BOOKS
Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia UP, 2024).
After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers.
This book offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia. In readings of writers including Ted Chiang, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, and Charles Yu, I examine how Asian American fiction maps the immigrant narrative of intergenerational conflict onto the “two cultures” conflict between the arts and sciences. I argue that the self-consciousness found in these writers’ works is a legacy of Japanese and American modernization projects that emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization. I consider Asian American writers’ attraction to science fiction, the figure of the engineer and notions of the “postracial,” modernization theory and time travel, and what happens when the dream of a stable professional identity encounters the realities of deprofessionalization and proletarianization. Through a transnational and historical-materialist approach, this attempts to illuminate what makes texts and authors “Asian American.”
REFEREED
“Semiperipheral Realism: Uneven and Combined Development in Taiwanese American Return Fiction,” in “Genres of Empire,” eds. Mitch Murray and Alyssa Hunziker, special issue, College Literature (forthcoming, 2023).
This article argues that Taiwanese American fiction’s situating of post-’65 embourgeoisiement within narratives of return brings into focus an analogy between the model minority and Taiwan’s status as a semiperipheral country. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, semiperipheral states possess features of core states like the US and Japan, as well as peripheral states like pre-reform China. As the term implies, semiperipheral states exist in an awkward position of betweenness: “Under pressure from core states and putting pressure on peripheral states, their major concern is to keep themselves from slipping into the periphery and to do what they can to advance themselves toward the core.” The “concern” that Wallerstein describes is analogous to the “fear of falling” in class status that Barbara Ehrenreich described as the “inner life” of the postwar American middle class: a fear that, in Asian American communities, is expressed as the “success frame” of model minoritization. Taiwanese American authors attempt to fashion narrative solutions for these semiperipheral anxieties: this article focuses on Kathy Wang’s Family Trust (2018) and Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011). The aesthetic and rhetorical forms that Taiwanese American authors mobilize to register these modes of betweenness strongly tend towards racial satire and deformations of racial identity because the model minority racial form elevates race’s materiality and basis in economic relations.
“Uncertain Fictional Objects,” in “The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional,” eds. Andrew Brandel and Naveeda Khan, special issue, Anthropology and Humanism (November 22, 2022).
The trope of formal rupture in the films of sixth-generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is a key site where ethnography and fictionality merge. Situated in Jia’s documentary-like aesthetic and oriented to a non-Chinese global art cinema audience, “uncertain fictional objects” are tasked with a great deal of mediating labor. They ultimately tell us not only about Jia’s rural and upwardly mobile characters but also the cognitive leaps they and Jia’s global audience must undergo to function within a landscape of unimaginably rapid industrialization and a world in which China is undermining Western hegemony. Uncertain fictional objects—figured as literal unidentified flying objects, animated intercut scenes, and non-diegetic voices from elsewhere—pose a frontal challenge to an abiding orientalist gaze and the very possibility of the ordinary in capitalism. Stripped of the familiar and compelled by the inexorable current of industrial economic policy, the totality and mode of cognition left to Jia and his characters are what I term “science fictionality,” as opposed to simply “science fiction.”
“Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature,” American Literary History 33.1 (Spring 2021).
Since 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.
“Animacy at the End of History in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea,” in “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies,” eds. Chih-ming Wang and Yu-Fang Cho, special issue, American Quarterly 69.3 (September, 2017).
This essay examines how dystopian depictions of US-China interdependency speculate on the material and aesthetic consequences of China’s rise, which, of late, have been articulated-though rarely explicitly-as “capitalist realism”: a belief in the impossibility of imagining alternatives to capitalism at the end of history. I focus on Chang-rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea, arguing that it stages a pragmatic acceptance of China’s rise through its depictions of the end of history, environmental apocalypse, and perpetual economic stagnation; and through its reimagining of the novel form itself. I then show how Lee’s novel explores the limits of capitalist realism by exchanging a sine qua non of the novel genre—a liberal, bourgeois protagonist—for a minor character: specifically, an “animacy,” to use Mel Y. Chen’s term. As a refraction of American stereotypes of Chinese workers, this character/animacy mediates the novel’s consideration of how US-China interdependency portends the end of history and, via environmental crisis, the end of the world. I show how Alexandre Kojève’s orientalist end of history theory-the progenitor of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history theory, which is the main provocation for “capitalist realist” criticism-might in fact offer some surprising possibilities for imagining beyond the end of history via “post-historical” aesthetics.
“Battle Hymn of the Afropolitan: Sino-African Futures in Ghana Must Go and Americanah,” in “Transpacific Overtures,” eds. Christine Mok and Aimee Bahng, special issue, Journal of Asian American Studies 20.1 (February, 2017).
This article argues that a China-directed Orientalism infuses the political unconscious of recent fiction by “Afropolitan” writers. Focusing on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, this article demonstrates that crises of national economic development compel Afropolitan characters to self-Orientalize. Unable to rely on the stability of their home countries’ economies, and unwilling to endure the racism of the United States, these characters cathect alternative futurities offered by China’s non-ideological economic involvement in Africa and the flexible citizenship of Asian/American identity. Afropolitan novelists thus bring into relief the cultural and affective contours of an emergent Sino-African geopolitical formation that, to paraphrase Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, has turned its back on the West.
“Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 6.1 (2015). Reprinted in Takayumi Tatsumi, ed.,Trans-Pacific Cultural Studies (Tokyo: Sage, 2019).
Christopher T. Fan argues that McHugh’s award-winning 1992 science fiction novel perceives the twilight of the American Century by offering a “critical realism,” to use Georg Lukács’s phrase, of postsocialist US–China interdependency. In other words, it offers a form in which we perceive ourselves as subjects and objects of the twenty-first century world-system’s most important bilateral relationship. Moreover, as a novel about US–China interdependency, it implicitly critiques the binary Orientalism that structures the rapidly growing body of work on “techno-Orientalist” formations. Fan’s analysis thus extends arguments about American Orientalism’s non-Manichean formations (Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, Colleen Lye) into the postsocialist era. The novel’s near-future, China-centric world analogizes McHugh’s personal crises of professional desire as a precarious laborer in New York City, with the massive reorientation of desires from Maoist politics to market-directed individuality that she witnessed among her students when she taught in China from 1987–1988. Chinese racial form plays a crucial mediating role in the novel because it reflects the revival of Confucian humanist discourse in reform-era China as a way to focus a national project of rapidly generating capitalist desire. Finally, by describing US–China interdependency, this article also generates a theory of US–China neoliberalism that corrects for universalist, Euro-American accounts of neoliberal subject formation (Lauren Berlant), as well as insufficiently subject-sensitive accounts (Aihwa Ong).
“Melancholy Transcendence: Ted Chiang and Asian American Postracial Form,” Post45: Peer Reviewed (November 6, 2014).
This essay focuses on a reading of Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life” (1998). Despite its almost total exclusion of racial and ethnic content (not to mention Asian or Asian American content), I argue that “Story of Your Life” is nonetheless systematically structured by ongoing processes of Asian American racialization. To argue this claim, I make recourse to Colleen Lye’s concept of Asian American “racial form”: a form that is keyed to the transactions between language and social relations rather than to essentialist mythologies of racial biology, and that, in fact, often eschews direct reference to race. Unlike other Asian American writers, who sometimes write as Asian Americans and sometimes don’t, Chiang indicates and conceals his Asian American identity in the same gesture. What, then, are the features and circumstances of Chiang’s writing that produce Asian American racial form in the very same postracial move of not writing as an Asian American? This question corresponds to a crucial aspect of the postracial that deserves more emphasis: namely, that it is impossible to think or write about race without reference to a specific manifestation of it. The Asian American and postracial dimensions of Chiang’s fiction do not operate independently from each other. Every enunciation of the postracial is an enunciation of a specific racial relation.
“WordSeer: A Knowledge Synthesis Environment for Textual Data,” ACM Conference of Information and Knowledge Management (2013).
We describe WordSeer, a tool whose goal is to help scholars and analysts discover patterns and formulate and test hypotheses about the contents of text collections, midway between what humanities scholars call a traditional “close read” and the new “distant read” or “culturomics” approach. To this end, WordSeer allows for highly flexible “slicing and dicing” (hence “sliding”) across a text collection. The tool allows users to view text from different angles by selecting subsets of data, viewing those as visualizations, moving laterally to view other subsets of data, slicing into another view, expanding the viewed data by relaxing constraints, and so on. We illustrate the text sliding capabilities of the tool with examples from a case study in the field of humanities and social sciences—an analysis of how U.S. perceptions of China and Japan changed over the last 30 years.
SELECTED NON-REFEREED
“Critical Ethnic Studies,” in The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler and Sherryl Vint (forthcoming).
This chapter sets out to do two things. First, to establish a methodological relation between sf and ethnic studies as a way of historicizing the increasing presence of the ethnic in sf production and criticism. And second, to supplement the ethnic-specific chapters in this companion’s first section with a case study of how the material determinants of Asian racial form over the last half century have shaped Asian American sf and the vocabulary of so-called “techno-orientalism.”
“Democratic Realism, National Allegory, and the Future of the Asian American Novel,” in “Democracy and the Novel in the US,” eds. Rachel Greenwald Smith and Gordon Hutner, special issue, American Literary History 35.1 (Spring 2023).
Recent fiction by Asian Americans grapples with, on the one hand, the waning stakes and political failure of American identity (a democratic realism), and, on the other hand, the allure of Asia’s simultaneous capitalist challenge and alternative to US-based racial form (a capitalist realism). This article argues that the tensions and contradictions of this conjuncture are registered in recent Asian American novels via national allegory and reads the aesthetic partition between comedy and tragedy in Marie Myung-ok Lee’s 2022 novel The Evening Hero as exemplary of this formal approach.
“Andrew Yang and Post-65 Asian America,” American Literary History: Forum, March 3, 2020.
A review of Andrew Yang’s campaign autobiography, The War on Normal People (2018). I argue that Yang’s mission to resist the tide of automation and overturn capitalism is perhaps in many ways also a desire to overturn his father’s legacy and, more, the economic legacies of post-’65 Asian America. Yang’s parents were typical of the waves of Taiwanese immigrants who flooded into the US in the decade or so after the passage of the 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act. That is to say they pursued professions in STEM fields. This is the historical origin of the stereotype of the Asian math and science nerd, which Yang embraces in the form of his signature hat with the acronym “MATH” emblazoned across it. While these stereotypes upset his progressive critics, Yang is in a way merely reflecting post-’65 Asian American demographic realities.
“Asian/American Antibodies: An Ending,” Post45: Contemporaries, April 14, 2016.
The idea behind this series was to think of the Asian American body as both an empirical reality and as discourse, and to link its discursivity to an Asian American academic/intellectual class’s longstanding commitment to executing two simultaneous operations: elaborating the “nonderivative nature of Asian racialization” and maintaining a politically viable narrative of racial grievance.
“Asian/American (Anti-)Bodies: An Introduction,” Post45: Contemporaries, November 23, 2015.
Introduction to the essay cluster “Asian/American (Anti-)Bodies.” This series of articles for Contemporaries presents a variety of approaches to figurations of the Asian-raced body in recent literary and cinematic texts: specifically, a non-metaphorical body as material embodiment of subjectivity rather than as object of discourse. The bodies readers will encounter in these articles are anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic, partial and whole, scaled to the micro and macro. But each in some way illustrates how racialized forms of “Asians” and “Asia” are produced through the material forces of global capitalism, biotechnology, foreign policy, and advances in neuroscience, as well as aesthetic forms meant to stabilize increasingly complex intersections of these forces.