Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility

Author: Christopher Fan

Publication Date: 2024 

Publisher:‎ Columbia University Press 

Total Page: 320 

Price: $35 / £30 

ISBN: 9780231213233

Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia University Press, 2024) provides an account of contemporary Asian American fiction as the expression of the professional class formation of its authors. The story it tells begins with the concrete material relations and geopolitical dynamics that cohered Northeast Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China) as a political, economic and ideological region, beginning in the Japanese colonial period and continuing through the US and now Chinese neoimperial periods. The transimperial emphasis on modernisation and rapid industrialisation in this region generated the conditions for the massive waves of emigration to the US after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, through which Asian America has been refashioned into what is now the fastest-growing ethnic group in the US, as well as the most occupationally concentrated in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) fields. 

Building upon yet departing from predominantly race-first accounts of Asian American literary production and history, Asian American Fiction After 1965 examines how post-65 Northeast Asian American authors emerged from these conditions as professional and economic subjects who must contend with a racial form in which they are only legible as STEM professions. It also shows how their writing grapples with these historical forces and, in doing so, brings into relief a fundamental shift in the racial form of the Asian and Asian American – away from the manual labour subjects of industrial capitalism to the knowledge worker subjects of deindustrialisation. 

Through readings of authors like Ted Chiang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, Charles Yu and dozens more, this book shows how their work, and Asian American literature in general, is so much more than a literature limited to identitarian anxieties bounded by a US historical and political horizon. Instead, it is a transnational literature that is highly attuned to the most expansive political economic dynamics, as well as to the most intimate experiences of those dynamics. Taiwanese American authors play a special role in this account (as detailed in Chapter 5), owing to the relative economic, academic and professional success of Taiwanese American immigrants, compared even to other Asian American groups. Their class status situates them awkwardly within an Asian American racial form that is already itself awkwardly situated in a predominantly black–white US structure of racial hierarchy that equates economic with racial abjection.

Chapter 1, “Deep Conditions of the World: Modernization Theory and Transimperiality,” outlines the transimperial history of modernisation and rapid industrialisation. Focusing on midcentury modernisation theory’s influence on Northeast Asian economic development, it shows how the link between scientific positivism and economic growth that it promoted led to the production of STEM human capital as well as fantasies of economic integration. It outlines the historical links between modernisation theory and Asian America through readings of work by Ruth Ozeki and Ken Liu, both of whose explorations of Asian American identity have led them to confront questions of historical justice across Japanese and US imperialisms.

Chapter 2, “Writing Like an Engineer: Postracial Form and Utopia,” traces “postracial aesthetics” into the racial discourses of Japan–US transimperiality. Key to this genealogy is the elevation of the figure of the engineer during the postwar years as a kind of national hero in the developing world. The engineer bears not only national hopes of economic development and global integration, but also the worldview of modernisation theory that believed itself to be ideologically and scientifically beyond race. The conviction that economic growth was available to all human societies, regardless of race and history, and that the only precondition for economic “takeoff” was taking the right steps through stages of development, projects a utopianism that is captured by an amplified version of “postracial” aesthetics. All of this is exemplified in the fiction of Ted Chiang, which not only brackets historical contingency but literary style itself. The result is a kind of technical writing that crystalises an “expository impulse” that is a key formal register of science fictionality, and that can be tracked in post-65 Asian American fiction more broadly.

Chapter 3, “Shakespeare Words: Professional Identity and Literary Style,” turns to the oeuvre of Chang-rae Lee, the prose-poet of the post-65 Asian American professional–managerial class (PMC). It focuses on how the central concern over professional identity in Lee’s work undermines the allegory of race and literary style that has informed Asian Americanist literary criticism. Style is at once the most personal and the most typical aspect of an author’s writing, and Lee’s style in particular develops in response to the interrelation between Japan–US transimperiality and post-65 Asian American PMC class anxieties: a response that is most powerfully registered in the trope of the two-cultures conflict, in which an excessive aestheticism compensates for the disappointments of occupational concentration.

Chapter 4, “Genres of Deprofessionalization: Economic Subjectivity and Chinese American Women Writers,” examines a generic continuity in Chinese American women’s writing that contends with a distinctly post-65 struggle to reconcile interconnected conflicts pertaining to occupational concentration, normative femininity and Asian economic futurity. Beginning with a reading of the theme of deprofessionalisation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976), this chapter then leaps forward in time to a recent cluster of Chinese American women authors whose debut novels feature characters that, like Kingston’s protagonist, resolve these conflicts by cathecting professional identity and an emerging US–China economic subjectivity.

The concluding chapter, “Enough? Semiperipheral Structures of Feeling in the Taiwanese American Novel,” shows how in recent Taiwanese American novels the trope of the ideologically unreliable narrator can be traced back to Taiwan’s emergence into semiperipheral geopolitical status. Because of Taiwan’s histories of colonialism and national ambiguity, the stakes of racial discourse in fiction by authors like Kathy Wang, Jade Chang and Charles Yu are amplified not only by the act of return, but also by the semiperipheral ambiguities of Taiwanese identity. 

What emerges in these chapters is an account of how post-65 Northeast Asian American fiction has responded formally to the shifting geopolitical relations between Northeast Asia and the United States. What I hope becomes apparent is how such an account depends on taking seriously the questions of what makes a text Asian, and what it means for an author to be from Asia. Through the geographical itineraries they trace, and the temporalities they evoke, the texts examined in these chapters, along with their authors, bring into relief these material realities as well as their most private dimensions. Conflicts between parents and children, contradictions of cultural identity, the fraught process of envisioning a future for oneself and one’s community – these are not isolated events but dialectical aspects of a broader historical process in which one is implicated not only via race, but also class. One of Asian American Fiction After 1965’s core aims is to help us understand the deep anxiety, also known as model minoritisation, in which PMC status (whether STEM professional or author) will never be good enough. Not only because model minoritisation might assign higher material ambitions, but because the transimperial project of modernisation was itself never good enough for the countries it guided, the region it cohered, or the human capital whose fantasies it shaped.