Increasing attentions in recent Asian American studies have been devoted to a
re-thinking of Asian America as a unified category of nation.45 Conceived in the wake of the Civil Rights Movements and the Third World Peoples Movement in the 1960s and
1970s,“Asian America” has been a political expedient to build a coalition among different
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45 Please refer to, for example, Li, Lowe, and Dirlik.
peoples of Asian origin. It has never been clear, however, how peoples of diverse national origins, linguistic backgrounds, cultural identifications, and class associations can be lumped together in one single category of political empowerment.46 And this heterogeneity of Asian American constitution is exacerbated after the U.S government’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The influx of new immigrants, migrants, refugees, travelers, and
businesspersons renders the male-centered and nation-based “Asian American discourse”
even more inadequate to address the increasing national, gender, and class diversities of Asian American populations. Clear is that “Asian American” should not be reduced to a cultural icon, a fossilized ethnic label, which excludes the “different” types of Asian Americans. Nor should it assume the image of a stable center, a new “melting pot,” awaiting the integration of differences into it. For “Asian American” to remain a living and useful category, it has to be constantly re-signified.47 Or, to borrow from Lacan, it has to remain “not-whole” (pas-toute), admitting that some part of itself remains underneath or outside the territorial confinement and temporal linearity of a nationalist representation, that something repressed or simply missing is always in the process of (re)emergence.48
This paper intends to excavate the constitutive differences of Asian America. Instead of reading “Asian America” in terms of its pedagogical self-confinement as one nation, I attempt to understand “Asian America” as constituted by multiple families of shifting spatial and temporal dimensions. Of primary interest here is the complicated relationship between nation-building and family-construction. Traditionally people tend to connect nation and family. Not only do we usually speak “nations” as “homelands,” “fatherlands,” or “mother countries,” the coining of the term “nation-family” figures nation in the seeming organic unity and continuity of a family.49 To compare nations to families is to justify the “natural” status of nations. The idea of “nation-family” best links the paternal genealogies and genetic continuity of both a nation and a family.
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46 As Yanagisako has pointed out in “Transforming Orientalism,” “‘Asian American’ poses the conundrum of how a category of people whose only common experience is that of having been labeled ‘Oriental’ in an
‘Occidental’ nation can forge for themselves a politically empowering ethnic identity” (275). She argues that Asian American identity is primarily a product of “academic and “pedagogical” practices (275).
47 My idea of “re-signing” Asian America is indebted to Ono, who eloquently advocates a “re-signing”
(refiguring) rather than “resigning” (retiring or replacing) “Asian America.” My analysis in this paper, however, departs from Ono’s in at least two aspects: (1) While Ono feels the need to “re-sign” Asian American largely because of the influx of new immigrants after 1965, my study of the heterogeneous constitutions of Asian America extends to the era before 1965; (2) while Ono emphasizes in his essay a “critical rhetorical analysis”
(68), my analysis of Asian American families demonstrates certainly more than “rhetorical” concerns.
48 Lacan introduces the idea of “pas-toute” mostly through his analysis of Woman (La femme) and Woman’s jouissance. Being “pas-toute” (not-whole), Woman is never completely represented or appropriated by the phallic symbolic. She is there in the symbolic order “in full” (à plein); but
there is “something more” (en plus) (74).
49 For a detailed analysis of the nation-family analogy, see McClintock 90-91.
What is ironic in this nation-family analogy, however, is that families are not always as unified and continuous as may have been expected. Whereas many people conceive “family”
in terms of the bourgeois nuclear model, emphasizing its institutional function to impose spatial boundary and ensure patrilinear reproduction, few “real” families feature idealized domesticity.50 For one thing, it has been noted that the bourgeois nuclear family is a pretty recent invention in human history. It did not arise until the nineteenth century as a by-product of industrialization and urbanization. Moreover, even among the urban, middle-class
populations, the “ideal domesticity,” defined as a household completely “closed off” from the outside world like a “private kingdom” (Hareven 5), is usually not achievable in everyday reality. Studying the role of families in the context of the nineteenth-century imperial expansion, Amy Kaplan suggests that domesticity mostly serves as “the ambiguous third realm between the nation and the foreign” (584)—“not as a static condition but as the process of domestication” of the wild, the unfamiliar, and the other, which keep intruding into the family (582). Analyzing the twentieth-century women’s writings, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar further describe families and homes as the “front” in gender and cultural wars (xv).
Both studies lay bare an inevitable blurring of the line between the domestic-private and the foreign-public even in the so-called bourgeois domicile. Investigating the development of kinship in the U.S., Sylvia Yanagisako actually reaches the conclusion that “[t]he so-called modern American family is a folk model, a Weberian ideal type, that describes no one’s behavior, not anyone’s normative system—other than, of course, that of a hypothetical category of Americans” (Transforming the Past 258).
And the porosity of domesticity becomes even more evident when we take into consideration families that are not defined by the bourgeois nuclear model. Tamara K.
Hareven notices that the idea of domestic enclosure and genetic unity does not apply to many types of families in human history. Both preindustrial households and modern working class and immigrant families, for example, are “characterized by sociability rather than privacy” (3).
In the preindustrial society,
the household was the site of a multiplicity of activities. It served as the site of production, as a welfare agency and correctional institution, as an educational institution, and as a place for religious worship. Rather than catering strictly to the needs of the family, the household served the entire community [. . .]. (2)
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50 Here, what I mean by “real” does not simply refer to “reality”; it is more or less a Lacanian “real” that is situated outside language and would return as the specter of reality. As will be demonstrated by my ensuing analysis, I am concerned not only about what most families appear in reality but how their “real” underside keeps emerging to threaten their albeit unified and harmonious appearance.
Similarly, a modern working class and immigrant domicile is not “merely a private refuge; it was a resource that could be used for generating extra income, for paying debts [. . .]” (14).
And as “[p]rivacy was less important than the flexible use of household space,” the working class and immigrant families “frequently took in newly arrived immigrants and, at least temporarily, shared housing with them” (14).
Contrary to the prevailing belief that household members must be individuals tied by
“blood and marriage,” it is not unusual for both preindustrial and modern working class/immigrant families to take in “unrelated individuals such as servants, apprentices, boarders and lodgers, and ‘unfortunates’ from the community” (2). Families as such are not emptied-out metaphors of stability and homogeneity for nations. Rather, they undergo continuous changes by taking in the genetically unrelated and accumulating the heterogeneous.
Indeed, while “nation” usually appeals to a “family” trope to cover up its discontinuous history and heterogeneous constitutions, “family” could itself be a space introducing others’
interventions and generating everyday hybridities. “The family becomes,” summarizes Anne McClintock, “at one and the same time, both the organizing figure for national history and its antithesis” (91). Based on this understanding, to study Asian American families is not to consolidate “Asian America” as one nation but to restore Asian American construction to its domestic dimensions, which involve Asian American individuals’ familial connections, productions, deviations, and hybridizations. In what follows, I take Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World (1989) and Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey (1992; henceforth Talking to High Monks) as two cases to study the familial dimensions of Asian American constitution, seeking in the Japanese American households the radical spaces from which a re-signification of “Asian America” is made possible. Briefly, Asian American families must be known not simply as tools of genetic integration or cultural assimilation but as spaces of national, ethnic, cultural identificatory conflicts and gender, generational, and transnational negotiations. The change and
development of Japanese American communities are in one way or another embedded in the establishment, extension, movement, and/or disintegration of individual families.