Course description

By the end of the 1940s, Asian-Americans seemed to be on the verge of integrating into American society. Through the eyes of novelists and filmmakers, this course tracks the Asian-American experience as it has grown increasingly diverse, both ethnically and economically, into the 21st century.

From American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. Illustration: © Gene Luen Yang, used with permission of First Second Books

Required books and films

America Is in the Heart

(1946)

by Carlos Bulosan

Based loosely on the author’s experiences, this sprawling narrative chronicles life for the many Filipinos who arrived in the United States in the shadow of 1924 legislation that halted immigration from the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific and severely curtailed immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. Filipinos were exempt because their country was then a U.S. territory. Often unpolished in prose and plot, America Is in the Heart follows the narrator from his childhood in the Philippines to his adulthood spent traveling throughout the American West as a migrant worker, and it conveys the critical role that dislocated Filipinos played in the great working-class struggles that defined the interwar years in this country. A union organizer of agricultural workers and a published poet, Bulosan was selected by President Roosevelt to write one of the “Four Freedoms” essays (“Freedom from Want”) that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943.

Citizen 13660

(1946)

by Miné Okubo

These 206 sketches were created by Okubo for friends and graphically dramatize how as a young art student she was swept from her Berkeley home and moved first to an assembly center at Tanforan Race Track, south of San Francisco, and later to an internment camp in Utah, as wartime animosities against the Japanese nation fed into active discrimination against Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. The captions are plain, even impersonal in tone (“At this time a still more thorough search was made. Each section was placed under guard while the search was conducted”), compelling the reader toward scrutiny of the drawings. Okubo’s detailed backgrounds never allow the reader to forget that mass imprisonment is her subject. One ironic panel shows the author sketching as camp officials rifle through her room in search of contraband such as cameras. Fortunately, the officials do not recognize her drawings as unauthorized documentations of the camp experience.

The Namesake

(2003)

By Jhumpa Lahiri

Slightly less well received than Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), this novel focuses on Gogol Ganguli, an American-born son of Bengali parents, who dislikes his name because it is neither obviously Anglo-American nor Indian. From his childhood in a Massachusetts college town to undergraduate years at Yale to a career as an architect, and through several failed romances, Gogol never once suffers overt discrimination but still ends up feeling out of place and somehow diminished. When he lives with a WASP girlfriend in her liberal parents’ house, the novel observes in characteristically cool, precise prose, “It is dependence, not adulthood, he feels.” In this way, Lahiri communicates Gogol’s sense of his welcome, always as a guest who must be sure to be well behaved.

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

(1999)

By Andrew X. Pham

The author of this memoir was young when he and his family made their escape from Vietnam after the war, first to a Thai refugee camp and later to the United States. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pham was haunted by actions his family took in the course of surviving the war and by the fate of family members in the United States, especially the suicide of his sister, who lived her adult life as a post-operative man. Alongside recollections of escape and of his family’s struggles to settle into American life, Pham relates a bicycle tour he took while in his thirties. It began in Mexico, continued up the coast of the Pacific Northwest, into Tokyo, and finally along the roads between Saigon and Hanoi, jostling among locals variously hostile and, from his perspective, overly friendly.

Flower Drum Song

(1957)

By C.Y. Lee

Long cut off from China, America’s Chinatowns after World War II remained largely segregated and dominated by aging bachelors. As restrictions on naturalization and immigration began to loosen, however, the communities witnessed a renewed vitality, with immigrants arriving again in significant numbers. Lee’s novel chronicles how these dynamics were experienced by the new residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown, focusing on a single father, who is resistant to the social changes in the air, and his two sons, one of whom has an abiding love for hot dogs and baseball. The novel quickly became a national best-seller before Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it into a Broadway musical and later into the first Hollywood movie to feature a nearly all-Asian cast. The film’s images of Asians singing and dancing in their Chinatown homes diverge from the tone of the novel, which is more somber in its portrayal of young people who have few job prospects and many frustrations in romantic choices.

Country of Origin

(2004)

By Don Lee

From 1988 to 2007, Lee was the editor of the prestigious Boston literary journal Ploughshares, but this, his first novel, initially appears to be a surprisingly formulaic work of genre fiction, in the mystery/ suspense mode. In Country of Origin, a Japanese detective and a U.S. Foreign Service officer halfheartedly work together in a bumbling alliance to discover what happened to Lisa Country­man, a young American who has disappeared in Tokyo. The reader soon learns that Countryman, who is half African-American and half Asian, was deeply involved in the city’s sex industry. The CIA gets drawn in, and the Japanese and American main characters both undergo a series of humorous personal meltdowns. Gradually, it becomes clear that Lee is using a familiar genre to satirize notions of racial and national identity in a world imperfectly knit together through globalization.

Who Killed Vincent Chin?

(1988)

Directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima

This powerful, Oscar-nominated documentary, by filmmakers who also collaborated on the 1997 road movie My America . . . or Honk if You Love Buddha, shows the city of Detroit at the end of the 1970s. Spikes in oil prices and competition from overseas carmakers, German and Japanese, assail the already struggling regional automobile industry. In one scene, a crowd at a local dealership is invited to take turns hitting a new Japanese import with a sledgehammer. Against this backdrop, the documentary relates how, in 1982, a Chrysler foreman named Ronald Ebens was heard saying to Vincent Chin at a strip club where Chin was enjoying his bachelor party, “It’s because of [expletive] like you we’re out of work.” Later, Ebens and his stepson, a laid-off autoworker, attacked the Chinese-American draftsman and part-time waiter in a McDonald’s parking lot with a baseball bat, and murdered him. In court, they received three years probation.

American Born Chinese

(2006)

By Gene Luen Yang

The only graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award, American Born Chinese tells a complex story in three distinct parts. The first fancifully retells the classic Ming epic Journey to the West and focuses specifically on the adventures of the Monkey King (a 16th-century version of a superhero and one of the most popular characters in Chinese folklore). The second is about a Chinese-American boy who is born in San Francisco’s Chinatown and whose family relocates to a predominately white, suburban town where his only friend is a recent immigrant from Taiwan. The final part is the most outrageous, as a white high school student is revealed to have a Chinese cousin named Chin-Kee. (Yes, “chinky.”) At this point it becomes clear why Yang chose the graphic form to tell his stories. The mystery of how the three parts will eventually fuse into one encourages the reader to rush to the finish, while the expressive drawings, gorgeous coloring, and witty details invite a second look.

Sa-I-Gu: From Korean Women’s Perspective

(1993)

Directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson

In 1992, Los Angeles suffered one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history, after the acquittal of four police officers involved in the videotaped beating of an African-American motorist, Rodney King. This documentary tells the story of the Korean-American shop owners caught in the path, from the perspective of women who worked behind the counters. Small Korean-owned family businesses suffered nearly half of the almost $1 billion in property losses—much of it never recouped—during the several days of unchecked looting, arson, and vandalism. In this film, news footage and one-on-one interviews make way for the story of 18-year-old Edward Song Lee. As his mother recalls on camera, Lee heard that local stores were being ransacked and set afire, and he ran out of the family house in a quixotic attempt to help in their defense. He was accidentally shot in the back by another Korean-American, becoming the community’s only fatality during the rioting.

Min Hyoung Song is an associate professor of English at Boston College and the author of Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (2005).