A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

accepted ethnicities. 191 The book registers expansion and diversification in the 1980s and
90s, and in her preface, Elaine Kim mentions several crucial changes:
During the past two decades, some Asian and Pacific American populations have
increased by 500 to 1,000 percent. […] The lines between Asian and Asian
American, so crucial to identity formations in the past, are increasingly blurred:
transportation to and communication with Asia is no longer daunting, resulting in
new crossovers and intersections and different kinds of material and cultural
distances today. 192
In spite of such mobility, the recurrent motifs of dreams of ‘homecoming’ and
experiences of homelessness exhibited in Filipino texts are reminiscent of their
prevalence in the literatures of migrant economies such as the Caribbean, and in the
essays of exilic or diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie or Edward Said. 193 Campomanes
quotes the latter when identifying “a pressing need for the recovery of the land that […] is
recoverable at first only through the imagination.” 194 A more postcolonial than
assimilationist sensibility will not find the America that is ‘in the heart’ while the home
that one left behind cannot be returned to. This engenders the ‘imaginary homelands’ and
‘Indias of the mind’ which contemporary ethnic literatures create. Campomanes identifies
‘aesthetics of economy,’ or a ‘heritage of smallness,’ and an ‘archipelagic poetics’ as
characteristic elements of Filipino American texts. He concludes: “The portability of
191 Vietnamese Americans are largely the descendants of a refugee community that emerged after the fall of
Saigon in 1975. Historian Ronald Takaki states that “in 1964, there were only 603 Vietnamese living in the
United States. They were students, language teachers, and diplomats” (in Strangers from a Different Shore:
A History of Asian Americans, Boston 1989: 448; quoted in Cheung 1997: 220). In April 1975, 86,000
South Vietnamese arrived in the U.S. within days. South Asian Americans is the label for people with
Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi backgrounds who are “linked by common histories of British
colonization.” Reviewing their emergent literature, Ketu H. Katrak makes a statement that applies to all
ethnic groups: “Even within the same ethnic group there is multiplicity rather than homogeneity, and this is
often the hardest fact for any mainstream to recognize” (Ketu H. Katrak, “South Asian American
Literature,” in Cheung 1997: 192-218, here 193). While Vietnamese Americans have not produced a
canonized body of texts yet, South Asian American writers such as Meena Alexander and Bharati
Mukherjee have been vocal in ‘claiming America.’ This is explainable with class privilege and educational
background. Many Indian Americans are upper middle class professionals. Coming generations will surely
add to both these literatures.
192 Elaine Kim, “Preface,” in Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary
Asian American Fiction, 1993: xi.
193 One such example of a Local Filipino quest for ‘home’ is Michelle Cruz Skinner’s 1988 novel
Balikbayan: A Filipino Homecoming.
194 Campomanes in Cheung 1997: 85.
57