triumphs, and distinctive personalities of the Chai
clan’s independent-minded intellectuals in 20th-
century China and America.
Leo MahoneyChan, Jeffery Paul (1942– )
A third-generation Chinese American living in
California, Chan earned a bachelor’s and mas-
ter’s degrees from San Francisco State University,
where he is currently professor emeritus of Asian
American Studies and English. In 1973 he worked
with Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn
Hsu Wong to edit the groundbreaking anthology
Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian-American Writ-
ers. In 1991 he produced an updated anthology
entitled The Big Aiiieeeee. Chan devotes his criti-
cal attention to explaining and showing the his-
tory of Asian-American literature. Chan wants
to make sure readers and critics understand the
tremendous bounty and production of Chinese-
American writers. For example, besides cowriting
a literary history of Asian-American literature in
the introduction of Aiiieeeee, Chan has cowritten
an article in A Literary History of the American
West on Asian-American literary production and
trends. In it, he establishes the longstanding pres-
ence of Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-Ameri-
can writings in the formation of the American
West throughout the 19th century until the post-
war period.
Chan’s fiction has been published in various
literary journals including the Amerasia Journal
and the Asian Pacific Journal. His fiction typi-
cally addresses the interchanges between Chinese
Americans and mainstream Americans. Most re-
cently Chan wrote a novel entitled Eat Everything
before You Die (2004), in which he creates the
character of Christopher Columbus Wong, who
“explores” the multiple countercultures of 1960s
California and learns in the process what it means
to be “Chinese” in America. Recently Chan has
been awarded a guest editorship with Asian Liter-
ary Journal and divides his time between Italy and
California.
Matthew L. MillerChang, Diana (1934– )
Writer and painter Diana Chang was born in New
York City in 1934 to a Chinese father and an Am-
erasian mother of Chinese-Irish heritage. In 1935
the family moved to China, where Chang received
her education at American schools in Beijing,
Shanghai, and Nanjing. Right after World War II,
Chang returned to New York City for high school
and college; she majored in English at Barnard
College. A prolific writer, Chang has written six
novels: The FRONTIERS OF LOVE (1956), A Woman
of Thirty (1959), A Passion for Life (1961), The
Only Game in Town (1963), Eye to Eye (1974), and
A Perfect Love (1978). Her three books of poetry
include The Horizon Is Definitely Speaking (1982);
What Matisse Is After (1984); and Earth, Water,
Light: Poems Celebrating the East End of Long Is-
land (1991). Chang’s short stories and essays have
also appeared in various journals and anthologies.
A recipient of many literary awards (including the
John Hay Whitney and Fulbright Fellowships),
Chang is regarded as an important early Asian-
American writer. As a painter, she has also held
several exhibitions at galleries in New York. Her
artistic achievements in fiction, poetry, and paint-
ing have gained Chang a special place in Asian-
American culture and literature.
Raised and educated in the “between-worlds”
environment, Chang reiterates in her work the
salient theme of in-betweenness or, in Amy Ling’s
word, “bifocalness.” Between her Chinese heritage
and Irish identity, and between China and Amer-
ica, Chang inscribes the Eurasian subjectivity, a
“hyphenated condition,” in much of her work.
For example, in The Frontiers of Love, Chang’s
most acclaimed novel, she focuses on three Eur-
asians’ search for identity in wartime Shanghai at
the close of World War II. The three young Eur-
asians—Sylvia Chen, Mimi Lambert, and Feng
Huang—represent three responses to their hybrid
identity. Despite the Eurasians’ entanglement in
the hyphenated condition, they choose their forms
of existence in either a creative or destructive
project of self-realization. In other novels, Chang
extends the unhinged racial identity to a univer-
salized existential estrangement. In A Woman of
Thirty, the heroine, Emily Merrick, confrontingChang, Diana 35