Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds

by Stephen Hong Sohn

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author’s ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective.

Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry and Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, Racial Asymmetries employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.

297 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 2014

Reviews

[Peter Tieryas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the smartest, analytical books I’ve read on literature in the past year, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds by Stephen Hong Sohn nearly caused my brain to explode with so much interesting information. Seriously, I felt my nerves working overtime, but in a good way that challenged me to grow as a writer. As Sohn writes, Racial Asymmetries “challenges the tidy links between authorial ancestry and fictional content, and between identity and form, to expand what is typically thought of as Asian American culture and criticism.”

And challenge it does, examining a selection that includes “Sesshu’ Foster’s Atomik Aztex, Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft, Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore Inquiry,” and more. Sohn contextualizes all the works in a broader perspective and his inquiry disrupts cliches like a chainsaw to chopsticks. It got me really thinking about what defines “Asian-American” literature, or for that matter, any cultural brand that constitutes a “genre.” What stereotypes bind the disparate experiences together? How forced is that chain, and once bound, how can any set of writers either defy, escape, or work within those constraints?

"In some sense, speculative fictions by Asian American writers push the field the furthest toward expanding its critical lenses, precisely because these narratives are so incredibly whimsical."

I especially liked this line because it had me thinking about how capricious and “whimsical” creativity often is. You’d like to think there’s a formula or a methodology behind creation, and though there is a certain extent, it often does come down to whimsy. It’s that connection between identity, creation, and personal narrative that Sohn so deftly explores The attention to detail, the breadth of knowledge contained within Asymmetries is impressive (check the notes and works cited at the end to get an idea). But it’s more than just an array of information assembled haphazardly. The arguments are stated clearly and Sohn uses creativity of his own to make his points, balancing thematic analysis and literary insight, as with an exploration of alien abductions in which “the form allows her (author Light) to explore questions of authenticity, identity, and storytelling, as the veracity of these narratives is often questioned.” Sohn is telling several stories through these essays, weaving together a narrative in a nontraditional way by putting these speculative tales under his microscope.

Racial Asymmetries is a book that will engage you and demand attention. It will challenge your definitions, not just of racial narrative, but literature, genre, and our desire to express ourselves in unconventional ways. Cast aside the ethnic shackles and, as Sohn urges: “We must attend to the ways that a given story is told and how the untelling unlocks fictional worlds that radically widen the social contexts of Asian American cultural productions.”

[Zoë Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York University Press, 2014) by Stephen Hong Sohn, currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, is an outstanding book of literary theory. With his profound knowledge of the history of Asian American literature, the author builds up his arguments and provides sufficient evidence and facts by citing numerous Asian American literary works from 19th century to 21st century to support his viewpoints. Reading this book is quite a brainstorming process, which refreshes the reader’s memory and incites new ideas. The book makes the reader think hard about the definition of Asian American literature, and how it is both different from American literature at large, but still necessarily related.

Having analyzing several literary works by Asian American writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chang-rae Lee, the author, in the first chapter, presents great details in Lee’s novel Aloft to support his point that Asian American writers have never been only writing about Asian American characters or contexts, but they “are investing in revealing how whiteness become mapped as a literary site as racial, cultural, and spatial normativity.” (P. 27)

In the second chapter, the author also examines the local history and economy of California as well as the social condition of immigrant groups, and with the analysis of Sesshu Foster’s novel Atomik Aztex, he explains how Asian American writers’ fictional world reflects multiracial groups and their relationships. In Sohn’s opinion, Carlos Bulosan, Brian Ascalon Roley, Bhira Backhaus, and Sesshu Foster “present an exceptional subset within the Asian American literary”(P. 63) due to their depictions of interracial dynamics between Chicanos/ Latinos and Asian Americans.

The third and fourth chapters focus on the fictions of Sigrid Nunez and Sabina Murray. The author discusses the works of these mixed-race Asian American writers and their respective publications to support his argument that “mixed-race authorial ancestry cannot be explicitly tied to narrative perspective.” (P. 104)

Finally, readers who are interested in speculative fiction by Asian American writers would enjoy the author’s exploration in the reflection between reality and fictional world in Claire Light’s collection Slightly Behind And To The Left and Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. His analysis of these two cultural productions is the last body chapter of Racial Asymmetries.

As someone whose books have been published as so-called Asian American literature, I’ve found the book to be a useful study.

Sohn mentions that “Asian American writers have often been circumscribed by the expectation that their fictions are composed with their personal and communal histories in mind.” (P.14) My situation concurs with his statement. Some readers assume each of my fictional works is my personal story or my family history.

I hope that Sohn’s Racial Asymmetries reaches its goal “to push for scholars outside Asian American studies to take more effort in considering the import of racially asymmetrical fictional worlds to their subfields.” (P.212) Sohn has read and reviewed hundreds of books written by Asian American writers in the past decade. You can see the majority of his reviews in the open access online forum called Asian American Literature Fans. This tremendous and unique exertion can only be done with zeal and endeavor. His strenuous efforts coincide with the objective of Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds.

[Mills College Library]

813.54098 S682 2014