Cheung,King-Kok.Chinese American Literature without Borders:Gender,Genre,and Form.

King-Kok Cheung's new bookChinese American Literature without Borders,as its name alludes,transgresses boundaries of time and space,gender and genre,language and culture,poetics and politics,and centers and margins.To use Cheung's words,the book title “undermines any barriers” and “allows for as many tributaries and confluences as possible.”1Cheung,Chinese American Literature without Borders,2.Cheung,a migrant critic and veteran player in the field of Asian American Studies,manages her knowledge of American as well as Chinese culture and takes advantage of her bilingual access to present this truly transcultural work that not only reflects her own migrating experience but also advances the transnational trend of American studies,bridging Asian/American Studies and comparative literature.

Edward Said recommends in several of his works that migrants have “double vision,” urging them to overcome their sense of strangeness and keep their critical distance when observing both the host and home countries “in terms of what has been left behind and what is [actually] here and now.”2Edward Said,Representations of the Intellectual:The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York:Pantheon Books,1994),60.See also Edward Said and Jean Mohr,After the Last Sky:Palestinian Lives (New York:Columbia University Press,1998),6;Edward Said,Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge:Harvard University Press,2000),186.The plurality of vision that Said accentuates is manifested in Cheung's book in which she reads Chinese and Chinese American writings through a reflexive lens.In the first part,Cheung challenges Western gender norms by introducing the Chinesewen-wudyad (literary arts and martial arts).The second part examines Chinese and Chinese American writers whose works constructively employ traditional Chinese tropes to shed light on the critical observations of America,China,and Chinese America.

Having plurality of vision,moreover,underscores the importance of “Reclaiming the Hyphen”—the third phase of the three concurrently prevailing paradigms of Asian American literary history that Cheung reviews in her book.The third phase “has gone further than the second phase of ‘Claiming Diaspora' in advancing a hemispheric,transpacific,and especially multilingual approach” and seeks to reclaim the hyphen that has been taken out in the first phase of “Claiming America.”3Cheung,Chinese American Literature without Borders,6—10.Of course,one can reclaim by claiming as well as critiquing both sides connected by the hyphen,as Cheung argues.

Cheung begins her work by intervening in the debate between Maxine Hong Kingston and theAiiieeeee!editors (esp.Frank Chin) over Asian American gender reconstruction in the early effort of claiming America.Frank Chin's criticism of Kingston'sWoman Warrior(1976) as “falsifying Chinese myths and catering to white audiences” has incited rebuttals from Kingston herself and feminist critics.Cheung,however,points out that both Kingston and Frank Chin use their works to respond to stereotypical representations of minority people of Asian origin in mainstream American society by comparingWoman Warriorand Frank Chin'sDonald Duk(1991).In order to reshape gender and redefine heroism,both authors turn to Chinese classics and tweak their ancestral culture to fulfill their respective goals.4Ibid.,7.For Frank Chin,his objective is to refashion Asian American masculinity via Asian heroic tradition;for Kingston,“a feminist and pacifist subjectivity” is added to the forge of this new transpacific literary movement.5Ibid.,31.Cheung believes that both authors,in a way,enact the Chinesewen-wudyad,which she develops from Kam Louie's theorization of the duality of Chinese masculinity,by which “yingxiong(outstanding male) andhaohan(good fellow) is counterbalanced by a softer,cerebral male tradition—thecaizi(the talented scholar) and thewenren(the cultured man).”6Ibid.,53—54.Cheung suggests that the dyad provides an alternative masculinity (to the macho man) represented by wordsmanship (wen) and supplements swordsmanship (wu).As revealed by Kingston and Chin's works,both authors were “fighting through writing” against the dominant culture's racist perception of minorities.7Ibid.,16.

Cheung then exemplifies a modern epitome of ChinesewenrenXu Zhimo in reading Younghill Kang'sEast Goes West(1997),Pang-mei Natasha Chang'sBound Feet and Western Dress(1997),and Anchee Min'sPearl of China(2010).Cheung utilizes the characteristics of Xu to push back against the monopoly of Western discourse on masculinity that emphasizes machismo.Rejecting Western stereotypes of Asian men as Kung Fu heroes or asexual nerds,Cheung notes that Xu is not only welcome in the British Bloomsbury group as a close friend,which demonstrates his East-West cultural hybridity,but is also constructed as a romantic and caring lover as well as a helpful friend in the above-mentioned works.8Ibid.,102.Furthermore,since Xu and numerouswenrenin Chinese literary history seek their equals injiaren(beauty) and appreciate the literary caliber and intelligence of their female partners,Cheung argues that the Chinesecaizi-jiarengenre—or,better,“renamed cainü-caizi (‘talented women and men')”—celebrates independence and talent in a female beauty and acknowledges a sense of equality between a couple.9Ibid.,103.Althoughwutradition is the dominant discourse,the Chinesewenrenand his equal partner open a space for alternative gender conceptions.The characteristics ofwenren,along with other qualities that Cheung discusses in part I,such as the cultivation of art,the pursuit of spirituality,the Confucian creed ofren(benevolence),and the feminist ethics of care,reveal how perceptions of masculinity differ and travel across history,nation,and culture.

Drawing on Gish Jen's observation of the “two very different models of self-construal”—independence in the West,particularly America,and interdependence in the East,particularly China—and exploring the convergences and divergences in Chinese and Chinese American life writing,Cheung argues in the second part of the book that Chinese American writers transform the (auto)biographical genre,which Frank Chin designates as a Western and Christian tradition,to promulgate their own causes of “ethnic reclamation” and/or allegiance to a maternal legacy.10Ibid.,173—74,193—94.The Chinese interdependent selves in the writings of Liang Qichao,Hu Shi,and Shen Congwen become polyphonic narratives in Maxine Hong Kingston,William Poy Lee,and Ruthanne Lum McCunn's life writing across the Pacific.Responding to Chin's claim that “autobiography is a Western genre and that autobiographical Chinese American works reek of Christian confession,” Cheung indicates that “the de-emphasis of the self” in Chinese American writing is not due to “Christian self-loathing” as Chin claims,but rather is an example of negotiating the Chinese interdependent self and the American individual self.Chinese American writers not only contextualize the self and highlight maternal legacy following Chinese tradition,but they also do not shy away from challenging authority and “allowing family secrets to come out of the closet,” which is influenced by American culture.11Ibid.,15,177.

Cheung's research manifests that a multilingual and transcultural approach is crucial for readers in reading and interpreting texts from both shores.Simultaneously,it is the strategy writers adopt to produce traveling theories.Cheung delves into Chinese writer Bing Xin's short story “The Photograph” (1934) to show the potential of texts in generating cross-cultural theory and the possibility and power of breaking linguistic and national boundaries in Asian American studies that expands its scope to adjoin with Chinese literature,comparative literature,and postcolonial theory.Although Bing Xin's works,with their emphasis on love and hope,have gendered reception and been taught mostly as children's literature in the Chinese world,“The Photograph,” at least,discusses vital issues of race and gender,such as Orientalism,racist love and hate,transnational adoption,patriarchy,etc.,decades earlier than their appearance in the history of critical theory.

Focusing on poetics,Cheung extols Ha Jin—a non-native English writer—for enriching English language with words and expressions rooted in his Chinese migrant experience in his autobiographical novelA Free Life(2007).Cheung also acclaims Marilyn Chin and Russell Leong's play of “slanted allusions”—innovative and subversive appropriation of traditional Chinese cultural tropes—in their poems in the effort to reclaim the hyphen,critiquing both Chinese and American national cultures and challenging gender and class discrimination.12Ibid.,291.They achieve this goal of “fighting through writing” by “coordinat[ing] poetics and politics,discern[ing] transnational affiliations,and reshuffling of ethnic signifiers,” thereby reenacting thewen-wudyad introduced in Part I.13Ibid.,16,264.

Questions that readers might have after readingChinese American Literature without Bordersare:Why is the book title not bold enough to intentionally include a hyphen connecting Chinese and American,resonating with the bicultural and bilingual spirit that Cheung reiterates? Why does a book that disrupts gender norms not even mention the gender problem in Ha Jin'sA Free Life,which is a problem in several of his works that have been well received in the West? It seems as if it is acquiescence to what the fictional autobiography presents—a free life is important and entitled only to men rather than women.Overall,Cheung's book facilitates trans-Pacific dialogue by teasing out confluences and divergences in Chinese and Chinese American writings and tracing the changing patterns of culture and literature along with migrating experiences;it provides a reflexive lens for readers from different shores to interrogate homeward and review the other side critically;and it showcases the efficacy of bilingual and bicultural literacy to avert cultural misunderstandings.What is more,the book challenges,through theorization and exemplification,scholars and students of Asian/American Studies and comparative literature to undertake multilingual and transcultural literary research and to produce traveling theories.