 and edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Following the cultural movements of the sixties, publishers became increasingly interested in such collections as they began exploring ways to reach new and younger audiences. The party where the Four Horsemen had met was for Reed’s “19 Necromancers from Now,” a 1970 collection showcasing multicultural writing that was formally and substantively radical.
Anthologies are an assertion of critical mass: We are here. They give emerging communities shape, a name, a kind of portability. It’s hard to imagine contemporary feminism without the visionary collections published in the early eighties by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, like “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,” edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, and “Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology,” edited by Barbara Smith. Yet, as greatest-hits collections, they are canon-building by nature. Defining a scene requires you to make an argument about all those who will be left out, too. So anthologies also announce: We are the ones you should regard, not them. At first, the mere gesture of naming a new community perhaps sufficed. Before “Aiiieeeee!,” there were other anthologies, like Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas’s “Asian-American Authors” (1972) and David Hsin-fu Wand’s “Asian-American Heritage” (1974), which described a community negotiating the “Asian tradition of their ancestors and the American tradition of their current homeland.”
“Aiiieeeee!” featured some of the authors who appeared in these previous books. But it was far more polemical, far more focussed on patrolling the borders than on examining the commonalities shared by those safely within them. To be Asian-American, the editors wrote, was to possess a “sensibility.” It was something that you understood instinctively as a consequence of growing up in America, without any real relationship to Asia beyond what one gleaned from “the radio, off the silver screen, from television, out of comic books, from the pushers of white American culture.” The “Aiiieeeee!” editors didn’t care much about representation in the crude demographic sense, which could be tokenizing. They had particular scorn for the “yellow goons” promoting perspectives that were “actively inoffensive” to the white mainstream. They bristled at how Asians were often described as having an “inner resource,” some primordial connection to the centuries-old civilizations of a mystical Orient long idealized in the West. This was why, they thought, Asian-Americans were always described as having a “dual heritage” or “dual personality,” and thus as being part alien, even after having been here for generations.
As the scholar Tara Fickle notes in her foreword to a new edition of “Aiiieeeee!” (University of Washington Press), the book has been remembered almost exclusively for its brash introductory essays. Alongside the provocatively vague definition of Asian America, the essays are full of bold claims, some of which have aged poorly. “Asian-Americans are not one people but several—Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans,” the editors wrote in the preface. (So much for Korean-Americans or Vietnamese-Americans, say.) And these groups, according to the editors, had collectively published “fewer than ten works of fiction and poetry.”
The excerpted works that followed were far more eclectic than the opening polemics suggested. This was especially true of the fiction written in the forties and fifties, in pursuit of horizons that were forgotten once their authors were absorbed into latter-day categories of identity. There are a few pages from John Okada’s “No-No Boy,” a slow-building 1957 novel about a young Japanese-American who, after the Second World War, is searching for a way to express his psychological anguish. We get a taste of the early disenchantments that propel Carlos Bulosan’s “America Is in the Heart,” a 1946 novel that tracks the gradual political awakening of a migrant laborer from the Philippines as he bounces around the West Coast. An excerpt from Louis Chu’s “Eat a Bowl of Tea” is full of the lewd humor that made the novel, from 1961, such a striking depiction of Chinatown life. One of the most intriguing pieces is “Rough Notes for Mantos,” a lyrical essay about queer desire masquerading as a short story. It was written by Russell Leong but was published under the name Wallace Lin.
“Aiiieeeee!” was fairly successful, reviewed by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, as well as Bridge, where a writer named Bill Wong wondered who, exactly, the book was for. He felt that the editors’ attempt to define Asian America in such “limited” and “arcane” terms would confuse most people. For better or worse, “Aiiieeeee!” set the terms for debating the community’s parameters for decades. The editors believed that Asian-Americans could move forward politically only once they realized how the art and culture around them had stunted their imaginations: if you gained a popular audience, you were probably a sellout. Later generations read their bluster as embittered rage. But they wanted to start conversations, not close them. At least, this was the initial hope. “We know each other now,” they wrote, referring to an emerging sense of solidarity among young and old Asian-American writers. “It should never have been otherwise.”
In 1976, Knopf published Maxine Hong Kingston’s first book, “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.” She had a lot in common with the “Aiiieeeee!” editors, including a wariness toward the American culture that had diminished their sense of possibility: “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”
Kingston’s publisher designated “The Woman Warrior” as nonfiction, even though the book’s stories involve time travel and the supernatural. It appeared during a period when publishers had become interested in previously marginalized voices, particularly ones that might educate a broader, white mainstream. Kingston’s book gorgeously blurred the line between historical and first-person perspectives. It felt raw and intimate, expanding the reader’s sense of what it meant to write memoir. Her book relied on “talk-story,” a kind of improvisational storytelling technique that allowed her to shuttle back and forth between the banal, everyday life of Californians in the mid-century and Chinese heroines of bygone epochs. “The Woman Warrior” won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of nonfiction. It’s been a presence on college campuses ever since.
Kingston’s success presented a conundrum. Her book was dense and disorienting, coy and lyrical, bearing little resemblance to the bland Asian-American best-sellers of previous decades. Her Asian-American critics, like Jeffery Chan and Benjamin Tong, accused her of inauthenticity, willfully mistranslating Chinese stories and customs to appeal to a white readership. They were frustrated by how she catered to popular appetites for ethnic autobiography. Frank Chin argued that first-person writing was a vestige of Christian conquest, when heathens would demonstrate their worth by participating in stories of self-discovery and consciousness. He described “The Woman Warrior” as “another in a long line of Chinkie autobiographies by Pocahontas yellows blowing the same old mixed up East/West soul struggle.” This kind of self-representation, he argued, was a Western construct, and its focus on Chinese misogyny, or the “icky-gooey evil” of Chinese culture, was a self-indulgent play to please white readers.
Chin and Kingston’s conflict unfolded over years. In time, it came to obscure some of the original questions that had animated the “Aiiieeeee!” editors. Kingston’s writing was expansive and generous, making anything feel possible, while “Aiiieeeee!” was seen as border patrol. But the debate “Aiiieeeee!” initiated was ultimately not about the real versus the fake. It was about the marketplace—its power to anoint, its capacity to ossify the ephemeral thing that your literature is trying to articulate in the first place.
Kingston, like Chin, was born in 1940 and was raised in California. But, where Chin described himself as a fifth-generation Chinese-American, Kingston was the daughter of immigrants. Part of the reason “The Woman Warrior” was so palatable to mainstream readers was that it could be read as a story of the traumas associated with immigrant assimilation. Perhaps these wounds might even compel a young woman to retreat into folktales, to rewrite odes of the distant past. Family bonds, the psychology of immigrant households, estrangement from the mother tongue: these became the defining themes of Asian-American literature, in part because they were market-tested.
When, in 1991, Chin and his collaborators decided to publish a new anthology of Chinese- and Japanese-American writing, titled “The Big Aiiieeeee!,” Chin contributed an opening essay, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” The wounded masculinity that had been on the fringes of “Aiiieeeee!” was now more pronounced. And one sure way of earning Chin’s scorn as a “fake” was by finding a big audience or winning awards, as had David Henry Hwang (whose Tony-winning play, “M. Butterfly,” premièred on Broadway in 1988) and Amy Tan (whose best-selling novel “The Joy Luck Club” appeared in 1989). It’s not that the Four Horsemen had failed in their own careers. Chin won prizes and accolades for his plays and novels, and he was the subject of a 2005 documentary. Inada was named the poet laureate of Oregon in 2006. Chan continued to write fiction and teach literature at San Francisco State University, where he had started an Asian-American-studies program. And Wong published two acclaimed novels, “Homebase” (1979) and “American Knees” (1995). But their successes didn’t reshape popular culture the way Tan’s “Joy Luck Club” did. Asian-American literature was growing, even as the ranks of the “Aiiieeeee!” hard-liners were shrinking. Kingston rarely acknowledged Chin’s aggression, though she did publish a novel, “Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” in which she tried to understand the psyche of an angry young Chinese-American man from the Bay Area who happens to be a playwright. If he’s sending me hate mail, Kingston later said, I’m sending him love letters.
Earlier this year, John Okada’s estate was embroiled in a dispute with Penguin Classics, which republished “No-No Boy” as part of a set of early Asian-American literary works. (I wrote the introduction to one.) Okada died in 1971, unaware that his book had been discovered by a younger generation. The “Aiiieeeee!” editors brought it back into print themselves in 1976, helping Okada’s family transfer the copyright to the University of Washington Press three years later. The case was eventually resolved, and Penguin stopped publishing the American edition. But the dispute echoed some of the complications of ethnic literature’s acceptance as part of the cultural mainstream.
Minority writing has always assumed a kind of antagonism, a prefab agony about being invariably misunderstood. This part of “Aiiieeeee!” still feels resonant. Yet if you look at the upper strata of literary culture—the books published and reviewed and given prizes—it feels as if diversity won. Diversity has been honored as a principle, and it has become more prevalent as a marketing strategy. As Asian-American literature grew over the decades, and the study of it was professionalized, the reckless, almost punk attitude of “Aiiieeeee!” came to seem antiquated. Its editors, convinced that acceptance was impossible, had been drawn to the idea of perpetual marginalization.
If cultural capital accrues around authors and books that appease our appetite for inclusion, our classrooms and bookstores are better off as a result. Decades after “The Woman Warrior,” the canonical experience of Asian-American life remains the first generation’s negotiation of the immigrant household. It’s what gives successful films such as “Crazy Rich Asians” and, on a smaller scale, “The Farewell” a footing in America, even though they take place mostly in Asia. But has the balance of power actually been disturbed? The enshrinement of the Asian-immigrant narrative still crowds out alternative visions of Asian-American difference. And narratives of upward mobility can be part of how “minority” literature joins the majors. In 2010, the cultural critic Ilan Stavans was asked about his work as the general editor of “The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.” Stavans seemed to feel that there was a great symbolic importance to this legendary publisher recognizing an overlooked lineage of writing in America. He wrote, “It is a book that all middle-class Latinos need, proof that we’ve made it: We’ve arrived.”
It’s telling that Stavans named the middle class, a suggestion that full assimilation is achieved through representation. The “Aiiieeeee!” editors, by contrast, never imagined “arriving.” I first read the anthology in college, a time when we cultivate our sense of zealous singularity by rejecting the same in a previous generation. The book seemed overly earnest. Revisiting it today, I was struck by how fatalistic the editors sound, positioning the Asian-American as the ultimate underdog, forever denied the possibility of literary voice. They can’t see the vast energies that will one day gather in their wake, under the banner of Asian-American literature, or the possibility that markers of difference will come to distinguish, rather than limit, a writer. “Aiiieeeee!” is a manifesto suffused with tragedy, a struggle against isolation. As part of Okada’s biographical sketch, the editors excerpt a letter that he had sent his publisher. “Providing my efforts are unsuccessful,” he wrote, “I pray equally fervently that there is another like myself who is creating a similar work which will find its way into publication.” There were others out there. But you can’t choose who or what follows, whether it’s “Aiiieeeee!,” or Maxine Hong Kingston—a legacy that is cultish and obscure, or one where it turns out that you wrote a great American novel, after all. ♦
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