The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Producing Asian American Spaces:
From Cultural Nation to the Spaceof Hybridity as Represented in Texts
by Asian American Writers

Fukuko KOBAYASHII INTRODUCTION: AMERICA AS AN “IMAGINED COMMUNITY” AND
ITS CONSTRUCTION OF ASIANS AS “PERMANENT ALIENS”
In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha asks rhetorically, “What kind of cultural space is the nation?”1 Drawing upon
Benedict Anderson’s concept of nation-states as “imagined communities,” Bhabha argues that nations can come into being only through thetelling of stories, such as the myths of “origin” or “foundation myths”
that bind the otherwise disparate mindsets of their people.
It is no surprise, then, that in a multi-racial nation like America thecompulsion to establish unity and cohesion through such emotionallybinding narratives is particularly strong. Indeed, it hardly needs sayingthat the idea of America as a uniﬁed community has depended largely
upon the repetition of such “foundation myths,” such as the Pilgrim
Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock off the Mayﬂower or the frontiersmen exploring the “Virgin Land” as the “New Adam.”2 However, we are
simultaneously aware of the fact that a slave ship carrying captured
Africans had reached Jamestown one year prior to the Mayﬂower’s landing and that in the so-called “Virgin Land” indigenous Americans had
lived for generations.
Copyright © 2002 Fukuko Kobayashi. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
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In view of these facts, we cannot but conclude that the construction ofAmerica as a nation-state was dependent on the idea of America as an
untainted space, where only white Caucasians could enjoy full visibility. As Toni Morrison states in Playing in the Dark, being “American”
meant being “white.”3
Thus in the imagined community of America as a space of purity, socalled people of color were destined to have only a shadowy existence.
Of all non-white people in the U.S., the group that remained among theeasiest targets for such exclusion were people of Asian descent, who bycommon consent are the latest comers to the U.S., the foremost being ofChinese origin, who began to arrive in the mid-19th century, and ofJapanese origin, who began to arrive in the late 19th century. This fact
is clearly demonstrated in the series of U. S. immigration laws, such as
the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Alien Land Law, and the Japanese
Exclusion Act, as Lisa Lowe explains meticulously in her pathbreaking
work on Asian American cultural politics titled Immigrant Acts.4
What should be noted is that, whenever we see such blatant moves to
exclude people of Asian descent, some critical development is occurring
either within or without the U. S. borders. Thus the 1880s, the time of
the Chinese Exclusion Act stemming from the “yellow peril” phenomenon, coincides with the disappearance of the frontier and the subsequent
large-scale American advancement into Asia, resulting in the ﬁrst U.S.
war in Asia, namely the U.S.-Philippines war in 1898. Granted that theso-called “yellow peril” syndrome, castigating people of Asian origin as
invariably alien and barbarian, was due in a large measure to the threat
posed by hard-working, low-waged Asian immigrants to white workers,
the more signiﬁcant cause was a compulsion to achieve a sense of unity
on the part of mainstream America at its critical moment. Indeed, theconstruction of Asians as “exotic Others” was crucial in solidifying thenational foundation.
With the more egalitarian Immigration and Naturalization Act of
1965, such blatantly discriminatory practices toward people of Asiandescent seem no longer feasible. In fact, there has been a marked tendency among mainstream Americans to celebrate people of Asian origin as an exemplary ethnic group who have successfully promoted
themselves to middle-class status thanks to their unusual perseverance
and hard work. But this “model minority” discourse, which dumps all
people of Asian origin into a readily assimilable ethnic group, can itself
be a different version of the Orientalist discourse that has been prevalentthroughout the century.

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65

In the following pages, I will examine some noteworthy literary texts
by writers of Asian descent, writers who invariably attempted to construct their own subjectivity through their writing. I will view each of
the texts as the author’s endeavor to produce what might be called Asian
American spaces, distinct from mainstream America.
But, one might ask, what on earth can Asian American spaces mean?
For some the term might evoke those tangible ethnic communities like
Chinatowns and Japan Towns. Certainly those places can be part of what
I regard as Asian American spaces. However, I am referring speciﬁcally to spaces of a more metaphorical kind—what Henri Lefevre designates as “mental” or “abstract spaces,”5 those that ideally can have aconcrete social function as, to use Lowe’s words, “countersites to U. S.
national memory and national culture.”6 The task of producing such
spaces is by no means easy, however; driven by the compulsion toachieve unity, it holds the danger of engendering yet another exclusionary space.
I will trace the following three kinds of Asian American spaces represented in Asian American literary texts: 1) a space of cultural nationalism as constructed in texts by early male writers, 2) a space of mothersand daughters as produced in texts by women writers with an emphasison gender consciousness, 3) a space of hybridity as created in texts byrecent women diasporic writers. Of these three, I will pay special attention to the last, which I designate as a “Thirdspace,” a space beyond theclosed system of conventional binarisms.7
II

ASIAN AMERICAN SPACE AS A CULTURAL NATION IN TEXTS BYFRANK CHIN AND OTHERS

The term “Asian American” originated from the ethnic movement of
the 1960s to create solidarity among the otherwise scattered constituentsof the Asian American population, which then was largely composed ofChinese and Japanese Americans along with a much smaller number ofFilipino Americans. In their effort to seek ethnic self-esteem, these early
practitioners of the “Asian American movement” began to seek out andexpress their cultural heritage, including literature, which came to becalled “Asian American literature,” still hardly known to mainstream
readers.
Bruce Iwasaki, one of the early Asian American literary critics, expressed his sigh of regret over the deplorably marginalized state of theirliterature in the pioneering Asian American Studies textbook titled Roots:

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The experience of Asians in America has been such a neglected area of study,
there is no wonder that the literary output of Asian Americans is virtually
unknown. True, there have been no Japanese American Saul Bellows; no
Chinese-American Ralph Ellisons; no Filipino American Scott Momadays.
But there have been—and are—noteworthy authors of Asian descent in the
United States.8

The tone of Iwasaki’s voice found an echo in the preface to the ﬁrst
anthology of Asian American literature titled Aiiieeeee! (1974), edited
by four male writers of Chinese and Japanese origins, who all participated in the 1960s and 70s Asian American Movement—Frank Chin,
Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong. What is noteworthy about this preface is that the editors’ anger was directed not only
toward white racism but also toward Asian Americans themselves who
had internalized the mainstream’s image of them either as “unassimilable Aliens” or an over-assimilated “model minority.”
Impatient with this dual personality paradigm, they proposed a morewhole, uniﬁed version of their own identity that they argued was genuinely Asian American: namely, the “Japanese-, Chinese-, FilipinoAmericans who are ‘American born,’ ” who possess an “Asian American
sensibility distinct from Asia and white America.”9 One may sense insuch a clearly demarcated Asian American identity these editors’ acutedesire to claim their own space as a unique independent ethnic groupwithin the U.S., a space that is clearly an “Asian American space.” Statedwith ﬁrmness and vehemency, this Aiiieeeee! version of Asian American
identity turned out to have a considerable inﬂuence on the terrain of
Asian American literature, with its ensuing tendency to privilege only
those writers who were American born, English-speaking, and of East
Asian descent.
This stance of the Aiiieeeee! group, which has since been termed oneof Cultural Nationalism, proved to have limitations, however, with thedramatic increase of Asian-born immigrants not only from East Asia but
from South and Southeast Asia during the 1980s. Another factor thatcame to appear increasingly limiting was their undisguised tone of malecenteredness as exempliﬁed in the passage where the editors expressed
their frustration toward mainstream labeling of any Asian American man
as a desexualized type: “At worst, the Asian American is contemptible
because he is womanly, effeminate devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity.”10
The subsequent popularity of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan

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among mainstream readers, which I will discuss later, only exacerbatedthese editors’ sexism, especially that of Frank Chin, the most militant of
the four, and engendered what was later termed the “gender war in Asian
American literature”—a war that rendered Chin as the perpetual enemy
to any feminist critics involved. However, if we examine the very stanceof so-called Cultural Nationalism itself, we can see that what is at issue
is not the mere personal idiosyncrasy of Chin as a misogynist but thepremises of Cultural Nationalism itself, which is invariably problematical in terms of gender.
As black feminist critic Madhue Dubey has pointed out, the conceptof Cultural Nationalism was originally deployed in the Black Movementof the 60s on the assumption that “black people in this country make up
a cultural nation” and that any program to liberate black people shouldﬁrst emphasize a “revolution of cultural consciousness.”11 Needless tosay, the “cultural nation” referred to here is different from the ofﬁcial
nation-state in that it has no autonomous government of its own but isendowed with the basic rights to self-determination. Dubey further comments on the discourse of the Black Aesthetic which she calls “the literary program” of Cultural Nationalism as follows:
Even as black cultural nationalism and its literary program, the Black Aesthetic, catalyzed the remarkable formal experimentaion of black literatureduring the 1960s and 1970s, its race-centered aesthetic hindered a just appreciation of the works of black women novelists. . . . Black Aesthetic discourse,
consolidated around the sign of race, discouraged any literary exploration ofgender and other differences that might complicate a unitary concept of theblack experience.12

Thus we come to a realization that the so-called “gender war in Asian
American literature” was to a large extent a repetition of what had happened in the black literary world; and that, whether it be black or Asian
American, cultural or political, any group’s attempt to construct a “national” space, with the inevitable compulsion to achieve unity and coherence, will lead to an exclusionary attitude, suppressing any differences
within not only in terms of race and ethnicity but of gender as well.
How, then, is the stance of Cultural Nationalism reﬂected in the actual works in Aiiieeeee! ? As examples, we can take two of the texts inAiiieeeee!—namely Act I of The Chickencoop Chinaman (1981), a
drama by Frank Chin, and No-No Boy (1957), a novel by the late JapaneseAmerican novelist John Okada, hailed by the Aiiieeeee! editors as exemplary texts of Asian American literature.13

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To be sure, both of the main protagonists in these works, Tampax Lum
in The Chickencoop Chinaman and Ichiro in No-No Boy, are constructed as wholly deviant from the “model minority” type: Tampax vehemently attacks white society for failing to acknowledge him as a uniqueadult male, and Ichiro refuses to be drafted to ﬁght in the Second World
War. Likewise, both make common gestures in rejecting their ancestral
cultures in contradistinction to the people immediately surrounding
them. Thus both seem to be endowed with what Aiiieeeee! editors callan “Asian-American sensibility” that is “distinct from Asia and white
America.”
However, those gestures on the part of the two protagonists are somewhat unsatisfactory when we realize that neither of them is capable ofcoming to terms with his surroundings: anxiously seeking a legitimate
place in U. S. society, they are unable to take any concrete measures toreach their goal, while rejection of their ancestral cultures keep themalienated from their own communities. Perpetually suspended between
the two already-occupied spaces, so-called “white America” and theirown ethnic communities, they can ﬁnd no place of their own in either.
The only way out of their sense of futility is found in the comfort
offered by women surrounding them: Tampax seeks moments of solace
from women like “Hong Kong Dream Girl,” whom he considers a mere
sexual object, while Ichiro derives comfort from casting blame for hissituation on his mother’s failures. As has been pointed out by Elaine Kim,
Chin’s propensity toward making a virtue of male virility is manifested
in his desire to identify himself with the Western cowboy-type hero.14
One might say his male-chauvinism is shared by all the editors ofAiiieeeee!.
Most probably what these Aiiieeeee! editors wished to convey was that
if all Asian American men could grow as “masculine” as Tampax and
Ichiro, they would eventually gain their own legitimate spaces within the
U. S. Needless to say, however, this space will remain strictly a man’sworld, where women are allowed mere secondary, subservient roles.
III

A SPACE OF MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS IN TEXTS BY MAXINEHONG KINGSTON AND AMY TAN

Ironically enough, it was works by two second-generation Chinese
American women writers that realized what their fellow male writers
could not, namely to construct positive Asian American subjectivities

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69

and hence legitimate Asian American spaces as well through their own
writing. The two works are The Woman Warrior (1975) by Maxine Hong
Kingston and The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan.15
As has been suggested earlier, most earlier texts by Asian American
male writers—many of them of Chinese descent, such as Jeffery Chan,
Shawn Wong, and Frank Chin—share a common pattern with their second-generation male protagonists searching for viable Asian American
identities, invariably in vain. One reason for the failures of these protagonists can be discerned in the fact that their own immigrant fathers,
usually presented as helpless ineffectual beings, are unable to offer any
valid role models for their sons.
Exactly the opposite can be said about the two women writers’ texts.
They also deal with second-generation Chinese American protagonists
seeking legitimate ethnic identities through exchanges with their parents,
with the difference being that the central ﬁgures are daughters and mothers and that the mothers are extremely powerful and resilient. This
doubtlessly reﬂects the actual situation in Asian American communities
in terms of gender assignments: while men were apt to remain disillusioned by their inability to be accepted by white-centered society,women felt more stable in their home and communities, pursuing theirmore or less ﬁxed role of preserving their indigenous culture.16
Indeed, the mothers in The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Clubare both so forceful that their daughters have to challenge them to attainany degree of selfhood. The mothers are intent on imparting to theirdaughters their own notion of proper womanhood based on the old Confucian ideas from China, emphasizing such “virtues” as woman’s chastity and obedience. At the same time, those mothers continuously tell theirdaughters stories of their own experiences in China, demonstrating theiruncommon strength and ingenuity as Chinese women, as well as the old
Chinese folk tales concerning powerful legendary heroines such as “thewoman warrior.”
Through this interaction with their mothers, the daughters come toattain not only their independent American selves but also a more sharpened sense of their own cultural heritage passed down from their mothers, an important legacy with which the daughters can confront larger
society. Thus Maxine, the daughter of The Woman Warrior, and the fourdaughter-protagonists of The Joy Luck Club together present refreshingly new Asian American subjectivities, at once rooted in America andyet not neglectful of their own cultural legacy.

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It might well be argued that in their effort to construct legitimate ethnic identities acceptable to larger society, these women writers wereappropriating their fellow male writers’ concept of Cultural Nationalism
for their own needs. The result, as we see, is a sort of a woman-centeredethnic “cultural nation,” a space they could claim as their own throughtheir writing.
It is, of course, to those women writers’ credit that their works cameto enjoy unprecedented popularity among mainstream readers. However,it should also be pointed out that they owe their success in no small measure to the particular intellectual climate of the U. S. society at the time
when their works were produced. During the 1970s and 80s, there wasa marked tendency among U. S. feminists to valorize so-called “herstory,” or woman-centered historical narratives, based on the concept ofthe mother-daughter bond, in contradistinction to what is termed “hisstory,” based on the father-son bond, a phenomenon that helped considerably to generate the critical acclaim with which the works werereceived.17 The emphasis on the idea of “multiculturalism” prevalent
since the late 1980s is no doubt another factor in accelerating the wide
acceptance of these texts, since their clear-cut demonstration of their own
traditional cultural legacy was exactly what the general practitioners ofmulticulturalism valued.
Thanks to these two women writers, Asian American literature attracted a surge of attention from the mainstream media. At the same time,
however, partly due to their being positioned as representative writersof a newly recognized genre, Kingston’s and Tan’s texts came underclose scrutiny, resulting in a variety of criticisms that boiled down to two
kinds:
1) While Kingston’s and Tan’s works include ample criticism of gender discrimination within their communities, they do not sufﬁciently criticize white racism.
2) Their forthright depiction of indigenous culture is liable to fetishization as exemplary Asian exotica.
The ﬁrst criticism is not particularly new: a similar point was made by
the Aiiieeeee! group. Its importance, however, has become all the more
highlighted because those who have raised this issue recently are feminist women critics, obviously reﬂecting a major change that has takenplace in feminist scholarship of late, disrupting the previous tendency toprioritize the perspective of gender and stressing instead multiple ana-

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71

lytical axes like race, class, and sexuality. Thus critics like Sau-ling
Wong, Shirley Lim, and Leslie Bow all caution that these women writers’ texts with their focus on matrilineality can possess the dangerous
possibility of “containing questions of ethnic difference within a universal feminist resolution” and thus becoming “non-threatening” tomainstream readers.18 The second criticism is obviously connected withthe problem inherent in multiculturalism itself. As Trinh Minh-ha has
noted, if multiculturalism means the mere juxtaposition of different ethnic cultures with each of their boundaries intact, it will simply end up
solidifying those boundaries, hence further promoting their marginalization.19 Especially in the case of Kingston and Tan, since the formulaic reading of their work as stories of a “mysterious” Asian American
mother-daughter bond has become so widely accepted among mainstream readers, their novels can indeed easily be commodiﬁed as yet
more neo-Orientalist exotica.
The text that is the most frequently cited as inviting and promoting
baneful misconceptions in mainstream reception is Tan’s widely marketed second novel The Kitchen God’s Wife. In this work, “the sociallymonstrous phenomena of concubinage, abandoned daughters, arranged
marriages, patriarchal abuse, and so forth” are represented as the essenceof traditional Chinese culture.20 This allows mainstream U.S. readers to
indulge simultaneously in pity and self-congratulation: they can pity the
Chinese immigrant mother for all the miseries she has to go through, butthey can applaud her transformation into a brave new Asian American
heroine, ﬂeeing the “monstrous” Third World for an America full of progressiveness and Utopian possibility.
In this section, I have examined works by two Chinese American
women writers, Kingston and Tan, as texts that can ultimately be linked
with the Aiiieeeee! editors’ attempt to construct a cultural nation as an
Asian American space through their writing, an attempt that these
women writers together could accomplish. I have also addressed theissue of the mainstream reception of their works, which undoubtedly has
functioned as the major driving force in bringing the emergent genre of
Asian American literature to the limelight. I have simultaneously called
attention to the danger inherent in such reception—namely of having thisonce-proclaimed Asian American space reterritorialized by mainstream
America as its readily accessible commodity. In the section to follow, I
will deal with texts by diasporic women writers of Asian descent, mostly
from the new immigrant generation, whose ingenious narrative strategies

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can be regarded as their effort to avoid the pitfalls of the texts by preceding writers. I see their effort as an attempt to create a “Thirdspace,”or a space of hybridity.
IV HYBRIDITY AND DIASPORA: WORK BY MEENA ALEXANDER AND
THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA
By “new immigrants,” I mean the more recent Asian immigrants whoarrived in the U. S. from such diverse countries as Korea, India, Vietnam,
Cambodia and the Philippines during the latter half of the 20th century—whose number increased drastically after the enactment of the new
Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1970. Unlike the old immigrants
from China and Japan during the 19th century, who were more intent on
settling down in the U. S., the new immigrants of the late 20th century
tend to be far more mobile. The majority are those people whom Edward
Said has called the “exiles” of “our times”, or diasporic subjects who,
having undergone forced displacement due to a variety of causes associated with the on-going condition called “post-coloniality”, and who
continue their migration to whichever part of the globe that allows themto seek a better life or more opportunities.21 Hence, it is no surprise thatthe writers coming from this group of “diasporic writers” show a newkind of subjectivity—far more ﬂuid and multiple than the ones depictedin the texts I have cited above.
Indeed, the foregoing writers I have examined, even though theirapproaches were widely different, whether the Aiiieeeee! editors or thepair of Chinese American women writers, shared a basic common project of creating a viable image of “Asian Americans” as legitimate members of the U. S. as opposed to “permanent aliens.” Ironically, the efforts
of both groups have been reappropriated by mainstream America: while
the former proved to have internalized the norm of white masculinity,
the latter fell in the trap of letting themselves become instrumental in therecirculation of Orientalist images of regressivity and inscrutability. In
other words, even though those writers attempted to decolonize their
allocated space as “permanent aliens” and establish instead their own
independent Asian American spaces, they were, in effect, simply recolonized by hegemonic society. One factor in this might be that, despite
the explicit intentions of their authors, the texts of both groups were still
somewhat approachable within the framework of ﬁxed binaries such as
Asian/American, old/new, and regressive/progressive.
Hence, the important question for any writer of Asian descent in the

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73

U.S. can be how to create a space that might enable movement beyond
the conﬁnes of the foregoing binaries and yet maintain some form ofcultural speciﬁcity—a space that is constantly on guard against any unifying, consolidating tendency from within, while simultaneously functioning as a cultural front from which to ﬁght back against any
exoticizing, essentializing move from without.
In this sense the texts by the two diasporic women writers I will deal
with now, namely Meena Alexander who is of Indian descent and
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha who is of Korean descent, are of particularimportance. In their common endeavor to express their diasporic subjectivities which have emerged out of and through their shared bordercrossing experiences, they both reveal the painful but meaningfulprocess of their own search for the new kind of cultural space as mentioned above.
Fault Lines (1993), subtitled “A Memoir,” is Indian-born poet-writer
Alexander’s ﬁrst attempt at autobiographical writing. Having traversed
four continents before reaching the U. S., the author still ﬁnds herself “insearch of a homeland,” and it is to spell out some kind of wholeness or
coherence in herself that she decided to write this memoir.
However, as soon as she starts writing, she becomes overwhelmed by
the sheer difﬁculty of it. Because she has “mov[ed] about so much,” shefeels that “time does not come ﬂuid and whole to her,” and she keeps
asking herself, “how should I spell out these fragments of a broken geography?”22 Finally she reaches the recognition that she has no choice but
to accept the idea of herself as “a mass of fault,” “a woman cracked bymultiple migrations.”23
The result, as we see, is a different kind of autobiography. To be sure,
like much autobiographical writing, Fault Lines traces the author’s different life-stages in different places: her childhood in India, her adolescence in Sudan, her student life in England, and ﬁnally her adult life in
New York, where she settled down with her Caucasian American husband and her child, piecing together a variety of episodes concerning thepeople and places she came across on her life-journey. However, since
she presents those episodes in a non-chronological manner, moving backand forth between the past and present throughout the text, the bookescapes from the linear developmental narrative of traditional memoirs,in which the autobiographical subject invariably moves from ignorance
to enlightenment, regressivity to progressivity, barbarity to civilization,
etc.
Another notable aspect of Alexander’s narrative is that, as Helena

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Grice has pointed out, in her emphasis on “matrilineal connection” assources for her own inspiration and empowerment can be discerned theinevitable inﬂuence she has received from preceding women writers ofAsian descent, particularly Maxine Kingston.24 However, what makes
Alexander’s text stand out is that she does not conﬁne her maternal ﬁgure to just one person. She presents two women as her own maternal ﬁgures: her mother “Amma,” still alive in India while she was writing her
memoir, and her maternal grandmother “Kunju,” who was already deadwhen the author was born, but whose face she could see in photos. They
are both important ﬁgures to Alexander, albeit in different ways : Ammaas an ever protective nurturer, who, after an arranged marriage, has continued to remain a devoted wife and mother like the majority of Indian
women of her time; and Kunju as a spiritual nurturer, who, after her marriage to a member of the Nationalist Movement, continued to be active
for women’s causes even after the birth of her daughter. Throughjuxtaposing the narratives of those two contrasting maternal ﬁgures,Alexander prevents mainstream readers from taking their ancestral
female ﬁgures simply as a ﬁxed, essentialized type.
Another feature worth noting is that the author more often than not
expresses her feelings of doubt when she compares herself with those
two maternal ﬁgures: she wonders with a sense of yearning what it would
be like, had she followed in her mother’s footpath, to live in her village
as a conventional wife and mother, even though she rebelled against her
mother strongly. An even sharper feeling of yearning arises when she
thinks of her other maternal ﬁgure Kunju, a woman who had precisely
what she herself lacks, namely, “history and tradition,” since Kunju wasa woman who witnessed “the birth pangs of a nation.”25
Eventually, however, we see the author reaching a new terrain of selfrecognition based on her own multiple border-crossing experiences,which are painful in the sense that each time she crosses a new border,
she is invariably hit by a sense of alienation, but exhilarating in the sensethat each gives her a heightened sense of the differences among people
in various parts of the world in terms of race, ethnicity, and nationality.
One incident that gave her a huge “shock of recognition,” for example,
happened while she was walking on a street in Minneapolis; a stranger
halted her by yelling “you black bitch!”26 To be sure, it was a paralyzing experience, but it was a catalytic one as well, for after that incident
we see her world-view broadening drastically. As someone who has“learnt all over again about the violence of racism” in the U. S.,27 shePRODUCING ASIAN AMERICAN SPACES

75

comes to associate her own position as a “female, Indian, Other” withher “postcolonial heritage,” interrogating such transnational gender issues as clitoridectomy, arranged marriage and women’s education on topof such domestic racial issues as “Asian children in city schools” and“brown youths . . . who pack our city streets.”28 In her emerging consciousness as a postcolonial feminist we see the birth of a new subjectivity that is neither unitary nor simply dual, but multiply anchored; sheis led to an awareness of what Donna Harraway calls “new kinds ofunity” among the oppressed people of the world, thereby disrupting theﬁxed binaries of East/West, Asia/America, and Third World/FirstWorld.29 Thus we see the author no longer vexed with the lack of her
own coherent historical past: she is celebrating “the perpetual present”
associated with her own “dark female body” as a rich source for her senseof connectedness with variously marginalized people who live contemporaneously with her across the boundaries of race, nationality, and ethnicity.30
However, it should also be borne in mind that the author does not consider it easy to form such alliances. This is manifested in the scene
described at the outset of the memoir. The author is sitting in a cozy café,
talking with her editor-friend about the publication of her own book. Hereyes happen to catch the two blanket-covered men of color outside, oneof whom suddenly comes “hobbling up, his hands stretched out” toward
her.31 Dropping her gaze instinctively to avoid the sight, she then glancesat the plate glass which separates her from the two men, where she sees
her own reﬂection, “face disﬁgured”. The scene is obviously a self-critical reminder against any facile talk of coalition-forming; the “distorted
face” of the author obviously signiﬁes her recognition of her own arrogance in regarding herself as an outsider when, to the eyes of the twohomeless men, she is a privileged insider. The author thus cautions herreaders against the naïve belief in the possibility of transparent spaces
where any disenfranchised people can be homogenized into one seamless group; that even though the need should be recognized for transnational or transethnic alliances against any kind of injustices practiced indifferent parts of the world, one should not forget the differences existing among them not only in terms of gender and ethnicity but of classand social status as well. Hence we may say that the cultural space
Alexander invokes in Fault Lines is never ﬁxed. It is a site where contesting claims of differences are always foregrounded and renegotiated.
While Fault Lines seems to have had little difﬁculty in gaining critical76

FUKUKO KOBAYASH

recognition, as suggested by the favorable comments at the back of its
paperback edition by such well-known critics as Catherine Stimpson andAnita Desai, another text by a diasporic woman writer, the last writer tobe dealt with here, namely Dictée by Korean-born poet-performer
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, received a hostile reaction from her criticalcommunity. When the book was published in 1982, it was largely ignored except by a handful of critics who mostly made cursory remarks
on it, and it was virtually forgotten thereafter until 1991, when four Asian
American scholars organized a panel focusing on the text at the annual
meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies. The result of thepanel was published in 1994 as an anthology titled Writing Self, Writing
Nation, which gave rise to a subsequent proliferation of articles andessays.
One obvious reason why the acknowledgement of the literary worthof Dictée was so delayed was no doubt its avant-garde form: composedof personal letters, French dictation exercises, personal photos as well
as photos of war scenes during the Second World War and other miscellaneous scraps of writing, the book escapes any attempt at categorization. On top that, its multilinguality is daunting: apart from English,
we recognize Han-gul, Chinese, Japanese, French, Greek, and Latin scattered throughout the text. As Kim notes, since the majority of Asian
American critics at the time were trying hard to “deﬁne and claim” aclear Asian American identity, the extremely heterogeneous form ofDictée appeared as a hindrance to their search.32 The sudden shift in critical appraisal of Dictée in early 1990s is equally understandable: as Kim
observes, the dramatic rise in new immigrants around the end of the 80s,
which resulted in the “increased Asian American insistence” on their“complex, plural, and continually changing identities,” doubtlessly
helped create a more receptive environment to the multi-form text.33
Hence, we should not consider Dictée as a mere exercise in the postmodern concept of endlessly shifting protean selves. As Laura Kang
aptly argues, “the heterogeneous composition” of the text should be readas “accounting for multicultural, multinational pressures that havewrought the peculiar and crisscrossed contours of a Korean American
female subject” who is shaped by the heterogeneous elements surrounding her:34 Japanese colonialism, Korean militarism, U. S. imperialistic
intervention into Korea leading to the Korean War and the country’s subsequent division into North and South, Cha’s immigration with her mother to Hawaii and to California, where she was to undergo the common

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process of assimilation, her graduate study in France, and her sojourn in
Korea , where she was treated as a cultural Other.
What differentiates Dictée from Fault Lines is that, while Fault Lines
ends up celebrating the “perpetual present” associated with the author’s
own transnational feminist self, Dictée’s subject is clearly concernedwith recovering her own national past. In fact, the book is as much Cha’s
attempt to explore her subjectivity as a postcolonial diasporic subject as
her effort to reconstruct Korean national history. The reason for Cha’s
persistent preoccupation with Korean history, despite her multiple border-crossing experiences has to be the fact that, as Kim notes, Korea has
hardly ﬁgured in the West’s understanding of world history, while acountry like India is far better-known in the West. However, one has tobe vigilant about the familiar pitfall of the homogenizing, essentializing
tendency whenever one attempts any retelling or recovery of a national
narrative. Much of the complexity and ambiguity of the text of Dictée,
I assume, derives from Cha’s strategic effort never to be caught in sucha trap, and to create instead a kind of space that is ever open to multiplicity and change.
The most conspicuous among such strategies in Cha’s text is her inclusion of narratives usually neglected in ofﬁcial histories: a Korean coalminer’s inscription in Han-gul in the earth of a coal-mine in Japan, forexample, and a letter petitioning President Roosevelt for intervention in
Japanese colonial rule (to which he did not respond). The most impressive of these unofﬁcial narratives are the ones concerning two Korean
women: Yu Guan Soon who joined the Korean male revolutionaries
despite their strong opposition to allowing a woman membership, who
eventually was tortured to death by the Japanese military, and Hyung
Soon Huo, Cha’s own mother, a school teacher sent to Manchuria toteach the Japanese language, forbidden to use her own language, but
speaking it silently in her head nevertheless. Thus Cha successfully presents an alternative history of Korean people not as mere passive victims
but as people who possess their own agency, actively seeking to resist
hegemonic powers.
It would be a mistake, though, to consider Cha as romanticizing thecommon Korean people and creating her own version of national heroines or heroes. What is most challenging about Dictée is that while ittries to recover the lost history of Korean people, it simultaneously problematizes the very way history is constructed, stressing the arbitrarinessand unreliability of memory, and highlighting the fact that no such spaces

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78

as pure inside or outside exist. This is suggested in the following passage in Dictée, which reminds us of Alexander’s musing in the café
scene:The View, Absent all the same.
Hidden. Forbidden.
Either side of the view.
Side upon side. That which indicates the interior
and exterior.
Inside. Outside.35

In her endless journey for her lost homeland, which tends to be equatedwith the process of re-membering her mother, we see once again thefamiliar pattern of a mother-daughter plot repeated. What should be
noted, however, is that in Cha’s case, the mother is presented from the
beginning as an “impure” being, having been deprived of her own “mother” tongue, a woman whose existence is as hybrid and heterogeneous asthat of her own daughter.
Thus we see the female subject in Dictée always located in a liminal
space, where she shuttles incessantly between “inside” and “outside,”blurring boundaries between all such binaries as Asia/America, national/transnational, and inside/outside. She is exactly what Trinh calls an“Inappropriate Other,” a person who is not easily appropriated in eitherof the occupied territories.36 This interstitial space, or “Thirdspace,” as
Edward Soja has called it,37 is the very legacy Cha tries to pass down toher fellow Asian Americans or, for that matter, anyone living in the present age in which diasporic imagination is more required than at anyother time in the past.
V

CONCLUSION: ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AS THIRDSPACE

I would like to end by cautioning that even the space of hybridity orinterstitiality that has been examined here contains a chance of being
appropriated by hegemonic powers, for anything once named can always
be changed into another fetishized and commodiﬁed object. In fact, there
has been some criticism of late against so-called “hybridity talk.”38 It
argues that dealing with hybridity has become a mere fashion, and thatit has no actual power to solve problems arising from the ongoing racial
and gender imbalance in society. I both agree and disagree with this argument. What I believe is most important is never to ﬁx one’s viewpoint

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79

with either side for too long. For, through shuttling between inside andoutside, one can always self-reﬂexively criticize outside from inside,
inside from outside and so on, or as King-kok Cheung says:
Individuals may feel empowered by an ethnic American identity, by a diasporic identity, or by both . . . An Asian American consciousness . . . hasallowed some writers to rupture a racist and patriarchal deﬁnition of an
American nationalistic identity. . . . Similarly, an exilic or diasporic identity
can enable others to contest the exclusiveness of state or cultural nationalism. . . To reckon with these sometimes contradictory stances is . . . to make room
for reciprocal critique and multiple commitments.39

A multi-text like Dictée, or to a lesser degree Fault Lines, can itself
be regarded as forming in-between spaces, disrupting binaries like poetry/prose, literature/theory, ﬁction/fact, art/politics, memory/history, andso on. The fact that there are quite a few multi-texts in Asian American
literature besides the ones examined here, such as Jessica Hagedorn’s
Dogeaters, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest,
and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, is a testimony to the fact that Asian American
literature can form such a space of hybridity, or Thirdspace. These texts
can indicate the way to what Lefevre designates as “a planet-wide space,”
the one that contains the most hope for the future. As he observes in the
conclusion of his seminal work Production of Space:
The creation (or production) of a planet-wide space as the social foundationof a transformed everyday life open to myriad possibilities—such is the dawn
now beginning to break on the far horizon.40

We can hope with Lefevre, then, that from this space of Asian American
literature will emanate the power to transform our consciousnesses andcontinuously widen our horizons.
NOTES
Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 5.
See R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955).
3
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 47.
4
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 13. It should be noted that
other non-white groups in the U.S. were allowed the right of becoming naturalized citizens earlier than those of Asian origin. For example, “persons of African nativity anddescent” were allowed their right in 1870, while those of Chinese and Japanese origins
were allowed only in 1943 and 1952 respectively.
5
Henri Lefevre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 3, 49.
6Lowe, 4.
1
2

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FUKUKO KOBAYASH

7
I became acquainted with the concept of “Thirdspace” mainly through: Edward W.
Soja’s Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 5. See also Homi Bhaba, “The Third Space,” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (New York: Routledge, 1990), 207–21.
As for the relationship of space with gender and ethnicity, the following books havebeen particularly helpful: Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the
Cultural Geographies of Encounter, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998); Doreen Massey,
Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, U of Minneapolis P, 1994); Caren Kaplan,
Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke UP,
1996).
8
Bruce Iwasaki, “Response and Change for the Asian America,” Roots: An Asian
American Reader (Regents of U of California, 1971), 89.
9Frank Chin, et al. eds. Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers(Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1974) , viii-ix.
10Ibid. xxx.
11
Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1994), 14–15.
12
Ibid. 1.
13Frank Chin, “Act I of The Chikencoop Chinaman,” Aiiieeeee!, 50–74; John Okada,“From No-No Boy,” Aiiieeeee!, 130–140.
14
Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982), 177.
15
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Knopf, 1975); Amy Tan,The Joy Luck Club (New York: Putnam, 1991).
16
One illustration of this might be the fact that when an exhibition of JapaneseAmerican History was held by the National Japanese American Historical Society in the
U.S., men tended to emphasize their contribution as nisei soldiers during the Second
World War, while women preferred to display traditional Japanese objects for daily use.
See “Nikkei Josei no Rekishiten” [Exhibition of Japanese American Women’s History]
Asahi Shinbun, 21 July, 1990.
17
For the most extensive analysis of the mother-daughter bond in the literature thatwas produced during the 1970s and 80s, see Marianne Hirsch, The Mother-Daughter
Plot (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989).
18
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Chinese American Literature,” Interethnic Companion to
Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997),
50. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Immigrants and Diaspora,” Interethnic Companion to Asian
American Literature, 302. Leslie Bow, “Cultural Conﬂict/ Feminist Resolution In Amy
Tan’s Joy Luck Club,” Asian American Women Writers, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia:
Chelsea House, 1997), 92–3.
19
Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red (New York: Routledge, 1991), 232.
20
Lim, 301.
21
Edward Said, “Reﬂections on Exile,” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West et al. (New York: The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991), 357–66.
22
Meena Alexander, Fault Lines (New York: Feminist P, 1993), 3.
23
Ibid. 3.
24
Helena Grice “Fault Lines [book review],” Amerasia Journal, 22. 2 (1996): 165.
25
Ibid. 15.
26
Ibid. 169.
27
Ibid. 199.
28
Ibid. 202.

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81

29
Donna Harraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Coming to Terms, ed. Elizabeth Weed
(New York: Routledge, 1989), 196.
30
Ibid. 169.
31
Ibid. 1.
32
Elaine Kim, “Poised on the In-between: A Korean American’s Reﬂections on
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” Writing Self, Writing Nation, ed. Elaine Kim andNorma Alarcom (Berkeley: Third Woman’s Press, 1994), 3.
33
Ibid. 7.
34
Laura Kang, “Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,” A Resource Guide to Asian
American Literature, eds. Stephen Sumida and Sau-ling Wong (New York: Modern
Language Association, 2001), 32–33.
35
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995), 127.
36
Trinh, 76.
37
Soja, 5. Elaine Kim also maintains that in Dictée, “Cha creates and celebrates a kindof third space, an exilic space” (“Poised on the In-between,” 8).
38John Hutnik “Hybridity Saves? Authenticity and/or the Critique of Appropriation,”
Ameraisa Journal 25. 3 (1999/2000): 39.
39
King-Kok Cheung, “Re-viewing Asian American Literary Studies,” Interethnic
Companion to Asian American Literature, 9–10.
40
Lefevre, 422.