Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 75
Film and Asian American Literature
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are second generation Chinese Americans bom in the United States. They not
only tell stories about their own lives, but also serve as “narrators” of traditions
with which they sometimes struggle, as the narrator in Bone describes: “We know
so little of the old country. We repeat the names of grandfathers and uncles, but
they have always been strangers to us. Family exists only because somebody has
a story, and knowing the story connects us to a history” (36).
To compare works by first generation Asian immigrants and those by
second and third generation Asian American writers is also to descry a divergence
in thematic concerns, in tone, and in the use of traditional materials such as myths
and legends. In the article, “Ethnicizing Gender: An Exploration of Sexuality as
Sign in Chinese Immigrant Literature,” Chinese American scholar Sau-ling Cynthia
Wong calls for “in-depth comparisons” of the “intriguing contrast between the
thematic preoccupations of the foreign- and American-bom Asian American writ
ers.” In her study of Asian American female writers’works, the author notices that
while immigrant writers such as Yu Lihua, Nie Hua-ling, Chen Ruoxi, Li Li, Shi
Shuqing, and Cong Su “are especially interested in issues of heterosexual court
ship, marriage, jilting, celibacy, divorce, widowhood, extramarital affairs, and child
rearing, a consequence of sexual union,” American-bom authors seem to favor
“the coming-of-age story in which sexual initiation is conspicuously absent: the
canonical pattern shows an adolescent or young adult seeking a healing reconnection
to his/her ethnic culture and a viable place in American society” (123). Indeed,
whereas the main thematic occupations in Vietnamese American writer Le Ly
Hayslip’s autobiographies. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) and
A Child o f War, A Woman o f Peace (1991), and Korean American novelist Ronyoung
Kim’s Clay Walls (1987) revolve around issues such as survival and the fight for
respect, dignity, and social justice, characters in Chinese American writer Gish
Jen’s novel. Typical American, in David Wong Louie’s collection of short stories.
Pangs o f Love (1991), and in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen Gods Wife are more con
cerned about individual development and social and economic mobility; whereas
the voice behind Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan’s autobiography, America
Is in the Heart (1943), Asian American Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee’s novel.
Jasmine (1989), and Korean American writer Mary Paik Lee’s autobiography. Quiet
Odyssey (1990), is painful, bitter, and sometimes sarcastic and angry, the one be
hind Chinese American writer Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant
and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter is reconciliatory and appeasing.^
It is also interesting to notice that while works by both first generation
Asian immigrants and second and third generation Asian American writers are
celebratorial of the writers’ cultural heritage, the two groups’ treatment of their
cultural and literary traditions is quite different: the use of traditional materials by
the first group is usually sincere, faithful, and respectful, whereas the use of the