A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 95
man. On the brink of starvation with no money and nowhere to go, Minnie and her
daughter are taken in and cared for by a compassionate and generous young Chinese
man, Liu Kanghi. Far redefi nes manhood by the juxtaposition of the two husbands,
Liu and Carson, to subvert the emasculating stereotypes of Chinese men as weak,
passive, and asexual. In contrast with Carson, Liu is a man who respects, protects, and
provides for the woman and child and does so without impinging on their indepen-
dence. The white community ’ s reaction of horror to Minnie ’ s choice refl ects the reali-
ties of sinophobia and antimiscegenation laws at the time (for example, in 1905
California declared interracial marriages “ illegal and void ” ). The story ’ s sequel, “ My
Chinese Husband, ” ends with Liu murdered by some Chinese who are opposed to the
interracial union. This tragic ending invites the reader not simply to realize that racial
prejudice exists in both cultures but also to gain an insight into the workings of racial
oppression where entrenched power relations instill self - hatred as well as fear of dif-
ference in the oppressed.
Winnifred Eaton, Edith ’ s younger sister, chose to adopt the pseudonym, Onoto
Watanna for her writing career. During her time, the Japanese suffered less discrimi-
nation than the Chinese, and with her invented background as a Japanese - born, half
Japanese descendant of samurai, Watanna fared better than her sister and enjoyed
popularity as a novelist and a Hollywood screenwriter. Infl uenced by Pierre Loti
( Madame Chrysanthemum
) and John Luther Long ( Madame Butterfl y
), who depicted
fl irtatious but tragic Japanese heroines enamored with white men, Watanna ’ s Japanese
heroines, however, display two major differences: many of her heroines are biracial,
and they resist the image of the exotic sex - toy popularized by Loti and Long. Interest-
ingly, many heroines in her short fi ction are named “ Kiku, ” the Japanese expression
for “ chrysanthemum, ” thus directly evoking Loti ’ s work. Her subversion of the geisha
stereotype happens in “ A Half - Caste ” (1899). The Kiku in this story is a half - Japanese
tea - house girl who becomes the object of desire of a middle - aged American man,
The Asian American Story
439
Hilton. Ignorant of the fact that Kiku is his daughter, whose mother he had aban-
doned before the child ’ s birth, Hilton pursues Kiku enthusiastically. When she dis-
covers the truth, Kiku decides to break Hilton ’ s heart in order to avenge her mother.
Watanna is the fi rst Asian American writer who didn ’ t always write about Asians or
about racial themes. In “ Delia Dissents ” (1908), for example, she chooses the point
of view of an Irish domestic, whose coarsely rendered brogue is just as exaggerated as
the pidgin of her Japanese heroines.
Following the Eaton sisters is a fl ourish of Asian American fi ction writers, some of
whom were born in the US, some who immigrated and settled in this country as
adults, and some who traveled back and forth across the Pacifi c Ocean. Their aesthetics
and subjects are largely determined by their differing experiences. Toshio Mori, for
example, was born in California to Japanese immigrant parents. In his best - known
book, Yokohama, California (1949) , characters have been shaped by their lives in a
Japanese community in California, exemplifying the hybrid culture and identities
developed in such a community.
“
Japanese Hamlet,
”
for instance, portrays Tom
Fukunaga, who passes his young adult life studying the role he will never play. There
is Hatsuye, who is in love with Clark Gable, and “ is hopeful in spite of the fact she
is hopeless ” (165). Other stories of Mori ’ s explore generational tension between fi rst - ,
second - , and third - generation Japanese Americans who are struggling to balance the
American demand to assimilate with their families ’ traditional beliefs and practices.
Yokohama, California
was accepted for publication in 1941, but due to anti
-
Japanese sentiment during the war, Caxton Printers postponed it until after the war.
This intervention altered the book ’ s nature as well as the author ’ s intention. Before
the book was fi nally published, Mori added two stories set in the Topaz Camp, Utah
(where he and his family were interned during World War II), to an already complete
collection of stories set exclusively in his California hometown, fi ctionalized as Yoko-
hama. These two camp stories changed the tones of what would have been funny,
hopeful, and uplifting stories about Japanese immigrants ’ Americanization, for all the
stories, minus the two camp stories, portray “ a time of pride and accomplishment, ”
in the words of Lawson Fusao Inada, who introduced the new edition (x). Several
critics have noted the infl uence of Sherwood Anderson ’ s Winesburg, Ohio on Mori ’ s
Yokohama, California
, as it centers on a fi ctional community and its inhabitants.
Interestingly, one of its stories, “ Akiro Yano, ” features an aspiring author who imitates
the style of Anderson. Although Mori structures his stories in the tradition of
Anderson, his style and subject are entirely his own and never venture into Anderson ’ s
realm of the “ grotesque. ”
Hisaye Yamamoto was also second - generation Japanese American, born and raised
in California. At age 20, she was interned in the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona.
Her camp experience profoundly shaped her literary production, such as “ The Legend
of Miss Sasagawara. ” Confi nement has sensitized her to the devastating result of loss
of control. In almost all her short stories, her central characters fi ght overwhelming
odds. She portrays characters who are hurt, who have deviated from the norm, who
are grasping for beauty in their desperation. Yamamoto is best known for her short
440
Wenying Xu
story, “ Seventeen Syllables, ” which has been reprinted at least twenty times in differ-
ent anthologies since 1969. “ Seventeen Syllables ” depicts simultaneously Rosie ’ s (the
daughter ’ s) awakening sexuality and Tome Hayashi ’ s (the mother ’ s) devastating anni-
hilation. The tale ’ s power lies in the vortex created by the mother ’ s action outside her
traditional Japanese Issei role of farm worker, cook, housekeeper, and wife. The nar-
rative tensions arise out of a seemingly simple interest that Tome develops, haiku. At
one level, the story depicts the cultural barriers that haiku creates and reveals among
Tome, her husband, and her daughter; at another level, the tale unravels the destruc-
tion of a woman who creates independently.
Several early Asian American writers chose their native cultures as their subject,
because the old world dominated their imagination more than the new. Issues of
ethnicity and Americanization do not seem to matter to them as much as to other
Asian American writers. For example, Raja Rao, from a well - known Brahmin family
in India, settled in the US when he was aged 57. Most of his short stories portray the
lives of women and the poor in
Indian villages; it is their oppression and powerless-
ness that Rao is most keen on representing. “ The Little Gram Shop, ” told from the
perspective of a child, depicts the grandfather ’ s life with ten concubines and the
father ’ s physical abuse of his pregnant wife. All the wives are subjected to routine
violence. By interweaving the lives of three generations of a family, Rao underscores
the continuing oppression of women in rural India. The Filipino writer, Jos é Garcia
Villa, immigrated to the US in the 1930s, and also set most of his short fi ction in his
home country. Many of them explore the universal themes of love, sorrow, and self
sacrifi ce, and these stories never end happily. The failure of communication between
lovers is a perennial theme in Villa
’
s stories, as though the sexes were eternally
divided. “ Fence, ” the fi rst story in his Footnote to Youth , describes two women who
erected a fence between their houses out of spite, and the fence keeps apart two young
people in love, one of whom dies while waiting for the other to play the guitar.
Among the early writers, some wrote stories set in both Asia and America. It is
no surprise to readers that what they chose to write mirrors their diasporic existence.
For instance, Bienvenido Santos was born in the Manila slums and came to the US in
1941 for graduate studies. In 1946 Santos returned to the Philippines, where he wrote
his fi rst collection of fi ction, You Lovely People (1955). Almost all his characters are
based on the Filipinos he met during his fi rst stay in America. In 1958 he returned
to the US on a Rockefeller creative writing fellowship, and at the end of the fellow-
ship he went home once again. It was not until after a few more trips back and forth
between the Philippines and the US that Santos settled in America and became a
citizen, in 1976. Yet he chose to retire to his family home at the foot of Mount Mayon,
Philippines, where he is buried. Santos ’ s short fi ction portrays Filipinos both in their
villages and in exile in America struggling to acquire the feeling of belonging. De -
romanticizing the na ï ve notion that one fi nds community at home, Santos creates
characters who struggle equally hard to belong, whether they are in their native vil-
lages or exiled in the US. In his early stories collected in Dwell in the Wilderness (1985) ,
Santos pictures the lives of poor farmers, young couples, and students who feel
The Asian American Story
441
alienated due to poverty, sickness, passion, and aging. In You Lovely People , Santos
deals mostly with the Pinoy expatriates in the US, who are preoccupied with creating
a sense of community in a country where individualism is a dominant ethos. Recon-
ciling the tension between the Filipino dream of solidarity and the American valoriza-
tion of the individual occupies the central place in Santos ’ s American stories.
Carlos Bulosan, born in the Philippines, arrived in Seattle at the age of 19. Much
of his fi ction was initially published in the 1940s in the New Yorker , Harper ’ s Bazaar,
and Arizona Quarterly . Almost all his stories are autobiographical fi ction, representing
his experiences in America and his family ’ s in the Philippines. Bulosan writes from
the perspective of an exile, without either the fantasy about a true home or the opti-
mism for the promise of America. In “ Homecoming, ” Bulosan articulates the deep
sorrow of his protagonist, who returns to the Philippines because
“
America had
crushed his spirit ” ( Hagedorn , Charlie Chan 2 31). At home, however, he is pained
by the fact that “ his mother and sisters had suffered the same terrors of poverty, the
same humiliations of defeat that he had suffered in America ” (33). At the end of the
tale, Bulosan exiles his protagonist once again without offering a defi nitive destina-
tion. By refusing to offer any clue where the protagonist might fi nd “ home, ” the story
seems to allegorize the condition of homelessness of all Filipinos, who wander in the
world as postcolonial subjects, who live under the colonial rule of the US, or in the
postcolonial homeland dominated by American culture and economy.
The Age of Blooming: The Contemporary Asian American
Short Story
“ Let the hundred fl owers bloom ” is an accurate description of Asian American litera-
ture since the 1970s. Given the change of immigration patterns when the exclusionary
immigration laws eased after World War II and when the Immigration Act aban-
doned “ national origins ” in 1965 as the basis for establishing quotas, Asian American
communities have grown not only new generations but also literary talents. Asians
are now a fast - growing group in the US, a population projected to increase from 11
million in 2003 to 20 million by 2020. In the literary scene, different from the earlier
generation, which consisted of mainly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino American
writers, contemporary writers trace their cultural origins to much more diverse roots,
such as Vietnam, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Pakistan, India, Laos, Thailand,
Sri Lanka, etc.
In the contemporary generation, Indian American writers have gained increasing
visibility, not only in quantity but also in craft; among these are Jhumpa Lahiri,
Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Divakaruni. Divakaruni, born in Calcutta, India,
arrived in the US at the age of 20. She has published two collections of short stories,
Arranged Marriage (1995) and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001) , with the fi rst
receiving various awards including a 1996 American Book Award from the Before
Columbus Foundation, and several stories appearing in Best American Short Stories and
442
Wenying Xu
The Pushcart Prize Anthology . Her stories largely involve Indian immigrant women
living at the border between the old world of patriarchy and the new one of supposed
possibilities and choices. Juxtaposing the physical and psychological landscapes of
India and America, she explores the experiences of women who devise strategies of
survival in changing cultural contexts. One pervasive image in Arranged Marriage is
of women ’ s attires. In “ Clothes, ” for example, the protagonist Sumita ’ s development
is suggested by various stages of clothing: from her traditional saris to her clandestine
posing in American clothes for her husband, and eventually to her widow ’ s white sari.
The image of her in a mirror at the end of the story, dressed in a blouse and skirt,
symbolizes her decision to remain in the US and become a teacher. Divakaruni ’ s use
of diverse points of view fascinates her readers. For instance, “ The Bats, ” reminiscent
of Henry James ’ s What Maisie Knew , uses a child narrator to tell the story of her father ’ s
abuse of her mother in guileless terms: “ Things fell a lot when Father was around,
maybe because he was so large ” ( Arranged 2). The only story narrated from the hus-
band
’
s perspective,
“
Disappearance,
”
reveals the wife
’
s suffering through the hus-
band ’ s blindness to
her situation. Many of the stories end with the women breaking
away from expectations and imposed forms of living, and starting again. Once the
women accept what they often refuse – “ It ’ s how we survive, we Indian women whose
lives are half light and half darkness, stopping short of revelations that would other-
wise crisp away our skins ” ( “ Disappearance ” 167), as one of the women says – the
stories become chronicles of hope.
The Unknown Errors of Our Lives demonstrates a shift in Divakaruni ’ s concerns.
Though she still privileges the plight of immigrant women, these stories widen her
negotiation with cultural adjustment, toward more general human themes of memory,
forgiveness, and acceptance, the fear of wrong choices and regret, age, and family. The
characters have to come to terms with the confusing coexistence in their lives of
memories of past and present, India and America. As in the earlier collection, many
women leave India with the intention of living fuller and freer lives, only to fi nd
themselves unsure of how to proceed and what to believe in a situation that is more
insidious than the one from which they escaped. Divakaruni problematizes the char-
acteristics and consequences of Americanization. In “ The Lives of Strangers, ” Leela ’ s
visit to India after an attempted suicide leads to her gradual release of the “ absurdly
American ” notion of individual control and her appropriation of her aunt ’ s more
interconnected notion of destiny (67). Interestingly, American - born Indians revert to
the old ways, as in “ The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, ” where a couple chooses to
have an arranged marriage because, as he says, “ the alternative – it doesn ’ t seem
to work that well, does it? ” (214).
Jhumpa Lahiri, daughter of Bengali immigrant parents in London, moved to the
US with her family when she was two. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies
(1999) , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fi ction. It contains nine stories that explore
common motifs, such as exile, displacement, loneliness, diffi cult relationships, and
problems about communication. Her characters vary from Indians, Indian é migr é s,
and American - born Indians to white Americans involved with them. Although Lahiri