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UMI Microform 9921482 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. ‘This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road ‘Ann Arbor, MI 48103‘The dissertation of Karen Har-Yen Chow is : ? CA See geel September 1998September 1, 1998 Copyright by Karen Har-Yen Chow 1998VITA June 20, 1969—Born—Weymouth, Massachusetts. 1991—B.A., University of Southem California. 1992-95—Teaching Assistant, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara 1994—M_A., University of California, Santa Barbara. 1995-96—Teaching Associate, Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 1997- Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies and English, University of ‘Connecticut. PUBLICATIONS "Asian American Writers,” Reference Guide to English and American Writers, Mark Dady-Hawkins, editor, St. James Press, London, 1996. "Zora Neale Hurston,” Reference Guide to English and American Writers, Mark Dady-Hawkins, editor, St. James Press, London, 1996. "Maxine Hong Kingston," Reference Guide to American Writers , Gale Research, Inc., 1995. "The Woman Warrior," Reference Guide to American Writers , Gale Research, Inc., 1995. "Wakako Yamauchi," Reference Guide to American Writers , Gale Research, Inc., 1995. ‘Hong Kong Americans," Encyclopedia of Multiculturalism , Marshall Cavendish, 1994, FIELDS OF STUDY ‘Major Fields: Twentieth Century American Literature, Asian American LiteratureABSTRACT From Mono-Ethnic to Transnational Community Identity in ‘Asian American Literature and Film By Karen Har-Yen Chow The relaxation of immigration restrictions, along with faster and cheaper transportation of people and goods, resulted in a dramatic expansion of the Asian ‘American population and Asian American communities post-1965. As more Asian and become visible in American culture, ethnic identifications communities are determined and shaped by how Asin American Etrary naraives in Yokohama Califia, Ilook ata iterary representation ofa mono-etnic community. Toshio Mori recovers and fictionalizes a pre-WWII Japanese American community. His stories depict how the ethnic insularity of that community is complex, sheltering and stifling the independent creative and philosophical minds of artists and writers. Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey is set in San Francisco in the 1960s-1970s, an era of ethnic awakening and assertion of an Asian ‘American solidarity. The protagonist’s vision of a pan-ethnic, politically coalesced ‘Asian American community identity is performed and enacted in his life and in theater. Abraham Verghese's memoir My Own Country depicts a diasporic immigrant Asian American who in his everyday world negotiates with Dogeaters and John Woo's film “Bullet In The Head" make Asian American community transnational, constructing Asian American cultural communities outside of the U.S. Both texts exemplify how postcolonial global world migrations and ‘American military presence in Asia change binaristic constructions of first world/third ‘world cultural paradigms. Hence, while America has exercised an imperial, colonizing influence on Asia, in the late twentieth century we are also seeing how ‘Asia is appropriating, consuming, and re-imagining American culture and a mythicTABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I: Introduction................ Chapter I: Writing Yokohama, California as America: Race and Class Dynamics of An Insular Community. . AT Chapter HI: imagining Penethie Community and Performs Identity ‘In Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book....... 59 Chapter IV: Immigrant Asian American Memoir. Healing and ‘Negotiating Communities in Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country... Chapter V: Asian American Transnationalism in Jessica Hagedorn’s ‘Dogeaters and John Woo’s “Bullet In The Head”... ...eeseecsee Chapter VI: Conchusion: Asian American Communities and LiteratureCHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION From Mono-Ethnic to Transnational Community Identity in ‘The concept of “Asian American” is a fairly recent invention, and is attributed to UCLA historian Yuji Ichioka, who came up with the term in the late 1960s to describe a politically emerging group’s sense of solidarity based upon common histories of exclusion and marginalization. By 1974, four young Asian American writers, Jeffiey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong had compiled and published Ailieceee!, a pioneering anthology of Asian American writing with a long introduction that boldly adopted a cultural nationalist definition of Asian ‘American literature. Elaine Kim, in her groundbreaking scholarly study, Asian American Literature, also set out to delimit boundaries and parameters of what she included in this body of literature. The subsequent years since the publication of these two texts have been a time of an unprecedented increase in the mumbers of ‘Asian Americans and their cultural productions. A surge of interest in Asian American literary production is especially notable during this time, marked for instance by the immense popularity of Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and the rise of David Henry Hwang as a major American dramatist whose plays are produced by sharp increase in the Asian American population and nmch greater participation by Asian Americans in a wide spectrum of American culture including high profilearenas such as journalism, politics, media, film, entertainment, and sports. In the context of these historical and sociological changes, the boundaries Kim and the Ailieeeee! editors set out now seem limited, as they exclude many Asian ethnic ‘groups, experiences, and perspectives. In a foreword to Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Kim explains retrospectively This strategically constructed unitary identity, a closed essence sharply dividing “Asian American” from “Asian,” was a way to conjure up and inscribe our faces on the blank pages and screens of America’s hegemonic culture and was necessarily exclusive rather than inclusive, leveling such critical differences as gender, nationality, and class. Asian Japanese American male perspectives and valorized Chinatown and Little Tokyo as source, root, and geographical center of Asian America. (xii) Further, she notes that the contemporary complexities of Asian American demographics and experiences demand a recognition and consideration of the fact that ‘New communities have sprung up across the country as Hmong refugees settled in Minneapolis and Korean immigrants moved into Flushing, New York. Even San Francisco’s Chinatown is giving way to “new Chinatowns” in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco and across the bay in Oakland. Not all of the new communities are territorial. Asian Americans are not necessarily moving along a teleological continuum from “segregation” to “integration”... . As the world has changed, so have ‘our conceptions of Asian American identity. The lines between Asian and Asian American, so important in identity formation in earlier times, are increasingly being blurred. (xii) While originally dominated by Japanese and Chinese American interests, accompanied by some Filipinos’ participation, “Asian American” as a term to describe a panethnic demographic group and its productions now includes more than 2thirty ethnicities that speak many more languages, and embraces as many as six or more generations of Asians in America. Since 1965, when changes to immigration restrictions made it possible for more Asians to immigrate as professionals and sponsored family members, the exponential growth of the Asian American population has evinced an undeniable transformation on the American landscape, especially in California. As we enter the next century, a compelling question facing ‘Asian Americans is what constitutes their ethnic identities and what binds these ethnic communities together. This is a formidable question, since even a geographically distributed accounting of Asian Americans is only partially documented. Whereas communities are often thought of as visible geographic entities, ethnic communities are also significantly determined by an imagined sense of ‘community. An Asian American community identity is not just marked in geographic locales of ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns and Koreatowns, but by literary, artistic, and other verbal, visual, and audio sites that contribute to a cultural imagining of Asian America. Narratives to which ethnic identity and community can be linked not only ‘explain the conditions of their existence but actively shape the ways in which ‘community identity evolve. Such narratives in Asian American literature and film simultaneously assert, challenge, and reinvent American communal identity, enabling the inclusion of these ethnic communities as part of America. The kinds of community imagined in these literary and filmic productions also increasingly define a 7continually shifting network of shared connections that are not tied to region and thus reflect the interactions of transnational identities, that is, of identities that blur distinctions between ‘American’ and ‘Asian’ culture and subjectivity, inasmuch as they have often been polarized as ‘west’ and ‘east.’ My dissertation traces three kinds of community identity in contemporary Asian American narratives: monoethnic identification with other minority ethnic groups, and transnational Asian America. I argue that a central thrust of Asian American narratives is to delineate Asian ‘American identity through and against group formations along these muttiple identities. These texts illustrate the ways in which Asian American communities are not just assimilated and dispersed into mainstream culture but are also refigured and transformed. Further, the cultural constructions and productions of “Asian American” are entering a period of what Sau-Ling Wong has termed “denationalization,” a term that describes the increasing permeability in the boundaries between “Asian American” and “Asian.” For example, film directors such as Ang Lee and John Woo, who are, respectively, nationals of Taiwan and Hong Kong, have produced films that participate in the constructions of the contemporary, transnational experience of Asians in America. In my dissertation, I analyze one of Woo’s films, “Bullet In The Head,” to examine one transnational trajectory of Asian American community identity. ‘The definition of “Asian American community” is not strictly based on 4geographically localized communities, but also through forged common identities based on political, cultural, and ideological allimces that traverse and even eschew national boundaries. The literary texts and films discussed in my dissertation trace the ambivalences and problematics of mono-national identity in the shifting everyday places and communities of Asian Americans. Asian American identity has its own geography linking different communities, one that negotiates the cultural experience of being American by defining and accepting the intersections of diverse identifications that make up a multiply-informed identity. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Asian American cultural production. Paralleling the large influx of Asians to America between 1965 to the present, Asian ‘American literature, film, popular culture, and criticism have rapidly increased in publication and popularity in the past thirty years, The immense commercial success of authors such as Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Gish Jen, Fay Myenne Ng, and Bharati Mukherjee indicates that there is great interest in representations of Asian experiences. The traditional immigrant narrative in America is driven by the obstacles faced by an immigrant who escapes persecution or poverty in a native country to seek freedom and opportunity in America. Canonized writers such as Willa Cather, ‘Theodore Dreiser, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have tuned that pursuit of the elusive “American dream’ into classic American narratives. Asian Americans are also 5immigrants and their descendants who pursue(d) better opportunities for material comfort and education, but they have come to occupy unique positions in the racial and ethnic fabric of America. Asian Americans have been depicted as a slippery Other in the mainstream American imagination, simultaneously ‘invisible’ and ‘inscrutable,’ and visibilized as the perilous yellows who threaten to take over America by military and/or economic might. In popular culture, Asians are hypersexualized in the form of Suzie Wong or viewed as asexual in the form of Charlie Chan. They are also depicted as monstrous as Merciless Ming and Fu Manchu or, or the other extreme, as loyally subservient as Hop Sing. Popular representations of Asian Americans reflect the real discrimination and victimization that they experienced. Most of the older Asian American communities such as the urban Chinatowns and Japantowns were ethnic enclaves not unlike other ethnic enclaves in that they were voluntary as well as forced marginalizations of immigrants, being members of these communities belped individuals become financially and socially established. However, the parlance of ‘Asian American community’ has undergone multiple permutations, even as Chinatowns, Little Saigons, and other enclaves emerge in U.S. regions such as the South and the Midwest, where significant Asian populations have only recently risen. In the late twentieth century, ‘Asian American community’ has taken on much more political, social, and panethnic significance, As travel and communications technology make it easier to be physically and mentally “transported,” Asian Americans increasingly 6locate identities transnationally, multiply-nationally and even post-nationally. Contributing to that transnational trend is the rise of Asian nations as powerful participants in the global economy and as providers of goods and cuftural productions to the world market. Simultaneously, however, continued treatment of Asians as “foreign Others” as well as persistent stereotypes of Asians in American culture has led not to the breakdown of Asian American community but to growing numbers of individuals claiming inclusion in that community. There has also been a proliferation of ethnic communities within the Asian American community, evidenced in the increasing numbers of Asian/Pacific Islander ethnic groups that can be marked on the US Census and college applications. Negotiations of Asian American community identity formations form a significant problematic in literature by and about Asian Americans. In literature, contestations and expansion of community inform some of the earliest narratives about supposed insular ethnic enclaves, such as Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, Californiav and Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea. As multiple trajectories of Asian ‘American community identity formations are both reproduced and contested by this, literature, my dissertation traces the ways in which ‘Asian American community,’ as an ideograph of ethnic identity, is shaped by Asian American cultural productions." " [ase ideograph to mean an abstracted term that functions in society as a key word that articulates ideological beliefs and images; examples would inciade words and phrases such as “liberty,” : ‘Among Asian. ” “freedom.” cans, American cities such as Los. ‘Westminister, Monterey Park, San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, New York and Boston are ideographs for “Asian American community.’ However, “Asian American community’ is also an ideograph linked w ethnic enclaves. Thns, ‘Chinaiown,” ‘Koreatown,’ ‘Litle Tokyo,’ and ‘Lite‘My dissertation is concemed with how literature and films about Asian Americans inform community constructions along the trajectories of ethnicities, regions, Despite the rhetoric of individualism and individual rights that is asserted and fiercely protected in America, community is still deemed a desirable aspect of American culture. In media, politics, and everyday life, Americans are experiencing a crisis of community, articulated as conservative fears over various forms of Wester cultural ‘disintegration’ by writers such as William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and Dinesh D'Souza. While multigenerational Americans search for ways to reconstruct community, first-generation immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities are perceived as possessing strong communities, or at least a strong sense of group identity. Yet, strong marginalized group identities have also been described as “tribal,” with negative connotations that suggest that they pose a threat to a fictional homogeneous “American’ society because they contribute, in Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr’s words, to the ‘disuniting’ of America. “Asian American community’ then carries with it both positive and negative significations. On the one hand, Asian Americans are praised for having close-knit ‘communities and kinships which are seen as the cause for many immigrants” Saigon,” are recognized as real communitics marked by signs carrying these monikers (for example, “Asian American’ ‘example, Monterey Park, California, bas been marketed as a “Chinese Beverly Hills” in Taiwanese — ;into Asian Americans’ solid foothold in the middle and upper socioeconomic strata of American society. On the other hand, Asian American communities have also been seen as prohibitively insular, creating tensions with non-Asians who fear that their familiar ways of living, landscapes, and opportunities to succeed are being encroached upon and taken over by foreign elements. ‘Asian Americans are in a unique moment when patterns of immigration, determined by a long history of exclusion policies and increasingly by global capitalism, have resulted in definitions of ethnicity and community that are much ‘more transnational and transcultural than the familiar, Euro-American narrative of immigration that assumes a unidirectional transformation from the “old world” to the “new.” With immigration, the rise of corporatism, and the advent of high technology, American culture arguably has become global and commodified.” American literature is invested with a sense of place and placelessness because of its history of immigrant and migrant origins.’ While the opportunity to (re)invent the individual is celebrated in America, the conditions of displacement and migrancy also create counter constructions of desire for rootedness, home, and national community. At the same time, the condition of migrancy produces new forms of place identity, one that is not dependent on a geographical space but formed 2 Walter Sasman explains this progression of twentieth century American clare in Cau as History, 1984. Tn Pocahonta’s Daughters, Mary Dearborn argues that the experience of migration is the central feature of American identity. 5on the notion thet one’s “home” is psychically located in relation to a social ‘community, and that that relationship is potential via multiple connections to different cultures and commodities. Asian American literature and cultural productions richly mark the diversity within “Asian American community” by showing how individuals negotiate multiple community formations. As Americans increasingly turn to viewing films and consuming cultural productions as a means of creating a sense of community, Asian ‘American cultural productions raise complex questions. What difficulties and issues arise if community is formed not just around similarities but the disruptions of transnationalism and the conditions of being ‘other’? What aspects of the constructions of Asian American community occupy popular imaginings of America? ‘What are the tensions of community in American experience, and how are boundaries of community challenged and reformulated? In chapter two, “Writing Yokohama, California as America: Constructions of Race and Class dynamics In An Insular Community,” I note that Asian American literature often explores a process of Americanization in the transition from defining ‘community formed around kinship and familial relations to community formed around organizations whose links between members are not family-based. Ethnic enclaves formed in response to mainstream racism are an extension of the kinship- based communities. This chapter looks at two novels’ depictions of Japanese and Chinese American enclaves. The enclaves are self-sufficient, insular and insulated 10from the American society at large. Toshio Mori’s fictional community of Yokohama, California is often read as a nostalgic re-creation of the Japanese American community prior to the disruption of World War II internment, but that nostalgia thinly masks a critique of the economic and cultural pressures to maintain Japanese Americans isolation. In chapter three, “Imagining Panethnic Community and Performing Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” I examine the notion of Asian American panethnicity as it subsumes multiple Asian American ethnic identifications into an inclusive “Asian American’ identity. The politically empowering possibilities of Asian American panethnicity are apparent in coalitional Asian American activism, as documented by sociologist Yen Le Espiritu. As one dimension of the multiple forms of American identity, Asian American panethnicity can also present different visions of America. Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel posits a panethnic American community that does not erase difference in the interest of ‘community’; in other words, recognizing ethnic difference and building pan-ethnic community are not oppositional in this novel. Kingston reprises the 1960s visions of coalition and unity while simultaneously challenging reductive notions and boundaries of gender, race, and class. Kingston's protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing. values and conventions, a means of protest that is self-effacing and disingenuous. However, when Ah Sing takes up another strategy, using epic theater to build lived a‘community, he injects a multicultural, panethnic perspective into his reinvention of Chapter four, “Immigrant Asian American Memoir: Healing and Negotiating ‘Communities in Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country,” argues that because ‘Verghese’s autobiographical memoir bears the title “My Own Country,” it precludes the question: where does this immigrant Indian doctor, raised in Ethiopia, educated in England, India, and Boston, and working in Tennessee, claim as his ‘own country.” Verghese answers that question early on—he claims it to be Johnson City, Tennessee. ‘Yet, as an infectious diseases specialist who becomes the first local ‘AIDS doctor,” ‘Verghese must contend with marginalization on several levels: being a foreigner in a largely white town, working with the despised gay population, treating a dreaded and incurable disease, and suffering from a lack of support from his family and Indian ‘American community for his work. Verghese’s memoir portrays an Asian American subjectivity more strongly identified with the condition of being a marginalized ‘American who is constantly negotiating different communities in his region of Tennessee. These communities include those he encounters through his work, such as gay/AIDS patients and activists, and medical staff and researchers. His memoir also constructs his social/cultural communities, which are middle/upper middle class Indian American immigrants whom he encounters at communal social gatherings, and ‘working/middle class whites whom he encounters in public spaces when shopping, running errands, and in social activities apart from Indian Americans, such as line 12dancing. In Verghese’s memoir, the: of an Asian American identity encompass regional, class, racial, and sexual differences. The chapter looks at how he constructs the communities he interacts in as sites where his personal identities are negotiated. His narrative presents how community identity is individually enacted and claimed. Anxiety as well as a sense of liberation accompanies his negotiations as he claims/disclaims communal affinities. Finally, in chapter five, “Asian American Transnationalism in Jessica Hagedomn’s Dogeaters and John Woo’s “Bullet in the Head,”” I examine how a novel and a film enact transnational Asian American identities. Jobn Woo’s 1987 film, vritten and shot in the immediate aftermath of the 1988 Tien An Men Square incident, narrates how three Hong Kong protagonists’ opportunistic pursuit of ‘wealth lands them in the midst of war in Vietnam. Throughout the film, while fighting to stay alive, they must contend with the complexities of their identities as Hong Kong natives, neither Vietnamese nor American. Because they are Chinese subjects of British colonial rule, they represent an atypical “Third World’ view of the conflict. They sympathize with the insurgents’ resentment of Western post-colonial imervention, while desiring the power and wealth that the West represents. Viewers’ identifications with the main characters demand adopting a position fraught with tensions of different community and national identifications, tensions that exist for ‘Asian Americans in the aftermath of America’s wars with Asia. In Hagedom’s novel ‘Dogeaters, she articulates the similarly complex transnational condition of Filipino 1BAmericans who are situated in a long history of western colonialism in the Philippines. The novel and the film represent a transnational Asian American community in which the boundaries of ‘Asia’ and “America” are increasingly blurred, ‘condition that characterizes an evolution of Asian American idemtty from ethnic nationalism to transnationalism. General view of theoretical approaches informing my work In recent years, significant critical activity in the field of cultural place and space identity theory has expanded the understandings of community formation. Private, public, gendered, and racialized spaces culturally map contemporary Place and other ideographs in Asian American literature represent intra~ as well as inter-ethnic negotiations in the rhetoric of Asian American ethnicity. The definition of ‘Asian American’ is contested by scholars and community activists. The term ‘Asian American’ embodies a dialectical tension in its encompassing of national and ethnic identity, and thus has been continuously reformulated since its inception in the 1970s. In subsequent years, various outspoken Asian Americans have ridiculed the notion of a ‘dual Asian and American personality,” dropped the hyphen in “Asian- ‘American,’ and asserted that this label is falsely homogeneous and too limiting to ‘encompass a pan-ethnic identity, even 2s for political and organizational purposes, it continues to be a powerful consolidating agent. On a thetorical level, ‘Asian “4‘American’ refashions two distinct nationalities into a hybrid, one that is susceptible to contestations do not signal that ethnic identification is irrelevant or unnecessary, rather, they are an inevitable outcome of increased visibility and diversity.* ‘Those contestations have only recently been traced in Asian American writing. Although works by writers such as Siu Sin Far, Pardee Lowe, Jade Snow Wong, Louis Chu, Carlos Bulosan, Hisaye Yamamoto, Toshio Mori, and Benvenido ‘Santos were published prior to the 1960s, Asian American writing was not identified as afield of literature until the 1970s. Since the publication of the seminal 1974 anthology Aifieeeee!, Asian American writing has been defined mainly along lines of thematics, aesthetics, or identity politics. Identity configured within place and space, however, remains largely unexamined in literary studies of Asian American literature set outside of Hawaii Contextualized within Asian American economic, legal, and literary history, intersections of place, community, and identity formation inform many Asian ‘American narratives. However, Asian American literature and film also construct communal identity arising from multiple places and spaces, and even outside of place and space; they redefine the notion of American community as a geographically regional construct. The highly interdisciplinary field of cultural place and space are unavoidable; once challenges to the dominant ideological discourse of race take Pana beome per of be emblbdpoltal scome, thin ane es > rearticulation.” Routledge Press, New York, 1986, p.86)theory are my theoretical guides for this kind of cultural mapping. The work of humanist geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Pierre Bourdieu deals with the significance of space and place to social identity in ways that I find useful to my discussions.” In my discussions of community and ethnic and racial identity, I also turn to the work of cultural critics Arjun Appadurai, Edward Soja, Madan Sarup; cultural historian Frederic Jameson; post-colonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Edward Said, Chandra Mobanty, and Gayatri Spivak, feminist scholars bell hooks and Diana Fuss; and ethnicity/race scholars Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Stephen Steinberg, Cornel West and Patricia Williams. Their works are enriched when cast in intertextual dialogue with the critical work of Shirley Lim, Sau-Ling Wong, King- Kok Cheung, Elaine Kim, Lisa Lowe, and David Li-Wei Li. I also refer to Yen Le Espiritu, Gary Okihiro, Sucheng Chan, and Ronald Takaki’s work in formulating my conceptualizations of Asian American communities. Tuan defines “space as a physical dimension devoid of associations; ‘place’ on the other hand, is a location which is “one unit among other units to which it is linked by a circalation net..”. (Space ‘and Place: The Perspective of Experience,CHAPTER TWO Writing Yokohama, California as America: Race and Class Dynamics of An Insular Community The stories in Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California, set prior to and just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1942, depicts a fictional Japanese American community in California. Collectively, these stories seem to represent this locale and its people as complacently having little interaction with other ethnic groups, even though the narratives take place in a agricultural California setting where other people of color, especially Mexicans and other Asians, would be working in the fields and nurseries. Thus, the Yokohama, California in these stories might be defined as an insular community, like Sherwood Anderson's community in Winesburg, Ohio. In fact, Lawson Fusao Inada characterizes the uniqueness of this communal insularity as its fortimde: There are no white people in all of Yokohama, California... . This is not “reverse racism”—for whites like Dewey, Lincoln, Emerson are mentioned in the same breath as Noguchi, Akegarasu, and Shakayamuni. The point is, this is a Japanese-American community--the people do not define themselves as nonwhite, nor do they need to rely on whites. Whites are just there, like street names, like racism—they come with the territory. (nada, xvii) | concur that this absence of non-Japanese names and characters subverts most readers” expectations of representations of America because such absence immerses them in a community in which they must imagine a reversed hegemony of whites and Asians, a reversal that is made subliminal by the fact that all dialogues and expressions are in ‘standard’ English, even though, as Inada notes, the characters are mainly first and second-generation Japanese Americans and more likely “are 7actually speaking Japanese”(xvii). Most of the stories in Yokohama, California, as Inada explains, were written “in the late 1930s and early 1940s although some of the stories might take place in the 1920s or earlier. The book was accepted for publication in 1941, slated to be issued in 1942, finally appeared in 1949 and went out of print” (xviii). This publication history frames a sociopolitical undercurrent for these stories because the stories are Mori's depictions of Japanese American community shaped over a decade in which Japanese Americans experienced the greatest upheaval and intense scrutiny of their loyalty and national identity. The depictions of individuals and the stories’ quiet undertones of interrelational tensions also make this collection useful for addressing who and what is “Japanese America.’ Inada himself positions this text as at least part (if not the entirety) of the answer to this inquiry; he claims forcefully in the outset of his introduction that This is more than a book. This is legacy, tradition. This is the enduring strength, the embodiment of a people. This is the spirit, the soul. This is the community, the identity. This is the pride, the joy, the love. This is Yokohama, California. This is Japanese America. (1) Inada raises one example of how the depictions represent Japanese America: the character of Motoji Tsunoda, ‘the Seventh Street philosopher,” becomes a “pathetic, ridiculous figure when only eleven people (“counting the two babies")” show up to hear him speak. Yet, because the story also valorizes him as possessing “something worthwhile for everyone to hear and see, not just for the eleven persons in theauditorium but for the people of the earth,” Tsunoda is ultimately a man of “courage and bravery” (vii). Inada reads the story of Tsunoda as a “very expensive lesson” about Mori himself. Because Mori’s literary work was ignored and rejected even by members of the very community he wrote about, Tsunoda’s story may be read as an allegory of Mori’s unrecognized and unappreciated talent and contribution to defining Japanese America. Yet, there is an irony here that Inada does not mention in the introduction. That is, what defines Japanese American community is articulated in these stories by the ‘outsider within,” by one who is somehow marginalized in that community; in Mori’s case, he was marginalized because he was a nurseryman wio had a lifelong passion for becoming a ‘legitimate American ee Yokohama, California and No-No Boy: Dialogic Texts Articulating Tensions in Japanese American Community As significant as Mori’s stories are to defining Japanese American ‘community, a discussion of literary constructions of Japanese American and Asian ‘American community must address another text which Inada has also recuperated as a defining literary work about those communities: John Okada’s novel, No-No Bov. Inhis introduction, Inada relates one of the most famous anecdotes of the recovery of an Asian American literary text. The novel had fallen out of print and seemed destined to languish in obscurity until it was ‘discovered’ by writers Lawson Inada, Frank Chin, and Shawn Wong in a second-hand bookstore in Portiand. The efforts these Asian American writers, who were members of CARP (Combined Asian 19Resources Project), led to its republication by the University of Washington Press, its present publisher. The novel has since become one of the most popular Asian ‘American texts used in university curricula, and itis read in Asian American studies and American literature courses as a groundbreaking, defining work about the post- ‘WWII west coast Japanese American community. Okada’s novel was published in 1957, eight years after Yokohama, California's publication, and deals with the a ‘young Nisei (second generation Japanese American) man's problematic return home’ to Seattle after being imprisoned in a special interment camp for suspect insurbordinators. The fictionalized narrative is based upon the historical ostracization of “no-no boys,” Niseis who refused to affirm loyalty to the U.S. and serve in the wartime military draft. There is an eight year gap between the publication dates of Toshio Mori's ‘Yokohama. California and John Okada’s No-No Boy. Mori's short story collection ‘was completed much earlier but, because of the second World War, was not published until 1949, several years after the war ended. When read together, the ‘two texts depict a Japanese American community just prior to and in the wake of the war, anti-Japanese sentiment, and the internment of Japanese Americans. Though published after the war, Mori’s stories were mostly written prior to 1942, evoking a period before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Japanese Americans’ communal insularity was not viewed suspiciously as anti-American. Okada’s novel, published in 1959, clearly articulated the tensions arising in a post-internment Japanese ‘American community that was largely eager to put the war behind it, but which was 20hampered by continued racism/prejudice that blocked individuals’ entries into a mainstream middle class. Both Yokohama, California and No-No Boy are arguably among the most ‘well-known texts that imagine a Japanese American community in American literature. Though fictionalized, No-No Bov’s depiction of Seattle’s Japanese Americans and Yokohama. Califomia’s portrayals of a predominantly Japanese ‘American suburb in California's agricultural region are based upon actual communities that existed, including, as I discuss later, Yamato Colony and Turlock. [As these works are increasingly read and studied as representations of Japanese America, they gradually become as much a part of the American cultural imagination as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which represents the California “Okie” migrant farmers who moved to California in search of employment opportunities during the “Dustbow!” depression years. In Mori and Okada’s texts, Japanese American communities are represented as ethnically insular, where individuals seem to have little interaction with places and people outside those communities. Because Mori and Okada’s texts are generally recognized as the first sustained representations of Japanese American communities, their depictions of those communities as isolated and therefore ‘marginalized from a ‘mainstream’ America have contributed to a cultural imagination of not just Japanese America, but also of Asian America. ‘The questions of identity No-No Boy raises enables us to see the more subtle complex negotiations and tensions among and within individuals of an insular acommunity such as represented in Yokohama, California and to view them as Precursors to the confrontations of identity Japanese Americans faced immediately afier the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I analyze the turning point of that moment, depicted by Mori in the story, “Slant Eyed Americans,” later in this chapter. That is, the war only brought to the surface the negotiations and tensions of identity and ‘community that existed prior to the war. The tensions were sublimated in the illusion that attaining middle-class status would wansform Japanese Americans’ status from racial outsiders to acceptable insiders in the mainstream. While Okada depicted the sham of that illusion in raw and bitter terms in his novel set after World War II, Mori also depicts, in more subtle terms, that assimilative hope as unlikely to be fulfilled in the pre-war Yokohama community. No-No Boy shows that it was not until the Japanese American community was forcibly ruptured that Japanese Americans felt pressured to “choose” a Japanese or American identity; Mori's stories, however, depict Yokohama, California as an example of how Japanese Americans bonded, affirmed each other, and were visible in geographically localized and insular communities. At the same time, the stories suggested that the tensions and conflicts that inevitably accompany these communities are also an indisputable and even necessary corollary of defining them. Furthermore, the concept of an American community and of national identity, articulated on every U.S. one dollar bill as “E pluribus unum,” or ‘out of many, one,” is negotiated around these tensions.‘The Unsaid Marker of Whiteness Outside Insularity Specifically, Mori’s short stories, I contend, are not just literary snapshots of a Japanese American community that are meant to be viewed in a sepia-toned nostalgia. They begin to explore the ambiguities and negotiations and marginalizations within an ethnic community that participate in the imagination of its wholeness. That is, whereas the shared familiarities amongst individuals that cohere in a cultural and ethnic community of “Japanese America” are affirmed in the stories, the moments of potential splitting and individuals’ isolation presage the more violent fracturing of Japanese American community in Okada’s No-No Bov. While Okada’s novel is not the focus of this chapter, I wish to draw attention to a few of its moments to explore how reading them against moments in Mori’s stories show that the war and internment experience themselves were not the causes but the catalysts to the fragmentation of Japanese American identity. Such fragmentation highlights the fact that the racialization of American experience continues to shape the imagining of ethnic community in culture and literature. That is, a notion of ‘Asian American community persists and remains extant because of commonly shared cultural practices, but also because of continued marginalizations and identifications against a hegemonic white ‘mainstream.’ ‘Okada’s novel contains many passages of haunting ambivalence, suggesting feelings both/and as well as simultaneously neither/nor Japanese or American. As the “outsider within,” Ichiro articulates the unnameable gap of a culturally in- 2Bbetween Asian American identity. Ichiro comes ‘home’ to alienation from his former friends and the uncanny feeling of being a stranger amongst what was familiar. This alienation triggers his unspeakable, uncontrollable rage, especially after he is greeted by a “bunch of Negroes” who taunt him with: “Go back to Tokyo, boy..Jap-boy, To-ki-yo..."(5)- Friggin’ niggers, be uttered savagely to himself and, from the same place deep down inside where tolerance for the Negroes and the Jews and the Mexicans and the Chinese and the too short and too fat and too ugly abided because he was Japanese and knew what it was like better than did those who were white and average and middle class and good Democrats or liberal Republicans, the hate which was unrelenting and terrifying seethed up. (6) In this moment, even as he feels hatred, Ichiro recognizes that it is misdirected. When blacks target him as not-belonging, not-American, he recognizes that they are manifesting an internalized prejudice that is also a kind of self-hatred. He feels tolerance for other racially and ethnically marginalized groups because he recognizes himself among them. Yet he also feels how powerfully that same recognition generates an immediate, visceral prejudicial hatred rising from feelings of internalized racial inferiority imposed by a hegemonic white culture. At this moment, he privileges people of color as more experienced, more insightful about “ity that is, about American life, than middle-class whites who are identified as ‘average’ or in other words, solidly ‘mainstream.’ ‘While never overtly mentioning race, Mori's stories suggest how racialized constructions of America as “white” create internalized racism within those excluded from the dominant racial narrative of the nation. For example, 24"Tomorrow and Today” reveals how the missing marker of race serves all the more to highlight it. A Nisei girl named Hatsuye, who dreams about being Clark Gable's lover, is presented as admirably hopeful "in spite of the fact that she is hopeless"(143). Overtly, what is presented as the source of her hopeless situation is her ugliness, the specific details of which are not discussed in the story. But ‘ugliness here is tied to the noticeable absent reference of race. Hatsuye’s attitude towards her ugliness is that "she did not dread being ugly herself; that she accepted. But for others to see in her all ugliness gave her no lead and all hopelessness ahead” (164). Like the fact of being racially marked by others, the “ugliness” is unavoidable, undeniable; like the Niseis who responded to anti-Japanese sentiment with fervent American patriotism, the source of futility in their fervor would result from others’ inability to look past race and see their Americanness. Beauty, in this story, then, is the unsaid marker of "whiteness"; the irony of the narrator's comment that "Although her hope may be unfilled, there is no reason why she cannot be a lover of Clark Gable"(166) is underscored by the story’s conclusion, which exposes the "tomorrow which is her day and which will not be"(166). No one ever tells Hatsuye why she cannot be Clark Gable's lover. However, although no distinctively unattractive features of Hatsuye are mentioned, the fact that Hatsuye looks physically Japanese is the unsaid basis of her ‘ugliness.’ David Palumbo-Liu names race as the ‘subtextual presence’ in another of Mori's stories, “Three Japanese Mothers,” which is about a character's failed ambition: 25[Race] is this strong subtextual presence that informs the core of the story, yet just as Mori was reticent in real life to articulate such real obstacles to acceptance, here too we find the elision of the historical. Nevertheless, it is only barely elided, and calls attention to itself emphatically, since it is the only way to understand what it is exactly that blocks Tom's ability to manifest his dream.(45) Although “beauty” in another story, "The All-American Girl,” is identified as a petite ‘frail’ Japanese girl, there resides a skepticism that such a beauty could actually be all-American, as seen in the narrator's response to his brother's comment that she is “an All-American if there ever was one” (91): "Do you think so?" I said. "Don't you think so?” he said. I did not say anything. I did not know.(92) It is not until his brother repeats the term over and over that one day the narrator says "The All-American was here"; his brother's surprise registers that skepticism in linking ‘All-American beauty’ with ‘Japanese’: ""You say it almost naturally,” he said and laughed” (92). ‘The “American Creed”: Dialogic of Nation and Community As argued by Benedict Anderson in his concept of nations as "imagined communities,” the insularity of experience which is lived and narrated by an individual in small, isolated communities is precisely the foreground against which a narrative of nation, with attendant notions of inclusion/exclusion, is forged. I will show that, conversely, it is through such communities that the homogeneity of nation can be challenged.‘Yokohama, California demonstrates a dialogic relationship of nation and community. In the stories, the American nation is constitutive of the local ‘community, and the local community in tum participates in the construction of the ‘American nation. Despite the insularity of the community and the prevalent tone of isolation and solitude in the characters and drama they enact, a dialogue with American national discourse is demonstrated in the stories’ conclusive desire for the social. By ‘desire for the social,’ I mean that Mori's narratives imagine acceptance and inclusion of Japanese American communities within the literary discourse of the ‘American nation. Homi Bhabha's dual concepts of the narrative temporality of the nation and the pedagogical versus the performative help us understand how Mori’s stories strategically manipulate performative narratives to interpret and critique a pedagogical narrative of America, one which has historically shut out Japanese American experience. Bhabha calls the ‘performative’ those narratives and responses of marginalized individuals and groups that aim to ultimately alter the ‘official’ or dominant nationalist ‘pedagogical’ narratives. These dominant narratives include the historical and mythological narratives that define national identity. However, the performative narrative does not emerge in a cultural vacuum it is hailed into being by the pedagogical narrative, which is informed by an American ideology that Gunnar Myrdal defines as the ‘American Creed.” ‘Although Myrdal’s Creed is not often invoked in late twentieth-century mainstream discourse about American identity, his articulation that such a creed is lived mostly as a national suggestion is still pertinent to the ways in which minorities negotiate aand assert claims to America. Furthermore, Myrdal’s expression of what that Creed is is perhaps more appropriate to sentiments present at the time period in which Mori and Okada wrote. Myrdal identifies an American Creed as a concept particular to American discourse of nationalism. He notes the Creed has been at its strongest when America is engaged in war; it "gives the common American his feeling of the historical mission of America in the world" (Myrdal, 5). Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, from ignorance, want, fear, and of speech, for example, are manifestations of the Creed. ‘The waves of immigration and the resulting significant demographics of immigrant Americans, according to Myrdal, are important to the upholding of the national Creed. While waves of immigration resulted in disparity of national origin, language, religion, and culture, a disparity that Myrdal notes "has been correlated with income and social class distinctions"(6), the Creed allows and even encourages the individual to individualize and work towards social mobility with the ideals of freedom and equality this Creed espouses. Ironically, Myrdal defines this Creed vaguely as "a social ethos, a political creed" (3). In other words, it is only a “national suggestion” in which the main norms are centered in "belief in equality" and in the "rights to liberty"(8). Myrdal suggests that the Creed itself embraces ideologies that admit tension: In society liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for others. The result of competition will be determined by who got a head start and who is handicapped. In America as everywhere else—and sometimes, perhaps, on the average, a little more ruthlessly—liberty often provided an ‘opportunity for the stronger to rob the weaker. Against this, the 28egualitarianism in the Creed has been persistently revolting. The struggle is far from ended. ( 9) This tension within the Creed is not problematic to nation formation but an inherent part ofit, resulting in what Homi Bhabha asserts is the nation's "vacillating representation... [which] opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference” (300). According to Myrdal, that American Creed was a powerful signpost directing the insular community's interpellation into an American discourse, but, Mori's stories signal the failure of that Creed to protect minoritized citizens, as evidenced in the history of America's intemment of Japanese American citizens from 1942 to 1944. The failure of the Creed marks a potential moment of rupture in the American nation itself, a rupture which continues to be problematic today. Even as the Creed makes potential a space for oppressed minorities to claim parity, the notion of the Creed downplays group inequalities, for its very existence glosses over those inequalities with a veneer of democratic ideals.' Elements of that Creed are traceable in the characters’ discourses, yet Mor's stories subtly expose the hypocrisy of Americans’ upholding of that Creed while racism and the marginalization of minority communities still exist. ndeed, the social scientist Stephen Steinberg argues in “Up From Slavery: The Myth of Black Progress” that Myrdal’s greatest shortcoming was placing fér too much optimism in the Creed alone to address and eliminate prejudice and oppression of min inthe USS. Rather, Steinberg argues, for Aftican American, it took ethnic communal mobilization and political insurgency inthe form of the civil rights and Black power movements to finally make gains in securing equal rights for Blacks. ‘Similarly, for the Japanese Americans, communal organization and Sansei and Nisei-led demands for ‘governmental reparations for economic losses incurred by invohmtary interament eventually resulted in an official apology signed by President Ronald Reagan, as well as $20,000 reparation for each surviving internee. 29‘Walking the Tightrope of Horizontal Comradeship ‘When Benedict Anderson proposes that the nation is political community “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign"(Anderson, 15), he raises an important vantage point from which to discuss the constructedness of nation, especially how culture inserts itself into that construction. Anderson’s “point of departure is that nationality, or as one might prefer to put it in view of the word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts [sic] of a particular kind"(13). Anderson is interested in identifying the deep horizontal comradeship among its citizens that the concept of nation evokes. Thus, he turns to investigating the origins of nation as religious and monarchical or socially hierarchical communities. He also traces a development from these origins to the modem nation, in which this comradeship is no longer maintained along a common overarching ideological belief or hierarchy. Rather, individuals in the modem nation maintain an imagined comradeship along the notion that other individuals engage in similar activities, performed more or less in a kind of temporal simultaneity. For example, when an individual reads a newspaper, that person is "well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion"(39). Mori depicts how feeling part of one’s immediate surroundings and local community also is significant to how an individual imagines his participation in that 30kind of national simultaneity. In the story “Akira Yano,” Akira Yano is a writer- artist who wishes to have his work read by by a national readership. He leaves the community in his attempts to have his work published in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner's. All these publications reject his stories, but he is not completely discouraged until he meets with rejection from the Japanese American community; that discouragement from his local community leads to his retreat into solitude. Even the narrator, one of the few Japanese American community members who indulges Yano in his talk about being a writer, is cynically doubtful about Akira's announcement that he has signed a contract with a publishing company. Similarly, in the story Mori titles after himself, "Toshio Mori,” the protagonist Teruo faces irrepressible and unrelieved isolation within the Japanese American community, despite his search for solace and company to "crush and wipe out this ominous feeling of standing alone, walking alone, going alone, without a nod or a smile or caress or better, an understanding from someone"(39). Teruo feels disconnected from what Anderson calls the unisonance, or the sense of simultaneity which forms the individual's constructedness of participation in the modern nation. It is telling that when Anderson refers to nation, he uses the pronoun "a"; and when he discusses national boundaries, he is dealing only with those "beyond which lie other nations” (16). Even as he raises the notion of nations as imagined communities, Anderson is still preoccupied with nations as singular, unified entities; his breakdown of the way those communities are imagined presumes a unified imagination among the members of the nation. For example, his sense of this 31unification is especially called into question when Anderson tracks the emergence of the realist novel and the newspaper as the forms that provide the nation with a national temporality via the narrative of the ‘meanwhile.’ This national temporality evoked by the linearly organized plot structure of the realist novel and the newspaper's narration of daily events, gives credence to the sense of an onward. movement and recording of calendrical time, which in tum gives the imagined world of the nation a kind of sociological solidity. "Homogenous empty time"2and the "unisonance"3 are terms Anderson uses in characterizing modem national narratives to accentuate the collectivity evoked by this national temporality. ‘Anderson’s work is important because it articulates what does unify a nation; my work in looking at Mori’s and other Asian American texts, however, attempts to address the negotiations and resistances and ruptures that are also part of national community. I am not inferring that Anderson does not consider these possibilities and moments of rupture, but they do not appear to be his focus. For Japanese Americans, the episodes of World War II and interment have become important moments of ruptures in community that have continued, conversely, to provide a means of claiming and asserting an American identity.* 2 referring to the simultaneity in which experiences seem to take place in the novel and the newspaper. 3 of literary voices whose narrations are foregrounded against the assumptions of readers’ familiarity with the cultural artifacts ofthe nation “For example, individuals such as Frank Kitamoto of Bainbridge Island near Seatle have made a personal commitment (in Kitamoto's cas, that is in addition to his professional commitments as a ‘entist to goto schools as distant as University of Connecticut to conduct presentations educating students about interament through autobiographical and biographical narrative. In these presentations, Kitamoto asserts that his history is their history and thus ‘our’ national history of 32.Enacting Nation Narration In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson theorizes how print capitalism undergirds the nation and creates an imagined community. The later development of live broadcast radio also further reinforced a national community linked by mass media. Mori depicts how that moment of linking is also an Althusserian moment of ‘interpellation,’> whereby the Japanese American characters experience an alienating, unpleasant feeling inside and outside America. On December 7, 1941, the nationwide radio airwaves’ sober announcement that Pearl Harbor had been heavily bombed addressed all listeners, including Japanese Americans, as part of the ‘national’ American community. The bombings brought the fighting dangerously close to home for Americans. Simultaneously, however, the same Japanese Americans who listened to the addresses, recognized their instantly more precarious American status: they would likely be seen by non- Japanese as bearing suspicious allegiances to “enemy” Japanese because of their Japanese heritage and Asian physical characteristics. Before moving into a close examination of those stories, which include “Slant-Eyed Americans,” “Toshio Mori,” and “All-American Gitl,” it is necessary to explicate how the American nation also gets interpellated through specific acts of America. SLouis Althusser, in “Ideological State Practices,” talks about now “ideological state apparatuses,” or ISA’s such as police forces, government agencies, and schools, “interpellate,’ or socially and imstiutionally yoke individuals into a community whereby these individuals almost involuntarily recognize and respond to these ISA's. 33narrative. Because these stories are written in present tense, the act of reading them is to recast the present time as the moment in the story, and the present place as, ‘Yokohama, California. Anderson has explicated how evoking a common moment of experience is the power of literature, specifically novels, to unify readers into a national community. Such literature creates a homogenizing moment whereby a reader would experience the events of the texts as a ‘meanwhile’ temporality to other events happening at the present moment. Itis precisely this issue of the homogenizing national temporality of the ‘meanwhile’ which Homi Bhabha complicates and disputes. Bhabha argues that the experience of the present, the ‘meanwhile,’ is not a homogeneous collectivity, but rather a splitting of the nation; it reveals the incommensurability of individuals’ experience—and that incommensurability results from the fact that the nation's history is one of migration, immigration, and colonization. The ‘imagined community’ is never fixed, but always changing, geographically shifting and shifted from within. ‘The more compelling question Bhabha leads up to is how to conceptualize the nation as encompassing a claim to a fixed, stable historical identity, yet enabling an “interpellat[ion of] a growing number of national subjects"(Bhabha, 297). To address this conceptualization of how nation narration encompasses both, Bhabha identifies not one but two modes of narrating the nation, which display two modes of temporality in the nation: a fixed past and a changing present. These models are signified by the pedagogical and the performative. The pedagogical time of nation 34identifies the nation's fixed past as a “succession of historical moments that represents an eternity produced by self-generation” (Bhabha, 299). In contrast, the performative time of nation presents the nation as what exists in the present moment or as the variegated individual experiences of a patchwork which incorporates the “scraps, patches, and rags of daily life" (Bhabha, 297) of the nation's culture. The growing numbers of national subjects thus contribute to and are interpellated by this moment of the performative. However, the performative, by dint of its fluid defining of nation, disrupts the pedagogical, challenging its sovereignty to determine a fixed conceptualization of nation. It is here that Bhabha can turn to marginal discourses, especially minority literature and voices articulating cultural difference, to show that they can serve as those strategies of performative intervention to disrupt the pedagogical discourse of nation narration. These voices emerge to "supplement" any previous nation-concept evoked by the pedagogical. Because the performative's fluidity disallows any total authority of an elite voice, because all voices are supplementary and thus interdependent, the existence of minority discourse thwarts the possibility that the nation's instability, revealed in the slippage between the pedagogical and the performative, would resolve itself into stability. The liminality of the nation concept is then revealed to not be locatable in the margins of the nation from other nations, but in the very center of nation as signifier. Curiously, Bhabha sees nothing problematic about collapsing the in-between of these signifiers and signifieds when discussing the the enacters/performers of 35minority discourse~the colonials, postcolonials, migrants, and minorities who “are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modem nation”(315). Bhabha primarily traces the occurrence of this split in language. In “Nation and Narration,” he attributes a cultural and linguistic ‘split’ in the ‘imagined community’ of the nation to bi- or multi-lingual people. By speaking a ‘foreign’ language, such individuals disrupt the unity of the imagined community. Of Narrators and Narrations While Bhabha’s concept of the nation as constructed within two major discourses~of the performative and the pedagogical have significant bearing on Mori’s stories, he does not take into account the minorities who do speak the dominant language of the nation (in Mori's case, English) and their ability to challenge the ‘center,’ especially once the language of the center is acquired. In reading Mori’s stories as “universalizing’ narratives, and in asserting that they are, indeed, legitimate American texts, Lawson Inada and William Saroyan attempt to ‘counter critiques of the narratives’ flawed stylistics, attributed to Mori’s less than deft handling of English. In the years since they wrote those introductions, there has been increasing recognition of the ways in which America may be narrated and what is ‘standard’ American English. For example, linguists now recognize Ebonics, an African American vernacular, as a legitimate dialect of American English. Neither Inada nor Saroyan read Yokohama, California as stories of resistance to a notion of a homogeneous America. Rather, in his introduction to the collection, Saroyan reads Mori's stories as comfortingly ‘universal’ in their appeal. 36Indeed, the history of its publication in 1949, after Japan's surrender and the release of the Japanese Americans from internment, adds significance to the ways in which Mori’s stories might be read, even as Inada and Saroyan in their introductions attempt to ‘universalize’ (which can also be read here, ‘Americanize’) Japanese ‘American experience. Curiously, both Inada and Saroyan also note the stories’ Japanese sensibilities and Mori’s imperfect English, although Mori’s writing does not contain blatant stylistic errors. A nagging question remains from Inada and Saroyan’s contradictory characterizations of Mori’s stories. If non-Japanese names were to be substituted for the Japanese names, would the sense and coherence of the stories alter significantly? Do the stories more complexly challenge the pedagogical nation narration of America, or do they simply showcase Mori’s talents as “a natural-born writer,” as Saroyan argues? I begin considering these questions with the representation of the narrator(s), ‘whose presences are the thread of connection between the stories. The "narrator(s)" may be pluralized because although a narrative first person "I" dominates throughout the text, that “I” subsumes several different subjectivities. The placement of "Tomorrow is Coming, Children" as the opening story to the collection exemplifies a willingness to forgive America for the injustice of the camps, and seems to imply that this injustice is a thing of the past, and further, that it is up to Japanese Americans themselves to “make peace” with this injustice. This story contains a moment where the Issei (first generation immigrant) grandmother 37notes, "war has its good points too. ... You become positive. You cannot sit on the fence, you must choose sides"(21). This grandmother tells the story of her passage, arrival, and initial adjustment as a Japanese “picture bride" in America. In other stories, the "I" becomes an unnamed narrator who relates entire conversations, even stories, in which he has little or no part, other than as a passive observer®. What connects the stories is some form of a ubiquitous narrator—either this first person "I" ‘who can enter the immediate, intimate sphere of a family or small group and incongruously blend into the background, or a third person narrator who not only observes the events but also is able to enter the characters’ psyches. The narrator of the aforementioned story titled "Toshio Mori” is a third person narrator by the name of Teruo; since this is a story, it must be read as fiction, but Mori's titling the story after himself leaves questions about what this lonely protagonist, who wanders the town streets at night observing others, has to do with ‘Toshio Mori.’ Collectively, then, the narrators form a bodiless, ubiquitous subjectivity that seems to have total access to this insular community. ‘The most significant fiction of these narrators is to ‘expose’ the desires of the individuals within the community. These individuals make up a narrative that occupies several, sometimes contradictory, discursive positions. The cumulative effect of these multiple narrators is that they collectively represent a “communal” subjectivity. These include "The Seventh Street Philosopher,"*The End of the Line,” “Say It With Flowers,” "The Chessmen,” "Nodas in America,” “The Eggs of the World,” “The Six Rows of Pompoms,” "The 38In addition, many of the stories end with a gesture toward the future, which makes them seem timeless. An example of such universalizing endings include that of "The Seventh Street Philosopher”: ‘And as he finished his lecture there was something worth while for everyone to hear and see, not just for the eleven persons in the auditorium but for the people of the earth: that of his voice, his gestures, his sadness, his patheticness, his bravery, which are of common lot and something the people, the inhabitants of the earth, could understand, sympathize and remember for awhile.(32) Rather than providing closure, the endings seek to open these narratives and to extend these experiences as not simply limited to the community of Yokohama. This emphasis on the universal lends a poignant underscoring of the suppression of political critique; clearly, it would have been extremely risky for a Japanese American writer to write openly about American racism during and immediately after WWII. However, the resigned optimism in the story "Tomorrow is Coming, Children,” which Lawson Inada reads as a “double-edged” reminiscence, 7 contributes to a performative minority discourse which—for Bhabha~offers a perspective from wiich a pedagogy of America, particularly in the anti-Japanese sentiment of the period, can be challenged. Perhaps, as inada's interpretation notes, the aim of this story is to create a ‘third space’ of Japanese American identity, one Brothers,” and "Tomorrow and Today” 7 The “double edge” is composed of a grandmother's invocation to fre generations to remember the Nisei uncle soldier fighting overseas, as well as the story of the immigrants’ hardships. 39which does not demand absolute loyalty to a white-codified homogeneity of nation, but rather accepts that "Pro-Japanese American, or pro-American, is not necessarily pro-white, or anti-Japanese” (xxii). Constructing Social Mirrors in Community David Palumbo-Liu's reading of the question posed by Tsunoda, the "Seventh Street philosopher” of the story, looks at how Tsunoda depends upon a notion of a social collectivity as well as a specific time-space in order to define himself. Tsunoda asks "What is there for the individual to do today?"(27). Palumbo-Liu states: ‘The specificity of the historical moment thus accounts for the exigencies that weigh upon the individual at this moment, as different from former conditions and possibilities, and set against transcendental imperatives. This too forces us to reassess the concept of individualist, since the individual, defined by his/her scope of action, is now faced with a different set of parameters within which he/she can/must act~"what is there” thus pointing toa finite rage of possibilities, not a completely open space of self- determination 8 ‘The ‘historical moment” Palumbo-Liu refers to is post-World War I, when palpable anti-Japanese sentiment limited the options open to Japanese Americans eager to resettle in mainstream America after interment. The sense of alienation and loss of property after four years of incarceration was so traumatizing that a significant number of Japanese Americans who had previously made their homes on the West "Palombo-Liu, David. “Toshio Mori and the Atachments of Spirits,” Amerasia Journal, 17:3 0Coast chose to relocate to the Midwest and Northeast to create new lives. For an individual like Tsunoda, whose devotion to philosophical oratory would be considered eccentric in almost any community, finding an audience willing to listen and exchange in dialogue with a Japanese American orator would be even more difficult. Palumbo-Liu proposes that the lack of a ‘real’ audience causes Mori to posit himself as audience: "Mori's narrators tend to be advocates for the thinly veiled projections of Mori the author, commenting back upon equally opaque projections of Mori as protagonist."9 For example, Tsunoda as the unheard artist, speaks and writes despite that lack of an audience who understands him: "there was this man, standing up and talking to the world, and also talking to vindicate himself to the people. . . am sure he had a reason to stand up and have courage and bravery to offset the ridicule, the nonsense, and the misunderstanding”(32). Arguably, the desire for the social can be read as a desire for inclusion in the nation, and the stories testify to the absence of the Japanese American experience from the America’s nation-time and nation-space. In his introduction, Inada notes that at least one of the stories, "Tomorrow is Coming, Children" was written in the camps for a camp audience and was in fact published twice, in both English and Japanese translation, in an 1943 issue of Trek, the Topaz Camp magazine. While the first story of the collection addresses the camp audience, Mori's search for the reader (1991)43 ‘Palumbo-Liu, D. p. 44 4a‘who will at least attempt to understand his work ends with the audience he posits as, the larger American community. And, reversing Anderson's assertion that the act of reading the realist novel is a simultaneous activity that unites citizens of the modern nation, all readers who thereafter come to Mori's text must imagine inhabiting a positionality within this community, and conversely, also must refigure their imaginations of America as encompassing Yokohama. Thus, Mori's characters’ desire for the social beyond the insular community in Yokohama, California leads to its insertion into the narration of America. This insertion of Yokohama into the national consciousness is contradictory to the notion of simultaneity because it does not reinforce an already agreed-upon concept of the nation. Of course, it takes more than simply Mori's desire to insert himself in the nation for a reader to understand Mori's stories as a narration of America. The ‘universality’ of the stories posits Mori's recognition and manipulation of certain cultural artifacts which may be recognized as elements that form a national ideology. According to Anderson, such cultural artifacts include an evocation of pluralities of the nation, familiar landscape, and a sense of calendrical time. Mori includes these aspects in his stories, but he also focuses on a specific narration of the ideology of the American nation. Real Fictions in Representing Japanese American Community The presence of the Japanese American as the "other within," in Mori's depiction of Yokohama both reinforces the Creed and exposes the lack of 2conformity to it. Mori's narrative is most powerful in doing so when slippage occurs between the fictionality of Yokohama and the historical experiences of the Japanese ‘Americans in this period. Even the community of Yokohama, California moves quickly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to show loyalty to American ideals of liberty and freedom. Mori’s depictions of an American community in the throes of World War II show how the fictional intersects with the real in the establishment of calendrical time. There are two stories situating clear historical moments: interament ("Tomorrow is Coming, Children”), and the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor ("Slant Eyed Americans”). In the latter story, the insularity of the ‘community is disrupted by the announcement on the radio: "It was Sunday noon, December 7. . .. At 7:25 a.m. this moming a squadron of Japanese bombing planes attacked Pearl Harbor. The battle is still in progress"(127). In (re)constructing an interpellation of Japanese Americans into/outside the American nation in the simultaneity of listening to the American radio announcement, the unmarked fictional time of the stories suddenly converges into historical time. The characters’ reactions illustrate the power of this simultaneous moment: farmers’ prospects for the Japanese American flower businesses are immediately reversed from imminent prosperity to imminent ruin. Ironically, President Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms”— freedom from ignorance, want, fear, and freedom of speech— which America embraces as the ideals for whose protection it fights the war, are exactly those freedoms that are threatened for Japanese Americans. The moment of that threat is 43encapsulated as a threat to the nation itself when the American-born narrator realizes he is forced to take a position as an American national against his Japanese and thus ‘foreign’ parents. He also encounters a jarring moment of splitting himself, as he recognizes that all individuals with Japanese faces, including himself, will be seen as foreign: “Since Japan declared war on the United States itll mean that you parents of American citizens have become enemy aliens," I said. "Enemy aliens,” my mother whispered. "This is very bad for the people with Japanese faces,” I said. Father slowly shook his head. "What shall we do?” asked Mother. "What can we do?" Father said helplessly. (128-9) Pointedly and ironically, the ‘enemy alien’ Issei mother assumes the most fervent patriotism in response to the imminent war. It is she who urges," This is not time for young folks to despair. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. America needs you"(131). Itis also the mother who expresses an undying faith in the Creed: "And America is right. She cannot fail. Her principles will stand the test of time and tyranny"(132). This moment also offers a significant contrast between the fictional time of the story and ‘factual’ Japanese American experience. During the war, many Isseis were still Japanese nationals because they were prohibited fom becoming American citizens. Their Nisei children, however, were granted citizenship because they were born in the United States. This difference became a painful issue for many dual-generation families; the Niseis, eager to prove theirloyalty to America, clashed with their Issei parents over renouncing their own Japanese citizenship. The Isseis were reluctant to do so, because that act would have left them citizens of no country." Mori's depictions are consistent with Myrdal's observation that in the disparity between the promise of the Creed and the reality of social inequality in ‘America, itis the weak and the most marginalized groups who intensely embrace the Creed, even as it fails to prevent their victimization. Myrdal noted that at the time of his writing, American Negroes, "like the whites, are under the spell of the great national suggestion. With one part of themselves, they actually believe, as do the whites, that the Creed is ruling America'(4). Besides transcending race boundaries, the Creed also is widely embraced across class: “by the logic of the unique American history, it has developed that the rich and secure, out of pride and conservatism, and the poor and insecure, out of dire need, have come to profess the identical social ideals"(13). The Creed, then, fimctions as an equalizer of social differences. America’s history as both conservative and revolutionary contributes to this upholding of the Creed. Myrdal locates the tenets of the Creed as those that inform America's higher laws, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. However, Americans’ relationship to laws is fraught with hypocrisy- Americans inscribe ideals in laws, a phenomenon which Myrdal identifies as a {For some hisorical accounts of this generational confi, see Takak's Srangers From a Different Shore. 45remnant of the country’s Puritanical origins. On the other hand, Americans also view laws as disputable on moral grounds, an attitude that recalls America's revolutionary origins as well. It is America's "fetishistic cult of the Constitution” that allows the strong to block popular will by evoking the 14th Amendment; but the Constitution's role in protecting individual rights also allows minority groups and the weak to openly challenge the lack of conformity to the Creed. Real Fiction Contextualized: Alien Land/American Farm Mori’s depiction of complacent insularity in Yokohama, California is contrasted to the historical documentation of the political struggles of actual Japanese American farming communities in California from the 1920's to 1940's, the time period in which Mori situates his stories. The 1910 U.S. Census records 72,157 Japanese in the United States; 41,356 of these Japanese were in California, and 4,502 of these were Niseis (American-born second generation). The Census also reports that 39,500 Japanese were employed in agriculture, and three-quarters of them were in California. Most Japanese immigrants began as laborers, worked their way up to tenant farmers, and then a few became landowners and held their ‘own farms and nurseries. Despite the 1913 Alien Land Law which prevented non- citizens from owning land, the Isseis were able to purchase land in the names of their American-bom children. By 1920, 5,152 Japanese American farmers held "Matsumoto, Valerie. The Cortez Colony: Family, Farm, and Community Among Japanese ‘Americans, 1919-1982, p. 17-18 46361,276 acres in California and produced crops valued at $67 million.12 This development of Japanese American farming communities was met with some resentment. White farmers in Turlock, California, resentful of Japanese Amerian farmers who underbid white farmers, tried to ban Japanese American tenant farmers from leasing land. White hostility against immigrant farmers and laborers was also expressed in violent attacks against them; on July 20, 1920, ‘masked white bandits’ expelled 58 Japanese laborers from their bunkhouses in Turlock, California. Forced into trucks, they were unloaded six miles north of Turlock and warned not to return, 13 Despite such hostility, Japanese American communities continued to grow and gradually formed tenuous amicable relations with the white communities around them. The Yamato Colony, Japanese American farm community near Livingston, California, was all-Methodist and engaged in church activities of the town. Nisei children were often mode! students in the public schools, though Prejudice took the form of denying recognition to these students. For example, rather than have a Nisei valedictorian for the high school commencement ceremonies, the principal decided to have the white class president speak.14 The periodicals of the period reveal the ambiguous position the Japanese Americans held. The editor of the Livingston Chronicles, a community newspaper, was on good terms with Japanese Americans in the Yamato Colony. However, he wrote an a7editorial in the paper which, while not supporting other exclusionists’ aim of denying citizenship to American-bom children of Japanese in California, opposed the influx of Japanese into California.15 This ambiguity became more pronounced around the period of WWIL. In 1942, the Turlock Journal \6 included reports of Japanese American church activities in its social column, but also printed an editorial titled "Hatred versus Love", which warmed readers that "no matter how much we admire certain Japanese qualities or individuals, this trait of respect on our part doesn't stop the Japanese from bombing our cities and killing our citizens, and making actual slaves out of us."!7 ‘What kind of construction of the ‘real’ social forces shaping Yokohama and Japanese American community does Mori (represent? For this discussion, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein's explorations of how social constructions, in particular race, ethnicity, and class, intersect with nation and capitalist economy illuminate Mori's incorporation of the ‘real.’ Wallerstein views race as directly related to axial divisions of labor in a core-periphery antinomy model. Because the core and periphery increasingly become geographically as well as politically distinguishable, race and class categories become crystallized along differences between what areas and occupations constitute core and periphery. Communities like the Japanese American farming communities, which ibid, p.78 'Sibid, p. 28 16 Turlock was a neighboring town of the Cortez Colony, another Japanese American farming community 48continue to exist today in California, show how class oppression pushed the first Issei Japanese Americans to immigrate. According to Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, who ‘wrote a program on California Japanese American strawberry growers for an 1989 display at the Japanese American History Museum, most of the early twentieth- century Issei farmers were extremely poor. Speaking little to no English, they were forced into farm labor. Glen Hasegawa, a Sansei descendant of these immigrants, who maintains the family strawberry farming business, notes, “That first generation really took to strawberries. ... They probably saw the potential. It’s not an easy crop to grow; it takes a lot of hand work and a lot of patience. Maybe it just fit the demeanor of the Japanese Americans, as far as being able to stick with it."18 So rapid was the growth of this community that by 1910, “almost 80% of the strawberry growers in Los Angeles County were Japanese. When the Central California Berry Growing Association, the first strawberry marketing co-op, was founded in 1917, the bylaws required that half of the board of directors be Japanese American.”!9 Only four years later, the Alien Land Law was passed, prohibiting non-citizens from owning land; by the 1940s, only 30% of the Japanese American farmers farmed their own land. This racial economic marginalization led to the formation of ethnically insular Japanese American communities whose ties continue today. Furthermore, those Japanese American farming communities were part of a larger California agricultural minority community that has been virtually ignored by "pid, p. 108 18 Interview in the Los Angeles Times, H3, April 16, 1997. 49the mainstream—probably because they interacted mostly among themselves rather than with whites. Historian Thomas Almaguer has noted the formation of a Japanese and Mexican American agricultural workers’union; George Yamamoto, a Nisei strawberry grower in Oxnard, California, recalled that his mother spoke more Spanish than she did English, since “Working out in the fields with the workers, she had to learn to speak Spanish, but she never really had any social dealings with English-speaking people. She was always at work or with the kids.”20 The cross- cultural, cross-ethnic interactions, then, were determined by racial marginalization intersecting with class marginalization. The Mexican-Japanese alliances represent these marginalized groups’ resistances to employers’ use of interracial class stratification to diffuse collective organization. Mori’s stories, however, exemplify how minorities are also fractured intraracially by these stratifications. Resisting that fracturing is difficult because minority mono- and multi-racial alliances would disrupt a national identity formation dependent upon majority racial homogenization. The ways in which race and class participate in nation formation are theorized by Etienne Balibar. Balibar sees race not as an expression of class struggles but as a form of political alienation inherent in class struggles within the field of nationalism (12). For Balibar, institutional racism is a common enemy for diverse racial and ethnic labor groups in the ‘proletarian nations’ of the Third World and Western Europe. '9 Parsons, Russ. “Our Strawberry Roots,” Los Angeles Times, H 1-3, April 16, 1997. 20 fpid, p. H3. 50With Immanuel Wallerstein, Balibar formulates this relationship between race and class based upon political activity in the modern world, in which class-based politics take the form of social-based politics (such as the convergence of class struggles with feminist struggles). While this struggle produces pan-ethnic, pan-racial alliances, class also functions to stratify intra-ethnic relations. Mori’s stories subversively critique class stratifications within racially marginalized communities as seen in interpersonal relations within the community. ‘That class stratifications existed in actual Japanese American farming communities is an issue that has been noted by Matsumoto.2! She records distinct class differences between the two neighboring Japanese American farming colonies of Yamato and Cortez around the 1930s-40s; those differences were still evident in the early 1980s, when Matsumoto conducted her study of the communities. The ‘Yamato Colony in Livingston was perceived to be more refined and more highly ‘educated than the newer Cortez Colony in Turlock. Having a 13-year lead over the Cortez Colony in community establishment enabled Japanese American farmers of the Yamato Colony to prosper in the economic boom period during WWI; in addition, the Yamato Colony had established a closer relationship with the white community via common religious worship in the Methodist faith. Thus, higher class became a distinction of the Yamato Colony and enabled greater assimilation into the mainstream white community. In Mori's stories, class distinctions are not foregrounded as divisions along stwhich the Yokohama community can be demarcated, but a reading of class distinctions does fill in narrative gaps to explain the characters’ relations and social situations. For example, in "The All-American Giri,” the hesitance which the brothers exhibit in approaching a girl who regularly walks down their street is not explainable until one day when the narrator's brother observes in awe, "She must come from a well-to-do home. Her clothes are of the finest materials"(93). The refusal to violate their abstract admiration for her beauty and to "see the ugly that is Jhuman"(94) suggests the brothers’ reluctance to violate class boundaries. The only way in which the brothers are able to know anything about her is through the newspaper: "one day in the Mainichi News we saw her picture and the announcement of her marriage to a promising doctor in Los Angeles"(95) Still, the brothers continue to sit om the porch to watch for the girl, even giving up their other activities to do so. This watching, which they call "our play,” indicates that despite their conformity to class distinctions, they still desire to violate those bounds. They wait for the next phase of the “adventure,” which is the meeting, the actual interaction. That desire is closed off when the brother finally says "We must move on, too. Our play isn't over,” and they resume painting and watching the traffic from the porch. Class as a restrictive marker, momentarily weakened in a possibility of its violation, is again affirmed by the end of the story. 21Matsumoto, p. 18. 2The Language of Home For both Wallerstein and Balibar, ethnicity is the socializing unit of race. In Wallerstein's conception, ethnicity serves as a function of the state which maintains large components of the capitalist work force, since household structures are located inside communities of ethnic groups. “The ‘culture’ of an ethnic group is precisely the set of rules into which parents belonging to that ethnic group are pressured to socialize their children"(83). The home, then, is the place in which that function of national ethnic socialization is carried out. For Balibar, the ultimate principle of closure, then, rests on race. The construction of national subjects as a “race” can assuage anxieties of miscegenation ‘when marrying one's “fellow citizen" of the nation. It must be emphasized here that ‘when he speaks of ‘dissolving social inequalities’ via race, what Balibar is formulating is the idea of a nation as a race, rather than race in the sense of biological genetic/phylogenic qualities. But America’s history of legal definitions of race, most notably in issues of miscegenation and discrimination, presents it as a slippery biological difference determined by ‘one drop’ or ‘fractional’ genetic makeup. Furthermore, many Americans read race as skin color, so that issues of “passing” individuals’ moving between boundaries of color—raise much social and legal controversy. Balibar interprets the emergence of private life within the individual family home and the intimate family circle and family policies of the state as the moment when the nationalization of family took the place of lineal kinship as a means of 3forming community. According to Balibar, this nationalization took on a familialist discourse of nationalism. Along this formulation, Mori's representations of the familial relations and generational interaction in Yokohama, California complicate the ways in which a generational and familial nation-state is constructed. In the language of home for Mori’s Japanese American characters, generational counting functions to both unite the family unit and assert a claim to America. This move is discussed in Wemor Sollors’ essay “Ethnicity” and is reinforced in the opening story in Yokohama, California. Sollors theorizes ethnicity as either a construction of genealogical descent or individual consent to ethnic identification. Sollors contends that generational rhetoric serves as a means of forming community; generational counting gives the atomized units of nuclear families a “semblance of cohesion. Many individuals or nuclear families (often mixed ones) can become "second-generation Italian-Americans" as they are challenged to rally against certain dangers (such as defamation of dilution)"(223). Similarly, evoking an “epic grandfather” in the historical Puritan and Revolutionary figures who are constructed as crucial to America's formation further reinforces a mythologized, familial metaphor of nation. Generational metaphors have also adopted negative associations as well. Sollors uses as an example the perception that the second generation is ‘degenerate’ in its assimilation into the nation, an assimilation which carries with it the threat of miscegenation, as well as the second. ‘generation's forgetting of the first generation's origins. Ultimately, asserts Sollors, “it is when Americans speak of generations, numbered or unnumbered, that they saeasily leave history and enter ‘the myth of America” (234). In Mori’s story "The Nodas in America,” successive generational naming does symbolize a desire to establish American roots. Papa Noda's eagemess to tell the story of his coming to America, and his children's willingness to hear the story repeatedly shows the closeness of the Issei-Nisei interaction that the barrack living, style of the interment camps has often been blamed for disrupting. Mama Noda, for example, proudly displays her Sansei granddaughter and already looks forward to the next, "Pretty soon fourth generation,” she said, smiling” (114). Because of the community's insularity, the younger generation’s inclination to leave the family is accompanied by anxiety. In "Lil Yokohama," Ray Taketomo's departure for college is fraught with ambivalence: "Everybody says he is taking a chance going so far away from home and his folks. ... The folks will not see him for four or six years. Perhaps never. Who can tell?"(75). Confirming traditional Japanese filial respect for older generations, competition between generations is depicted as unnatural and tragic. In "The Chessmen,” George Murai, the Nisei, and Nakagawa-san, the Issei, are competing for one position of employment in a nursery. In the narrator's eyes, the competition In the introduction to Yardbird Reader #3,” in Yardbird Reader, vol. 3, Chin and Wong write, “The blacks were the fist to take us seriously and sustained the spirit of many Asian American writers.” (from Kim's Asian American Literanure, 174). ‘publicly asked this question of Kingston, and received this answer, when she came to speak at University of California, Irvine, shortly after her home and its contents, including the nearly finished. manuscript of her fourth novel, entitled “The Book of Peace,” were decimated in the 1993 Oakland fire that in toral devastated over 100 homes in the Berkeley Hills. 6succeed in doing, however, through her strategy of making Wittman an eloquent and ‘impassioned but occasionally myopic character who intellectually and artistically grows in his engagement with others in Tripmaster Monkey, is to extend Chin's demarcation of ‘real’ and “fake” Asian Americans. By insisting that Asian ‘Americans are multiply defined and informed, represent different classes, generations, and immigration histories even within one ethnic culture such as Chinese American, the boundaries of real and fake are exposed to be wavering ones rather than the clear lines that Chin, in his previous writings, seems to favor. Wittman’s final broadly inclusive stance towards a notion of American community that embraces all, especially historically marginalized minorities and women, can be read as Kingston's literary response to Chin’s dialectics, as well as a reinforcement of the existence of an Asian American community that is in dialogue with itself, constantly shifting, and multiply identified. In any case, the 1960s have been associated with ‘cultural revolutions” by and for people of color, and Wittman’s ambition to create ‘community theater’ involving people of all ethnicities attempts to build pan-ethnic relations, a goal which continues as a legacy of that revolutionary period in the 1960s. Wittman’s ‘weapons against social complicity and passive acceptance of what is important are his conscious and constant re-interpretations of conventional ways of seeing and hearing. When he hears a Wall Street stock market report, for instance, he hears “Friday’s Tao up 2.53 points” and feels “pleased with himself, that he hadn’t lost his, Chinese ears. He had kept a religious Chinese way of hearing while living within athe military-industrial-educational complex”(85). Wittman is acutely concemed with making passion, art, and interpersonal connection part of everyday life of most people. For Wittman, those things are tied to social concerns, such as criticizing and correcting racism. Yet, the novel also shows how battling racism is a constant challenge that cannot be completely overcome by one individual. Although ‘Wittman possesses an unusual level of social consciousness, he is vulnerable to fatigue and his actions are inconsistent; he sometimes acts on his anger and sometimes does not. For example, he is sullenly silent when watching racist. depictions in “West Side Story” and in an interview tips video at the unemployment office. Yet, at another time in a restaurant, when ovethearing a racist joke told at another table, he publicly confronts and embarrasses the teller and storms indignantly out of the place. Wittman’s persona and ideologies also draw from revolutionary white writers; his name can be read a pun on Walt Whitman, the literary model for this young, twenty-something-philosophizing-playwright-poet sixth-generation-Chinese ‘American. In the epic poem “Song of Myself.” Walt Whitman embraces the ‘marginalized and traditionally voiceless individuals in American history and published texts. Likewise, Wittman’s desire to write and his artistic development are activated by locating a minoritized, ethnic subject~ Chinese Americans— and using that as a starting point for his epic, panethnic play. By titling the first two chapters of the book, “Trippers and Askers” and “Linguists and Contenders,” after lines in “Song of Myself,” Kingston further announces Walt Whitman’s shaping of 6her vision. Yet, while both “Song of Myself” and Kingston’s novel can be read as epics of America, their strategies are quite distinct. Both texts do embrace a large scope of democratic American society, with many characters appearing, but the protagonist's voice still dominating. Both could be called “dramas of identity” because the first person narrative lists a multitude of images which the narrator ‘embraces and makes his own. However, while Whitman’s multitudes are anonymous, Wittman Ah Sing makes innumerable intertextual references to western literature, poetry, film, popular culture, and Chinese mythology. The speaker’s language alternates between English and the Toishan dialect of Cantonese Chinese, ‘with an occasional sprinkling of Spanish and French. These make for some of the ‘most humorous moments in the text. For example, there is a scene which plays with the Cantonese phrase for hoi mun, which means “open the door.” “Knock knock. Hoimun. Hoimun who? Hoimun, I want to come in, ah. Haha, get it? Herman, open the door”(254). ‘To make matters more confusing, the first-person interior monologues represent not only Wittman’s thoughts, but also the voice of an unidentified, ‘anonymous narrator who performs many functions. At some moments, the narrative seems to fuse this narrator with Wittman’s subjectivity. This narrator freely ‘comments on events and characters, introduces new chapters, foreshadows later ‘moments in the novel, critiques the characters, and corrects their views. Kingston directs the interpretation of this split narrator when, in a 1989 interview in the New a‘York Times Magazine, she identified the omniscient narrator as “a woman...She’s always kicking Wittman around and telling him to do this and that and making fun of him...She’s Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy” (Loke, 28). In short, the novel’s structure is extremely referential and multiply dialogic. It depicts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novel as a representation of the multivocalic psyche. According to Bakhtin, the novel as psyche is a social and discursive entity which interprets experiences through sensory and linguistic signs. ‘The narrative is constructed of *heteroglossia’ and multiple consciousness. As Bakhtin describes, Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they—as it were— know of each other and are structured in this mutual knowlege of each other); it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other. Double- voiced discourse is always internally dialogized. Examples of this would be comic, ironic ot parodic discourse, the refracting discourse of the narrator, refracting discourse in the language of a character and finally the discourse of'a whole incorporated genre~all these discourses are double-voiced and internally dialogized. A potential dialogue is embedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages.(325) ‘These heteroglossic voices are Wittman’s and other characters’, but also form the internal dialogue between Wittman and the omniscient narrator as well as between Wittman and himself. Wittman’s admiration for canonized American writers is 6ssoured by his recognition that many acclaimed American writers do not include him in their community and would see him as the ‘other.’ He considers Jack Kerouac a literary influence on his own identity as a writer but Kerouac’s condescending adjective “twinkling” to describe a Chinese person in his poem makes Wittman feel ousted as a literary colleague. In addition, the novel’s heteroglossia is extended with the multiple shifting referentiality of the first person “we.” The “we” refers to: ‘we Americans,” ‘we Chinese Americans,’ to ‘we Asian Americans’ to ‘we minorities.’ With the double- voiced narrator, that ‘we’ can also step outside Wittman to refer women and others who chastise Wittman’s moments of masculinism. This multiply split ‘we’ signals the hierarchization of class and gender that occurs in everyday discourse, which continually disrupt our fixed identities and force us to see ourselves as “other,” as Bakhtin notes: Incorporated into the novel are a multiplicity of “language” and verbal- ideological belief systems—generic, professional, class-and-interest-group (the language of the nobleman, the farmer, the merchant, the peasant); tendentious, everyday (the languages of rumour, of society chatter, servants” language) and so forth, but these languages are, itis true, kept primarily within the limits of the literary written and conversational language; at the same time these languages are not, in most cases, consolidated into fixed persons (heroes, storytellers) but rather are incorporated in an impersonal form “from the author,” alternating (while ignoring precise formal boundaries) with direct authorial discourse. (311) Like “Song of Myself” in Whitman’s first volume of Leaves of Grass, the multiple voices in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book confound readers and critics. Kingston herself states her objective to “keep ambiguity in the writing all the time” 66(Islas, 18). The measure of that success may be found in the varied reviews the novel gamered. Michelle Kakutani, in the New York Times, says “everyone in this book. . . . turns out to be a non-stop monolinguist dispensing Chinese “talk-stories’, drug induced fantasies, family memories, [and] ridiculous riffs about the lost ‘tradition of fatness” and the sensitivity of elephants’ trunks”(C30). Another Times reviewer, Alan Schreiber, complained that the main protagonist's voice dominates the book: “Nobody else gets a word in edgewise, not if Wittman can help it”(9). ‘Still another reviewer praises its humor, while Anne Tyler notes the novel’s “funniness of grimaces, not of humor.” Published literary scholarship on Tripmaster Monkey has been sparse since its publication in 1987. Isabella Furth, whose critical article on the novel appears in Modem Fiction Studies,” has read Tripmaster Monkey as an allusive and elusive text which enacts the slipperiness of a hyphenated identity. According to Furth, “perspectives shift, narratives multiply, significations oscillate through multilingual puns, and the straightforward, stable equation balanced on a hyphen is revealed as a reductive appropriation.”(36) Furth sees that Kingston's model of ethnicity, nationality and textuality is unstable, and defies the hyphen; it is instead a constant series of negotiations and changes. In it, the hyphen can also become the “magic pole...that the King of the Monkeys keeps hidden behind his ear” (Tripmaster Monkey, 32). According to Furth, “The magic pole is a staff that can change from toothpick to giant’s staff, an axis of transformations, negotiations, and osubversions”(Furth, 36). Indeed, itis frustrating that there seems to be little consistency in Wittman’s thoughts and actions; like his namesake, Walt Whitman, Wittman Ab Sing is large, and contains multitudes of identities. The novel opens with Wittman, the protagonist, walking alone through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, contemplating violently graphic suicide methods. Contrary to its gruesome opening, the book ends with Wittman on a theater stage, basking in the audience’s congratulatory celebration of his recent marriage. This reversal characterizes Wittman’s contradictions and extremes. Wittman imagines himself as a poet, a playwright, an anti-war pacifist, a warrior-god, a lone artist, and a community builder. Like many young artists who were in Berkeley in the 1960s, he is smitten with the countercultural ideologies of that period and imagines himself to be a cultural radical. His radicalism is, however, unique in that underlying all his identities are his concerns with being Chinese and Asian American. He literally expresses that identity on his body: long-haired and bearded, he chooses to wear green because “some dorm guy said ‘we look yellow in that color.” Ithad to do with racial skin. And from that time on, he knew what color he had to wear—green” (44). Even as Wittman retells episodes of the Chinese epic “Journey to the West” about the Monkey King and other travellers’ pilgrimage to India, he is on a journey himself to negotiate what his Asian American identity means, and how he, as an SEurth, Isabella. “Bee-e-cen! Nation, Transformation, and the Hyphen of Ethnicity in Kingston's 8artist, ascribes meaning to it. In negotiating that, he wrestles with a dilemma that faces all Americans who participate in the multivalenced cultural matrix that is ‘America. The novel phrases this dilemma in the form of the question: How does cone reconcile unity with identity?® One character persona of Wittman’s that is sustained in the novel is the one whose name is the novel’s title. Tripmaster Monkey, a famous figure in Chinese mythology, is a king who rules a small monkey kingdom. In the story of “The Journey to the West,” he defies and angers the heavenly gods who expect his deference, but he emerges victorious when they attempt to punish him for his mischievous defiance. Monkey's power lies in his ability to be a master of changes. ‘As mentioned earlier, he possesses a magic stick whose size he can change at will. With a simple command, “Be-een!” (which is the Cantonese word for “Change!” ) Monkey can radically change himself as well—he can shrink to invisible size or grow to gargantuan proportion, perform superheroic acrobatics, and multiply himself. He is an agile fighter and a quick thinker. But he is also short-sighted, arrogant, quick-tempered, and he ultimately meets his match in the Tripitaka, @ fellow traveller, who humbles him.” The strengths and weaknesses of Tripmaster Tripmasier Monkey,” Moder Fiction Saudies, 4:1, Spring 1994, pp 33-49. ‘While tha question sets up unity and identity as polar opposites, Kingston's narrative comes to ‘complicate that construction-—although one can read unity as group cobesion and identity as. individual self distinction spart from community the unity of ethnic and racial community i built on expressed and felt common identities, a concept which became more popular in the 1960s, as I will laser explain “itis worth noting that Arthur Waley, whose English translation of Monkey and other Chinese folk tales are widely known, explains the allegorical significance of Tripitaka and Monkey as follows: “Aas regards the allegory, itis clear that Triptaka stands for the ordinary man, blundering anxiously through the difficulties of life, while Monkey stands forthe restless instability of genius"(Preface to °‘Monkey are inscribed in the dual-voicedness of the first person narrators. While ‘Wittman imagines himself to possess Monkey’ trickster ability to defy authority and challenge the status quo, the omniscient first person “I” criticizes his sometimes combative and sexist views, as well as his initial privileging of western aesthetics. ‘Wittman has his initial prejudices, especially towards some “F.O.B.’ first generation immigrants whose frankness shames him; his dismissal of these individuals, however, is reversed in the final play, where the homely “Chinese, the kind who ‘works hard and doesn’t fix herself up"(73) Judy Louis, whom he avoids at a party, becomes “Miss Hu the Pure,” leading the main army of four thousand men and amazons into the city. In disrupting the hyphenated space of ethnic identity, Wittman’ identity, above all, is performance. Although he seeks entry into a national identity, a unitary “[’ that is unmarked by the hyphen, he finds himself constantly back in that ambiguous space. His identity is reactive and proactive, rather than formed around some single unification. What I refer to as performance is not limited to theatrical or staged performance, but includes the performances we all carry out in living everyday life. Itum to Michel de Certeau here, in defining everyday life not simply as a passive environmental matrix which encompasses us, but as systems of operational combinations composing a “culture” which we selectively act in and con® Looking at identity as this kind of performance raises the stakes of ‘Monkey: Folk Novel of China, John Day Company, Inc., New York, 1943). "de Certemu, Michel. The Practice of Evervday Life, University of California Press, Ltd, London, 1988. 0representation because performance takes representation one step further. Whereas Tepresentation is the thing that is already emerged and produced, performance relies ‘on the moment of emergence. Performance involves an actor and delivery, and as such, invites consideration of multiple gaps and conditions of identity. It can be broken down into the setting and narrated conditions of the enactment of performance, the words or descriptive action performed, the means of delivery, and the reception by intended and non- intended receivers, who may be the reader, other characters, or the speaker him or herself. Using words and language to enact performance and identity in performance also focuses on the gap between what Ferdinand de Saussure calls the signifier and signified. In other words, it invites scrutiny of how identity is being represented, how language can create and limit what is “real” for us. Wittman unpacks this, further in his musings on hair: Is it really true that Caucasians have more of a variety of looks than other people? Grant that almost all Black people and russet people have brown eyes. Do they say they can’t tell us apart because we all have brown eyes and we all have black hair? Whereas they have red hair and strawberry blonde and dishwater blonde and platinum and wisps-of-tow and auburn, and brown, and black. And they also have curly and wavy as well as, straight, Ash blonde. Honey blonde. Taffy. Hey, wait just a minute. Hold everything Are there all those kinds of blondes or are there lots of words? There are lots of words and all those blondes. Because of the words and vice versa. People look at blondes with discernment. When you think about it, aren't blondes sort of washed out? Pale? But there's an imerest in them. Everybody looks at them # lot. And sees distinctions, and names the shades. “Those four heads were each a different biack. Kette black. Cannonball black Bowting-balt biack. Licorice. Licorice vais. Patent-leather black. Leotard black. Black sapphire. Black opal. And since when have ashes been blonde? Ashes are black and white. Ash black And his own bair. ‘What color was his own hair? He pulled a mess of it forward. It's brown. nBut he always put “black” on his ids. 've got brown hair. And never knew it though combing it at the mirror daily because when you think of Chinese, Chinese have black hair. (59) Wittman actively seeks to use words to construct identities that both defy mono- ethnic typing and embrace panethnic consciousness. He ties his hair back, for example, not simply into a ‘ponytail,’ but in a “samurai-Paul Revere-piratical ‘braid”(44). ‘And yet, Wittman’s attempts to perform an identity are not always ‘successful. He finds that in daily life, there are barriers to his attempts to escape being stultifyingly “typed” by his job as a toy salesclerk in a department store. There, he eagerly seizes upon interaction with customers as an opportunity to “Humanize them, as they said in the Cal Education Department”(46). He tries to convince a grandmother not to buy a basketball shooter toy: “For the good of the kid, your grandson...you should not buy him this thing that is really a gun”(46). Disappointingly, for his trouble, he only succeeds in offending the woman, who declares, “We didn’t come in here to be lectured to,” and promptly purchases the toy. (47). Simply celebrating the novel’s slippage and never-ending referentiality ‘seems only to emphasize that the novel's attempt to encompass everything ultimately means nothing, that there are no stakes, only play, in its representations. But Wittman has a purpose that does drive this disjunctive narrative: he wishes to produce a play, but not a play that will simply entertain. He wishes to revive a lost tradition of American theater—the travelling theater, theater for the masses, which nhe traces not only to travelling shows and vaudeville popular in 19th and early 20th century America, but also to Chinese travelling theater. That tradition includes ‘travelling operas and paper puppet shows that performed well-known epics and myths.” In her novel, Kingston imagines this form of Chinese performance coming with Chinese American immigrants to America. Chinese opera troupes do stage these stories in America too, especially around holiday and festival times. What ‘American vaudeville and travelling shows and Chinese theater have in common is that both cater to public desire to view the unusual, fantastic, the monstrous, the freakish. The major difference between these shows is that American shows displayed Asians as “freaks”—-including the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, as well as the “Flying Lings”, and the “First Chinese Woman in America” (according to Barnum and Bailey handbills, which advertised these attractions). ‘The Chinese theater also displays unusual, fantastic, and frequently non-human characters—such as Tripmaster Monkey, but these allegorical creatures are meant to be related to, not disowned by the viewers. For example, one of the one hundred and ight outlaws, the heroes of the famous epic “Journey to the West,” is Li Kwai, Black Li, a “Black Chinese”. By combining these two theatrical forms, Wittman hopes to create a distinct, all-inclusive, American community. He imagines a scene *pecording to Chinese folklore scholar Moss Rober, the waitin of drama and soryeling frst became very popular in the Yuan Dynasty beginning around 1260. Moss further traces the Yuan se petiolate comer eo te Song Mow so mest aes f Tee Sus 1 sven) wares found inthe Noch Song (Go Tes Kinga A igus Nove attributed to Luo Guanzhong; translated from the Chinese with introduction and notes by Moss Roberts, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991, p. 957-958) Bwhich borrows elements of the famous myth and refashions them for his goal: ‘There the stranger, the weird and the alienated make their own country. And have one hundred and seven brothers and sisters. The one hundred and eight banditors, banished from everywhere else, build a community. Their thousands of stories, multiples of a hundred and eight, branch and weave, intersecting at the Water Verge. (261) Like Walt Whitman, Wittman Ak Sing takes pains to include the marginalized, the so-called riffraff of society. Wittman is a frustrated and mostly unemployed recent college graduate struggling to find recognition as a writer, but he finds renewed purpose for his work as a playwright who will use theater to build panethnic community. His vision is that performing Asian American identity and enacting ‘community participates in developing a panethnic consciousness that is transmuted throughout other means of American experience and culture. As he explains, Tm going to start a theater company. I’m naming it The Pear Garden Players of America. The Pear Garden was the cradle of civilization, where theater began on Earth. Out among the trees, ordinary people made fools of themselves like kings and queens. As playwright and producer and director, Pm casting blind. That means the actors can be any race. Each member of the Tyrone family or the Lomans can be a different color. I'm including everything that is being left out, and everybody who has no place. My idea for the Civil Rights Movement is that we integrate jobs, schools, buses, housing, lunch counters, yes, and we also integrate theater and parties.(52) Wittman’s desire to create community through theater disputes the notion that ethnic identity and community cannot co-exist with a politics of difference. As ‘Stuart Hall notes, cultural identity is not simply defined by similarities; rather, “critical points of deep and significant difference...constitute ‘what we really are”; or rather~since history has intervened~"what we have become.” Cultural identity...is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’.” (Hall, 225) On the other hand, Wittman "and the omniscient narrator are suspicious of wholesale celebration of the politics of difference, illuminating the fact that in the racialized, gendered, and class-conscious society that is America, being “different” has real consequences if one is on the negatively perceived side of difference. Culture and society establish and maintain hierarchies of those differences. But for Wittman, these consequences of being marginalized do not preclude individual agency. Wittman’s experience as a cultural consumer and observer only affirms his sense of urgency and agency to disrupt racial boundaries. Wittman cannot watch West Side Story without questioning the film's undercurrent of Hollywood's racial homogeneity: ‘The Jets are an Italian gang? But what about jet black? Like the Fillmore, the Wester Addition. Black. Only they don’t hire and cast Blacks, so Russ ‘Tamblyn, as Riff the gangleader with kinky hair, indicates Blackness, right?... The leader of the Sharks is Bernardo, Maria's brother, plaed by George Chakiris. Greek Danish Puerto Ricans of the East Coast..Don’t the rest of the audience get Sharks and Jets mixed up in the fight-dancing? They should have hired dark actors for one side or the other. But not a face up there was darker than Pancake #11. Come on. Since when? A White-boy gang? Two white-boy gangs. White boys don’t need a gang because they ‘own the country. (71) He is similarly offended when he views a similarly unsubtle racial prejudice in the unemployment office’s interview tips video: *You mean business. Dress for it” An X crisscrossed a brunette with a low- ccut blouse and tight skirt and a cigarette hanging from her lips. She hada beauty spot on her cheek. Rita Moreno. Light rays shone around a woman with a Peter Pan collar and a blonde flip; she was smiling into a hand mirror and patting her hair. Trashy Rita Moreno versus employable Sandra Dee. (246) In response to the film’s advice to come alone to the interview, Wittman privately 8interprets that Americans are being advised to “stand alone. .. . Alienated, tribeless, individual. To be a successful American, leave your tribe, your caravan, your gang, your partner, your village cousins, our refugee family that you’re making the money for, leave them behind.” (246). Wittman’s private response disrupts the exclusionary pedagogical narration of nation that Homi Bhabha critiques, which I will discuss further. But this private response is not enough—for Wittman, only the actual performance of resistance is effective. He asks: "Where did my monkey powers go?” And the next sentence refers to Wittman in third person voice, so that it may be the omnicient narrator agreeing with him: “He should have pulled the film out of its sprockets, festooned it around the room."(247). Performing identity claims and marks cultural terrains for individuals, and opening a space to stage these marginalized identities does not, contrary to conservative fears, promote balkanization or tribalism, but ultimately enacts a cohesive, inclusive, panethnic American community. Wittman sees hegemonic communal cohesion as a mere facade for groups that resist acknowledging identities of difference among its members to create false consensus. Two instances of this are in the novel. ‘The first is the Mattel convention that Wittman reluctantly attends as an department store employee. He rejects the corporate community enthusiasm which the company tries to stir up around its new toys and sees the company’s cheerleading rhetoric (“You can tell it's Mattel. It’s swell.”) as a dictum of productivity and profit which demands that minority employees suppress their racial 6and ethnic difference and social consciences. The Mattel corporate “family” is depicted as saccharine, predominantly white, and falsely homogenizing. Wittman notices another group of Asian Americans among the attendees, but they and he never seek each other out, except for one woman who stalks over to him and demands he “get up and quit making a fool of yourselé.” (58) They scom Wittman for his beatnik appearance, and he scoms them for their eagerness to be accepted by whites, thus affirming non-threatening “Oriental” stereotypes of Asians. Ironically, for Wittman and these other Asian Americans, even in their panethnic disidentification, Asian Americans notice other Asian Americans in common environments and project others onto themselves, forming an involuntary ‘community’ even as they resist being ‘seen’ or “linked” together. "° This moment also signals the minority tokenism that is increasing in the 1990s as corporations, pressured to recognize diversity, have only switched tactics in their suppression of minorities in the workplace. Angela Davis has drawn critiques of the ways in which contemporary strategies of “multicultural diversity ‘management” aim to contain and control dissatisfied middle- and lower-level minorities while maintaining the white status quo.'' While it is predictable that a young, pacifist, Berkeley graduate in the late 16 Other Asian American writers also explore this. In his novel American Knees, Shawn Wong takes up this tension of connecting/not connecting among Asian Americans in environments where they whontiey srs become om ot cosing ech oer cathe art” Simily, Dama ngs description of the assessments Asian Americans make of each other captures this tension humorously in her shor story, “The Oriental Contingent.” which appears in The Forbidden Stitch. ™ Davis, Angela. “Gender, Class, and Multicuiuralism: Rethinking ‘Race’ Politics” in Mapping ‘Multiculturalism, Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., 1995, pp. 44-48. 7sixties who scorns the pursuit of wealth and aspires to be a writer would find corporate structures repugnant, an anachronistic development in the novel may be that it is also critical of the youth who thought they were creating community through shared political discussions and drug use. Wittman’s impressions of a party of his peers is that they are all, including himself, in pursuit of pleasure and stimulation, which leads to ultimately dissatisfying self-absorption. He becomes conscious of the ways in which race is elided rather than discussed in party conversations, and shies away from the discomfort of those moments, such as when 4 group of people are musing on the beauty of African Masai men and the ugliness of Masai women, and subsequently look for someone among them who resembles a Masai: “There was a tall Black girl in the group, getting taller, and nobody was about to say it was her, and nobody was going to point out any other Black woman either. Wittman wasn’t shining, time to maneuver a getaway”(90). ‘Yet, the narrative slyly implicates Wittman into one contradiction of the concems of the 1960's: on the one hand, interest in drugs and spirituality led to preoccupation with self-absorption, and on the other hand, developing social conscience. Wittman is entrenched into the social construction of parties as places to escape realism and exhibit one’s ‘cool’; he is irked by a partygoer who is “this left-wing fanatic who can’t tell the difference between a party and a meeting...he carried on about injustice in a country you never heard of. . .. If you got a word in edgewise, he put it in his Marxist bag and let you have it for not being radical enough”(90). The narrator’s third person narration depicts Wittman’s reaction, to nthis man’s South American freedom fighter guest, as bored and insensitive: “[Wittman’s] ignorant, inengage, not serious. . ..Shame on him, so much more playing to do"(91). Inall, group drug trips and parties offer only temporary diversion and community from the solitude Wittman feels. For him, the sense of real community does not return until the post-party morning after, when he reveals his epic play and secures some friends as players, against the dawn of a new day, the exciting knowledge that he will be leaving the party with a new beautiful female acquaintance, and in the afterglow of the comfort of shared coffee and breakfast with friends, Wittman declares, T'm going to bring back to theater the long and continuous play that goes on for a week without repeating itself, Because life is long and continuous. ‘The way theater was in the old days. I mean the old days in this country. ‘The audience comes back every night for the continuation. They live with us. The thing will not fit between dinner at the Tivoli and the after-theater snack at Martha-Jean Inc. or the New Shanghai Cafe.(150) It seems strange that Wittman feels his marginalization in the Chinatown community as well as in the mainstream culture. Although he lives in Chinatown, he is called a ‘jook tsing,” or “bamboo node,” a term used by first generation immigrants to culturally alienate the young American-born Chinese. While searching for a Chinese word for Chinese-American, he can only think of ‘jook tsing,’ for which he creates a linguistic community by placing it alongside ‘ho chi ‘gwai’ (meaning “ghost likeness,’ where ‘ghost’ refers to whites) as well as mestizo, and pachuco, Mexican American terms whose implications are similar to ‘jook 9tsing” Like Tripmaster Monkey, these persons who are not completely accepted either in mainstream American community nor in ethnic communities have less individual cultural investment at stake and are in more fluid positions to do the work of pan-ethnic crossings. When cajoling the doubtful president of the Chinese Benevolent Association to open his hall for the staging of a play, Wittman argues, Listen, we must play in here. Else, what Association for, huh? collecting dues? What you do, huh? You bury old men. You be nothing but one burial society. Better you let United Farm Wrokers use the bathroom and kitchen. Let them crash overnight. Be headquarters—Hello, Strike Central—for unions of waiters and garment workers (255). We make our place-this one community house for benevolent living. We make theater, we make community. (261) Wittman’s vision of using theater to create community enacts Bhabha’s defining of the performative as one part of nation narration, a narration which Bhabha sees as a temporal duality. Instead of locating the center of national identity ina synchronous narrative of national unity, Bhabha posits national identity in a spatial and temporal break, what he calls the performative, which disrupts the fictitiously constructed stable national narrative. Bhabha sees the performative as a temporal space of slippage that both gives response and adds to, a nationalist, pedagogy, in other words, what is accepted as the central history of the nation. If we define the epic as Bakhtin does, as a national tradition that recreates and affirms a national past, then Wittman’s unusual epic theater, like Walt ‘Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, is forged as a new epic of America, one that embraces ‘every individual’ song of himself as well as the traditionally celebrated heroic 80vanguards and forefathers. This strategy of using performance to articulate and enlarge America has a long tradition, from Walt Whitman in the 19th century, to Alan Ginsberg and the Beat Poets in the 1950s. By Wittman Ah Sing’s time, it is also adopted by the countercultural social Left theater of the 1960s, as well as the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It should be recognized, then, that Wittman’ artistic vision for panethnic community is significantly shaped by the social conditions of the 1960s. We should look at Asian American community in the 1960s as a pivotal moment to the development of the Asian American panethnic consciousness that Wittman Ah Sing espouses. In the 1960s, the Yellow Power movement created and shaped that panethnic consciousness and community. I bring attention to “Yellow Power's” defining moment in Asian American panethnic identity formation because although it was a powerful symbol of solidarity, the term “yellow” was short-lived, soon challenged by Filipino Americans who rejected that term because they claimed they were brown, not yellow. That moment illustrates the fission and fusion process that characterizes not only specifically Asian American but also a general American panethnic identity. According to sociologist Yen Le Espiritu, as an offshoot of the larger Civil Rights movement, the university student-led Yellow Power movement was also influenced particularly by the Black Power movement's political and organizational tactics. Yellow Power's unique locus of unity was the internal colonial model, which stressed commonalities among “colonized groups.” For example, declaring 81solidarity with other Third World minorities as well as fellow Asian Americans, ‘Asian American student activists of the Third World Strike organization rejected the term “oriental” and proclaimed themselves to be “Asian Americans.” They acknowledged that Asians in America experienced and shared histories of struggles which included racial violence against Asians, Japanese American interament, Asian exclusion acts, anti-miscegenation laws, and other legislative and social restrictions on their participation in American culture. According to historian Amy Uyematsu, they sought “freedom from racial oppression through the power of a consolidated yellow people.” In the summer of 1968, a conference titled “Are You Yellow?” at UCLA convened one hundred students of diverse Asian ethnicity to discuss issues of Yellow Power, identity, and the war in Viemam. In 1970, anew pan-Asian organization in northern California called itself the “Yellow Seed” because “Yellow [is] the common bond between Asian-Americans and Seed symboliz{es] growth as an individual and as an alliance.” The first objection to the term yellow came from Filipino American activists who did not reject being called “yellow” because they objected to the pan-Asian framework—on the contrary, they rejected it because it excluded them from that grouping. Other groups such as South Asian Americans, Southeast Asian Americans and bi-and multi-racial Asian Americans have made similar protests of marginalization in order to be more fully participatory and included as Asian Americans. Through the many changes in Asian American diversity in the late ‘twentieth century, it is remarkable that Asian American panethnic identity has not 2been rejected, only expanded and redefined since the 1960s. ‘This expansion has been both expedited and complicated by a paralle! development in American immigration policy. The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act revised the quota system for non-European applicants for immigration, allowing as many as 20,000 quota immigrants per sending country per year, In addition, the act allows spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of USS. citizens to enter as nonquota immigrants. The latter provision has greatly increased and diversified the Asian American population. As more Asian ‘Americans became U‘S. citizens, they sponsored family members wko came to the U.S. with a kinship support network already in place. This is a significant contrast to the Asian immigrants who came in the early twentieth century. For example, the first Chinatown community organizations known as tongs were formed because Chinese immigrant laborers and workers had no means of group suppott to help them negotiate American life. By the 1970s, significant numbers of first and second generation Asian Americans were college students. Many had been raised by their families in the U.S., and their experiences being American-born, raised, and educated led to demands for a different concept of Asian American community ‘The challenge to creating panethnic commumity centers around how to link diverse ethnic groups, different times of immigration and generational status, and the participation of transnational, diasporic Asians in American culture. Espiritu agrees with studies that identify panethnic groups in the United States “largely as products of political and social processes, rather than of cuttural 8bonds”(13). However, despite America’s relatively short existence as a nation, isolating political and social processes from cultural bonds in this country seems difficult. We can look at the evolution of panethnic white regional identity as an example, with the strong regional identity of the South being an obvious case. Southern identity formed around nostalgia for and reseatment over the loss of its plantation culture, forever wiped out by Norther or ‘Yankee’ interference, quickly overshadowed distinct ethnic identities of the descendants of originally French, German, and English immigrants. The political differences over the issue of abolition escalated into the Civil War, creating a North-South division of the country that continues to be a popularly recognized point of identity for the South, even as new identities are constantly being forged. Nationalisms in other countries are similarly complex intersections of political, social, and cultural bonds. The interdependence of Irish cultural nationalism on political and religious oppressions for example, make it nearly impossible to separate political from cultural bonds. Although these intersections are in flux and indeterminate, the formation of Asian American identity in the sixties provide a continuuing reference point for Asian American identities today. It is the focus of struggle between “Asian American cultural nationalists,’ who wish to keep Asian American history at the center of Asian American identity, and ‘transnationalists’ who increasingly see Asian American identity as multi- or even post-national, with the hybrid, postmodem culture of the ‘Pacific Rim’ as the heart of Asian American identity. The distinction is apparent in widely distributed periodicals produced by and for uAsian Americans. The San Francisco-based weekly tabloid “AsianWeek,” focuses ‘on political and traditional cultural issues and events of Asian Americans around the nation. It is countered by the growing popularity of small independent “ “zines” such as Giant Robot, which feature articles on Asian popular culture, Asian pop music, and Asian cinema. Both types of publications seem to define Asian Americans with very different interests. But simultaneously, they both maintain different influences of the sixties and seventies Asian American movement. AsianWeek articles are steeped in the rights-centered orientation of political struggles for equal rights—reporting, for instance, on community organizations’ efforts to preserve Medicaid benefits for elderly Asian immigrants. Altematively, Giant Robot’s writers’ rough reporting and edgy, hip, and rebellious tone captures the youthful defiance of assertions of “Yellow Power.” ‘The formal organizations and institutionalization of panethnic group consciousness, then, does not take place in a social vacuum but is shaped by cultural productions resulting from both public and private social interactions. This is a fluid process and a continuum rather than a unidirectional trajectory. Acting or thinking panethnically does not necessarily displace distinct mono-ethnic and other group identifications. As Espiritu notes, To be sure, panethnic groups are still full of internal divisions...Historical intergroup enmities, cultural differences, and class divisions exacerbate these conflicts, at times polarizing the panethnic coalition. For the Latino and the aggravated by continuing immigration. This influx creates new constituencies that may fee! inadequately represented by established panethnic groups; it also rejuvenates ethnic cultures, reinforces national 85allegiances, and reminds ethnic members of how little they have in common with members of other ethnic groups... . Hence the study of panethnicity is a study of the process of fission as well as of fission (14). And this process of fusion and fission is what the dialogic discourse in the novel negotiates in depicting panethnic community. It shows individuals’ crossings and recrossings of cultural terrains that take place in a panethnic consciousness. Kingston's retrospective vantage point leads to complicating and disrupting ‘Wittman’s position—the feminized omniscient narrator, as the Goddess of Mercy, oscillates between a maternal voice (“poor Wittman”), and that of an encouraging or indignant sister (“Tana will get back at him later”) Wittman’s relationship with his best friend, Lance, a second-generation, or ‘Nisei, Japanese American, plays out the process of fusion and fission in negotiating ‘@ panethnic Asian American identity. Wittman and Lance have bonded through years of shared LSD, chile rellenos and appreciation for Fellini movies and William Carlos Williams prose. Yet, Wittman considers Lance, in whose wedding he served aas best man, both his friend and foe. The complications of panethnic Asian American bonding is apparent in the mock-vaudeville act they honed together, ‘where they play “Mr. Chin and Mr. Chan,” an Asian American parody of the blackface Amos and Andy minstrels. But Wittman eventually “quit(s) the act; all Chinese jokes, no Japanese jokes” (87). Panethnic consciousness is one that is informed by multiple histories, and ‘Wittman’s ambivalence towards Lance is linked to these histories~one being 86Japan’s military aggression against China and the Allied forces. Another history is that of tensions between marginalized ethnic and racial minorities in America, caused and exacerbated by larger mainstream hostilities towards all minorities. With limited options and opportunities for all minorities, it is often easier for minorities to battle other minorities for these opportunities than to join together to battle institutionalized racism and prejudices. During World War II, for example, when Japanese Americans faced intense hostility and were sent to internment camps, Chinese and other Asians wore buttons proudly proclaiming they were not Japanese, which photojournalists documented in Life magazines from the period. America’s history also illustrates racism’s fickle insidiousness. As writers Hisaye Yamamoto and Cynthia Kadohata depict in their fiction'”, many Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from American schools could not find work in their career fields, even after being allowed to return to school and university in the 1940s and 1950s to eam the necessary degrees. But by the 1960s, they were allowed to pursue higher education, quickly attain financial and social success and establish a status as the superior Asian American group. AAs part of this group of upwardly mobile Japanese Americans, Wittman’s friend Lance has studied at the London School of Economics, secured a fast-track prestigious federal government job, and married a doting, beautiful, blond, white woman. Wittman’s discomfort with his friend’s new situation stem from his resentment of successful Japanese American assimilation that he sees as a form of 87“sellout” to white majority culture, and thus a betrayal to Asian American panethnic community. Wittman reprises his memories of Chinese American children, including himself, being bullied by a Japanese American classmates as reminders of this resentment towards Japanese Americans who trample on other less assimilated Asians. Wittman condemns Lance’s ‘selling out’ of his Japanese heritage, but he is also jealous of him— for being a natural leader, and his talent for giving good parties, and telling stories. He is chagrined that Lance has abandoned his more bobemian creative activities to establish a “Young Millionaires’ Club” of other similarly upwardly mobile individuals eager to become part of the established upper middle class that he and Wittman used to reject. When he openly chides Lance in front of his wife for these shortcomings, the two men nearly come to blows, but resolve their differences with a story. Wittman cannot resist Lance’s talent for storytelling, Which he demonstrates in describing his youthful rebellion in the internment camps. as well as in an ambiguously autobiographical allegorical tale about a red fox who commits a murder and leaves America to embark on a Ulysses-like journey of discovery and return. Yet, Lance is generous with his friends, genuinely concerned about Wittman, and not too proud to cancel hosting a party to allow Wittman and his community play take center stage in their social sphere. Wittman must deal with the fact that although Lance’s life situation becomes more distant from his own, their friendship also evolves. Wittman ultimately cannot remain resentful; he "31 refer to Yamamoto’s short stories in Seventeen Svilables and Kadohata’s nove! The Floating Fs)admires Lance’s “daring; he was not afraid to declare, “You are my best friend.” And disarm you"(122). As for many old school friends, though the real differences driving them further apart still exist, they can bridge the widening gap between them ‘with performing stories and re-enacting scenes from their past. Although the narrative critiques institutional racism which is often presented as white racism, not all whites are villified in the novel. Wittman also learns that real life complicates constructed polarizations of race when be falls in love with a ‘white woman, Tana. His identity as a lover continues to be a performance, but one which he cannot control by intellectualization— its orchestration is vulnerable to the sway of human lust, and emotion. Wittman and Tana have much unfamiliarity to overcome as new lovers, but their interactions are further complicated by the fact that Wittman is always conscious of the interracial dimension of their relationship. His masculinity is always in danger of being undermined by her unconventional femininity as well as his insecurity about her reactions to his being Chinese, as well as his doubts about whether his attraction to her is not the result of some internalized racism. Wittman’s seduction of Tana is rife with clichés and reenacted scenes from books he has read and films he has seen, signaled in the narration by italics. “Like a blank piece of paper, I drifted along past the houses," Wittman recalls while pulling ‘Tana along by the hand as they walk. When she leans against a wall, “be leaned above her, like his elbow against her high-school locker. “Hey, wanta make World. 39out?”"(151). As they talk, he remembers courtship scenes from the films Far from the Madding Crowd, Snow Country, and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Wittman’s passion is intertwined with his fascination with Tana’s whiteness; as he kisses her, he taunts: “Blonde chick. White girl... . Are youa loose white girl? Where do you live, loose white girl? I want to take you home. And I want youto invite me in.”(151) Postlovemaking, when Tana asks what he likes about her, Wittman replies, “You have pink nipples”(155). He is intrigued in her assessment of his physical characteristics like his toes, to “get some inside answers to questions. Spy out specific racisms” (157). He is afraid that she will reveal some hidden racism, yet is also interested in knowing “what physical feature of mine makes me Chinese to [Tana], and how it tums [her] on”(155). Paradoxically, he is happy that she identifies his ‘ears’ and ‘skin’ as those features, as long she does not say “yellow” skin and “slanty” eyes, which are the hallmarks of an ‘orientalist" Lust, the narrator seems to imply, overrules cerebralness. When Wittman taunted Tana by calling her ‘white girl,” She ought to have slapped his hands away, and dumped him for acting racist. If you have principles, you do not like him anymore when you find out somebody’s a racist or a Green Beret or a Republican or anarc. You ought to be able to sense such a defect, and the obstinacy of it, and run. (151) ‘Not only does Tana not fulfill Wittman’s fears, she in effect takes on the role of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, who criticizes his short-sighted moments and one-ups his egotism. She is a feminist who feels stultified in her insurance office job where the women are “girls” who are paid less than the men who take three hour 0lunches with clients. When Wittman suggests, “Did you see the ballerina? You should be more like that,”(165), she doesn’t answer. She is already shaping herself not to be the damsel in distress in Wittman’s Chinese epic storytelling—rather, she interprets herself as a woman in armor who saves the male hero. And the narrator explains, “Unbeknownst to [Wittman], Tana was getting feminist ideas to apply to his backass self” (175). She takes such charge when she announces, “Darling I've been thinking: The next time I get it on with a man I set ground rules"(153). Asa strong feminist, Tana is a crusader against women’s discrimination in the workplace as well as the Vietmam war-she marries Wittman primarily to save him from the draft. But she also endears herself to Wittman, his mother and aunts by not imposing cultural superiority or exotification on them; she remains in the sidelines in their group, and gamely sings classic American musical songs with them. Tana is not 2 metaphor for the kind of white American who, as Shawn Wong describes in his novel Homebase, “patronizes {Asian men] and loves {them] and tells [them] that [they are] the product of the richest and oldest culture in the history of the world.”(66). She is proof that not all whites are either sinophilic or sinophobic. ‘The last part of this chapter will discuss the finale of the novel itself—the play, which lasts three nights, and Wittman’s long soliloquy that covers a bewildering amalgam of issues around Asian American identity. In shaping Asian ‘American panethnic community, the play and the soliloquy do not simply replicate unproblematic celebrations of multiculturalism that have been discussed by contemporary ethnic cultural studies critics. They defy the national boundaries abetween ‘Asian’ and ‘Asian American’ set up by the editors of the seminal anthology of Asian American literature, Aiiieceee! ‘The myth is that Asian Americans have maintained cultural integrity as ‘Asians, that there is some strange continuity between the great high culture of China that hasn't existed for five hundred years and the American-born Asian.” ‘What distinguishes the play’s seamless connection of Chinese myth to Chinese American, Asian American, and other ethnic American culture and experiences from what Lisa Lowe calls a ‘multicultural spectacle’ that dangerously masks and therefore erases differences that are felt by minorities in the cultural hegemonic structures of their lives? Lowe has objected to the way in which a ‘multicultural festival in Los Angeles represented the city as ‘2 postmodern multicultural comucopia, an international patchwork quilt... although the “signifiers” were the very uneven, irreducible differences between these diverse acts, the important “signified” was a notion of Los Angeles as multicultural spectacle. In the process, each performance tradition was equated with every other, and its meaning was reduced and generalized to a common denominator whose significance was the exotic, colorful advertisement of Los Angeles. Despite tensions between the narratives of authenticity, lineage, and variety, all these narratives effect, in different ways, the erasure and occlusion of the “material” geographies of Los Angeles. (89) Wittman’s play does incorporate a camivalesque, revue structure. It showcases the talents and accomplishments of many uncelebrated Asian Americans in America’s history, and exhibits the many-faceted Asian American cultures while it presents a story of origin, telling a Chinese American hybrid tale of Chinese immigration to‘America using elements of the Chinese myth Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Unlike Lowe's characterization of the multicultural festival, the community play does not simply tell Asian American ‘success’ stories of ‘making it’ in America. For instance, Chinese American gang members show up to tell the story of martial aftist Bruce Lee (who was affectionately known to Chinese audiences as Siew Loong, ‘Little Dragon’) as a critique of the racist Hollywood studios who tell him “Chinese man has no Star Quality”; the story turns Lee’s failure to be a Hollywood star into his heroic triumph. “The bell with them. Good for me. I did not let Haw- lee-woot change me into the dung dung dung dung dung with the little pigtail in bback"(281). ‘The play's opening is a discomforting critique of how Asian Americans ‘occupy a problematic space in the American cultural imagination. The portrayal of the original Siamese Twins dramatizes the problematic meaning of Asian American itself, looking at the term as seemingly signifying something freakish, monstrous. A linked pair of acrobatic twins somersault across the stage~Chang and Eng, the ‘conjoined Siamese twins, both wearing one green velveteen suit. They are played by a Japanese American, and a European American, and they can neither find consensus about their identities, nor can they survive without the other. They are both pulled involuntarily into American society as war draftees, where they re-enact the Civil War anxiety of brothers fighting brothers, as well as the Vietnam War-era resistance to the draft. They are also forcibly marginalized as freaks and put on. “from “Introduction,” in Aiieenee!, p. 7-8 83display. Inciting a riot when they refuse to let the curious crowd see the ligament that joins them, they are arrested. Between the bars, Chang yells: We know damned well what you came for to see—the angle we're joined at, how we can have two sisters for wives and twenty-one Chinese-Carolinian children between us...You want to know if we feel jointly. You want to look at the hyphen. You want to look at it bare.”(293). As the play continues the following night, the revue continues in camivalesque fashion. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins have described the carnival as a form of post-colonial drama that are “characteristically exuberant, non- naturalistic, and self-consciously theatrical...drawing attention to public space, communal activity, and vernacular languages..."(78) Thus, the camival proclaims Asian Americans’ historical and continued presence in America, but does so ina way that is farcical, both parodying the American carnival that exhibited Asians as freaks, as well as appropriating the forum for depicting alternative, Asian American self-made images and revisionist histories. The Chang and Eng twins are followed by a succession of other theatrical appearances—of individuals who are both fictitious and actual historical Chinese American figures. Among the stars are other Chinese American women writers: Siu Sin Far, the first published Eurasian woman writer, as well Jade Snow Wong. Along with Anna Chenault, and the Soong sisters, these women are not “bucktoof myopic pagans... These excellent dark women should have overcome dumb blondes forevermore.”(296) ‘A moment in the play also reverses the traditionally privileged white gaze 4upon the Asian ‘other’—characterized by Rudyard Kipling’s description of Chinatown in American Notes. By depicting Kipling as a Chinatown tour guide, the audience looks at tourists as the oddities: “see how strange the tourists are, pale ‘outsiders abroad in their own country”(299). As Kipling narrates his story of Chinese man who is killed by a Mexican during a poker game, his paranoia takes on absurdity; the narrator comments: “You would think that that Chinese guy had killed somebody instead of having gotten killed himself. Rudyard Kipling exits, chased off by cherry bombs and cymbal clangs”(300). The play goes on to represent history as myth—blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. A re-enactment of the violent history of the lynchings of Chinese Americans history in the frontier period of the mid-19th century merges with performances of Chinese epic “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” The stage is alive with scenes of multiple stories, and the narrator notes “As in real life, things were happening all over the place. The audience looked left. right. up. down, in and about the round, everywhere, the flies, the wings, all the while hearing reports from off stage. Too much goings-on, they miss some, okay, like life."(298) Amidst all this activity, the narrator acts as interpreter, setting straight some cultural misperceptions: “The police break up the riot started by a lynch mob in a store and arrest the grocers for assaulting officers. So Chinese Americans founded the Joang ‘Wah for the purpose of filing legal complaints with the City of New York against lynchings, illegal arrests, opium, slavery, and grocery-store licensing. A tong is not a.crime syndicate and not a burial society. It is organization of community, for 95which Chinese Americans have genius.”(298) In its affirmation of community, the play draws the audience into the action, ending with a fighting free-for-all that spills outside the theater into the streets. While it appears to be an apocalyptic moment, it is not—it is an illusion, a performance which is ultimately controlled and brought to climactic closure with a fireworks show. As the participants experience the ‘theater as community” that Wittman has envisioned, there is a reminder that there is a dominant part of society who has not yet taken part in this and do not understand it. Like the arrival of the police cars that break up Lance’s party, the police are again the messengers of those who hear the noise as cacophany rather than community. When the police come to the Benevolent Organization to investigate the tumultous noise, they do not make any arrests nor citations because, the narrator explains, “the Chinese are allowed more fireworks than most people"(299). The exoticism of Chinatown acts to marginalize it but also, ironically, to make it exempt from some restrictions such as fireworks without permits. The end of the play is subdued as Wittman has the last word~there has been no mention of him in the description of the play up to this point. Wittman all but virtually disappears for the first two nights of the play, and then finally reappears for his long soliloquy at the play’s conclusion. Although Wittman is the director/writer of this play, he has no interest in becoming a curator/ethnographer who is simply interested in ‘importing’ culture to the stage without dealing with the problematics 96of making a spectacle of performed identity. Unlike the ethnographer who always uses his own subjectivity as a central reference point, Wittman’s role is more like that of a catalyst who brings the elements together that generate their own spontaneous reactions—as the free-for-all fireworks finale indicates. Wittman’s soliloquy provides a solitary spoken voice at the end of the novel. Deborah Geis describes soliloquy as a . . kind of monologue that generally suggests introspection...A soliloquy usually involves the verbalizatian of the speaker’s interior feelings or thoughts and often entails a revelation or decision that may not be ordinarily rendered in speech outside of a theatrical framework but which is enacted aloud for the benefit of the audience (e.g. Hamlet's soliloquies). (8) ‘Yet, even the interiority of Wittman’s feelings is performed and thus subject to the slipperiness of that performed identity. The end of the novel does not attempt to present a neat summary or explanation of Asian American identity. To the end, the reader still has to determine whether Wittman’s soliloquy reflections are composed for the audience, or whether they represent spontaneously honest, off-the-cuff thoughts. It is impossible, again, to determine ‘authenticity,’ but Wittman's construction of community through vertacular, argumentative, and persuasive discourse maneuvers multiple identities. ‘The community he encircles is positioned against the ‘other’ whom he marks as sinophiles, orientalists, consumers of an Asian culture that is a product of their own imagination. By critiquing seemingly positive newspaper reviews of the play's opening night, Wittman brings attention to the ways in which stereotypes of Asian 7exoticism can seem benign. He asserts that the play is distinctly American, the ‘West’: “There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West... lam so fucking offended. Why aren't you offended? Let me help you get offended” (308). Wittman’s rejection of “the East’ is not an internalized racism or self-hatred of his Chinese ethnicity, but rather a rejection of “sinophiles’ who see the East as exotica, as a culture to be consumed and amused by. To further dramatize his rejection of exoticism, he cuts off his own hair, his, potentially exotic feature, on stage while he talks to the audience. By revealing the play reviewers’ sinophilic use of food metaphors to describe the play, Wittman seeks to engage the audience in the community of the theater, tearing down the fourth wall between players and audience. This moment is also a rupture in that community-the sinophiles formerly and presently in the audience, are now the other, ‘them’: “They think they know us~the wide range of us from sweet to sour—because they eat in Chinese restaurants. They're the ones who order the sweet-and-sour shrimp."(308) In that moment, community is split— the fission occurs. But by directly addressing the audience, Wittman also fuses the gap between, them and himself-they become part of the play, even if they passively spectate—the ‘audience’ he addresses at one point appears to be Asian Americans who would ‘identify with the collective “we” as in: “We're about as exotic as shit. Nobody soo- pecial here. No sweet-and-sour shit.”(308). The addressed ‘you’ also includes non- Asian Americans, especially in the remarks enclosed in parentheses within *Wittman’s speech, which are moments of slippage, doubled voice, ambiguity in the speaker—is Wittman or an unnamed ‘omniscient’ narrator speaking? “Okay, let’s say in this soap opera, they hear bad news about their only son—killed in war. (Don’t you whites get confused, he’s killed fighting for our side. Nobody here but us Americans.)..."(309) The nature of soliloquy makes it a problematic vehicle to build community, since the notion of having a solitary speaker creates community by silent consensus, and this must be examined. As Geis argues, When a monologue seems to address the audience directly, the paradoxical Position of the audience in respect to the speaker intensifies. It is possible to argue that this type of monologic utterance simultaneously includes the spectators ina more direct way than otherwise and reasserts their very powerlessness. The audience seems to be addressed, yet its members are not (except in certain forms of experimental theater) in a position to respond, for doing So would, s Gofinan explains, involve breaking the ‘dramatic frame.’"(14) Yet, even as Wittman directs and performs his monologue (driven by his indignance with America’s treatment of Asians and Asian Americans, and by his performed rejection of Asian stereotypes), his ‘authority’ as the soliloquist is diffused by two types of disruptions to Wittman’s performance. One type of disruption is the outbursts from the audience, which Wittman welcomes and encourages; the other is the omniscient narrator’s comments on Wittman’s words and the audience’s reactions in the theater. ‘The audience members engage in dialogue with Wittman’s soliloquy. They collaborate on figuring out the missing parts of race jokes of which Wittman and ”others have only overheard the punchlines. A Chinatown ‘oldtimer’ resident, ‘stepfather Lincoln Fong,’ contributes an eloquently worded history of the Boxer Rebellion and the Opium War between China and Britain. This community respects the voices of its elders, even when they are long-winded: “You had to let the old guy talk, and once started, take over"(322). As a longtime resident of Chinatown, Stepfather Fong is likely one of the thousands of immigrant laborers still largely dispossessed of influential voices to protest abuses and inequities, and thus, to use Bhabha’s term, have been traditionally pedagogically silenced. Stepfather’s name, “Lincoln,” is indicative of the many Chiense ‘oldtimers’ who adopted names of American Presidents for their new identities in America, and is an immigrant act of ‘claiming’ America—the kind of “bottom up’ localizing power articulated by Antonio Gramsci and Michel de Certeau, One part of Wittman’s soliloquy, which he considers to be “his craziest riff, the weirdest take of his life at the movies,”(314) is naming famous male American movie stars who have appeared on screens as “cowboys with Chinese eyes.’ This radical act of reversing Hollywood’s negative representations of Asians, to Whitman’s delighted surprise, does not lose his audience. They stay with him and verbally volunteer more names of actors with ‘Chinese’ eyes who have played cowboys. The long list that eventually develops can be imagined as a powerful affirmation of ‘Chinese eyes’ as ‘American-heroic,’ especially if claiming, as Wittman does, the following actors’ squint-eyed toughness as similar to ‘Chinese eyes’: Roy Rogers, Buck Jones, John Wayne, John Payne, Randolph Scott, 100Hopalong Cassidy, Rex Allen, John Huston, John Carradine, Gabby Hayes, Donald O’Counnor, Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, Jack Palance, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Richard Boone, and Clint Eastwood. ‘The omnicient narrator controls the focus of the reader’s “gaze,” but also conveys the ‘inner thoughts” of the soliloquist as well as to members of the audience in the text. The sense of community is broken and reestablished by the narrator and reader who have this access that is denied to a spectating, listening audience in a theater. When Wittman delves into a lengthy condemnation of Asian stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood, as well as by Asian women themselves when they agree to have their eyes surgically remade into westernized eyes (slicing the eyelid to ‘create an epicanthic fold), he is again splitting his audience. He is implicating that ‘women in the audience are also submitting to this humiliating perception that their eyes are not Westem enough. Yet, as Tana and the omniscient narrator note, “Bad ‘Wittman did not let up”(312) indicting the women themselves and not the societal messages which create the idealized female images that women aspire to be. Although these women may be silently listening, they may also be in disagreement. Performing the desire for/acquisition of western eyes, and performing the outrage against this means of “beautifying” oneself are both oppositional discourses of being, “Asian American.” The effect of Wittman’s critique and rejection of stereotypes, coupled with the audience and narrator’s dialogic response, explodes the uniformity of the term “Asian American.” Kent A. Ono radically suggests that we may be in a cultural 101moment that demands a ‘re/signing’ of the term “Asian American’ as an ideograph for “multiple struggles over language and power relevant to contemporary political practices.”"* Ono explains: ‘The ambivalent use of the term, ‘re/signing,’ in my title is purposeful. There are two meanings I hope to evoke by using it. First, I suggest that use of the term ‘Asian American’ should be questioned, it may have to be resigned, scrapped, or disused. Second, I suggest that another possibility is available: rather than resigning the term, we may be able to re-sign it... . By shuttling between the two meanings: resigning (retiring) and re-signing (refiguring), I hope to enact a critical, rhetorical practice that creates slippage between using and disusing the term, Asian American.(68) Wittman’s frustration at the lack of a satisfactory name for Americans of Asian descent expresses this issue of nomenclature that is part of the oppositional negotiation of Asian American identity. It is easier for him to articulate what he is ‘not rather than what he is: Where’s our name that shows that we aren’t from anywhere but America? .. Look at the Blacks beautifully defining themselves. ‘Black’ is perfect. But we can't be “Yellows”. . .. Nah, too evocative of tight-fisted Chang. Red’s our color. But the red-hot communists have appropriated red. ... We are not named, and we're disappearing already. We want a name we can take out in the street and on any occasion. We can’t go to the passport office and say, “Tm a Han Ngun,”. .. . Once and forall: [am not oriental. .. . There’s no such person as a Sino-American (626-327), ‘The end of the play, as might be expected, is not so much an ‘end’ but an. ‘opening’ of panethnic Asian American community and the tensions within it—the community of the play is in a bonding moment—but one chronologically situated in * Ono, Kent A. “Re/signing ‘Asian American’: Rhetorical Problematics of Nation,” in Amerasia Journal, 21:1 & 2, 1995, p. 67. 102a time when Americans’ sense of wartime optimism and unity became shattered by seeing the brutalities of the war on television, and by the U.S. government's retreat from the Viemam War after years of fruitless fighting. Wittman’s pacifism is both affirmed as he vows he will not serve in Vietnam, but this decision threatens his status as a loyal member of the American community—as a disloyal American, he will defect to the U.S. Canada border at Niagara Falls with Tana, the white woman, as his paper-wife escort. Yet, renegade spaces continue to “open up’ America: “He ‘had memories of dug-out dressing rooms that were part of an underground city ‘where Chinese American s lived and did business after the L.A. Massacre, nineteen killed. He and other draft dodgers could hide in such places until the war was over"(340). ‘Thus, this ending/opening signals the discomforting tension inherent in forming community—the aim to form connections and commonalities elides difference and can lead to misunderstanding Wittman chronicles his marriage’s degeneration into neglected domesticity of shrimpshells, dirty dishes, cat feces, and mold and he tells Tana, “I love you unromantically but.” The but, as in Bharati Mukherjee’s short story “The Wife,” signals an ambivalence that threatens to unravel unity, and complicimess. But the audience chooses to focus on hearing “I love you,” willfully misreading Wittman’s frank deconstruction of marriage into a celebration of idealized romance. Like it or not, the community blesses Wittman. ‘And he has to admit, “he was having a good time. Although not everyone has heard everything, he fulfils a pacifist goal: “our monkey, master of change, staged a 103fake war, which might very well be displacing some real war.”(Ltentionally blank)CHAPTER FOUR in Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country ‘Sometimes it was possible to have the illusion that I was so much a part of the town, so well integrated that I even looked like the townsfolk. . . . ‘Sometimes I fett that I was accepted only as long as they needed me, as long as I could be of service to them. I had fought the clannishness of the Indian community. But now I wondered, did they understand something I did But even within the Indian community, the issue of belonging was not so simple. The north Indians were starting to have their own gatherings, the same was true of the south Indians. The Sikhs’. . . . poorly concealed delight in Indira Gandhi’s death did not sit well with the rest of the Indians. The Pakistanis, who till then had fit under the general rubric of “Indian,” now increasingly met by themselves. And to all these groups, I was an outsider of sorts: an Indian born in Africa. Was there ever going to be a place in this world for me to call my own?(308) ‘Abraham Verghese, My Own Country Simultaneously of Indian (or, say, Pakistani or Sri Lankan) and of speropoltan, Wester space, the South Asian in Anglo-America Sides between identities, illustrating the transnational reality of migration and hybridity.(13) Deepak Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, “Introduction” in Between ‘The Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality In literature, mass media and popular culture, depictions of South Asian ‘American community are still rare, even as South Asian American organizations and organizations are rapidly forming and growing with the rise of the South Asian population. Bahri and Vasudeva acknowledge that attempting to pin down “a stable South Asian identity is a daunting venture”(1), and I do not attempt to do so "For more detailed information about the increase of South Asian American women's organizations in the 1980s amd 1990s, see Madhnlika S. eee ‘Indian Women, (Community, and Feminism” in 106here, Rather, I look at how Verghese’s memoir illustrates the ways in which multiple identifications play out in his experience, such that he contructs a narrative that remaps cultural configurations of imagined communities of white Southerners, gay men, and South Asian immigrants. Furthermore, he also narrates the emotional and psychic dimensions of identifying with and yet still feeling inside/outside these different communities as one who negotiates them in his personal and professional life. ‘Verghese’s text, like Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California, depicts the interactions of an ethnically insular community. Although Mori’s work is fiction and ‘Verghese’s memoir is ‘non-fiction,’ a comparison can be made in terms of how the narrators construct Asian American communities and position themselves inside/outside those communities. Unlike the Japanese American community of Mori’s Yokohama, the immigrant South Asian community in Verghese’s Johnson City is not a community of individuals who create a geographically insular and isolated town. Rather, it is an aggregate community, a term I use to describe a ‘community that does not have clearly visible geographical markers, but forms in group interactions and gatherings, whose members come together in solidarity, and desire to not be marginalized. For these first and second-generation immigrants, these gatherings create what cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls analeptics, or spaces that individuals make into zones of safety and acceptance that combat 107anxieties about living in a world where they feel otherwise isolated. In the case of the immigrant South Asian community in Verghese’s locale, it becomes manifest when members, garbed in saris and other traditional dress, congregate to eat Indian food and relate their experiences and histories as immigrants striving to attain financial security and material comforts. Even though those spaces are temporary analeptics, they serve to mobilize and solidify an imagined sense-of ethnic ‘community. ‘Whereas families in the Japanese American community depicted in ‘Yokohama, California live next door to each other and often work together, the Indian American community in Verghese’s depiction of Johnson City, Tennessee is composed mainly of families who live in single-home white suburbs and hold professional jobs as doctors and engineers in which they interact with many non- Indians. As in Yokohama, the conditions which enable these immigrants and their families to be in Johnson City are largely the result of immigration legislation and limited opportunities for immigrants in more populated areas. However, the exponential growth and gains of Asian Americans in mainstream America after the carly to mid twentieth century (the time setting of Mori’s stories), the established employment networks, professional statuses, and greater familiarity with westem culture through British colonialism all enable more a more geographically-mobile Indian American community, in comparison to Moris Japanese American Yokohama 108residents. That geographic mobility indicates a change in the ways class affects cross- ethnic interactions and identifications, specifically, as a doctor, Verghese interacts ‘much more with mainstream whites, who include his predominantly white AIDS patient population. One difference between the Mori’s and Verghese’s constructions of ethnic communities is the indication of class differences within ethnic community. Certainly, class struggles do exist in the Indian American community, but for the most part, the Indian American families Verghese interacts with are comfortably middle-class. While class differences, as I discuss in chapter two, arise as a point of communal fragmentation resulting from social barriers between lower- and middle class Japanese Americans in Mori’s Yokohama, California, Verghese’s narrative stance ‘outside’ the immigrant community arises from his discomfort with participating in the material desires of other middle and upper-middle class immigrants, despite his being of that class. Verghese feels more affiliation with the narratives of experiences of working-class whites, because these “country people had let me readily into their world. They may have been ignorant about lands like India or Afica that were outside their world. They may have been shy and reluctant to talk, but once they did, they gave me complete access. It was not difficult to qualify for the shirts off their backs"(42). ‘The insider/outsider identification he feels with the gay male communitycomes out of his fascination for people who leave a familiar place in search of an emotionally comforting ‘home.’ As a heterosexual, married father, he struggles first with his homophobia when dealing with his patients. He recalls: “I was fearful that I migh inadvertently give offense by saying something crass, or otherwise reveal my ingrained societal homophogia, my lack of sophistication, my foreignness”(58). Gradually, however, he comes to see many parallels between his and their ‘stories,” oF experiences: Society considered them alien and much of their life was spent faking conformity; in my case my green card labeled me a “resident alien.” New immigrants expend a great deal of effort trying to fit in: learning the language, losing the accent, picking up the rituals of Monday Night Football and Happy Hour. Gay men, in order to avoid conflict, had also become experts at blending in, camouflaging themselves, but at a great cost to their spirit.(58) Verghese forges an identification with gay men over their ‘alien’ status, with stories of how one feels pressured to ‘camouflage’ difference, and experiences of cultural and even sexual awakenings in the desire to imagine and live in a world that accepts them. His narrative delves into gay men’s descriptions of their sexual awakenings and social behavior, presenting them as not far removed from what heterosexual people such as himself can relate to and feel. For instance, Verghese introduces one of his patients “James, a person with AIDS, a man possessed of great dignity,” and then relates James” story about the moment he becomes first aware of his sexuality, upon being fascinated with his athlete brother’s jock strap at age three. Following M0this, Verghese recalls his own memory “as a five-year-old of taking a bath and imagining my kindergarten teacher taking a bath with me” and sees these moments ‘as normal incidents of “pretrembling of a carnal life in a child”(59). The depiction of Verghese’s identification with multiple communities in this text exhibits a confluence with the notion, articulated in Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, that Asian American community is an imagined construct, but one that is manifest in individuals’ enactment of community. However, whereas Kingston’s protagonist Wittman Ah Sing imagines this pan-ethnic community as an Asian ‘American artistic, literary, and cultural solidarity with African Americans and Latinos, enacted and performed in a pan-ethnic communal play, Verghese’s first person narrative articulates it more as an everyday connection-building, motivated by an eagerness to share group histories and stories of leaving and returning home, migrations, and personal life events. ‘Verghese’s memoir fills a void in American culture—the lack of South Asian American voice and subjectivity, despite the fact that South Asian Americans represent almost one million people in this country, most of those numbers resulting from a large wave of South Asian immigrants who entered the U.S. during the 1970s to the present.” Sidonie Smith situates memoirs like Verghese’s as texts that map American identity on an individual’s experience and redefine American geographical ? Mogelonsky, Marcia, “Asian-Indian Americans” p. 1. utregions and communities upon that experience. According to Smith, telling a personal story is “one means by which national mythologies produced the conformity of individuals to new notions of identity and normative concepts of national subjectivity. Writing autobiography testified to arrival in ‘America’ and the achievement of an ‘American’ identity’(5). As an example of how life writing shapes such mythologies, one may think of how significant Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is in shaping cultural imaginations of New England identity, colonial city life, and the notion that Americans are individualistic, enterprising, and self made. For all the ways in which life writing can affirm national mythologies of ‘America, narratives which do not fit those mythologies can also alter what it means to be an American subject, and the ways in which regions and communities are defined. Verghese leams from his mother that the act of telling stories makes them his and enables him to claim them and tap into the power of the storyteller: to shape others’ imaginings and worldviews. When his mother tells his wife a story about ‘Verghese as a child, he observes, “the event was no longer mine. It had gone from fact to anecdote; it was the property of my mother”(169). Even as his mother has claimed and shaped the narrative of his past, he enacts his narrative tools on shaping the present moment for the reader, etching Indian Americans into an American tableau. As he looks upon his wife and parents together in their house, he feels as if 12he is “on the outside looking in: the four of us around the dining table, bathed in the soft saffron light, a family tableau, Indians in east Tennessee. The perfect family— well fed, safe from danger”(169). This family tableau may be read as a re-imagined Norman Rockwellian moment with the ‘perfect’ American family who is not white, but Asian Indian. As the storyteller, Verghese views the scene as an outsider even as be is part of the group, but he has the power to reinvent cultural imaginings of American family and community. This role of shaping and configuring American culture as he, an insider/outsider, knows and experiences it, remains important throughout Verghese’s memoir, as most of his anecdotes about his patients indicate that to feel part of a ‘group of people is vital to an individual’s well-being. That is, group identification, or having a community to claim inclusion in informs much of this text. The title of his book refers to his claiming of east Tennessee as ‘his own country.” It is a claiming that he does not exercise through property ownership or an emotional connection to the land but rather through individuals he meets. As he explains, ‘When I justified to friends in the Northeast my decision to settle in the South, 1 found myself talking not about the natural beauty of the place, or its climate, or the mountains you could see in every direction, or the lakes, rivers and innumerable streams where you could fish. It was the people of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia that drew me. (41) ‘The people delight him, but Verghese’s sense of belonging to community is not passively gained. He does not encounter, in Tennessee, some idyllic community 113ready and willing to accept outsiders with open arms. Rather, his community negotiated. In his narrative, transplanted and socially marginalized communities grow from individuals seeking acceptance and others who share customs and habits; those communities are not just geographically marked, they are also interrelated networks that may not be visible. His characterization of Dr. Aziz, another ‘foreign’ doctor, who maintains an air of uncultivated and even arrogant insistance upon social distance and alienation from the predominantly white hospital staff, represents the undesirably cufturally myopic individual Verghese takes pains to avoid becoming. ‘Verghese’s shame in Dr. Aziz reveals many immigrants’ fears that because they are racially othered and seen as ‘all the same’ in America. They carry burdens of ethnic ‘group representation that white Americans do not have to bear in America. Ina country now sensitive to racially stereotyping Black Americans, and at a time when racism continues but is masked by ‘politically correct’ rhetoric that downplays race, Asian Americans, particularly immigrants, still experience pressure to change certain cultural practices (especially in learning English and losing foreign accents) in order to assimilate into the mainstream as a strategy for achieving acceptance. Verghese’s memoir is not free of these complex internalized racial biases that privilege white culture, and romanticize its provineialities. Yet, his negotiations of these biases with his insistence upon narrating and legitimating immigrant and gay communities as part 4