Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Global Asias)

337 Pages·2010·2.06 MB·English

by  Steven Yao

FOREIGN ACCENTS
GLOBAL ASIAS
Eric Hayot, Series Editor
Foreign Accents
Steven G. Yao
FOREIGN ACCENTS
Chinese American Verse from
Exclusion to Postethnicity
.
STEVEN G YAO

2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yao, Steven G., 1965–
Foreign accents : Chinese American verse from exclusion to
postethnicity / by Steven G. Yao.
p. cm. – (Global Asias)
Includes index and bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-973033-9
1. American poetry—Chinese American authors—History and criticism.
2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Chinese
Americans in literature. I. Title.
PS153.C45Y36 2010
811′.5098951073—dc22 2009052980
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I n writing F oreign Accents, I have benefi ted from the generosity of numerous
institutions and individuals. To begin, I wish to express my appreciation to
the American Council of Learned Societies and to the Stanford Humanities
Center for fellowships that enabled me to devote substantial, concentrated
time to this project at a crucial point in its development. I also wish to thank
Hamilton College for its continuing support of my eff orts as a teacher and a
scholar. I am particularly grateful to the libraries and their staff at Hamilton
College, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley,
especially Reid Larson and Wei-chi Poon. Th is project fi rst took shape at
Ohio State University, where initial work was made possible by a Seed Grant
from the Offi ce of Research. During my time in Columbus, I gained immea-
surably from discussions with the following colleagues and friends: Patricia
Sieber, Kirk Denton, Marjorie Chan, Bill Tyler, Judy Wu, Christopher Reed,
Julia Andrews, Dick Davis, Jeredith Merrin, Elizabeth Renker, Jared Gard-
ner, and Beth Hewitt. Gratitude also goes to Paul and Debra Hyman, Lisa
Clark, and Eric Augis.
H amilton College in central New York has proven to be a remarkably
congenial place to live and work. I am especially thankful to Deans of
Faculty David Paris and Joseph Urgo, as well as to chairs of the English
department, Nat Strout, John O’Neill, and Catherine Kodat, for their unwa-
vering support. In addition, Carol Young, Kelly Walton, Linda Michels, and
Carolyn Mascaro have each provided invaluable assistance. I also wish to
acknowledge the encouragement and friendship of Doran Larson, Margie
Th ickstun, Vincent Odamtten, Patricia O’Neill, Onno Oerlemans, Naomi
Guttman, Tina Hall, Martine Guyot-Bender, Larry Bender, Tom Wilson,
April Oswald, Kevin Grant, Lisa Trivedi, Chris Georges, Sarah Goldstein,
Bonnie Urciuoli, Patrick Reynolds, Damnhait McHugh, Masaaki Kamiya,
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Anne Lacsamana, Joyce Barry, Michelle Lemasurier, Renae Bowman, Carl
Rubino, Barbara Gold, Hong Gang Jin, De Bao Xu, Steve Goldberg, Susan
Goldberg, Katherine Terrell, Aishwarya Lakshmi, Austin Briggs, Bunny
Serlin, and Mary Mackay. In addition, special gratitude goes to Edward
Wheatley and Kirk Pillow for their professional advice and mentorship.
Th anks are also due to my student Laura Oman who assisted with some of
the preliminary research for chapter two under the auspices of an Emerson
Foundation Collaborative Research grant during the summer of 2005.
I n addition to material support, the Stanford Humanities Center also
provided a warm and stimulating intellectual environment where I spent a
remarkable year working on this project. I am indebted for their collegiality,
conversation, and friendship to David Palumbo-Liu, Gordon Chang,
Johannes Fabian, Steven Justice, Wendy Larson, Carlo Caballero, Bob Roy-
alty, Jennifer Roberts, Rob Polhemus, Carol Schloss, Paula Moya, Keith
Baker, Jennifer Paley, David Holloway, Purnima Mankekar, Yoshiko Matsu-
moto, Bryan Wolf, Arnold Zwicky, Jehangir Malegam, Marcus Folch, Joann
Kleinneiur, Maya Ma, Christen Smith, Blake Stevens, Roberta Strippoli,
Miri Nakamura, and Steven Lee. Th e eff orts of John Bender, Chiyuma Elliot,
Nicole Coleman, Matthew Tiews, Najwa Salame, and Susan Sebbard, among
others, made the Center an easy and wonderful place to be. While in the
Bay Area, I also enjoyed and learned much from discussions with Colleen
Lye, Sau-ling Wong, Ling-chi Wang, Dan O’Neill, Rob Wilson, Madeline
Hsu, Jon Jang, Xiajun Lin, Soo-hwa Yuan, Diana Chiang, and Jaideep Singh.
Particular thanks go to my brother, Spencer Yao, and Han Pham for their
consistent hospitality in ways both large and small.
N umerous other colleagues have provided extremely helpful feedback
and suggestions at various points along the way. Th ese include Jing Tsu, Wai
Chee Dimock, Peter Nicholls, Sabina Knight, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Yu,
Josephine Park, Joseph Jeon, Laura Chrisman, Stephen Sumida, Shirley Lim,
Shu-mei Shih, Xiaomei Chen, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, K. Scott Wong, Yunte
Huang, Ming Xie, Lisa Yun, Nick Kaldis, Rolland Murray, Jose Benki, Anand
Pandian, Sanchita Balachandran, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Debra Madsen,
Pheng Cheah, P. K. Leung, Prasenjit Duara, Helen Siu, Mae Ngai, Rebecca
Walkowitz, Pericles Lewis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mia Carter, Kurt
Heinzelman, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Tom Garza, Keijiro Suga, Yoshiaki
Koshikawa, Michael Coyle, Kara Rusch, and Bernard Dew. I am thankful to
have had the opportunity to present portions of this study to audiences at
various institutions, including Stanford University, the University of
California at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Texas at
Austin, Penn State University, Meiji University, Sussex University, North-
western University, Binghamton University, Middlebury College, Williams
College, and the University of Zürich.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
I am thankful to Chris Huie for permission to reprint the photograph of
the poem carved into the wall of the Angel Island Immigration Station
Detention building.
Particular appreciation also goes to Shannon McLachlan and Brendan
O’Neill at Oxford University Press for their interest and assistance in bring-
ing this book to publication.
For the intellectual camaraderie and friendship that they have so gener-
ously provided over the years, I want to acknowledge several people in
particular: Timothy Billings, Christopher Bush, Haun Saussy, and Colleen
Lye. In addition, I am especially grateful and indebted to Eric Hayot for his
sustained engagement with my work, as well as for his editorial suggestions
that helped to improve the both the conception and the organization of
this book. All remaining misjudgments and faults are my sole responsi-
bility. Each of these friends has served as a model for combining intellec-
tual curiosity with an easy collegiality. I hope one day to be equal to the
example that they have collectively set.
I dedicate this book to my mother, Marjorie Yao, and to the memories of
my grandmother, C. T. Yu, and father, Sin Ping Yao. My entire life has been
shaped by the cadences of the accents they thankfully never lost. Th rough
their tremendous eff orts and sacrifi ces, they have opened doors for me that,
in any other place or moment in history, would have almost certainly been
closed.
F inally, I would like to thank Kyoko Omori for all the love and patience
that she has shown during the time I have written this book. It is because of
her that I know fi rst-hand the poetry that can come from feats of transpa-
cifi c exchange.
A portion of the introduction appeared as “Taxonomizing Hybridity” in
Textual Practice 17:2 (2003); a version of chapter 1 appeared in R epresenta-
tions 99 (Summer 2007); a version of chapter two appeared in the volume,
Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota 2008); and a version of chapter 3
appeared in Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Th eory 12:1 (2001). I am grateful
to these journals and to the University of Minnesota Press for permission to
reprint that material here.
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CONTENTS
Introduction: To Be (or Not to Be) the Poet: Th e Cultural
Politics of Verse in Asian American Literature, 3
1. Toward a Prehistory of Asian American Verse: Pound, Cathay ,
and the Poetics of Chineseness , 39
2. Chinese/American Verse in Transnational Perspective: Racial
Protest and the Poems of Angel Island, 63
Interchapter: From the Language of Race to the Poetics of
Ethnicity: Th e Rise of Asian American Verse , 95
3. “A Voice from China”: Ha Jin and the
Cultural Politics of Antisocialist Realism , 109
4. Th e Precision of Persimmons: Li-Young Lee, Ethnic
Identity, and the Limits of Lyric Testimony , 143
5. “Are You Hate Speech or Are You a Lullaby?”: Marilyn Chin
and the Politics of Form in Chinese/American Verse , 187
6. “Th e Owner of One Pock-Marked Tongue”: John Yau
and the Logic of Ethnic Abstraction , 231
Conclusion: Chinese/American Verse in the
Age of Postethnicity? , 265
Notes , 271
Bibliography , 305
Index , 319
ix