Sunday, June 30, 1991
THE MERCURY NEWS

Finding a Voice

There was a mountain of books—thousands of them, dumped in the desert of Manzanar in Southern California. There was no library. Indeed, there was barely a dining hall at Manzanar, one of 10 internment camps hastily erected for the confinement of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. So the books—donated by charities—were thrown in a firebreak that had been dug around the camp.

For the next three years, the books were 7-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki’s building blocks. She and the hundreds of other children evacuated to Manzanar in 1942 would spend hours tunneling through the mountain of books, constructing caves, passages, forts. When it rained, she found shelter inside the heap of waterlogged books. And when she grew bored, she picked up a book and began to read. It was her defining moment.

Today that silence has ended in a burst of voices as Asian-Americans—long successful in fields such as medicine, engineering and business—are making their mark in the literary world.

An anthology of Asian-American women writers, The Forbidden Stitch, won an American Book Award last year. Critics have acclaimed Indian-born Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories and, most recently, the novel Jasmine. Cynthia Kadohota and Holly Uyemoto, Japanese-Americans in their early 20s, have published first novels dealing with the coming-of-age issues of love and self-identity.

At least five books by Chinese-American writers have been published this spring. Following the enormous success of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan received a $4 million advance for her much-anticipated second novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife. Three of the new books are first novels, including Typical American, by Gish Jen, which has been singled out by some critics as one of the year’s best. Jen tells the story of a Chinese family in San Francisco coping with the problems they encounter on the road to assimilation.

In poetry, there is Garrett Hongo, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, who turned to writing in part because he could find no literature that reflected the people and stories of his Hawaiian childhood. Li-Young Lee, a 34-year-old Chicago resident who was born in Indonesia and grew up in Pittsburgh, is one of America’s most important young poets. Lee’s poems address the sacredness of love, his childhood memories of persimmons and steamed ginger fish, and, most important, his father, who was the personal physician to Mao Tse-Tung before the Cultural Revolution drove him out of China.

There are also the plays of Frank Chin, which smolder with aggressive masculinity and rage against the racism of America. In 1972, Chin became the first Asian-American to have a play open on Broadway; his influence on other Asian-American writers has been profound. Among them are David Henry Hwang, whose M. Butterfly won a Tony Award for best play in 1989.

And, of course, there is the work of Maxine Hong Kingston, whose three books, The Woman Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey, have inspired and shaped the Asian-American literary experience. The Woman Warrior is required reading in college courses ranging from feminism to literature, sociology and history.

Like Jewish and African-American writers before them, Asian- American writers belong to a community that is wrestling with how it wants to see itself portrayed to the world. Debate has erupted among Asian writers about the social responsibility of minority writers, just as it did 30 years ago when Philip Roth and Saul Bellow began to paint unflattering characterizations of Jews, and more recently, when novels by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison showed black men in a harsh and violent light.

Within the community of Asian-American writers, poets have been vilified as “bananas” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and playwrights accused of selling out their race. Novelists have been denounced as traitors, and their accusers likened to the Ayatollah and the Gang of Four. Maxine Hong Kingston, veteran of untold numbers of Asian-American writers’ conferences, says that each conference is “like another Cultural Revolution.”

The imbroglio has touched every successful writer.

Amy Tan has been assailed for writing about the so-called dual-personality conflict: “Am I American or am I Chinese?” “I see Tan as a product of racism,” says Laureen Mar, a literature and writing teacher in Seattle. “I don’t like the negativity and self-contempt, the attempt to blend in with white American culture.” In her judgment, The Joy Luck Club perpetuates a tradition of self-contempt that found its ultimate expression in the late 1950s and ’60s with the practice of Asian-American women taping their eyelids to create a double fold and, hence, a “whiter” look.

David Henry Hwang has been denounced for turning one of the central figures in Chinese myth into a mass murderer. In FOB, Hwang’s first play, Gwan Gung cries aloud for American recognition—an act critics dismiss as absurd and demeaning to the great Chinese god of war and literature.

Cynthia Kadohota’s lyrical first novel, The Floating World, has been criticized for neglecting to place the book’s pivotal scene in a Japanese internment camp. In the story, a man comes in search of the narrator’s mother in the 1960s—some 20 years after their love affair. Logically, the affair could have taken place only during the internment, but the camps are never mentioned in Kadohota’s novel.

But the greatest controversy revolves around Maxine Hong Kingston, who has been attacked for everything from giving away such secrets as the Chinese gastronomic penchant for monkey brains to rewriting the legends at the heart of Chinese tradition.

Leading the attack is Frank Chin, a 6-foot-tall, self-described angry “Chinaman,” whose philosophy has been nurtured on the ancient Chinese myths of strong masculine archetypes: “Everyone is born a soldier; all behavior is tactics and strategy; all relationships are martial. The individual, to maintain his personal integrity, must know everything, to approach life as a strategic situation. The state is against you, the bureaucracy is against you, everyone is against you. Trust no one.”

Chin calls his kind of theater “making war.” In Chin’s world, all Chinese-American women writers are traitors. Ask him to elaborate, and he roars back that the “feminist assimilators” are actually “Christians” who are out to destroy Chinese culture and complete what the Christian invaders of the 14th century failed to accomplish.

Chin, who wears cowboy hats and plays flamenco guitar (he taught it to Robbie Krieger of the Doors), was the first Asian- American to rise to literary stardom in the early 1970s. His plays Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon raged against the stereotypes of the Asian male as either effeminate eunuch (Charlie Chan) or yellow devil (Fu Manchu). They were praised by the New Yorker for their vitality, humor and “dazzling eruption of verbal legerdemain.”

Chin’s first novel, Donald Duk, was published in February. The book’s narrator is a precocious 12-year-old Chinese-American boy who hates everything Chinese and is acutely embarrassed by his family and culture. The novel’s reviews have been mixed; it has been faulted for a sense of humor so broad that it excludes its audience, and defended as a passionate reclamation of ancient myths and culture.

Chin’s immense passion is directed especially against Kingston, Tan and Hwang—writers he disparages as “traitors” to their race for perpetuating age-old stereotypes through their “white racist art.”

“Oh, does he hate Amy Tan, too?” asked David Henry Hwang in a recent interview. “Interesting how we all care who Frank hates.”

“Being a Chinese-American does not mean I suck up to whites and falsify Chinese culture,” says Chin, a fury building in his voice. “And in Chinese-American literature, that’s what’s happening. Every work ever published by a Chinese-American is autobiography or an autobiographical novel or a cookbook.” He sneers. “Christians write autobiographies. The autobiography is a Christian, religious form; it’s not Chinese.”

He accuses Kingston of shamefully acquiescing to her publisher’s decision to apply an autobiographical label to The Woman Warrior (subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts). He accuses her of rewriting history according to her own feminist ideology. And he is outraged by the liberties she has taken with the traditional legends.

Fifteen years after the publication of The Woman Warrior, he still literally rises in anger at Kingston’s transformation of the girl heroine Fa Mu Lan from a Confucian figure of romantic love into the female avenger who rides into battle with the words of her parents carved across her back. In “The Ballad of Mu Lan,” a Chinese fairy tale for children, there are no tattoos.

“She doesn’t know Fa Mu Lan,” asserts Chin, pacing in the office of his Los Angeles apartment. “Her conception of Fa Mu Lan is racist. Her portrayal of the Chinese—racist! Her portrayal of Chinese culture —racist! Every assertion she makes about Chinese culture is wrong. She says the character for woman and slave are the same word in Chinese. Not so! Just not so! Any Chinese student who studies the language knows that that is not so. And it is so offensive.”

Since 1975, when the publisher, Knopf, hoping for a cover blurb, sent him an unbound manuscript of The Woman Warrior, Chin has been hammering away at Kingston in essays, academic conferences and newspaper articles. Their duel of pens has enlivened university conferences and inspired academic papers, doctoral dissertations and college lectures. Entire papers have been devoted to what Kingston got “right” and “wrong” in The Woman Warrior.

Sandra Holstein, an English instructor at Southern Oregon College in Ashland, Ore., taught a course in American literature at Hong Kong’s Shue Yan College for seven years. During that time, she said, her students also objected to several inaccuracies in The Woman Warrior. Chief among them was an incident in which the narrator’s married aunt was stoned by villagers in China after they discovered that she was pregnant by a man other than her husband. The villagers would never have thrown stones, the Chinese students protested. They would have used sticks.

“People are approaching ethnicity with a religious fundamentalism that is no different than the way the Ayatollah Khomeini responded to The Satanic Verses,” charges Garrett Hongo, whose own poetry has been subjected to “talking stink,” a Hawaiian expression that says it all. “They want to discredit and repress certain works from the canon of Asian-American writing. They want to be the arbiter of what constitutes worth in Asian-American literature. The problem is they’re trying to edit control over all the rest of us.”

At the core of the argument is the role and purity of myths in the preservation of a people’s history: In retelling Chinese history and legends, is it legitimate to alter myths that are unknown to the majority of readers? Shawn Wong, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, is one who argues that there is “a need to know what the real is.” When James Joyce wrote Ulysses, readers were familiar with the original story in Homer’s Odyssey. How many literate American readers of The Woman Warrior know “The Ballad of Mu Lan”?

“I don’t quite get the legends right either,” says Elaine Kim, a Korean-American assistant professor of Asian studies at Berkeley. “I don’t quite get anything right about Korea. It’s part of our identity as Americans to get it different. Who says you can’t transform a legend? If you’re a woman, you might have to transform a legend in order to escape patriarchy. Santa Claus can be a woman. Would that be a travesty?”

“There’s a long tradition of stories changing constantly, from the oral tradition,” says Kingston. “And artists just continue the changing story. People carry myths inside of them, telling the stories on board when they came to America, and then when they landed, exchanging stories. Certain stories were forgotten because they weren’t applicable any more, and some myths were changed, according to need and circumstances. So when I hear these stories, they’ve already changed, and I imagine them from what I know.”

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Copyright 1991 San Jose Mercury News
Knight Ridder