Elaine Kim, “Preface,” Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1993): vii-xiv.

            In the United States, racism’s “traveling eye” has created and cordoned off race-based communities, affixing meaning to them according to the degree of threat they are thought to pose to the dominant culture at particular points in time.  Asian-origin communities were called “Oriental,” east and peripheral to an unnamed center.  Historically, Asian Americans, as we renamed ourselves, have had no place in the discourse on race and culture in the United States except as “model minorities” on the one hand or as unassimilable aliens on the other, as statements about the ultimate goodness of the dominant culture and the ultimate badness of those who refuse to go along with the program.  Faced with sets of mutually exclusive binaries between “East” and “West,” between Asia and America, and between alien and patriot, those seeking a third space as “both/and” instead of “either/or” are usually considered racist, un-American, even anti-American.  With the context of these silencing systems of domination, Asian Americans are supposed to deny their cultural heritages, accept positions as sojourning “exotic aliens, “ or “go back” to Asia.

            A generation ago, I attempted to define Asian American literature as a work in English by writers of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean descent about American experiences.  I admitted at the time that this definition was arbitrary, prompted by my own inability to read Asian languages and my own lack of access to South and Southeast Asian communities.  But for these shortcomings, I wrote, I would have included in my introductory study works written in Asian languages and works written from Vietnamese American, Indian American and other communities.

            Nonetheless, it is true that I wanted to delineate and draw boundaries around whatever I thought of as Asian American identity and literature.  Clearly, Asian American experiences and creative visions had been excluded from or distorted n the established texts: although I had majored in English and American literature in the 1960s at Ivy League universities and at Berkeley, I was never assigned the work of a single writer of color, not even Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright, whose books I had read on my own, together with the work of many other “Third World” and American writers of color.  A century and a half of persistent and deeply rooted racist inscriptions in both official and mass literary culture in the United States perpetuated grotesque representations of Asian Americans as alien Others, whether as sinister villains, dragon ladies, brute hordes, helpless heathens, comical servants, loyal sidekicks, Suzy Wongs, or wily asexual detectives.  Like many other Asian Americans, I felt an urgent need to insist that these were not “our realities.”  Our strategy was to assert a self-determined Asian American identity in direct opposition to these dehumanizing characterizations, even if it was limited by being contained with the exclusive binary system that occasioned it.

            For the most part, I read Asian American literature as a literature of protest and exile, a literature about place and displacement, a literature concerned with psychic and physical “home”—search for and claiming a “home” or longing for a final “homecoming.”  I looked for unifying thematic threads and tidy resolutions that might ease the pain of displacement and heal the exile, heedless of what might be missing from this homogenizing approach and oblivious to the parallels between what I was doing and dominant culture attempts to reduce Asian American experiences to developmental narratives about the movement from “primitive,” “Eastern,” and foreign immigrant to “civilize,” Western, and “Americanized” loyal citizen.

            The cultural nationalist defenses we constructed were anti-assimilationist.  But while they opposed official nationalism, the Asian American identity they allowed for was fixed, closed, and narrowly defined, dividing “Asian American” from “Asian” as sharply as possible, privileging race over gender and class, accepting compulsory heterosexuality as “natural,” and constructing a hierarchy of authenticity to separate the “real” from the “fake.”  According to this definition, there were not many ways of being Asian American.  The ideal was male, heterosexual, Chinese or Japanese American, and English Speaking.  The center of Chinese American was San Francisco or New York Chinatown, and the heart of Japanese America was in Hawaii or along Highway 99, which cut through the agricultural fields the issei and nisei had lost during World War II.  Asian American history was about railroads, “bachelor societies,” and internment.  The sacred Asian American texts—such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, John Okada’ No-no Boy, and Loius Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea—were by “dead yellow men” instead of “dead white men.”  Asian American literary studies usually did not question the concept of canonization but simply posited an alternative canon.  It seemed that every film, every article, and even many novels had to be a one-dimensional documentary filled with literal and solemnly delivered history lessons.  Given the magnitude of general ignorance about Asian Americans, it was difficult to do anything but play a dead straight part.  Dealing with subtleties, hybridities, paradoxes, and layers seemed almost out of the question when so much effort had to be expended by simply justifying Asian Americans as discursive subjects in the first place.

            Cultural nationalist agendas have the potential to contest and disrupt the logic of domination, its exploitation and exclusions.  Certainly it was possible for me as a Korean American female to accept the fixed masculinist Asian American identity posited in Asian American cultural nationalism, even when it rendered invisible or at least muted

women’s oppression, anger, and ways of loving and interpreted Korean Americans as imperfect imitations of Chinese Americans; because I could see in everyday life that not all material and psychic violence to women of color comes from men, and because, as my friends used to say, “No Chinese [American] ever called me ‘gook.’”  No matter what, some cultural nationalist approaches have the power to render visible what David Lloyd has called the “history of the possible.”[1]

            While I was preoccupied with defining Asian American identity and culture in the 1970s and with uncovering buried stories from “early” Asian America, changes in U. S. immigration quotas in 1965 were already resulting in massive and highly visible transformations in Asian American communities.  Indeed, it might be said that until recent years, Asian American communities and cultures were shaped by legal exclusion and containment, while contemporary experiences are being shaped by the internationalization of the world’s political economies and cultures.  Yesterday’s young Asian immigrant might have worked beside his parents on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii or in a fruit orchard on the Pacific Coast, segregated from the mainstream of American life.  Today’s Asian immigrant teenager might have only Asian friends, but she probably deals daily with a not necessarily anguished confusion of divergent influences, a collision of elements she needs to negotiate in her search to define herself.  In this regard, she is not unlike other Americans: as Trihn T. Minh-ha has pointed out, “There is a Third World in every First World and vice versa.”[2]  Her collisions, however, are probably tied to the particularities of her cultural background at a particular point in time.  Thus, she might rent Korean language video melodramas from a shopping center in Southern California today, after having watched “MacGyver” and “Entertainment Tonight” on television in Seoul as a child.

            During the past two decades, some Asian and Pacific American populations have increased by 500 to 1,000 percent.  New Asian American communities have taken root all over the country, as Vietnamese refugees settle in Westminster, California, and Korean immigrants gather in Flushing, New York.  Newcomers are diverse in terms of origin and ethnicity, language, social class, political situations, educational backgrounds, and patterns of settlement.  They have moved to cities and towns where few Asian Americans had lived before and are doing things to earn their livelihoods that they could not have imagined when they were in their homelands: Cambodians are making doughnuts, Koreans are making burritos, South Asian are operating motels, Filipinos are driving airport shuttle buses.  The lines between Asian and Asian American, so crucial to identity formations in the past, are increasingly blurred: transportation to and communication with Asia is no longer daunting, resulting in new crossovers and intersections and different kinds of material and cultural distances today.

            Asian American identities are fluid and migratory: the Minnesota social worker who clings to the idea of Hmongs as limited-English-speaking refugees from a pre-literate society may be surprised to encounter a Hmong teenagers who composes rap music, plays hockey, and dates Chicano boys or girls.   Cultures, whether Asian origin cultures or the “majority culture,” which is no more monolithic and unitary than “Asian” or “Asian-American culture,” have never been fixed, continuous, or discrete.  The notion of an absolute American past, a single source for American people, a founding identity or wholeness in America, is rooted in the racist fiction of primordial white American universality, as is the fear that “American culture” is now being broken down by rowdy brown and yellow immigrants and other people of color who refuse to melt into the final identity of “just Americans.”

            I often hear people lament that things are getting worse all the time, that Americans are more divided, that there is less tolerance and more racial violence than ever before. But according to my own experience of the Wonder Bread days before the Civil Rights Movement, there was much more racial violence and much less racial tolerance then than now.  Maybe some people remember the “good old days” of Ozzie and Harriet 1950s as peaceful and harmonious; I don’t.  The races were more divided in the past, when segregation was the rule and racial hierarchies were accepted as natural and permanent.  In Maryland, where I grew up, interracial marriages were illegal, and job announcements routinely stipulated “whites only” as well as “men only.”  It is true that hate crimes against Asian Americans are more and more frequently in the news.  But if anyone thinks that racial violence is a 1990s phenomenon, maybe that’s because racial violence in the “good old days” was not documented except in the lived experiences of Americans of color.  In my view, the “good old days” were not so good for women and people of color.

            The America that is ever “becoming” has always been a polyglot nation of immigrants, but this has never been all; it is also a site of Native America, of African slavery and resistance to it, of the war between the United States and Mexico and the yet to be fully honored Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  Knowing that there never has been a unified Mayflower-and-Plymouth Rock beginning to “return to” make me feel hopeful about the future.

            No matter what we wish for, things do not necessarily come to a harmonious resolution.  Perhaps after all there is no “home,” except for a place of contestation that negates as well as affirms.  And identity, like “home,” is ever in progress, less a refuge than the site of contending, multiple meanings.  Inevitably, the Asian American identity offered by cultural nationalism could not but produce conflicts that portended its own undoing: what was excluded and rendered invisible—the unruly, the transgressive, and the disruptive—began to seep out from under the grids and appear from between the cracks.  Eventually the seams burst and were exposed.  In the case of Asian America, this unruliness has come from women who never stop being both Asian and female, as well as from others rendered marginal by the essentializing aspects of Asian American cultural nationalism.

            This book shows us what is now possible as well as what is in store, for without a doubt, there is much more where these stories came from.  Charlie Chan is indeed dead, never to be revived.  Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English, his stereotypical Orientalist version of “the [Confucian] Chinese Family,” challenged by an array of characters, some hip and articulate, some brooding and sexy, some insolent and others innocent, but all as unexpected as a Korean American who writes in French, a Chinese-Panamanian-German who longs too late to know her father, a mean Japanese American grandmother, a Chinese American flame-diver, or a teenaged Filipino American male prostitute.  Instead of “model minorities,” we find human beings with rich and complex pasts and brave, often flamboyant dreams of the future.  These are dysfunctional families that bear no resemblance to the Charlie Chan version of “Chinese family values,” tragic stories of suicide, incest, and child abuse, as well as bittersweet songs about aging, love, and death.  The locales span the world, and the writers are old, young, established, and new, reflecting the amazing diversity of Asian American national origins and a wide variety of subject positions.  To read them, we will need to go beyond cultural nationalist approaches to employ mixed strategies and critical practices.

            For me, this collection celebrates many ways of being Asian American today, when the question need no longer be “either/or.”   This anthology gives us both Asian American literature and world literature:  Asian American literary work may be about Asian American experiences, but this is never all it is about.  The writers here are magicians who transform “facts” into meanings, reaching across pain and silences t shape legacies and create new cultures as they open spaces for the historically banished.