92 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
attempt to place over it. Located at the intersection of race and
gender, Asian American women's writings insist on identity and
difference in multiple layers of selfhood and community.
NOTES
I am indebted to Marilyn Alquizola, Elsa Eder, Barbara Hiura, and Shelley Wong
of the UC Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department for the many ideas they generated
during our informal seminar discussions. I am also grateful to Norma Alarcon of the
Chicano Studies program at UC Berkeley for her friendship and inspiring comments,
and to Sucheng Chan of the Asian American Studies program at UC Santa Barbara
for her criticisms of the first draft of this manuscript. The lapses and flaws, of course,
are all mine.
1. Carlos Bulosan, Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile, ed. Dolores S. Feria
(Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1960), p. 5.
2. Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1946), p. 236.
3. Younghill Kang, East Goes West (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937),
p. 341.
4. Bienvenido N. Santos, You Lovely People (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1965), p.
133.
5. Shawn Hsu Wong, Homebase (New York: I. Reed Books, 1979), p. 78.
6. Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan, "Racist Love," Seeing Through Shuck, ed.
Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), pp. 65-79.
7. "Introduction," Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed.
Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).
8. Lecture, Oakland, California, September 15, 1989.
9. Frank Chin, The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. (Minneapolis: Coffee
House Press, 1988), pp. 5, 136, 109.
10. This interpretation was suggested by Shelley Wong. Frank Chin equates the
"feminization" of Chinese America with Western Christians' colonization efforts in
China and the U.S.
11. Lecture, Oakland, California, September 15, 1989.
12. Robert Murray Davis, "Frank Chin: An Interview," Amerasia Journal 14:2
(1988), p. 85.
13. Panel Discussion, Berkeley, California, September 16, 1989.
14. This discussion focuses primarily on prose writings; readers should not neglect
the fine poetry of Asian American women writers like Virginia Cerenio, Marilyn
Chin, Chitra Divakaruni, Chungmi Kim, Carolyn Lau, Janice Mirikitani, Genny
Lim, Cathy Song, Nellie Wong, and Mitsuye Yamada, to name only a few.
15. Kingston calls Tripmaster Monkey (1989) her first work of fiction. She has
defended the classification of The Woman Warrior and China Men as non-fiction by
pointing out that the characters were real people whose stories were the "fictions":
Kingston says that she was translating from inside the people she was writing about.
