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This article revisits and reevaluates the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s debut novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2005) as an important and intimate map of the social geography of a small Canadian town that illuminates how diasporic Chinese life is both constructed and constricted by the institution of the Chinese restaurant. I propose that having a narrative of restaurant life that centres around Chinese Canadian waiters and cooks exposes how socioeconomic institutions reproduce dominant social relations by limiting movement and representational possibilities for immigrant populations. In the book, sedentariness is presented alongside the social and political institutions that generate these diasporic subjects, which, I argue, creates a scene of stasis — where diasporic subjects work to achieve an equilibrium between competing cultural regimes. Bates’s book is remarkable insofar as it maps the unevenness brought on by diasporic globality but in a very "fastened" way — showing how the characters’ global outlooks are shrunk and slowly withered away by the small-town space. This article considers, then, what writing about diasporic stasis achieves in an age that is often characterized by global mobility.

The central premise of this article is that reading The Book of Salt as a work of world literature shifts the temporal and spatial sites, as well as the reading practices, involved in thinking about Vietnamese American literature and subjectivity away from the effects of the so-called Vietnam War and toward a long historical view that compares how Vietnamese actors have accrued, and continue to accrue, worth within differing regimes of global value. With The Book of Salt inching toward canonical status in the Asian American Studies curriculum, it is clear that Monique Truong's work has emerged as a central text of Vietnamese American literature. However, analyzing the novel solely as a work of Asian American literature may, in fact, limit the promise the book holds due to the conventional marketing and reading practices that frequently reduce a heterogeneous collection of Vietnamese American works to a hermeneutic centred around the “Vietnam War.” In contrast, I propose that reading The Book of Salt as a work of world literature reveals how Truong creates a ground of comparison that reimagines accepted routes of cross-cultural representation, reception, and value. This world literature perspective nudges Vietnamese American writing away from its own shores by delving deep into the history of Vietnamese mobility and reconsiders the multiple promises held within the Vietnamese diasporic past in a way that brings into question a singular construction of the Vietnamese present.

The study of food in Asian American literary and cultural studies is particularly concerned with the political significance of rhetorically linking of identity and cuisine. Addressing the ways eating, cooking, and preparing food is represented in a number of literary works and cultural texts, these academic studies investigate how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression. Indeed, Asian American studies scholars approach food by taking culinary taste, ethnicity, and racialized labor as co-constitutive, rather than given. For the ways Asian American chefs, cooks, eaters, and food workers engage food, in part, defines their cultural position, both internally and to the US population at large. The performative force of these acts is transformed by writers and artists into personal and sensual histories, that for various gendered, linguistic, and economic reasons would otherwise be silenced. Further, Asian American authors and artists can strategically use an interest in food and cuisine to convey the complexity, multiplicity, and history of Asian American identities and politics. Recently the study of food has been transformed into a critical practice used to combat the challenges Asian Americans endure surrounding the question of authenticity. Stories of culinary ethnic affiliation are marketable, and Frank Chin’s calls of “food pornography” loom whenever a predominately white audience wolfs down overly saccharine stories of Asian American culinary solidarity. But in the same breath the genre is also commercially viable because of its unique ability to communicate culturally specific stories in ways that are appealing to younger generations unfamiliar with, or who want to learn more about, customs, traditions, and historical events. Indeed, these stories are unique insofar as they can provide material histories that explain how socioeconomic institutions reproduce racial inequity; yet remain palatable for those outside the ethnic group, even if these readers are those whose subject position comes under review. This article will serve as a reminder, then, that culinary writing remains a robust literary form that makes use of its market appeal to write about Asian America in a manner that is at once personal, material, and historically potent, while the study of this work recognizes that the rhetoric that becomes attached to culinary acts is a unique, active, and, at times, combative, discursive space. The study of food in Asian American studies has been invested in demonstrating how the rhetorical linking of identity and cuisine is a politically significant act. As the “event of eating” is impossible to describe without using expressive language that catalogues communal values, the ways cultural producers write about cuisine is a unit of analysis that can be compared across national traditions, genres, and media. By historically situating how eating, cooking, and preparing food is represented in a number of literary works, academic studies of Asian Americans, food, and literary culture show how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression. The ways Asian American chefs, cooks, eaters, and food workers engage food, in part, defines their cultural position, both internally and to the US population at large. The material force of these performative acts has been refashioned, aesthetically, by writers and artists to counter the persistence of the perpetual foreigner stereotype, as Asian American authors and artists leverage a general interest in their food and cuisine to convey the complexity, multiplicity, and history of Asian American identities and politics. Asian American studies scholars approach food by taking culinary taste, ethnicity, and racialized labor as co-constitutive, rather than given. This approach recognizes a unique and active Asian American culinary space, while opposing pernicious stereotypes that seek to limit the power of alimentary images and Asian American ways of life. In this light, the study of food has been transformed into a critical practice used to combat the challenges Asian Americans endure surrounding the question of authenticity. Faced with articulating the parameters of their community, often without the benefit of institutional power, Asian Americans have turned to food to tell not only “who they are” but to communicate sensual and complex histories that for various gendered, linguistic, and economic reasons would otherwise be silenced.

This article examines the production and negotiation of Korean American televisual images in U.S. reality and travel food programs. We explore two different representations of Korean Americanness, the first in CNN’s Parts Unknown and the second in Bravo TV’s Top Chef, to identify the demand for ethnic transformation that Korean Americans face and examine how these trials reanimate the role of Korean Americans on television. We argue that the iconoclastic figure of the “Bad Korean” highlighted in Parts Unknown challenges stereotypical portrayals of Korean Americans by positioning cast members as active and disruptive cultural producers. In our analysis of Top Chef, we focus on the emergence of the “Shifting Korean” to highlight the transformative process demanded by the reality television genre. We conclude by querying the representational possibilities for Korean Americans, asking what claims the “Bad Korean” and “Shifting Korean” can make on cultural authenticity.

Near the end of Bich Minh Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2007), a memoir of a Vietnamese American girl growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the reader encounters a conspicuous two-page “Author’s Note.” In this section, found between the body of the text and the acknowledgments, Nguyen explains some of the decisions she made when writing the book—specifically, “owning up to my own memories rather than others’” (255). She continues: Although I did need to rely on stories from my father, uncles, and grandmother to depict our escape from Saigon, I generally tried to avoid turning my family into collaborators. . . . I do not mean to speak for all of my family, or all of Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom have had entirely different experiences with, and opinions on, assimilation, culture, and language. (255-56) This note, as brief and unobtrusive as it may be, is striking when one considers the dearth of Vietnamese American writing and scholarship, a field that is distinctly marginal even within Asian American Studies, never mind the humanities at large. With Michele Janette’s warning that Vietnam is in danger of slipping away from the American psyche through projects that systematically erase memories of violence, contradiction, and defeat (280), one might think that Nguyen, whose memoir traffics richly in the hardships Vietnamese refugees faced in America, would be more than happy to open up and submit her memoir as evidence of the trials that she, her family, and other Vietnamese American families have had to endure. Distinguishing her experience from others’ avoids producing a broadly conflated image of the Vietnamese American subject. Considering the paucity of Vietnamese diasporic representation, this is surely a concern. But still a question lingers: what is behind this reluctance to turn her family and other Vietnamese immigrants specifically into “collaborators”? For instance, Vietnamese American author Andrew X. Pham in the