Asian Crossroads/Transnational American Studies

Abstract

It would be hard to find any moment in the history of the U.S. when products, people, or ideas from Asia did not play a vital role. The American Revolution? It was 45 tons of tea from China that the Sons of Liberty, led by John Adams, dumped into the Boston Harbor.1 The American Renaissance? Emerson and Thoreau were reading and learning from translations of Eastern texts.2 American impressionism? The most famous works by painter Mary Cassatt are indebted to lessons she learned from traditions of Japanese printmaking.3 How about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book which Hemingway claimed gave birth to all 20th century American literature? Twain undertook his first experiments with using satire to attack racism when, as a young journalist in the 1860s, his direct exposes of racism towards the Chinese in San Francisco were censored.4 Indeed, Asia shaped what would be the U.S. even before Columbus set sail for the New World—for, as Gary Okihiro reminds us, “America’s very ‘discovery’ resulted from . . . Europe’s ancient and persistent search for a passage to Asia.”5 From the start, Asia—its geography, its people, its products and its culture—was woven into the very fabric of what made the U.S. what it was. My own childhood was neither typical nor atypical. It was simply mine. All of my grandparents immigrated to New York near the start of

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