Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

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"Laura Hyun Yi Kang's poised and tactful critique will greatly advance our understanding of the important social crises figured in the representation of 'Asian' women within the discourses of literary studies, cinema, history and historiography, and social science throughout the last century. "Compositional Subjects" is both a critique of the ideological and epistemological stakes of disciplinary formations and a bold exemplary work of interdisciplinarity itself."--Lisa Lowe, author of "Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics"

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Compositional Subjects

Duke University Press

Contents

acknowledgments...............................................................................................ixintroduction..................................................................................................1chapter 1 Generic Fixations: Reading the Writing Self.........................................................29chapter 2 Cinematic Projections: Marking the Desirous Body....................................................71chapter 3 Historical Reconfigurations: Delineating Asian Women as/not American Citizens.......................114chapter 4 Disciplined Embodiments: Si(gh)ting Asian/American Women as Transnational Labor.....................164chapter 5 Compositional Struggles: Re-membering Korean/American Women.........................................215notes.........................................................................................................271bibliography..................................................................................................323index.........................................................................................................349

Chapter One

Reading the Writing Self

One of my growing convictions, founded upon the last 20 or so of my more than 40 years of teaching at Yale University, is that the life of the mind and the spirit in the United States will be dominated by Asian Americans in the opening decades of the 21st century. The intellectuals-the women and men of literature and the other arts, of science and scholarship, and of the learned professions-are emerging from the various Asian-American peoples. In this displacement, the roles once played in American culture and society by the children of Jewish immigrants to the United States are now passing to the children of Asian immigrants, and a new phase of American literature will be one of the consequences. -Harold Bloom, Asian-American Women Writers

Composing the lifeline of national culture as an ethnically marked succession of dominance, recession, and another emergence, this confident prognosis opens Bloom's editorial introduction to a 1997 compilation of various published critical writings on "Asian-American women writers," part of a series on "Women Writers of English and Their Works." As if in anticipation of the bewilderment as to why and how this particular critical authority has come to append his proper name to such a specified bibliographic and editorial project, Bloom takes some pains to situate himself in relation to the writing subjects of this collection. An intriguing short essay that precedes the introduction, is titled simply "The Analysis of Women Writers" and begins,

I approach this series with a certain wariness, since so much of classical feminist literary criticism has founded itself upon arguments with that phase of my own work that began with The Anxiety of Influence (first published in January 1973). Someone who has been raised to that bad eminence-The Patriarchal Critic-is well advised that he trespasses upon sacred ground when he ventures to inquire whether indeed there are indisputable differences, imaginative and cognitive, between the literary works of women and those of men. If these differences are so substantial as pragmatically to make an authentic difference, does that in turn make necessary different aesthetic standards for judging the achievements of men and women writers?

But this is no nave and open-ended investigation of the relationship between social identity and disciplinary specialty, for, as Bloom declares on the following page, "The consequences of making gender a criterion for aesthetic choice must finally destroy all serious study of imaginative literature as such." After quoting a comment by Elizabeth Bishop, which begins by acknowledging the significance of gender in artistic production and ends by emphasizing that "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art," Bloom concludes: "Gender studies are precisely that: they study gender and not aesthetic value." Instead, Bloom would subsume considerations of gender's significance in literature to a more disciplinarily legible and generically specified "biographical criticism," which "like the different modes of historicist and psychological criticism, always has relied upon a kind of implicit gender studies."

This charge against identity-based delineation of literature as displacing the aesthetic and formal concerns that should be the centering object of proper literary study is, by now, a familiar mode of protectionism. What is intriguing is how Bloom conjoins this disciplined resistance to feminism to a critical acclaim of "Asian-American women writers." Indeed, Bloom sets up the titular subjects of this collection to mediate an intriguing triangulation amongst three other compositional subjects that he names as: (1) "American literature," (2) "feminist literary criticism," and (3) "the Asian-American peoples." In betting the future of this national body of writings on an ethnically specific constituency of writers, Bloom would relegate the work of the unspecified but implicitly not "Asian-American" feminist literary study to a misguided past. To chart one genealogy of this prodigious body of writing subjects, this chapter studies the travels and travails of the most heralded of "Asian-American women writers"-Maxine Hong Kingston-through the profuse murmur of interpretations and commentaries about one particular textual production, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.

Named the best work of nonfiction in 1976 by the National Book Critics Circle, it was reviewed favorably in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time. A vibrant second wave of U.S. feminism also created a receptive context for a woman-authored book whose title so rousingly named a generic subject-position of female empowerment. A reviewer for Ms. magazine praised it as being "almost a psychic transcript of every woman I know-class, age, race, or ethnicity be damned" while demonstrating "the real meaning of America as melting pot." In addition, the publication and reception of The Woman Warrior would prove singularly notable in relation to an emergent "Asian American" social collectivity and the literature produced and interpreted under that name. In a 1998 review of "Asian American Literary Studies," King-kok Cheung distinguishes it as "the first Asian American work to receive astounding national acclaim."

The generic classification of the book as an autobiography of Maxine Hong Kingston has crucially shaped the contours of its critical acclaim and prolific representativeness. A much-circulated "origin story" traces its "nonfiction" labeling to editors at Alfred Knopf, the publishers of the first 1976 printing, who "felt it would sell better as autobiography." This marketing strategy proved successful, both commercially and critically, by inviting the text to be read as a transparent window onto Maxine Hong Kingston and her family. In a particularly visceral collapsing of a textual detail and its author's lived body, "Kingston has been asked in radio interviews to explain how her mother cut her frenum." Even as late as 1990, after she had published two more books, both centered on male protagonists, Maxine Hong Kingston continued to be enfigured as "Woman Warrior."

By metonymic extension, numerous book reviews and critical essays have heralded this book as speaking for a range of overlapping social, cultural, and political constituencies: ethnic Americans, women, immigrants, the Chinese people, all Asian Americans, Chinese women, Chinese Americans, Asian American women. The New York Times praised it as "an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course." When Kingston's second book, China Men, published four years later in 1980 but focusing on a range of Chinese immigrant male characters, again garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, it further cemented the reputation of Kingston as ethnic spokesperson. One journalist, in characterizing the two texts as "chronicles of Chinese-Americans," confidently declared, "In both, the author was passionately concerned with her roots and the achievements of the immigrant Chinese, many of them her relatives, who faced the challenge of finding a secure place in American history and culture". In contrast, Kingston's purchase as spokesperson for "women" or even for "American women" has been more fraught and discontinuous. While The Woman Warrior continues to be heralded as a cross-culturally resonant articulation of women's oppression and feminist empowerment, the other two texts, focused on male characters and often narrated from their points of view, have been less amenable to such a mimetic and political reading.

These generic fixations in the popular press have carried over into critical literary studies. The Woman Warrior's canonical stature and pedagogical prominence in literary studies are notably demonstrated by the 1990 publication of the edited collection Approaches to Teaching Kingston's "The Woman Warrior," published by the Modern Language Association in a series of "approaches" to such disciplinary brand names as Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare. Most discussions in this volume and elsewhere in academic criticism take for granted and uphold the classification of autobiography. One such instance goes so far as to brand Kingston as an "autobiographer" who "immerses herself in her ethnic girlhood by recalling discrete narratives of Chinese-American women." The classification of the book as "autobiography" is even more striking in those instances in which the critics acknowledge the conventional and constructed nature of this genre. If one were to take seriously all of these confident and contending interpretations, then the person named Maxine Hong Kingston would seem to have led multiply contradictory lives.

Although it is a key genre in literary classification, autobiography can also be disciplinarily muddying, comprising an uneven mixture of novel, diary, journalistic reportage, native testimony, familial genealogy, political statement, and oral history. Even Georges Gusdorf, one of its early renowned theorists, must resort to an extradisciplinary metaphorical reach in arguing that "the appearance of autobiography implies a new spiritual revolution: the artist and model coincide; the historian tackles himself as object." Indeed, the autobiographical branding of The Woman Warrior has enabled a multidisciplinary scope in scholarly interpretation. As Elaine H. Kim noted in 1990, "Critical essays explore the book from the point of view of anthropology, folklore, sociology, linguistics, theology, history, and psychology." The book has also been frequently discussed under the rubric of two "interdisciplinary" fields, women's studies and especially Asian American studies where the book's autobiographical status has been persistently contested less as a matter of literary genre and more as an impasse of representation in a broader discursive struggle against racism.

In tracking the multiply dispersed yet also interpretively constrained critical circulation of the text, this chapter is primarily interested in measuring the shifting pressures of disciplinary location and social identification within and across two sites, in particular, literary studies and Asian American studies. Tellingly, the book's generic classification and disciplinary belonging have been more easily assumed when it is read as exhibiting a social or cultural difference from some privileged, primary axis of identity. For instance, in literary studies Kingston's gender is emphasized under "American autobiography," whereby its consideration also affirms the project of the inclusion of women writers even as the book is heralded for its ethnic specificity under the rubric of women's writing. In contrast, the generic categorization has been vociferously contested in Asian American studies because the text threatens to stand for sameness, thereby displacing other literary representations and critical studies by and about Asian Americans. However, an inverse tension around disciplinary classification follows from this. Under the most confident rubric of literary criticism, The Woman Warrior is read for much more than its aesthetic merits; it is often read instead as a sociological or ethnological document. In contrast, in the ongoing critical debate waged by Asian American studies scholars, there is a certain lament that the text is not being read as "literature," further raising the question of whether there is or can be a discrete field of "Asian American literature" or "Asian American culture" apart from the identity-based demands of fidelity to historical, ethnological and linguistic verities. Noting how the autobiographical categorization has proven to be both immensely productive and constrained, these readings could tell another tale, having little to do with Maxine Hong Kingston or The Woman Warrior and much more with the preoccupations of a particular site of reading/rewriting.

The Proper Name of Autobiography

The discursive career of the tripartite name Maxine Hong Kingston has far exceeded the sentient individual and the productive writer. In attempting to locate a criterion by which to distinguish autobiography from fictional writing, Philippe Lejeune suggests, "Autobiography (narrative recounting the life of the author) supposes that there is identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about." Although it never appears beyond the title page, the proper name of the author is readily attached to both the perceived narrator and female protagonist of The Woman Warrior. Many critics refer to a "Kingston" as a discernible textual figure, eliding any distinctions among the protagonist, narrator, author, and, what Lejeune calls, the person of "vital statistics." Here, I would point out that one of the text's most striking aspects is the near absence of any proper names. Most of the characters featured in the five differently titled sections of the book are unnamed; indeed, the title of the first section is "No Name Woman." The most prominent exceptions are "Brave Orchid" and her sister, "Moon Orchid," but the relationship between these named protagonists and their narrator is unstable and admittedly mediated. By familial extension, Brave Orchid and the "No Name Woman" are often referred to as "Kingston's mother" and "Kingston's aunt." Despite his stated aversion to emphasizing any aspect of an author's social identity and existence, Harold Bloom's editorial introduction to the section on the critical scholarship on the works of Maxine Hong Kingston asserts, "The Kingstons' tradition of passing down myths and family history profoundly influenced the future author, who would incorporate much of these memories into her novels" (37). He also adds, "the text is in fact populated by numerous characters drawn from the Chinese-American community of Kingston's youth." In other extreme instances of this (auto)biographical collapsing of author and textual figure, the perceived girl narrator is called by her more informal and intimate first name: "The struggle of the artist/protagonist is defined a few pages into the book, in the chapter 'No Name Woman,' where Maxine engages in an imaginative reconstruction of the life and suicide of her father's sister in China." One critic goes so far as to study the arrangement of the three parts of the author's name and concludes, "As her name reveals, Maxine Hong Kingston is somewhat distanced from her Chinese-American origins by marriage to a Caucasian."

Through recourse to the ontological uniqueness and solidity afforded by the proper name of "Maxine Hong Kingston," the prevailing axes of social formation, in which a self bears one each of a given array of gender, sexual, cultural, national designations, mutually shape and reinforce the presumed referential solidity of autobiography. I would add furthermore that this generic fortification also affirms two sides of the larger literary critical enterprise: (1) penetrating interpretation of a self who writes, and (2) appropriate classification of the kinds of selves who come to write but, moreover, who come to be legible as writers. But what gets displaced in this embrace of identity and disciplinarity? As Biddy Martin has pointed out about "lesbian autobiography," the composite alignment of the social nomination with the generic categorization "brings out the most conventional interpretation of each, for the lesbian in front of autobiography reinforces conventional assumption of the transparency of autobiographical writing. And the autobiography that follows lesbian suggests that sexual identity not only modifies but essentially defines a life, providing it with predictable content and an identity possessing continuity and universality."

Inasmuch as it constrains the interpretive possibilities of the text, the proper name of a writing self also enables and affirms other extratextual claims. In tracking the question of authorship as "a privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge and literature," Michel Foucault focuses on "the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it." In contrast to earlier times when texts were "accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of the author" (125), the author now plays a social role that exceeds the limits of any individual writer, a productive capacity that Foucault calls an "author-function":

The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their various modifications (and this through an author's biography or by reference to his particular point of view, in the analysis of his social preferences and his position within a class or by delineating his fundamental objectives). The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. Governing this function is the belief that there must be-at a particular level-a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental and originating contradiction. (128)

(Continues...)

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