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This article supports Barbara Christian’s observation that theoretical insights can be directly manifested in literary texts. I demonstrate how Bing Xin’s story “The Photograph” (1934) anticipates ideas later articulated by postcolonialist and Asian American literary critics such as Edward Said, Frank Chin, Rey Chow, and Arif Dirlik. The narrative interweaves three strands of Orientalism — missionary denigration of the Chinese as inferior heathens, American construct of the Asian as the silent model (minority), and Chinese complicity in the enactment of the stereotype. I argue that this transnational tale dissolves the boundaries of Chinese, Chinese American, and postcolonialist studies; interrogates both American imperialist assumptions and Chinese traditional values; and offers caveats against essentialist approaches to transracial adoption.

This article combines legal, sociological, and literary scholarship. Taking the lead from scholars of Critical Race Theory who have shown how African Americans and Korean Americans were positioned agonistically in People v. Soon Ja Du and in the media accounts about the LA uprising, I submit that “The Court Interpreter” by Ty Pak at once impugns and underwrites the oppositional racial identities dictated by the “master narrative.” Part III opens with Cheung’s interracial analysis of what she describes as “(mis)interpretations and (in)justice” during the 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and “Black-Korean Conflict” (2005). Here, Cheung draws on fictional and legal material where racial issues are interpreted and misinterpreted within the context of a highly charged racialized climate in 1992 on the heels of the verdict that exonerated four white policemen captured on video as brutally beating Rodney King.

This article interprets Kingston's China Men as "historiographic metafiction"--a revisionist novel which counters traditional historiography with an alternative mode of telling and reimagines the past to make room for a different future. Kingston's "talk story" technique allows her, by inter­ weaving oral and literary traditions and a polyphonic multiplicity of narratives, to fracture and subvert both Chinese patriarchal and white American authority. Like Foucault's genealogy, talk-story · thus "fragments what was thought unified" by decentering, disseminating and interrogating authority. But Kingston embellishes historical data and received myths with imagined details; she mixes fact and fantasy to herald a world grounded in reciprocity rather than domination.

This article extends the terms of debate in Western feminism by analyzing the gender politics within Asian American cultural studies. On account of historical "emasculation" of Asian American men (exclusion laws, labor restrictions, cultural stereotyping, etc), Chinese American male writers feel the need to reassert manhood through heroic literary portrayal. I urge these writers to recover a cultural space without denigrating the "feminine" and to redefine heroism by transcending binaries.

Using four works by Marilyn Chin and Russell C. Leong, this essay engages with Ethical Literary Theory and Criticism on several fronts. It shows the ethical impulses that have galvanized many ethnic American writers since the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It questions the possibility of a purely “objective” Ethical Literary Criticism given that ethical or literary criteria are invariably inflected by race, gender, class, ethnicity, politics, and religion. Instead of placing ethics above aesthetics, it demonstrates their interdependence and inextricability. This article also introduces the topics of class exploitation, homophobia, sexual harassment, and marginalization of minority writers into the sphere of Ethical Literary Criticism.

This article compares the reclusive ideal extolled by Chinese poet Tao Qian (T’ao Ch’ien or Tao Yuan Ming) and the solitude that Ralph Waldo Emerson regards as a prerequisite to self-trust. Tao Qian and Emerson are fathers of Chinese and American pastorals respectively. Both the Chinese poet and the New England sage disparage the social, economical, and political pressures that curtail individual spirit and enforce conformity. Both deem nature to be at once salubrious and edifying, and discern correspondences between ecological and moral well-being. Their differences are no less pronounced. Tao Qian, who considers the countryside to be essential to solitude, is content to lead a self-effacing pastoral existence. Emerson, who sees nature as ancillary to the divine spark within each human being, avers that the enlightened soul can find solitude anywhere. While Tao Qian believes that he can only be true to his high-minded nature by literally removing himself from the world of affairs, Emerson never shirks his responsibility as a public intellectual and continues to weigh in with a piece of his mind concerning pressing social and political issues.

Through a comparison of Chinese and Chinese American (auto)biographical accounts, this article facilitates a transpacific literary exchange that tracks cultural persistence and diffusion, offers a transnational perspective on the alleged absence of indigenous Chinese autobiography and the controversial use of fake “Orientalist” material in Chinese American life-writing, and highlights the need for bicultural literacy in grappling with this literature. Contesting Frank Chin’s categorical condemnation of autobiography (as a Western Christian contraption laden with self-hatred), I trace its manifestations in transpacific texts and the convergences in those texts: melding of autobiography and biography, salience of maternal legacies, and interdependent self-formation. Unlike the Chinese authors who lavish compliments on their forebears, however, the Chinese American authors do not scruple to disclose unseemly family secrets or to defy the boundaries between history and fiction—practices that some Asian American critics find vexing. I demonstrate that the critical qualms about Chinese American life-writing have to do with the politics of representation and that bicultural literacy can obviate cultural misreading.

Reflections by the author, a Chinese American woman, on the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in China.

Personal impressions of the 2008 Oympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing

The article uses McCunn’s Wooden Fish Songs as an example to articulate how to reimagine transnational and interracial Chinese American history. It emphasizes the importance of accepting and integrating varied views of scholars from Asia, North America, and other ethnic areas. Only so can we enrich Asian American Studies, and avoid blind patriotism and narrow nationalist psychology.

This article examines a nonfiction account of the deepening empathy felt by Yamamoto toward African Americans. After "A Fire in Fontana"—title of her memoir—the author blames herself as a journalist for her failure at preventing a hate crime that results in the deaths of a black family in Fontana. Her visceral account evinces the importance of overcoming debilitating silence upon witnessing iniquities perpetrated against any marginalized minorities.