The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American

by Min Hyoung Song

Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by emerging Asian American authors and having interviewed several of these writers, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. Some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, while others embrace it as a means of tackling the uncertainty that many people feel about the near future. In the literature that they create, a number of the writers that Song discusses take on pressing contemporary matters such as demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2013

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[W]hat makes literature special is its capacity to make worlds. More precisely, world-making is a process if stepping outside the flow of time in order to see what potential exists beyond the constraints of the possible and its always accompanying shadow, the impossible" (228).

"In stressing the world-making capacity of literature, what I hope to do is to ask a different set of questions than the ones that uses to concern me: What vision of the future can a literary work offer us that can't be found elsewhere? What inspiration can it provide? How can it move us to be different, to want to alter our life...to enable in unsettling visions of what we are always, ceaselessly, becoming? How can it show us potential when all there seems to be is possibility?" (230)

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to jump around the book for the sake of time, but the conclusion is s-tier for academic monographs. More monographs with autobiographical reflections!!! Song is definitely someone who just loves reading, and it comes through so clearly in his writing. I'd probably use at least the first half of this for an undergrad asian american lit course.

[ASC Library]

810.9 Son

[Mills College Library]

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