The individual works by these and other writ-
ers led to several literary anthologies, allowing a
choice for students and teachers. First published
in 1974, Aiiieeeee! gave a wake-up call to the liter-
ary consciousness of Asian Americans. In 1991
the volume was reedited as The Big Aiiieeeee! as a
more comprehensive collection. Jessica Hagedorn’s
Charlie Chan Is Dead came out in 1993, focusing
on Asian-American fiction, while Garret Hongo’s
The Open Boat of the same year collected poems
exclusively. As if to prove the popular demand
from the public, dozens of Asian-American liter-
ary anthologies have been published in just the
last decade.
In 1992 Elaine H. Kim asserted that we were
witnessing the start of a “golden age of Asian
American cultural production” (Foreword xi).
Looking at the shelves in major bookstores now,
one would agree that she was right. Moreover,
as multicultural education gained momentum
in school curricula, works by talented writers
of South Asian background—Meena Alexander,
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, and
Bharati Mukherjee, for example—have been mak-
ing regular appearances in school syllabi and
academic conferences. Following the terrorist
attacks against the United States on September
11, 2001, and the continuing unrest in the Middle
East, public interest in works by authors of West
Asian origin surged noticeably, creating another
momentum for rich cultural production from
Afghan- and Arab-American authors.
CHALLENGES: SOCIAL CONTEXTS
AND LITERARY AESTHETICS
In her Asian American Literature, Elaine H. Kim
cogently argues that understanding the social
context of Asian-American immigration history
is crucial to reading Asian-American writings,
and that there are specific images, metaphors, and
themes relevant to Asian-American writings. Sau-
ling Cynthia Wong, in her Reading Asian American
Literature, echoes this idea, although she adds
that there are actually several contexts for differ-
ent ethnic groups. While it is possible to enjoy
a literary work without understanding its cul-
tural background, the number-one challenge for
a beginning reader is to learn about the historical
and cultural contexts in which Asian-American
literature has been produced.
Another challenge has to do with literary aes-
thetics. When Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan,
and David Henry Hwang were making spectacular
debuts into the book market, Frank Chin claimed
that they were popular mainly because they pan-
dered to the taste of mainstream readers. Accord-
ing to Chin, they were the first writers of Asian
ancestry to “so boldly fake the best-known works
from the most universally known body of Asian
literature and lore in history” (3). Chin further
argued that the works of Jade Snow Wong and
Maxine Hong Kingston “completely escaped the
real China and Chinese America into pure white
fantasy where nothing is Chinese, nothing is real,
everything is born of pure imagination” (49). In
response to Chin’s accusations, Maxine Hong
Kingston and Amy Tan insisted that myths change
as people face new adventures and that early
Chinese immigrants changed details of ancient
Chinese myths to deal with their new realities in
America. Despite the long and heated debate, this
question about “authenticity” remains unresolved:
Are writers responsible for representing their cul-
tures accurately, and who is to say what is authen-
tic and what is fake?
Another challenge facing readers of Asian-
American literature is to find a proper means to
evaluate each literary piece. American students
who are used to reading only European or Euro-
pean-American literature may be tempted to
dismiss any piece of Asian-American literature
just because it is different or hard to understand.
If a Laotian character in a short story seems
impenetrable, if the symbols and metaphors used
in a Korean-American poem are different from
those in Shakespeare, if the historical setting
used in a novel by a Pakistani-American writer
seems remote and irrelevant, do we dismiss them
as inferior works with no literary merit? If the
issues explored in these pieces seem to have little
or nothing to do with us, why should we con-
tinue to read them? To address these issues, new
critical paradigms are being created, and readersx Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature