|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Spring of Chinese American Letters
| Article
# : |
18646 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,909 Words |
| Author
: |
Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
This spring has brought us a full bloom of books from Chinese American writers, highlighted by three distinctive first novels--playwright Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Gish Jen's Typical American, and Gus Lee's semiautobiographical China Boy. And there is also the second, long-awaited novel from Amy Tan, whose beautifully written best-seller, The Joy Luck Club, triggered the current landslide of interest in Chinese American literature.
Since Tan's phenomenal success in 1989, acquisitions editors at publishing houses have been eagerly scouting for a successor. It is inevitable that other books will be compared to The Joy Luck Club, including Tan's own second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife. As a matter of fact, in an April issue of Publishers Weekly, Tan wrote a hilarious account of her near-breakdown trepidation as she assayed the jinxed Second Novel. "Critics will say it is too much like the first," she said of the dilemma she faced. "Readers will complain that it is too different."
While comparisons are unavoidable, it is also true that each writer speaks in a unique voice, and tells a singular story. As a serious literary novelist, even Amy Tan does not want to tell the same story twice. And although Donald Duk, Typical American, and China Boy are all about the Chinese experience in the United States--with its cycle of immigrant arrival, culture shock, adjustment, and varying degrees of assimilation--they are markedly divergent in tone and in vision.
The American dream in chaos
The very first line in Gish Jen's Typical American signals the novel's intent. "It's an American story: Before he was a thinker, or a doer, or an engineer, much less an imagineer like his self-made-millionaire friend Grover Ding, Ralph Change was just a small boy in China, struggling to grow up his father's son." This is a story about immigrant experience.
Yifeng, only son of the Chang family in Jiangsu Province, is dispatched by his father to study engineering in the United States. In New York he changes his name to Ralph and falls in love with the school secretary, who has "orange hair, pink face, blue eyes." With the communist takeover of China in 1949, Ralph can't go home again.
Then his sister Theresa, also unmoored from the motherland, finds him in a public park. She introduces him to her friend Helen, another Chinese expatriate, and the two naturally become
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
