Daniel Y. Kim

The Borderlands of the Korean War and the Fiction of Rolando Hinojosa

This essay reads the work of Rolando Hinojosa for the ways in which it invites a consideration of the two wars that the United States fought in the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the US-Mexico War and the Korean War, respectively—as part of a continuous history of US empire. It examines the array of cross-racial identifications operant in his Korean War trilogy—Korean Love Songs, Rites and Witnesses, and The Useless Servants—which attach variously to Japanese and Korean civilians as well as to North Korean and Chinese soldiers. In so doing, this article shows how Hinojosa’s war writings are part of an Orientalism that is deployed in the service of anticolonial and antiracist critique but that also recapitulates aspects of the colonial imaginary. These works also engage in an auto-critique of how certain segments of the Chicana/o population came to be beneficiaries of a liberal Cold War racial dispensation that enabled limited forms of upward mobility for some communities of color.

Asian American Literature within and beyond the Immigrant Narrative

For a very long time, Asians in America have been viewed as newcomers to the country and destined always to be outsiders. While the antiquity and greatness of their countries of origin were often touted, Asians themselves who crossed boundaries and set themselves up as immigrants to the United States were greeted with scorn. The following is an example of this attitude, published in 1904 in the widely read and much-respected Century Magazine : “These Orientals have a civilization older than ours, hostile to ours, exclusive, and repellent. They do not come here to throw their lot with us. They abhor assimilation, and they have no desire to be absorbed. They mean to remain alien; they insist upon being taken back when they are dead; and we do well to keep them out while they are alive.” 1 Under such conditions, it was diffi cult – but not impossible – for Asians in America to become writers who could fi nd a large readership. To do so required being aware of their uniqueness. It meant having to navigate a complex series of spoken and unspoken expectations about what they could write and how they could write it, with few if any models for how to accomplish this feat. This situation changed to some degree as activists began to organize as Asian Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s and started to make claims about a history of writing that had largely been obscured. Immigration laws also changed in the postwar era, fi rst incrementally and eventually in a large-scale way that opened the door to particular kinds of immigrants from Asia. The economic fortunes of several prominent Asian countries improved in the last decades of the twentieth century as well, putting enormous pressure on ingrained habits of racial perception. While the Asian as perpetual foreigner is a perception that continues to be widespread, its circulation is increasingly impeded by challenges to its underlying logic. The post-1965 immigrants and their children, working alongside more established communities of Asian Americans, have substantially contributed to an altered understanding of how Asians in America are raced. One way they have done so is by becoming creative writers, their numbers now signifi cant enough MIN HYOUNG SONG