764 The American Century: Literature since 1945Pacific Rim have in common is something they share with some, but by no means
all, immigrant peoples from other parts of the world. They came in quest of what
earlier Chinese immigrants had christened the gold mountain, and what still earlier
travelers had seen as the golden land in the west, the virgin territory or the city on a
hill. As Bharati Mukherjee, who was born in Calcutta, puts it in her essay “American
Dreamer” (1997), they came from a traditional, if often disrupted society, one
governed by convention and consideration of class or caste, to a site of “scary
improvisations and heady explorations.” For an immigrant to “desire America,” as
Mukherjee puts it, is to move from a place where “identity was fixed, derived from
religion, caste, patrimony, and mother tongue” to somewhere where adjustment is
required to a new repertoire of styles, to the rampant pace and frantic mobility of
postmodern culture. For an immigrant to enter America, in turn, is to change, not
only him or her, but the character and complexion of the American nation itself. As
Mukherjee has pointed out, along with other immigrant peoples Asian-Americans
are “minute-by-minute transforming America.” “The transformation is a two-way
process,” Mukherjee adds. “It affects both the individual and the national cultural
identities”; it is part of the continuing process of imagining new communities,
improvising America.
By the end of World War II the Chinese-American community was decimated, its
aging bachelor society waiting for an injection of new immigrants and a recovery of
family life. Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) by Louis Chu (1925–1970) is one of several
novels to capture the tone of this bachelor society; others include Chinatown Family
(1948) by Lin Yutang (1895–1976) and The Flower Drum Song (1957) by Chin Yang
Lee (1917–). Set among a group of older men in Chinatown in New York, Eat a Bowl
of Tea, in particular, is a humorous, sympathetic account. However, it is sharply
unsentimental in its depiction of the cramped, lonely lives of these men, their work
in laundries and restaurants punctuated only by visits to prostitutes and mah-jong
games. And it shows a younger generation of males apparently facing the same
destiny. What is remarkable since the publication of the Chu novel is not only the
exponential growth in the Chinese-American population, but also the proliferation
of Chinese-American writing: poetry, autobiography, and, above all, fiction.
Reflecting the growth, too, not just as a growth in numbers but a growth in
community, of women as well as men, the young as well as the old, many of the more
notable new Chinese-American writers have been female. Among poets, for example,
the most notable has been Cathy Song (1955–). Song was born in Honolulu to a
Chinese mother and Korean father. Her first book, Picture Bride, was published in
1983; later works include The Land of Bliss (2001) and Cloud Moving Hands (2007).
Consisting of 31 poems divided into five sections, Picture Bride concentrates on
autobiography to explore family and history – and, in particular, the equivocal
nature of her own relation with the traditions of Asian culture. In “The Youngest
Daughter,” for example, Song delicately sketches out her relation with her mother,
“the familiar silence” of their intimacy, her mother’s unease about her and her own
longing for flight. In “The White Porch,” through a carefully articulated development
of imagery, Song pursues a similar, deeply felt conflict between tradition and theGGray_c05.indd 764ray_c 05 .indd 764 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM