Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective

Author(s): Rachel Lee

Source: boundary 2 , Summer, 1999, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 231-254
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/303801

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Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective

Rachel Lee

One of the most-if not the most-pressing social concerns inf

ing Asian American cultural critique in the 1990s is globalization a
prospects of an Asian-Pacific community amid increasing transnatio
fic.1 While most critics in the field of Asian American studies agree
point, they differ radically on the implications of such border-defy

A version of this essay was presented in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the Multi-Ethnic L

of the United States (MELUS) Conference, "Multi-Ethnic Literatures across th
and the Pacific: Exchanges, Contestations, and Alliances," 19 April 1997. My
Christopher Connery and Rob Wilson for their thoughtful comments on earlier
this essay.
1. Registering an early 1990s interest in questions of globalization are Sucheta Mazum-
dar's influential essay "Asian American Studies and Asian Studies: Rethinking Roots"
and the volume in which it was printed, the official proceedings of the annual meeting
of the Association for Asian American Studies, titled Asian Americans: Comparative and
Global Perspective, ed. Shirley Hune, Hyung-chan Kim, Stephen S. Fugita, and Amy Ling
(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1991). See also Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich,
and Lucie Cheng, The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring
(Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1994); and the special issue of Amerasia
Journal titled "Transnationalism," 22, no. 3 (1996).

boundary2 26:2, 1999. Copyright ? 1999 by Duke University Press.

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232 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

grations to Asian American political identity. To take two contrastive cases,

Susan Koshy and Sau-ling Wong, in their (re)mappings of the field of Asian
American studies, both underscore the demographic changes in Asian
America's population following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.2
Koshy uses this data to suggest the inadequacy of Asian American rubrics
-such as the U.S.-based, Asian panethnicity model3-to speak to the "de-
territorialization of ethnic identity" that characterizes this more recently ar-
rived emigrant population.4 By contrast, Wong suggests that this same con-
stituency will reinvigorate the "older" issues of citizenship, voting rights,
access to education, and pressures to assimilate, which, though set into
motion by populations flowing across national borders, are still very much
questions of national consciousness and consequence.5 Both of these posi-
tions are part of an ongoing critical debate in which the past and future
directions of Asian American studies are being hotly contested.
Concurrent with this reassessment of the field by Asian American
scholars in response to the pressures of globalization, theorists of the "Asia-
Pacific" have also speculated on the meanings of Asian American cultural
production to the formation of alternative imagined communities "created
by travel and trade, and . .. mobilized in dispersion" rather than primarily
through settlement within individual nation-states.6 In the groundbreaking
book What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea,
Arif Dirlik frames an Asian American literary tradition--defined by cultural
nationalists Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan-as the embodiment of a
cultural tradition corresponding to the "Asia-Pacific" idea.7 By proposing a
cultural dimension to the Pacific Rim, Dirlik intervenes in the economic de-

2. Susan Koshy, "The Fiction of Asian American Literature," Yale Journal of Criticism 9,
no. 2 (fall 1996): 315-46; and Sau-ling Wong, "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian
American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads," Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1
and 2 (1995): 1-27.
3. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Phila-
delphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1992).
4. Koshy, "Fiction of Asian American Literature," 334-35.
5. Wong, "Denationalization Reconsidered," 16-17, 19.
6. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of
Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.
7. Arif Dirlik, ed., What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boul-
der, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993). In a subsequent article, Dirlik persists in identifying
cultural nationalism as the hegemonic reference point of Asian American studies ("Asians
on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of Contemporary
Asian America," Amerasia Journal 22, no. 3 [1996]: 17).

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 233

terminism that haunts discussions of the Asia-Pacific region; and though I

appreciate his motives in this respect, I take issue with his dated account
of Asian American studies, which is reduced to a past formation of hege-
monic cultural nationalism intent on claiming America. My point is not to
fault Dirlik's essay in particular but to regard its misapprehension of Asian
American studies as symptomatic of the hierarchical field positionings of
Asia-Pacific theory versus Asian American literary studies. In essence, the
Asia-Pacific paradigm is framed as the heuristic device of the future with
old-fashioned Asian American studies imagined as a mere subset of a more
expansive and timely area of study. Whether deliberate or not, this privileg-
ing move requires that Asia-Pacific critics overlook Asian American literary
texts that, far from lagging behind, actually anticipate global frameworks,
enunciating precisely the formation of hybrid Asian cultures in scattered
sites across the Pacific due to labor migrations, colonial invasions, the flow
of transnational capital, and the hyperlinks of satellite communications.
Three years before the publication of Dirlik's book, Karen Yamashita
published Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, a novel concerned more with
border-defying "finance-scapes," "media-scapes," and eco-scapes than with
U.S. multiculturalism and the struggle of Asians against domestic racism.8
Granted, many Asian American literary critics did not know how to charac-
terize this novel's fabulistic subject matter and style. This essay represents
an effort at rapprochement between spokespersons of critical regionalism
who take a narrow view of Asian American culture and Asian American cul-
ture specialists who, though knowledgeable on a wealth of border-crossing
cultural artifacts, haven't yet articulated these texts in terms of the trans-
Pacific and global frameworks theorized by historians, sociologists, econo-
mists, and anthropologists.
In this essay, I examine Yamashita's novel in relation to both theories
of the "Asia-Pacific" and Asian American cultural nationalist paradigms. By
examining this particular novel's relationship to these overlapping, yet also
contestatory, interpretive rubrics, I hope to shed light not only on two salient
notions of community formation that continually vie for hegemony in the field
of Asian American studies but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the
way in which that struggle for hegemony has been narrated as a paradigm

8. Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee
House Press, 1990). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text as TAR. Ar-
jun Appadurai coined the terms finance-scapes and media-scapes in "Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (spring 1990): 1-24.

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234 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

shift that has its telos (and, paradoxically, its origin) across the Pacific.9 To
my mind, there are several dangers in Asian American discourse standing
in as a foil for the expansiveness of the Asia-Pacific, not least of which is
the evacuation of a sustainable space of Asian American studies that is
neither a subset of American studies nor of Asian studies but a third (tacti-
cal) space from which to critique both fields and to reflect scrupulously on
its own (potentially oppressive) institutional conventions.

1. The Asia-Pacific

To begin with a broad definition, one might describe the Asia-Pacific

region as one of several ways to represent organizations of capital in the
late twentieth century.10 According to Dirlik, the modern incarnation of

9. For recent narrations of the field that imply the eschatology of Asian American stu
across the Pacific, see Dirlik's "Asians on the Rim" and Koshy's "Fiction of Asian Ameri
Literature." For an alternative mapping, see Sau-ling Wong's "Denationalization Rec
sidered." Remarking not on the direction of Asian American studies as a field but
the very ambiguity of the cardinal directions themselves, Christopher Connery makes
point that the globe's circularity renders the journey westward and forward (and
the future) simultaneously the journey backward to the past-to origins in the East
further argues that this circularity is implicated in a capitalist imaginary ("The Oce
Feeling and Regional Imaginary," in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Trans
tional Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake [Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer
Press, 1996], 298-99).
10. Connery describes Pacific Rim discourse as "an imagining of U.S. multinational c
talism in an era when the 'socialist' bloc still existed, and it is the socialist bloc that is
the principal discursive and strategic Other" ("Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global
Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years," in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production,
ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 32); while
Bruce Cumings claims that the "Pacific Rim" is a "class-based definition of Asia. The
'community' is a capitalist archipelago, based on indigenous labor power and purchas-
ing power-although mainly labor power until recently" ("Rimspeak; or, The Discourse
of the 'Pacific Rim,'" in Dirlik, What Is in a Rim, 33). To my mind, Donald Nonini offers
one of the most persuasive accounts of the Asia-Pacific: "The 'Asia-Pacific' or 'Pacific
Rim' can best be understood as the trope for a set of economic, political, and cultural
processes creating relationships within a supraregion of Asia and the United States that
have been under way since approximately the mid-1970s--processes arising from what
the Marxist geographer David Harvey has called the 'spatial displacements' or 'spatial
fixes' of contemporary capitalism" ("Ethnographic Grounding of the 'Asia-Pacific' Imagi-
nary," in Dirlik, What Is in a Rim, 163). See also Ong and Nonini's characterization of
modern Chinese transnationalism as a parallel, yet ethnic-specific (Chinese) rather than
pan-Pacific, social formation likewise associated with late capitalism and arising "out of

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 235

"Pacific Rim" began as a parallel initiative to the European economic com-

munity and anticipated the formalization of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA)." From one aspect, the Asia-Pacific idea appears to
be the subset of a particular type of global discourse: transnational econo-
mism-as distinct from internationalism or humanism, for instance.
From another aspect, however, visions of the Pacific Rim have a par-
ticular American cast-a means by which U.S. corporations responded to
the economic successes of East Asian nations, Japan, in particular, after
World War II. Posing as part of an Asian-Pacific region or Pacific Rim en-
abled the United States to take part in those "miraculous" growth scenarios
in the "newly industrialized countries" of the East (Taiwan, South Korea,
Hong Kong, and Singapore), even if that meant the ambivalent recognition
that capitalism had been de-Westernized.12 To quote Christopher Connery,
"the [Pacific Rim] discourse of equality and connectedness reflects, in part,
a reaction to East Asian 'success': When Japan is number one, the only
way not to be number two is to transcend the nation."13 A primary rea-
son for evoking a postnational community, then, is to deny the waning of
U.S. superiority by incorporating "outsider" threats into a new transnational
coalition.

As a preemptive strike at the economic potentiality of Asian-based

entrepreneurs, the Asia-Pacific, on the one hand, merely extends the United
States' discourse of Manifest Destiny. On the other hand, by evoking a
region defined by an economic logic specifically designed to transgress
national borders, the Pacific Rim undermines the persuasiveness of territo-
rial nationalism, U.S. or otherwise. A tension, therefore, develops between
the general boundless capacities of capital flows-which the concept of

the new transnational economic processes that transcend the porous political boundaries
of nation-states" (Ungrounded Empires, 11).
11. Dirlik, What Is in a Rim, 8. According to Dirlik, the Asia-Pacific idea was invented by
Europeans somewhat haphazardly from their discovery of it in the sixteenth century and
more formally since the nineteenth century onward (What Is in a Rim, 5-6). However, he
and the other contributors to his book are concerned with "the discourse on the Pacific
as part of a global discourse ... the product of a discourse of capitalism" that "began
to emerge sometime in the 1960s" (What Is in a Rim, 7-8). See M. Consuelo Le6n W.,
"Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific," in Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as
Space of Cultural Production, 17-29, for a genealogy of the Pacific image in American
minds since the eighteenth century.
12. Alexander Woodside, "The Asia-Pacific Idea as Mobilization Myth," in Dirlik, What Is
in a Rim, 24.
13. Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse," 6.

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236 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

the Asia-Pacific tries to capture-and the territorial conceptual order sug-

gested in the term Pacific Rim. To illustrate, Dirlik argues that the relation-
ships comprising the Pacific Rim cannot "be understood without reference
to global forces that transcend the Pacific."14 Claiming that the "Pacific re-
gion idea" is not about spatial fixity, though it is named after a geographical
marker, he proposes "that the terms [of the Pacific Rim] represent idea-
tional constructs that, although they refer to a physical location on the globe,
are themselves informed by conceptualizations that owe little to geography
understood physically or positivistically."15 Instead, they are distinguished
by human activity and networks that are nonetheless associated with the
grand expanse of the Pacific:

There is indeed a Pacific region in a different (and more meaning-

ful) sense than the physically geographic. Motions of people, com-
modities, and capital over the last few centuries have created rela-
tionships that traverse the Pacific in different directions. ... Such
motions continue to this day and account for the gap between the
Pacific area (conceived physically) and a Pacific region conceived
in terms of human activity. Emphasis on human activity shifts at-
tention from physical area to the construction of geography through
human interactions; it also underlines the historicity of the region's
formation(s).16

The emphasis on human interactions becomes crucial to Dirlik's argument

that the Asia-Pacific -generated by economists and military strategists-

14. Dirlik, What Is in a Rim, 4.

15. Dirlik, What Is in a Rim, 3. Despite its incongruency with a geographic region, many
critics specify the Pacific Rim through geographical lists. Connery notes that "by 1973 or
1974, it appears to mean the United States and East Asia"; however, "the most exten-
sive geographical definition of the term has been peninsular and island Southeast Asia;
China, Northeast Asia, including the Soviet Pacific region; Australia; New Zealand; Papua
New Guinea, the islands of the south Pacific; and the Pacific Coast of South, Central, and
North America. For practical discursive purposes, the Pacific Rim consists of the United
States, Canada, Mexico (tenuously though ... ), Japan, China, the Four Tigers .. .-
Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore-and the up-and-coming, or minor-
league players: Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The psychic center
of the Pacific Rim is the United States-Japan relationship" ("Pacific Rim Discourse," 32).
Relying less on a geopolitical catalog and more on a geo-economic one, Cumings ar-
gues that "Rimspeak" ropes in the miracle economics of Latin American, "post-Allende
Chile, maquiladora Mexico, even Atlantic Rim Brazil (but only in its pre-debt-crisis phase
of 'miracle growth')" ("Rimspeak," 31).
16. Dirlik, What Is in a Rim, 4.

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 237

might be converted to culturalist ends. In other words, what was intended

as a trope to catalyze financial partnerships and increase corporate profits
might be diverted for other purposes, namely to describe the human labor,
suffering, and ecological fallout blithely covered over in allusions to a co-
prosperity sphere. Thus, Asia-Pacific theorists search for cultural forms that
might speak to an alternative "Asia-Pacific" consciousness produced out of
the "human networks that endow the region with a social reality."17
In his early mapping of the Asia-Pacific, Dirlik turns to the cultural
nationalist writings of Chin and Chan as possible proto-expressions of the
"Asia-Pacific" ethos: equal partnership in a Pacific region rather than as-
similation into an anglicized United States.18 In this way, "claiming America"
is rehabilitated under the Asia-Pacific rubric as an effort to claim America

for Asia or for the Pacific region. In other words, if "America," like China
or Japan or Korea is part of a vast Asian-Pacific network, then claiming
America is not necessarily a denial of Asia but rather a disclaiming of the
United States as an Anglo-Saxon preserve. Replacing or vying with the
notion of America as an extension of European civilization is the idea of an
Asia-Pacific that extends into America.19

In a more recent culturalist project, Dirlik, along with coeditor Rob

Wilson, attempts to rectify the absence of Pacific Basin cultures in prior
definitions of the Pacific Rim. The editors include creative works by Pacific
Islanders and Asian Americans in order to highlight "indigenous traditions
as alternatives to construct social identity."20 Orthographically, Asia-Pacific
with a hyphen refers to the capitalist utopia, while Asia/Pacific with a slash
indicates a "counter-hegemonic 'space of cultural production' " derivative of
the local memories of Pacific Basin peoples.2 Interestingly, both of these

17. Dirlik, What is in a Rim, 307.

18. Dirlik, What is in a Rim, 320-25.
19. Interestingly, Dirlik-a specialist in modern Chinese history-has little difficulty em-
bracing the idea of an Asia-Pacific that extends into America. By contrast, Gary Okihiro-
a central figure in Asian American studies--stresses an American invasive desire that
ultimately brought forth Asian American history: "Asians, it must be remembered, did
not come to America; Americans went to Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not
come to take the wealth of America; Americans went to take the wealth of Asia. Asians, it
must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to
conquer and colonize Asia. And the matter of the 'when and the where' of Asian Ameri-
can history is located therein, in Europe's eastward and westward thrusts, engendered,
transformative, expansive" (Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and
Culture [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994], 28-29).
20. Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, 13.
21. Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, 6.

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238 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

attempts to refine and develop the Asia-Pacific as a cultural category fail to

comprehend a text such as Through the Arc, which neither claims America
for Asia nor represents the local memories of Pacific Basin peoples.
It is my argument, then, that both definitions of the "Asia-/Pacific" as
well as the fictional work Through the Arc can all be viewed as responses to
the unsettling effects of globalization or time-space compression. To quote
Doreen Massey, time-space compression refers to "movement and commu-
nication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations,
and to our experience of all this," 22 in other words, to a spreading out onto a
global terrain of the social relations that determine the meanings and speci-
ficities of local places. In the same way that theories of the Asia-/Pacific
study social identities and cultural artifacts through spatial, regional, and
emplaced languages, so does Yamashita's novel provide a new, perhaps
provisional, conceptual container for prospective communities.23 However,
the semifictional place that unites the "imagined community" of Yamashita's
novel is neither an island in the Pacific nor a nation that rests on its Rim
but the Matacio, "an enormous impenetrable field" located in "the southern
region of the Amazon basin" (TAR, 16). Though situated outside the "Asia-
Pacific," this fictional site conceptually resembles the former geographic
zone. As in the case of the Pacific Rim, the Mataco describes not a fixed
and singular territory established by political claims but a shape-shifting re-
gion (later regions) defined by the presence of a "miracle" substance-in the

22. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), 147.
23. It is my argument, then, that theories of the Asia-Pacific come in a variety of forms
(fictional, ethnographic) that are not necessarily under the express banner of the "Asia-
Pacific." For instance, Ong and Nonini do not examine their subject-modern Chinese
transnationalism--under the express banner of Asia-Pacific theory. However, by Asia-
Pacific theory, I mean to evoke institutionally and generically distinct studies (for example,
under the rubric of diaspora studies, area studies, East Asian studies, Pacific Basin
studies, and Asian American cultural criticism) that delve into questions of globalization
in relation to contemporary Asian ethnogenesis across various sites. Ong and Nonini,
though focusing specifically on Chinese transnationals, make clear their affinity with the
post-Orientalist and critical regionalist approach of the explicit "Asia/Pacific" theorists
Dirlik and Wilson: "We agree with Dirlik's position and seek in our essays to go beyond the
analyses of written texts in his two edited volumes ... by providing ethnographic detail....
We, with Wilson and Dirlik (1994), call for the humanization -and transformation -of the
so-called global system of late capitalism, in Asia and elsewhere" (Ungrounded Empires,
12-13). Yamashita's novel--though characterized as a magical-realist text about Brazil--
also has affinities with the critical regionalist approach even as it significantly intervenes
and revises many of its premises.

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 239

Matacio's case, a highly moldable, magnetic plastic. Like the Pacific Rim,
the Matacdo is a quasi-geographical place-name, somewhat contiguous
with the Amazon Rain Forest, yet also marked by indeterminate boundaries.
Throughout the narrative, Yamashita confronts her reader with both
the geographic specificity of the Matacdo (its Brazilian distinctiveness) and
its formation through global flows that belie such locational limits. The Mata-
cdo comes to light as a phenomenon caused by external forces--garbage of
the most populated and polluting nations sunk down into the Earth's molten
layers and redistributed to the "virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon For-
est, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty" (TAR, 202). The
local specificity of the former Amazon-its "virginal," isolable qualities-
paradoxically, contributes to the undoing of its "local" determination. At the
same time, the narrative suggests that the notion of place boundaries is
itself a fiction, yet one that is necessary to comprehend the increasing com-
pression of the world, which is signaled in the violation of such boundaries.
Limning the effects of global financial flows, media networks, and migration
routes requires the construction of a border to trespass, to mark the infiltra-
tion of local (native) identities by global (alien) influences and vice versa.
Whereas theorists of the Asia-Pacific grapple with the effects of
global capital by highlighting the trespass of East-West dichotomies, Yama-
shita's novel emphasizes globalization as a multinoded cultural intermingling
that is not relayed through the merging of two "opposites"-for example,
Asia and the United States-but through the compilation of heterogeneous
national, racial, and cultural components all in one site, the Matacio. Thus,
an Amazonian native, a Japanese immigrant, a New York entrepreneur, a
Sho Paulo denizen, and a pilgrim from Ceara all converge in this mystical
place. Moreover, several of these characters are themselves embodiments
of racial, regional, and cultural cross-fertilization: The narrative attributes
Chico Paco's blond hair to "the old Dutch conquerors of [the northeastern]
part of the country" (TAR, 25) and describes the Sdo Paulan protagonist,
Batista Djapan, as "a mellow and handsome mixture of African, Indian and
Portuguese" (TAR, 12).
The novel especially highlights the global constitution of local iden-
tities in its portrait of the Amazonian denizen, Mane Pena. Though Mane
has never traveled beyond his native stomping grounds, he remains greatly
affected by the increased mobility of others: Tourists "from every corner of
the world" flow into Mane's unbounded locality-a veritable "wonder of the
world" (TAR, 16-17; my emphasis). When a national network comes to tape
a documentary on the altered Amazon, Mane Pena appears contradictorily

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240 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

as "a poor, barefoot regional type," yet dressed in a "faded Hawaiian shirt
splattered with Aloha" (TAR, 18, 23). The Hawaiian shirt that Mane wears-
imported from another tourist site-represents the spread of a Hawaiian
artifact that is, paradoxically, a localized item that sheds some of its ethnic
specificity as it makes its way around the world on the bodies of tourists.
Thus, both Mane and the Hawaiian shirt he sports are somewhat like "the
primeval forest that is not primeval" (TAR, 16), underscoring the already hy-
bridized, global-local cultural milieu of not only the Matacdo but also the
Pacific Basin. The revelation toward the end of the novel that the Mata-
cdo, itself, is a conglomeration of waste from industrialized, high-polluting
countries only confirms the sense of globalized localities and localized glob-
alization (TAR, 202).
Because Mane lives in a region of particular international interest,
the restriction of his life to this singular place actually intensifies his connec-
tions to people from other locations and to global culture. In this respect,
he seems to exemplify what Massey describes as those who are affected
by "time-space compression" but are not in control of it; in fact, they might
be imprisoned in it.

Different social groups have distinct relationships to . . . mobility:

some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows
and movement, others don't; some are more on the receiving-end of
it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.
... There are the people who live in the favelas of Rio, who know
global football like the back of their hand, and have produced some
of its players; who have contributed massively to global music, who
gave us the samba and produced lambada that everyone was danc-
ing to last year in the clubs of Paris and London; and who have never,
or hardly ever, been to downtown Rio. At one level they have been
tremendous contributors to what we call time-space compression;
and at another level they are imprisoned in it.24

In drawing out the distinct positions of various peoples with respect to these
global flows-what she calls "the power geometry of time-space compres-
sion"- Massey importantly distinguishes the jet-setters, media moguls, and
organizers of international capital from both the undocumented migrant
workers and those who do not physically travel yet whose immobility is
greatly affected by the mobility of others.25 Thus, while relatively immobile

24. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 149-50.

25. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 149.

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 241

with respect to the businessmen, tourists, scientists, and government offi-

cials who flock to the Matacdo, Mane paradoxically finds himself displaced
and transformed by their movements and flows.
Through its portraits of Mane and the Matacio, Through the Arc
broaches themes of globalization that similarly preoccupy theorists of the
Asia-Pacific; however, where these critics, to a large degree, rehabilitate a
focus on Asia and the United States (though redefined in a relationship of
partnership rather than hierarchy), Yamashita's novel attempts to displace
both these optics by focusing on the fantastical site of the Matacao and
on local native identity not necessarily derivative of the Pacific Basin but
possibly affected by it (as is the case with Mane dressed in an "Aloha"
shirt).26 However, by illustrating globalization as a multiform rather than
East-West convergence, Yamashita also attenuates her novel's connec-
tions to both Asian American and Asian-Pacific critical contexts. In not

stressing the East-West cultural distinction (but preferring a First World

Third World distinction), Yamashita defies the methodological convention
of both these scholarly fields. The question that immediately arises i
whether Through the Arc is, indeed, relevant to Asian American literary
traditions and an Asian American political project. Is the novel's particular
outlook on globalization inherently at odds with an ethnic-specific readin
Does Yamashita's exploration of polyglot cultural influences require a r
visioning of an implicit communal structure based on pan-Asian racial ide
tity? These questions hint at a fundamental tension involved in interweavin
a global thematic with a specific focus on Asian-Pacific and Asian Americ
political concerns. While theories of the Asia-Pacific attempt to resolve tha

26. Furthermore, by moving focus away from the miracle economies of the Pacific R
and scrutinizing a former export-driven "miracle" economy now in a state of trem
dous debt crisis--ostensibly located outside the "Asia-Pacific" region-the narrative e
courages speculation over the financially determinate, changeable borders of the "As
Pacific" region. As noted earlier, Cumings claims that "sometimes Rimspeak ropes i
the Latin American countries [such as] Atlantic Rim Brazil (but only in its pre-debt-cris
phase of 'miracle growth')" ("Rimspeak," 31). If Brazil can only be a part of the Rim in i
miracle phase, then is Through the Arc's portrait of post-miraculous Brazil a harbing
of "the endpoint of Pacific Rim discourse," for which Connery gave the date of Februar
1990, the same year of Through the Arc's publication ("Pacific Rim Discourse," 46)? Whil
for some "free marketeers" the end of Pacific Rim discourse merely marks the expansio
of their economic formulas onto a "global rim" (Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse," 55
in the case of Through the Arc, going beyond Pacific Rim discourse is part of a larg
critique of the fiction of co-prosperity. The novel wedges apart the seamless portrait
miraculous "development" by underscoring the diversity of social actors participating
co-prosperous growth.

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242 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

tension through a heavy reliance on geographic and spatial moorings (in

essence, to recontain the spread of border-crossing effects), Yamashita's
novel negotiates the disjuncture of her global and specific interests by way
of literary allusion, narrative voice, wordplay, and discursive details. In the
following section, I trace the Asian American specificity of Yamashita's novel
that plays in counterpoint to its Brazilian and global focus.

2. The Karaoke-Singing Railroad Worker: Shattering the

Time-Space of Asian American Literature

When reviewers broadly characterize Yamashita's novel, they do not

label it "Asian American fiction"; instead, they describe Through the Arc as
"a parable of ecological devastation" (New York Times), a "wise first novel
of global dimension" (Booklist), and "a mixture of magic realism, satire, and
futuristic fiction" (San Francisco Chronicle).27 Though the novel features a
Japanese immigrant protagonist, this character is sufficiently altered from
the expected Asian immigrant profile-for example, the plantation worker,
gold miner, laborer in the guano pits, war refugee-that his presence does
not seem an obvious link to other Asian American literary works. Yet for
readers familiar with Asian American historical contexts, Yamashita's pro-
tagonist, Kazumasa Ishimaru, seems a subtle parody of a familiar arche-
type, the Chinese American railroad worker.
This historical figure has provided grist for the mill in Asian American
studies for nearly three decades. In the late '70s and throughout the '80s,
Asian American historians, playwrights, and novelists recalled the labor
of Chinese immigrants on the Central Pacific Railroad to make a case
for national belonging.28 The grandfather in Maxine Hong Kingston's best-

27. John R. B. Campbell, review of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, by Karen Tei
Yamashita, New York Times Book Review, 10 March 1991, 16; Donna Seaman, review
of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, by Karen Tei Yamashita, Booklist, 1 August 1990,
2157; and Stan Yogi, "An Eco-Fantasy Set in Brazil," review of Through the Arc of the Rain
Forest, by Karen Tei Yamashita, San Francisco Chronicle Review, 30 September 1990, 6.
28. See Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of
Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1990); Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New
York: Vintage, 1989); Frank Chin, The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. (Minneapolis,
Minn.: Coffee House Press, 1988); David Henry Hwang, "The Dance and the Railroad,"
in Broken Promises: Four Plays (New York: Avon Books, 1983), 59-99; Bill Ong Hing,
Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 20; and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 243

selling novel China Men (1980) exemplifies the type of heroic portraiture
surrounding the Chinese railroad worker: "[Grandfather] spent the rest of
his time on the railroad laying and bending and hammering the ties and rails
[until] the engine from the West and the one from the East rolled toward one
another and touched. The transcontinental railroad was finished. . . . 'Only
Americans could have done it,' they said.... [Ah Goong] was an American
for having built the railroad." 29 Kingston portrays her forebear not as part of
an international workforce but as an "American" by virtue of his toil on the
rails. Great national projects such as the Central Pacific thus attest to both
the Chinese immigrants' making of America (and hence right to claim it as
their own) and their remembered labor in the United States, which, in turn,
remade these immigrants into "Americans."
Playfully riffing on this archetype of Asian American history, Yama-
shita anticipates those critics who comment on the pressing need for Asian
American studies to go "beyond railroads and internment," which for so long
have been the focal points of scholarship.30 Yamashita both resuscitates
this familiar communal "hero" and brings him beyond his original meanings
by updating him for her twenty-first-century setting. Rather than building a
national infrastructure, Kazumasa is a maintenance worker on a fully devel-
oped system that is breaking down both literally and financially into priva-
tized subunits. After being downsized out of his job, this Japanese, rather
than Chinese, worker travels from Sado Island, via Tokyo, to Brazil to find
work as a highly specialized technician on the railways.31 Instead of doing
the backbreaking work of laying rails, Kazumasa-by virtue of his technical
gifts (his having a supernatural ball that can sense railway deterioration)-
renders travel more efficient by proleptically remedying breakdowns before

American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1993), 124-25.
29. Kingston, China Men, 145.
30. Elaine Kim, "Beyond Railroads and Internment: Comments on the Past, Present, and
Future of Asian American Studies," in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American
Studies, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro, Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and K. Scott Wong
(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), 12-13.
31. A combination of Japanese technological innovation and Chinese American history,
Kazumasa is a truly pan-Asian American invention, a figure whose founding identity
myths cross ethnic and national borders. Also, in referring to the Chinese railroad worker
as an archetypal figure in Asian American history, I am not suggesting that this figure
will or ought to remain at the center of Asian American founding myths. Rather, I wish to
emphasize Yamashita's "signifying" (repeating with a difference) on traditional tropes of
Asian American literature.

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244 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

they occur.32 Because he is technologically advanced, he has an easy time

relocating to South America (rather than North America),33 where his job
consists of riding the rails and waiting for his ball to jerk uncontrollably (TAR,
8-9).
By evoking this icon of Asian American heroism, Yamashita invites
comparisons not only between the lives of her protagonist and an earlier
generation of pioneers but also between the function that these icons may
perform in their respective interpretive contexts. When Elaine Kim calls for
scholars to go "beyond railroads and the internment," she may be, more
importantly, urging them to reconsider the nationalist basis of these topics.
If the Chinese railroad worker (and for that matter the interned Japanese
family) represents an ideal symbol to press Asian American claims on a
national legacy-a move that tacitly accepts myths of American exception-
alism even as the larger project may be to question the "whites-only" basis
of that exceptionalism--then Yamashita redeploys that archetype for post-
national purposes. Kazumasa--although called upon by "[Japan's] national
headquarters [to inspect] the entire national system" (TAR, 7)-finds his
past service for the country no match for the corporate bottom line that
now favors an "electronic gadget" to take over his functions at reduced
cost (TAR, 8). Precisely by resuscitating this familiar figure whom Asian
American scholars are conditioned to admire as a hardworking contributor
to the American nation, Yamashita underscores the limitations of this type
of centering move. In other words, it is not the case that Kazumasa doesn't
have the makings of a national hero; he clearly does. Rather, in a time
when national utilities are fragmenting into competing capitalist units, when

32. While Kingston emphasizes the backbreaking work of her Chinese ancestors on the
railroads, Takaki wishes to dispel the notion that this immigrant population provided only
unskilled labor: "The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad line was a Chinese
achievement. Not only did they perform the physical labor required to clear trees and lay
tracks; they also provided important technical labor by operating power drills and handling
explosives" (Iron Cages, 230; Strangers from a Different Shore, 85).
33. Many Asians in the nineteenth century did emigrate to South America, for instance
the Chinese in Peru and Mexico, and the Japanese in Brazil. See Evelyn Hu-DeHart,
"Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru (1849-1930)," Amer-
asia Journal 15, no. 2 (1989): 91-116; Nobuya Tsuchida, "The Japanese in Brazil, 1908-
1941," (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1978); Christopher A. Reichl,
"Stages in the Historical Process of Ethnicity: The Japanese in Brazil, 1908-1988," Ethno-
history42, no. 1 (winter 1995): 31-62; and Takashi Maeyama, "Ethnicity, Secret Societies,
and Associations: The Japanese in Brazil," Comparative Study of Society and History
(1979): 589-610.

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 245

building the infrastructure is less important than downsizing to maximize

profits, when railways signify less as patriotic achievements and more as
"a lucrative travel business," crafting a national hero is to create a deliber-
ate anachronism, a figure who, despite having saved "hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of lives" (TAR, 10), is outplaced.34
By calling the construction of this national hero a deliberate anach-
ronism, I want to stress that Yamashita is framing this archetype of Asian
American identity as one among many other possible heroes or heroines
and not necessarily arguing for the transcendence of his significance. In
other words, Yamashita redesigns rather than abandons this archetype of
Asian American cultural nationalism and, in doing so, does not so much
endorse an end to the romance with the "railroads and the internment" 35 as

encourage a reasoned exploration of what connections could be made be-

tween these traditional topics (and the terms of nationalism upon which they
presume) and her thematic concerns-such as development in the "Third
World," time-space compression-and the global grounds upon which they
are imagined. Thus, while acknowledging the railroad worker's importance
to twentieth-century Asian American politics, the narrative proposes that
his twenty-first-century counterpart, Kazumasa Ishimaru, may be less hero-
ically and singularly imagined in a prospective future of cross-national, multi-
racial political coalitions. In addition to an Asian immigrant protagonist, then,
the novel features five other main characters.

34. To be perfectly clear, I am not pronouncing the fight for national inclusion anachro-
nistic. Sau-ling Wong compellingly argues that making claims vis-a-vis the U.S. nation-
state is as legitimate and ongoing a critical practice for Asian Americans as mining the
economic, social, and cultural links between Asians in the United States and Asians
elsewhere (for example, Brazil, Japan, and the "Pacific Rim"). Wong stresses that Asian
American scholars ought to configure these foci not in a time line of progression and
succession but as simultaneously occurring modes of redefinition and struggle ("De-
nationalization Reconsidered," 17), a position with which I wholeheartedly agree. I use
the term anachronism, then, in a literary-critical sense: to highlight Yamashita's use of a
particular icon, object, or technology associated with a particular time and displacing it
into another setting to produce a jarring effect.
35. Yamashita's early '90s novel, thus, foreshadows reformulations of Japanese identity
in the Americas that have been aired in this latter half of the decade, for instance in
the most recent issue of Amerasia Journal 23, no. 3 (winter 1997-1998), titled "Beyond
National Boundaries: The Complexity of Japanese American History," where guest edi-
tor Yuji Ichioka's introduction clearly enunciates a narrative of Japanese and Japanese
American perspectives, on the one hand, linked to the historical watershed of World War II
(alternatively, the "Pacific War") yet, on the other, moving beyond the internment as the
singular meaning of the war for Japanese on both sides of the Pacific.

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246 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

The novel negotiates the tension between keeping focused on its

Asian immigrant character and diminishing his importance respective of
other racial, gendered, and classed subjects by constructing a first-person
narrator that has a localized perspective and yet can panoramically detail
five other "lives" set in disparate regions. This narrator, a baseball-sized
globe hovering inches from Kazumasa's forehead, at first identifies closely
with the Japanese protagonist: "Of me you will learn by and by. First I must
tell you of a certain Kazumasa Ishimaru to whom I was attached for many
years. It might be said that we were friends, but ... we were much closer"
(TAR, 3). The initial chapter of the book concentrates solely on Kazumasa's
life in Japan. Once "the ball" travels to Brazil, however, it becomes a fully
omniscient voice:

While I could not, of course, control the events that were to come,
I could see all the innocent people we would eventually meet ...
There was old Mane Pena, the feather guru, and the American, Jona-
than B. Tweep. There was the man they called the angel, Chico Paco,
and there was the pigeon couple, Batista and Tania Aparecida. (TAR,
8-9)

These things I knew with simple clairvoyance. I also knew that

strange events far to our north and deep in the Amazon Basin, events
as insignificant as those in a tiny northeastern coastal town wedged
tightly between multicolored dunes, and events as prestigious as
those of the great economic capital of the world, New York, would
each cast forth an invisible line, shall I say, leading us to a place they
would all call the Matacdo. (TAR, 15)

It is as if, in choosing to limn a specific globalized locale in the twenty-first

century, Yamashita cannot keep her focus solely on the Japanese but must
spatially displace the point of view from an individual body to a number of
scattered, multiethnic, multinational, and regional perspectives.
By crafting five non-Asian protagonists, the author somewhat dis-
articulates narrative focus from Asian or Asian American identity. In this
respect, Through the Arc once again strays from the cultural nationalist
project of searching for the origins of an Asian American collective iden-
tity through rehearsals of the past labor, migration patterns, conditions of
colonization, and cultural artifacts of Asians in the United States. Rather,
Yamashita's text grapples with both new and old imaginative formations of
community and coalition enabled and transformed by spatial convergences

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 247

particular to postmodernity or late capitalism.36 These alternative commu-

nities are composed of nationally and racially heterogeneous social actors
who are globally interrelated by virtue of worldwide media links, touristic
travel across borders, international financial networks, transnational trade,
and a shared ecology. Yet significantly, in the novel, they are also connected
via a satellite that is associated, at least initially, with an Asian immigrant
character.

Another means by which the author balances her global thematic

and ethnic-local preoccupations is to make the two projects homologous
by giving globalization an Asian cast. Whereas many theorists who explore
the spread of social relations across space tend to equate globalization
with the dissemination of Western culture,37 Yamashita makes clear that the
widening of Japan's influence is also her concern. The North American,
and later multinational, firm GGG incorporates "old courses in Japanese
corporate business sense" into its operating model (TAR, 53). Likewise, the
three-armed New Yorker J. B. Tweep describes himself as an East-West
hybrid, a man who has "the security of a Japanese businessman" but also
the mobility and instability of "an American worker" (TAR, 125). Playing with
signs and acronyms, Yamashita colors her narrative with other references
to Japan, for instance, in J. B.'s initials, which might stand for "Japanese
Brazilian," and in Batista and Tania's last name, a homonym for "Japan."
Such wordplay, along with other overt references, builds to a cumulative
effect hinting at the "Japanification" of Brazil and the United States.
I have characterized such references as part of the author's attempt
to resolve the tension between her global and ethnic-specific interests, by
making globalization a synonym not for Americanization but for the spread
of Japanese culture. Yet some perhaps unintended consequences result
from this particular type of negotiation. First, in a somewhat utopian vein,
Yamashita imagines an Asiatic globalization that occurs seemingly without

36. David Harvey, "The Condition of Postmodernity" (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990);
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left
Review 146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92.
37. Exemplary of this approach are critics of media imperialism who "concern themselves
with the structural and institutional aspects of the global media . . . focusing on such
issues as the 'dumping' of cheap television programmes in the Third World or the market
dominance of Western news agencies" (John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical
Introduction [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991], 22). See also, in Cul-
tural Imperialism, 34-67, Tomlinson's critique of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's
How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.

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248 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

violence. For instance, in her chapter titled "Karaoke," the author details the
expansion of this "style of nightclub invented by the Japanese" until "almost
every town in South America had one" (TAR, 88). The narrative portrays
both the immigrant Kazumasa "singing with abandon in his specially built
karaoke shower at home" and the local Sdo Paulan Batista Djapan express-
ing all of his pent-up saudades (a particular form of Brazilian longing) at
Hiro's Karaoke on the Matacdo (TAR, 149, 128). Here, Japanification is envi-
sioned as a relatively harmless cultural invasion, where individual (and local
Brazilian) expression is mediated--perhaps even facilitated--but certainly
not annulled by Japanese technology. In other words, the author seems
to suggest that Japanese inflows ought not to be viewed with Orientalist
anxieties about another "yellow peril."38 Such perceptions have resusci-
tated a racist and institutionally sanctioned backlash that affects all Asian
Americans, as the Vincent Chin case well illustrates.39 By the same token,
by portraying these Japanese influences as detached from a worldwide
complex of uneven development, Yamashita understates the power asym-
metries between Japan, an economic superpower, and Brazil, a country
in virtual bondage to the International Monetary Fund and to "First World"
lender nations. According to Swasti Mitter, this debt crisis has led to "20
million abandoned and undernourished children in Brazil, a country that has
the resources to feed not only all its own children but also millions in other
countries."40 Though the novel does not comment on Japan's role in Bra-
zil's debt crisis, it does underscore the extraction of Brazil's wealth to enrich
the coffers of other nations. The fictional run on Brazil's newest "miracle"

38. See Leo Ching, "Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun," in Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/
Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, 268, 270, which details the resurgence of Japan
bashing; see also Meredith Woo-Cumings, who traces a renewed Orientalism in Pacific
Rim discourse that portrays "East Asian countries [as] . . . predatory in economics ...
sapping U.S. strength" ("Market Dependency in U.S.-East Asian Relations," in Dirlik,
What Is in a Rim, 137).
39. Vincent Chin was a Chinese American draftsman in Detroit who was clubbed to death
by two recently laid off American autoworkers who blamed Japanese imports for the loss
of their jobs. Chin's killers were sentenced to three years of probation and fined $3,780.
See Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991),
176-78; and William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 193-96, for an account of how the Chin case galvanized the Asian
American community.
40. Swasti Mitter, Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy (Lon-
don: Pluto, 1986), 73. Mitter dwells specifically on the World Bank's role in the debt crisis
of Brazil (70-74). See also James Schwoch, "Manaus: Television from the Borderless,"
Public Culture 7 (1995): 455-64, for details on the extraction economy of Brazil.

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 249

resource, the Matacao, mimics past expropriations of the country's assets:

"Brazil had once before emptied its wealthy gold mines into the coffers of
the Portuguese Crown and consequently financed the Industrial Revolution
in England. This time, if there was any wealth to be had, it had better re-
main in Brazil. Some scoffed . . . saying that the treasure of the Matacdo
might, at best, make a small dent in their continuing interest payments to
the International Monetary Fund" (TAR, 96). Japan's cultural infusions are
relativized respective of other cultural "invasions" and exchanges involving
Portugal, Britain, the Netherlands, Africa, and the United States.
Second, Yamashita suggests that as the configuration of world power
shifts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,41 it may be impos-
sible or only nostalgic for Asian Americans to see themselves innocently as
part of the Third World oppressed-the people being invaded by cultural in-
fluences from elsewhere. Recent reassertions of Asian Americans' "origins"
in the Third World student strikes might be viewed as precipitate responses
to this crisis of identification.42 That is, progressive Asian American activists
find it all the more urgent to reassert their anti-imperialist and anticapitalist
commitments at precisely a time when "Asian America" is no longer ho-
mologous-if it ever was-with a critique of development and modernity,
as the examples of Hong Kong entrepreneurs in Vancouver and San Fran-
cisco make manifest. The futuristic portrait of Through the Arc suggests
that rather than identifying first and foremost with the nineteenth-century
railroad worker and rallying behind his exclusion from national belonging,
Asian Americans might widen the scope of their struggles and de-ethnicize
their communal fidelities in order to fight for the poor and oppressed re-
gardless of national origins.43 At the same time, Through the Arc stresses

41. As a brief economic historicization of that shift, Masao Miyoshi notes that "in the late
1960s, the global domination of U.S. multinational corporations was unchallengeable," but
that "around 1970, European and Japanese transnational corporations (TNCs) emerged
rapidly to compete with their U.S. counterparts" ("A Borderless World? From Colonial-
ism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State," Critical Inquiry 19 [summer
1993]: 734-35).
42. In 1968, at San Francisco State University, student members of the Third World Lib-
eration Front conducted a student strike to demand changes in admissions and in their
education. See Glenn Omatsu, "The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation:
Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s," in The State of Asian America:
Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Boston: South End,
1994), 19-69.
43. In her 1991 essay "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Dif-
ferences," Diaspora 1, no. 1 (spring 1991): 24-44, and in her more recent book Immigrant

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250 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

the unevenness of Asian-Pacific nationalities and regions, as suggested by

the different meanings attached to the spread of karaoke and the global
travel of "Aloha" T-shirts. In effect, Yamashita underscores the need neither
for a complacent reiteration of Asian America's past nor for an uninformed
reorientation toward Asian America's vexing and prospective subjects but
rather for a stereoscopic view of both, incarnate in her railroad worker who
sings karaoke.

3. Conclusion: On Laughter, Forgetting, and Rapprochement

The Asia/Pacific is an imagined community that tries to forget the

trauma, war, and power inequities of the Cold War.
-Rob Wilson, 3 December 1997

I began this examination of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by

noting a particular crisis moment, or, more precisely, a crisis space between
Asian America and the Asia-Pacific, informing both Yamashita's thematic
preoccupations as well as the (politically invested) interpretive choices in
reading this novel. It is my argument that underlying the gap between
these two fields and the reluctance to overlap them completely is a barely
articulated class cleavage that has too often been misapprehended as a
geographic narrowness in the service of (cultural) nationalism. One of the
primary stakes of my project, then, is to reveal class cleavages as the
more important ground of Asian America's struggle with Asia-Pacific theo-
ries and their alternative imagined communities. Asian American critics do
not simply resist globalization but decry a particular form of global-Pacific
studies-one that triumphally heralds the entrepreneurial Asian transna-
tional class, their alternative imagined communities mobilized in dispersion
but also formed through travel and the ownership of trade. Until the Asia-
Pacific is reformulated as speaking to marginalized, even disenfranchised,
subjects in the basin, Asian Americanists will continually resist its overtures,
and it would be a mistake to read this resistance as mere stubbornness
toward internationalist frameworks.44

Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996),
Lisa Lowe precisely urges Asian Americans to "affiliate with other groups whose cohe-
sions may be based on other valences of oppression [i.e., valences other than Asian
American ethnicity]" ("Heterogeneity," 32).
44. Interestingly, work such as Wilson's and Dirlik's recent book may be crucial to the
project of bringing the two fields together, though Asian Americanists might question why

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 251

Yamashita's work45 emerges precisely at the moment when herald-

ing Asians and Asian Americans is likely to be viewed in overtly conflicting
ways: both as a "rescuing" of subaltern subjects from Western domina-
tion and as a more ambiguous advocacy of an economically stratified,
though racially named, community.46 As triumphal accounts of the Pacific
Rim suggest, contemporary Asians both in the Americas and across the
Rim do not correspond unambiguously to the politically and economically
persecuted, even as recitations of U.S. national laws, such as the Chinese
Exclusion Act (1882), the Alien Land Law (1913), or the Tydings-McDuffie
Act (1934), remind us of historically traumatized Asian beings. Asians and
Asian Americans in the new millennium are as likely to conjure up an
image of entrepreneurial success and transnationally amassed wealth as
to evoke sympathetic portraits of Thai seamstresses sequestered in Los
Angeles sweatshops. The struggle over whether Asian American studies
can, should, or must globalize its outlook seems to eclipse or misdirect our
attention from the more onerous class issues underlying the field's reluc-
tance-at least in some quarters-to do so. In other words, such a debate
over the globalization of Asian American studies cannot be meaningful
without consideration of the context of class and the reluctance of Asian
Americanists to be framed as experts or apologists for the new "model
minority"--the transnational Asian capitalist. Pacific Rim discourse is par-
ticularly invested in obscuring distinctions of class and power between, on
the one hand, Asian heads of state and Confucian entrepreneurs and, on

Hawaiian and local cultures need Asian/Pacific sponsorship as a prerequisite to their

engagement by Asian American critics.
45. Yamashita's latest book-length work of fiction, Tropic of Orange (1997), is likewise set
across the Americas, though the emphasized locality of this novel is Los Angeles. De-
spite their superficial differences in setting (Brazil versus the United States and Mexico),
the two books are quite similar in their preoccupation with the compression of the world,
and, I would argue, they similarly manage a 1990s crisis in the Asian American studies
field imaginary. Both novels suggest newly configured "Asian American" protagonists as
cross-racial coalitions, whose members are connected by their efforts to counter, expose,
or merely survive transcontinental market and media forces (however, in Tropic of Orange,
those forces are more gruesomely embodied in drug and biological organ traffickers).
46. Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng remark precisely on the class fracturing of Asian America's
population, intensified by the post-1965 waves of immigration: "Many Asian immigrants
to the United States are helping to renew capitalism .... They embrace capitalism with
enthusiasm. This trend poses a challenge to those political forces in the United States
that are more critical of capitalism, as well as to older Asian Americans, some of whom
have developed a 'progressive' politics" (New Asian Immigration, 29).

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252 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

the other, the disenfranchised Asian factory or agricultural worker. What is

resisted - yet also tentatively embraced - in Asian American circles, then, is
this blurring of class lines that, though not homologous with an international
or critical regionalist focus, remains a prominent feature in mainstream
imaginings of the Pacific Rim.
At present, Asian America contains within its "imagined community"
the "professional-managerial" economic stratum symbolized by Yamashita's
protagonist, Kazumasa, as well as the Pacific Basin working poor, most
closely approximated in the figure of Mane Pena. However, increasingly,
Asian American studies is zeroing in on the economic disjunctions of its own
membership-disjunctions that are certainly co-articulated with geographic
and ethnic disjunction,47 yet that seem to be the more troublesome points
of resistance in thinking about Asian American culture in Asian-Pacific per-
spective.48
It is precisely through raising these matters that Through the Arc
plays a significant role-pressuring the limits of Asian America as a nation-
ally bounded entity and challenging the assumption that Asian American
cultural texts offer testament to a strictly downtrodden racial-economic sub-
ject largely defined by his or her victimization in the West. Readers may

47. In "Class Constraints on Racial Solidarity among Asian Americans" (in Ong, Bona-
cich, and Cheng, New Asian Immigration), Yen Le Espiritu and Paul Ong trace the rise
in the (visibility of) class differences in pan-Asian organizations as a function of a decline
of overt racial oppression (297): "The weakening of artificial racial barriers in the eco-
nomic and political sectors has deepened the class polarization in minority communities,
as those who were able to do so took advantage of new job and educational opportu-
nities while the majority remained locked in poverty .... These class divisions fragment
the population, undermining racial solidarity" (298). They also read the ethnic fragmenta-
tion in Asian American communities as a disarticulation of underlying class differences:
"Much of ethnic conflict is in fact based on group differences in resources and class
position" (309).
48. Moreover, as Espiritu and Ong have argued, class stratification cannot be thought
of as having a strictly centripetal effect on Asian American unity: "In the Asian Ameri-
can case, class divisions play contradictory roles, both fragmenting the population and
creating a class of professional social activists interested in uniting Asian Americans
into a common racial category" ("Class Constraints on Racial Solidarity among Asian
Americans," in Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, New Asian Immigration, 295). As a cultural
artifact both commenting on and emerging from within this professional-managerial class
perspective, Through the Arc negotiates the various gaps and economic incommensu-
rabilities that both threaten and enliven pan-Asian unity; furthermore, the novel, rather
than framing class disjunction as a force against a strictly racial unity, highlights class
stratification as it also impinges on cross-racial coalitions.

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 Lee / Asian American Cultural Production 253

enter this novel expecting to cheer for its Japanese protagonist, Kazumasa,
but by the end they must also consider the subaltern figure of Mane Pena
and wonder why his fate is not to survive in this transnational, tricontinental
expanse of limitless interchange. By revealing that the Asian protagonist
and the economic subaltern are not self-identical, Through the Arc both re-
flects on and intensifies the crisis in Asian America's foundational subaltern
identity politics, a crisis primarily generated by the disarticulation of Asian
racial profiles with subaltern economic profiles. All of this is to suggest that
Yamashita--rather than giving us easy answers to whether we must trade
"claiming America" for globalizing Asian American studies-serves notice
that even as the terrain of Asian America already exceeds national bound-
aries, the maps, paradigms, and reconfigured regions of global study are
themselves multiple (and that Asian Americanists have a choice among
them). Asian American critics can select those that favor a celebration of the
bourgeois transnational class, or those that champion the subaltern labor-
ing class, or even those that favor ethnic markers as a way of bringing both
those classes under one communal roof (for example, studies of Chinese
diaspora). The pathways to the study of Asian American culture and society
in global contexts are themselves multiple and ought not be flattened out
into an either/or game between nationalism and internationalism.
In conclusion, I want to return to the notion of rapprochement with
which I began my analysis. In the epigraph cited at the beginning of this
section, Wilson characterizes the Asia-Pacific as a community encouraging
a type of active forgetfulness that would help move both the East and West
beyond cold war binaries. Asian American cultural artifacts, by contrast,
have long been in the business of memorializing trauma, of not forgetting
specific acts of exclusion, imprisonment, and dispossession. In fact, Asian
Americanists would likely supplement Wilson's observation to highlight the
way in which forgetfulness might extend rather than diminish hierarchical
relations within the Pacific that do not necessarily end with the cold war. In
other words, the Asia-Pacific might be viewed as an imagined community
that "tries to forget the trauma, war, and power inequities of the Cold War"
precisely in order to solidify power inequities established in the cold war.
Remembering trauma becomes the key to undoing those inequities (hence,
the highlighting of Asian American injury as memorialized in the straining,
toiling, or imprisoned bodies in literary works such as Kingston's China Men,
Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, or Wakako Yamauchi's 12-1-B).
Yet Yamashita's Asian American protagonist, her railroad worker who
sings karaoke, is a ludic figure, and as with most ludic figures, Kazumasa

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254 boundary 2 / Summer 1999

is split by his "two-ness"--his resonance in past and future temporalities

and his dual positions as racially marginalized yet economically privileged.
Kazumasa holds these two "moments" and "spaces" together as he also
makes sense of (or is made sensible through) both national and global-
regionalist models of interpretation. Trauma might be thought of, then, as
the renarration of division and of separation, either between East and West
or even between subaltern migrant classes and emergent entrepreneurial
transnationals. Yamashita's novel partakes of a particularly untraumatic nar-
ration. The author crafts a humorous, giddy, and playful text best serving
her purposes of marking a moment of connection-of the simultaneity of
local and global, and the selfsameness of Asian American national heroes
transfigured by global capital yet still intelligible through Asian America's
evolving paradigms. Clearly a figure of rapprochement rather than of moral
imperative, Yamashita's comic text also advocates a forgetfulness of trau-
matic monoracial politics in order to enable the imagining of hybrid-and
even pleasurable-spatial, racial, and cross-class convergences.

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