Chapter 14 - What Is Asian America to Asians?

Summary

Scholars in Asia have argued that to teach Asian American literature in Asia, one must take liberties to queer and subvert this very literature - to see it within transpacific narratives of colonization and empire, to look at it as a historical inventory of the ways in which this literature erases, dismisses, or seeks to “other” Asia. In this chapter, I reflect upon my experiences teaching, queering, and subverting Asian American literature during more than five years at three universities in Nanjing, China, and in Hong Kong. As a mixed Filipino/white man who was most often seen as “Eurasian,” I witnessed students racialize me either as living proof of American multicultural exceptionalism or as its very opposite: the exilic Chinese who had come to claim my true home. Teaching Asian American literature, I found, brought these presumptions to the fore and allowed me to undo many of the presumptions placed upon me as a self-exile descended from American colonial subjects. My experiences lead me to suggest that rather than just queering or critiquing Asian American literature, educators teach Asian American literature as an ambiguous archive that can reframe commonsense notions of what it means to be American or Asian.