America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945

Introduction
THE MINORITY WHICH IS NOT ONE
SOON AFTER I STARTED TEACHING at Berkeley, I was invited to speak in a large student-organized undergraduate English lecture course called "Other Voices," a course that exists primarily to introduce lower-division students to minority faculty on the campus. It was suggested by the course facilitators that I talk about my research interests, but that in preparing my remarks I bear in mind that I would be the only Asian American guest that semester. For the students' reading assignment I chose a short poem by Mitsuye Yamada, "Looking Out":
It must be odd
to be a minority
he was saying.
I looked around
and I didn't see any.
So I said
Yeah
it must be.1
I framed my presentation around a reading of the poem, calling attention to the disjuncture between seeing and being seen, to the ambiguity in the speaker's response (registered in the gap between sight and speech) that could indicate either a reluctant acquiescence to social construction or an ironization of the other's perception. I wanted the students to wrestle with the misunderstanding that arises in the poem: is Yamada playing on the gap between external and internal perception or between different kinds of social perception held by the two people in the poem. I wanted the students to reflect on the kind of sociological and psychic construction signified by the term "minority" and its relation to questions of visibility, representation, identification, and subjectification. Yamada's poem helped me to kick off an introductory lecture on a central problematic of Asian American identity: the invention of "Asian American" as a panethnic construction by the yellow power movement of the 1960s, the coalitional character of its structuration, and its limitless tendency toward fragmentation.
Addressing undergraduates on the topic of ethnic identity is always tricky because it involves a double move--one of raising basic historical awareness and, at the same time, of demonstrating the constructedness of that history. In the case of the term "Asian American," this double move (empirical and critical) is particularly complicated by a persistent heterogeneity effect, which generates continual confusion about who Asian American describes or leads to repeated angry notices of "forgotten" Asian Americans.2 Either the category will not hold or it demands constant supplementation. At the end of my forty-five-minute presentation, an African American student raised his hand and asked the following question: Does the lecturer in fact consider Asian Americans to be a minority group? In his view, Asian Americans are white. At the University of California, where the abolition of affirmative action by state Proposition 209 was just then raising the specter of the resegregation of state higher education for African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans--but not Asian Americans--there are no politically comfortable responses to this perception, which arises from a sense that the group has somehow been exempt from the historical laws of systemic racial subordination. Even when the existence of historical discrimination is acknowledged, there is a sense that the minority status of Asian Americans is likely to be somehow temporary and that in a world of unfettered competition Asian Americans are likely to rise to the top of the socioeconomic order. Both opponents and critics of Proposition 209 at the time predicted that the law would primarily benefit Asian Americans, whose relative share of the admitted pool of students was bound to increase. Yet to some extent, this pitting of black and brown against yellow was a replay of an admissions scandal in the 1980s in which the university administration had resorted to the (illegal) application of differential criteria for whites and Asian Americans, in the belief that without them Asian Americans were likely to displace whites.
This book explores the history of such perceptions and beliefs. The eccentricity of "Asian American" to the minority discourse of liberal multiculturalism has an origin in the historical identification of an Asian presence in the United States with the social costs of unbridled capitalism. The prominent post-1960s representation of Asian Americans as nonminorities, or as "minorities, yes; but oppressed, no,"3 forms the kernel of what has come to be called the "model minority" myth--the representation of Asian Americans as capable of upward mobility without the aid of state-engineered correctives. For reasons having to do with the necessarily international context of Asian American racialization, as this book will show, the domestic signification of Asian Americans has its counterpart in the global signification of Asia.