Suspicious Characters: Realism, Asian American Identity, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

Abstract

Suspicious Characters: Realism, Asian American Identity, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée Sue-Im Lee As a conceptual basis for organizing, the category of Asian American identities was founded upon the utility of large-scale identity politics in the late 1960s. Its collective agenda targeted the politically and culturally dominant group's designation of all Asian Americans as "Orientals," and the attendant racial and ethnic stereotypes, centuries old, that were institutionalized in the legal, economic, and cultural marginalization of peoples of Asian descent in America. But even as the visibility of Asian American identity politics bespoke the increased measure of institutional and discursive power held by its constituents, its success in social mobilization and institutional representation was built upon a site of contradictory significance . The principle of panethnic coalition in the Asian American category of identity responded to, and invariably confirmed, the hegemonic principle of "racial lumping," the organizing practice of the politically and culturally dominant group to ascribe a singular, homogenous identity to its racialized ethnic minorities (EspÃ-ritu 10). The strategic benefits of assuming a panethnic category of identity demanded the subsuming of differences in nationality, gender, class, language, and religion among its peoples for the competitive advantage promised by a unified political identity.1 It is precisely the expedient nature of such collective identification that JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.2 (Summer 2002): 227-258. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 228 ) N T has come under critical scrutiny in the Asian American discourse of the last two decades. If strength lay in numbers in the Asian American movement of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the intemal strictures imposed by that large-scale identification come under assault for their complicitous relationship to the hegemonic terms of identification. The title of Lisa Lowe's influential 1991 essay—"Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences"—expresses the critical shift in theorizing Asian American identities and discourse. While it is important to uphold collective Asian American identity as an agency of social mobilization, Lowe cautions, the selfsame necessity must be "inscribe [d] . . . within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of difference" (68). A significant area of Asian American discourse re-examined under the suspicion of hegemonic complicity is the predominance of realist narrative form in the Asian American literary tradition. Just as the institutional relevance of pan-Asian identification is reassessed for its strategic expediency, realist narrative strategies are held under suspicion for their representational utility in rendering "the Asian American character" formally intelligible and culturally accessible to the readership of the American majority culture. If the institutional relevance of a pan-Asian identity coalition requires the observance of an externally imposed categorization, what is the ideological significance of constructing an Asian American character according to the realist narrative properties of locatable setting, convincing dialogue, believable physical description, and developmental plot? What hegemonic conditions of representation are observed in projecting the linguistic construct of a racialized ethnic minority character into the material realm of political, economic, and cultural subjecthood? What, after all, is the cost of representational clarity?2 Targeting the textual means by which realist storytelling generates a coherent, stable, and classifiable notion of Asian American identity, the critical tum against the realist narrative form in Asian American discourse takes part in the larger postmodem suspicion of representational and narrative accessibility. As Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, "[cjlarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing , two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically , to impose an order" (Woman, Native, Other 16-17). As the critical pendulum swings away from Asian American collectivity to an emphasis Suspicious Characters 229 on heterogeneity, from realist clarity to postmodern opacity, from the value of a unified, consistent, developmental Asian American character to the fragmented, multiple, and fluid subjectivity of postmodem language, the figure of the Asian American travels through a tumultuous body of competing critical waters.3 My examination of that figure begins at the level of realist narrativity —the narrative techniques by which the text generates a mimetic illusion of material...

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