Asian American Literature Fans Megareview for March 12 2014

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

Always with apologies for formatting/ grammatical/ typographical/ spelling errors).

A Review of Peter Tieryas Liu’s Watering Heaven (Signal 8 Press, 2012).



Another book on my to-read list: Peter Tieryas Liu’s quirky and impressionistic debut Watering Heaven: A Collection of Short Stories. Though these stories are disparate in their contexts and characterizations, Liu’s collection generally coheres around the unpredictable nature of (romantic) relationships, especially as they unfold during an era of increased transnational mobility. Liu is especially keyed into the hypermodernization of China, with wonderful passages concerning the density of cities such as Beijing. In this regard, he is part of a new generation of Asian Anglophone writers who have been considering China’s shifts in the recent decades (see for instance, Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire). Watering Heaven is also a work that could easily be taught/ read alongside short story collections such as Wena Poon’s Lions in Winter, Xu Xi’s Access, Wang Ping’s The Last Communist Virgin, and Ha Jin’s A Good Fall. Many of the characters live highly transnational lives, moving between China and the United States with such plasticity that we are always recalling Aihwa Ong’s now already classic work on the flexible citizen (see also Xu Xi’s Habit of a Foreign Sky for a great novel that dramatizes the flexible citizen). The first story “Chronology of an Egg” is quite illustrative in this regard: the narrator Ethan Zhou meets Sarah Chao at a gaming conference in China. She promises to keep in touch and she eventually contacts Ethan when she visits Los Angeles. Formalistically dynamic, the story is told through specific times in the night, therefore giving us the “chronology” of their Southern California misadventures. The “egg” portion of the title involves the fact that Sarah Chao says she lays an egg anytime she has sex. As readers, we’re in a similar position as Ethan: we simply disregard Sarah’s comment as something spouted out of a free-spirited young woman’s mouth. Later, after Ethan and Sarah do have sex, Sarah does in fact lay an egg. What are we to make of this moment? At once comic and speculative, this strange conclusion pushes the entire collection onto a different plane and we’re meant to read the following stories through a slightly refracted eye: what kind of stories are going to emerge from this off-kilter shell we wonder? We are accordingly not surprised to see oddballs all throughout this collection: those who are disabled, psychically traumatized, others who are socially marginalized. References to diseases, technology, engineering and scientific discourses are threaded throughout generating another level of narrative unity that continually pushes the reader to consider the poles of healthfulness and pathology, normativity and idiosyncrasy, the human and the nonhuman. These stories tend to be impressionistic with a kind of poetic intertextuality because Liu effectively employs primarily first person narrators who have a wonderfully keen eye for observation and detail. The best stories, in my opinion, are the ones that move slightly away from a purely realist registers, such as the opening story, and others including a strange woman who falls in love with specific parts of the body and a documenter of urban legends. In these planes of the almost-surreal, Liu’s stories find move into a generative level of creative experimentation, directly evoking the whimsical title. For those craving more from Liu in this whimsical way, see his upcoming publication Bald New World (Perfect Edge): a book which riffs off of Aldous Huxley, we won’t be able to read soon enough!

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Watering-Heaven-Peter-Tieryas-Liu/dp/9881553911/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=13946022

On Bald New World:

http://www.amazon.com/Bald-New-World-Peter-Tieryas/dp/1782795081/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394645254&sr=8-1&keywords=Bald+New+World


A Review of Ellen Oh’s Warrior (HarperTeen, 2013).



By the end of Ellen Oh’s Warrior (the second book in the Dragon King Chronicles), you’ll immediately realize that there’s a third installment on the way, revealing that the Dragon King Chronicles are taking the format of the tried-and-true trilogy that seems to be dominating the YA fiction market right. Warrior avoids the sophomore slump by doing what it did best: creating a feminist updating of a fantasy kingdom based upon ancient Korea and supercharging it with action sequences, including a colorful monster menagerie and some romantic intrigue for good measure. Our heroine and the titular warrior Kira returns with the intent of fulfilling the prophecy as outlined in the first book (see my earlier review here):

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/153877.html

The beginning of Warrior sees the kingdom of Hansong thrown into chaos after some untimely assassinations. The bulk of this plot involves Kira and her comrades embarking on a long journey that requires them to go to Mount Baekdu, the site wherein Kira might be able to locate a famed dagger. Kira and her allies (the young Taejo, her brother Kwan, her possible romantic foil Jaewon, Taejo’s companion dog Jindo, among others) must confront and defeat a horde of new villains and monsters, including half-breeds, evil cavern maidens, a fox-demon, a dragon, amongst others in order to find one of two key treasures that will allow Kira to bring peace back to Hansong. By the conclusion, you’re already ready and willing to read the third installment. Though you know you’re rooting for Kira to complete the quest, it is the journey—of course—that will prove to be the reader’s most tantalizing treasure.
For the purposes of my own scholarly interests, I’ve actually been revising an article that explores depictions of kitsune, or fox-demon/trickster figures. It was with much interest that I read Oh’s Warrior, which includes a very prominent portrayal of the Korean version, also known as the kumiho. Oh is intent in revising this myth to a certain extent, providing the kumiho with qualities that many traditional folklorists would say deviates from source materials. Of course, this revision is exactly the kind that Oh is already mapping with her dynamic construction of the feudal Korean superheroine we have in Kira, the enterprising demonslayer. The pairing of the kumiho and Kira proves to be one of the most compelling aspects of this novel.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Warrior-The-Dragon-King-Chronicles/dp/0062091123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394520679&sr=8-1&keywords=Ellen+Oh

A Review of Amy Sueyoshi’s Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi (University of Hawaii Press, 2012).


(fantastic cover!)

I’ve been really behind on my reading and I finally was able to get around to Amy Sueyoshi’s Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi utterly fantastic scholarly monograph. It’s quite clear that an incredible amount of research went into this fascinating biography, which focuses on the complicated ways that Noguchi negotiated his social difference. The fluidity with which Noguchi treated his national background, racial difference, and queerness is evidence of a kind of tactician intent on making the most of his time in America: “While Yone cringed from the abuses and exclusions that markers of racial difference brought, he maximized what benefits he could reap from Japanese stereotypes to cushion him from the hardships of living as an Asian immigrant in the United States” (76). Such contextual considerations make Sueyoshi’s monograph nuanced, powerful, and absolutely indispensable in overturning blanket categorizations of Asian immigrant artists as potential sell-outs or at worst neoconservative traitors. Sueyoshi’s work is incredibly instructive in revealing how much immigrants had to work around ossified notions of the foreign and the exotic in order to gain any measure of social legibility or legitimacy. Sueyoshi’s excavation reveals a figure also quite carried away in various love affairs and friendships, including a same sex intimacy with the writer Charles Stoddard. As Sueyoshi explains the larger stakes in this book project, “Among histories of sexuality as well, Queer Compulsions more aggressively suggests the presence of Asians particularly in the United States who engaged in same-sex affairs. Studies on late Victorian American center largely on white and to some extent African Americans of marginalized sexualities who carved out vibrant communities. In cities where Noguchi resides such as San Francisco and New York, subcultures appeared to offer numerous venues that tolerated varied sexualities and intimacies” (4). In this respect, Sueyoshi does much to reorder the terrain of queer American histories and cultural studies in the in-depth examination of one particular life, a testament to the importance of a continuing eye toward addressing scholarly lacunae. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Sueyoshi’s book reads almost as a kind of creative work itself, written with a grasp of sequencing and plotting that makes this scholarship both rigorous AND readable: a devastatingly rare combination.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Queer-Compulsions-Sexuality-Affairs-Noguchi/dp/0824834976/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1394516986&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=amy+sueyoshi

A Review of Min Hyoung Song’s The Children of 1965 (Duke University Press, 2013).



Min Hyoung Song’s The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American provides an important, timely, and exciting intervention in the fields of cultural criticism, American literature, and race/ ethnic studies, especially in its evocation of the complicated positionality of the minority writer. Perhaps the most crucial and dynamic aspect of this monograph is the socioanthropological methodology that Song deploys by interviewing a score of Asian American writers and directly delving into the importance of authorial intentionality and identity politics. Song thus deftly mines the fertile and complex divide between cultural producers (professional authors) and cultural critics (professional readers) and in so doing relates the myriad formal and political impulses behind the construction and reception of so-called Asian American literature. On another note, Song’s style is especially refreshing; often times, he eschews critical distance from the writing process for a more approachable tone. In the conclusion to the book, he argues that “Namely, what I am coming around to as an important project for literary studies is the need for us to get over our hang-ups about making aesthetic judgments. It seems to me now, after much self-debate, that we need to be assertive about making our preferences for some literary works over others more explicit and to be able to articulate what guides these preferences” (222). Given the diversity of formal and contextual issues at hand in Asian American writing and literature, Song’s clarion call is of paramount concern. With an area that is expanding so rapidly that it is simply impossible to keep up with the sheer volume of output from American writers of Asian descent, Song is dutifully marking out what cultural critics have to do as part of their work: place some sort of value—however it may be defined—in what it is we decide to study. A must-read for any scholar or reader of cultural, literary, race/ethnic, Asian American studies.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Children-1965-Writing-American/dp/0822354519/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394687257&sr=8-1&keywords=Min+Song