TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.9 KB | 145 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 66

Fresh Voices Above the Noisy Din


New works by four Chinese-American writers splendidly illustrate
the frustrations, humor and eternal wonder of the immigrant's
life

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    After receiving his first stack of rejection slips in the
mid-1970s, David Wong Louie made a painful change in the short
stories he sent out: he stripped them of all traces of ethnic
identity. "What I'd do is write in the first person about
somebody like myself, but I wouldn't identify him as Chinese
American," he says. "I was trying to satisfy my paranoia about
what people wanted to read or what editors thought people wanted
to read. And I didn't see anything out there to tell me
differently."

    There wasn't much out there to see. Until the 1976 success
of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, a luminous
collection of stories that mixed memoirs about the author's San
Francisco girlhood with mystical tales of female warriors and
monkey kings, Asian Americans were the invisible men and women
in American literature. Even after Kingston's success, a dozen
years passed before another Asian-American fiction writer
achieved fortune and fame. First-time novelist Amy Tan's The Joy
Luck Club, a loosely connected series of stories about
Chinese-American mothers and daughters, sold an astonishing
275,000 hard-cover copies. Publishers took note, and this spring
brings not only Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, but
also splendid debuts by three other Chinese-American writers.

    Gus Lee's China Boy ($19.95) is this season's major
fiction offering from Dutton, which paid the novice writer an
advance of nearly $100,000 and ordered a first printing of
75,000 copies. Houghton Mifflin, which had ordered 11,000 copies
of Gish Jen's Typical American ($19.95), increased the run by
5,000 as pre publication excitement grew for this engaging tale
of one immigrant family's pursuit of the American Dream. Two
houses fought to publish Pangs of Love (Knopf; $19), Louie's
sharp and quirky collection of short stories.

    The enthusiasm among publishers for Asian-American writing
can be attributed in part to the growth of the country's Asian
population, which nearly doubled, from 3.5 million to 6.9
million, over the past decade. But editors say it also reflects
the fact that more Asian Americans are writing -- and writing
good books. "They're second generation, and they're better
educated and ready to tell about their experiences," says
Seymour Lawrence, Jen's publisher.

    Some cynics warn, however, that the fascination with
Asian-American fiction may be only skin-deep. "When there is a
great success like Amy Tan's book, everyone is out there looking
for his or her own Amy Tan,'' says Shannon Ravenel, the recently
retired editor of the annual collection of The Best American
Short Stories. Louie, 36, predicts that "if Gus Lee or Gish Jen
don't come through with big sales, then the next wave of
interest in Asian-American writers may not come for another 15
years." That would be a shame, because each of these authors
possesses the kind of fresh and original voice that marks a
genuine talent. "We're all individual writers," says Lee. "It
would be awful if we were compressed into one single dumpling."

    Even when Louie stopped putting Chinese names in his
stories, his prose captured the alienation the author felt
growing up as the son of a Chinese-laundry owner in a Long
Island, N.Y., suburb. Pangs of Love, whose darkly humorous tales
were written over the past seven years, recounts the adventures
of a Chinese-American waiter working in a Japanese sushi bar,
an Americanized son who can communicate with his
Cantonese-speaking mother only in a pidgin version of her
language, and the Chinese invention of baseball. Says Louie:
"Asian Americans are still marginalized. I feel I have to write
from those margins and tell what the experience is like."

    Jen works the margins too. The Chang family in Typical
American are devoted baseball fans who call themselves the
Chang-kees in honor of their favorite team, but "the one time
they went to an actual game, people had called them names and
told them to go back to their laundry." Jen, 35, who grew up in
Scarsdale, N.Y., and graduated from Harvard, is especially
intrigued by how outsiders move from the margins into the
mainstream.

    Typical American chronicles that bittersweet journey for
Ralph Chang, a Chinese engineering student who comes to the U.S.
in 1947 for his doctorate; his wife Helen; and his sister
Theresa. The Changs initially disdain the lack of tradition they
describe as "typical American" behavior, but soon they are
stir-frying hot dogs. They also fall under the spell of Grover
Ding, an American-born Svengali of free enterprise who leads
Ralph into a dubious fried-chicken business, seduces Helen and
causes Theresa, the family loyalist, to leave home. The happy
ending for the Changs comes not in abandoning the American Dream
but in finding a way to make it their own. "I wanted to broaden
the immigrant experience," says Jen. "The idea is to give
America back to Americans again in a fresh way."

    It would be hard to find a more all-American story than
Lee's delightful China Boy, a semiautobiographical novel based
on the author's childhood. Kai Ting, the title character, is
the pampered youngest child and only son of a once wealthy
family that fled China following the Communist takeover and
settled in a poor -- and predominantly black -- neighborhood in
San Francisco. When Kai's mother dies, his father brings home
a white wife. She institutes a harsh Americanization campaign
that bans all Chinese food, language and customs from the house
and abandons her stepson to regular beatings at the hands of
neighborhood bullies who call him by the humiliating name China
Boy. Kai gets little help from his father, who "was in an
untenable position, forked on the cultural chessboard where the
white squares of intellectual China met the hard black
industrial squares of the West." But the boy does find allies
in a black family, a Hispanic mechanic, a Chinese scholar who
is an old family friend and a trio of boxing coaches at the
Y.M.C.A. With their help, Kai learns how to make -- and protect
-- a place for himself in America.

    An attorney who attended West Point, Lee, 44, had never
written fiction before. But he is a natural storyteller who
stocks his tale with vivid characters, spirited dialogue and
good humor. The book began as a private memoir for Lee's two
children, but Kai Ting's struggle for self-identity is sure to
win the hearts of a much wider audience. "I didn't write this
book for commercial success," says Lee. "But I'd like to see
Asian-American writers have the chance to succeed and be read."
With books like these, they deserve to be.