A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

it justice. He had to have the nerve, or the arrogance, he wasn’t sure, to cross beyond
that.” 412
In other words, if America, like China or Japan or Korea is part of a vast Asian-Pacific network,
then claiming America is not necessarily a denial of Asia, but rather, a disclaiming of the United States as
an Anglo-Saxon preserve. Replacing or vying with the notion of America as an extension of European
civilization is the idea of an Asia-Pacific that extends into America.
Rachel C. Lee – The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and
5.2.4 Ethnic Asian Identities
Transnation 413
In 1989 Bamboo Ridge editors Chock and Lum published a collection of texts by Hawai’i
writers of Chinese ancestry. While commemorating the 200th anniversary of Chinese in
America, Lum says Paké was primarily intended to showcase that,
[i]ndeed, we do have a literary history: in English, with Hawaii settings, themes
and concerns, in the Western literary tradition; literature that is lively and vibrant
and concerns itself with making contemporary Asian American life in Hawaii.
[…] These are tales of settlers, making a life in the Islands struggling with the mix
of cultures and generations and languages. 414
Trying to express the significance of ethnicity in the lives of Hawai’i-born Asian
Americans, Lum is well aware that
we’re consciously trying to preserve a Chinese tradition that is not truly Chinese
to begin with, rather one that has evolved over the years and very likely bears little
resemblance to anything done in China. […] What we have is a local Chinese
412 Quoted in Hawai’i Review 22 No. 2 (Summer 1999): 54.
413 Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and
Transnation, Boston 1999: 110. As Fujikane notes, this ‘claiming of America’ is associated with the
Aiiieeeee! group, while Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men can be read as a counternarrative to such
strategic claims (see Fujikane 1996: 11).
414 Eric Chock/Darrell H.Y. Lum (eds.), Paké, Honolulu 1989: 10. The word pake, Hawaiian for Chinese,
though, has negative connotations. For an example refer to Cathy Song’s poem “Pa-ke” in Song 2001: 14-5.
Leprosy was commonly called ma’i pa’ke’, the Chinese sickness.
158