ALitA 2010, Session 8F, Asian American Literature: Ambivalent Precursors
Yuan Shu (Texas Tech), “Rereading Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America in the Age of Globalization”
David Roh (Old Dominion), “Japanese and American Scientific Management: The Construction of Korean Labor in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West”
Benzi Zhang (Chinese U of Hong Kong), “An Ambivalent Precursor in Asian American Drama: Re-reading David Henry Hwang” [withdrawn]
Jeffrey Kim Schroeder (UCLA), “Looking Back at '68: Chuang Hua’s Crossings and the (re)Mapping of the Political”
Response by panel chair Merton Lee (UIUC)
Yuan Shu framed his talk with late C19 Chinese American autobiographical writing—the writer as passive subject, not active agent—and its recent (since 1970s) rereading within contexts of masculinity. Hsu suggested that Yung Wing’s mission has been reconstructed re: negotiating education, science, technology. We ought not (only) to connect postcolonial study of such texts to American transnationalism because Chinese modernization (appropriating Western sci/tech) also factors in: multiple POVs, i.e., not only transnational as stemming from the U.S. Yung’s autobio performs an emerging, sometimes contradictory Chinese American identity, articulating his perspective in relation/opposition to (American) missionary activity: he argued that agreeing to go on to do missionary work in China would circumscribe Yung’s own utility by limiting what he could do with his Yale education. (Wished once that he hadn’t been educated thus because it changed his horizons irrevocably—he’d become more sensitive to power issues within Qing structures.)
Shu discussed an instance when Yung complained to a ship company after someone transgressed his rights and reflected that without a Western education he would not have spoken up. Subsequently, he left his job as interpreter in Shanghai and began working to send over a hundred Chinese young men to be educated in the U.S. (starting in 1872, for nine years). Taste of different freedoms. The Chinese mission ended after both countries became irritated—Qing China because these men were not receiving Chinese education, the U.S. from rising anti-Chinese sentiment—and all students were withdrawn as of 1881.
By reading Yung’s work against colonial modernity, one can discern his work to create a new model of education. The recent rise of interest in Yung ought to consider how Asian Am lit is also world lit.
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David Roh talked about Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937, critique of capitalism) and Korean diaspora writing. Consider the Japanese element in that book: a consideration of colonial Japan is necessary to look at Kang’s consideration of the U.S., given that Japan imported a U.S. model of industrialism during the 1920s.
Taylorism (humans as machines) versus Fordism (focus only upon the machine)—after the Meiji Restoration, Fordism was incorporated into production, then Taylorism as revision (for arms production in particular). The Japanization of Taylorism involved dividing workers along racial lines.
Kang went to the U.S. in 1921, when the assembly line was (as it were) gaining momentum. He had qualms about Taylorism—busy New Yorkers both as producers of widgets and as widgets themselves. His opposition to management science may have arisen from his understanding of occupation Korea. Korean labor entered the Japanese management system under a wartime, anything-goes experimentalism; by 1940, 1.2M Koreans lived in Japan, most of them working as unskilled laborers. But Kang’s disagreement with Taylorism had to do with its potentially global reach: the character Han in EGW goes to NYC to find a new life—sublime while he has funds—but is subsumed by Yankee production modes after he ends up living in a homeless shelter, which Han compares to living amongst the Japanese (similarly straitened circumstances).
National politics becomes, in the book, a galvanizing force that overrides individuality—a character run through because of his disagreeable politics, though the instigator likes his victim personally. [I missed the characters’ names.] Han is advised to gain an education, but there’s also a critique: American education is too much like a Dearborn (Mich.) plant. Han’s escape to the U.S. goes from colonial to capitalistic, but the means of “success” remain, depressingly, the same.
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Jeffrey Kim Schroeder linked Chuang Hua’s Crossings to 1960s protests at SF State and UC Berkeley and the emergence of the term “Asian American.” Ling’s intro to the book identifies it as the first Asian Am modernist novel, due to its influences from Flaubert and Hemingway, despite its “belated” appearance (1960s, again); like Cha’s Dictée, it highlights the lack of available language with which to convey meaning.
Schroeder talked a bit about Colleen Lye’s sense of racial form (e.g. model minority versus yellow peril). We can look at Asian Am lit’s construction as another emanation of racial form.
[I found Schroeder’s talk meandering and hard to follow—notes are minimal.]
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Merton Lee, the chair, offered a short response: what precedes Asian Am Studies is a troubling situation—reception histories of autobiographies (Yung Wing), and Frank Chin’s dismissal of all of that. History, too, is a text subject to interpretation; it is possible now to historicize these texts further. Lee noted Hsu’s and Roh’s respective talks as discussing subjectivities that are not specifically Chinese or Korean, in a “negative space” before Asian Americanness as such existed formally.
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Q&A
Q: roles of genders in each of these works? (Invisible women.)
Shu: in some ways, Yung’s work is similar to Frank Chin’s (emphasis on masculinity, minus the space of Asian Americanness); yes, women really are largely absent.
Roh: minus Japanese-local work, Korean America was largely a bachelor society; but also, Asian American immigrants had taken on feminine roles (houseboy, other domestic jobs).
Schroeder: not very progressive in Crossings—one of its central tropes = fragmentation of family, yet not particularly critical of gender relations amongst family members.
Q: reception—Chinese mission as a site that configured reception of Western ideals into China—what was the curriculum like, and what happened with the graduates? Also, how was Kang’s novel received (contemporary)?
Shu: when the 120 students went back to China, initially not received well, but eventually several gained power—father of Chinese railroads, a prime minister, reasonably high rank in the navy. China tended to read Yung’s experience as Chinese, not Chinese American.
Roh: two phases—Grass Roof (in English about his life in Korea) was successful; EGW was considered a failure, partly because critique was so strong. Second phase was recovery by later Asian Am scholars.
[Missed one question to get to next session.]