Imagining Asian Americans: From mono-ethnic to transnational community identity in Asian American literature and film

The relaxation of immigration restrictions, along with faster and cheaper transportation of people and goods, resulted in a dramatic expansion of the Asian American population and Asian American communities post-1965. As more Asian Americans participate and become visible in American culture, ethnic identifications and configurations of Asian American communities become more diverse and fluid. Asian American communal affiliations are not simply formed around regional marginalizations as the first Chinatowns were, but are also formed along commonalities of age, religion, class, gender, sexuality, professional identities, and political ideologies. While noting the importance of historically and geographically mapping Asian American communities to trace experiences of immigration and acculturation of Asians in America, I argue that the cultural constructions of such communities are determined and shaped by how Asian American literary narratives imagine them.;In Yokohama, California, I look at a literary representation of a mono-ethnic community. Toshio Mori recovers and fictionalizes a pre-WWII Japanese American community. His stories depict how the ethnic insularity of that community is complex, sheltering and stifling the independent creative and philosophical minds of artists and writers. Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey is set in San Francisco in the 1960s--1970s, an era of ethnic awakening and assertion of an Asian American solidarity. The protagonist's vision of a pan-ethnic, politically coalesced Asian American community identity is performed and enacted in his life and in theater. Abraham Verghese's memoir My Own Country depicts a diasporic immigrant Asian American who in his everyday world negotiates identifications with multiple communities: immigrant Indian Americans, gay men, AIDS patients, medical professionals, and the rural whites in Tennessee. Finally, Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dogeaters and John Woo's film "Bullet In The Head" make Asian American community transnational, constructing Asian American cultural communities outside of the U.S. Both texts exemplify how postcolonial global world migrations and American military presence in Asia change binaristic constructions of first world/third world cultural paradigms. Hence, while America has exercised an imperial, colonizing influence on Asia, in the late twentieth century we are also seeing how Asia is appropriating, consuming, and re-imagining American culture and a mythic 'America'.