Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 75

Film and Asian American Literature 69 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