Unfound: The Princeton Journal of Asian American Studies - Volume 6, 2019 by Unfound Journal

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UNFOUND THE PRINCETON JOURNAL OF ASIAN A MERICAN STUDIES

2 019 VO L . 6

UNFOUND Editors-in-Chief

Editorial Staff

Jasmine Li ‘22 Soo Young Yun ‘22

Kaixing Chou ‘22 Marina Cooper ‘22 Jessica Lee ‘23

Faculty Advisor

Professor Anne Cheng

Layout Staff Jacqueline Chu ‘23 Hanying Jiang ‘22 Cindy Song ‘22

LET TER from from the the editors editors

Dear reader, This year has shown an unprecedented mobilization of social activism and truly represents a Dearpast reader, time of racial awakening in the U.S. The outbreak of COVID-19, by fueling anti-Asian racism, has both incited and underlying issues of racialand prejudice and xenophobia the AsianThe past year hasrevealed seen immense levels of political social unrest taking placetargeting on various American community. The Black Lives Matter movement, in signalling a national reckoning onand issues platforms, both old and new. We have seen the effects of a new administration on national of systemic racism targeting African-Americans, has also prompted Asian-Americans to reflect state-level policies. But far from just a bleak year of tension, we have also seen solidarity across upon their complexwho tieshave with come other together racially marginalized in concerns society. Inand such groundbreaking groups of people, to hear eachgroups other’s share in each other’s times, it is all morethis important and necessary that we engage in scholarly conversation through triumphs. It isthe within climate that the work of identity construction for the sake of understanding platforms such as Unfound as we continue to battle issues of racial injustice in the U.S. ourselves and others whose stories may not be unlike our own has become increasingly important. Our journal is only a small part of one university’s efforts to do this kind of important work. This year we are excited to present four articles that delve into a highly diverse array of issues pertinent central to the community. Rangingvastly fromdifferent analyses topics interweaving This year and we are pleased to Asian-American present five articles, which explore and fields literary, cultural, historical, sociopolitical, and institutional studies, these pieces exhibit a cohort of study within Asian American studies. We believe that these authors represent a new passion for research and a rigorous examination of the intricate layers of the Asian-American of scholars ready to engage deeply, explore rigorously, and write passionately about the rich experience. One article explores orientalism and appropriation the concept aspects of the burgeoning field ofissues Asian of American studies. In the followingsurrounding pages, we hope you of another closely theThese role ofarticles single-author narratives in Asian-American willABGs; find arguments with aexamines fresh twist. certainlyfolk made our own staff think more literature; yet another explores the journey ofmyth Indian-Americans in situating themselves in in the critically about topics like the model minority and the role of the medical profession America’s racial spectrum. And finally, we close with a piece documenting the history of opium epidemic. We followed an author as she explored all that Bruce Lee symbolized,student another activism demanding institutionalization of Asiancommunities, American studies at another Duke University. as he explored leftistthe ideology in Asian American and yet as she recounted

and analyzed the student advocacy for Asian American studies at Northwestern University. Founded in 2014, Unfound is a testament to the ever-growing field of Asian-American studies and to strive itsasmission of uncovering the and complexities of the Ourcontinues journal began fourtowards years ago a student-led initiative toambiguities show the interest in Asian American Asian-American identity and representation at large. Notably, this year marks key milestones studies and the potential of undergraduate research. Since its inception, we have been continually not just forbythe but also at ouratown Princeton University, as aevidenced by for the American renaming of humbled theU.S. privilege of being Princeton University during critical time Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and residential college. As we celebrate studies. This year has been no different. After nearly forty years of advocacy, students finally these efforts to reexamine and reflect upon past racial injustices, we encourage our readers to have a course designation with which to search for Asian American studies courses. While this continue engaging in conversations surrounding issues of diversity, representation, and identity may seem small, this course designation represents an institutionalized promise to Princeton’s of ethnic minorities in this timecan of finally criticalwelcome racial consciousness America. As always, we are students. The community a new juniorinfaculty member, who will joingrateful Professors for the support from our sponsors at Princeton University, and we hope Unfound continues to Anne Cheng and Beth Lew-Williams in teaching courses on Asian American studies. Through foster the dynamic growth of intellectual change and conversation in Asian-American studies. the generosity of Nancy H. Lin ’77, we can also celebrate the establishment of the Lin Family Endowment for Asian-American studies, which will provide valuable resources as American studies Sincerely and AsianYours, American studies continue to grow at Princeton. This certainly has been a big year Jasmine Li and Soo Young for Princeton, and we lookYun forward to being a part of this continued growth of scholarship. Sincerely yours, Angela Feng and Rebecca Weng Co-Editors-in-Chief, Unfound

ABOUT UNFOUND

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The title Unfound refers to the ambiguities of the Asian American experience. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Unfound,â&#x20AC;? in its most basic sense, simply refers to something that remains elusive. But the word connotes deeper, emotional meaning upon reexamination. Unfound implies that there is something to be discovered. Unfound implies that someone has tried and tried again to find what she has been looking for, only to come up short. Caught between two identities, the Asian American seeks to carve out her own place in the greater American narrative. Asian American studies and Unfound seek to create a space where what has remained unfound can be discovered.

All articles submitted to Unfound go through a double-blinded selection process. Following blinding by our managing layout editors, articles are distributed to our selection editing team, of which our managing layout editors are not a part. Each article is read by at least two editors and graded according to a standardized rubric that takes into account factors such as quality of argumentation, quality of writing style, and quality of research. Following discussions between all editors comparing the relative merits of all submitted articles, articles are selected based on group consensus.

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If you would like to subscribe to receive physical copies of Unfound, please email us at unfoundjournal@gmail.com and include your name, address, and institution (if applicable). A subscription fee will apply. Virtual copies of Unfound are available at unfoundjournal.com via ISSUU.

Unfound is a publication of the Princeton Asian American Studies Committee. This journal is possible due to the generous support of the Program in American Studies, the Asian American Studies Research Fund, and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Documenting the Struggle for Asian American Studies at Duke: an Oral History

Francia Fang, Lucy Dong, Leah Abrams, Michelle Qiou, Duke University ‘20

Indian-Americans’ Relationship with Bhārat: The Indosphere’s move Westward via Diasporic Remittances

Shivani Parikh, Cornell University ‘18

Asian American Autobiographies, Teaching Genre Expectations, and Single-Author Folk Narratives in Ed Young’s Lon Po Po and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

Marina Tinone, Yale University ‘20

A Brief Inquiry into ABGs: Orientalism, Identity, Performativity, and Appropriation

Jenny Jingyi Tan, University of California, Los Angeles ‘19

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Documenting the Struggle for Asian American Studies at Duke: an Oral History Francia Fang, Lucy Dong, Leah Abrams, Michelle Qiou, Duke University ‘20 “It shouldn’t be identity politics, it should be the politics of identity—it should be a group of people who come together whether or not they look the same, but have the same politics and are working towards the same vision of liberation.” - Helen Yang, Duke ‘19

Introduction For over three decades, coalitions of students and faculty have struggled for the creation of a Department of Asian American Studies at Duke University. Their work only recently came to fruition, resulting in the 2018 creation of an Asian American Studies Program (which is not yet a fully-fledged department). This movement is tied to a long history of collective action between minority groups on campus and faculty activists, situated amongst a larger movement for ethnic studies in the US. These efforts continue as students push to expand the program to a diploma-granting department and establish political education on the importance of ethnic studies. The narrative of Asian American Studies at Duke University can be understood from a variety of lenses, each relying upon the historical perspectives of its most active participants, opponents, and witnesses. However, in order to effectively analyze this narrative, it is imperative to have a grasp of the chronological history of Duke’s Asian American Studies Program (AASP). While this summary will give a broad overview of these events, a more comprehensive timeline is available in the Asian American Studies Working Group (AASWG) Google Drive.1 The story of Asian American Studies at Duke is best understood in waves, each stemming from the original fight for ethnic studies in the late 1960s. Though this foundational moment, based in the activism of the Third World Liberation Front, will be further investigated in the following analysis, it is critical to note its manifestation on Duke’s campus in a key moment known as the 1969 Allen Building Takeover. Thirteen black Duke students occupied the Allen building and issued a list of demands, including the establishment of an Afro-American Studies department. The following fall, Duke’s Black Studies department was established, marking Duke’s first victory for ethnic studies. In the following decades, slow momentum also grew around academic inquiry into the Asian American identity, including House Courses2 and 1 Asian American Studies Working Group Google Drive: http://bitly.ws/8X4f 2 Half-credit courses taught by undergraduates. 4 | UNFOUND

political education events throughout the 1980’s. A second wave of activism swelled in the early 2000’s as a core group of student activists organized a teach-in, a petition, and a proposal geared toward the establishment of an AASP. From 2002 to 2003, these students built a movement around Asian American Studies, garnering support from over 1,000 students and culminating in a Duke Student Government resolution. According to these student leaders, the movement was successful in its strategic approach to the University’s administrators. Stephanie Lowe (neé Liu, Class of 2005), a core member of this 2000’s wave, says of her time organizing: “...because of [fellow activist leader Christina Hsu’s] really astute analysis of the politics and of how decisions get made in regards to hiring faculty, etc., we were able to gain a little more traction than those who came before us.” But despite major wins in drawing awareness to the neglect of Asian American student experiences in academia, this wave ended without administrative approval of neither faculty hires nor courses in Asian American Studies. That said, its efforts laid the groundwork for later student organizing. The most recent and most tangibly successful wave in organizing for Asian American Studies at Duke unequivocally began in 2013 after the IFC fraternity Kappa Sigma drew national disgust for its “Asia Prime” party.3 In the wake of this party, a new group of students activists, many of whom affiliated with Duke’s Asian Students 3 A 2013 fraternity party at which mostly white attendees dressed in racist caricatures of East Asian culture. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/duke-kappa-sigma-party_n_2630598

Association (ASA), organized a series of rallies, fora, and editorials exposing the antiAsian racism entrenched on campus. This culminated in a joint issuance of demands from ASA and Duke Diya, petitioning the administration not only for a hate and bias policy and a physical center, but also for the establishment of four faculty positions dedicated to Asian American Studies. These demands were reiterated two years later as Asian students banded together with Black and Latinx identity groups to disrupt an administrative forum following the 2015 hanging of a noose in the Bryan Center, a homophobic death threat, and the defacement of a Black Lives Matter poster. These activists were successful in building a coalition and went on to form the Asian American Studies Working Group (AASWG). Throughout 2016, 2017, and 2018, AASWG organized strategic events and weekly planning meetings advocating for policy change, further working to address incidents of racism on campus. In April of 2018, their work successfully led to the launch of Duke’s AASP, which currently offers classes. Though Duke’s AASP is not a degreegranting program (nor does it accompany a certificate or minor), it represents a major step in the decades-long fight for ethnic studies on Duke’s campus. Asian students, faculty, and allies have poured their political will into this movement for years, and in a series of recorded-interviews, eight of these key actors shared their stories with us. In the following paper, we will examine their perspectives thematically, weaving them Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 5

together in an oral history that focuses on the past, present, and future of Duke Asian American Studies through the following four sections: Alliances Across Identity Groups, Approaching the Administration, Building Sustainable Student Activism, and Correcting the Narrative. Alliance Across Identity Groups The history of Asian American Studies at Duke is inextricable from a broader history of activism for racial justice. Indeed, coalition building both transcends and is informed by temporal context. Ethnic studies in the US has its origins in the global and national movements for decolonization of the 1960s, organized under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front. Evelyn Hu-DeHart (2001) contends that the desire to establish ethnic studies in higher education was rooted in a movement away from assimilation, and instead towards “cultural autonomy” and “national self-determination” in the postwar era (104). Angela Ryan (2015) characterizes the events surrounding 1968, when the first demands for ethnic studies came out of San Francisco State University, as radical reimaginings of public higher education from standard Eurocentrism. While illustrating the importance of coalition between Black, Latinx, and Asian American student organizations at San Francisco State University, Ryan (2015) highlights the leadership of black and public-school affiliated organizers, as well as the impact of Black Power as a prevailing paradigm in the era. The explosive racial climate of the 1960’s 6 | UNFOUND

was reflected on Duke’s own campus, where in 1969 student activists occupied the Allen Building and demanded space and support for black Duke students. One such demand eventually led to the creation of an African American Studies Department at Duke, reflecting a historical tendency that “Black Studies programs have led the way to an Ethnic Studies proliferation” (Hu-DeHart, 104). Understanding themselves as indebted to the TWLF student activists of the 1960s, including Duke’s own student activists, later organizers for Asian American Studies at Duke consistently reference the labor of black and brown students as foundational to a history of successive waves of activism. Coalition-building has been a consistent strategy for demanding Asian American Studies at Duke. Stephanie Lowe (neé Liu) attributed her wave’s relative success specifically to a clear understanding of campus politics and a vision of diverse coalition articulated by fellow leader and activist, Christina Hsu (Class of 2004). Lowe reflects of Hsu : “She had a strong sense that in order to build a really strong case we would need people from different backgrounds, in terms of ethnically and racially, but also departmentally…to build the case for why this was important to more than a one small niche group of people.” To this end, Hsu built connections with faculty and graduate students across departments, seeking a “diverse set of people who were influencers and could champion this [cause].” Hsu’s vision of a diverse coalition was aided by her access to other campus

leaders through the President’s Council, of which Lowe served as secretary. At the time, the President’s Council existed under Duke’s Center for Multicultural Affairs and consisted of the presidents of all undergraduate cultural affinity groups on campus. According to Lowe, Hsu (who then served as the President of the Asian Students Association) was invested in leveraging her position as a leader in the campus community. Hsu sought not only to galvanize Asian/American students in the push for Asian American studies, but also to build strong relationships with the presidents of other student identity groups. She used her inter-group connections to compel those outside of the Asian American community to participate in political education events, such as a teach-in in 2002. Lowe believes that this multiracial approach presented a united front that placed pressure on Duke administration, enabling activism in the 2000s to gain greater traction. Through mobilizing support from nonAsian identity student groups and faculty, Hsu and her fellow student activists were able to secure promises for a non-physical research center and funding to organize an Asian American Studies symposium. We see again in the most recent push of activism in the 2010s that moments of crisis galvanize not only isolated identity groups but organized multiracial coalitions. In 2013, the fraternity Kappa Sigma hosted a yellow-face themed party called Asia Prime. The incident naturally incensed Asian Americans on campus, who issued demands towards the administration including the

creation of a physical cultural space and an academic department for Asian American Studies. When a noose was hung from a tree outside Duke’s student center in 2015, it was yet another incident in a long chain of white supremacists hate crimes committed on campus. According to Bryce Cracknell (Class of 2017), student activists were frustrated by the administration’s lack of consultation with students of color in their planning of a forum to address the incidents. Cracknell was a member of a group of primarily Black students who organized an independent student forum, inviting a wide spectrum of identity groups to list their disparate demands. Stanley Yuan (Class of 2016), a core organizer for Asian American Studies, said that because of the opening of this space, Asian American Alliance saw a chance to reiterate demands they had previously issued in the aftermath of the Asia Prime party. Yuan notes that coalitions on campus have historically not “occurred in explicitly racialized terms,” with the 2016 Allen Building sit-in serving as one example of a “strong multiracial effort” that was built around the widely held belief that “all of us care about justice and equity, in whatever form that looks like.” The coalition that emerged out of shared outrage against the hate crimes of 2015 and the 2016 Allen

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Building sit-in4 showed that student activists in the 2010s were, like their predecessors, committed to the idea that “it’s important to not just care about the things that affect you but to think about equity more broadly.” Though Asian-specific pushes appeared to stagnate between the 2000s wave and the 2010s wave, Asian/American organizers continued to gain experience, organizing towards a broader sense racial justice with other identity groups on campus and with the Durham community. The impact of multiracial coalition is further reflected upon in the section Building Sustainable Activism. Approaching the Administration The creation of the AASP would not have been possible without cooperation from the Duke administration. University administrators are key players who hold the power to create plans, hire faculty, and ultimately approve decisions to move forward. However, it should be recognized that it was the students who fought to secure such a program. Working with administration has posed barriers notably for AASWG in their quest to create a formal academic program. To document 4 The Allen Building houses Duke’s top administrative offices, and is thus a common site for student protest. The Duke Chronicle article “Student activism at Duke since the Allen Building Takeover” provides notable highlights, including 2016, when a Duke administrator called a parking attendant a racial slur after hitting her with his car. In response, Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity occupied the Allen Building for a week and issued demands including a call for the administrator’s termination. 8 | UNFOUND

the administration, we spoke with students, mediators, and administrators themselves. Dean Sue Wasiolek, the Dean of Students, remembers being intimately involved with the fallout from the infamous “Asia Prime” Party of 2013, an event that she calls the “impetus for the trajectory” of the AASP. This “Asian-themed” party was hosted by the Kappa Sigma fraternity, advertised with a blatantly racist email invitation that consisted of demeaning stereotypes such as “Herro Nice Duke Peopre” and “We look forward to having Mi, Yu, You, and Yo Friends over for some Sake.” After the email was reported to the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life, the party was re-branded to the theme “International Relations.” Despite this, the party went on as planned. Images from the night soon emerged, revealing students dressed in clothing such as sumo wrestler attire, traditional Asian dresses, and conical straw hats. Though dubbed as a “racist rager” by many students, no formal action was taken against the fraternity. The weeks following the party were difficult for all involved, sending shockwaves beyond the immediate Duke community. Students of Asian descent came together with faculty and administration to express their disappointment, as well as to seek actionable change. Dean Sue met with both perpetrators and victims over several discussions that included “a lot of tears shed, a lot of apologies, but there was a better understanding and enlightenment. What came from that meeting was an acknowledgement and recognition that

more needed to be done.” According to her, the Asian American students approached the need for change in a mature, strong, and purposeful manner: she recalls that “there was not this inclination to shame and blame, but rather there was an opportunity to be patient, explain, and take the time to let others know how they were feeling as a result of this party and what it meant to their lives and Duke experience.” Although there was never guarantee that reform within student groups would be long-lasting, she felt confident that the students responsible for the party had learned in an appropriate and impactful way. “It was a great model for reconciliation, much like [what] we would refer to as a restorative justice circle.” While Dean Sue was not personally involved in the creation of the AASP, she touched on how the same barriers exist for all academic proposals brought forth by students and faculty. “It’s purely a matter of resources,” she said in regard to the Duke community’s request for an Asian American Studies Program. Upon further questioning, the term “resources” had no fixed meaning. Within the context of the AASP, this included faculty hires (“probably a million dollars to bring a singular faculty member”), supporting staff, physical space to house the program, programming and logistics, and other costs such as graduate student and TA funding. In its essence, the creation of an AASP (or any other program) requires large spending that may not be immediately accessible. Dean Sue admitted that to this day, she does not know the source of the funding used to create the

AASP, given that funds for new programs are either redistributed from existing programs or raised from large donations. The only costs that the university has covered for the program as of 2019 have been the hiring of a postdoctoral student, a student administrator, and the creation of a website. As Dean Sue mentioned, administration has not yet committed to any large costs, such as the creation of tenure lines, procurement of physical office and classroom space, and support staff. She insisted that the “greatest barrier is usually not a conceptual, philosophical one; it usually doesn’t usually conflict with the values of the institution – it’s a matter of priorities.” Given this context, it does not seem plausible that the program will be promoted to a full-fledged department in the foreseeable future. Despite the impact that increased “resources” may provide, such as more degree options, Dean Sue does not believe that the discrepancy between the two is enough to “get in a big swivet about.” She believes that the quality of faculty, classes, and opportunities provided in the program are comparable to that of a fully-fledged department. This runs tangent to a question AASWG has long struggled to answer: who must push for change? Dean Sue claims that the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of faculty and administration, mainly due to the transiency of undergraduate education, each student staying four years at most. In addition, she noted “what students want today is not necessarily what students want five to ten years from now,” and therefore Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 9

“at the end of the day you’ve got to have faculty and administration who see whatever it is fitting into the longer range vision of Duke.” The students at the forefront of the struggle would not agree. Christine Lee (Class of 2018), a founding member of AASWG, recalls researching a promise made by the administration in the early 2000s for an Asian American educational program: when the administrator responsible stepped down, the commitment made was not communicated. “Dean Valerie Ashby, new to her position at the time, didn’t know about this. Her predecessor didn’t give her a heads up at all when she was hired. No one had told her about this at all,” (Lee). Helen Yang (Class of 2019), a member of AASWG, explained how Temple University cut a similar AASP because there “weren’t enough students enrolling in their courses.” She believes that Temple administration carelessly failed to account for logistical difficulties, not aiding students in mapping these new courses onto their educational plans, resulting in less student enrollment. Though dismayed, Yang believes that Duke’s AASWG must continue to serve as a safeguard and something to hold Duke administrators accountable for their own commitments: “I wouldn’t put it past the admin to do something similar, because if… it looks like students or faculty aren’t interested, then it’s not on them, it’s instead reflective of everyone else’s needs.” Yang is one among many who suspects the university may not have the students’ interests in mind. Stanley Yuan added that “the deans and presidents are the ones with the power and leverage. They would say ‘We really need to focus on these hires,’ and they kept deferring. They said, ‘We don’t control hiring, you need 10 | UNFOUND

to go convince different department heads,’ and then department heads would say ‘We’re limited by hiring, you really need to talk to the deans.’” For Yuan and his fellow peers, this back and forth was exhausting – and by design. Sucheng Chan (2005) emphasizes that the informal power structure of university ranks rely on power, influence, and legitimacy. She argues that out of six main types of power within the academy, Asian Americans possess the least of administrative power, which belongs to individuals who maintain the ‘old boys’ network and restrict its entry to the obedient. These individuals are also the “collegial power brokers” responsible for every academic and political commitment undertaken by the university. A greater Asian American presence in the administration, especially in faculty positions beyond the typical scientific or mathematical positions held, would greatly aid in negotiation for Asian American-specific demands; again, the creation of an Asian American Studies Program or Department. Until this becomes more prevalent at Duke, students of AASWG will continue to shoulder the burden of advocacy and struggle to identify those responsible for pushing change. Another important individual in the fight for an AASP is Joanne Kang, a former Student Development Coordinator at the Center for Multicultural Affairs (CMA). During her time at Duke, Kang operated between students and administrators. She viewed her position as a “behind the scenes detail arranger, taking pictures of students at the rallies but not necessarily at the front lines.” Because her paychecks were signed by Duke, she had to be careful not to align against the university.

She supported the students primarily by helping to draft emails to administration, as well as offering an insider’s perspective on navigating institutional politics. Her insight into administerial context, ideal scheduling for meetings, and how best to approach these meetings made communication as effective and respectful as possible for both parties. Kang often used her position to humanize both sides of the struggle; she was especially crucial in modulating tone and expression: “When I talked to students about how to write an email requesting ethnic disaggregation data on the racial populous, sometimes I would say ‘It seems really antagonistic, and this is the Associate Dean of the Registrar who is extremely busy and they’ll want to respond to something that is not so antagonistic. They will be more receptive to curious students asking for a meeting rather than a student demanding justice and equity through statistics. I understand that students don’t want to come off as palatable, and the priority shouldn’t be making language easier to swallow for people of power, but the first step to the whole creation process of an academic department is getting your foot in the door.” Her work as a student coordinator and staff representative demonstrate the complex barriers that many of AASWG members faced in their journey for the AASP. While the students of AASWG continue to fight for greater representation in academic studies, efforts to create Asian American programs in higher education are not always characterized by an oppositional relationship between administration and activists. Sucheng Chan, a scholar and Professor of Asian American Studies at U.C. Santa

Barbara, single-handedly negotiated for both an academic department and the hiring of faculty to support it. In her book “In Defense of Asian American Studies,” (2005) she details how early preparation of a proposed curriculum helped improve the program’s prospects. The program would go on to be well-received, given degree-granting status shortly after. Although the time and location provide important context – the year was 1993 and the institution was a liberal California public university – this success represents how other schools have managed to accomplish this daunting task. Building Sustainable Student Activism for Asian American Studies As the demographics of Asian Americans in the US have changed as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act, so has Asian American student activism. Since the mid-1970s when the Asian American student population at several colleges increased dramatically, students were eager to carry on the efforts of their predecessors from the 1960s. William Wei (1993) notes that this new generation, not only focused on racial and ethnic pride, promoting their histories, and fighting institutional racism, but also emphasized educational reform through Asian American Studies (151). The increased affluence of the post-1965 generation of students was key behind the emergence of efforts toward Asian American Studies in elite institutions, Duke being one of them (151). As immigrants with heightened access to higher education and social mobility flocked to the United States, their children became more prominent and populous presences on American campuses. Garnering Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 11

strength in numbers, movements to establish Asian American Studies took flight throughout the 1980’s, 90’s, and 2000’s. In addition to working with administration, AASWG efforts illuminate how student activism on college campuses is informed by the students’ relationships with each other and their understanding of themselves. Student activism involves many moving parts and requires the passion and dedication of students who, as Stephanie Lowe describes, have “a clear, compelling vision for an alternate reality that is more inclusive.” Speaking to students and staff present in this dialogue and activism, we learned of the immense complexity of student activism for Asian American Studies awareness. Scholars narrow the purpose of Asian American Studies into four concrete categories: “Raising the ethnic consciousness and self-awareness of Asian American students; disseminating new educational materials on Asian Americans; developing radical social and political perspectives and research on Asian Americans; providing culturally sensitive services to Asian American students and communities” (Wei, 135). Each principle has direct implications on the formation and sustainability of Asian American student activism. Even among the Asian American community on Duke’s campus, the interest in Asian American issues was not necessarily immediately strong enough to form and support the efforts of AASWG. Several interviewees emphasized the struggle to make students care about a formal Asian American academic program, or furthermore, believe in the feasibility of its creation. Shalini Subbarao 12 | UNFOUND

(Class of 2017), a former AASWG member, pointed out that “this push has been going on for a way longer time than people think” and that students often don’t know that “there has been this sustained interest in this program.” Aside from ignorance of this history, many students’ interest in Asian American issues plateaus when they are presented with the idea of an AASP. Helen Yang saw that the “Asian American community [would band] together in terms of a social, cultural community, but this hits a wall when it comes to thinking about educational things.” While she acknowledges the need for this community, she and many other members felt frustration that fellow students did not acknowledge the necessity of actual classes on Asian American issues. Furthermore, Duke’s student groups and campus programs lack distinct representation of all Asian American identities, especially Asian American minority identities. For South Asians specifically, there has been a continuous issue of inclusivity in the narrative of Asian American identity. Subbarao commented on how “a lot of South Asians don’t feel represented by the term Asian so [she] wanted to make sure students knew that this program was also for them.” She explains that a large push for her to be involved with AASWG a desire to represent this group of students. Even when there is student interest in learning about Asian American issues, the method of effectively providing political education proves difficult. Certain political education events such as one called “What does it mean to be Asian American at Duke” strove to increase student awareness of their identities and histories as they relate to present day struggles. This also targeted Wei’s

principles of Asian American studies. Yang, however, recalls that “the people who are coming to [AASWG] events are not necessarily the people we are trying to engage with.” The notion of “preaching to the choir” held true for many of these events, which showed the struggle to expand outreach to new students. Furthermore, political education events were designed to increase contextual knowledge and encourage critical thinking, but it became tricky to meet students at different levels of prior knowledge. The question for Yang became: “how do we continue to keep the people who have had these conversations before interested in the events, but also not scare away the people who might not understand?” Our interviewees overwhelmingly agreed that shouldering the burden of explaining and educating others was a responsibility that one must be willing to take on to see change. After the Asia Prime party, Dean Sue recalls the conversation between Asian American students and the student group who hosted the party. She explains that the affected students were able “to take the time to let these other students know how they were feeling [...] and what it meant to their lives and Duke experience.” Although just one example and just one step, these moments of dialogue form the basis of student activism, and from which larger efforts can grow. Stanley Yuan significantly benefited from conversations with other student leaders, saying that “they often challenged me and invested in me, and spent a lot of time explaining things to me when they didn’t have to.” Yang agrees, emphasizing that “you can’t start by knowing, and you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you don’t

have someone there to listen to what you have to say then it’s going to be hard to know.” This education is highly important, especially to those who have little understanding of their ethnic identity, or what it means to fight for their voice in a White-centric society. ThaiHuy Nguyen (2015) points out that students who have yet to learn of their ethnicities’ histories and struggles are able to dive deep into “an unknown area” and emerge enlightened (350). Thus, the efforts to educate fellow peers played a huge role in galvanizing interest and spreading awareness for Asian American Studies. Alongside political education was, of course, the more direct student activism efforts to bring attention to the issues they push for. This reflects Wei’s purposes of Asian American Studies as not only being educational but also political and civically oriented. Nguyen (2015) would agree that Asian American Studies courses shouldn’t only be for the “scholarly unfeeling researcher;” it should also galvanize them to be civically and politically engaged in their fight for equality (350), and we can see this in some student efforts on Duke’s campus. While civil interventions with the administration are possible, our interviewees found disruptive tactics the most effective for activism. Yuan stated that “when you are disruptive and hold protests, then you gain leverage because then the administration sees that this is actually something they have to handle and take care of.” In addition to protests, examples of disruptive activism include photo campaigns led by the Asian Students Association, where students responded to the statement: “Duke doesn’t teach me…” These statements were a Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 13

platform for individual student voices to flag where Duke failed to educate them. Students brought up not learning the history of Asian Americans in the US, the way mental health is discussed in the Asian American community, the relationship between Asian Americans and other minority groups, and many more issues that intimately affect their lives and identities. Another example is in a 2015 student survey where students were asked multiple questions about their interest in an AASP, one of which stated “will the Duke administration’s decision to build an AASP affect your decision to donate to the school?” By referencing the contributions students would someday make as alumni, this survey question made current students’ needs and influence relevant even beyond their time at Duke and bridging the issue of transience. These tactics are more direct and disruptive than working with administration, but both kinds of tactics contributed to this movement. An intense commitment to intersectionality became a cornerstone of the fight for ethnic studies. Cooperation amongst a multiracial coalition of student groups on campus occasionally caused friction in this movement, but Yuan points out that it was the participation in other causes on campus that prepared members of AASWG for activism in Asian American issues specifically. For a presentation that he gave at an Asian American conference in November of 2017, he detailed the timeline of events relating to this movement. The pink dots are events relating to Asian American studies and the black dots are events relating to other students of color. Yuan 14 | UNFOUND

explained that “Asian American studies and the push, the activism, the knowledge that we had to make that effective was only possible because we had done all this organizing before on all these other causes and we gained our organizing knowledge through that.” Coalitions were not only essential to making demands and addressing equity broadly, but were key to teaching students the tactics to make their protests and disruptions effective and their organizing sustainable. Because activism attempts to bring about equity in an intentionally intersectional way, student activism is built on an emphasis on community and solidarity in a way that cannot limit itself to its siloed student causes. Yuan recalls how it was always difficult to focus only on Asian American issues because there were always other things happening around campus, and student activists often took on multiple causes at once. He repeats during the interview the idea that we cannot just care about equity issues as they apply to ourselves, but rather we have to care about equity more broadly. Thus, he explains that “when you’re organizing together you learn about people, and [...] that kind of multiracial understanding naturally happens,” and this is what strengthens all activism. This sentiment was echoed by Black students like Bryce Cracknell (2017), who saw AASWG as a co-conspirator

(2017), who saw AASWG as a co-conspirator for a broad push toward the rights and protection of students of color. Similarly, Yang urges us to understand that “we’re fighting for Asian American Studies not just because it serves our interests as Asian American people, but also because we’re thinking about how Asian American Studies fits into the greater narrative of ethnic studies.” A consequence of being involved in many areas of activism is the exhaustion and burnout that many student groups face. Educating students on political issues and constantly working toward goals that may not be realized within their years at an institution is a draining personal sacrifice. Yuan explains that he and his friends felt this burnout, and urges that “sustainability and self care [...] are key parts of effective activism that I don’t think we actually looked at.” Joanne Kang describes how her role in supporting students “was a lot of emotional support and validating the students experiences and being a listening ear.” She explains that “the frustration behind organizing is not seeing any results” and “part of why activism is so tiring is because you not only have to say this is something that you need, but also just to explain the existence of the problem in the first place.” Nguyen (2015) comments on how Asian American Studies would validate the wrongfully trivialized voices of students who continually demand the teaching of their histories (349). Furthermore, students involved in campus activism often also participate in activism in the local community, through events such as Inside Out and Moral Mondays, and any organizing related to HB2. Members of the Durham and North Carolina community who

attend these events provided Duke student attendees with insight on sustainable activism. Yuan recalls them saying that “Durham is their home and they’re not going anywhere. [they] can’t operate in this student activism model that we did, where it’s this ‘go-go-go burn yourself out’ type of mindset.” Yuan realized that it is important to learn from this mindset so that student activists can set realistic goals for themselves while maintaining healthy activist habits. The long-term survival of AASWG — of any student activism — rests not only on maintaining student interest, but also building the relationships and tactics to support the endurance of activists that have devoted their energy to this cause. Conclusion: Correcting the Narrative “The point of investigating all of this is to uncover that any sort of progress or any sort of development that the university has made was directly due to and because of students that led it, students that pushed it, students that held the administration accountable.” - Bryce Cracknell, Duke ‘17 The narrative history of Asian American Studies remains in negotiation across the country. Scholars and activists have sought to develop a better understanding of the Asian American experience in higher education through the eyes of individual students, while others have established a collective story. Pak, Maramba, and Hernandez, write about the inability to define this history in one single story, and argue for an understanding of the Asian American college campus experience that places students within their historical contexts — affirmative action, AAS, hate incidents, and identity development chief Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 15

among them (2014). But their narrative does not stand alone, and in fact, is complemented by the addition of individual stories and experiences. The importance of memory work is to unearth the deep-rooted barriers that block the path to progress. Not only did our interviewees see this preservation of memory as a commemoration of the path to Asian American Studies at Duke, but many mentioned an opportunity to correct the simplified narrative that surrounds “progress” on campus. Student activists like Bryce Cracknell, who spent his college career pushing for change, emphasized disrupting the myth that change happens organically at the university level; instead, Cracknell is adamant that “no point of progress is made without the tension of students forcing the university to get there, forcing the university to hold itself accountable, forcing the university to be equitable in the ways in which it engages with people.” Cracknell sees this reckoning with the power of student activism as integral to future progress in the fight for an Asian American Studies Department. Asian American activists are intent on highlighting the intersectional leadership of the movement at Duke. Stanley Yuan recalled the leadership of women and genderqueer students in AASWG, saying, “I wish it were explicitly named that a majority of the efforts were led by women and gendernonconforming folks. I think for the most part in the AASWG, I was the only man, and I think that’s important to recognize that cost of this labor came from women and gender-nonconforming folks.” The role of these marginalized Asian students is not 16 | UNFOUND

always prevalent in historical narratives, but Yuan emphasized its importance. Another group whose role in AASWG has often been overlooked is Duke’s South Asian community. Manish Kumar (Class of 2020), a junior Senator for Academic Affairs in Duke Student Government and member of AASWG, remarked that though most of the founders of the group were East Asian students, Indian students like himself were trying to ensure that a diverse set of perspectives were represented in their activism. Kumar noted that a lot of the assumptions around Asian American identity are rooted in historical context: “When you refer to Asians in the U.K., you refer to South Asians. In the U.S., it seems like ‘Asian’ more often refers to East Asians — like I even had somebody tell me that India wasn’t in Asia, which is ridiculous. American culture has constructed the Asian identity around East Asian experiences, though I think everybody in AASWG recognizes that it goes beyond that.” One integral piece of telling the story of Duke Asian American studies is uprooting the myth that Asian identity is limited to the East Asian experience. Finally, faculty and student organizers alike emphasized moving from a scarcity mindset in the collective understanding of ethnic studies and embracing a perspective that recognizes the intrinsic importance of learning ethnic experiences. In this sense, Christine Lee believes that minority students should not have to be pitted against one another while advocating for themselves. Lee explained that she saw other universities operating from this scarcity mindset, saying, “With many other universities, in the work that is done in an attempt to create a AA studies, a lot of the time

students will have their main justifications be: ‘Well, so and so other groups have these resources, Asian Americans account for even more of the school population, why don’t we have this?’” Lee says that this argument, though sometimes effective, fails to recognize the deep necessity and inherent value in providing all sorts of ethnic studies classes. Her understanding of the national will to pit students of color against each other in the fight for higher education resources is on par with academic research. Stotzer and Hossellman confirm the existence of this resource war in their article, “Hate Crimes on Campus: Racial/Ethnic Diversity and Campus Safety.” The authors find that campuses with larger numbers of nonwhite students were better organized and better able to recover from racist incidents on campus—be they hate incident or administrative bias (2012). Thus, the valueadded through collective cooperation is exactly as Lee perceives: identity groups function best when they support each other and advocate on behalf of each other rather than comparing themselves to other groups. A fully-fledged ethnic studies department incorporating a multiplicity of histories can help facilitate this collective action between all students— particularly marginalized students. Ultimately, Cracknell puts words to this value, and in doing so, sums up the reason that all of the student activists, faculty members, and administrative leaders who took part in the movement for Asian American Studies at Duke were motivated to do so. Cracknell said that ethnic studies helped him understand that “the history that is described and discussed within mainstream American history is extremely narrow.” He added that “to only be fed these

sort of lies and myths like the model minority forces folks into boxes and doesn’t help us understand the wider nuances and deeper histories that are here.” Through the work of coalition-building, political strategizing, and narrative construction, students and staff have built a movement that honors these histories in a meaningful way. Returning to this oral history a year later in 2020, current members of AASWG reflect that while similar pushes for Asian American studies existed and continue to exist at peer institutions, the nature of organizing was isolated to individual campuses. Unlike the partnerships exhibited between UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University under the Third World Liberation Front, the history of activism for Asian American students at Duke has centered around discrete waves of activism within Duke’s own institutional history. With the murder of George Floyd and the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, more student activists are realizing that their organizing for ethnic studies is tied to broader goals for social justice and cannot be contained to their own schools or cities. This is a moment of enormous potential, and we hope that this localized history of activism can serve as a usable past from which to imagine greater futures. Bibliography Chan, Sucheng. 2005. “Proposal for a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara [1993].” In In Defense of Asian American Studies : The Politics of Teaching and Program Building, 43–57. The Asian American Experience. Urbana : University of Illinois Experience. Urbana : University of Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 17

Illinois Press, c2005. https://find.library.duke.

edu/catalog/DUKE003466109. Chan, Sucheng. 2005. “Asian Americans and the Structure of Power in American Universities [1989].” In In Defense of Asian American Studies : The Politics of Teaching and Program Building, 43–57. The Asian American Experience. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2005. https://find.library.duke.edu/ catalog/DUKE003466109. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. 2001. “Ethnic Studies in U.S. Higher Education: The State of the Discipline.” In Color-Line to Borderlands : The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies, edited by Johnnella E. Butler. American Ethnic and Cultural Studies. Seattle : University of Washington Press, c2001. https://find.library. duke.edu/catalog/DUKE003042888. Nyugen, Thai-Huy and Gasman, Marybeth. “Activism, identity and service: the influence of the Asian American Movement on the educational experiences of college students” History of Education 44, no. 3 (2015): 339-354. Accessed April 4, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080 /0046760X.2014.1003338 Pak, Yoon K., Maramba, Dina C., and Hernandez, Xavier J., eds. 2014. Asian Americans in Higher Education - Charting New Realities : AEHE Volume 40, Number 1: 69-75. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Accessed April 7, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central. Ryan, Angela. 2015. “Counter College: Third World Students Reimagine Public Higher Education.” History of Education Quarterly 55 (4): 413–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/hoeq.12134. Stotzer, Rebecca L., and Emily Hossellman. “Hate Crimes on Campus: Racial/Ethnic Diversity and Campus Safety.” Journal of 18 | UNFOUND

Interpersonal Violence 27, no. 4 (March 2012): 644–61. Wei, William. “Activists and the Development of Asian American Studies” in The Asian American Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Primary Sources Cracknell, Bryce. 2019. Bryce Cracknell T’18 interviewed by Leah Abrams. Kang, Joanne. 2019. Joanne Kang interviewed by Michelle Qiou. Kumar, Manish. 2019. Manish Kumar T’20 interviewed by Leah Abrams. Lee, Christine. 2019. Christine Lee T’18 interviewed by Francia Fang. Lowe, Stephanie. 2019. Stephanie Liu Lowe T’05 interviewed by Lucy Dong. Subbarao, Shalini. 2019. Shalini Subbarao T’17 interviewed by Michelle Qiou. Wasiolek, Sue. 2019. Dean Sue Wasiolek interviewed by Francia Fang. Yang, Helen. 2019. Helen Yang T’19 interviewed by Michelle Qiou. Yuan, Stanley. 2019. Stanley Yuan T’15 interviewed by Michelle Qiou.

Indian-Americans’ Relationship with Bhārat¹: The Indosphere’s move Westward via Diasporic Remittances Shivani Parikh, Cornell University ‘18 One of the ways that those of Indian ancestry articulate their relationship with their Indian motherland is through remittances. Remittances are a soft power means that the Indian state leverages, as funds from its emigrants support its philanthropic projects and allow it to benefit from the largely economically upwardly-mobile populations it has in various Western nations. The contours of which diaspora members in the Western Hemisphere are valued and the cultural ties that the children of Indian immigrants seek to maintain through their forms of engagement with the Indian state in the context of sending money “back home” jointly exemplify the complexities of identity when folks are caught between two nations with vastly different histories, postcolonial development trajectories, and material resources.

With the advancement of globalization and the increasingly secure socioeconomic establishment of Asians in the Americas, notions of citizenship, heritage, and cultural nationalism are expanding realms of academic study and intensely personal questions of self-identification. These notions manifest tangibly for Indian-Americans, whether they are immigrants or the children of immigrants. The hyphen which links those two demonyms alludes to the duality of allegiance, because there are two nation states claiming these transnational individuals. Their Americanness is qualified by their Indianness. The term “non-resident Indian (NRI),” used colloquially but also legally in section 6 of India’s IncomeTax Act of 1961, defines someone who resides outside of the Republic of India’s borders and does not qualify for citizenship due to residential requirements as still fundamentally Indian. Alternatively, the United States would designate the same individual (within the context of documented 1migration) as an American that is racially Asian and of Indian origin. As India does not permit dual citizenship, an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status is an option taken by many NRI’s who wish to be able to travel to India frequently and easily. In doing so, the holder’s passport reflects the following permissions: multiple-entry, multi-purpose lifelong visa to visit India; exemption from foreigner registration requirements for any length of stay in India; and parity with non-resident Indians in financial, economic and educational fields except in the acquisition of agricultural or plantation properties. A sense of affinity for India among its American diasporic members in the Information Age and in this era of globalization is cultivated, developed and sustained through various forms of remittances, including 1 Bhārat is the official Hindi name of India. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 19

through donations to nonprofits and social enterprises, capital investment, and voluntourism. Each of these manifestations has its respective contours and effects on the Indian nation state, and they reflect a range of ethical implications rooted in Global North-South postcolonial relations. Authentic “Indianness” and its utility to the Indian state is not monolithic because the premises for various generations of those leaving the subcontinent range widely in the spectrum of coercion to choice. The Indian state is thus not equally invested or committed to maintaining ties with those who may claim their ancestry. However even then, there is stratification based on geographic distance between these populations’ new sites of citizenship and India. Sri Lankan-Austrailian Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University Chandra Jayawardena explains the distinctions between the Indo-Guyaense people and the Indo-Fijians, emphasizing first on the experiences of the latter: More ‘Indian’ than the Guyanese; they have a more realistic knowledge of India, for them it is less of a myth. Yet the consequence of this is that India can be ‘more meaningful’ in the literal sense for Guyanese, in that they can read more meanings into the phenomenon of ‘India’ and their ‘Indianness’. To Indians in Fiji, India is too real, too existent to be susceptible to re-moulding and therefore less amenable as a political and cultural symbol.2 Another contributing factor is the 2 Chandra Jayawardena, Culture and Ethnicity in Guyana and Fiji (1980), 434. 20 | UNFOUND

differences between these diasporas’ was in their willingness to interface and build community with other native populations. Indo-Fijians were initially not allowed to move into Fijian villages, and so they developed isolated independent communities. Contrastingly, Guyanese Indians upon their arrival worked in proximity to freed slaves who were of African descent and they jointly “produced conditions of life that sapped at the roots of traditional culture”3 under the oppression of the British empire’s white watchful lackeys. While African cultures and Indian cultures mixed over the next several decades in the realms of music and food, interracial marriages were discouraged and remain highly policed by both communities’ men.4 Here, religion, caste, language, and ties to specific ethnic & regional origin in India are all important factors that provide bases for differentiation between the experiences of those pulled out of India by the British imperialist intimidating and forcing Indians into indentureship to work on their other colonies’ cane and sugar plantations versus those seeking economic opportunity beginning over more than a century later. Indo-Guyanese’ “Indianness” is often unfairly characterized by privileged economic migrants as contrived and rooted in an unsubstantiated longing for a place that is presumably not fully known or remembered as their means of 3 Jayawardena, Culture and Ethnicity in Guyana and Fiji, 439. 4 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (London: Hurst & Company, 2016).

justifying the exclusion of Indo-Guyanese Americans from their communities. The smaller Gross Domestic Product of IndoCaribbean countries and their higher rates of poverty, the high cost of airfare travel, and their diasporans’ ties to India being a greater number of generations away from their migrant ancestors has led to the Indian state limitedly acknowledging IndoCaribbeans’ existence outside of cricket sporting competitions. Understanding Indian-Americans’ positionality through a lens of contrasting their position from that of Indo-Carribbeans is crucial to framing how and why India as a state has taken an extensive interest in sustaining relationships in the Western hemisphere with its socioeconomically apparently successful emigrants who reside in Global North nations over the members of the descendants of its “coolie,” unskilled worker diasporas. The case of Indo-Trinidadians, the descendants of the coerced Indians brought as indentured servants from 1874-1917, demonstrate how recent political struggles for national visibility and inclusion remain salient in how Indianness as a racial category abroad manifests as a complex identity that erases the differences in ethnicity and caste that may be otherwise salient within the population. In the late 1980s and early 1990s in Trinidad, Indians were demanding that the image of Trinidadian-ness needed to change to include them, rather than for them to compromise their Indian roots and cultural pride to accommodate a sense of nationhood

that reflected Afro-Trinidadian cultural and political hegemony. Themes of ethnic consciousness, (a resistance to) creolization, and a certain audacity for equality resonate in the organizing movements that were brought about as a result.5 In the United States, equivalents of such reckonings have not occurred, though the establishment in the last decade of nonprofits and coalitions that crossed ethnic and religious lines is somewhat comparable; these organizations understood the need for bonding within the broader South Asian community in order to resist the aftermath of surveillance and securitization against them after 9/11. Nonetheless, the generational distance, in addition to the geographic one, for IndoTrinidadians is a recurring theme for all diasporas, including the Indian-American one, whose populations of primarily immigrant generations are becoming older and smaller. For the American-born children of Indian immigrants, when traveling back to India is not feasible, they now have more immediate access to understanding India’s continuing evolution beyond being a place of cultural origin as a nation with a growing global presence by virtue of its film and music exports and transnational organizing. Cybernetic spaces “constantly problematize the idea of identity, since some vectors that help create the global space would attempt to harmonize the relationship between 5 Viranjini Munasinghe, “Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4, no. 1 (2001): 1-34, doi:10.1353/jaas.2001.0007. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 21

the identities of people of different spatial origins, while other tendencies would want to disrupt the homogenizing forces thus placing certain identities in jeopardy within certain spaces.”6 The voices of immigrants in cyberspace are relatively protected and not limited by physical limitations. Blogs, digital magazines, and even matrimony sites allow for immediate exchange with non-existent to relatively horizontal structures of power and authority. The website Non-Resident Indians Online (NRIOL_ provides a listing of articles such as, “Diwali – An Integral Part of American Culture”; “India Languishes while Indians Abroad Succeed. Why?”; and “What Can We Expect from President Clinton’s Visit to India?” As the titles of these stories suggest, these articles offer an area of congruence between the Indian past and the immigrant present by focusing on the ways in which the two identity narratives overlap).”7 Therefore, understanding Indianness for residents of the United States is neither monolithic nor is the narrative stagnant. Technology is not just the modality for the occupational migration of many Indians, but the novel way they now retain a firm grip on their heritage and their contemporary perceptions of their motherland. Technology and the I.T. sector in the United States, as aforementioned, is thereby a large premise for where remittance capital 6 Ananda Mitra, “Creating Immigrant Identities in Cybernetic Space: Examples from a Non-resident Indian Website,” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 3 (2005): 373, doi:10.1177/0163443705051749. 7 Mitra, 383. 22 | UNFOUND

is being accrued. Since the advancement of out-sourcing, H-1B visa reform, body shopping, and the advances of the I.T. sector in India and the United States, the training and export of a highly educated labor force has particularly offered India the potential to expand markets and forge global connections over the long term. Body shopping is “the purchasing of manpower from another country, usually one where wages are cheap” (Body shopping). Body shopping allows for American employers to continue operating while providing fewer opportunities for visa sponsorship and increased competition amongst the Indians that were recruited. With these occupations in the I.T. sector having higher wages and more immediate financial security, Remittances are especially evident if these immigrants’ settlement is temporary or undocumented circular migration, because this increases the incentive to remit money home. Therefore, the greater the uncertainty of settlement and tenure for Indian migrants overseas, the greater the potential economic returns to India.8 The H-1B visa model and its regulations therefore jointly serve the interests of both American employers and the Indian economy, as Indians’ precarity in the United States job market leads them to financial decisions in which they feel compelled to send their savings to India. Aihwa Ong, Professor of Anthropology at the University 8 Margaret Walton-Roberts, “Globalization, National Autonomy and Non-resident Indians,” Contemporary South Asia 13, no. 1 (2004): 56-57, doi:10.1080/0958493042000209870.

of California, Berkeley, argues that “new strategies of flexible accumulation have promoted a flexible attitude toward citizenship.” The flexible citizenship entails “flexible practices, strategies, and disciplines associated with transnational capitalism” that create new “modes of subject making and new kinds of valorized subjectivity.”9 In this instance, though the Indian worker is adversely affected by the policies of both countries, it is India that is seen as the nation that fundamentally has their best interests protected, even though the two nations’ policies are actually working in tandem. With a significant hub for I.T. and newly migrated professional Indians being in California’s Silicon Valley, Chong-Moon Lee has noted that: Growing numbers of skilled immigrants return to their home countries after studying and working abroad, and even those who stay often become part of transnational communities linking the United States to the economies of distant regions. These new immigrant- entrepreneurs thus foster economic development directly, by creating new jobs and wealth, as well as indirectly, by coordinating the information flows and providing the linguistic and cultural knowhow that promote trade and investment flows with their home countries.10 A growing population of younger Indian 9 Gerard Delanty and Aihwa Ong, “Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality,” Contemporary Sociology 30, no. 1 (2001): 17-19, doi:10.2307/2654361. 10 “The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” Choice Reviews Online 38, no. 08 (2001): 276, doi:10.5860/choice.38-4556.

engineers in Silicon Valley are seeking the opportunity to return home because of unstable visa policies and explicit xenophobia with the Trump administration in office. They send and save their money not only as deposits or bonds in Indian banks, but by also investing in the Indian economy and new ventures and start-ups there. New economic opportunities that link the US and India are fundamental to questions about globalization, identity, and thinking about the processes for upholding dual nationalisms and cultural identity through increasingly and exclusively capitalist means. In some ways, “NRIs have come to stand for a whole category of India’s urbanized, superficially Westernized ‘new rich’ who have flourished with modernization.”11 The children of such Indian immigrants in the United States, especially when brought up in households that are at minimum middle class but often approach even higher income brackets, connect with India in ways that presuppose wealth. Median annual household income for Indian Americans, “in 2010 was $88,000, much higher than for all Asian Americans ($66,000) and all U.S. households ($49,800) — perhaps not surprising, given

11 Johanna Lessinger, “Investing or Going Home? A Transnational Strategy among Indian Immigrants in the United States,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645, no. 1 Towards a Tra (1992): 53-80, doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1992.tb33486.x.

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their high education levels.”12 With more disposable income, using monetary means becomes a natural course of action, as does accepting and operating upon the American narrative about the need to bring development, education, and a neoliberal attitude to the realms of the world which were impoverished, uneducated, and homeless. India, in spite of being considered one of the five major emerging national economies, fits well into this narrative, hence the subsequent involvement of Indian-Americans in endeavors such as the nonprofit Uplift Humanity and the expansion of the nonprofit Ekal Vidyalaya’s offices to the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Uplift Humanity is a “501(c)(3) non-profit organization that operates rehabilitation programs throughout India to educate juveniles and orphans in life skills and technology training.”13 Uplift Humanity was founded by Anish Patel when he was a junior in high school. In an interview with a local magazine, he recounted: I came up with the idea of Uplift Humanity while I was vacationing in India this summer. While riding in rickshaws through the streets of Baroda, I looked around and realized that India is inundated with neglected, underprivileged teenagers. After conducting research at the local 12 Drew DeSilver, “5 Facts about Indian Americans,” Pew Research Center, August 14, 2020, accessed August 24, 2020, http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2014/09/30/5-facts-about-indian-americans/. 13 “Uplift Humanity India,” Wikipedia, August 14, 2020, Accessed August 24, 2020, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Uplift_Humanity_India. 24 | UNFOUND

library, I learned that juveniles in detention facilities do not receive much care, and thus find it extremely difficult to assimilate back into society. After discussing the idea with my parents and a few friends, I established Uplift Humanity.14 Perusing the nonprofit’s website, two elements are striking. The first is that to participate in the summer program there, “students must have a basic understanding of how to speak in Gujarati or Hindi.” Similarly for Hyderabad, the website states, “In order to volunteer in Hyderabad, students must have a basic understanding of how to speak in Telugu or Hindi.” Language skills are not required for Mumbai or Delhi, but with Gujarati and Telegu being regional languages, the nudge for deliberate and highly specific ethnic parity is clear. Second is the cost for participating in the program. Though the teens are volunteering for a month at either a juvenile delinquent facility or at an orphanage, they must pay for their airfare, meals, and lodging. These packages range from $1700-$3000 and are intended for high school aged youth in particular. With these caveats, the remittance model for Indian-Americans is further solidified as one that rests in their notion that they are “uplifting the humanity” of their thirdworld and less humane brethren by sending their children for a short period of time back to India. These teens know English because they were born and raised in an English speaking society, and that is all that is required in order to teach underprivileged youth enough English language skills so 14 Wikipedia, “Uplift Humanity India.”

that they may rise above their circumstances and find employment. The extent to which the imposition of the American Dream on these Indian youth is not detailed in any “success story” section of Uplift Humanity’s website leaves donors to wonder about the extent to which these youth are benefitting from Indian-American teens’ and their parents’ “generosity.” Nonetheless, this generosity is an avenue for NRIs to simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically challenge and sustain that belief in an accessible, transferable, and capitalist-driven American Dream. Ekal Vidyalaya promotes the “holistic development of villages through empowerment of tribal (vanvasi) and rural communities in India with basic education, digital literacy, skill development, health awareness, learning modern and productive agricultural practices and rural entrepreneurship.”15 The mission itself is explicit in its push for indigenous communities to become better incorporated into the rest of society, with a civilizing mission and an acceptance of market forces that runs counter to their traditional subsistence practices. Through internship opportunities and youth ambassador programs, as well as leadership networks established in several cities across the United States for NRIs to hold administrative and operation positions, Ekal Vidyalaya capitalizes on the diaspora’s desire to be involved in their development-based mission and work. They host fundraising events which have included bringing contestants from Indian singing competitions

to host small galas, conferences, and ping pong tournaments.16 Important here is Ekal’s reliance and catering to the post-migrant first world imposing view. There is no acknowledgement on the website or in testimonials as to whether or not these indigenous communities that are being brought education and skills are interested in participating in modern societies and whether or not they feel that they are suffering greatly without them. Notions of poverty and advancing standards of living are largely imported from Western nations, and so it is not surprising that people in India tend to see NRIs as “no longer fully Indian, and to blame them for the social and spiritual dislocations inherent in the modernization process itself.”17 Retaining Indianness, as concluded by how diasporas across the Americas have varyingly integrated or resisted incorporation into the national sphere of their respective nations, takes into consideration language, religion, and a sense of pride in being able to directly trace one’s origin to a place and time in India. In the United States, the advent of the information technology (I.T.) community and the more general premise for post-1965 migration that relied heavily on filtering only degree-carrying professionals from India allowed for selecting the immigrants that were most likely to settle here quickly and, with careful investment and conservative spending practices, accumulate wealth and security. As a result, for reasons including migrational security, the potential for returns on investments, or philanthropy, remittances to India have become a norm for

15 “Events - United States,” Ekal Foundation - United States, accessed August 24, 2020, https://www.ekal.org/ us/events.

16 Ekal Foundation - United States, “Events - United States.” 17 Lessinger, 53-80. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 25

Indian-Americans. American born Indians in particular have, through a Western lens, been presented with narratives of India that frame her as one that desperately needs immediate saving, and these youth are more than happy to perform their culture and understand their transnational identities through means of voluntourism, youth ambassador programs for nonprofits, and raising money for organizations and social causes that “uplift” India’s most marginalized populations. Global North imperialism functions well through the post-migrant identity, and it remains to be seen how future generations, beginning with the children of American-born Indians, will identify with the models that are present and how they choose to engage with their Indianness and the Bhārata Sarakāra. Bibliography Bahadur, Gaiutra. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. London: Hurst & Company, 2016. “Body Shopping Definition and Meaning: Collins English Dictionary.” Body Shopping Definition and Meaning | Collins English Dictionary. Accessed August 24, 2020. https:// www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/ body-shopping. Delanty, Gerard, and Aihwa Ong. “Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.” Contemporary Sociology 30, no. 1 (2001): 74. doi:10.2307/2654361. Desai, A. “Home Page.” Uplift Humanity. Accessed August 24, 2020. https://uplifthumanityindia.org/. DeSilver, Drew. “5 Facts about Indian Americans.” Pew Research Center. August 14, 2020. Accessed August 24, 2020. http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2014/09/30/5-facts-about-indian-americans/. “Emigration of Highly Skilled Indians to the United 26 | UNFOUND

States: S&E Personnel (Students and Workers) and School Teachers.” India Migration Report 2010–2011: 49-68. Accessed August 23, 2020. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139152358.004. “Events - United States.” Ekal Foundation - United States. Accessed August 24, 2020. https:// www.ekal.org/us/events. Jayawardena, Chandra. “Culture and Ethnicity in Guyana and Fiji.” Man 15, no. 3 (1980). doi:10.2307/2801343. Lessinger, Johanna. “Investing or Going Home? A Transnational Strategy among Indian Immigrants in the United States.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645, no. 1 Towards a Tra (1992): 53-80. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1992.tb33486.x. Mitra, Ananda. “Creating Immigrant Identities in Cybernetic Space: Examples from a Non resident Indian Website.” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 3 (2005): 371-90. doi:10.1177/0163443705051749. Munasinghe, Viranjini. “Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad.” Journal of Asian American Studies 4, no. 1 (2001): 1-34. doi:10.1353/jaas.2001.0007. “NRIOL - Non Resident Indians Online.” NRIOL Resourceful Information and Services for Non Resident Indians, Indian Diaspora, India’s Position in the World, Indians Abroad. Accessed August 24, 2020. https://www.nriol.com/. Sadlouskos, Linda. “Ridge Junior Establishes International Organization to Assist Indian Juveniles.” Basking Ridge, NJ Patch. February 25, 2011. Accessed August 24, 2020. https://patch. com/new-jersey/baskingridge/groups/aroundtown/p/ridge-junior-establishes-internationalorganization-t63ed906d74. Saxenian, Annalee. “Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant High-Growth Entrepreneurs.” Economic Development Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2002): 20-31. doi:1

High-Growth Entrepreneurs.” Economic Development Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2002): 20-31. doi:10. 1177/0891242402016001003. “The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.” Choice Reviews Online 38, no. 08 (2001). doi:10.5860/choice.38-4556. “Uplift Humanity India.” Wikipedia. August 14, 2020. Accessed August 24, 2020. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Humanity_India. Walton-Roberts, Margaret. “Globalization, National Autonomy and Non‐resident Indians.” Contemporary South Asia 13, no. 1 (2004): 53-69. doi:10.1080/0958493042000209870.

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Asian American Autobiographies, Teaching Genre Expectations, and Single-Author Folk Narratives in Ed Young’s Lon Po Po and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior Marina Tinone, Yale University ‘20 This paper argues for a continuous, developmental approach to the reading, teaching, and reception of Asian American literature across ages and intended audience by comparing the critical analysis and reception of Ed Young’s picture book Lon Po Po to those of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior. In placing The Woman Warrior in a children’s literature framework and Lon Po Po in a non-children’s literature framework, an unconventional juxtaposition of perspectives can be created. Lon Po Po can be ireinterpreted within the genre of [adult] Asian American autobiography, and The Woman Warrior can be valued for its imaginative retellings of cultural stories, an aspect important to diverse children’s literature. These two cross-developmental interpretations of the respective works defy, perhaps unsuccessfully, the receptive paradox of single-author folklore. it is this paradox that symies the overall reception and representation of Asian Americans for the greater non-minority public.

Introduction Before discussing or analyzing literature, we read, and before reading, we are taught to read. Someone reads to us, and this person (and the many other people who read to us) show us not only how to read, but how to anticipate, make predictions, and extrapolate from the text a new sense of the world. Teaching and teaching methods are therefore the first discussions and analyses of texts. These early analyses, as presented by the authority of a teacher and in this paper, the classroom (as a site of teaching and primary interpretation), shape the understanding of a text and develop readers’ literature-to-life expectations. From literature, readers learn lessons about themselves and their world that transfer into their life, and perhaps for life. The reception and criticism of texts, then, can serve as a gauge for the lessons that readers have already learned and readers’ learned expectations for particular kinds of texts. This approach is especially important in understanding multicultural literature as these texts act as windows and mirrors for readers to understand their identity and the identities of others (Sims Bishop ix). To track this developmental approach to genre expectations and life lessons in Asian American literature, I compare Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior and Ed Young’s picture book Lon Po Po. The Woman Warrior, enduringly taught and regarded as Asian American literature, features Kingston’s retellings of Chinese folklore which critics scrutinize for their cultural inauthenticity and disservice to Chinese American representation. Lon Po Po, a children’s picture book subtitled “A Red-Riding Hood Story From China”, prepares younger readers to view American and Chinese cultures against each other, and I interpret a set of Lon Po Po lesson plans to explore the pedagogical burden placed on Lon Po Po in teaching nonChinese American audiences about China and Chinese-ness. The publication and teaching of these texts, in relating 28 | UNFOUND

Chinese folklore to a wider American audience, also demonstrate the implications of what I call singleauthor folk narratives in genre, autobiography, and cultural narrative. In analyzing and combining criticism surrounding frequently taught Asian American texts like The Woman Warrior and Lon Po Po, the placement of an Asian American cultural identity and home (or in this case, a Chinese American cultural identity and home) is founded in an otherness taught and developed over the life of a reader.

BRINGING THE WOMAN WARRIOR TO MULTICULTURAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND LON PO PO TO ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE As scholar Carole H. Carpenter writes, “an appreciation of how children’s literature functions to colonize and politicize ‘minors’ can provide insight on the dynamics that inform the treatment of other ‘minorities.’”1 Children’s literature not only reflects adults’ sensibilities of societal respectability but also the enduring lessons passed onto future adult audiences. The dynamic of literature, in this sense, moves and converses throughout the developmental life of a reader. Adult literature, especially positively reviewed and well-considered adult literature, reflects cultural paradigms often instilled at an early age; expectations aren’t born overnight, so to speak, and children’s literature creates these expectations. Criticisms of “adult literature” are thus applicable to children’s literature, and the analyses and criticisms of “children’s literature” reveal the preoccupations and worries of the adult world. I follow Carpenter’s direction and reconsider The 1 Carole H. Carpenter, “Enlisting Children’s Literature in the Goals of Multiculturalism,” Mosaic 3 (1996): 53-73, search.proquest.com/docview/54708263?accountid=15172.

Woman Warrior, if not a piece of children’s literature, then as a politicizing text that can share the same critical concerns as children’s literature, especially when connected through the genre of autobiography. The Library of Congress subject listings for the first edition of The Woman Warrior are: “Kingston, Maxine Hong--Childhood and youth, Chinese Americans-California--Social life and customs, United States— Biography.”2 As a biography about her own childhood and upbringing, Kingston’s autobiography falls under

a specific category of Asian American literature, as argued by critic Frank Chin.3 This feature of intergenerational and childhood autobiographies is similar, too, in children’s literature: “[s]tories exploring generational conflicts, particularly those that address differences in language and in lifestyle between the older generation directly from the root country in Asian and Asian American child, abound.”4 The themes of The Woman Warrior, then, are genre hallmarks in Asian American children’s literature. The criticism surrounding the genre of autobiography, however, differs between children’s and adult literature. The primary concern of The Woman Warrior’s critics, according to Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, is “its 2 “The Woman Warrior: LC Catalog – Item Information (Full Record),” Library of Congress Catalog, accessed April 27, 2019, lccn.loc.gov/76013674. 3 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiography Controversy.” Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (Oxford University Press, 1999): 35. 4 Junko Yokota, “Asian Americans in Literature for Children and Young Adults,” Teacher Librarian 36, no. 3 ( 2009): 16, search.proquest.com/ docview/224872212?accountid=15172. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 29

generic status: its being billed as autobiography rather than fiction, when so much of the book departs from the popular definition of autobiography as an unadorned factual account of a person’s own life.”5 Kingston’s retellings of Chinese folklore falsely represent Chinese American cultural heritage, and yet, The Woman Warrior is classified as a biography.6 In some ways, these departures from “authenticity” allow The Woman Warrior to be better placed in an Asian American children’s literature tradition of

the performance of selfhood and the evolution of meaning”, then the self, the author’s personal life, is implicated alongside the performance of self in the text to produce this evolved meaning.9 Teachers, readers, and critics consider Kingston’s life history outside of what she writes in The Woman Warrior in their interpretations of The Woman Warrior. If part of the burden of The Woman Warrior’s authenticity thus rests on Kingston’s personal life and identity as a public figure, what of Lon Po Po’s

5 Wong, 30. 6 Wong, 30. 7 Rocío G. Davis, “Asian American Autobiography for Children: Critical Paradigms and Creative Practice,” The Lion and the Unicorn 30, no. 2 (2006): 185, search.proquest.com/docview/221758593?accountid=15172. 8 Wong, 30.

9 Davis, 186. 10 “About Ed,” Ed Young, April 27, 2019, edyoungart. com/about.html. 11 “Maxine Hong Kingston – National Book Foundation,” National Book Foundation, accessed May 9, 2019, www.nationalbook.org/people/maxine-hong-kingston/. 12 “Ed Young,” Bookbird 38, no. 3, 68, search.proquest. com/docview/216114703?accountid=15172. 13 “Ed Young.” 14 Ed Young, “About Ed.”

autobiography; “[a]n Asian American writer who writes autobiography for children invites us to rethink the implications of life writing within the context of identity formation, and reconfigures the genre of autobiography with creative possibilities.”7 This discrepancy between cultural authenticity for adult literature and individualized, agentive authenticity in children’s literature reveals competing values. Readers and critics recognize the imaginative, fictive play of identity formation as a child, yet condone it in an adult, even in a biography about one’s own childhood. Understanding where the value on representing creativity ends and a representing a formed and fixed cultural identity is crucial to learning how the Asian American autobiography is beyond concerns of “unadorned factual account[s].”8 The Asian American author is charged and burdened with the responsibilities of identity formation and cultural actualization. If Asian American autobiographies at large are “highly effective vehicle[s] for two fundamental concerns of ethnic self-inscription:

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Ed Young? Although not an autobiography (or a biography), critics attach Lon Po Po, as Young’s Caldecott-winning illustrations, to the author and his relevance to the publishing industry.10 While Lon Po Po is presented as a version or iteration of the Red-Riding Hood story (of which there are many variations), I could not find other texts, children’s or adult, that presented a similar retelling of this Red-Riding Hood variation. In this way, Lon Po Po is not only Young’s illustrations, but also his words and his story. Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, California.11 Young, on the other hand, was born in 1931 in Tientsin, China before immigrating to the United States for architecture school.12 In 1957, he instead graduated with an art degree from the Center College of Design in Los Angeles.13 Since then, he has taught at multiple American institutions and has two daughters.14 In addition to winning the Caldecott Medal for Lon Po

Po in 1990, he has also received two Caldecott Honors and was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen prize twice for his career impact in the children’s book industry.15 On his professional website, Young is described as finding “inspiration for his work in the philosophy of Chinese painting… ‘A Chinese painting is often accompanied by words,’ explains Young. ‘They are complementary. There are things that words do that pictures never can, and likewise, there are images that words can never describe.’”16 Young’s self-

strange, sometimes savagely terrifying”, “fierce clarity and originality”, and lastly, “triumphant… astonishingly accomplished”. Whereas the critical acclaim for Young’s work implies an expected, obvious mastery and cultural literacy, positive reviews of The Woman Warrior connote a surprising sharpness based in something primal, unrefined, and feared. The marketing of these two books match the reception of the folk stories retold within them. For Lon Po Po, Young’s retelling is skillful and trustworthy;

turned into a sword”, “intense, fierce, disturbing…

was channeled through retellings from tradition—a less self-conscious and demanding act than the

alignment with Chinese philosophy and art places a greater emphasis on his Chinese heritage over his American professional life, perhaps allowing Young the freedom of individual creativity and artistic selfexpression without being burdened with concerns or checks for cultural authenticity. Young’s personalized Chinese philosophy translates to Lon Po Po in the form of words and panels reminiscent of traditional Chinese art styles. The authenticity of these panels and Young’s images in describing what “words can never describe” is neither mentioned nor contextualized in the cover and jacket that contain the story of Lon Po Po.17 The back flap of Lon Po Po affirms how Young “brings his Eastern heritage to his artwork”, citing two other notable and well-received works Young illustrated about a “long, long ago” China similar to the setting of Lon Po Po. This back flap also commends Young’s “versatility of feeling, theme, and style” in his artwork. The back cover of the 1989 Vintage International edition of The Woman Warrior, published the same year as Lon Po Po, features favorable reviews of Kingston’s writing. Many of the key adjectives narrow Kingston’s style into a specific niche: “dizzying, elemental, a poem 15 Ed Young, “About Ed.” 16 Ed Young, “About Ed.” 17 Ed Young, “About Ed.”

Kingston’s retellings are and considered unstudied and unprofessional. The publishing of non-Western folk stories, however, may also factor into the discrepancy between the reception of the two texts. Folklore is an inherently oral and malleable tradition open to variation and interpretation, yet it is also particular to its cultural contexts and the authority of its teller. Considering again how children’s literature “functions to colonize and politicize ‘minors’”, folklore is a similar method of cultural inculcation.18 Publishing folklore from multiple cultures, then, is a political project in not only spreading knowledge of these other cultures but also teaching a fixed reception of these works in the culture of the country of publication.19 The authenticity of these published folk stories for children began strategically with the authors publishers selected to write the stories. Carpenter writes: “From the early 1970s, publishers actively sought out tellers of the stories from the distinct traditions involved. These writers were often first-generation immigrants still personally connected to the heritage culture and engaged in the early stages of integration and settlement. In such circumstances, their creativity

18 Carpenter, 65. 19 Carpenter, 65. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 31

production of other types of works, for instance novels (chapter-books in children’s literature terminology).”20 Finding authors culturally connected to the folk story prevents appropriation, and audiences benefit from this kind of representation.21 However, the publishers’ emphasis on “first-generation immigrants” being “still personally connected to the heritage culture” implies a privileging of, for instance, being Chinese over being Chinese American (emphasis mine).22 Second and subsequent generations

inherently lose their cultural authority via settlement and integration, an implication similar to the cover and back cover flap discussion between first-generation immigrant Young and the second-generation daughter Kingston. Young’s retelling, beyond evidence that his story is culturally “authentic”, is inherently closer to a “factual account” than Kingston’s autobiography and more closely fulfills the genre expectation of a formed (not imaginatively forming) identity.23 However, Carpenter’s specific concern for first-generation immigrant authors’ creativity and self-assertion in publishing their folk stories (“a less self-conscious and demanding act than the production of other types of works, for instance novels”) implies a lack of the creativity necessary for the identity formation important in autobiographies in children’s literature.24 An expression of greater creativity, seen as a more “self-conscious” act, implies a greater attention towards a public author enacting “a performance of selfhood.”25 However, considering Kingston’s positive reviews (“elemental”, “disturbing”, “astonishingly 20 Carpenter, 66. 21 Carpenter, 66. 22 Carpenter, 66. 23 Wong, 30. 24 Carpenter, 66. 25 Davis, 186. 32 | UNFOUND

accomplished”), this creativity is not prodigious or desirable but in tandem with something self-aware and primal. Original, but unrefined and not expected for public consumption. The role of the reader is not simply to consume literature, however. Regardless of the palatability of Asian American autobiographies or the degree to which these autobiographies fulfill the children’s literature concerns of identity formation or the adult literature concerns of formed cultural identity, readers,

critics, and teachers can choose whether or not these paradigms persist in the host culture. On its own, “literature functions as a cultural product that both reflects and shapes the culture of those who live it— and the way that ‘consumers’ or beneficiaries can in turn play a role in the production of culture and its literary artifacts.”26 But in directly teaching texts and creating pedagogy for these texts, adult readers directly assuage their own genre expectations by reinforcing the expectations they understand to be culturally true of their “own” culture and of the “other” culture.

TEACHING LON PO PO: INTERPRETING CULTURAL AND GENRE EXPECTATIONS I previously referenced academic articles about children’s literature to reinterpret The Woman Warrior as a work of autobiography in children’s literature. To connect Lon Po Po to adult literature, I would have to treat it as adult literature: analyze the text based on peer-reviewed articles from its academic readership. Until children peer-review their analyses of children’s literature, the best way to analyze Lon Po Po like an adult literature text would be to analyze the ways the text is taught and interpreted to child readers. Understanding how Lon Po Po is taught would reveal not only the key interpretations of the text given to 26 Carpenter, 53.

children but also the genre expectations adults prime children to look for in their future reading. Scholastic, the American publishing and educational company, provides full lesson plans for Lon Po Po on their website. I found many other free and full lesson plans for Lon Po Po written and posted by American schoolteachers. However, due to the power and ubiquity Scholastic holds, I chose to focus on the Scholastic lesson plans. It is also difficult to ignore that Scholastic’s lesson plans were on the first

Hood. “Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan” mentions “Comparing American and Chinese Lifestyles”, a lesson plan to introduce “a new culture”. The reproducible associated with this lesson plan is a Venn diagram for students to organize the content learned from this lesson plan (“Comparing Our Cultures”). Both “Chinese Fairy Tale Plan” and “Comparing American and Chinese Lifestyles” are one-day lesson plans part of Mazzurco’s “Exploring China” 12-day unit plan for “[immersing] students in a study of Chinese

27 “Lon Po Po Teaching Plan,” Scholastic, accessed April 10, 2019, www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plans/teaching-content/lon-po-po-teachingplan/. 28 “Elizabeth Mazzurco,” Scholastic, accessed April 27, 2019, www.scholastic.com/teachers/contributors/ site-contributors/elizabeth-mazzurco/.

29 Elizabetch Mazzurco, “Exploring China,” Scholastic, accessed April 10, 2019, www. scholastic.com/teachers/unit-plans/teaching-content/ exploring-china/. 30 Mazzurco, “Exploring China.”

results pages on Google after a general search for “Lon Po Po lesson plans”, so I would also like to assume that many other American teachers use or at least find Scholastic’s materials relevant or similar to their teaching approaches. From Scholastic, I found four lesson plans and two classroom reproducibles intended for grades one-five. One lesson plan was published without an author, presumably produced by Scholastic.27 This lesson plan details a general outline for teaching and interpreting Lon Po Po, especially by comparing it against the “European” version of Red-Riding Hood. The other three lesson plans and the two reproducibles associated with them are by Elizabeth Mazzurco, a first and second grade teacher from Paramus, New Jersey.28 “Lon Po Po: A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan”, like “Lon Po Po Teaching Plan”, provides an outline and approach for understanding Lon Po Po when compared to Red-Riding Hood. “Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan” also includes a T-chart, “Comparing Fairy Tales”, which highlights seven points of comparison for students to note between Lon Po Po and Red-Riding

culture and geography through literature”. As a set, these lesson plans privilege the weight and burden of literature in teaching another culture helps reveal adults’ expectations of literature’s authenticity of a culture and biases in regarding cultural others. “Exploring China”, and the prospect of this exploration though literature, is one lesson plan based in an artificial, guided discovery based on adults’ leading emotions. In stating that “[i]t is always exciting and eye-opening for students to learn about another culture”, the lesson cues the students, regardless of the material they already know or wish to learn about China prior to the lesson, to look for something out of the ordinary or “fascinating.”29 The goal of “[getting] a sense of the world around them” is one based in fascination via contrast; although there can be “some similarities”, the implicit lesson is to learn “how cultures can be so very different.”30 This attitude is continued in “Comparing American and Chinese Lifestyles”; after reading a nonfiction book about China, the teacher is advised to “hold an open discussion about what the students learned about the Chinese lifestyle. Talk about things that

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were interesting, shocking, or exciting” (emphasis mine). The lesson, beyond learning about China, is to learn how China is out of the ordinary or expected realm of the dominant, host American culture. The implicit objective of the unit is to establish how non-American literature can be interpreted to extrapolate wideranging, “fascinating” conclusions about the respective non-American culture. It should be noted that the four stated objectives of the “Exploring China” unit are:

which we explore and discover. The third objective complicates the fourth and primes the perspective from which Lon Po Po is read and interpreted to readers. Literature and culture can not only be “explored” but also, interestingly, “can change” between cultures.33 Rather than presenting the idea that different cultures can author different versions of a story, “change”, as a decisive act, implies a choice in the telling of the story. This place-based cultural rigidity is similar to the earlier considerations

31 Mazzurco, “Exploring China.” 32 Mazzurco, “Exploring China.”

33 34 35 36

Students will: - Discover the fundamental differences between China and the United States - Compare our daily lives to the life of a child in China - Explore how literature can change in different cultures - Compare and contrast the two cultures’ versions of Little Red Riding Hood31 Together, these four objectives further the ramifications of the previously discussed imperative of extrapolation based on choice examples of Chinese (or about-China) literature. “[Discovering] fundamental differences”, paired with the attitude that learning about other cultures is “always exciting and eyeopening”, implies that readers should feel righteous and accomplished in their “discovery” and assertion of the differences between Chinese and American culture.32 The wording of the second objective, the comparison to the life of a child in China, implies that the “explorers” of China are not Chinese, but American. The comparison between these cultures goes beyond the pages of the lesson plans and the primary texts and into the real-life expectations of the readers’ cultural extrapolations, as founded upon a default of Americanness. In one place is China and a life decidedly not “ours”; “our” place is America, from

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of seeking first-generation immigrants “in the early stages of integration and settlement” to tell folk stories; the place and a person’s duration in this place is greater than the personal connection felt to a culture.34 The task of “[comparing and contrasting] the two cultures’ versions of Little Red Riding Hood” then is an inherently localized and nationalistic task based on the assumption that cultures can be explored and contained by geographic borders.35 Scholastic’s general lesson plan for Lon Po Po describes how Young’s story “parallels the European tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’”; these stories are described as never intersecting despite the pedagogical decision to teach them together.36 Teaching Lon Po Po with Red-Riding Hood is not only an exercise in “exploring” Chinese culture, but also in separating and perpetuating the idea that these texts cannot share a heritage that, in reality, cannot be separated without losing literary and cultural context. The lesson plans specifically for Lon Po Po advise the [adult] teacher to demonstrate and “model” their

Mazzurco, “Exploring China.” Carpenter, 66. Mazzurco, “Exploring China.” Scholastic, “Lon Po Po Teaching Plan.”

thinking of the text.37 This instruction to teachers allows adult biases and expectations to also participate in the “discovery” of differences with their students with the same ramifications for successful exploration. In the “During Instruction” section of “A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan”, Mazzurco states: “I like to engage them in the literature of the Chinese culture. We read many fictional stories, but I always create one lesson around Ed Young’s Lon Po Po. This is a Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood. There are

the wolf, the term for ‘Grandmother’, the location of the mother throughout the story, the children’s hero, the fate of the wolf, and the ending of the story; whereas these categories can aid elementary school readers’ comprehension of the content, given the language surrounding exploration and discovery, these seven points seem to be points of contention between the two cultures the stories represent.40 Lon Po Po and Chinese culture must be viewed as different, “eye-opening” and “fascinating” compared to Red-Riding Hood

37 Elizabeth Mazzurco, “Lon Po Po: A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan,” Scholastic, accessed April 10, 2019, www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plans/teaching-content/lon-po-po-chinese-fairy-tale-lessonplan/. 38 Wong, 30. 39 Elizabeth Mazzurco, “Comparing Fairy Tales,” Scholastic, accessed April 10, 2019, www. scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/lesson-plans/ migrated-featuredfiles/janfairytales.pdf.

40 Mazzurco, “Comparing Fairy Tales.” 41 Mazzurco, “Lon Po Po: A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan.” 42 Mazzurco, “Lon Po Po: A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan.”

many differences and the students love to notice the changes to this version.” The first sentence’s parallel structure with “the” emphasizes the rigid connection between literature and culture; literature is taught and enforced to be not a cultural product, but culture itself. Positing that Lon Po Po as a Chinese version of Red-Riding Hood (and later in the lesson plan, describing Lon Po Po as “the Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood”) places the burden of cultural representation on Young’s story (emphasis mine). Without discussion of the authenticity of the story, the task of the lesson plan is to treat the story as a “factual account” and as a source of “discovering”, to reuse the language of “Exploring China.”38 While the associated T-chart reproducible describes Lon Po Po and Red-Riding Hood as “based on the same fairy tale”, the task is to find “some very large differences.”39 These potential differences are listed as: the number of main characters, the first appearance of

and Western/American culture. These highlighted plot details, then, must be inherently piquant and important to Chinese culture, even if these differences between stories are simply differences between stories, not culturally resonant markers. Regardless of what differences the readers ultimately learn about these different stories/cultures, the attitude of the teacher leads readers to interpret the “discovery” of these differences as an accomplishment. In mining Lon Po Po of cultural meaning, the teacher’s enjoyment of this exploration (“I like”) transfers to the students (“students love”).41 The teacher’s preference towards “exploration” without consideration of an “authentic” (or even more comprehensive) understanding of a different culture teaches readers that extrapolating not only cultural differences, but also personal biases and opinions, are appropriate in informing an understanding of a different culture. The teacher, who “likes” engaging students, is advised by Mazzurco to “stop to ask if [the students] are noticing any differences between the two stories. Model your thinking by thinking out loud some of the connections you make to the American version.”42 In “modeling” thinking and “thinking out

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loud”, the teacher’s biases and expectations for Lon Po Po (and following the logic of the lesson plan, Chinese culture as a whole) become part of the interpretation of the text. As a picture book, both “A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan” and “Teaching Plan” note for teachers to study Young’s panel art-inspired illustrations. In reading these images, “Teaching Plan” advises: Ed Young’s illustrations feature contemporary watercolors and pastels on ancient Chinese panel art. Ask the class to comment on the effectiveness of

combining these techniques – what feelings do Young’s illustrations evoke? …[H]ave children suggest a list of reasons why the illustrations in Lon Po Po are especially scary (e.g., part of almost each illustration is hidden, the illustrator uses lots of dark colors, the eyes in the pictures look frightful or scary, etc.). (emphasis mine) Earlier, I discussed how Young’s illustrations were described as having a “versatility of feeling, theme, and style” on the back flap of Lon Po Po. In “Teaching Plan”, Young’s illustrations are described as combining ancient and contemporary media to produce the illustrations as an “effective” method. The “versatility of feeling”, however, is not present in this interpretation of Young’s artwork. Rather than comment on a range of possible emotions that could be “evoked”, the children are asked specifically to discuss why the images are “scary”. Whereas the first two examples, the hidden aspect of the illustrations and the use of dark colors, are artistic, stylistic choices, the mention of the eyes as looking “frightful or scary” do not specify between the depictions of neither the wolf nor the (frightened or scared) Chinese children. This note on the eyes is an already racially charged comment to make towards Asian communities. When paired in the same terms as “thinking aloud”, the classroom discussion opens towards subliminal racism or exotification of the texts as acts of “exploration and discovery”. This Orientalizing approach to Young’s illustrations also narrow his “versatility” into something more akin to 36 | UNFOUND

Kingston’s “elemental”, “sometimes savagely terrifying” work. Through the teaching of Lon Po Po, Young’s authenticity is exoticized into the “authentic” opinion or expectation [white adult] American readers wish to explore and re-discover.

THE BURDEN OF SINGLE-AUTHOR FOLK NARRATIVES I discuss earlier how autobiographies in children’s literature are tasked with identity formation whereas

autobiographies in adult literature are tasked with cultural actualization. With the complication of the lesson plans in undermining Young’s “authenticity” as an adult “autobiographer” and Kingston’s “creativity” being better aligned with the children’s literature concerns of identity formation, the reception of both works trouble issues of representation, especially since both texts, in their respective markets and audience groups, were institutionalized. To better align the similarities and differences of these works and their respective receptions, I wish to reconfigure these works as “single-author folk narratives”. A single-author folk narrative is a work attributed to a single minority writer who is publicly credited, or at least well-known for, a cultural folk story. The writer’s name is attached to this folk story, and the story is interpreted to be their own creation, despite the fact that folk stories are inherently always retold. The author’s folk story is interpreted to be truthful by [white] mainstream audiences, regardless of cultural authenticity because of the “authenticity” mainstream audiences are taught to expect from readings about cultures outside of their own. The author is thus “canonized”, or institutionally accepted, into teaching settings, along with their retelling of the folk story. Additionally, their version of the folk story, as a published work, becomes permanent and impossible to be “retold”, inciting the frustration of the other community members who share the same cultural and/

or racial identity as the single-author. In publishing these works, the author represents not a new folk story, but a new “folk narrative” that matches mainstream audiences’ expectations and definitions of the singleauthor’s cultural heritage. This acceptance furthers the difficulties of minority children’s and adult literature to form new identities or to actualize cultural heritage, respectively. It should be noted that the content of the author’s work is not the only factor a work may have to be

considered a single-author folk narrative. The jacket covers of Young’s Lon Po Po and Kingston’s The Woman Warrior enforce the idea of a single-author folk narrative. In the final pages of Lon Po Po, Ed Young is credited as the translator of Lon Po Po as the story was “translated from collection of Chinese folktales”. However, his name appears on the cover of the book with no such mention; he is thus marketed and treated as both the author and illustrator. Similarly, Laurence Yep, an Asian American children’s literature author, retold the Chinese “Auntie Tiger” iteration of the RedRiding Hood story, yet on the cover of Auntie Tiger, the book is “By Laurence Yep”. The covers of retellings of the German Red-Riding Hood story by white authors, such as James Marshall’s Red Riding Hood (as recommended in “A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan”) or Trina Schart Hyman’s Little Red Riding Hood, specify that the “author” has “retold” the story. The public knowledge that the story has been “retold” allows the author to escape the autobiographical implications of “writing” a folk story. For minority authors, however, the marketing as “author” without any qualification that the story has been retold ties the author’s culture closer to the author’s personal identity, regardless of the author’s circumstances and occasion for their retelling. Kingston’s decision to retell the titular Fa Mu Lan story and the other Chinese folk stories comes from the personal ways she identified with the stories that her

mother would “talk-story” to her at night.43 Despite the detail that she “couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began”, critics still note the discrepancies between Kingston’s dreamy retelling and the culturally accepted “authentic” Chinese story.44 Young has a similar rationale that motivated the publication of Lon Po Po: Lon Po Po is a story that I heard when I was small, and I didn’t know then that it was a rare version of the Red Riding Hood story. It wasn’t until I came to this country and I became a children’s book author that it occurred to me that it was only one version of the widely known story.45 Like Kingston’s, Young’s first encounter with Chinese folk stories was through a parent. But, as previously discussed, perhaps due in part to his status as a firstgeneration Chinese immigrant and because his work is considered children’s literature, the authenticity of this retelling is not criticized or investigated. The fact that his variation of the Red-Riding Hood story may not be common is also not discussed; I tried to look for both the collection of Chinese folktales from which Young translated or any other Red-Riding Hood variations, but I could not find other versions that were similar to Lon Po Po. At best, Lon Po Po is a cross between the “Wolf and the Kids” and “Auntie Tiger” variations of RedRiding Hood. Either way, Lon Po Po does not seem to be a common retelling. This particular lack of Lon Po Poiterations of Red-Riding Hood may further contribute to the reason why Young cannot be criticized like Kingston; there can be no other comparison, at least in American publishing. Young’s answer also points to a different reason to 43 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Random House, 1976), 19. 44 Kingston, 19. 45 “In-depth Written Interview: Ed Young,” TeachingBooks.Net, accessed April 27, 2019, www.teachingbooks. net/interview.cgi?id=55&amp;a=1. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 37

tell the folk stories: industry opportunity. Knowing that Lon Po Po did not yet exist in the American publishing industry may have further contributed to a personal reason for sharing the story. Kingston’s motivation for publishing The Woman Warrior as nonfiction, beyond perhaps the desire to write a memoir, may also have been driven by marketing. In Kingston’s correspondence to Wong: The only correspondence I had with the published concerning the classification of my books was that

he said that Non-fiction would be the most accurate category; Non-fiction is such a catch-all that even “poetry is considered non-fiction.”46 Kingston may recuse herself from responsibility over labeling her work as nonfiction, but “the published” may have had industry reasons for calling The Woman Warrior nonfiction. If so, this decision could be motivated by an industry desire for “fascination, exploration, and discovery” of a new culture; or, as Wong states, “readers who do not pay sufficient attention to the narrative intricacies of The Woman Warrior, especially white readers with biased expectations, will mistake fiction for fact.”47 I raise the aspect of industry opportunity because, even with the exotification of Asian and Asian American narratives, minority literature in general does not sell.48 The minority texts that do sell, or at least maintain their prominence in institutions the way that The Woman Warrior and Lon Po Po do, have an even greater burden in representing their respective cultures. This burden is greater for single-author folk narratives, for which the author and the retelling become not only household names but also permanent, fixed culture markers for minority and mainstream audiences. For minorities of the culture, this permanence can trouble the cultural representation as they continue to struggle 46 Wong, 30. 47 Wong, 32. 48 Yokota, 18. 38 | UNFOUND

against the expectations from white audiences, as noted by Wong. For members of the mainstream culture (who control the mainstream publishing industry), the published retellings from the single-author are not only truth but also accurate depictions of the single-author’s culture, if only true because it fulfills their expectations. Single-author folk narratives are an inherently troubled and timeless genre. Due to the expectations of the mainstream readership and the desires of the minority readership, these narratives will never be fully accepted neither as true to the creative and agentive identity formation of an individual from a minority group nor as an accurate and fulfilling actualization of the minority culture. The retelling of the folk story, too, as a published piece, fixes this retelling and prevents both new versions of the particular folk story and the possibility of new minority stories to represent a culture.

READING CHINESE AMERICA AND CONCLUDING THOUGHTS I am not arguing for a way that single-author folk narratives could responsibly represent a culture. In considering literary representation of Asian American literature beyond single-author folk narratives, I agree with Yokota: “representation does not mean looking for the ideally authentic book to represent a culture; no one book can be ‘the best book’ for representing Asian American literature. In fact, it takes many books to create a multidimensional look at a culture.”49 But until the many books are published, the lasting impact of the single-author folk narrative remains. A harmful result of the single-author folk narratives Lon Po Po and The Woman Warrior is a displacement of Chinese American readership as readers and as civic members. In mentioning “reading Chinese America”, I wish to discuss the more concrete effects single-author folk narratives have on both Chinese American readers 49 Yokota, 16.

and the ways Chinese America is interpreted or “read”. The aforementioned “Exploring China” unit plan assumes that the students are not Chinese American, or more specifically, that a person cannot be from both China and the United States. This assumption demonstrates a lack of recognition or acceptance for the heritage of young Chinese American readers. If real acceptance of a cultural other is to be defined as “recognition of that other as distinct, as esthetically positive, that is good or worthy and, in some ways, as

authentic, heritage. “A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan” advises teachers to “think aloud” as they read Lon Po Po. Yokota agrees that “[t]he power of hearing a story read aloud, complete with teacher-librarian scaffolding to better understand the story cannot be underestimated”, and she further states that minority children “who find their heritage reflected in the book may take pride in seeing a familiar story being featured in the read aloud.”52 However, this pedagogical technique can also

50 Carpenter, 61. 51 Elizabeth Mazzurco, “Comparing Our Cultures: Make a Venn Diagram,” Scholastic, accessed April 10, 2019, www.scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/lesson-plans/migrated-featured-files/jancultures.pdf.

52 Yokota, 16. 53 Yokota, 18. 54 Davis, 194.

being significant to oneself and ultimately as possessing an aspect of ‘selfness,’ which in one’s own case is what it is that I think makes me whom I think I am,” then young Chinese American readers are taught to understand Chinese culture and American culture as distinct but ambiguously positive, let alone as something in which they could find “selfness”.50 “Comparing Our Cultures”, the Venn diagram reproducible associated with “Comparing American and Chinese Lifestyles”, does not consider the possibility of a distinct kind of Chinese culture in the United States. The directions of the Venn diagram state: We have learned a lot about the Chinese culture. Use the Venn Diagram to compare and contrast our two cultures. Remember that the section in the center of the diagram is for facts that both cultures have in common.51 Although both cultures are “ours”, the emphasis on difference and that the section in the center has to be “remembered” implies that shared or merged cultural traditions are often forgotten by the mainstream. A Chinese American reader filling out this Venn diagram would have to split their heritage knowing that the mainstream would not recognize their true, or

be to the detriment of the Chinese American reader’s acceptance of heritage. If the thinking aloud involves questions surrounding the “frightful or scary” eyes, reading aloud may simply teach how implicit racism is mainstream. Similarly, although inviting speakers of Chinese heritage to come to the class can be seen as a positive and empowering lesson, I believe it can create an in-class single-author folk narrative performance.53 Knowing that Chinese culture and American culture are separate entities in which the “center section” cannot be Chinese America, inviting a Chinese parent to the classroom would instantiate a person into a sole representation of Chinese culture faced with the burden of either verifying students’ “exploratory” questions or presenting a spectacle of “fascination” as the face of China in America (but never Chinese America). These early setbacks create situations that disenfranchise Chinese American readers towards the concerns and criticisms outlined by Wong. As members of the American readership, the Chinese American relationship to the country is intertwined in a particularly civic way as “the desire to participate in society is defeated by marginalization, a history of racial discrimination.”54 The impulse to read Lon Po Po and The Woman Warrior is ultimately political: to better understand the

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world and the reader’s place in it. It is an honorable and necessary lesson for readers of all ages and heritages. However, the persistence of single-author folk narratives in academic institutions and the publishing industry remain a challenge in new interpretations and directions in Asian American literature. In Yokota’s words, “it is my hope that this literature will inspire us all to understand Asian and Asian American heritage in our world—to experience lives and worlds vicariously through literature—while engaging in good

reading. After all, books are powerful in helping us to begin to know our world.”55 I share this hope, and I recognize the struggle in representing minority cultures in a literary tradition in which minority cultures cannot retell their own stories.

Bibliography “About Ed.” Ed Young. Accessed April 27, 2019, edyoungart.com/about.html. Carpenter, Carole H. “Enlisting Children’s Literature in the Goals of Multiculturalism.” Mosaic 3 (1996). search.proquest.com/ docview/54708263?accountid=15172. Davis, Rocío G. “Asian American Autobiography for Children: Critical Paradigms and Creative Practice.” The Lion and the Unicorn 30, no. 2 (2006). search. proquest.com/docview/221758593?accountid=15172. “Ed Young.” Bookbird 38, no. 3. search.proquest.com/ docview/216114703?accountid=15172. “Elizabeth Mazzurco.” Scholastic. April 27, 2019. www.scholastic.com/teachers/contributors/sitecontributors/elizabeth-mazzurco/. “In-depth Written Interview: Ed Young.” TeachingBooks. Net. Accessed April 27, 2019. www.teachingbooks.net/ interview.cgi?id=55&amp;a=1. Hyman, Trina Schart. Little Red Riding Hood. New York: Holiday House, 1983. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New 55 Yokota, 18. 40 | UNFOUND

York: Random House, 1976. “Lon Po Po Teaching Plan.” Scholastic. Accessed April 10, 2019. www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plans/ teaching-content/lon-po-po-teaching-plan/. Marshall, James. Red Riding Hood. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1987. “Maxine Hong Kingston – National Book Foundation.” National Book Foundation. Accessed May 9, 2019. www.nationalbook.org/people/maxine-hongkingston/.

Mazzurco, Elizabeth. “Comparing American and Chinese Lifestyles.” Scholastic. Accessed April 10, 2019, www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plans/ teaching-content/comparing-american-and-chineselifestyles/. Mazzurco, Elizabeth. “Comparing Fairy Tales.” Scholastic. Accessed April 10, 2019. www. scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/lesson-plans/ migrated-featured-files/janfairytales.pdf. Mazzurco, Elizabeth. “Comparing Our Cultures: Make a Venn Diagram.” Scholastic. Accessed April 10, 2019. www.scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/lessonplans/migrated-featured-files/jancultures.pdf. Mazzurco, Elizabetch. “Exploring China.” Scholastic. Accessed April 10, 2019. www.scholastic.com/ teachers/unit-plans/teaching-content/exploringchina/. Mazzurco, Elizabeth. “Lon Po Po: A Chinese Fairy Tale Lesson Plan.” Scholastic. Accessed April 10, 2019. www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plans/teachingcontent/lon-po-po-chinese-fairy-tale-lesson-plan/. Sims Bishop, Rudine. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom 6, no. 3 (1990). “The Woman Warrior: LC Catalog – Item Information (Full Record).” Library of Congress Catalog. Accessed April 27, 2019. lccn.loc.gov/76013674. Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling. “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The

Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiography Controversy.” Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook. Edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. Oxford University Press, 1999. Yep, Laurence. Auntie Tiger. New York: Harper Collins Children’s Books, 2009. Yokota, Junko. “Asian Americans in Literature for Children and Young Adults.” Teacher Librarian 36, no. 3 ( 2009): 16. search.proquest.com/ docview/224872212?accountid=15172. Young, Ed. Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story From China. New York: Philomel Books, 1989.

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A Brief Inquiry into ABGs: Orientalism, Identity, Performativity, and Appropriation Jenny Jingyi Tan, University of California, Los Angeles ‘19 Decades of popular culture depict Asian women to be demure lotus blossoms, hypersexualized dragon ladies, or subservient figures. In the last decade, the proliferation of Asian American culture has paved the way for a new stereotype, the ABG - or Asian baby girl. This paper examines the cultural origins and implications behind the ABG stereotype through a subversive reading, revealing how the ABG stereotype allows Asian American women to empower themselves by taking on the ABG identity, despite capitulating former stereotypes about Asian women.

Introduction Asian American women have always borne the brunt of stereotypes about their purported deviousness, hypersexuality, and subservience. In the 19th century, Chinese exclusionary sentiments accused Chinese prostitutes of “disseminating vile diseases capable of destroying whole nations.”1 These popularized perceptions of Asian women persisted into the early years of Hollywood, where white actresses emulated Asian women by wearing prosthetic eyelids and winged eyeliner.2 In the last century, popular media portrayals of Asian women have characterized them as demure lotus blossoms, faithful war brides, hypersexualized dragon ladies and subservient prostitutes – characteristics derived from Orientalism, a term that perpetuates the binaries of Eastern and Western culture. The proliferation of “azn pride,” car import shows, and Asian Americans in social media and popular culture has created the Asian Baby Girl, or ABG stereotype. Urban Dictionary, an online user-sourced dictionary for slang words and phrases, defines the term ABG as an “aznbbygirl , Asian baby girl, or Asian baby gangster” who is “stereotypically hot, wears a lot of makeup… possibly has piercings, tattoos, and dyed hair.”3 They also typically “party all night.”4 The definition of ABG has continuously evolved and has yet to be incorporated in academia. After speaking with multiple girls who selfidentified as ABGs or were identified by peers, I realized this stereotype could be interpreted through a subversive reading. I argue that the ABG is a fluid and performative identity that 1 Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Oakland: University of California Press,1995), 32. 2 Jenny Cho and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, Chinese in Hollywood: Images of America (Los Angeles: Arcadia Publishing, 2013), 7. 3 Urban Dictionary, Asianbabygirl (2011), s.v. “ABG.” Retrieved June 10, 2019, www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=ABG 4 Urban Dictionary, Asianbabygirl (2011), s.v. “ABG.” Retrieved June 10, 2019, www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=ABG 42 | UNFOUND

utilizes its subjectivities to negotiate and resist hegemonically patriarchal frameworks, despite capitulating certain stereotypes of subservience and hypersexuality. Although ABGs’ behavioral and aesthetic practices allow them to transgress cultural boundaries, they also reveal how dominant portrayals of Asian Americans as the “model minority” allow them to reproduce aesthetics that appropriate Black and Latinx culture. through a subversive reading. I argue that the ABG is a fluid and performative identity that utilizes its subjectivities to negotiate and resist hegemonically patriarchal frameworks, despite capitulating certain stereotypes of subservience and hyper-sexuality. Methodology and Researcher Positionality My data consists of in-depth interviews conducted with four Asian American women. All of my participants either selfidentified as ABGs or were identified as an ABG by peers. Three of my interviewees were college students, ages 18-22, and my fourth interviewee was a 39-year-old teacher who was identified by peers as an ABG during college. I applied the snowball sampling method by first asking my high school and college networks; ultimately, I garnered my subject pool from friends’ recommendations. Participants represented four distinct ethnic groups – Chinese American, Vietnamese American, Korean American, and Filipina American. My interviews ranged from thirty minutes to an hour, and I asked follow-up questions

the days after the interviews. All of my interviewees are referred to under pseudonyms. My position as a researcher and selfidentification as a non-ABG may have influenced my interviewees’ responses. I do not consider myself to be an ABG nor have I been called an ABG, but my status as an outsider allowed me to ask my interviewees more thorough, individualized questions relating to their opinions on who could be considered an ABG, as well as their perspectives on the popular perceptions of ABGs’ physical and behavioral characteristics. Orientalism and Long-Held Stereotypes The ABG stereotype is a perpetuation of long-held qualities and characteristics that derive from Orientalism. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said argues that the Orient is a cultural construct that derives from popular colonial perceptions about the people of the Orient that signifies exoticism, primitivity, femininity, and submission.5 According to Said, the Orient has helped define Western civilization as the Orient’s “contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience.”6 Centuries of academic literature have developed arguments based on the Oriental and Occidental binary, when the binary itself has been socially constructed by Eurocentric schools of thought. Furthermore, Said argues that 5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 10. 6 Ibid, 10. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 43

Orientalism serves to legitimate and justify colonial expansion, cultural hegemony and exploitation of the Orient, which is reflected in particular stereotypes involving Asian American women. 7 For example, the Orient was perceived to be subservient, feminine, and exotic, which allowed European powers to justify their exploitation of Asian women, who are still perceived as submissive and docile. War brides and prostitutes arose out of Western military pursuits and expansion in Asia, and made their way to Hollywood films, which have continued to perpetuate these stereotypes in the last century. In the last two decades, the proliferation of Asian Americans in popular culture and long-held previous stereotypes pioneered the newest stereotype involving Asian American women: the ABG. Many of my interviewees stated that ABGs uphold many Western standards of beauty such as “big/colored eyes, dramatic false lashes, tattoos, piercings, hoop earrings, revealing clothing, dyed hair, and heavy makeup.” My participants also revealed that ABGs pride themselves in their Asian American identity by participating in Asian American social environments such as boba shops, car import shows, and Asian sororities and fraternities. Ultimately, ABGs undermine the Orientalist framework by participating in the cultural hybridity of being Asian American women. I argue that there is no clear definition of what is considered beautiful by Eastern and Western standard because beauty standards are continuously molded by social and cultural constructs, 7 Ibid, 9. 44 | UNFOUND

such as the Oriental and Occidental binary. Beauty Standards: East and West We see the persistence of Orientalism in scholarship on Asian Americans through Eastern and Western beauty standards. Asian American psychologist Pei-Han Cheng is interested in the relationship between Asian American women’s racial identities, internalization of white beauty standards, Asian American women’s perceptions of body image, and the psychological stress induced by beauty standards.8 She argues that the lack of research conducted on Asian American women has resulted in “limited cultural responsive treatments” to body dissatisfaction and psychological stress that stem from internalizing dominant white beauty standards.9 Utilizing online surveys that employ rating scales, Cheng compartmentalizes data from 479 Asian American women who responded through university emails.10 Contradicting Cheng’s argument, I found that most of my interviewees rejected the idea that Asian American women internalize white standards of beauty because ABGs reference various aesthetics: from Black and Latinx street culture to continuously evolving beauty aesthetics. These influences undermine beauty 8 Pei-Han Cheng, “Examining a Sociocultural Model: Racial Identity, Internalization of the Dominant White Beauty Standards, and Body Images among Asian American Women,” (New York, Columbia University Press, 2014), 3. 9 Ibid, 3. 10 Ibid, 32.

characteristics constructed through Oriental and Occidental discourse. There is no clear definition of white beauty standards when ABG beauty standards continue to blend and overlap today. While my interviewees stressed the importance of physical appearance for ABGs, they also divulged information that reproduced long-held stereotypes and appropriated certain aesthetics from communities of color. All four of my interviewees established that the ABG is an alluring look, which concedes to stereotypes that characterize Asian American women as exotic and sexually appealing, ultimately supporting my argument that ABGs capitulate stereotypes of hyper-sexualization by purposely choosing to express their individuality through beauty practices. Mai, a 39-year-old interviewee who was perceived to be an ABG by her college peers, described how ABGs in the 1990s exhibited beauty ideals rooted in Mexican American communities such as “thin penciled in eyebrows, brown lip liner that lined just the lips, crop tops and baggy pants.” Thinly penciled eyebrows, darkoutlined lips, crop tops and baggy pants are reminiscent of “chola” aesthetics, initially forged by marginalized Mexican American women in Southern California.11 Chola/o describes a “Mexican American street style usually associated with gangs and criminal

11 James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1988), 4.

behavior.”12 Consequently, my three college aged interviewees maintained that present day ABGs typically dressed in “hoop earrings, crop tops, tube tops, [and] skin revealing clothing,” often dying their hair, having tattoos and piercings, and wearing heavy makeup. Hoop earrings, in particular, became especially popular among African American women during the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, which utilized Afrocentric fashion as a form of resistance.13 Similarly, working-class Mexican American women in Southern California popularized oversized hoops in the 1990s.14 Mary, a 22-year-old interviewee and non-identifying ABG, discloses the complex relationship between Black and Asian culture. She described how both Black and Asian cultures “cross borrow” aesthetics, resulting in ever-changing and ambiguous debates about what is considered appropriation, which occurs when marginalized communities are embraced and marketed purely for their aesthetic. She stated that ABGs often spoke in African American vernacular English, 12 Julie Pettie, Women Without Class: Chicas, Cholas, Trash, and the Presence/Absence of Class Identity from Signs, Vol. 26, No 1 (Illinois, University of Chicago Press, 2000), 10. 13 Mary Phillips, The Power of the First-Person Narrative: Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party from the Women’s Studies Quarterly Vol. 43, No. ¾ (New York City, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2015), 46. 14 Julie Pettie, Women Without Class: Chicas, Cholas, Trash, and the Presence/Absence of Class Identity from Signs, Vol. 26, No 1 (Illinois, University of Chicago Press, 2000), 30. Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 45

listened to trap music, twerked, and tried to get a “phat ass for the club.” Additionally, she referenced Black rappers, like Asian Doll and Nicki Minaj, whose alter ego Chun Li, wears chopsticks, hair buns and Asian aesthetics. Mary distinguished how the rappers “played off cool Asian aesthetics” with little to no repercussions, while Asian American beauty gurus, like Nikita Dragun, were accused of cultural appropriation for wearing braids and tanning their skin for photoshoots. Conversely, Mary brought to my attention that Asians have worn braids for centuries to symbolize social status, practicality and prosperity, as seen in examples of Chinese men wearing “staircase braids” and Tibetan women utilizing braids as a “rite of passage” into adulthood.15 Furthermore, early ABGs’ associations with “gang” culture and aesthetics highlight larger cultural representations of antiblackness and anti-Latinx discourse, revealing how Asian American women’s relations to middle-class whiteness allowed them to embrace Black and Latinx aesthetics, maintaining an alluring appearance without bearing the consequences communities of color face when utilizing the same aesthetics. Mai revealed to me that ABGs in the 1990s were often considered “gangsters” because “they would always have each other’s backs” and often “looked intimidating when they were hanging with their girls,” which is reminiscent of gang culture. We must 15 Nicola Schneider, “Introduction: Hair in Tibetan Culture,” last modified November 20, 2018. http:// journals.openedition.org/ateliers/10799. 46 | UNFOUND

observe the ever-changing line between cultural appropriation and appreciation, and that Asian and Black cultures crossborrow specific physical and performative characteristics. Identity and Performativity In relation to aesthetics and physical appearance, I examined scholarship on how fashion practices shape identities and carry political meaning. Scholar Jessica Neumann argues that fashion is “a tool for female agency and expressing individuality, rather than just a mode for reinforcing gendered norms.” 16 Utilizing visual analysis and feminist rhetorical analysis, she examines how fashion bloggers “dissent and play with stereotypes, boundaries, senses of the body,” ultimately constructing “a visual representation that highlights intersecting, mixed identities reflective of their most authentic selves.”17 I argue that ABGs embody the “visual representation that highlights intersecting, mixed identities” through their physical and performative characteristics. Lillian, a 21-year-old who sometimes identifies as an ABG, emphasized how her ABG identity was empowering because she could choose when she wanted to adopt this identity. She further emphasized the fluidity of the ABG look, expressing that wearing heavy makeup, big lashes, and 16 Jessica Neumann, Fashioning the Self: Performance, Identity and Difference (Denver, University of Denver Press, 2011) https://digitalcommons.du.edu/ etd/475 17 Ibid, 25.

tight, skin-revealing clothing was “probably not an appropriate look to have all the time… like when I go to class and I’m on campus all day.” In class, she chose not to express and perform her ABG identity not because she felt like she couldn’t, but because it was ultimately her choice and it “made her happy.” While the fluidity of the ABG identity is empowering for Asian American women, Black and Latina women are routinely looked down on for embodying the same fashion practices. Moreover, because of historical processes of racialization, Black and Latina women are unable to employ the same fluidity that allows Asian American women to take on and off specific identities like the ABG. Eva, a 21-year-old interviewee, revealed to me that although she embodied many physical and behavioral traits of being an ABG such as “drinking hella boba, wearing big lashes, and being in an Asian sorority,” she felt compelled to state that she did not identify as an ABG because of how negatively ABGs are portrayed. She stated that she did not want people to think that she “trapped” often. Interestingly, trap is a term derived from Black culture, originally used to describe a trap house - a residence in which illegal drugs and substances are sold and consumed. Consumers develop addictions, constantly returning to the trap house, ultimately becoming “trapped” in a cyclical drug-rampant lifestyle. Eva explained to me that to “trap” in ABG terms meant to “drink and do drugs.” While trapping stems from criminalized communities of color, ABGs have adopted

the term to connotate an alluring and dangerous lifestyle that exempts them from racialized processes of criminalization when partaking in behaviors such as partying, drinking, raving, and doing drugs. Lillian implicated similar negative connotations of the ABG identity. She explained that when an Asian American woman takes on the identity of an ABG, she is associated with being “promiscuous and wild” because the ABG’s bold makeup, revealing clothing, and “trapping” behavior directly contrasts with stereotypes that characterize Asian women as subservient and docile. Reiterating the idea that identity is performed, I placed Neumann’s argument in conversation with gender theorist Judith Butler’s notion that gender is “put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly.”18 Butler argues that gender is “performed” through repetitive acts and that gender performances are “naturalized as simply an integral part of one’s core identity as a self.” While other gender performances are “naturalized as an integral part of one’s core identity and self,” ABGs highlight how Asian American women express agency in all of the ways they perform gender, not just the ones they are self aware about. Lillian maintains that the ABG identity is empowering because she gets to choose whether or not she wants to “seem more or less ABG” by putting on more 18 Judith Butler. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, from Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 47

bold makeup and wearing specific styles of clothing. Consequently, she emphasized that her sorority friends highlighted their selfawareness by “roasting each other” because they were aware that they looked like ABGs, yet they chose to put on the identity because it empowered them collectively. Another potential detriment that stems from the ABG stereotype is the overemphasis of physical appearances. Eva revealed that some of the ABGs in the Asian Greek Council “don’t take off their lashes or circle lenses… because they do look a lot different without makeup. My friend used to tell my lil sis that she looked like a mole rat without makeup on.” She maintained that her “lil sis” could not truly “be herself” without her falsies and makeup. Additionally, Eva mentioned that being in an Asianinterest sorority where the ABG identity is performed could produce environments of peer pressure. Originally, Eva did not want to dye her hair blonde, but because she was constantly surrounded by girls who had blonde hair and “liked themselves,” it compelled her to want to “dye her hair, get bigger lashes” and to “drink more and do more drugs.” Physical appearances can be incredibly uplifting and empowering, as seen in the way ABGs utilize makeup and fashion practices to perform identities that empower them, but the same practices can also be debilitating to their self-esteem. She maintained that her “lil sis” could not truly “be herself” without her falsies and makeup. The Model Minority Myth Because ABGs are perceived to be sexy, 48 | UNFOUND

alluring, and bold, which directly contrasts with stereotypes that characterize Asian American women as docile and submissive, I examined the class and social implications that the ABG stereotype connotes. Asian American women are able to take on the ABG’s fluid and performative identity because Asian Americans have historically been perceived as the “model minority.”19 After the Hart Cellar Act of 1965, which allowed many Asian immigrants to come to the United States under the provisions of skilled labor and family reunification, stereotypes that characterized them as being naturally hardworking, disciplined, and intelligent emerged to portray Asian Americans as the “model minority.” Furthermore, being the model minority characterizes Asian Americans as possessing “seemingly positive and white-like qualities,” but because they were typically perceived as “perpetual foreigners,” they could never achieve the same racial treatment and privileges afforded to whites despite being held up to standards as “honorary whites.”20 As a result, many Asian Americans were able to achieve socioeconomic mobility due to access to upper middle-class jobs, higher educational degrees, and previous professions in their native countries.21 White Americans utilized these depictions of the burgeoning Asian American community to obfuscate racial 19 Bok-Lim C. Kim, Asian-Americans: No Model Minority, from Social Work Vol. 18, No. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 20 Judy Soojin Park, Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in the EDM Festival Scene, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) 21 Ibid, 49.

inequalities, implying that if Asian Americans could overcome decades of discrimination with their discipline and hard work, other marginalized communities could do the same. These aspects of the model minority myth created ethnic tension between Asian Americans, Latinx, and Black communities, who were not afforded the same privileges due to decades of oppression, criminalization and racialization. Collective Empowerment and Safe Spaces Lillian, an interviewee in an Asian-interest sorority, emphasized that participating in the ABG identity is an “inherently social act.” When speaking about the activities associated with being an ABG, she revealed that even “preparing the [ABG] look” was a social activity because the girls in her sorority would get their nails done together, help each other apply makeup, and share lashes and beauty products when needed. She felt like she had a “special case” of the ABG experience because of her membership in an Asian interest sorority and highlighted the collective empowerment of the ABG identity. She disclosed that most of her sorority members’ parents back home did not want them to “get tattoos, piercings, bleach their hair, and wear acrylics.” Furthermore, she described her Asian-interest sorority as a “safe place” where the members were encouraged to express their identities, whereas in other environments “more traditional people” and their parents would criticize them. Additionally, she felt a “sense of sisterhood” because if she forgot something or “wasn’t confident” about how she did her hair or makeup, she could rely on her girlfriends.

Eva noted some similar associations of ABGs, which evinced their relations to middleclass whiteness and the model minority. She noted that ABGs “always have their makeup done” and that they are always “put together.” Consequently, she revealed that they “are usually well off” because they have their “makeup, hair, outfits, nails done… and might have designer bags and clothing.” Beauty comes with a price when adding up the cost of high-quality makeup, hair products and appointments, and designer brand fashion. On the contrary, one could argue that not all ABGs are able to afford designer brand clothing and accessories - it is up to each ABG’s individualized interpretation, social class, and means of expression. Lastly, Eva expressed that she had never met an ABG who was “mean,” although she had “heard of them and knew they existed.” She expressed that all the ABGs she knew were always open to sharing information, such as where they purchased particular lashes, makeup, and clothing. This experience reinforces the trust and reliance forged through the collectively empowering aspect of the ABG identity. Conclusion When I first conducted my research, I proposed that the ABG could be a reclaiming of sexual identity for Asian American women. However, after conducting interviews, I realized that people who were more familiar with the ABG culture heavily emphasized how the ABG is an identity that Asian American women take on. This caused me to focus on researching ABGs through the lenses of Orientalism, identity, performativity, and Volume 6, Fall 2019 | 49

cultural appropriation. In this paper, I aimed to introduce the topic of ABGs into Asian American Studies and fill the gap of ABG literature in academia. Previous scholarship on Asian American women and their sexualities largely overlooked how ABGs could be interpreted through the lens of identity and performativity. More interviews conducted over a longer span of time would make this paper more comprehensive, as I only had time to interview four people. This paper also calls for more research on Asian American women’s engagements with popular culture. I believe my results would have been more homogenous had I chose to only interview specific populations of Asian American women in Asian-interest sororities, since I have learned that many of them consciously and subconsciously participate in the ABG identity. Because the stereotype of the ABG is so recent, I did not find any scholarship specifically on ABGs, which led me to look into interpreting the stereotype through different cultural frameworks. My research provides a much-needed academic analysis of ABGs and modern subjectivities Asian American women navigate in the 21st century. Employing subversive readings, I argue that ABGs represent fluid and performative identities, ultimately utilizing their nuanced subjectivities to negotiate, resist, and recapitulate specific stereotypes in hegemonically patriarchal frameworks. Although ABGs’ behavioral and aesthetic practices allow them to traverse cultural boundaries, they also imply how dominant portrayals of Asian Americans as the “model 50 | UNFOUND

minority” allow them to emulate aesthetics that appropriate black and brown culture without bearing the consequences that communities of color face. Bibliography Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, from Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4. Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Cheng, Pei-Han. Examining a Sociocultural Model: Racial Identity, Internalization of the Dominant White Beauty Standards, and Body Images among Asian American Women. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2014. Cho, Jenny and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. Chinese in Hollywood: Images of America. Los Angeles: Arcadia Publishing, 2013. Kim, Bok-Lim C. Asian-Americans: No Model Minority, from Social Work Vol. 18, No. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Kim, Elaine H.“At Least You’re Not Black”: Asian Americans in U.S. Race Relations, from Social Work Vol. 25, No. 3, Social Justice/Global Options, 1998. Neumann, Jessica. Fashioning the Self: Performance, Identity and Difference. Denver, University of Denver Press, 2011. https:// digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/475 Park, Judy Soojin. Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in the EDM Festival Scene. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pettie, Julie. Women Without Class: Chicas, Cholas, Trash, and the Presence/Absence of Class Identity from Signs, Vol. 26, No 1. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2000. Phillips, Mary. The Power of the First-Person Narrative: Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party from the Women’s Studies Quarterly Vol. 43, No. ¾. New York City: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2015. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York City: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schneider, Nicola. “Introduction: Hair in Tibetan Culture.” Last modified November 20, 2018. http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/10799 Vigil, James Diego. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Oakland: University of California Press, 1995.

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