Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 74

68

Popular Culture Review

are not susceptible to Christian conversion (18) and uphold traditional Chinese
and Japanese values such as Confucianism, the Japanese sense of honor, and the
samurai sense of nobility (69), can be considered as the real voice in Asian Ameri
can literature. This group includes Chinese American writer Louis Chu {Eat a
Bowl o f Tea, 1961) and Japanese American writers Toshio Mori {Yokohama, Cali
fornia, 1949) and John Okada {No-No Boy, 1957). But Chinese American writers
such as Pardee Lowe {Father and Glorious Descendant, 1943), Jade Snow Wong
{The Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945); Maxine Hong Kingston {The Woman War
rior, 1975; China Men, 1980; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989), and
Amy Tan {The Joy Luck Club, 1989; The Kitchen Gods Wife, 1991), Japanese
American writers Mike Masaru Masaoka and Bill Hosokawa {NISEI: The Quiet
Americans, 1969), and Asian American writers who use the exclusively Christian
form of autobiography and revise Asian history, culture, and childhood literature
and myth are the fake voices: in their depiction of the “Christian yin/yang of the
dual personality/identity crisis,” these writers not only misrepresent their own cul
tural heritage, but also betray its values (11-26).
Whereas Chin’s arduous effort to defend the purity of Asian cultures is
laudable and his attempt to problematize the cultural configurations of Asian Ameri
can literature instrumental to developing a healthy critical discourse, his definition
of Asian American literature is too narrow and arbitrary. In the “Foreword” to
Reading the Literatures o f Asian America, Korean American scholar Elaine H.
Kim acknowledges that the pioneering work of the members of the Combined
Asian Recourses Project (CARP)—Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao
Inada, Nathan Lee, Benjamin R. Tong, and Shawn Hsu Wong—played an impor
tant role in helping define the identity of the Asian American community and es
tablish Asian American literary voices. But Kim also points out that the terms of
our cultural negotiations have changed and are changing over time because of
differences in historical circumstances. In order to (re)vision Asian American lit
erature we must traverse the boundaries of unity and diversity, to make our
rootedness enable us to take flight, and to have it all by claiming an infinity of
layers of self and community (xiii-xvi).
Chin’s article, however, raises a legitimate question about how to inte
grate and represent Asian histories and cultures in Asian American literature. A
noticeable phenomenon in Asian American literature is that most “successful” works
are produced by American-bom Asian American writers. These writers do not
have a language problem; some of them are more ideologically in tune with Ameri
can mainstream culture than with their own ethnic cultural heritage; and thanks to
their language capability, many of these writers have adopted the role as transla
tors for their ethnic culture. In Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men,
Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, for instance, the narrators