Consumption and Identity in Asian-American Coming-of-Age Novels

STUDIES IN ASIAN AMERICANS
RECONCEPTUALIZING CULTURE,
HISTORY, AND POLITICS
Edited by
Franklin Ng
California State University, Fresno
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
STUDIES IN ASIAN AMERICANS
FRANKLIN N G , General Editor
CARING FOR CAMBODIAN AMERICANS ASIAN AMERICANS AND THE MASS MEDIA
A Multidisciplinary Resource for the A Content Analysis of Twenty United
Helping Professions States Newspapers and A Survey of
Sharon K. Ratliff Asian Americans Journalists
Virginia Mansfield-Richardson
DYNAMICS OF ETHNIC IDENTITY
Three Asian American Communities in HOMEGROWN CHINATOWN
Philadelphia The History of Oakland's Chinese
Jae-Hyup Lee Community
L. Eve Armentrout Ma
IMAGINING THE FILIPINO AMERICAN
DIASPORA CHINESE AMERICAN MASCULINITIES
Transnational Relations, Identities, and From Pu Manchu to Bruce Lee
Communities Jachinson Chan
Jonathan Y. Okamura
PRESS IMAGES, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND
MOTHERING, EDUCATION, AND FOREIGN POLICY
ETHNICITY A Case Study of US.-Japan Relations
The Transformation of Japanese from 1955-1995
American Culture Catherine A. Luther
Susan Matoba Adler
STRANGERS IN THE CITY
THE H M O N G REFUGEE EXPERIENCE IN The Atlanta Chinese, Their
THE UNITED STATES Community, and Stories of Their Lives
Crossing the River Jianli Zhao
Ines M. Miyares
BETWEEN THE HOMELAND AND THE
BEYOND KE'EAUMOKU DIASPORA
Koreans, Nationalism, and Local The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and
Cultures in Hawaï'I Filipino American Identities
Brenda L. Kwon S. Lily Mendoza
ASIAN AMERICAN CULTURE ON STAGE HMONG AMERICAN CONCEPTS OF

The History of the East West Players HEALTH, HEALING, AND CONVENTIONAL
Yuko Kurahashi MEDICINE
Dia Cha
DOING THE DESI THING
Performing Indianness in New York CONSUMPTION AND IDENTITY IN ASIAN
City AMERICAN COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS
Sunita S. Mukhi Jennifer Ann Ho
CONSUMPTION AND IDENTITY IN ASIAN
AMERICAN COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS
Jennifer Ann Ho
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Ho, Jennifer Ann
Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels
ISBN: 0-415-97206-x (hardback)
For Yolanda Yap Ho and Anthony Ho, my first role models of big
eating and even bigger thinking. To them I owe my love of words;
thus, this book is my way of telling them how much I love them.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
Feeding Identity, Subverting Stereotypes: Food and Consumption
in Contemporary Asian American Bildungsromane 1
Chapter One
Consuming Asian American History in Frank Chin's Donald Duk 23
Chapter Two
To Eat, To Buy, To Be: Consumption as Identity in Lois Ann
Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers 49
Chapter Three
Feeding the Spirit: Mourning for the Mother(land) in Lan Cao's
Monkey Bridge and Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman 79
Chapter Four
Fusion Creations in Gus Lee's China Boy and Gish Jen's
Mona in the Promised Land 111
Conclusion
Hungry for More? 143
Notes 149
Bibliography 179
Index 197
vii
Acknowledgments
A book about food must begin first and foremost with those who have fed my
intellectual curiosity. Specifically, I must acknowledge with much thanks and
gratitude the inspirational role models and mentors I have encountered, both
in and out of academia: Corky White, Jean Wu, Liz Ammons, Anita Patterson,
Laura Korobkin, Rajini Srikanth, Sunaina Maira, Sandy Johnson, Carol
Angus, Lorna Peterson, Nate Therien, Don O'Shea, Don Weber, Elizabeth
Young, Amy Kaplan, Amy Martin, Michelle Stephens, Sally Sutherland, Floyd
Cheung, Jonathan Lipman, Dan Czitrom, Mary Renda, Charles Hawley,
Tony Lee, Joshua Roth, Michelle Markley, Alberto Sandoval, Anita
Magovern, Holli Wilson, James Thompson, John McGowan, Shannon
Craigo-Snell, Karen Seto, and Beth Houghton. In particular, I must offer a spe-
cial note of thanks to Susan Mizruchi. Without her support, academic and
emotional, I would not have been able to start, let alone complete this project.
And I must also acknowledge the support that I received at Boston University,
Mount Holyoke College, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill—these institutions saw the gestation, development, and refinement of this
project and the guidance and stimulation I received from scholars and stu-
dents alike were necessary nourishment for the life of this project.
As important as my intellectual guidance has been, it is to the friends
who have fed me—literally when I was too tired to cook, as well as emotion-
ally when I was tired enough to give up—that I also owe a debt of gratitude.
So, for Beth, Ching-Yee, Elysa, Paul, Andrew, Heath, Stuart, Sheri, Scott,
Shannon, Seth, Joelle, Chris, Trish, Russell, Chris, Todd, Sejal, Stephanie,
Amy, Karen, John, Jay, Paul, and Gregg I can only say thank you and hope
that I have conveyed in actions if not in words how much you all mean to me.
Finally, this work would never have been possible without my hus-
band, Robert Primmer. He has read every word of this project and the reams
of paper that formed the preliminary drafts. He has agonized with me dur-
ing my setbacks and disappointments, and he has celebrated the small tri-
umphs along the way. Words cannot capture how much I owe him.
ix
Introduction
Feeding Identity, Subverting
Stereotypes: Food and Consumption
in Contemporary Asian American
Bildungsromane
"My memory begins with the taste of chicken blood. Coaxed from the
two-bone middle section of the wing, the crack of bone splintering be-
tween my teeth, the clotted marrow heavy on my tongue—the memory
of sweetness began before language, desire born before knowledge of
the words to describe it."
—Elaine Mar, Paper Daughter
Growing up, whenever people asked me about my nationality, I told them

that I was Chinese Jamaican. I don't know how or when I began to under-
stand that this question had nothing to do with my civic allegiance to a par-
ticular nation or my country of birth. Somehow, I understood that those
questioning me really wanted to know why I looked the way I did and where
my family was from. My social and political awareness of the thorny con-
structs that comprise one's ethnic or racial identity did not emerge until my
college years, when I began to differentiate among terms like nationality, eth-
nicity, race, and culture. So between the ages of eight and eighteen, I never
questioned the inherent (if unintentional) racism of the question and pro-
vided an answer that seemed perfectly clear to me, if not to my interrogators.
My father was from Chung King in Szechuan province—as a young boy he
had fled communist China for New York City, along with his four siblings
and my grandparents. My mother had come to the United States from
Kingston, Jamaica, by way of a nurse's college in Guilford, England; her tem-
porary layover in New York was indefinitely extended after meeting my fa-
ther. As a product of their immigrant union, I was obviously a child of three
2 Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels
nations—China, Jamaica, and the United States. When my pubescent self as-
serted my Chinese Jamaican identity, most people squinted close at me, try-
ing to distinguish the "Jamaican" features in my face and body. Although
many were satisfied at my explanation (especially younger peers who proba-
bly didn't exactly know what someone from Jamaica was supposed to look
like), others defiantly asked me how I could be Jamaican, because I didn't
"look" Jamaican. In reply to their skepticism, I would always say, "My
mother is from Jamaica; she speaks Jamaican and cooks Jamaican food."
Looking back on these encounters, I realize now that while others were
determining my identity based on phenotype and their own ethnic expecta-
tions, I understood my identity through my family and foodways. 1 At our
dinner table you could find ackee and salt fish accompanying roast duck and
bok choy, and rice came either with or without peas. 2 Examining my above
answer, I see that I was trying to authenticate my mother's Jamaican identity
through two prominent cultural markers: language and food. Although it
was untrue that my mother spoke "Jamaican," since there is no such lan-
guage, she did speak a Jamaican patois when in the company of relatives and
fellow Caribbean speakers and her Jamaican cooking was an indisputable
part of my existence and early memories.
Understanding that academic projects are and should be grounded in
textual analysis and theory, I open this work with these personal reminis-
cences because the idea for this study began through my realization of how
important food was and still is to my family's ethnic and racial identity and
how my understanding of my family and our foodways shaped my coming-
of-age and ethnic identity development. Nancy Miller identifies the insertion
of the personal into academic discourse as "personal criticism," a form of
theory that at its best demonstrates that "the personal in these texts is at odds
with the hierarchies of the positional—working more like a relay between po-
sitions to create critical fluency. Constituted finally in a social performance,
these autobiographical acts may produce a new repertory for an enlivening
cultural criticism" (25). My hope is that this project will continue the femi-
nist tradition of scholarship that is personal as well as political, because like
the adolescent protagonists in this study, my own coming-of-age involved an
understanding of my ethnic identity through my relationship with food. 3
Whether embracing or repudiating certain dishes, I learned to acknowledge
my ethnicity through the food that my family consumed and through my
awareness that the meals I had eaten as a child and adolescent provided nour-
ishment for both my physical body and my ontological sense of self.
Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels,
examines the intersections of foodways with the coming-of-age and ethnic
Feeding Identity, Subverting Stereotypes 3
identity development of young protagonists in a select group of contempo-

rary Asian American bildungsromane. 4 Using four discrete modes of iden-
tification as my organizing principle—historic pride, consumerism,
mourning, and fusion—I examine how Asian American adolescents chal-
lenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative eth-
nic affiliations through their relationship to food in six contemporary Asian
American coming-of-age novels: Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Lois Ann
Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge,
Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Gus Lee's China Boy, and Gish Jen's
Mona in the Promised Land. The explications of these Asian American texts
negotiate the tension between Asian and Asian American stereotypes prom-
ulgated in popular culture and more "authentic" self-representations of
Asian American consumptive practices. 5
Food is a critical medium for compliance with and resistance to
Americanization, a means for enacting the ambiguities of an Asian-ethnic
American identity that is already in a constant state of flux. 6 These young
protagonists' relationships to food represent their struggle to embrace an
American identity, forcing them to acknowledge their bi- or multi-cultural
status as hyphenated peoples in a country that historically has dealt with
race in black and white terms. Whether the authors of this study depict
first-generation immigrant families confused by American norms or fifth-
generation Chinese Americans, whose ancestors helped build the
Transcontinental Railroad, the portraits of Asian Americans in these texts
show food to be a critical means of acculturation. At the same time, Asian
American authors work against prevailing stereotypes that have associated
Asian Americans with food, its preparation, consumption, and service.
Although the authors of this study may not have consciously crafted their
novels with an eye toward undermining stereotypes of Asian Americans,
nonetheless, the complexity and richness of their works counters the prevail-
ing one-dimensional portraits of Asians as cooks, waiters, and other
fetishized objects of mainstream consumption. At the heart of my project is
my interest in the process of acculturation in Asian American literature: the
representation of a hyphenated American identity that is informed by ances-
tral roots in Asia and complicated by American national and cultural loyal-
ties. The works that I examine all grapple in one way or another with the
anxieties and pleasures issuing from the affirmation of ethnic identity in an
American context.
Of all the major racial groups in the United States, Asians in America
have had to self-consciously transform themselves into Americans. It is not
taken for granted that someone with Asian physical features is native to the
United States. 7 Instead, Asian Americans experience an ongoing tension of

looking "different" from those deemed to be "typically American." 8 In My
Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki comically depicts the myopic view that many
non-Asians have of Asian Americans through an exchange between her bira-
cial white-Japanese heroine, Jane Takagi-Little, and a Caucasian WWII vet-
eran, as he questions first her country of origin, her citizenship, and finally
her very identity, demanding "'What are you?'" to which Jane furiously ex-
claims, " 7 ...am...a... fucking. . . AMERICAN?" [italics in-text] (11).
The mixture of anger, pride, and frustration that Jane vents at this veteran
speaks to the ongoing problem that Asian Americans experience in trying to
find a place for themselves as legitimate American subjects.9
Thus, the texts of this project all act as counterdiscourses to the over-
whelming invisibility of Asian Americans in mainstream popular culture.
Each novel in this study affirms the place of Asians in America by focusing
on their relationship with food and consumption as a means for asserting
themselves as both Asian and American. In Donald Duk, Frank Chin uses
food to claim an American historical identity for his eponymous hero,
Donald Duk, and other Chinese Americans who can trace a literal as well
as cultural lineage to the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Chin
legitimates the Chinese contribution to this monumental engineering feat
and reinserts Chinese labor into American history. Wild Meat and the Bully
Burgers delineates the dangers of consumption—Lovey Nariyoshi's preoc-
cupation with buying and eating white products leaves her feeling at odds
with her ethnic identity. But Yamanaka also offers a corrective to Lovey's
unhealthy consumption by emphasizing her connection to the land of
Hawai'i. Both Cao and Keller, in Monkey Bridge and Comfort Woman re-
spectively, employ consumption imagery as a way to demonstrate their
characters' ambivalence at becoming Asian American. The mothers and
daughters share a deep sense of loss—of original culture, history, commu-
nity—that they experience in the process of their immigration and accultur-
ation to the United States. Their mourning and melancholia express the
difficult adaptations that they make from an Asian past to an American fu-
ture. And Gus Lee and Gish Jen demonstrate the alternatives to ethnic na-
tionalism and assimilation that Kai Ting and Mona Chang's multiple ethnic
affiliations symbolize in China Boy and Mona in the Promised Land. The
two protagonists retain their Chinese ethnicity, adapt to their American en-
vironment, and adopt yet a third ethnic identity, asserting a unique melding
of multiple American identities.
In her introduction to The Americas of Asian American Literature:
Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, Rachel Lee explains that she
is "not trying to construct a closed or unified field that will predict continu-
ing ways in which America will be imagined. Rather my inquiry follows a
borderland, hybrid, and multiple mode of inquiry in which I map the con-
tradictory incongruent representations of 'America'" (7). Like Lee, I do not
wish to claim that food functions in a consistent and predictive manner;
rather, this work is a thematic study that demonstrates how Asian American
authors portray the consumption patterns of their adolescent protagonists
as a means of promoting or challenging their Asian-ethnic American iden-
tity. Throughout these chapters, I implicitly pose a series of questions about
the relationship of food to ethnicity and stereotypes. For example: How
does food mediate the competing influences of the Asian-ethnic family and
the mainstream American peer group with whom these adolescent protago-
nists interact? How do these young protagonists negotiate intersections of
gender, race, and class through consumption? How does their rejection of
certain food items signal a rejection of their ethnic affiliation or their desire
to differentiate themselves from the older generation? Why do these writers
use scenes of consumption to stage character growth and to counteract
stereotypes in American popular culture?
The answers to these questions are important because the way we un-
derstand and talk about Asian Americans and foodways mirrors the way we
understand and talk about the process of Asian Americanization. 10 Food as
a symbol of identity is always fraught and full of complexities, complications,
and confusion: it is never as simple as eating Chinese food makes one Chinese
or its opposite—not-eating Chinese will allow one to forego a Chinese iden-
tity. Instead, both food and Asian Americanization try to balance between
that which can be assumed to be a stereotype (all Asians everywhere always
eat rice) with the facts of Asian American cultural preferences (many Asian
Americans have developed a taste for rice and therefore many Asian
Americans consume rice regularly). By using the texts of this study as coun-
ternarratives to the one-dimensional portraits of Asian Americans and food
promulgated in popular culture, these novels provide a more nuanced, com-
plex, and complete portrait of what it means to be Asian American. 11 And
analyzing the ways these authors have used food to convey their characters'
coming-of-age and ethnic identity helps us to better understand the place of
Asians in America and their struggle to claim America as their home.
I concentrate this study on adolescent protagonists because they are
particularly vulnerable to cultural influences due to the nature of their un-
stable position in society—they have grown out of childhood but have not
yet matured into adulthood. Adolescence marks a time of exploration and
experimentation, as these young adults attempt to find their place in society.
And Asian American adolescents exemplify this marginalized status through

the instability of both their age and their ethnic or cultural affiliation; as psy-
choanalyst Aaron Esman observes, the "adolescent of any class or color"
may be subject to "social ostracism or exclusion" as a result of their racial
identity (33). The uncertainty of ethnic identity combined with the classic in-
stability of adolescence makes a study of Asian American coming-of-age
novels particularly cogent, for Asian-ethnic American adolescents must at-
tend to the identity-shaping forces of the dominant society, as well as to pres-
sures from within their ethnic families.12 Asian-ethnic American youth thus
represent a dual instability. Adolescence is, in the words of psychologists
Patricia Phelan, Ann Locke Davidson, and Hanh Cao Yu, "a critical period
fraught with promise and peril—a time of passage in which biological, emo-
tional, and social factors converge to forecast the future of young adults"
(2). For adolescents of color, this process is obviously complicated by the ad-
ditional cultural strain of trying to locate themselves as minority subjects in
a predominantly white society. As Esman points out, "There is virtually uni-
versal agreement among social scientists that the phenomenology of adoles-
cence—its duration, its behavioral characteristics, its place in family and
social organization—is in large measure culturally determined" (39). The
cultural specificities of adolescence make the recognition of its racial and
ethnic particularities especially critical.
An examination of food with respect to Asian American subject for-
mation is long overdue; it represents a major lacuna in the field of cultural
studies. To date, there is no book-length work that examines how foodways
inform ethnic identity formation in literature, Asian American or otherwise.
And the number of books, articles, and chapters that contain any substan-
tive analysis of food and literature remains markedly scant, particularly any
treatment of food in American literature. 13 Although prominent Asian
American scholars such as Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Sheng-mei Ma have
written about food and Asian American literary and cultural productions,
and despite the fact that various literary scholars, anthropologists, and food
theorists have indicated the importance of foodways in mediating ethnic
identity, particularly with respect to Asian American subject formation,
scholarship in this area remains underdeveloped. 14 I hope that this study of
Asian American coming-of-age novels and food will be among the wave of
projects examining food and literature in the next few years. 15
T H E ASIAN AMERICAN BILDUNGSROMAN

The genre of the coming-of-age novel, bildungsroman, calls to mind the ex-
ploits of young male characters like Pip, Charles Dickens' hero in Great
Expectations, or Huck, the adventurous youth of Mark Twain's eponymous

Huckleberry Finn. In these classic coming-of-age tales, a young boy journeys
beyond the neighborhood of his youth, encounters adventure, romance, and
tragedy, and finally returns home wiser, richer (either literally or metaphor-
ically), and integrated as an adult into the larger society. James Hardin, ed-
itor of Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, privileges a
general, ahistorical definition of bildung that "could be used in a broad
sense linking it to the intellectual and social development of a central figure
who, after going out into the world and experiencing both defeats and tri-
umphs, comes to a better understanding of self and to a generally affirma-
tive view of the world" (xiii). Noting that the genre has become a
problematic area to define in its frequent misuse and abuse, Hardin asserts
that "hardly any other term is applied more frequently to a novelistic form
and scarcely any is used more imprecisely" because "part of the problem is
that there is no consensus on the meaning of the term Bildungsroman" (x).
Invoking various academics of the bildung tradition, from its first coinage
by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1870 to more contemporary scholars, Hardin at-
tempts to define, categorically, the essence of the novel of formation, but
concedes "that Bildung is a slippery concept, more so now than formerly,
one that is bound to our interpretation of cultural values" (xii).
Although Hardin seems troubled by the lack of specificity in defining
the genre of bildungsroman, various critics, from feminist scholars to Asian
American academics, have celebrated the elusiveness of the genre, seeking to
re-examine the novel of development by understanding how the gender,
race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality of the protagonist (or author) shapes the
adolescent's coming-of-age. In The Voyage In: Fictions of Female
Development, editors Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth
Langland extend and expand readings of bildungsromane to include novels
of formation by and about women. Their analyses of the impact of gender
in these female coming-of-age novels acknowledges a continuation with tra-
ditional bildung narratives yet also recognizes the unique differences and
challenges that gender imposes on the development of female protagonists.
"Our reformulation," the editors state, "participates in a critical tradition
by transforming a recognized historical and theoretical genre into a more
flexible category whose validity lies in its usefulness as a conceptual tool"
(Abel, Hirsch, Langland 14). Re-envisioning the bildungsroman through the
lives of women protagonists allows readers to understand the distinct im-
pact of gender in the coming-of-age process.
Building on the foundation of this study, I seek to replace "gender"
with "ethnicity," as my project demonstrates how the bildung tradition is
shaped anew when looking at Asian American coming-of-age novels.

Continuing the work by Asian American scholars Patricia Chu and Pin-chia
Feng, this study will re-envision the genre of bildungsroman by addressing
the impact of race and ethnicity on the subject formation of young Asian
Americans in Asian American narratives. Chu's study Assimilating Asians:
Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America demonstrates "how
Asian Americans re-write the genre [bildungsroman] to register their vexed
and unstable positions in America" (6) by focusing specifically on a gen-
dered reading of assimilation in select Asian American novels. For Chu, the
writers of her study use the novel of development and the trope of immigra-
tion as a means of affirming Asian American subjectivity in the face of his-
torical marginalization and exclusion. Arguing that "Asian American
rescriptions of the bildungsroman serve to create new paradigms for the
process of self-formation," Chu believes that her readings of Asian
American assimilation achieve a balance between hegemonic national forces
and Asian-ethnic self-definitions. Feng's redefinition of bildungsroman for
ethnic women writers, specifically the novelists Toni Morrison and Maxine
Hong Kingston, prompts her to define bildungsroman in highly inclusive
terms by incorporating cultural and historical circumstances that shape the
lives of ethnic American women. Arguing that her work is not separatist but
rather an attempt "to question the traditional study of the genre which turns
a literature of becoming, as Bakhtin calls it, into a criticism of the social
product," Feng asserts that her work "highlight[s] the importance of racial
(and to some extent) class factors, particularly the important role of mem-
ory, in the critical study of Bildungsroman" (15).
Both Chu and Feng's works have been useful for my understanding of
the political nature of subject formation. Furthermore, these scholars have
instructed me in the urgency of reformulating definitions of bildungsromane
to encompass the distinct differences of race and ethnicity in Asian American
narratives of development. Unlike Chu, however, I am not arguing that the
young protagonists of this study are grappling with assimilation issues; on
the contrary, I believe that the tension in these works does not lie between
an immigrant ethos and an American assimilation paradigm. Instead, I pro-
pose a third alternative extending beyond binaries of "Asian" and
"American" categories. Cultural critic Lisa Lowe points to "interventions"
as a mediation between these binaries: "Settling for neither nativism nor as-
similation, these interventions expose the apparent opposition between the
two as a constructed figure" (75). Like Lowe, I wish to explore a more hy-
brid and heterogeneous understanding of ethnic American identity, one
which will demonstrate the constructed realities of the protagonists' ethnic
identities. And although I understand Feng's project as a recuperation of a

genre that has traditionally excluded both ethnic American and women
writers, her widely inclusive definition of the genre (Feng allows almost all
writing by ethnic American women to be called bildungsromane, so long as
it features the identity formation of an ethnic woman) results in too broad
an analysis. Her readings preclude a nuanced understanding of how ethnic-
ity—and Asian-ethnic subject formation in particular—transforms the tra-
ditional coming-of-age narrative.
Given that the term "bildungsroman" is so contested, my own defini-
tion of Asian American coming-of-age novels seeks to incorporate the prin-
ciples of bildungsroman established by the earliest critics of the genre. Yet it
also attends to the differences of race, gender, and specifically ethnicity in the
development of Asian-ethnic American protagonists. The novels in this
study follow the same pattern: a young protagonist embarks upon a jour-
ney—mental, emotional, or physical—instigated by a crisis of identity, and
after his/her literal or philosophical adventures, s/he reconciles with his/her
home (symbolized most often through his/her Asian-ethnic family) and
his/her Asian-ethnic American identity. For if, generally speaking, the bil-
dungsroman is a novel of development in which adolescent characters must,
in Hardin's words, "consider an accommodation between the individual and
society" (xxi), then in Asian American bildungsromane, Asian-ethnic
American protagonists must not only negotiate their individual selves
against the larger Euro American society, but also against the society of their
families—often defined by an Asian-ethnic ancestry in conflict with the
hegemonic values of the dominant order. From Donald Duk's awakened
pride in the historic accomplishments of Chinese laborers on the
Transcontinental Railroad to Mona Chang's reconciliation with her Chinese
immigrant mother in Mona in the Promised Land, these young protagonists
develop their ethnic subjectivities by journeying outside their ethnic family
or community and then returning to an Asian American homecoming.
Understanding the bildungsroman either through a reinterpretation of
gender, ethnicity, or both is important because, in the words of the editors of
Voyage In: "Although the primary assumption underlying the
Bildungsroman—the evolution of a coherent self—has come under attack in
modernist and avant-garde fiction, this assumption remains cogent for
women writers who now for the first time find themselves in a world increas-
ingly responsive to their needs" (Abel, Hirsch, Langland 13). Like women
writers, Asian American authors (and other writers of color in the U.S.) find
their insistence on subject-formation and subjectivity called into question by
postmodern theories of fragmented identities. Re-viewing bildungsromane
with an Asian American lens allows readers to understand literature as a so-

cializing force, one that, in Lisa Lowe's words, "has a special status among
the works selected for a canon, for it elicits the reader's identification with the
bildung narrative of ethical formation" (98). Lowe further argues that Asian
American coming-of-age novels "offer other modes for imagining and nar-
rating immigrant subjectivity and community" because the texts "challenge
the concepts of identity and identification within a universalized narrative of
development" (101). Thus, studies of Asian American bildungsromane ques-
tion hegemonic definitions of self-hood and redefine American citizenship to
include all racial subjects.
Ideas of coherent selfhood are also important for Asian American sub-
jectivity, in that existing historical forces continue to mark the bodies of
Asians in American, exposing them to social forces (exclusionary immigra-
tion laws, unconstitutional internment, and discriminatory treatment) that
announce their racialized difference—a reality that cannot be erased or
elided by academic theories of postmodern subjectivity. As Henry Louis
Gates Jr. has noted, race may be a social construction, but when he and two
other prominent black scholars cannot get a taxi to stop for them in NYC,
a phenomenon that Houston Baker labels the "taxi fallacy," race becomes a
material force that shapes public perception and collapses all black men into
the category of untenable fare (147). 16 This study of Asian American bil-
dungsromane allows for a greater understanding of the racially marked bod-
ies of Asians in America and their continued conflation with signs of ethnic
difference, most notably with ethnic food.
F O O D AS SURVIVAL: EATING T O EXIST IN ASIAN AMERICA

Food is inextricably linked to survival. However, as writers and academics
from disciplines as varied as sociology, anthropology, women's studies, liter-
ary studies, cultural studies, and psychology (to name a few) have asserted,
food's importance is not confined to its life sustaining properties—it is
among the most important of sign systems, affording an extraordinary flex-
ibility of interpretation as symbol, metaphor, code, and language. This study
includes an analysis of food per se but also analyzes the broader constella-
tion of foodways—the practices, rituals, and customs surrounding all as-
pects of food preparation, consumption, and disposal. Jay A. Anderson
defines foodways as "a whole interrelated system of food conceptualization
and evaluation, procurement, distribution, preservation, preparation, con-
sumption, and nutrition shared by all members of a particular society" (qtd.
in Kaplan et al 122). Integral to this definition of foodways is the shared so-
cial relationship between people and food.
Since the first significant wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in

California in search of Gam Saan in the mid 19th century, food as survival
has been a social and historical reality for Asians living in America. 17 Many
Chinese miners ended up tending to frying pans as cooks and waiters instead
of panning for gold due to discriminatory laws. 18 From Filipino and
Japanese cane field workers of 19th century Hawai'i to contemporary
Vietnamese shrimp boat operators, Asian American labor and food have
been intimately linked for over a century and a half. Food has historically
been a complex and fraught arena for Asian American subjectivity since
Asians in America became coded by and through their relationship to the
food they cultivated, picked, packaged, prepared, and served. In both its ma-
terial and symbolic dimensions, food continues to inform subjectivity, as
contemporary film and television portraits tie Asian Americans irrevocably
with the food of their ethnic ancestries. Indeed, it is fair to say that Asian
Americans are almost invariably portrayed through foodways in television
and film. 19
This study demonstrates the integral connections between ontology
and food, linking adolescent emotional maturation with ethnic identity de-
velopment. Deborah Lupton, in Food, the Body, and the Self, writes that
"[f]ood and eating are central to our subjectivity or sense of self, and our ex-
perience of embodiment, or the ways that we live in and through our bod-
ies, which itself is inextricably linked with subjectivity. As such, the
meanings, discourses and practices around food and eating are worthy of
detailed cultural analysis and interpretation" (1). Lupton and other food
scholars like Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke have argued that food and on-
tology are undeniably connected. Indeed, one of the most famous and over-
used clichés, "You are what you eat," as explicated from Jean
Brillat-Savarin's famous quotation in The Physiology of Taste: "Tell me
what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are" (3), speaks to the popular
belief that human identity and consumption are inseparable. 20
"Foodways are an especially significant symbol," argues folklorist
Susan Kalcik, "in the communication of statements about ethnic identity in
the United States—about links with ethnicity and denial of it" (55). Kalcik's
essay "Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of
Identity" suggests that food as a symbol of ethnicity remains one of the most
visible and potent signs for ethnic identification. Similarly, Barbara and
James Shortridge, editors of The Taste of American Place: a Reader on
Regional and Ethnic Foods, argue that studying ethnic identity and food
"offers an appropriate way to approach the complicated issues of ethnic dif-
ferentiation" since food is both "easy to retain and to alter" (8). Indeed,
food's flexibility is one of the prime factors that various critics, like feminist
anthropologist Carole Counihan, cultural geographers David Bell and Gill
Valentine, and food historian Harvey Levenstein, have noted for the count-
less interpretations and meanings that food can bring to a study of subjec-
tivity.21 As literary critic Terry Eagleton writes, "If there is one sure thing
about food, it is that it is never just food—it is endlessly interprétable—ma-
terialised emotion" (204). Grasping the centrality of food—in both its prac-
tical and symbolic uses—leads inevitably to the recognition of its
significance for ethnic identity formation.
Food is a powerful symbol, conveying different meanings dependent
on various historical, social, gender, economic, sexual, racial, and ethnic
contexts. It is important, then, to understand food both as part of material
culture and as a figurative symbol, as anthropologist Mary Weismantel
notes: "It is because they are ordinarily immersed in everyday practice in a
material way that foods, abstracted as symbols from this material process,
can condense in themselves a wealth of ideological meanings" (7-8). For
food anthropologist Mary Douglas, food is a code that structures social re-
lations. By deconstructing the contents of different meals, Douglas clarifies
the various relationships among the consumers as well as their social atti-
tudes. Sociologist Shannan Peckham connects food with nation building, de-
lineating the power of specific foods to symbolize the collective
consciousness of a citizenry (174). And in Roland Barthes' essay "Toward a
Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption," Barthes describes
food as a culturally significant sign—food communicates social values and
attitudes; thus, tracing changes in foodways reveals changes in ideology. As
these various scholars suggest, food conveys the values of a society and na-
tion to the world; people define themselves against the consumption habits
of others: we are who we are because of what and how we eat, and they are
different because of what and how they eat.
ASIAN-ETHNIC AMERICAN SUBJECT FORMATION

The range of historic, linguistic, religious, and cultural differences that the
term "Asian American" encompasses prompted Valerie Lee, director of the
1992 Asian American Renaissance Conference, to ask, "What do [Asian
Americans] have in common except for racism and rice?" (qtd. in Mura
197). Indeed, the differences among Asian-ethnics (which comprise groups
as disparate as Pakistani Americans, Cambodian Americans, Korean
Americans, and Guamanian Americans) in the United States are greater than
among different U.S. racial groups, and as the history of the U.S. Census
Bureau demonstrates, it has been historically difficult to categorize Asian
Americans. 22 Lee's rhetorical answer to her own question, that racism and
rice are the only two unifying commonalties among Asian-ethnic Americans,
is particularly germane to this study because it is precisely the challenges of
overcoming societal oppression and achieving self sustenance that the pro-
tagonists of these Asian American coming-of-age novels engage in.
In this project, I concentrate on an Asian-ethnic identity versus a pan-
Asian American racial identity because I believe that using race as the only
category of identity would be too broad and would not allow me to see the
nuances of various Asian ethnicities. I am especially interested in looking at
similarities and differences among Asian-ethnic groups (Chinese,
Vietnamese, Korean, etc.) that are included within the racial category of
Asian American. I treat ethnicity as separate from but also as complicated
by racial classifications, in particular, because the young protagonists of this
study primarily identify as Asian-ethnic Americans rather than simply as
Asian American. The identity crisis in Mona in the Promised Land is be-
tween Mona's allegiance to her inchoate Jewishness and her identification
with her Chinese parents. And even in the multiethnic Asian American cul-
tural climate of Hawai'i, both Lovey Nariyoshi ( Wild Meat and the Bully
Burgers) and Beccah Bradley (Comfort Woman) come to an identification
and reconciliation with their Asian-ethnic parents (Japanese and Korean, re-
spectively). Moreover, this focus on ethnicity is especially warranted by the
fact that all of the young protagonists of this study are of the 1.5 or second
generation and beyond. 2 3 And as theorists have pointed out, "ethnic iden-
tity is probably the most significant topic for understanding second-genera-
tion Asian Americans' life experiences" (Min and Park ix).
My understanding of the differences among the terms "race," "ethnic-
ity," and "culture" has been greatly influenced by Michael Omi and Howard
Winant's work Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the
1980s. Omi and Winant thoroughly dissect the social constructedness of
racial identifications, stressing the necessity for grasping race as a separate cat-
egory irreducible to ethnicity or class-based paradigms. Still, political and so-
cial circumstances affect the people who must negotiate the intersections of
these terms in their daily lives: "In our view, racial meanings pervade US soci-
ety, extending from the shaping of individual racial identities to the structur-
ing of collective political action on the terrain of the state" (Omi and Winant
66). Although the terms are confusing and oftentimes used interchangeably, I
define race as both a social construction and a set of historical circumstances
that influence the way people view themselves and others based on shared
physical or phenotypic traits. Ethnicity differs from race because it describes
a set of shared cultural practices (language, foodways, religion, art, literature,
etc.) and a history of a people who either inhabit or trace their roots back to
a specific geographic region; unlike race, ethnicity is not necessarily informed
by one's physical features. Additionally, I understand the very broad term of
"culture" to refer to specific practices and beliefs that are not necessarily re-
gional. For example, one can speak of "youth culture," "queer culture," and
"academic culture," to name but a few examples.
As noted above, race and ethnicity may be understood to be social con-
structions, yet the reality for people, like Asian Americans, living in the U.S.
as racial and ethnic minorities is that their experiences are marked by their
phenotype. Cultural critic Anthony Appiah's model of racial/ethnic identity
formation in Color Conscious: the Political Morality of Race is useful for
understanding identity as both a social construct as well as a biological fact.
Appiah represents the genetic material people are born with as a toolbox:
the ways in which people use these tools symbolize the choices they make in
how they identify. Appiah's model is neither purely essentialist nor construc-
tionist, for in his own words, "we make choices but we don't determine the
options among which we choose" (96). We are constructions up to a point,
but constructions limited by our physical, social, and cultural composition.
Sociologist Mary Waters concurs by suggesting that ethnic identity is not
fixed but rather fluid and unstable, yet identity choices remain limited by
generation, class, geography, and age. 24 And like literary critic Traise
Yamamoto, I also wish to ground this study in "the awkward juncture be-
tween two claims: that identity is a highly contingent and constructed cate-
gory . . . and the somewhat contradictory assertion that for all the language
of postmodern subjectivity, there remains a place for the self" (3). Ethnic
identity (as well as racial identity) formation may be bound to one's essen-
tial self, yet it is also shaped by the social and cultural forces available at our
disposable—the freedom of limited choice.
Noting the "double edged" nature of identity formation, literary critic
Sheng-mei Ma argues that identity "[o]n the one hand, []implies subjectivity
which stems partly from the human agent or self-will; on the other, it suggests
being subjected to a system beyond one's control or even consciousness"
(Immigrant Subjectivities 7). Race may be a social construct, but the ability
of Asian Americans to create their own identities is always bound by both
terms of their subject position in America. They can choose to identify as
American, but their Asian phenotype will always make them vulnerable to
dominant conceptions of who they are. As sociologist Mia Tuan affirms, no
matter how many generations Asians can trace back their lineage in the
United States, "many people continually view and treat them as outsiders or
foreigners within their own country" (2). And historian David Yoo, studying
the generation of American-born Japanese in the critical period of

1929-1949, reinforces the idea that identity formation among Asian
Americans is not simply a matter of assimilation or ethnic nationalism but
rather an acknowledgement of "how identity formation involve[s] both ac-
commodation and resistance" (2). For Yoo, the Nisei of his study crossed
borders fluidly and frequently, occupying multiple identities without adher-
ing to an absolute Japanese or American subjectivity. Similarly, understand-
ing Asian-ethnic subject formation as contingent on a relationship with food
and consumption simultaneously marks and refutes their difference in their
claim for American identity. Asian-ethnic Americanization does not remain
static nor does it conform to the either/or choices of ethnic nationalism or
total assimilation. As Latino scholar Alberto Sandoval suggests, "in relation
to identity formation . . . ethnicity is a process, not a product" (128).
Finally, I recognize that the necessarily limited scope of this project will
not allow me to attend to literary representations of every Asian-ethnic
American group. The authors of this study are from East Asian and
Southeast ethnic groups: Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. This
study is not meant to be comprehensive in its range of texts or ethnic groups;
rather, I hope to introduce readings of Asian American literature that exam-
ine the trope of food and its relevance to the Asian-ethnic American families
of select bildungsromane. There is a rich and burgeoning literature in the
U.S. by and about other Asian-ethnicities, particularly by South Asian
American writers. 25 My aim, in part, is to lay the groundwork for future
studies of foodways and Asian American literature.
IMAGES OF ASIAN AMERICANS IN POPULAR CULTURE

In coming-of-age and coming to terms with their hyphenated American sta-
tus, Asian American adolescents encounter popular culture stereotypes of
Asians in such mediums as print and television advertisements, television
shows, and Hollywood films, where they find Asian Americans continually
portrayed in terms of their consumptive practices. From 19th century pam-
phlets depicting Chinese men as vermin-eating opium addicts to contempo-
rary media portraits of Asians in subservient positions as cooks and waiters,
the conflation of Asian Americans with preparing, eating, or serving food re-
inforces their marginal status. 26 My initial understanding of America as a
"melting pot" escaped the crucible of liquid metal conceived by Israel
Zangwill in his 1908 play. 27 Instead, while watching Saturday morning car-
toons in the mid-1970s, I understood the phrase "melting pot" as a soup
kettle in the School House Rock episode "The Great American Melting
Pot," as the lesson of multiethnic tolerance in America was emphasized by
an animated Statue of Liberty stirring a huge cauldron shaped in the outline

of the United States (the continental portion). 2 8 Different cartoon children
happily swim about in this multiethnic stew, as Lady Liberty stirs these dis-
parate ethnic ingredients together to form one American meal. Young view-
ers learn about ethnic assimilation and racial tolerance through the melting
pot symbol, while a woman's voice sings "You simply melt right in/it does-
n't matter what your skin/it doesn't matter where you're from/or your reli-
gion/you jump right in/to the great American melting pot."
However, a close examination of the children in this swimming pool-
cum-soup pot reveals the inherent fallacy of the melting pot message. The
children of European extraction, dressed in one-piece swimsuits or trunks
with no other discernible ethnic physical or sartorial features, do melt into
one another. In the section that precedes the children jumping into the melt-
ing pot, adults dressed in late 19th century traditional costumes from their
native lands hold flags from their respective European countries:
Czechoslovakia, Greece, Finland, and Italy. These 19th century immigrants
are replaced in the following scene by their white, Euro American pubescent
descendants. These Euro American children then jump into the melting pot
of America and remain indistinguishable from one another—you cannot tell
apart the German American girl from the Swedish American girl. However,
the cartoon depicts with racist and stereotypic distinction non-European
American children—an African-American boy is distinguished by his kinky
hair and overemphasized lips, a Chinese American boy wears a Mao cap and
is depicted with buck teeth and two lines for eyes (in contrast to the two dots
used with the European American children), and most notable of all, two
different Indian American children occupy a central place in this melting
pot—the first makes an entrance wearing a turban and lying on a bed of
nails that also acts as an inflatable raft. The second Indian child also wears
a turban and sits prominently inside an inner tube. To emphasize the myth
of the melting pot further, certain lines are recited when the images of the
African American boy and the Indian child appear onscreen: the line "It
doesn't matter what your skin" accompanies the image of the African
American boy, and when the Indian boy with the turban appears, the line
"or your religion" heralds his entry into the melting pot. 29
Despite the song's title, it is clear from an analysis of this cartoon that
the only immigrants who truly "melt" are those from European back-
grounds. And this message is subtly reinforced throughout the cartoon, as it
opens with a girl flipping through a family album of her Russian immigrant
grandmother and her Italian immigrant grandfather. As the photos of this
girl's ancestors turn into animated figures, the song running throughout the
cartoon emphasizes that these two immigrants from Europe had "heard
about a country/where life might let them win/they paid the fare to
America/and there they melted in." If you are a white immigrant, life in
America can let you win because you are able to successfully assimilate into
a white-Anglo Saxon culture. But if your skin is darker or if your religion
does not adhere to a Judeo-Christian belief system, then you will be marked
as ethnic and different, unable to melt into the pot of American assimilation.
Thus, the darker, ethnic children of the great soup kettle of America repre-
sent unmeltable spices, used for decoration but not meant to be mixed in
with their whiter Euro-American peers. 30
"The Great American Melting Pot" is a relatively benign example of
influential media; however, other examples from popular culture that con-
flate Asians with food have much more insidious political ramifications.
When a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided on April 1, 2001, a
flurry of anti-Chinese sentiment proliferated in American media outlets.
Comedians on Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show, and The Late Show
with David Letterman told numerous off-color jokes, and across the nation
radio shock jocks demanded the return of the spy plane in crank phone calls
to Chinese restaurants and residents with Chinese surnames. 31 Most dis-
turbing among the racist rhetoric promoted in these different media venues
was a return to a late 19th century invective of castigating Chinese in terms
of their consumptive patterns—most particularly those that charge Chinese
with eating pets and other unsavory vermin. In a Thomas Oliphant four-
panel political cartoon that ran in many U.S. newspapers, Oliphant depicts
the figure of Uncle Sam eating in a Chinese restaurant. A waiter who resem-
bles Chinese president Jiang Zemin spills a plate of "crispy fried cat gizzards
with noodles" onto Uncle Sam and then demands that Uncle Sam apologize
for getting in his way. In the last panel of the cartoon, Uncle Sam angrily
leaves the restaurant, dubbed "Hainan Palace" while the waiter/Zemin
jumps up and down yelling "Apologize Lotten Amellican!"
The setting of the Chinese restaurant and the meal of cat gizzards
spilled on Uncle Sam continues to stereotype and villify Chinese through
food. Oliphant's use of a restaurant setting and an unsavory (and inedible
by American standards) meal for comic purposes highlights the racial dif-
ference of the waiter/Zemin and by extension all Chinese people (whether
in China or the U.S.). It also recalls late 19th century minstrel songs that
portrayed Chinese as comic and uncivilized figures due to their consump-
tion of taboo food such as mice, cats, and dogs. 32 Robert G. Lee, in his
work Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, comments on the use
of the minstrel figure John Chinaman in late-19th-century anti-Chinese
rhetoric: "The minstrel representation of the Chinese immigrant as a racial

Other relied on a trope of insurmountable cultural difference. Unlike the
minstrel characterizations of free blacks, who were represented as fraudu-
lent citizens because they were supposed to lack culture, the Chinese were
seen as having an excess of culture" (35). According to Lee's analysis, min-
strel songs and other 19th-century works in popular culture depicting
Chinese as vermin eaters used food to highlight the threatening racial dif-
ference of Chinese immigrants, thereby promoting the anti-Chinese move-
ment to expel these inassimilable foreigners from the United States.
Oliphant's cartoon carries on this tradition of depicting Chinese as aliens
through food while delivering an implicit message of racial inferiority. As
Mia Tuan notes, "During times of doubt, all persons perceived to have
Asian features are assumed to be newcomers to this country" (39). Chinese
and other Asians in America will be, in Tuan's words, "forever foreign"
through their phenotype and their food. 33
As demonstrated above, food has historically been used to portray
Asian Americans in popular culture in very limited terms, which often re-
sults in negative portrayals and stereotypes. And the danger of stereotypes
is, of course, their ideological function—their attempt to fix and generalize
groups of people (in this case, those of Asian descent living in the U.S.),
which effects their dehumanization. Whether as a means of vilification (the
"yellow peril") or valorization (the "model minority"), the stereotype limits
the full humanity of the subject, as David Eng and Shinhee Han write in their
essay "A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia," the power of the stereotype lies
in its ability "to deny the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of vari-
ous Asian American groups that do not fit its ideals of model citizenry"
(674). 34 Furthermore, stereotypes are debilitating not only because they ig-
nore the full scope of Asian American subjectivity but because they become
part of the ideological apparatus that upholds a hegemonic system of white
superiority, as Jachinson Chan affirms: "[S]tereotypes marginalize specific
racial groups in order to sustain the superiority of the dominant group" (7).
And as the recurrence of themes involving unsavory food and Asian
Americans make clear, the repetition of these stilted images are important in
keeping alive the currency of the stereotype, for as Homi Bhabha explains,
the stereotype is inherently unstable since it is "a form of knowledge and
identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place,' already
known, and something that must anxiously be repeated" (66). Whether
through the seemingly harmless lesson featuring the American Melting Pot
in an animated video or through political cartoons in contemporary news-
papers, continued stereotypes of Asian Americans and foodways confine
Asian American subjects to a discourse that marks them as foreign others

whose consumptive habits preclude their full U.S. acceptance.
Yet in other types of cultural production, most notably Asian
American literature, food becomes a symbol that shows the humanity of
Asian American characters and the complex process of Asian
Americanization. The adolescents in the Asian American bildungsromane of
this study neither melt right in nor remain inassimilable aliens. Their jour-
ney toward maturity and ethnic self-awareness reveals a much more com-
plex understanding of consumption and heritage. These writers use food
metaphors, images, and tropes to convey the process of ethnic identity de-
velopment in ways that counteract negative Asian stereotypes promoted in
mainstream American culture. Thus, the portrayal of food in these works
becomes an antidote to the myths of melting pot assimilation fostered in
"The Great American Melting Pot" or alien foreignness depicted in
Oliphant's cartoon.
T H E ROLE OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM &

W H A T LIES AHEAD
Asian American literature's social and activist role is one that many literary
scholars have taken seriously, and I write in the spirit of this tradition. As
Patricia Chu, Lisa Lowe, and Benedict Anderson have demonstrated, the
ideology of a nation and culture is, in part, perpetuated through its litera-
ture. 35 Commenting on pioneering Asian American writers, Frank Chin and
Jeffrey Paul Chan, Rachel Lee writes: "Chin and Chan disseminate the idea
that the realm of discourse is an important arena in which to fight racism . . .
[they] catalogue the ways in which the social oppression of Asian Americans
manifests itself in the negative stereotypes of Asians circulated by main-
stream writers and in the dearth of resistance literature authored by Asian
Americans" (7-8). Therefore, one purpose of Asian American literary stud-
ies becomes an overtly political one—to combat the racist assumptions and
portraits of Asians in America in order to ensure that Asian American sub-
jectivity will be defended and upheld in and through the cultural produc-
tions of imaginative fiction and academic discourse. For Lee,
interdisciplinary work is self-consciously political, linked to a tradition of
literary scholarship that seeks
to illuminate individual literary works, not only in relation to the socio-

historical contexts from which they arise, but also relative to the struc-
tures of knowledge through which these texts are channeled. In other
words, cultural artifacts are never divorced from the way they are re-
ceived—or made to mean—in accordance with the dominant ideologies
of the time. Rosemary Hennessy calls this type of analysis 'ideology

critique,' which is 'a mode of reading that recognizes the contesting in-
terests at stake in discursive constructions of the social' (15). It regards
the act of reading itself as an ideological practice of making a text intel-
ligible for specific political and economic (power-laden) purposes, (viii)
Like Lee and other Asian American scholar-activists, I seek to demonstrate

the power of these texts in re-imagining an American identity grounded in
the social and historical realities of young Asian-ethnic Americans. By draw-
ing contrasts between these novels and prevailing stereotypes of Asian
Americans in popular culture, I too hope to engage in "ideology critique" in
order to claim the legitimacy and authority of Asian American texts within
the canon of American literature and culture. If the proliferation of Asian
American novels, short stories, poems, and scholarly works is any indica-
tion, the critical mass of Asian American literature (both in terms of num-
bers as well as awards) will continue to be an important force in American
letters well into the next century. 36
Studying and critiquing Asian American literature is important be-
cause even after being in residence in the United States for over 100 years,
Asian Americans are still grappling with how they can belong and where
they fit into U.S. society and its citizenry. The first Chinese sojourners were
denied citizenship, ownership of land, and eventually entry into the U.S.;
their presence in the U.S. created the first legislation that defined who had
the legal right to claim an American identity. 37 All subsequent immigration
and citizenship laws were based upon this first case of Asian exclusion. 38 By
better understanding this process—the means by which immigrants become
American citizens, legally, socially, and culturally—we as a nation can try
not to repeat the mistakes of the past when confronted with the next wave
of new American immigrants arriving at our shores. 39
Finally, what follows is a brief description of the four substantive chap-
ters comprising this study:
Chapter one: "Consuming Asian American History in Frank Chin's
Donald Duk" focuses on food as a language that conveys ethnic pride.
Through the eponymous character's growing appreciation of Chinese food
and his understanding of the Chinese contribution to American history,
Donald changes from a boy who hates his name, neighborhood, and her-
itage into a young man who is proud to claim a Chinese American identity.
By reinscribing Chinese back into American history and by portraying
Chinese men in a variety of empowering occupational roles, Chin directly
challenges the legacy of Hop Sing, the pidgin-speaking Chinese cook on
Bonanza, as well as the general 19th century depiction of passive Chinese
coolies and kowtowing Chinese houseboys. Through the characters of

Donald and his father, King Duk, Chin creates a "yellow" paradigm to em-
power Asian American men.
Chapter two: "To Eat, To Buy, To Be: Consumption as Identity in Lois
Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers" investigates the insepa-
rable definitions of consumerism, as both eating and buying, and the con-
sumption of mass media through an analysis of the consumptive habits of
Lovey Nariyoshi, the adolescent protagonist of Yamanaka's first novel. The
edible commodities—Coca Cola—identified with white culture and craved
by Lovey are set against the homemade food—wild turkey and deer—con-
sumed by the Nariyoshi family. The trademark items symbolize the white
world Lovey wants to exchange for her Japanese roots. Additionally,
Yamanaka's emphasis on the "local" and her depiction of the working-class
Nariyoshi family counters both the misrepresentation of Hawai'i, as pro-
moted in films like Pearl Harbor and South Pacific, and model minority
stereotypes of upwardly mobile Asian Americans. Her novel creates a coun-
terdiscourse to Hollywood's exotic spectacle and affirms the place of Asian
Pacific Americans in Hawai'i.
Chapter three: "Feeding the Spirit: Mourning for the Mother(land) in
Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge and Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman" shows
the relationship among mourning, food, and the longing for a former home-
land. In both novels, the process of grieving and identity formation become
intertwined with scenes of eating and rituals of mourning, as food consump-
tion becomes a means of compensating loss. Additionally, the racial melan-
cholia experienced by these immigrant mothers becomes transacted through
food rituals and passed down to their Americanized daughters: food ex-
presses the trauma of their displacement. As the mother-daughter pairs in
each novel cry out their grievances against the losses they suffer from war,
immigration, and acculturation, their literary portraits counter screen im-
ages of passive war refugees and silent prostitutes perpetuated in Vietnam
War films, so that Cao and Keller give voice to a population in the U.S.—
Asian refugee women—who have traditionally been silenced by popular cul-
ture and U.S. society.
Chapter four: "Fusion Creations in Gus Lee's China Boy and Gish
Jen's Mona in the Promised Land" looks at the construction of multiethnic
affiliations through the melding of food and culture. The adolescent pro-
tagonists, Kai Ting and Mona Chang, demonstrate the vital possibilities of
identifying across ethnic and racial boundaries, where food becomes the
primary basis for the framing of multiethnic identities. By self-consciously
choosing their ethnic identities based on affinity with their peers, Kai and
Mona challenge both assimilation and ethnic nationalism by introducing a

third alternative to ethnic identification. Positioning these novels against
the film What's Cooking? allows for a discussion of the difficulty of relying
on food to signify ethnicity, because while the novels' use of food demon-
strates a real fusion of cultures, the scenes of consumption in What's
Cooking? continue to reinforce stereotypes that emphasize the foreign ori-
gins of Asian Americans.
References
Table of Contents
Index ix 1 23 49 79 111 143 149 179 197 vii

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STUDIES IN ASIAN AMERICANS

ASIAN AMERICAN CULTURE ON STAGE HMONG AMERICAN CONCEPTS OF

Growing up, whenever people asked me about my nationality, I told them

identity development of young protagonists in a select group of contempo-

United States. 7 Instead, Asian Americans experience an ongoing tension of

And Asian American adolescents exemplify this marginalized status through

T H E ASIAN AMERICAN BILDUNGSROMAN

Expectations, or Huck, the adventurous youth of Mark Twain's eponymous

shaped anew when looking at Asian American coming-of-age novels.

identities. And although I understand Feng's project as a recuperation of a

with an Asian American lens allows readers to understand literature as a so-

F O O D AS SURVIVAL: EATING T O EXIST IN ASIAN AMERICA

Since the first significant wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in

ASIAN-ETHNIC AMERICAN SUBJECT FORMATION

the generation of American-born Japanese in the critical period of

IMAGES OF ASIAN AMERICANS IN POPULAR CULTURE

an animated Statue of Liberty stirring a huge cauldron shaped in the outline

rhetoric: "The minstrel representation of the Chinese immigrant as a racial

Asian American subjects to a discourse that marks them as foreign others

T H E ROLE OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM &

to illuminate individual literary works, not only in relation to the socio-

of the time. Rosemary Hennessy calls this type of analysis 'ideology

Like Lee and other Asian American scholar-activists, I seek to demonstrate

coolies and kowtowing Chinese houseboys. Through the characters of

Mona challenge both assimilation and ethnic nationalism by introducing a

Index ix 1 23 49 79 111 143 149 179 197 vii

Hardin, James N. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia,

Kim, Jean. "Asian American Identity Development Theory." New Perspectives on

Matsunami, K. Odo. International Handbook of Funeral Customs, Westport,

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time. Princeton:

Waters, Mary C. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley:

Yep, Laurence. Dragon's Gate. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

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