Tag: Asian American Literature

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How Reading Shapes Us: Lan Dong

By Lan Dong

My earliest memory of reading and literature is associated with pocket-sized picture-story books (known as “Lian Huan Hua” in Chinese). When I was young, my mother read the stories to me; when I learned to read enough words, I read as many picture-story books as I could get my hands on. The majority of these books are illustrated adaptations or abridged versions, usually in narrative form. Their language is generally accessible to young readers. Through these compact-sized books, I came to know the stories and meanings of idioms in Chinese language, anecdotes about where some of the renowned poets draw their inspiration, historical and fictional events, experiences of notable historical and literary figures, contemporary stories situated in and reflecting the social and political changes in twentieth-century China, the characters and plot elements of the four classical Chinese masterpieces: The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and A Dream of Red Chambers, as well as of a wide range of other works. I was particular drawn to characters on the margin of social structures: the rebels in The Water Margin, the underdogs in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the Monkey and his mischiefs in The Journey to the West. As a child, I found the imaginary worlds vast and enchanting, the characters’ physical and emotional journeys fascinating. In other words, I fell under the spell of reading and literature way before I learned anything about literary concepts, genres, movements, and theories. Reading fostered a sense of curiosity that carries me forward to this day.

I also remember going through phases with different kinds of reading materials while growing up: being obsessed with Aesop’s fables, myths, legends, and various folk and fairytales; or seeking out works by women writers, such as: Wang Anyi, Yang Jiang, Tie Ning, Chi Li, Can Xue, Bing Xin, Zong Pu, Zhang Jie, and Eileen Chang; or reading Japanese literature by Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, Osamu Tezuka, and other writers; or loving Heinrich Heine, Stefan Zweig, and Milan Kundera’s works for no particular reason. By the time I graduated college with a degree in Chinese literature, it was hardly surprising that I would choose to pursue graduate training in literary studies and continue to broaden my reading and learning.

Ethnic American literature was not really “a thing” on my radar when I was a college student. The closest experience I remember was reading works by Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai and Yu Lihua in an elective course on Taiwanese writers. That was the first time I was introduced to literary works about the life and experiences of Chinese living overseas. I did not discover Asian American literature or Asian American studies as a field until I came to the United States, pursuing a graduate degree in comparative literature and planning to focus my study on postcolonial theories. For that reason, I would describe myself as an “accidental” Asian Americanist. It is no exaggeration to say that reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts as a first-year graduate student at Dartmouth College changed my academic life. My late advisor Dr. Susanne Zantop recommended Kingston’s book, not for a particular class or project and just for reading. I remember feeling exhilarated and also overwhelmed at the time. It was the first Asian American text I read and one of the books I continue to go back to over the years. Each time I reread it, I still feel amazed by details, nuances, and meanings I have missed. The Woman Warrior became one of the cornerstones for my doctoral dissertation and continues to influence the ways in which I read, write, and teach. Reading works by Amy Tan, Gish Jen, David Henry Hwang, Li-Young Li, Karen Tei Yamashita, Fae Mei Ng, Jessica Hagedorn, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Okada, together with books by Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldúa, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaica Kincaid, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers and artists while I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is more or less an extension of the broad interests in literature that I developed as a child. Such an approach not only is important for my research but also informs the ways in which I teach literature and culture.

As an educator, I keep in mind that a liberal arts education prepares students to live responsible, productive, and creative lives in a dramatically changing world. Students need to develop their knowledge about diverse cultures and the intellectual skills to expand that knowledge through lifelong learning. Reading is a sustainable way to accomplish that. My classes generally emphasize global knowledge, intercultural skills, as well as ethical commitments to individual and social responsibility. Whether using Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl to challenge and reframe narratives about childhood, young adulthood, and the prairie; or including Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming or Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again to push the boundaries of generic categories and examine race, immigration, and religion; or using Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White to foster discussions on the intersectionality of racial segregation, language, and history; or reading Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber’s Dancing after TEN and focusing on the connection between disability, gender, arts, and healthcare policies, these encounters encourage students to analyze literary texts and visual materials critically, study cultural phenomena across geographical boundaries, gain an understanding of the larger contexts, and connect history with current affairs. Reading varied forms of cultural production, particularly narratives and people on the margin, helps us understand the complex connection and commonalities of human experiences, the power and importance of storytelling: what stories we tell, how they are told, and who gets to tell them and to whom, as well as the nuances of representations in political and cultural discourses.

Lan Dong is the Louise Hartman and Karl Schewe Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences and Interim Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Springfield. She teaches Asian American literature, world literature, comics and graphic narratives, and children’s and young adult literature. She is the author or editor of several books, including: Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States, Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms, and25 Events That Shaped Asian American History.

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How Reading Shapes Us: Jennifer Ho

By Jennifer Ho

Like many people who have pursued a PhD in English Literature or related fields, I was a precocious reader. Among my earliest memories are reading with my parents and sounding out words, matching them to the letters that accompanied the pictures in the books they read to me. By the time I was in first grade I was reading chapter books and by the fifth grade I had read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a book that continues to be among my favorites. I grew up the child of Chinese immigrant parents in a home that was working class and then eventually middle class when my mother went back to work once I became old enough to watch my younger brother. Thankfully both my parents were avid readers and took my brother and I to our local public library every Saturday morning. We checked out the maximum number of books that we could for the week, returning armloads the following Saturday and starting the cycle of books we’d read for the week anew.

Being an avid reader gave me aspirations to be a writer—specifically I wanted to write the kind of novels that transported me into different eras and realms. Along with canonical writers like the aforementioned John Steinbeck, in my K-12 years I consumed the novels of Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Some of these were assigned in school, others I discovered and devoured on my own. So it’s no wonder that when I thought about becoming a novelist, I thought I had to write under a pen name. Specifically, one that hid my Chinese American identity. I recall being thirteen and going to where the H’s were listed in the fiction section, where I would find the section beginning “HO,” except that instead of stopping there, I’d continue to where a book written by “Jacqueline Hope” would one day exist. Jacqueline Hope: that’s the pen name my pubescent-self picked, believing it sounded sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Of course what it sounded was White.

It wasn’t until 1989, in the winter quarter of my 1st year at UC Santa Barbara that I read a novel written by an Asian American writer, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. It is no exaggeration to say that this class and that book changed the course of my life. For the first time, I was reading about experiences that mirrored my own. For the first time I was reading a book written by a Chinese American woman who also grew up the child of immigrant Chinese parents, who also struggled with issues of fitting into US American society and norms. For the first time someone was describing a life and a world that fit into my own conception of what it was like to be Chinese American. I had not seen myself reflected in literature until I was nineteen years old—and reading this work of Chinese American literature led me to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, and a future career as a professor of Asian American literary studies.

I was fortunate to come-of-age at a moment when Ethnic Studies was gaining momentum in California—in 1989 UC Santa Barbara was one of only three universities in the nation that had an Asian American Studies department. I took multiple courses in not just Asian American literature but Chicano, Black, and Multiethnic Literature, offered through both the English department as well as the specific Ethnic Studies departments that UCSB was fortunate to have. I was mentored by faculty like Shirley Geok-lin Lim, a scholar and poet of renown, and graduate students like Wei-Ming Dariotis, now a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, admittedly the mothership for Ethnic Studies in the United States.

And here’s where I want to talk about the different bodies we encounter in literary studies, because bodies matter, whether we’re talking about actual flesh-and-blood bodies of authors or readers or the body of literature that we encounter in our K-12 education, in our public libraries, that we assign in our college and university classrooms, and that we choose to focus on in our scholarship, research, and writing. My body matters—my Asian American cis-gender female, non-disabled-for-the-time-being body is being read by other people, whether I want them to read my body or not. It matters that you have seen the photo that has accompanied this blog post. Because there will be certain assumptions that you are going to make about me based on what I look like—assumptions that this post is either confirming or confounding. It mattered, very much, that I was able to read a work of Chinese American literature at a formative moment in my life—and that the class in which this was assigned was taught by a Japanese American female instructor, who was also my first non-White instructor in a humanities class (I had a Japanese American female trigonometry teacher in high school—but math was never going to be in my future and my keenest memory from that class was getting removed after I couldn’t stop laughing at a joke my best friend told me about a dead iguana in a tree—trust me, it was hilarious but you had to be there).

The messages we receive from society and culture matter in affirming our humanity. I turned to literature in my youth to help me make sense of the world and to find my place in the world. The message I was receiving, not deliberately or consciously delivered by teachers in my K-12 classrooms, was that literature was written by White British or American people—usually who had died over a century ago. Reading contemporary American literature written by Asian American, Latinx, African American, and Indigenous people gave me a different perspective to understand the nation and the world and most especially my place in the world as an Asian American woman. And sadly the story I just shared is one that is still echoed by many students: Matthew Salesses, a talented fiction writer and former student in the first Asian American literature I taught at UNC Chapel Hill, contacted me a decade ago letting me know that my class was the first time he had read a work of Korean American literature. Other students have shared the same with me—that my Asian American literature class was the first time they had read a work that reflected their lives and the lives of their families—and they share that this is a powerful moment for them—a moment when they feel they are finally reflected in the curriculum and in US society. And a similar thing happens for my non-Asian American students in reading Asian American literature for the first time—it gives them a perspective they had not thought about or encountered before—it opens up their world.

And this is perhaps the most important thing to think about in how reading shapes us: reading shapes our understanding of what it means to be human. If we are only reading works that have for too long been deemed “canonical” we are reading about the past and not the present. If we don’t read works deemed “ethnic literature” we are missing out on the humanity of over half the globe. So it matters when we assign works of non-White writers in our class. And I guarantee it will matter to your students, whatever racial or ethnic identity they have—because it mattered, and still matters, to me.

Bio:

Jennifer Ho is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder. Among her publications is her co-edited collection Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (with Jim Donahue and Shaun Morgan). She is working on a breast cancer memoir and tweets @drjenho.