For more than a century, immigrants from various Asian countries and their descendants have made America their home. Throughout this time, writers whom we could call Asian American have expressed their joys, lamented their losses, crafted new forms, and imagined new worlds in their poetry, stories, novels, and plays.Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature, which focuses on the period of Asian American literary history between roughly 1880 and 1965, assists in the recovery of the rich, diverse, and complicated writings of Asian American literary pioneers. We acknowledge, as Cary Nelson reminds us, that “literary history...

Important critical debates over Asian American autobiographical writing have centered on the question of authenticity. For over two decades now, influential critics such as Frank Chin and Amy Ling have been delimiting the criteria necessary for works to qualify as authentic or inauthentic, “real” or “fake.”¹ With characteristically Manichean logic, Chin argues that “real” writers heroically defend “yellow fact and truth,” while “fake” writers succumb to “high assimilation” and “Christian stereotype” (1985, 109–10). In a similarly comparative mode but with different results, Ling contends that Asian American women writers, in fact, have been “more authentic” than men, since the...

In 1914, in the four weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year, Winnifred Eaton completed what would become her autobiography, a work she published anonymously the following year under the titleMe, A Book of Remembrance. In the eyes of her friend Jean Webster, Eaton’s achievement was especially remarkable because she had drafted the book while in the hospital, recovering from an operation of such gravity that it required her to remain in bed for two weeks. This productive stage made perfect sense to Eaton, however, for according to her, “these two weeks I have just passed in the hospital have...

Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s autobiography, ADaughter of the Samurai, was published in book form in 1925 after much of it had been serialized inAsiamagazine the previous year.¹ By 1935 over 80,000 copies of the book had been sold. The autobiography was reissued in 1966, and more recently, a paperback edition appeared in 1990. The initial popularity of Sugimoto’s narrative and its persistence in print make it one of the best selling and most widely read Japanese American autobiographies ever published. Sugimoto’s influence on her contemporaries was large. An excerpt from Sugimoto’s narrative is included in a 1931 anthology...

And China Has Hands(1937) by H. T. Tsiang presents difficulties to the reader on many interpretive levels. A polemical text that makes clear its commitment to communist revolution,And China Has Handsrelies on a notion of representation that is inextricable from politics: characters symbolize various ideological positions, and the novel decides their fates on the basis of their relationship to an emerging class revolution. The novel has two explicit purposes: first, to call attention to the dire situation of the Chinese in America (specifically, in New York’s Chinatown), a situation marked by their economic exploitation and social isolation;...

During his picaresque wanderings across 1920s America, the Korean immigrant narrator of Younghill Kang’s novel,East Goes West(1937), encounters a Negro student—Wagstaff—who works as a “yes-suh” elevator manin Boston while putting himself through college. This black Falstaffian wag counsels the exiled Shakespearean scholar Chung-pa Han to “learn the language of gyp, learn to gyp too. Confess honestly that right is not might, but might is right, always since the world began. That’s the perspective that only a Negro gets” (Kang 1937, 274). Throughout his fictionalized memoir, wherein he writes as one of the “drifting” Korean resident aliens...

Selected works from the student-authored collection ofCollege Plays 1937–1955¹ have been hailed by some as the first “Asian American” writing for the theater, and recent interest in Asian American theater and performance has begun to renew interest in this largely forgotten set of works.² The ten-volume set of plays written for the classes of English professor Willard Wilson at the University of Hawai’i provides a unique perspective on what might be called “Asian American” playwriting.³ Given Wilson’s directive to the student “to write of real people like himself,” these plays provide intriguing examples of dramatic writing seemingly free...

Toyo Suyemoto¹ was born in Oroville, California, in 1916, a time when laws were being passed in West Coast state legislatures forbidding immigrant Japanese, orIssei, from owning land. A second-generation Japanese American, orNisei, Suyemoto grew up in Sacramento, in what she calls “a multicultural community, surrounded by numerous nationalities” (Moran 1995, 37). Encouraged by her mother to write poems, she published even as a teenager and became “one of the most prolific and talented of the prewar Nisei poets” (Yogi 1996, 68). She was a young mother in her mid-twenties when the war began; she and her family...

If the Eaton sisters’ lives and writing represent a basic template of ethical choices for Asian Americans, the lives and work of Carlos Bulosan and John Okada represent a midcentury update of these choices, framed in the declining moments of a racial equilibrium they shared with the Eatons. The period of the Great Depression through World War II and the Cold War that Bulosan and Okada lived and wrote in was therefore a time marked by both optimism and pessimism for Asian Americans, as new opportunities developed for people of color even as their violent suppression continued. These were conditions...

The Constitution’s blighted promise in John Okada’sNo-No Boy(1957) and in Toshio Mori’s camp stories (1940s–1950s) is heightened by the paradoxical measuring of personal or communal freedom through tropes of dissent and displacement. InNo-No Boy, Okada signifies freedom through the Japanese American who, despite pressures to assimilate, chooses to dissent. By the novel’s end, however, the dissenter appears to desire a resolution wherein he shares a unified identity with other Americans. Much like Okada, Mori writes narratives of shame or rebellion, narratives that capture the chaos of wartime and postwar Japanese American bodies and communities. However, in...

The names of Toshio Mori and Richard Kim are probably not the first that most literary critics would associate with the development or expansion of Asian American masculinity. Neither is what might be called a “masculinist writer,” even in the broadest sense of the term; and neither focuses insistently on the Asian American male. Indeed, pairing the two writers—in virtuallyanycontext—may seem strangely imperceptive. It would be difficult to find two Asian American male writers with more divergent literary reputations. Mori is generally recognized as an innovative and gifted short story writer; over the last twenty-five years,...

Forty years after the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, hearings were held by a body of the U.S. Government, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, in an attempt to come to terms with and redress this shameful episode in American history. As evidenced by the Commission’s report,Personal Justice Denied(1982), the fact that the U.S. Government had imprisoned approximately 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II still seemed impossible for both internees and observers to grasp: “It became obvious that a forty-year silence did not mean that bitter memories had dissipated;...

Over the last three decades, N.V.M. Gonzalez has been a marginal presence in Asian American literary studies. Judging from the limited criticism of his works, his relationship with Asian American writers and scholars has been turbulent. Apparently, Gonzalez himself fired the initial salvos. In the early 1970s, as Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas sardonically note, Gonzalez struck a somewhat elitist pose vis-à-vis struggling ethnic writers in the Manilatown area: “[T]he internationally recognized short-story writer N.V.M. Gonzalez has little to say about Manilatown because he, as a visiting celebrity in this country, lectures to a more cosmopolitan audience and is housed...

Ronyoung Kim’sClay Walls(1987) is an apparently simple novel, particularly because its resolution seems to lie, like a neat Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in U.S. victory in World War II, in the American dream for Asian Americans, and in middle-class marriage for second-generation Faye.¹ Because of this seeming simplicity and also because of the predilections of contemporary cultural criticism, both within Asian American Studies and within American Studies more broadly,Clay Wallshas been somewhat neglected by literary critics.² Debates over the politics of literary realism that have deeply implicated realist forms in a discursive practice that interpellates conventionally...