Abstract
Early-twentieth-century China was a country in turmoil, witnessing such events as the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War. Of these events, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), which resulted in the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Northern Shaanxi, has captured the attention and imagination of historians, film makers, and fiction writers.1 In particular, the Rape of Nanjing has become the center of focus in this war, not least because of the atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army against the inhabitants of Nanjing, atrocities that have become the subject of historical scholarship and literary representation. When Chinese immigrants in America describe the Sino-Japanese War, they not only identify a major source of national trauma in twentieth-century Chinese history but also clarify that any sense of Chinese American belonging in the United States can never be free from American political involvement in the Asia-Pacific world.
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Notes
Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution, trans. and ed. Julia Lovell (New York: Penguin, 2007). In Eileen Chang’s story, resistance to the Japanese invasion of China encompasses tensions between idealistic radicalism and the complexities of romantic relationships in which a patriotic young woman finds herself unexpectedly harboring romantic feelings for a national enemy.
Ha Jin, Nanjing Requiem (New York: Pantheon, 2011). All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as NR.
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1997), 7.
In Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), David Palumbo-Liu notes that “America’s interest in the Sino-Japanese War, its war in the Pacific (and its postwar relations in that area), its concern with China’s and Taiwan’s position in the Cold War, its wars in Korea and Indochina, have all affected Asian Americans profoundly, both in terms of Asians already in America and Asians who migrated to the United States” (218). Palumbo-Liu notes the contribution of American military incursions into and imperialistic designs in the Pacific toward the “cross-border” shaping of Asian/American modernity, one in which the idea of the United States as a nation cannot be extricated from racial, geopolitical, spatial, and conceptual interpenetrations. The importance of war as a thematic feature in Asian American literary and cultural production has recently been given critical attention in Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Kim analyzes the ways in which Asian American literature and film engage in critique of US military activities and imperial ambitions in Asia. Specifically she focuses attention on the Cold War as an extremely important political and historical context for the working out of American imperial ambitions in Asia, the realization of which cannot be disentangled from the strategic discursive racialization and gendering of the East. A consideration of Cold War history and its enablement of American hegemonic designs in the Asia-Pacific world offers an important exemplification of the functioning of American Orientalism. In “The Sino-Japanese Conflict of Asian American Literature,” in
China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces, ed. Elaine Yee Lin Ho and Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), Colleen Lye analyzes how the Sino-Japanese War constitutes an important part of that larger canvas of twentieth-century history within which China, Japan, and the United States find themselves embroiled in major military conflicts. Strategies of self- and racial representation in both Chinese American and Japanese American literary production are influenced by the unfolding of historical events involving the United States’ political engagement with both Republican China and Communist China, with both imperialistic and militarily defeated Japan. World War II helped give shape to “the rhetorical protocols of the claiming of Asian American identity” (166).
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife (New York: Penguin, 1991), 166. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as KGW.
Charles Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 232–52.
Bella Adams, “Representing History in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife,” MELUS 28, no. 2 (2003): 9–30.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon,” in Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom, 83–110 (New York: Chelsea House, 2002), 94.
Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (London: Flamingo, 2001), 235. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as BD.
Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 159.
Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate (London: Harper Perennial, 2003), 305, 209. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as OF.
Langston Hughes, Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander, in The Collected Poems of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, ed. Joseph McLaren, 16 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001–04), 14:248–49.
Lisa See, Shanghai Girls (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 22. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as SG. 22. For readings of the historical and cultural significance of inscriptions of the experience of would-be migrants on the walls of the detainment center in Angel Island, see
Steven G. Yao, “Transplantation and Modernity: The Chinese/American Poems of Angel Island,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Steven G. Yao, and Haun Saussy, 300–329 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008);
Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 63–93; and also
Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 101–15.
King-Kok Cheung, “Art, Spirituality, and the Ethic of Care: Alternative Masculinities in Chinese American Literature” in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner, 261–89. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
For an important study of how the history and legal enactments of US immigration exclusion acts significantly shaped and informed Asian American social and cultural identity with all its complex contradictions, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (London: Picador, 1977), 155. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as CM.
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (London: Minerva, 1989), 289. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as JLC.
David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 116.
Lisa See, Dreams of Joy (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 349. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition and will be cited as DJ.
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© 2013 Walter S. H. Lim
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Lim, W.S.H. (2013). The Sino-Japanese War and Chinese History in Amy Tan’s Novels and Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls. In: Narratives of Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137055545_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137055545_2
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