Cheng, M.
Citation
Cheng, M. (2011, May 18). Transculturation : writing beyond dualism. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/17644
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Introduction
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Chinese immigration to the United States has taken place since the mid- nineteenth century. Their migration history from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century is characterized by prejudice, violence, exclusion, and deportation. These discriminatory practices were the result of a series of exclusion acts to which Chinese immigrants were subjected.1 The Chinese Exclusion Act passed by the American Congress in 1882 suspended the inflow of Chinese laborers. Afterwards, a series of discriminatory legislation acts against landownership, naturalization, miscegenation, and the entry of Chinese women further discouraged the settlement of Chinese immigrants in the US (Lim,
“Immigration” 293). For example, the Scott Act of 1888 forbade Chinese laborers to return after they had left the US for temporary visits back home. American authorities imposed stricter restriction on women’s immigration. At first the immigration of Chinese people was generally a male phenomenon. Under the Page Act, promulgated in 1875, men were not allowed to send for their wives from China. It effectively cut off the migration of Chinese women. This “administration of citizenship,” as Lisa Lowe notes, “was simultaneously a ‘technology’ of racialization and gendering” (11).
While these immigrant policies legally excluded or restricted the entry of Chinese people, Chinese immigration has simultaneously been the site for creative practices against these seemingly impervious restrictions. The representative “illegal” migratory experiences include secret migration, fraudulent entry with forged identity, and lying to immigration authority. These strategies fight American immigrant acts that validate the unequal treatment toward Chinese immigrants. The subversive experiences constitute a political protest against American
1 These acts include the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Scott Act of 1888, the Geary Act of 1892, and the Immigration Act of 1924.
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laws legalizing the exclusion. Thus, Chinese Americans “have not only been ‘subject to’ immigration exclusion and restriction but have also been ‘subjects of’ the immigration process” (Lowe 9).
The negative impact of the American restrictive policies continues long afterwards. Unlike European immigration experiences, these policies prevented comparable Chinese assimilation into American society. Chinese immigrants were stereotyped either as the threatening
“yellow peril” or as the domesticated “model minority” (Lowe 19).
Lowe notes that Americans treat Asian countries as exotic, barbaric, and alien, and Asian laborers as “yellow peril,” which threatens to displace white European immigrants and undercut white labor (4, 5). The “model minority” myth homogenizes Asians by constructing them as the most successfully assimilated minority group (68). They were willing to take and work hard at even the menial jobs offered to them. The two different kinds of stereotyped images both define Chinese immigrants as culturally and racially “other,” and suppress their specific differences in class, gender, origin, and cultural experience.
Decades of exclusion—legally and politically—render Chinese immigrants in a position of the “other” in the US. Lowe notes the contradictory definition between American citizens and Asian immigrants, stating how “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally” (4).
As American citizens, they were treated in a way that excluded them the privilege of citizenship. To suffer was their common fate in the democratic country. A large portion of the immigrant population assumed the lowest paying jobs in service industries, or was either under- or unemployed. Language barriers in communication and widespread repellent attitudes toward Chinese immigrants created and strengthened stereotypes of them as “other.” Consequently, Chinese immigrants had limited access to the political, educational, and economic systems in the US.
In 1965 Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act. It abolished the national-origin quotas in place in the US since the Immigration Act of 1924. Consequently, Chinese immigrants gained fairer legislative treatment. After that, the number of Chinese people migrating to the US increased dramatically, and the pattern of immigration changed too. The collective historical, cultural, and social heritage that is common to these immigrants forms their “immigritude”
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(George 189). This immigritude varies during different phases of immigration. It is “constituted in the individual literary representations of the immigrant experience” (Paul 3). Chinese immigrants constitute a heterogeneous group, but representations are different in terms of regional, occupational, and cultural backgrounds. Some immigrants are homeless or sojourning subjects without a sense of belonging. Others may claim dual or multiple identities. These various forms of identity challenge cultural conformity and political loyalty to the dominant culture. They constitute what Lowe calls “agents of political change, cultural expression, and social transformation” (9). Thus the movement of an increasing number of people across nations leads to other forms of border-crossing in the political, cultural, and social domain. Migrancy, this multifaceted border-crossing movement, as Chambers notes,
involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. (qtd. in Paul 2)
Therefore, migrancy is associated with a fluid construction of bicultural space. The transnational movement provides new modes of cultural reproduction and political engagement. This phenomenon can be perceived in literary texts. Immigrant literatures are products of geographic, cultural, and political encounters of home and host country.
Immigration literature often addresses questions of identity, cultural conflict, power relations, multiculturalism, and transnationalism.
Because of the representation of cultural encounter in immigrant texts, I argue the study of these literary works is necessarily multicultural, multidimensional and multidisciplinary. Immigrant literature is geographically, socially, and culturally shaped by various forms of race- and gender-specific experiences and by more than one socio-political system. Like other immigrant literatures, Chinese American literature also exhibits a deep sense of hybridity. Chinese immigration history has been written into literary fictions as a background of cultural conflicts.
The body of literature produced gives meaning to concerns of how to position oneself in the encounter of one’s immigrant past and American social reality. Minority writers are engaged in positioning themselves and other ethnic groups in a variety of ways. Their narratives represent a
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vivacious and diverse image of both Chinese American culture and people.
Women writers in particular eloquently articulate immigrant experience, family conflicts, and racial and gender discrimination.
Chinese American women’s literature brings up the following questions:
how are the writers’ specific identities (racial and gender) represented in their writing? What is the relationship between their ethnic experiences and their literary works? What literary imagination is produced as a result of cultural conflict and hybridity? What cultural legacy and aesthetics do these writers inherit and develop in their works, and how?
These questions urge me to investigate the cultural and ethnic politics of Chinese American literature. All the above questions can be narrowed down to one issue: how do these writers negotiate their bicultural conditions and transform them into new forms of self-identification in US-American discourse? Through a critical reading of several Chinese American works, I aim to chart the course of this process and investigate how these writers fit themselves into the new conditions. My research aims to explore this dynamic process of cultural negotiation and transformation in literature.
This study focuses on three works of Chinese American women’s literature: Hunger: A Novella and Stories (1998) by Lan Samantha Chang, Bone: A Novel (1993) by Fae Myenne Ng, and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston. Of these three writers, one of their noteworthy commonalities is that they are all second-generation immigrants born and raised in the US. As the offspring of immigrants, they encounter great confusion in cultural orientation. Their cultural identity is a blending of an indelible Chinese inheritance and the influence of the new American context.
However, it is their dual background that leads to their exploration of their cultural problems. It enables them to access two different literary traditions. One is the Chinese tradition of storytelling passed down over generations in the immigrant community. The other is that of postmodern American fiction that concerns an incoherent development of the self in an ever-changing world. Their narration mixes and crosses languages and styles of writing, and produces multiple modes of expression. The first-person narrators in their stories tell the real and imagined experiences of themselves and their families. Their fictional
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writing explores the ups and downs of Chinese immigrants and their offspring.
The three works I will investigate are all quasi-(auto)biographical stories published in the last decades of the twentieth century. They tell life stories in a way by which the narrative “is delusive and soon enough deconstructs itself” (Minnaard 72). The life stories “constantly shift in temporal, spatial and thematic terms” (72). This constant shifting is presented by a multifaceted version of border-crossing in terms of cultural heritage, value and belief systems, and literary tradition. The narratives are characterized by typically postmodern devices such as
“discontinuity, disruption, [and] dislocation” (Hutcheon, Poetics 3).
Linear and conventional narration is interrupted to allow for multiple perspectives. Chang’s novella Hunger, the most recent work among the three novels, distinguishes itself by its profound depiction of the unspeakable and unspoken past of immigrants. As Claire Messud comments in The New York Times, “Chang offers no easy or reassuring resolution to the tortures of the immigrant experience: complex and rueful, her fiction gives voice to internal struggles, withheld catalogues of loss.” The narration bears similarities to Holocaust literature in its depiction of a traumatic past and of traumatized characters. Ng’s Bone explores the concept of space through motif. It reflects a fascination with loss of space, displacement, and replacement. Its simple style of narration (un)covers a complex presentation of immigrant history and reality. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is definitely the most widely discussed novel in Asian American immigrant literature. The talk-story narrative does not follow logical trajectories. The seemingly straightforward recollections of childhood experience are intertwined with fantastical encounters with ghosts. Its nonlinear narrative of memoir produces effects of dissonance, fragmentation, and irresolution.
Though the three novels share common themes of intergenerational conflicts and cultural adaptation of two generations, the time between their dates of publication (especially the gap between Bone and The Woman Warrior) is reflected in their particular representation of the immigrant stories. In The Woman Warrior, the narrator’s life stories take place from the mid-twentieth century onward. Fear of deportation, the prevalent influence of Chinese feudalist ideology in Chinese American community, and the puzzlement the narrator feels toward her Chinese heritage, are the main themes of conflicts involved. In Bone, the
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protagonists (especially the second-generation immigrants) are more Americanized. Their stories are closely related to their American experiences. The stories of the two generations offer accounts of how immigrants and their offspring struggle to adapt to their American surroundings. The difference between the two novels tracks a change of identity construction from a reinterpretation of one’s cultural heritage to the exploration of cultural clashes in their bicultural environment. Or, in other words, ambivalence toward a Chinese American identity seems to develop into a positive attitude toward ethnic pasts in the new socio- political environment. The protagonists in Hunger, the latest among the three novels, migrate to the US not because of material needs, but to pursue mental or spiritual achievements. Their story reflects a change in the purpose of immigration in recent years. Chinese immigrants are no longer solely money-earners who work hard to send money back home or refugees who escape from political persecution.
Before going into a focused discussion of the notions of culture and identity, I feel it is imperative to survey the significance of
“immigrant genre” in times of globalization (George 171).2 My study makes use of two main theoretical approaches: feminist studies and diaspora studies. As these two fields cannot fully account for the diverse and heterogeneous narratives of either Chinese American literature in general, or of these three works, I will use theories from other fields, such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis as well.
Feminist Studies
Particular problems immigrant women face will be a special focus during my reading of immigrant literature. Feminisms are, then, indispensable approaches. Hierarchical society and white mainstream discourse construct third world women as a doubly marginalized
“others.”3 They become doubly discriminated, not only as subjugated women, but also as marginalized ethnic minorities. So unlike women in
2 George Marangoly states that the immigrant genre is both distinct from and closely related to literature of postcolonialism and exile.
3 Though the term “double colonization” is originally used to refer to women in postcolonial societies, now it has widely been applied to women in diaspora situations as well.
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mainstream society who are mainly concerned with dislodging sexism, ethnic minority women are also faced with the domination of the West in general and Western feminism in particular. My study is concerned with how minority women write to fight against the double domination of the mainstream discourse. My approach will make use of insights from postcolonial feminist studies.4
The term “third world women,” as the representative theorist of postcolonial feminism Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes, “designates a political constituency, not a biological or even sociological one”
(“Cartographies” 7). Thus the term “women” distinguishes itself from
“men” by its social and historical construction of gender rather than by its biological factuality. Likewise, for third world women specifically, they are not only racially and sexually different from white men but also socially different from women of first and second world countries. To go one step further, feminist struggles of these third world women are neither based on their gender identity of being female nor on their natural racial identity of minorities. Rather, their struggle is determined by the methods of their social constructions in terms of race, gender, and class. As Mohanty points out,
What seems to constitute “women of color” or “third world women” as a viable oppositional alliance is a common context of struggle rather than color or racial identifications. Similarly, it is third world women’s oppositional political relation to sexist, racist, and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality. (7)
So as a “community of resistance,”5 minority women struggle to transcend the sphere of fighting against racial and gender subordination to a politics of subjectivity construction. In other words, they aim to formulate “autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies” (Mohanty, “Under” 51).
4 As Stephen Sumida notes, minority American literatures share a lot of commonalities with postcolonial literature. The political and cultural issues are played in a way similar to the dynamics of race, class, and gender in postcolonial nations. Both literatures are engaged in processes of creating new narratives out of old and recent histories and languages (274).
5 Mohanty terms the struggling third world women under “communities of resistance,” which refers to opposition from different communities, such as refugee, migrant, and black groups (“Cartographies” 4-5). I see Chinese American women as one of “communities of resistance.”
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When asserting their double-aspect difference (from men and Western women), third world feminists articulate a “different” voice.
But when the difference is applied cross-culturally among third world countries, it is uncritically imposed as a universal difference, which homogenizes third world women into a monolithic, singular group. The discourse that acknowledges the difference of minority women ironically transforms into another discourse that homogenizes them into a coherent, unitary group of “third world women.” An attack against the indistinctive confusion of worldwide feminist struggles seems to reinforce another monolithic notion. For this reason, Mohanty endeavors to interrogate how “difference” is presented in postcolonial narratives.
As she puts it:
third world women as a group or category are automatically and necessarily defined as religious (read “not progressive”), family- oriented (read “traditional”), legal minors (read “they-are-still-not- conscious-of-their-rights”), illiterate (read “ignorant”), domestic (read
“backward”), and sometimes revolutionary (read “their-country-is-in- a-state-of-war; they-must-fight!”) This is how the “third world difference” is produced. (“Under” 72)
The “third world difference” generalizes minority traditions as backward and inferior, and minority women into images of “the veiled woman, the powerful mother, the chaste virgin, the obedient wife,” who “exist in universal, ahistorical splendor, setting in motion a colonialist discourse”
(73). This difference, Mohanty argues further, “appropriate[s] and
‘colonize[s]’ the constitutive complexities” of women (54), because it ignores complex power relations and conflicting interests among individual groups. Under the categorization of this difference, the resistance of minority women is “defined only as cumulatively reactive, not as something inherent in the operation of power” (73). The result is that “[i]t limits theoretical analysis as well as reinforces Western cultural imperialism” (73).
My contention is therefore that when postcolonial feminist writers attempt to fight against a monolithic subject-position of “third world women” by asserting their distinct characteristics, care should be taken as to how to articulate that difference. This poses a challenge to these feminist writers, for whenever they formulate difference, their voice risks falling into a discourse that homogenizes third world women under
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the unified conceptualization of “difference.” As I see it, inherent to the paradoxical function of articulating difference is a configuration of female subjectivity: the more heterogeneity among women, the more diversified articulation becomes necessary. It is impossible to formulate a third world feminist claim without reference to difference. When Mohanty bombards the homogenizing force of “third world difference,”
she is already expressing a voice of difference. However, it is not a monolithic difference, but a new difference, contrary to the difference which is “stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most […] women in these countries” (“Under” 53-54). This difference respects and encourages the specificity of each group. It reflects the
“everyday, fluid, fundamentally historical and dynamic nature of the lives of third world women” (“Cartographies” 6). Mohanty underlines the diversity among minority groups. As she says, “Alliances and divisions of class, religion, sexuality, and history […] are necessarily internal to each of the above ‘groups’” (7). I further contend this diversity does not exist only among different racial, gender, and class groups, as Mohanty notes, but also exists within each group, or even within each individual person who will not be the same, or in the same relation with others at different times and places. So neither the difference itself nor the understanding of it is established, fixed, and given. Both are fluidly constructed, and socially, culturally, and individually defined.
Chinese American women are put in a similar social and gender position as women in postcolonial countries. Whenever they speak for themselves, they formulate political differences because of their historical, gender, racial, and social situations of oppression and discrimination. However, they are monolithically perceived as exotic sexual beings subordinate to masculine power and authority. While the consideration of femininity as inferior gender is not an uncommon phenomenon globally, the misogyny of Chinese feudalism makes the situation worse. Women are deprived of a voice to express their thoughts.6 The feudalist influence from old China also permeates
6 Amy Ling notes that women have generally been suppressed in the long time of feudalism. As she says, “the old Chinese tradition […] stressed female chastity, modesty, and restraint.” This tradition “broke girls’ toes and bound their feet as an ideal of beauty; […] sold daughters into slavery in times of hardships; […]
encouraged and honored widow suicides” (“Chinese” 219).
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Chinese American society. As Kingston notes in The Woman Warrior, the characters’ silence is due to their identity as Chinese American women (166). Women are expected to be voiceless, obedient subjects in old China and in (Chinese) American communities. The two different ideologies treat women as “others,” though, to a different extent.
Postcolonial critic Rey Chow recognizes the extremely inferior position within feminist discourse faced by non-Western women. She notes that these women have not only been “left out of bourgeois liberal feminism’s account ‘as women,’” but also more importantly “their experiences as ‘women’ can never be pinned down to the narrowly sexualized aspect of that [unstable] category, as ‘women’ versus ‘men’
only” (82-83). Chow’s latter argument is especially pertinent to Chinese women. As she points out, the central transaction between women and (male-dominated) culture has little relevance in a culture like the Chinese (83), which codified women’s obedience and submission to their father, husband, and son for eighteen hundred years (Ling,
“Chinese” 219).
Women writers, as Francoise Lionnet notes, “rewrite the
‘feminine’ by showing the arbitrary nature of the images and values which Western culture constructs, distorts, and encodes as inferior by feminizing them” (5). So women writers are concerned with rewriting a different self by de-feminizing the inferior image that is imposed on them by Western discourse. In my study, an important strategy the ethnic writers exploit to “rewrite the ‘feminine’” is their innovative use of cultural heritage. They use their parents’ home culture to develop a feminist narrative, and to de-feminize discourses which construct them as social “others.” This heritage covers literary, linguistic, and ideological aspects. The writers interweave Chinese literary tradition (such as talk-story/storytelling) into their American mode of narration.
The traditional-modern narrative in which this results speaks about their sense of self, and about cultural clashes. Cultural aspects of their home culture, which are often regarded as “inferior” or “primitive” even by themselves, ironically characterize their American writing. Chinese ideas of value, responsibility, Yin-Yang, mediation, and Confucianism are scattered in their writing. Traditional ideas influenced by American ideology structure the innermost thoughts of the characters. This form of
“re-visioning” the past is necessary because the “recovered histories have now become the source of creative explosions” (Lionnet 5).
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The writers in my study use their gender, racial, and social differences to articulate a different discourse. They aim at constructing racial, sexual, and class identities in all their differences from the traditional and the prevailing norms. In their fictional works, they set up diversified models for Chinese women who cannot identify themselves with American society. The writers’ dual cultural backgrounds and inferior gender and racial positions urge them to break the imposed silence. Their writing incisively shows their ethnic and feminist thoughts that work to subvert the disciplining power of the white (fe)male dominated order. My analysis of this women’s writing will interpret the use of Chinese culture and the feminist affirmation of this culture. The main issues in the writing are the establishment of female minority subjectivity, the subversion of unequal positions of men and women, and the development of feminine discourse and writing power.
When Mohanty powerfully criticizes Western feminist
“difference” categorization of third world women, she fails to address that this categorization sometimes is also produced in the literature of these oppressed women themselves. For this reason I emphasize that some feminists of the third world construct a discourse which deconstructs the presentation of their monolithic difference produced by feminists from both Western and third world countries. This deconstruction is also a process of creatively transforming minority women’s disadvantageous conditions in terms of gender and race. So instead of seeing this struggle for difference as a homogenizing force that represses these women’s individuality, I will turn it into a force for change. The dual cultural background of Chinese American women makes this process into a cultural phenomenon as well. The search for difference thus involves fighting for a new relationship that not only breaks down the unequal power relation between men and women, but also between mainstream and minority culture. Such a perspective entails looking at how new cultural conditions are formed from these women’s natural and social conditions of being minority women in the US. Based on the above analysis, my approach to ethnic women literature will contain a double task. On the one hand, it interrogates dominant narratives of “the third world,” and subverts the oppression from both the domination of male discourse and (Western) feminist discourse. On the other hand, it will articulate a voice of difference—
from American mainstream, from native Chinese, and from other (ethnic)
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minorities. This voice will be studied as a guard against the tendency that homogenizes the female voice as Mohanty has noted. More importantly, my articulation of this voice aims to empower more women to construct themselves as heterogeneous and independent individuals.
Diaspora Studies
Diaspora studies arose in the 1980s as a result of increased globalization and the movement of people across nations. The implication of
“diaspora” as a forcible dispersion was found in Deuteronomy (Robin Cohen, “Diasporas” 266). The Greek word originally refers to the forced dispersion of Jews throughout their history. Now it has also been widely applied to migration and colonization of Armenians, Africans and at least thirty other ethnic groups, though not all of them are victims of oppression (266-67). Diaspora is widely studied in several appearances:
as a social form, a type of consciousness and a mode of cultural production (Vertovec and Cohen xvii). The renewed notion of diaspora characterizes ethnic diaspora groups. As James Clifford notes,
“Diasporic language appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse” (“Diasporas” 311). Changes in the meaning of
“diaspora” pluralize the concept to interrogate ethnicity-related questions of cultural identity, power relations, as well as multi- and trans- culturalisms or nationalisms. Further, Paul Gilroy looks at diaspora as a concept that “problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging” and “disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity” (“Diaspora” 328). That is to say the increasing use of diaspora signifies new changes in defining transcultural migration and ethnic relations after migration. It explores how new forms of transculturalism are transforming traditional understandings of cultural identity in terms of race and ethnicity.
Based on Safran’s definition of diaspora, Clifford summarizes six main common features of diaspora: “a history of dispersal, myths/
memories of the homeland, alienation in the host […] country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship” (“Diasporas” 305).
These criteria point to a brutal reality because diasporic people have experienced dispersal and are subject to alienation in the adopted land. In my opinion, one can study Chinese immigrants from the perspective of
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diaspora studies, though not all of them are subjects of historical dispersal or are longing for return, as in Clifford’s definition. Diaspora theories compel me to examine in what sense it is possible to speak of a Chinese diaspora. In this study, I consider the effects of Chinese diaspora as a specific type of consciousness that generates new modes of cultural production. In the following, I discuss two related concepts,
“double consciousness,” and “diaspora consciousness,” that are particularly relevant for my study of Chinese American literature.
Afro-Caribbean and African writers have made significant early contributions to the development of diaspora criticism. A scholar who especially draws my attention is W.E.B. Du Bois, an African-American radical and a Pan-African leader. His concept of “double consciousness”
has long been considered a feature of black experience in Western societies.7 It defines two perceptions that blacks have of themselves—
one in terms of their own community, and the other based on the way they are perceived. In diaspora studies, Clifford names a similar kind of consciousness of a paradoxical nature—“diaspora consciousness.” It renews the older mediating concept of “double consciousness” by infusing it with a strengthened spatial/historical meaning (“Diasporas”
311). Clifford recognizes the dual character of this consciousness as both positive and negative. He notes it is “constituted negatively by experiences of discrimination and exclusion” (311), and is “produced positively through identification with world historical cultural/political forces” (312). It “lives loss and hope as a defining tension” (312). He further asserts that this “empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there” (322).
Awareness of this temporally and spatially paradoxical situation raises a political concern among groups of diaspora. It may “propel members of diasporas to advance legal and civic causes and to be active in human rights and social justice issues” (Robin Cohen, “Rethinking” 260).
Other scholars also recognize the opposing force associated with the consciousness of minority identity among diaspora groups. Aihwa Ong, another scholar of diaspora studies, proposes the term “cultural
7 Du Bois describes black Americans as possessing a double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he puts it, “One ever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (3).
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citizenship” to describe immigrant minorities’ normalization process of ideological whitening or blackening (112). The two opposing senses are in a constant state of opposition, compromise, and negotiation. As she says, “Cultural citizenship is a dual process of self-making and being- made within the webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society” (113). Ong’s formulation on the one hand recognizes the hierarchical relation in which the cultures of ethnic minorities are subject to “being made.” On the other hand, the formulation also recognizes that these people can still exercise the power for “self-making.” Ong emphasizes the latter. She notes that to become a citizen “one must develop […] an attitude of self-making in shifting fields of power” (113).
In my reading, this “self-making” attitude forwarded as an alternative against “being made” produces self-made Chinese American characters.
They are people of self-valuation, self-determination and self-possession in opposition to de-valuation, indetermination, and denial.
In South Asian diaspora, Peter van der Veer calls this ambiguous feeling of consciousness “the dialectics of ‘belonging’ and ‘longing’” (4).
He explains the theme of belonging as oppositions of “rootedness to uprootedness, [of] establishment to marginality,” and that the theme of longing “harps on the desire for change and movement” (4). Gilroy, too, describes the awareness of dividedness, i.e. “a black particularity that is internally divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political consciousness” (Black 32). The paradoxically generative and resistant forces in ethnic people’s diaspora consciousness produce multiple histories, ethnicities, and identities. Stuart Hall offers important insights concerning the heterogeneity of diaspora identities. As he says:
The diaspora experience […] is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (58)
Hall argues that the “New World” presence is “the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference” (57). It is “the juncture-point”
where “the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated” (57). Chinese diaspora as an experience imbricates its cultural citizenship with these opposing historical and cultural forces.
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These opposing forces of resistance and adaptive strength at the juncture allow an opening up of dialogues about differences between Chineseness and (Chinese) Americanness, and between traditional Chinese ideology and contemporary Chinese American ideology. The negotiation of the two differences, as I will demonstrate in my later analyses, brings about a transformation of culture and identities among diasporic Chinese people.
Diaspora theories concerning diaspora consciousness and identity provide me with a forceful and convincing critical frame to read Chinese American literature. However, the above-mentioned diaspora theory fails to forge a solid connection between diaspora and feminist analysis. My study will trace the relation between diaspora politics and gender inequality in light of Chinese immigrant history. My literary analyses will focus on a dual identity that incorporates “American,” “Chinese,” as well as gender elements, followed by an understanding of a transcultured identity in the process of transculturation.
Defining “Dualism” in Chinese American Culture
In my study, Du Bois’s “double consciousness” is presented and extended by the term “dualism.” Generally “dualism” refers to a state of duality, or of consisting of two parts. I use this term as “a theory that considers reality to consist of two irreducible elements or modes”
(“Dualism”). These two irreducible parts are inherent in Chinese American immigrant reality. That is to say, the opposition between the two cultures of Chinese and American cannot be totally eliminated, but can only be mediated or reconciled. This durable nature of “dualism”
suggests generative force. The complex interaction of the two parts produces both contradiction and changes. The ambivalent and unfixed, or even promising aspect in the connotation of the two irreducible parts, makes “dualism” an appropriate term to address a variety of current issues and concerns about Chinese American culture. Duality is both an important constituent and a direct outcome of contemporary Asian American sensibility.8 The figure of dual beings provides a framework for my analysis.
8 Frank Chin proposes the notion of Asian American sensibility, which is a product out of in-betweenness. I discuss it in Chapter Four.
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As Chinese descendents who voice American experiences, the writers in my study are in a situation of split and/or double vision in their bicultural world. They have to deal with different sets of cultural and ideological contradictions with two or more consciousnesses. Du Bois’s merging of two selves emphasizes the division of ethnic belonging. It can also be applied to Chinese Americans. Their dual selves make them confused and lost concerning their identity. Asian American critics recognize the essential quality of the division. Amy Ling expresses this idea as follows:
Because they have grown up as a racial minority, imbibing the customs of two cultures, their centers are not stable and single. Their consciousness, as W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out for African Americans, is double; their vision bifocal and fluctuating. (“Chinese” 220)
Ling notes a series of dualities in the space of “between worlds”—
double consciousness, double vision, and double focus.9 She applies Du Bois’s “double consciousness” specifically to immigrant women because they too develop a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (“I’m Here” 154). Thus this consciousness develops into what Michael Fischer calls an ethnic search of bifocality: not just seeing others against a background of ourselves, but, more importantly, seeing ourselves against a background of others (199). This search is a dual tracking, i.e. “seeking in the other clarification for processes in the self”
(199). In a framework for identity construction, the other is forged as an opposing referent for perceiving oneself.
The opposition in Ling’s notion of how to perceive oneself (for women specifically) characterizes the between worlds. In my opinion, other oppositions than just the contrast between the self and the other characterize this space. In the narratives in my study, this characterization is manifested by various subject matters. The literary characters are “often constructed in relation to at least two national cultures, two homelands, two origins” (Lim, “Immigration” 292). The narratives give rise to a constant interaction of these sets of dual forces in terms of literary tradition, voice, genre, and theme. Based on the multifaceted movement between the two forces, my study will demonstrate the transformation from a “bi-” state into “trans-” acts. First,
9 I discuss the idea of “between worlds” in Chapter Four.
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however, I will provide a discussion of Asian American narratives that deal with the subject of dualism, and point out new relationships, other than binary opposition, between these dual forces.
Narratives of Dualism
Several Asian American scholars recognize the ambivalent position Amy Ling addresses of being in between worlds. As King-Kok Cheung notes,
“Because of the dominant perception that what constitutes ‘American’ is white, mainstream, and Western, the desire to reclaim a distinctive ethnic tradition seems forever at odds with the desire to be recognized as fully ‘American’” (“Re-viewing” 5). Donald Goellnicht notes the double, or multiple consciousnesses in Asian Americans: “we might expand [double consciousness] to ‘multiple consciousness’” (340). Goellnicht considers the binary position as negative. He expresses the necessity of transition from binary tension to a hybrid position. As he suggests, which parallels my study, “Rather than thinking in binary terms of inside/outside, we should perhaps think of hybrid positions as a web of multiply intersecting and shifting strands” (340). Yet Goellnicht does not go further in this direction, nor does he point out what the transition might produce. He only expresses the difficulty of this hybrid positioning: “the precise location of the subject is extremely difficult to map” (340). His analysis focuses on theory, and aims to provide a theoretical framework in which Asian American literary texts can escape binary positions (341-42). Thus, it opens space for me to explore.
In the field of Asian American literary studies, it is not difficult to find works that analyze being in between worlds. Among them, an influential work is Sau-ling Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature (1993). The subtitle of the book, From Necessity to Extravagance, strongly presents the extremity of a binary structure. Wong’s key themes of “necessity” and “extravagance” rhetorically serve as “an outer-inner dichotomy” (13). She defines these terms as “two contrasting modes of existence and operation, one contained, survival-driven and conservation-minded, the other attracted to freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism” (13). However, the extreme opposition does not result in a correspondent confrontation in the four chapters of her textual analysis. Intrigued by this idea, I develop my analysis from concrete motifs to an abstract and fluid interpretation of meanings. This
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dualism runs throughout my six chapters of textual analysis. My close readings display more relations rather than just strong contrast, as is hinted at by the subtitle of Wong’s work. It embraces relationships as diverse as juxtaposition, interdependence, (in)coherence, extension, and, finally, moves to a constellation of relations that bear ambiguity. Thus, dualism in my study does not commit to any clear opposition. This variation suggests binary opposition can no longer encompass experiences of Asian Americans, nor has their writing “coalesced around the theme of ‘claiming an American, as opposed to Asian identity,” as Cheung and Kim indicate.10
Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1996) is a work with a strong focus on contradictions. It aims to investigate the American denial of Asian immigration in the nineteenth century and its effect in the twentieth century. The opposition arises from the entry of Asians into the US and their position as linguistic, cultural, and racial foreigners and outsiders of American national polity. For Lowe, immigrant acts are “the acts of labor, resistance, memory, and survival, as well as the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification” (9).
Historically, Lowe plays out the antagonism that arises from how American authority works against immigrants of Asian backgrounds.
However, decades later in contemporary American society, the hostility has been weakened, especially after the promulgation of the new Immigration Act of 1965. Then how do these contradictions and immigrant acts work today? Surely, with the changing structure of politics and economy, they do not work in the same way as a century or decades ago as Lowe notes. But what are the differences? The theme of contradiction recurs in my analyses. I will show how it works differently in two generations. In doing so, I by no means aim to reduce cultural politics of racialized ethnic groups to generational struggles, thus
“displac[ing] social differences into a privatized familial opposition”
(63). Rather, the generational opposition works to allegorize social and cultural disparity. Especially in the children’s generation, the contradictions have developed into new directions, and hence into new significance.
10 Cheung, quoting Kim, says, “It is therefore not surprising that writing by Asian Americans has coalesced around the theme of ‘claiming an American, as opposed to Asian, identity’ (E. Kim 1987, 88)” (“Re-viewing” 6).
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A more recent work that elucidates dualism is Tina Chen’s Double Agency (2005). Chen uses impersonation as a critical trope to study the construction of Asian American identity. She regards “double agency” as a conceptualization of Asian Americans as “double agents.” Double agents “work both to establish their own claims to a U.S. American identity and to critique the American institutions that have designated them as ‘aliens’” (xix). This double act, as I see it, works out of a tension between claiming one’s identity and a cruel reality against this claim.
Chen’s agency performs a trajectory of opposition from history in which Asians have been marginalized and alienated. Contradiction, as I demonstrate in my study, is only one aspect of the interplay in dualism.
My focus will be on many other relations as well. The diversity of gestures in the dichotomy distinguishes my analysis from Chen’s immediately.
Defining “Transculturation”
As with many Chinese Americans, the writers’ confrontation with a dualistic cultural condition creates feelings of conflicting expectations.
Their writing continues to embody this contradictory trend, while their protagonists perform a double act. Yan Gao defines this act in moments when Chinese Americans can both insist on their Americanness and use their idiosyncratically-digested Chinese sources to articulate a unique American voice (6). They can “use [their] transnational consciousness to critique the polity” (Cheung, “Re-viewing” 9). They critically receive a cultural heritage, and incorporate it into their reinterpretation and re- creation of Chinese American subjectivity. I consider this critical reception and innovative re-creation as an act of “transculturation.” I borrow the concept from Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, which he coined in the 1940s to describe the dynamics of Afro-Cuban culture in Cuba.Ortiz favors “transculturation” over the term “acculturation.”11 He explains his motivation in the following way:
11 The term “acculturation” has been redefined as “phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups” (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 149). However, in its popular use, it is still interpreted as model of bicultural contact which is similar to the assimilation model (LaFromboise, Coleman, and Gerton 397).
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I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. (102-03)
In this explanation, Ortiz uses “culturation” with diverse prefixes, such as “ac-,” “de-,” and “neo-.” Culturation itself is a process that brings two or more cultures acting upon each other. With these prefixes, it suggests a series of movements in cultural merging and converging.
Later reinterpretations from other scholars further inform the understanding of the term “transculturation.” In a Cuban context, based on Ortiz’s formulation, Silvia Spitta uses a three-fold process to specify what happens in Ortiz’s transculturation (i.e., deculturation, acculturation, and neoculturation). It is “the partial loss of culture by each immigrant group […], the concomitant assimilation of elements from other cultures […], and finally, the creation of a new, Cuban, culture” (4). These three phases indicate a constant but unsmooth evolvement. First, the subordinated culture (partly) gives up old and acquires new values and meanings. The result is “deculturation” and
“acculturation.” In a later stage, the subjugated culture begins to affect the dominant. The two are in a relation of opposition as much as of coexistence and interdependence. The subordinate culture is not totally replaced or negated, nor does the dominant culture remain unchanged after contact with the subordinate. Transculturation takes place, and it produces a new form of culture. The apparent imbalance of power between the mainstream and the periphery cannot negate their mutually deterministic relationship.12 The new culture emerges from the impact of both cultures mutually. This complex process, as another Latin American scholar Angel Rama notes, “reveals destructions, re- affirmations and absorptions” (160).
12 As Mary Louise Pratt says, “While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery […], it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis” (6).
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The process of fusion, transition, and creation in transculturation can also be applied to the making of Chinese American culture. The process implies ever-new definitions and interpretations of a culture with new elements brought into being. In the Chinese American context, the movement at these three stages characterizes the cultural interaction within this space. It echoes what Lisa Lowe calls partly inherited, partly modified, and partly invented practices that affect the making of Asian American cultures (65). This idea emphasizes both the composition of a culture and its evolution. It looks at the heterogeneous Asian American culture as a dynamic and progressive blending of adaptation, preservation, and creation.
Distinctiveness of Chinese American Transculturation
Given the specific Latin American literary and artistic histories, Spitta favors the term “transculturation” over “translation” to signify cross- cultural interchanges. She explains why she thinks “translation” is not a proper term. It is not only because “translation [is] a negatively loaded term,” but because of the difference between Spanish literature and Cuban literature (14). The term “transculturation,” on the contrary, avoids the problems inherent in “translation” and it “describes the dynamics of the colony from the position and the perspective of the colonized” (15). Mary Louise Pratt expresses a similar idea of this dynamics. She reinterprets transculturation as “a phenomenon of the contact zone” (6). The contact zone itself is a place characterized by imbalance of power, which “involv[es] conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” among colonizers and colonized (6).
Pratt makes clear the asymmetric relationship between involved cultures.
As she says, transculturation is used to “describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6). Based on Spitta’s and Pratt’s arguments, I contend that transculturation in Latin American, or in postcolonial contexts, recognizes the power of dominant culture to repress voices of the dominated. It shows the imbalance of cultural and power relationships. Transculturation conceptualizes how the subordinated receive and appropriate dominant culture. Though transculturation is mobilized “in the interests of the colonized and of decolonization” (Spitta 3), it speaks itself in the forms of dominant
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political, historical, or literary representation within the dominant discourse.
The social position of Chinese Americans is similar to that of Latin Americans, who are “consciously or unconsciously situated between at least two worlds, two cultures, two languages, and two definitions of subjectivity, and who constantly [mediate] between them all” (Spitta 24).
In my opinion, Chinese American culture as a space of cultural encounter forms an immigrant “contact zone.” It involves movement as diverse as what happens in Pratt’s postcolonial contact zone. However, in this zone, the position and the perspective are not “of the colonized,”
as Spitta says, nor are the position and the perspective similarly marginalized or subordinated. The position is a borderland position in a constant state of transition. The perspective is an American one characterized by Chinese ethnicity. My study describes how minority immigrants select and invent from resources transmitted to them by their parents. It is an act of exploring their ethnic cultural heritage to articulate an ethnic (American) voice within the dominant discourse.
In her study of transculturation, Pratt raises the question: “How are metropolitan modes of representation received and appropriated on the periphery?” (6).13 In light of the differences in Chinese American culture, I reformulate this question in my study in this way: how do Chinese American immigrants and their offspring admit and allocate their home culture from the periphery to the center? In trying to answer this question, my analyses touch upon literary, historical, cultural, and political backgrounds of Chinese immigrants. As a result, my study demonstrates what transculturation implies in a Chinese American immigrant context.
For Chinese Americans, the allocation of their home culture involves a double act of reception and creation, or, more specifically, of Americanization and de-Americanization. It is not two acts working in two opposite directions, but one act built upon a “double recognition.”
Rama formulates double recognition in the following way:
on the one hand, it confirmed the existence, in an already transculturated contemporary culture, of a set of idiosyncratic values which could also be found in the remotest days of its past history; and, on the other, it simultaneously affirmed the existence of a creative
13 The concept of transculturation, Pratt says, “serves to raise several sets of questions” (6). Here I cite the most immediate one.
23 energy acting, not only on its own inherited traditions, but on ones coming from outside too. (158-59)
Rama’s conceptualization concerns Latin American culture, but also constitutes an anchoring ground for Chinese American transculturation.
On the one hand, it is recognition of difference, i.e. “idiosyncratic values” of a person’s originary culture in contemporary American culture. The difference implies opposition between the two cultures, which calls for an adjustment. On the other hand, “a creative energy” of both cultures proposes a performative act of cultural creativity.
Transculturation is effected in the process of opposition, adjustment and creation.
In the Chinese American context, on the one hand, Americanization manifests as a transcultural competence to understand American culturally specific values. It is an act that helps ethnic writers to “balance their need to politicize their history with their desire to conform to the dominant culture’s perception of them as good and typical Americans” (Ty and Goellnicht 11). Thus, it shows the power of the mainstream culture. De-Americanization, on the other hand, is an account of the way in which a person’s American upbringing is influenced by his or her Chinese home environment. It is at the same time an act of Chinese culturation. The “trans-” quality embedded in the double act generates contesting interchanges and indeterminacies. The
“impulses of claiming America and maintaining ties with Asia,” once regarded as competing (Cheung, “Re-viewing” 7), now also supplement each other. As Homi Bhabha argues that the opposition between binary forces (self vs. other, East vs. West, and colonized vs. colonizer) can be entailed into a passage for negotiation. This negotiation “overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity” (Location 25).
In the space of translation, new cultural forms are constantly re- created. The understanding of “re-creation” is paradoxical in its own logic. The prefix “re-” signifies a repetition of an already existent discourse. “Creation” means that something new, unique comes into being. The combination of the two, “re-creation,” in my study does not convey a meaning of simply connoted by “re-” plus “creation.” It implies a continuous and renewed generation enriched by the two cultures.
Defined, “creation” is the process of “caus[ing] to come into being, as
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something unique that would not naturally evolve” (“Create”). “Re-,” on the one hand, signifies an intricate connectedness and an indivisible relationship with the sources from which the creation takes place. On the other hand, it reinforces and doubles the unnatural and extraordinary effect of creation. Thus “re-creation” suggests the potentiality of the original because it can be simulated and transformed into a new form. It also signifies the generosity of the mainstream because the mainstream allows for new forms coming into being. That is to say, both the original and the mainstream culture are not fixed or set in stone, nor firmly established. The space of Chinese American culture is open for positive redefinition from both sides.
Specifically, in Chinese American transculturation, re-creation is not a going-back to, or a new production of a person’s own version of, home culture. Nor is it a creation of “a third cultural entity […] new and independent” as in the case of Cuban culture.14 It develops Chinese American culture, a hybrid form which grows out of the soil of Chinese culture and is adapted into American culture. The contrast with the two source cultures shows the influence of the writers’ home cultural inheritance and creativity of their American upbringing. In the bicultural contact, the subordinate culture creates its own version of the dominant culture. This entails a new cultural form marked by the subordinate people’s own characteristics and ideals. This development brings both cultures into mutual interpenetration on an equal give-and-take level.15 The new form of culture, though distinctive from the mainstream culture, is still a constituent part of the mainstream culture. It further diversifies American multiculturalism. These two features diminish the
14 As Cuban poet Nancy Morejon explains, “Transculturation means the constant interaction, the transmutation between two or more cultural components with the unconscious goal of creating a third cultural entity—in other words, a culture—that is new and independent even though rooted in the preceding elements. Reciprocal influence is the determining factor here, for no single element superimposes itself on another; on the contrary, each one changes into the other so that both can be transformed into a third. Nothing seems immutable” (qtd. in Lionnet 15-16). In Morejon’s formulation, the final creation is a third culture, independent of original cultures.
15 Scholars such as Spitta and Pratt regard transculturation as a two-way process (Spitta 2; Pratt 6).
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discriminatory aspect of transculturation that Spitta discerns in the new Cuban culture.16
Constructing Transcultured Identity
What the three writers central to this study share is an important aspect to my reading. Common amongst them are their gender, and ethnic and immigrant backgrounds. Another reason why I read them “together” is their literary commonality. All three writers try to cope with the dual influence of their original and new American culture and to develop literary characters of transcultured identity. The central conflict in their literary works addresses the tension between what is Chinese and what is American. Their narratives provide a site of reconsideration and transmutation of this tension. In their works, the characters are engaged in the search for an ethnic identity. Their literary ethnic experience articulates the making of Chinese American culture and identity. As we are dealing with quasi-autobiographical works, this experience of searching for ethnic identity is, in a sense, also a projection of each writer’s own search. Tracing the pattern of the search enhances both the understanding of the writers and the appreciation of their literary characters.
The double telling of the two cultures presents a dilemma of maintaining a home tradition and blending-in with the rest of America. I consider this dilemma as a theme of identity crisis stemming from an in- between position. The dilemma has plagued Chinese Americans for decades. It concerns reconstructing cultural integrity and relocating oneself out of a fragmented and displaced ethnic past. Concerning black Caribbean identities, Stuart Hall raises a question concerning the discordant development of identity in diaspora communities which resonates here as well. He asks: “If identity does not proceed, in a straight, unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation?” (53). I see that the formation of such an identity in a world of flux and change is defined by an equally turbulent and discontinued process of loss and reconstruction.
16 In Cuban context, Spitta reads Ortiz’s understanding of transculturation as
“whitening” Latin American culture (6). Though the new Cuban culture moderates the domination from the dominant side, it cannot eliminate it.
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Hall’s law of “being vs. becoming” formulates an identity out of a process of ongoing production.17 This identity, together with the situation from which it is produced, is “a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process” (51). Hall argues that cultural identity is fluid and rather than fixed in binary opposition. For him, identities have a past, but they are not at all “eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power”
(52). On the one hand, Hall’s formulation vertically connects the construction of a new identity with the recovery of the history of a nation.
As he asserts, identity is an ongoing process entailing “the re-telling of the past” and “the act of imaginative rediscovery” (52). On the other hand, identity is also subject to a horizontal connection. The construction of an identity is also taking place at this moment. This suggests that cultural subjects, as well as the cultures to which they are subject, are in a constant interaction with others in that particular situation.
Gilroy vividly describes this vertical-and-horizontal mechanism.
As he says, “The ‘raw material’ from which identity is produced may be inherited from the past but they are also worked on, creatively or positively, reluctantly or bitterly, in the present” (“Diaspora” 304).
Gilroy’s explanation positions the construction of identity within a socio-political history that has produced it. It also gives rise to its various influences, whether creative or positive, reluctant or bitter, of the present.
It seems the root-seeking idea, which used to be practiced by immigrants, has been replaced by cultural dialogue with, and accommodation in, their present situation. Applying these formulations to the making of Chinese American identity, I conclude that the process of identity formation has been shaped by, and is still subject to, historical, cultural, and geographic-political changes.
Asian American Narratives: Texts of Assimilation?
In Asian American writing, critics have long recognized the first two stages of transculturation, i.e. loss and assimilation. Frank Chin aggressively condemns American-born Chinese writers for the total loss and even destruction of Chinese history and philosophy in acculturation (“Come” 3). For critics like Chin, these writers’ publications are not
17 Hall says, “Cultural identity […] is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’
It belongs to the future as much as to the past” (52).
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representative of Chinese culture and literature, but are “products of white racist imagination” (Chan et al. xii). In a less aggressive way, Shirley Geok-lin Lim argues that the novels by second-generation writers share a common set of assimilatory themes. As she says, “These novels, beginning with an ex-filiative position, plot the acculturation of their Asian protagonists into a U.S. society […and] exhibit many of the marks of affiliation that symbolically reknit American sociopolitical hegemony” (“Immigration” 299). This assimilation is what Begona Simal and Elisabetta Marino call “the gradual ‘naturalization’ of Asian American literature as American” (11). David Palumbo-Liu calls such texts “model minority discourse” (395). He observes a duality in these works, “which serve as representatives of an eccentric ‘ethnic’ literature as well as models of successful assimilation into the core” (396). The different terminologies address a common assimilatory aspect to various extents.
The “a-” act—whether assimilation, acculturation, affiliation, or absorption—shows a one-way movement of incorporation and imposition from one culture to the other in a binary relation between the two cultures. Even if it is a positive method of cultural adaptation, it always assumes a hierarchical relationship of domination and being dominated. If Asian American texts are read with themes of assimilation, the working mechanism in the dualities will be (mis)understood as nothing but an asymmetrical structure of the two forces: periphery/center, dominated/dominant, and minor/mainstream. This way of reading reinforces the American myth that assimilates the differences among and/or within minority groups. It runs counter to the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” frame that is also claimed to characterize Asian American cultures (Lowe 67).
Lisa Lowe interprets heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity as
“the existence of differences and differential relationships,” “the formation of cultural objects and practices,” and the multiple ways of locating subjects within social relations respectively (67). Hybridity, in Lowe’s understanding, is not “the assimilation of Asian or immigrant practices to dominant forms but instead marks the history of survival within relationships of unequal power and domination” (67). Thus hybridization is an “uneven process through which […] they [immigrant communities] survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives” (82). This argument for
