A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

synthesizing art in 1989’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, whose main character, a
playwright and trickster figure, is modeled on Chin himself.
Given all that, one should not overlook the contribution the Aiiieeeee! group made
to Asian American literary historiography by (re)discovering and canonizing writers,
mainly of Chinese and Japanese ancestry. 177 For Chinese America, they champion for
example Sui Sin Far’s lucid thoughts on being Eurasian at the turn of the 20 th century, and
Louis Chu’s 1961 depiction of New York’s aging Chinatown bachelor society in Eat a
Bowl of Tea. Chu’s book is considered the first Chinese American novel, and its story
records the changes that altered immigration laws brought: Chinese were the earliest
Asian immigrants, associated with the California gold rush and the building of the
transcontinental railroad. From 1882 to 1943, the Chinese exclusion act prevented further
immigration, but after World War II, war brides enabled the building of families. The
liberalized immigration laws of 1965 led to a massive demographic shift and an influx of
immigrants from China but also from other Asian countries.
Compared to Chinese, the Japanese American experience up to 1941 generated a
much more self-assured literary activity, ranging from traditional haiku and tanka poetry
clubs to literary magazines in both Japanese and English. Disaster struck the immigrant
community with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent period of
‘wartime relocation camps.’ This sad and enraging story of injustice and insensitivity is
belatedly exposed and documented in Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy: The Untold Story
of America’s Concentration Camps, published in 1976, which became model and
incentive for redress suits. 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were interned in camps in
California, Arizona, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Idaho, mostly set up in uninhabited desert
areas. Removed from their homes, stripped of their constitutional rights, they were
suddenly considered potential traitors, collaborators with the imperial enemy. Japanese
American literature went through a stage of either silence or autobiographies testifying to
acculturation, Americanization, and the burden of dual identities. Later, third-generation
Japanese Americans, the sansei, blamed their nisei parents for keeping quiet, for not
demanding their rights as citizens, and for not standing up to the immigrant generation,
177 In the first anthology, Filipino authors are included but considered separately in a lengthy introduction to
Filipino American cultural history. The Big Aiiieeeee! reductively focuses on Chinese and Japanese
American writers. Today, of course, the Asian American umbrella struggles to keep Korean, Vietnamese,
and South Asian immigrants and their descendants under its wings along with those ‘earlier’ groups.
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