Asian American Women's Popular Literature: Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging

237 Pages·2013·1.808 MB·English

by  Pamela Thoma

Asian American Women’s
Popular Literature

Asian American Women’s
Popular Literature
Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging
pamela thoma

Temple University Press
philadelphia
Temple University Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2014 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Chapter 3 appeared as “Romancing the Self and Negotiating Consumer
Citizenship in Asian American Labor Lit” in Contemporary Women’s Writing
2013; doi: 10.1093/cww/vps036.
Published 2014
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Thoma, Pamela S. (Pamela Sue), 1961–
Asian American women’s popular literature : feminizing genres and neoliberal
belonging / Pamela Thoma.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4399-1018-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4399-1019-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4399-1020-7 (e-book)
1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. American
literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Asian American women—
Intellectual life. 4. Women and literature—United States. 5. Asian American women in
literature. I. Title.
PS153.A84T48 2013
810.9’895—dc23
2013016619
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48– 1992
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Asian American Women’s Popular Literature,
Neoliberalism, and Cultural Citizenship 1
2 Asian American Mother-Daughter Narrative
and the Neoliberal American Dream
of Transformative Femininity 38
3 Romancing the Self and Negotiating Postfeminist
Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Women’s
Labor Lit 79
4 Neoliberal Detective Work: Uncovering Cosmopolitan
Corruption in the New Economy 111
5 Food Writing and Transnational Belonging in Global
Consumer Culture 152
6 Conclusion: Crossing Over and Going Public 173
Notes 181
Bibliography 199
Index 217

Acknowledgments
I have many to thank for their support while I worked on this project.
I owe Andy Dephtereos a great debt of gratitude for being involved in
nearly every aspect of this book and for always believing in my work.
You have journeyed with me, Andy, to all the places I wanted to go and to
those places I needed to go. Thank you. I also thank Randy and Maisie,
who have been exemplars of the best companion species ever. They have
been beside me in the still snows of the Maine woods and the roaring
winds of the Palouse hills, always reminding me of the world beyond
human knowledge. I owe them many more walks and hope they will wait
for me to catch up.
I want to thank mentors who were especially attentive and caring,
including Katherine Burkman at The Ohio State University; Carol
Cantrell and Paola Malpezzi-Price at Colorado State University; and
Janet Jacobs, Alison Jaggar, Suzanne Juhasz, Ann Kibbey, Beth Robert-
son, Marcia Westkott, and especially Katheryn Rios at the University
of Colorado at Boulder. My graduate school mates also made that time
a terrifically rewarding experience, and include Joan Gabriele, Kayann
Short, Damian Doyle, and DeLinda Wunder. Several colleagues from
my years at Colby College have contributed to this work, supporting
me through their friendship and in other ways that cannot be fully
acknowledged here: Betty Sasaki, Lyn Mikel Brown, Jorge Olivares,
David Suchoff, Hannah Roisman, Yossi Roisman, Tarja Raag, Maritza
Straughn-Williams, and Mark Tappan. At Washington State University
I thank colleagues in the former Department of Women’s Studies: Luz
viii / acknowledgments
María Gordillo, Linda Heidenreich, Judy Meuth, Marian Sciachitano,
Nishant Shahani, and Noël Sturgeon; colleagues in English: Kristen
Arola, Joan Burbick, and TV Reed; the creative minds in Fine Arts,
especially Io Palmer, Reza Safavi, Kevin Haas, Michelle Forsythe, and
Maria DePrano; and colleagues in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race
Studies, with special thanks to fellow Asian Americanists Rory Ong and
John Streamas and to Rose Smetana. I also thank Gabriella Reznowski
at WSU for fabulous research assistance (at lightning speed). And what
would any of this work be without the hope and inspiration of students?
I want to acknowledge my former and my current students for their
enthusiasm and insight, with special thanks to Mary Jo Klinker, who
helped me maintain perspective as I completed this project.
I’d like to thank the many colleagues in American studies, Asian
American studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at various
institutions for their abiding commitment to interdisciplinary research,
teaching, and dialogue, often of the feminist sort, especially Tamara
Bhalla, Leslie Bow, Noelle Brada-Williams, Chris Breu, Yoonmee Chang,
John Cheng, Floyd Cheung, Marilyn Chin, Monica Chiu, Karen Chow,
Shilpa Davé, Patti Duncan, Karen Leong, Cynthia Franklin, Lynn Fuji-
wara, Ruth Hsu, Paul Lai, Rachel Lee, Rich Lee, Suzanne Leonard, Anita
Mannur, Katarzyna Marciniak, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra,
Crystal Parikh, Viet Nguyen, Art Sakamoto, Gayle Sato, Yvonne Tasker,
Linda Trinh Võ, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. In the process of writing and
completing this project, I was also fortunate to have had the wise coun-
sel of people who kindly gave advice and/or read proposals, chapters, or
even the entire manuscript. Thank you to Marc Stein, Gina Herrmann,
Christine Hughes, Jane Iwamura, Daniel Kim, and Min Hyoung Song
for helping me complete this book. I especially want to thank Jigna Desai
for being a wonderful mentor and friend, for extending her dazzling
mind and generous heart. Finally, I thank Janet Francendese and the
professional editorial team at Temple University Press for their fine work
on this project.
1 / Asian American Women’s Popular Literature,
Neoliberalism, and Cultural Citizenship

In American Woman: A Novel (2003), Susan Choi fictionalizes the “miss-
ing year” of unknown events following the 1974 kidnapping of Patty
Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical political group
loosely connected to the Weather Underground Organization.1 Choi’s
version features Japanese American protagonist Jenny Shimada as an
antiwar activist of the militant New Left variety who has bombed a gov-
ernment draft office in California and gone underground in upstate New
York as Iris Wong. Soon, Jenny summons inspiration to follow her politi-
cal conscience from the history of her father’s internment, draft resis-
tance, and incarceration during World War II, and returns to the West
Coast. While Jenny is arrested in California, she continues to explore
politics in feminist separatist and cultural nationalist communities and
joins her father in a pilgrimage to Manzanar.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Choi’s second novel is a
bracing indictment of US imperialism, capitalism, and Orientalism that
draws connections between World War II and the American war in Viet
Nam, not only through an unequivocal challenge to US foreign policy
and militarization in Asia but also through a condemning representa-
tion of the racialization of Jenny as immutably foreign in the United
States. American Woman thematizes, in fact, the orthodoxy in Asian
Americanist critique that Asian Americans and especially Asian Ameri-
can women are invisible in the United States as citizens or understood
only as racial Other, alien, or even enemy.2 As the title implies, the novel
undertakes a corrective, which it accomplishes through an excavation