CHAPTER 1

Theorizing Expectations

Everyone is invested with expectations of various kinds, to one degreeor another, and some of these undoubtedly bear striking similarities tothe ones that most frequently adhere to discourses about Asian Americans.Still, specific expectations pose challenges for Asian Americans thatothers, who are differently raced, do not face. The young in particular haveoften been reminded of how young they are and of what awaits them oncethey reach maturity. Harold Bloom, one of the most venerable Americanliterary scholars of the postwar era, provides a vivid illustration of thispoint when he observes:

One of my growing convictions, founded upon the last 20 years or soof my more than 40 years of teaching at Yale University, is that thelife of the mind and the spirit in the United States will be dominatedby Asian Americans in the opening decades of the 21st century. Theintellectuals ... are emerging from the various Asian-Americanpeoples. In this displacement, the roles once played in American cultureand society by the children of Jewish immigrants to the UnitedStates are passing to the children of Asian immigrants, and a newphase of American literature will be one of the consequences.

While it is now a commonplace to compare Jewish Americans of anearlier era with contemporary Asian Americans, as in this passage, theformer were not compared to another group when they were first leavingtheir mark on American society. This means that the former were not confrontedwith the same demographic expectations that now confront thelatter, namely that they will follow the path laid out by another groupin a kind of rite of ethnic succession. This succession begins with "thechildren of Jewish immigrants" and has as its only successor "the childrenof Asian immigrants." This does not mean that comparisons betweenAsian and Jewish Americans cannot be made. They are often made and canprove highly informative. It does suggest, however, that there is somethingsalient about Asian Americans and their relationship to the imaginationof the future that can bring them into proximate discussions withother groups that might not be as immediately obvious. In this instanceproduced by Bloom's self-assured prediction, focusing on expectationsbrings into relief what is particular about "the children of 1965": that theyhave become a potent representative of a future America, one which willno longer be majority white but will nonetheless keep alive a contiguousnational character.

As the root word of expectation suggests, having "to look out for" thefuture as Asian Americans do is fraught with ambivalence. From the Latinverb ex-spectare, the word conjures two intertwined feelings that are simultaneouslyat odds with but inseparable from each other: "to hope for" and"to dread." These feelings succinctly capture the relationship many AsianAmerican writers working within the last decade of the twentieth centuryand the early years of the twentieth-first century have with the future. Theylook with both hope and dread on what they are trying to accomplish withtheir work and on how their work will be received. In their myriad ways,they carefully and creatively wrestle with the specific racial expectationsthat condition, surround, enable, and possibly choke the lives their worksseek to imagine. While they each focus explicitly on individual characters,as individuals these characters are stymied by hopes and dread intimatelyrelated to the topic of race that exceed attempts at self-definition, agency,and autonomy. By struggling with such expectations, their works also givetexture to the ways in which race both affects and does not affect lived experiences,personal longings, and aspirations for meaningful existence.

This chapter begins with a discussion on how such expectations havecome to shape the experiences of Asian Americans and how Asian Americanwriters have sought to negotiate their forceful and often contradictoryimpositions. It does so by theorizing the concept of expectations, consideringalong the way how such expectations keep bringing Asian Americansinto surprisingly intimate juxtaposition with other discourses aboutpersonhood, including those that directly shape cultural understandingsof children and queers. While the connections between the latter two havebeen richly explored, critics have yet to consider in an equally rich wayhow the racialization of Asian Americans might also be linked. The chapterthen turns to the work of theory itself, explaining how the use of writingsby the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychotherapist Felíx Guattariseeks to respond—perhaps paradoxically—to the need for publishedwork in the humanities to be at once accessible and engaging at a timewhen the humanities itself is under fire.

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act

To query how Asian Americans, especially those of a specific generation,have come to be vested with the kind of expectations that Bloom singlesout is to take seriously the claim made by many in Asian American studiesthat it is difficult to overstate the importance of the 1965 Immigration andNationality Act. Publically available U.S. census data from 1960 to 2000provide a dramatic sense of this act's importance for a population thatgrew more numerous and more heterogeneous with each passing decadeof the second half of the twentieth century. This data is obviously limited.The categories the census uses to record its findings have not remainedconsistent through the years and, like all data, they must be interpreted.Nevertheless, their use provides at...