In literary and cultural studies, books with “transpacific” in their titles can probably be counted on five fingers. Unlike conceptual alternatives like “diaspora,” “globalization,” and “transatlanticism,” the transpacific, as an emerging idea, remains undefined and susceptible to the specialties and constraints of individual scholars who invoke it. It gives an elastic name to projects that study in new ways the political and cultural connections that constitute the Asia Pacific. Transpacific Articulations is one such project, a fresh, imaginative, cogent study of the culture and politics of U.S.-Asian relations. Wang chooses the “foreign student” as his trope to outline a few literary and political articulations that complicate our understanding of Asian America. He narrows his topic further to Chinese students, including those hailing from late Qing dynasty and Republican China and, from the 1960s onward, students from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The conclusion returns briefly to mainland authors in the post-1960s period by discussing the reception of a memoir of a mainland Chinese girl enrolled at Harvard.
The political and literary articulations that the author traces in the book are multifarious: the struggle to throw off European semi-colonialism in turn-of-the-twentieth-century China, resistance against twentieth-century Japanese imperialism in Asia, and the Cold War alliance of expedience between mainland China and the United States, among others. Wang scours a number of archives, including novels and autobiographies, student-run periodicals, and correspondence that overseas students sent back home. For the author, this paper trail spells out a conception of “transnational modernity” that has been muted in previous discussions of Asian American culture. The book provides not only literary readings but also a detailed, useful review of social history that gives rise to various minoritarian political projects among Chinese overseas students in the United States.
The most significant, intriguing discussion comes in chapter 4, where the author discusses the “Taidu” movement, that is, the movement for Taiwan independence and statehood. Engaging head-on with an extremely fraught topic, Wang first outlines the key figures and organizations pushing for independence since 1947. This date is important; for the author it shows that the Taidu movement has a trajectory separate from that of the communist-capitalist conflict that dominated narratives of political drama during the Cold War. The movement is then placed in the context of anti-racist, anti-imperialist movements in Asian America, for which the author offers a substantive catalogue. This chapter concludes with a reading of Brenda Lin's memoir, Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound, which does not so much engage explicitly with the politics of Taidu than voice an ambivalence toward national identity.
The other chapters are similarly filled with valuable insights. Chapter 1 documents Yung Wing's life and works, linking him, in an innovative move, to Fukukawa Yukichi's “Datsu-ron” (the doctrine of leaving Asia). Chapter 2 studies The Chinese Students’ Monthly, the first literary periodical started by overseas Chinese students in the United States, as a precursor to post-1950s writings by overseas Taiwan students, ranging from such familiar fictional works as Yu Lihua's Zaijian zonglu (1967) to less-known novels and essays by Chen Zhifan, Yang Mu, and Liu Daren. Chapter 3 examines the political and literary discourses subtending the “Baodiao” movement, including a journal founded by the Baodiao Group at Berkeley. The anger aroused by Japan's sovereignty claim over a cluster of islets lying between Taiwan and Okinawa engendered pro-mainland sentiments among certain factions of Taiwanese students in the United States, which illustrates the plurality of Taiwanese students' political attitudes toward the mainland, at least in the 1970s. Then comes the chapter on Taidu. Finally, chapter 5 turns to a seminal moment in Asian American literature and culture, when Frank Chin launched a tirade against the Chinese American literary journal Bridge for kowtowing to white Christian values and espousing a misguided nostalgia toward China. This chapter offers a highly valuable supplement to oft-repeated narratives of how Asian American literature emerged in bitter controversies over what it should stand for and encompass.
Though the literary argument of Transpacific Articulations is at times elusive, it remains a well-needed intervention in common understandings of “Chinese American” issues, politics, and literary history, highlighting in particular the political split between mainland-origin and Taiwan-origin individuals in the United States. This split also becomes manifest in the academy, where Chinese American scholars with different backgrounds clash routinely on certain political issues. This collision is no less dramatic than the “Chin vs. Ching” split, and an extensive analysis is long overdue. This book may well be the first to broach this topic in a scholarly fashion. Or, at the very least, it makes the gap so painfully clear for everyone invested in “Chinese American” studies that no one can avert their eyes any longer.
