Book Reviews

Beyond Ethnography

Rocío Davis (Author)
Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles. TSAR Publications
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Reviewed by Lily Cho

Moving beyond ethnography has become an increasingly urgent task in Asian North American literary studies. It is not enough to read these texts as marginalized histories which merely supplement a dominant western narrative, nor can we read them as transparent texts of identity. The work of writers such as Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Sigrid Nunez demands an embracing of the difficulties and complexities of their textual innovations. In this sense, Rocío Davis’ Transcultural Reinventions takes up a timely task in Asian North American literary criticism. As she notes in her introduction to the book, “[r]eading contemporary Asian American and Asian Canadian literature primarily as ethnographic texts undercuts much of its value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where the choice and manipulation of form and technique serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities” (3). In the area of Asian American and Asian Canadian poetry, critics such as Garrett Hongo, Timothy Yu, Dorothy Wang, and Shelley Sunn Wong have all, in different ways, already made the argument for attending to the complexities of racialized subjectivity and Fred Wah has termed this complexity “ethnopoetics.” Although this discussion already has a history in terms of poetry, relatively little has been written on other forms of Asian North American literature with these debates specifically in mind.

In an original move, Davis has chosen to focus on the short-story cycle and to explore this genre as a specific site in which Asian Canadian and Asian American writers situate a series of interventions. As Davis’ book shows, there are a number of Asian Canadian and Asian American writers who have written in this genre. Indeed, some of the texts that may be seen as foundational to Asian American literature, such as Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, can be classified as short-story cycles.

While I believe that Asian American and Asian Canadian literary criticism will have to grapple increasingly with the kind of critical project that Davis proposes, this kind of criticism is certainly not easy to do. The degree of its difficulty emerges in Davis’ execution of this book. What Davis calls for is a rigorous attention to the formal aspects of Asian North American literature. Despite the desire to move beyond an ethnographic reading of this literature, Davis’ treatment of these texts results in a series of readings that treat the Asian North American texts under discussion as representative texts of Asian American and Asian Canadian experience. For example, regarding Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, Davis reads Choy’s use of the novella form (a form that she sees as akin to the short-story cycle) in order to represent multiple views of Vancouver’s Chinatown between the two World Wars. Davis argues that “[b]y developing the individual voices of the three children and expanding the cultural signifi- cance of their stories, the author builds a multidimensional image of Chinese Canadian identity within and beyond a Chinatown setting” (214). This reading of The Jade Peony, which seeks within the text an image of Chinatown that comes closer to a representative Chinese Canadian identity, falls precisely within the ethnographic logic which Davis proposes to move beyond.

Further, Davis’ discussion relies upon relatively familiar categories that do not necessarily challenge ethnographic readings. The organization of the book into themed chapters such as “Myths of Childhood and the Voice of the Child,” “Inscribing Mothers and Daughters,” and “Rewriting History” all bear the traces of some of the previous criticism and it is not always clear how Davis intervenes in previous discussions. Davis’ reading of Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club under the theme of motherdaughter relationships reinscribes much of what the critic works against. She suggests that “Tan’s mother-and-daughter cycle widens the narrative possibility of representing the languages, conflicts, and attitudes that separate and the bond that ultimately unites” (92). Again, Davis takes the literary text as representative of a social condition.

Davis’ reliance upon a thematic reading that is representative of a particular social world not only results in an ethnographic mode of reading, but also leaves her reading vulnerable to missing some of the important ways in which this literature does resist ethnographic criticism. Viet Nguyen’s discussion of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s text shows the kind of problems that Yamanaka poses for Asian American literary criticism in terms of highlighting the divisions between minority communities. The interventions of Lois-Ann Yamanaka are not the same as that of Amy Tan and yet Davis’ treatment of this diverse canon effects a curious flattening out of difference under the category of genre. While I agree with the overall argument that “[t]he short-story cycle illustrates the general process of multiethnic literature toward plurality, multiplicity, polyphony, and fragmentation as it tends to favor the multi-voiced text” (Davis 22) I am also troubled by the limitations of genre criticism. Polyphony, fragmentation, and so on are characteristic of any number of literary texts, but what we need to know is how Asian American and Asian Canadian writers attend to racialized subjectivities. However, this is difficult work and Transcultural Reinventions deserves notice for its commitment to a significant critical project.

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This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #182 (Autumn 2004), Gang Yue. (pg. 111 - 112)

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