Authoring Identity

“Where are you from?”

To an Asian American, this question can be an impediment to a greater sense of belonging, says Josephine Park, School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English. “It can be incredibly important to say, ‘Actually, I’m from Utah.’”

Park, whose courses include Asian American Literature, Race and Asian American Literature, and American Modernist Poetry, says literature is one critical lens through which a complex and ever-evolving Asian American identity can be examined.

“Literature was always at the forefront of American movements for racial justice,” Park says. “I tell my students, for populations like Asian Americans who were long deemed statistically insignificant, if you don’t have a quantitative significance, you want qualitative expression. Almost nothing is more important than individual expression, individual stories. For movements that are trying to capture minority identity, that kind of expressive capability is critical.”

Identity Emerging

One quality early Asian American literature experimented with was language and lyricism, Park says. “Just as ‘Black’ English was a means of staking belonging for African Americans, the aesthetic use of ‘broken English’ in Asian American literature was also a powerful means of taking it back from the racist caricatures littered throughout the public sphere.” She says this was especially vital for Asian Americans expressing, “on the one hand, our mastery and fluency in English, but also the particular flavor of the ‘Englishes’ that we grew up with, which were often derided.”

Park cites Japanese American poet Lawson Fusao Inada, whose work has spanned the past five decades, as a key example. Inada, a lifelong devotee of jazz, pushed back on the expectations for Asian American poets at the time. “The rhythms of jazz are actually the form of his poetry,” Park notes. “Inada said, ‘I’m not going to write a haiku.’ He found it racist the expectation to write a haiku.”

Inada’s poetry sheds a light on the complex racial dynamics experienced during and after World War II, a period stained by the internment of Japanese American citizens, which Inada and his family experienced firsthand. “When the Japanese were incarcerated,” Park says, “there was a button that people wore that said, ‘I’m Chinese.’ There was an effort to distinguish” —a fractured history Inada pointed to in order to work toward a collective solidarity, she adds.

“By the late 1960s, the idea of ‘Asian America’ emerges,” Park says. “That really matters when you have these moments of racism, of reframing the racist efforts to lump together Asians through a collective vision.” As an example, she cites the anti-Asian sentiment during COVID.

Three Seminal Works

Throughout the decades, myriad touchstone literary works have deconstructed and shaped Asian American identity, Park says. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which Park teaches, was published in 1976 by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston.

“When I went to college in the early ’90s, I read it in three different classes,” says Park. “It’s one of the most-taught books in American colleges and universities ever.” The novel, which Park describes as a “mythic memoir,” contrasts Kingston’s stateside home of California with the tapestry of stories her mother told her about China, giving readers a glimpse at the complexities of dual identities.

The Foreign Student, a historical fiction novel published in 1998 by Korean American Susan Choi, is another example of a complex Asian American racial dynamic that was front and center on the U.S. literary stage. The book tells the story of Chuck, a young Korean man who travels to the U.S. after the Korean War and falls in love with an American woman. Chuck’s past is marred by his father having helped the Japanese during Japan’s occupation of Korea, which led to him being shunned. This dynamic of cyclical hate gets challenged when Chuck visits a neighborhood in Chicago with a sizable Japanese population.

For populations like Asian Americans who were long deemed statistically insignificant, if you don’t have a quantitative significance, you want qualitative expression. Almost nothing is more important than individual expression.

“It’s a very small moment in the novel,” Park explains, yet scholars have identified it as a moment of Choi contributing her knowledge of the Asian American movement via Chuck’s story. “It’s really fascinating to see someone whose family had lived through the Japanese occupation and the incredible turmoil of the war come to the U.S., be mistaken for Japanese, and being okay with it,” Park adds.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, published in 1999 by author Andrew X. Pham, is also a seminal work, Park says. The book, a kind of travelogue that charts the author’s bicycle journey around the Pacific Rim and Vietnam, provides a unique perspective on the push and pull Asian American immigrants often experience, while illustrating the progress made in cementing a sense of belonging.

“When he’s going across America, he experiences racism,” Park says. “He grew up tough, being a refugee in California. He had thought he would go to Vietnam to kind of find himself and to reconnect as a lot of people do. But as he’s biking up and down the country of Vietnam, he ends by saying, ‘I really miss America.’ ‘I miss the differences,’ ‘the colors,’ and ‘the range of people,’ and I always loved that.”

Park says it is especially thrilling for her students “dive deep into the experiences of groups other than their own. For example, in my advanced seminar on Asian American literature last spring, a Korean American student wrote a wonderful final paper on the Taiwanese immigrant experience, which explored the legacy of Taiwan’s colonial history on Indigenous populations. Her paper wove together personal and historical traumas into a broader framework of shared dislocation. Students who sign up for an Asian American studies course are often looking to learn their own histories, and our classroom conversations are enriched by the resonances they discover.”