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The Making of an Asian American Short-Story Cycle: Don Lee's Yellow: Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2015

KUN JONG LEE
KUN JONG LEE*
Affiliation:
English Department, Korea University. Email: kunjonglee@outlook.com.
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Abstract

Don Lee reworked his eight magazine stories to varying degrees, arranged the sequence of the stories in a specific order, and published a short-story cycle in 2001. Significantly, the writer changed the ethnic identity of some characters from white American to Asian American. He also added and highlighted Asian American themes and issues. In short, Lee made an “Asian American” short-story cycle par excellence by coloring his stories yellow. This essay examines Lee's rewriting and arrangement of his magazine stories for an Asian American short-story cycle. It first compares the differences between the magazine and cycle versions of the stories. It goes on to examine totalizing devices such as the common setting, recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. Lastly, it elucidates the arrangement of the eight stories and significance of the title story in the cycle. It ultimately argues that Don Lee retrofitted his magazine stories extensively and meticulously for a short-story cycle in order to portray the diverse aspects of post-immigrant Asian America at the turn of the century from his positionality as a third-generation Korean American.

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Articles
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2015, pp. 593 - 613
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

INTRODUCTION

Don Lee's Yellow: Stories (2001) is a unique short-story collection in Korean American literature, for it is the most perfect – if not the only – short-story cycle out of several Korean American short-story collections, such as Kim Yong Ik's Love in Winter (1969), Ty Pak's Guilt Payment (1983) and Moonbay (1999), Gary Pak's The Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories (1992) and Language of the Geckos and Other Stories (2005), Minsoo Kang's Of Tales and Enigmas (2006), Paul Yoon's Once the Shore (2009), and Krys Lee's Drifting House (2012). In his interviews, Lee naturally claims James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as the models of his short-story cycle.Footnote 1 As Gayle K. Sato has correctly pointed out, however, it is “disconcerting” not to find Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California (1949) in the list of Yellow's precedents.Footnote 2 It is puzzling, since Mori is not an incongruous figure among Lee's literary ancestors. After all, there is an interesting genealogy from Dubliners through Winesburg, Ohio and Yokohama, California to Yellow, in addition to their common themes of human loneliness, frustration, alienation, and lack of communication: Joyce superbly dramatizes an Irish woman's anxiety and hesitation in the face of her imminent emigration and ultimate rejection/failure to leave her home country at a time of Irish exodus to, among other places, the USA;Footnote 3 Anderson notes “the shrill cries of millions of new voices” in the USA and specifically refers to the intra-ethnic conflicts and violence of Irish immigrants in Chicago;Footnote 4 Mori portrays a representative cross section of first- and second-generation Japanese American lives in the San Francisco Bay Area;Footnote 5 and Lee describes third- and fourth-generation Asian American lives in a fictional small town between San Francisco and Santa Cruz.Footnote 6 Moreover, Yellow recalls Yokohama, California more immediately than Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio, because Lee's stories update and broaden the concerns of Mori's Japanese American characters in the 1930s by portraying pan-Asian American experiences at the turn of the twenty-first century. Indeed, Lee's short-story cycle echoes Mori's cycle in its title, setting, topics, themes, and politics of mark(et)ing as a “yellow” book.Footnote 7 Without denying its indebtedness to Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio,Footnote 8 then, one can argue that Yellow lies in the tradition of Asian American short-story cycles – the tradition most memorably inaugurated by Mori's Yokohama, California and flourishing in such texts as Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables: Five Stories of Japanese American Life (1985), Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), Sylvia Watanabe's Talking to the Dead (1992), Sigrid Nunez's A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burger (1996), and Peter Bacho's Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories (1996).Footnote 9

Yellow's affiliation with the tradition of Asian American short-story cycles is best attested in the composition process of the short-story cycle. Lee published his first short story, “The Lone Night Cantina,” in 1987. Two years later, he published “El Niño” with a crucial biographical note: “Don Lee is working on a collection of Rosarita Bay stories called The Plumb Line.”Footnote 10 The author bio demonstrates that Lee envisioned a series of interlinked stories from the outset of his writing career. In the beginning, Lee seemed to have in mind Rosarita Bay, modeled after Half Moon Bay, California, as the only unifying device of his stories – one of the typical strategies of a short-story cycle.Footnote 11 He made Rosarita Bay the common setting of his first two stories and continued to refer to the fictional town in his later stories: “Yellow” (1994), “Casual Water” (1995), “Voir Dire” (1997), “Imperialistas” (1999), “The Price of Eggs in China” (2000), “Domo Arigato” (2001), and “The Possible Husband” (2001). In 2001, Lee collected all of his magazine stories, except “Imperialistas,”Footnote 12 and reworked them to make the self-contained stories constituent pieces of the collected whole.Footnote 13 Significantly enough, he published the collection of independent and interdependent stories under the title of Yellow: Stories. The title of Lee's short-story cycle immediately raises the question of why Lee published the collection of eight “Rosarita Bay stories” not under the anticipated title of The Plumb Line – or Rosarita Bay, California in the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio and Yokohama, California – but under the unexpected one of Yellow. Needless to say, there is a world of difference between the neutral, race-free title The Plumb Line and the provocative, race-informed title Yellow. The change of title, highlighting the racially charged word “yellow” and privileging the eponymous novella “Yellow” as the title story of the cycle, eloquently reflects Lee's change in concept of his cycle from a collection linked by place to one focussing on Asian American experiences. In short, the Asian American writer made an “Asian American” short-story cycle par excellence by coloring his magazine stories yellow.

Though apparently intriguing, the question of why Lee made an Asian American short-story cycle out of his magazine stories is not an issue at stake in the criticism of Yellow: after all, he had conceived of a short-story cycle from the beginning and six out of the eight stories were already Asian American in characters and themes.Footnote 14 Rather, at issue is the question of how he made an Asian American short-story cycle out of his independent stories, two of which have nothing to do with Asian Americans. This is a crucial issue for our proper understanding of Yellow, for his change of the original stories was profoundly informed by his overarching design of the cycle. Though it constitutes an intriguing critical angle, however, Lee's transformation of the separate magazine stories into synthesized pieces of a short-story cycle has not been adequately discussed by scholars: at best, it has been noted in a passing comment by Su Mee Lee.Footnote 15 To fill up the critical lacuna, this essay studies the composition process of Lee's Asian American short-story cycle. It first compares the differences between the magazine and cycle versions of the stories. It goes on to examine totalizing devices such as the common setting, recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. Lastly, it elucidates the arrangement of the eight stories and significance of the title story in the cycle. It ultimately argues that Don Lee retrofitted his magazine stories extensively and meticulously for a short-story cycle in order to portray the diverse aspects of post-immigrant Asian America at the turn of the century from his positionality as a third-generation Korean American.

COMPARISON OF THE MAGAZINE AND CYCLE VERSIONS OF THE STORIES

Lee made hundreds of changes in his independent stories to make them interdependent in a short-story cycle. His reworkings range from simple corrections of mechanical problems to fundamental changes of narrative structure. To reflect the passage of time from the publication of his first story to that of his story cycle, Lee deleted or updated allusions to dated and irrelevant sociohistorical contexts. He also introduced new episodes and modified familial and interpersonal relationships. Most importantly, he mapped out the common setting, remade the narrative structures of a few stories, changed the ethnic identity of some protagonists from white American to Asian American and from one Asian American to another, and reinforced the issues confronting Asian Americans at the turn of the century.

It goes without saying that Lee reworked the eight stories with varying degrees of change. “The Possible Husband,” published in 2001, is the least changed narrative of all the stories. The only noticeable alteration is the change of “the local paper” in the original version to the Rosarita Bay Horizon, Lee's homage to Anderson's Winesburg Eagle, in the final version.Footnote 16 No substantive changes occurred in the reworking of the last-published story, simply because Lee wrote the original version with a definite sense of linkage with other stories. For the same reason, the magazine version of “The Possible Husband” served as a kind of guiding text for the reworking of other stories: for the first time, the story not only gives names to the undesignated bookstore, library, and restaurants in the original versions of other stories but also introduces the familial relationship of Lily, Eugene, and Danny, the characters/protagonists of what Tracy Chung calls the “Kim trilogy,”Footnote 17 – ”The Possible Husband,” “Domo Arigato,” and “Yellow.”

Curiously enough, Lee did not properly chart Rosarita Bay in any of the magazine stories, although he envisioned a collection of Rosarita Bay stories from the outset. The fictional town is introduced just as “a town an hour south of San Francisco without a dude ranch in sight” in “The Lone Night Cantina.”Footnote 18 Lee's editor noticed the glaring lack of proper information on the town and suggested that the writer “make the town more prominent in [his] final revisions.”Footnote 19 Lee duly mapped out the town when he reworked “The Price of Eggs in China.”Footnote 20 The narrator of the Yellow version of the story first shows the “panoramic views of Rosarita Bay – the harbor to the north, the marsh to the south, the town in the middle, and, everywhere beyond, the vast Pacific.”Footnote 21 He goes on to chart the town in three paragraphs, which provides the reader with the basic information on the topography, geography, climate, industries, population, and atmosphere of the town. He later adds the most prominent landmark of the town, Rummy Creek, introduces Skyview Ridge Road, names Vasquez Canyon, mentions a neighboring town of Miramar, and situates Rosarita Bay within San Vicente County. He also makes a more realistic downtown by properly naming originally unidentified stores and buildings. With such additions, Lee constructs a townscape which immediately reminds one of Harald Toksvig's famous map of the fictional Winesburg, as if the 1890s mid-western rural town had transformed itself to the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century western seaside town.Footnote 22

Rosarita Bay is given a more crucial role in the revised versions of the last two stories. In the magazine version of “Domo Arigato,” Eugene is an oncologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.Footnote 23 But he lives at Rosarita Bay and works at San Vicente Memorial Hospital in the cycle version.Footnote 24 Naturally, whereas the first version ends in St. Louis, the second version ends in Rosarita Bay. While reworking “Yellow,” Lee added a scene of the Kims’ family party during the Christmas holidays at Rosarita Bay. He also changed the place of the story's ending from Cinnamon Bay, St. John to Rosarita Bay. In the original version, Danny goes to the US Virgin Islands for vacation right after Sheridan's suicide attempt.Footnote 25 But he returns to his hometown to attend Lily's wedding ceremony at the end of the revised version.Footnote 26 These changes focussing on Rosarita Bay not only firmly anchor the two stories in the common setting of the cycle but also help them unambiguously address the key issues of intermarriage, racial discrimination, military brides, black Amerasians, and Korean American immigrant lives that resonate in other stories.

Unlike the Mid-west compared to Japan at the end of the magazine version of “Domo Arigato,” Rosarita Bay is identified with “that little mountain village in Japan” at the end of the cycle version.Footnote 27 The “little mountain village” is Kasugo Onsen, which Brady shrewdly compares with Sumatakyo Onsen, where the Hi Ro Kim incident – sensationally spotlighting the Japanese discrimination against the Korean Japanese – broke out in 1968.Footnote 28 It is also in the mountain village that Joanna advises Eugene, “It's easier with someone your kind.”Footnote 29 Eugene's identification of Rosarita Bay with Kasugo Onsen, then, inevitably asks us to read Brady's recall of the interethnic conflictFootnote 30 and Joanna's dissuasion against intermarriage into the last passage of the story describing the protagonist's life in the small town: “The people here were civil and polite, and they left their neighbors alone. Out of kindness, they never said what they meant. It didn't matter to Eugene what was really in their hearts, as long as they could live, side by side, in quiet disregard.”Footnote 31 Eugene has no illusions about the precarious position of his Korean–black Amerasian family in Rosarita Bay: the townspeople's ostensible civility, politeness, and kindness are nothing other than their “quiet disregard” of his biracial family in their midst. Thus his Caucasian American neighbors are similar to, if not identical with, the Japanese who, Brady argues, are “the most duplicitous people” who “never say what they mean … never mean what they say.”Footnote 32 Since Rosarita Bay is “the California ‘everytown’”Footnote 33 and, by implication, the USA writ small, the concluding passage of the ironically titled story is a powerful understatement devastatingly criticizing the US popular imagination that has regarded all Asian-descent multiracials and, more specifically, black Asians as the most unspeakable “apocalyptic monster[s].”Footnote 34

Rosarita Bay in the two new vignettes on Korean American lives in “Yellow” reinforces the sociopolitical significance of the novella as well. The added episode of a family gathering at the town is full of Korean ethnic foods, table manners and eating habits, and the family's “expressions of connection and affection” – the typical components of a “narrative of community” described by Sandra A. Zagarell.Footnote 35 More significantly, in another new scene of the wedding reception, Danny, who has hated everything Korean (American),Footnote 36 suddenly reveals his intention for a family trip to Korea and even asks Eugene to join him. Danny's ultimate affirmation of Korean American identity at his hometown, Rosarita Bay, is a response to, among other things, the anti-Asian (American) sentiments in the USA. This is evident when we read the protagonist's “awakening” with another reworking of the story, the Vincent Chin case. In the magazine version, the author refers to the case almost in passing even without mentioning Chin's name in his list of the 1980s racial tensions across the nation. But the short passage is fully elaborated on in the Yellow version. Lee describes in detail the socioeconomic context surrounding the killing of Vincent Chin and the racist motivation of the brutal killing of the Chinese American mistaken for a Japanese. He ends with the judge's lenient sentence of probation for the killers, which shocked the Chinese American community of Detroit and helped found the first Asian American grassroots community advocacy organization with a national scope.Footnote 37 With the two reworkings, Lee situates Danny's ultimate acceptance and affirmation of his Korean/Asian American identity in the sociohistorical context of “the archetype of anti-Asian violence” to recognize its impact on and legacy in the Asian American community.Footnote 38

Despite its reshuffled narrative structure, “Yellow” has not undergone any fundamental change of plot. It is “Casual Water” that is most drastically reworked in terms of plot. The original version is a story of insurance fraud.Footnote 39 To secure his position as Brian's legal guardian, Patrick makes a decision to fake Davis's drowning and get money from his father's VA policy. He capsizes a boat in a cove and files a missing-person report at the sheriff's office. But the fake drowning is detected by the sheriff. The narrative ends gloomily with Patrick facing a criminal indictment for insurance fraud and Brian on his way to a foster home. Unlike his prototype, Patrick of the Yellow version suffers severe anguish between his dream of becoming a pilot and responsibility as an elder brother. While Patrick is thus frozen in a dilemma, Evelyn volunteers to live with Brian so that Patrick can pursue his dream. In the original version, Evelyn is Patrick's calculus teacher at Rosarita Bay High School and is mentioned only in passing. In the revised version, however, she was Patrick's math teacher and is now Brian's teacher at an elementary school. Lee transfers her from a high school to an elementary school in order to make her a crucial character – almost a deus ex machina – in the revision: she sees Brian's self-inflicting act in the classroom, takes the boy to a clinic, and ultimately becomes his legal guardian.

No less significant than the plot change are the ethnic changes of a few characters in the story. Evelyn's ethnic identity is changed from generic Caucasian as Evelyn Wells to Korean American as Evelyn Yung. The Korean American woman's transracial adoption of a white Amerasian boy in the USA is an interesting rewriting of the general pattern of Caucasian couples’ transnational adoption of white Amerasian children from Korea. One can find a similarly crucial ethnic change of Billy: from the generic Caucasian Billy Webster to the Korean Amerasian Billy Kim. Billy is now none other than the eleven-year-old son of Eugene and Janet in “Domo Arigato.” Billy Webster's question – whether Brian's mother was a bargirl in the Philippines – could be interpreted as subtle discrimination against Asian military brides and their mixed-blood children. But the same question takes on completely different implications when it is asked of a first-generation white Amerasian boy by a second-generation black Amerasian boy. The inquisitive Billy might have heard from the dialogue of his parents about the prejudice against and tribulations of Korean military brides and their Amerasian children in Korea and the USA. Billy's clumsy question, then, could be his sincere gesture to identify with Brian, despite the difference of their color, class, and family status. From this perspective, Billy is reminiscent of James, the black Amerasian boy who asks the white Amerasian protagonist to swear an oath “never to betray each other” in Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother.Footnote 40 At the same time, the episode undermines the racist stereotype that black Amerasian children are abandoned by their GI fathers more frequently and easily than white Amerasian children. In the second version, Lee also highlights the white Amerasian teenagers’ physical difference from white boys, never indicated in the first version: “there was an unsettling otherness about them, their blood mix unusual and somewhat antithetical: Irish, Scottish, Filipino, Malay, with … a little bit of Ojibwa Indian.”Footnote 41 The almost playful list suggests that racial mixture represented by the Amerasian boys was part of US history even before the encounter of the USA and Asia. Lastly, Lee added passages about Lita's loneliness and depression, which explain why she repatriated to the Philippines: the Filipina military bride “felt snubbed by other Tour wives, with their blond hair and cheerleader smiles,” and “had no friends, nothing to occupy her,” in the USA.Footnote 42 Thus Lee reinforced the crucial issues of Asian military brides, their Amerasian children, and transracial adoption in his rewriting of “Casual Water.”

While reworking “El Niño” to “Widowers,”Footnote 43 Lee also changed the ethnic identity of all the major characters from Caucasian American to Asian American. Emily Ross in “El Niño” is a Caucasian. In “Widowers,” however, Emily Vieira Ross is first introduced as an “Asian of indeterminate origin”Footnote 44 and later identified as a Korean adopted from an orphanage by devout Catholics. With the ethnic change, Lee draws our attention first to the then underrepresented Korean adoptees.Footnote 45 Emily's wish to be a hand model now takes on a completely different meaning and hints at the difficulties faced by Asian American women in the advertising industry: she aspires to be a hand model because, unlike her Asian facial features, her hands will not betray her ethnic identity. What is interesting in Emily's ethnic change is the fact that Lee seems to have imagined even the original Emily, if subconsciously, as an Asian, since he describes her “eyes slit Orientally.”Footnote 46 Indeed, Emily seems to be a supreme case corroborating Lee's confession that some stories made more sense to him after the change of the main characters’ race: his protagonists newly endowed with Asian American identities “not only opened up for [him], but [he] also understood more of why they had behaved as they did in the stories.”Footnote 47

This is also true in the case of the male protagonist's transformation from a Caucasian American to a Japanese American in the retitled story. After changing Dale Burkman to Alan Fujitani, Lee added a new passage and elaborated on Alan's involvement in the antidevelopment movement significantly in the context of Japanese American history. Pointing at Pismo Beach, Alan says to Emily that he “had a beachfront house there that was in my family for four generations – excepting the three years they were interned at Manzanar.”Footnote 48 Though having lived in the USA for more than three generations, the Fujitanis were regarded as “enemy aliens” and interned at Manzanar after Pearl Harbor. Lee added the Japanese internment experience and mentioned specifically Manzanar, because the War Relocation Center at the foot of the Sierra Nevada was the first of the ten concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned and is the site of the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage to remember the internment, which has cast a long, ominous shadow on the psyche not only of Japanese Americans but also of all Asian Americans (and, after 9/11, American Muslims). Alan refers to the incarceration of Japanese Americans after a pause, as if on second thought. But his pause itself draws our attention all the more powerfully to the internment which almost destroyed the Japanese American community, as is eloquently symbolized by his early widowerhood without any children.

The ethnic change of protagonists from Caucasian American to Asian American can be found also in the reworking of “The Lone Night Cantina.” Annie Wells of the magazine story is a Caucasian American woman impersonating a character of the 1980 film Urban Cowboy. In the Yellow version, she is transformed to Annie Yung, the older sister of Evelyn in the revised “Casual Water.” The Korean American Annie becomes a more anachronistic and incongruous figure with her bleached blonde hair and western-style costume, and talking like “some yahoo.”Footnote 49 She cannot impersonate a cowgirl, for her Asian features immediately betray her racial identity. In other words, she cannot cross the racial divide that separates her from the all-American (read: white) icon of a cowgirl. When her escapist and self-deceptive fantasy collapses, she decides to dye her hair and buys “a box Number 36 Midnight, Neutral Black – the closest to her original color.”Footnote 50 This is a symbolic gesture of rejecting the white myth, shedding the alien persona, and retrieving her Korean American identity. Lee made a variation on Annie's male partners as well in his revision. Wells's ex-husband had left her for a young girl and her recent boyfriend for a better-paying job; but Yung's first husband left her for another woman, her second for another man, and her recent boyfriend for a long-standing job. More importantly, whereas Wells's male partners are presumably Caucasian, Yung's partners are multiracial: Korean American, Swedish, and Chilean. Lee criticizes the stereotypes of Asian women in his new description of Yung's encounters with “white men with A.H. F., Asian Hottie Fetish, wanting her to titter with high-cheeked China-doll timidity, or vamp it up as a wanton Suzie Wong, a dirty little yum-yum girl.”Footnote 51 The writer also makes fun of the model-minority myth in his portrayals of Korean Americans in the revised story. The gentle, sweet, and solvent Bobby is definitely a model minority. But the hip, philandering, and squandering movie-star wannabe Phillip Han – Lee's joking reference and homage to Philip Ahn, the first Asian/Korean American actor to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of FameFootnote 52 – is the antithesis of the stereotypical Asian American. And Annie is in between the mild Bobby and wild Phillip: while a model minority in her education and job, she is far from the trouble-free Asian American in a stable family.

The characters’ ethnic change in “Voir Dire” is somewhat different from that in other stories. In the original version of the story, Hank is a mixed-blood person, whose father is a Korean and mother is “a Hawaiian mongrel of Asian/Pacific origins – Chinese, Japanese, Samoan.”Footnote 53 But he is identified as Korean in the reworked version. Lee portrayed Hank's mother originally as multiethnic, probably to reflect the ethnic mixture in Hawaii, but made her Korean in his rewriting to point out the first-generation Korean Americans’ resistance to intermarriage. This reworking parallels the change of the ethnic identity of Hank's ex-wife, Allison, from Chinese American to Korean American. Hank's divorce from the Korean American wife and current interracial romance with a white American woman, and Allison's marriage with a Chinese American man in the revised version, aptly dramatize the second-generation Korean Americans’ gradual movement from inmarriage to intermarriage. Lee also changed Allison's profession from businesswoman to lawyer to allow her to meet Hank at the San Vicente Courthouse. In the newly added passage of their meeting, the writer not only shows that the Korean American couple got divorced simply because Hank and Allison were mismatched from the beginning. He also reveals that Hank's frustration caused by the stark disparity between his idealism and reality made him introverted, uncertain, passive, and even pessimistic, especially in his relationship with Molly and at the prospect of becoming a father. Lee's addition of Jason in the cycle version serves multiple purposes as well. Jason is not only Allison's affluent husband. He uses a race card when his proposal to build a multi-million-dollar project in Rosarita Bay is rejected: he believes that “it's racism, the reason why he can't get zoning.” Lee presents Jason also to raise the class issue in Asian America and to criticize the model-minority myth: the successful Chinese American businessman's internalized model-minority myth that “Chinese don't do drugs” is ruthlessly shattered by the presence of the underclass Chinese American cocaine addicts Lam and Ruby.Footnote 54

ANALYSIS OF THE INTERTEXTUALITY AND ARRANGEMENT OF THE STORIES

Lee meticulously reworked the magazine stories so that they can participate in the dynamic interactions with each other through intertextual links such as the common setting, recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. With such totalizing devices, he made sustained efforts to reinforce the Asian American dimensions of the story cycle. More specifically, he populated Rosarita Bay with the seemingly omnipresent Asian American characters, addressed contemporary Asian American issues, referred to the US military interventions in Korea and the Philippines, and recalled Asian military brides and Amerasians. The writer also arranged the revised stories in a specific order to give a sense of gradual movement from universal themes in earlier stories to particularly Asian American themes in later stories. The ultimate significance of the arrangement of the stories is best shown in the last story, “Yellow,” which, with its sheer length as the only novella and privileged status as the title story, profoundly dictates our reading and rereading of preceding stories.

In the history of the short-story cycles, argues James Nagel, “the most persistent continuity in the form has been in setting.”Footnote 55 Indeed, one can find the typical totalizing element of a short-story cycle in Yellow. The setting of the first six stories is Rosarita Bay; and even the last two stories, whose major episodes take place elsewhere, end in the fictional town. Lee's fictional town is somewhat different from its prototypes. Unlike Joyce's Dublin, Rosarita Bay is not a place from which the inhabitants try to escape. Anderson's Winesburg is a basically hermetic town, but Rosarita Bay overlaps with the racial, political, economic, military, and industrial context of the outside world, national and international. Despite the predominant Korean American characters, the town with the Spanish name has no ethnic enclave like Mori's Lil’ Yokohama. Yet, like those other mythical places, Rosarita Bay is a town of loneliness, entrapment, stasis, and paralysis. Lee's town, “with the gray air of anonymity,” is fundamentally “a place of exile” for those afflicted with “failure and missed opportunities.” Its residents yearn to “get lost” and “forgotten” in the small town.Footnote 56 Hence Rosarita Bay is the ideal place for Dean, who chose to drop out of the limelight of the art world; for Caroline, who ran away after her failure in the poetry world; for Hank, who is afraid of everything; for Alan, who is permanently mourning for his long-dead wife; for Patrick and Brian, who are abandoned by their parents; for Duncan, who is unable to commit himself in his almost never-ending relationships with women; and for Eugene, who is content with his invisibility. It could be the temporary refuge even for Annie and Joe suffering failed marriages and/or unsuccessful relationships. But it is not the place for Marcella, the “jet-setting artiste and bon-vivant,”Footnote 57 or for Danny, the successful management consultant. The town can accommodate Rob's humble Lone Night Cantina but not Jason's fancy project. As such, Rosarita Bay is more than a mere backdrop for the stories: it takes center stage in the cycle and embodies the entire community of the fictional world.

Lee interconnects the independent stories also by repeatedly mentioning in more than two stories the roads, landmarks, buildings, and stores of Rosarita Bay. The quintessential example of a recurrent place that serves as a connective device is Rummy Creek. The most prominent landmark appears in as many as five stories: Duncan first found the creek in “The Possible Husband,” Molly first met Duncan at the creek in “Voir Dire,” Dean drives Caroline to the place in “The Price of Eggs in China,” Patrick and Brian go to the beach at the creek in “Casual Water,” and Lily and Duncan marry on the headlands overlooking it in “Yellow.” There are seventeen other recurrent places in the cycle.Footnote 58 A study of the linkage of stories through them reveals an interesting pattern: “The Price of Eggs in China” is linked with five stories through twelve recurrent places, “Voir Dire” with five stories through eight places, “Casual Water” with five stories through six places, “Yellow” with four stories through five places, “The Possible Husband” with four stories through eight places, “The Lone Night Cantina” with four stories through five places, and “Widowers” with two stories through three places. Thus, whereas no story is linked with all seven others through recurrent places, “Domo Arigato” is not linked with any other story through a recurring place.Footnote 59

There is no human focalizer, like Anderson's George, who can serve as the primary link among the stories of Yellow. Instead, a series of characters moving in and out of focus interact with each other throughout the stories. As in other story cycles, a minor character of a story functions as the protagonist of another: Duncan, mentioned in passing as the mutual friend of Hank and Molly in “Voir Dire,” is the protagonist of “The Possible Husband”; and Eugene and Danny, briefly introduced as Lily's brothers in “The Possible Husband,” are the protagonists of “Domo Arigato” and “Yellow.” And some secondary characters appear in more than one story: Janet, Billy, Evelyn, Jason, and Becklund. The recurrent characters themselves are not the only connective human device of the stories, since characters of different stories are also linked to each other by familial relationship, common ethnic group, friendship, and vocation. Korean American characters link all eight stories, Chinese Americans connect four stories, and Japanese Americans unite three stories. “The Possible Husband,” “Domo Arigato,” and “Yellow” are most closely interwoven through the Kim siblings, but “The Possible Husband” and “The Price of Eggs in China” are interlinked most frequently with other stories through the characters. Unlike in the case of the recurring places, no story is left outside the interweaving of the stories through the characters.

The eight stories of Yellow are interconnected with each other by recurrent themes as well. In addition to the typical motifs of loneliness, paralysis, and fear in many short-story cycles, the themes of romantic relationships, antidevelopment, craftsmanship, sports skills, US military interventions in Asia, military brides, and Amerasians link Lee's stories. Yellow seems to be a sustained study in romantic relationships. One can find seven intra-ethnic relationships, five interethnic relationships, and nine interracial relationships. Out of them, the successful relationships are three intra-ethnic cases, two interethnic cases, and one interracial case. Significantly, all the interracial relationships of the post-immigrant Asian American characters are stunted, for even the as-yet maintained relationship between Hank and Molly is a precarious one at best. The theme of antidevelopment unites four stories: “The Price of Eggs in China,” “Voir Dire,” “Widowers,” and “Casual Water.” Yellow is also shot through with impressive characters in pursuit of perfection in their craftsmanship and sports skills. For example, Dean “no longer use[s] a level, square, or marking gauge, relying on his eye, and soon he plan[s] to dispense with rulers altogether, maybe even with pencils and chalk.” The master chairmaker labors towards an almost unachievable perfection: “He want[s] to get to the point where he c[an] make a Kaneshiro Chair blindfolded.”Footnote 60 Probably his rival is the unnamed Japanese master chef who has prepared “a whole fish, with its body sliced and fanned into sashimi pieces, its head and tail propped up as if it were still alive, breaching the water.”Footnote 61 Their “purity of purpose and execution”Footnote 62 reappears in other characters’ skills in surfing, handstanding, boxing, golfing, and even freebasing. As Viet Nguyen notes, the characters’ superb workmanship and sports skills ultimately become an apt metaphor for Lee's craftsmanship with thorough research and meticulous (re)writings.Footnote 63

Importantly, the motifs of US military interventions in Asian countries, Asian military brides, and Amerasians link four stories: “The Possible Husband,” “Casual Water,” “Domo Arigato,” and “Yellow.” Lee recalls the representative US military bases in Asia: US Army Garrison Yongsan in Korea and US Naval Base Subic Bay in the Philippines. Duncan had his most traumatic experience at Yongsan Eighth Army Base: the US military's “arrogan[t]” air show of “dropping [napalm] during peacetime into the river of a foreign capital, merely to entertain the troops”; and “the haole Army culture” sexually arousing, shaming, and ultimately paralyzing the twelve-year-old boy.Footnote 64 Lita met Davis during his tour of duty at Subic Bay. She is rejected by the white wives of golfers when she follows him for golf tournaments in the USA. The isolated, precarious condition of her white Amerasian children in the USA is symbolically represented by their home on a nameless road “in the middle of nowhere” far from the town proper.Footnote 65 Lee's portrayal of the Filipina military bride and her Amerasian sons is an indirect criticism of Korean (American) ethnocentric literary imagination that has disregarded the existence of migrant sex workers and their mixed-blood children in Korea.Footnote 66 His criticism is more pronounced when he depicts Lita's experience in the USA in parallel with Janet's mother's in Korea.Footnote 67 Janet's mother met her African American husband when he was stationed at Yongsan Eighth Army Base. The white wives on the US base called the Korean woman “a moose, their epithet for any local girl who bagged a G.I.”Footnote 68 Janet was an Army brat on Yongsan, and one can easily imagine her hardship as a black Amerasian girl completely ignored by her Korean relatives and snubbed by white Americans at the military base.Footnote 69 But her American experience was no better: while growing up in Mississippi, Janet and her siblings were routinely harassed by their black classmates and called “gook monkeys.”Footnote 70 In short, the black Amerasian was discriminated against by white Americans for not being white, rejected by Koreans for not being Korean enough, and harassed by African Americans for not being black enoughFootnote 71 – the very dilemma of Hines Ward Jr., the MVP of Superbowl XL, when he was growing up in the USA.Footnote 72

No less significant than the intertextual links is the arrangement of the revised stories in a short-story cycle, for the overall organization of a cycle reflects the authorial intention that crucially dictates our reading of the stories. Lee arranged the reworked stories in a specific order, different from the sequence of the publication of the original stories: “The Price of Eggs in China,” “Voir Dire,” “Widowers,” “The Lone Night Cantina,” “Casual Water,” “The Possible Husband,” “Domo Arigato,” and “Yellow.” The eight stories of Yellow are divided into two groups: the first three stories are connected by themes and characters, and the next five narratives are linked by, among other things, family ties. The second group of stories linked by Korean American family relationships can be further broken down into two subgroups. “The Lone Night Cantina” and “Casual Water” are loosely unified by the Yung sisters, and “The Possible Husband,” “Domo Arigato,” and “Yellow” are tightly interwoven by the Kim siblings. More significant is the placement of “The Price of Eggs in China” and “Yellow.” The first story of the cycle familiarizes readers with basic information on Rosarita Bay and contains many “narrative seeds”Footnote 73 in terms of places, characters, and themes that would be repeated and developed in later stories. The last story gives a sense of ending with a portrayal of the family reunion of the three-generation Kims, and attempts to round up the themes, motifs, and symbols which have been explored and developed in earlier stories. The arrangement of the stories clearly shows a pattern of incremental process. This is especially evident when it comes to the issue of race. “The Price of Eggs in China” revolves around the universal themes of love, rivalry, success, and art versus life. In contrast, “Yellow” is the most political narrative, centering around race, racism, racial stereotypes, and Asian American identity. Consequently, the movement of the cycle is from “non-didactic” stories to “politically charged” ones.Footnote 74 In fact, Lee acknowledges that the last two stories, replete with examples of racial discrimination, are “unadulterated polemics, blatantly confronting the issue of racism” in the USA.Footnote 75 If we take into account that racial issues are highlighted especially in interracial relationships between Korean American men and Caucasian women, it is highly suggestive that all the Korean American protagonists of the last three stories turn to Korean American women in the end. All in all, “race” as an organizing concept of the cycle acquires depth and resonance as the collection unfolds: race, which figures only peripherally in earlier stories, gets more attention and even takes center stage in later stories.

Lastly, the title of a short-story cycle is of paramount significance, since it alerts us to a specific perspective on how to read the stories. Despite its double meanings of racial and character slur, the “yellow” of the title – together with the yellow color of the cover and the photo of the Asian American author on the back cover – is unambiguously evocative of Asian American stories. Moreover, the provocative title of the collection is the eponymous title of the longest and last story of the cycle. Apparently, the novella focusses on Danny's paranoid fear of racism and ends with acceptance of his racial and cultural roots. As is typical in many short-story cycles, however, the final meaning of the ending of “Yellow” is complicated by the devastating lashing out against racism at the end of its companion piece, “Domo Arigato.” Indeed, the naive and artificial ending of the novella is possible only when Danny is satisfied with his place of living “side by side [with], [and] in quiet disregard”Footnote 76 by Caucasian Americans, like his practical wife Rachel, who becomes a costume designer after giving up her dream of an acting career. In fact, the title story chronicles Danny's lifelong struggles against his Asian American identity and culture because of the subtle and not so subtle racist discriminations against Asian Americans in the USA. The novella is filled not only with instances of Danny's personal experience of racist comments, jokes, slurs, and discriminations, but also with memories of racial conflict specifically bearing on Asian Americans, such as Japanese internment, discrimination against Indochinese immigrants, boycotts against Korean merchants, and Japan-bashing culminating in the Vincent Chin case. Most deeply imbricated in the racial ideology and conflicted race relations of the USA, “Yellow” mirrors and amplifies an array of racial issues hinted at or explored in earlier stories. Lee's placement of “Yellow” at the end of Yellow, then, eloquently demonstrates its centrality and the significance of race in the cycle. Almost like “The Dead” in Joyce's Dubliners and “The Bear” in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, “Yellow” assumes a hegemonic position in Yellow and constitutes a kind of “anchor story” of the collection.Footnote 77 Hence, while it unites the themes explored in earlier stories – as in the case of Danny, who “completes the legacy of Lee's vulnerable men” such as Dean, Hank, Duncan, and Eugene, who suffer from “a case of beleaguered masculinity”Footnote 78 – the novella makes the reader reread and reassess earlier stories in juxtaposition with the most political piece of the cycle – which will make clear the submerged significance of race even in the previous stories.

CODA

Don Lee did not have in mind an ethnic short-story cycle when he first envisioned a collection of Rosarita Bay stories in the late 1980s. He was more interested in the universal issues of identity, love, family, and ambiguities inherent in human experiences: we can find neither Asian American characters nor Asian American concerns in his first two magazine stories. To use the most prominent metaphor of the completed cycle, the protagonists of the stories might be “yellow” psychologically, but not physically. But the writer started to populate his fictional world with Asian American characters and to address Asian American issues from his third story, “Yellow.” While reworking his stories for a cycle, he made hundreds of changes not only for better characterization, more compact structure, and more fitting allusions to the contemporary sociohistorical context in each story, but also for better interlinking of the stories through the common setting, familial and interpersonal relationships, and unifying themes. More significantly, he inserted a few Caucasian characters’ Korean connection, transformed the characters’ ethnicity from Caucasian to Asian American, and reinforced the issues confronting Asian Americans at the turn of the century. He also used the Asian American characters and issues as the most crucial devices to link the stories. In short, he made a quintessentially Asian American short-story cycle, which portrays Asian American experiences from diverse perspectives in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, culture, and immigration history. With his stories cutting a wide swath of post-immigrant Asian Americans, Lee firmly situates Yellow in the tradition of Asian American short-story cycles and celebrates the diversity and heterogeneity of Asian American experiences at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Footnotes

1 See Jean Charbonneau, “Editor Tries on Short Stories: Collection Probes Experiences of Asian-Americans,” Denver Post, 20 May 2001, I.03, available at http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=73189052&sid=3&Fmt=3&clientld=40479&RQT=309&VName=PQD, accessed 21 July 2014; and Robert Birnbaum, “Interview with Ploughshares Editor Don Lee,” identitytheory.com, 2 Jan. 2003, available at www.identitytheory.com/don-lee, accessed 28 July 2014.

2 Sato, Gayle K., review of Yellow, Asian American Literature Association Journal, 7 (2001), 73–75, 73.

3 Joyce, James, Dubliners (New York: Norton, 2006), 26–32.

4 Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Norton, 1996), 34, 23–24.

5 Mori, Toshio, Yokohama, California (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1949).

6 Lee, Don, Yellow: Stories (New York: Norton, 2001).

7 Norton marketed Yellow as an “Asian American” book, best represented in its yellow jacket recalling the orange jacket of Yokohama, California, and Lee agreed to the publisher's marketing strategy. See “Asian American Heritage Month: ‘Yellow: Stories,’” transcript of live online discussion with Don Lee, Washingtonpost.com: Live Online, 18 May 2001, available at http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/01/authors_lee0518.htm, accessed 12 March 2009. For the only intertextual study of Yokohama, California and Yellow, see Sato, review of Yellow, 73–75.

8 There is no intertextual study between Dubliners and Yellow in Lee criticism. For intertextual studies of Winesburg, Ohio and Yellow see Tracy Chung, “Megatextual Readings: Accessing an Archive of Korean/American Constructions,” dissertation, University of Maryland, 2006, 95–98; and Lee, Su Mee, “‘Tanpyeon soseol saikl’-roseo Don Lee-eui Yellow yeonku” (Reading Don Lee's Yellow as a Short-Story Cycle), Yeongeoh yeongmumhak (Journal of English Language & Literature), 57, 5 (Winter 2011), 731–43.

9 For a good study of Asian American short-story cycles see Davis, Rocío G., Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles (Toronto: Tsar Publications, 2001).

10 Lee, Don, “El Niño,” GQ: Gentlemen's Quarterly, 59, 10 (1989), 224, 226, 228, 231–32, 234, 236, esp. 236.

11 For book-length studies in short-story cycles see Ingram, Forrest L., Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Mann, Susan Garland, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Dunn, Maggie and Morris, Ann, The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995); Kennedy, J. Gerald, ed., Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lundén, Rolf, The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999); Nagel, James, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Davis; and Pacht, Michelle, The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

12 “Imperialistas” seems to have been left out of Lee's collection because it has no direct connection with the other stories except that the protagonist was born in Rosarita Bay. It is a story about a Korean American college girl's vacation with a wealthy Englishman in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Originally attracted by her apparent passivity and submissiveness, the Englishman cuts short their vacation when she challenges his orientalist fantasy and male authority. Ten years later, the Korean American woman recalls the experience when she witnesses the official ending of the British colonial rule of Hong Kong “based on a fundamental principle: the pure and brutal assertion of superiority.” And she remembers the Englishman's enigmatic statement prior to his decision to shorten their vacation: “I guess the natives are getting restless.” Lee, “Imperialistas,” North American Review, 284, 3–4 (1999), 64–71, 71.

13 Lee, “Question-and-Answer with Don Lee,” in Lee, Yellow, page unnumbered.

14 Working as editor of Ploughshares, Lee knew well that a collection of interlinked stories read better than a collection of unconnected stories, as can be seen from his profiles of writers and book reviews. He also believed that the short-story cycle was a genre suitable for portraying a composite picture of an ethnic community. See his profile of Stuart Dybek, in which he refers to the second-generation Polish American writer's two short-story cycles Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories (1980) and The Coast of Chicago: Stories (1990), about the life in Chicago's East European American ethnic enclaves. Lee, “About Stuart Dybek,” Ploughshares, 24, 1 (1998), 192–98, 196.

15 Su Mee Lee, 735–36.

16 Lee, Don, “The Possible Husband,” Bamboo Ridge, 79 (2001), 56–71, 68; and Lee, “The Possible Husband,” in Lee, Yellow, 151–74, 168.

17 Chung, 104. But Chung's “Kim trilogy” is not a strictly correct term, since not Lily but Duncan is the protagonist of “The Possible Husband.”

18 Lee, “The Lone Night Cantina,” Ploughshares, 13, 2–3 (1987), 190–212, 190.

19 Lee, “Question-and-Answer with Don Lee.”

20 Lee, “The Price of Eggs in China,” Gettysburg Review, 13, 1 (2000), 97–116.

21 Lee, “The Price of Eggs in China,” in Lee, Yellow, 16.

22 For a reprint of Toksvig's map, see Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 2.

23 Lee, “Domo Arigato,” New England Review, 22, 1 (2001), 90–100, 91.

24 Lee, “Domo Arigato,” in Lee, Yellow, 175–95, 177.

25 Lee, “Yellow,” American Short Fiction, 4, 13 (1994), 27–72, 71–72.

26 Lee, “Yellow,” in Lee, Yellow, 253–55.

27 Lee, “Domo Arigato,” in Lee, Yellow, 195.

28 For details on the widely publicized five-day confrontation see “Korean Holds Police at Bay with Hostages,” Japan Times, 22 Feb. 1968, 4; “Korean Continues Defiance at Police,” Japan Times, 23 Feb. 1968, 4; “Gunman Holds Out Despite Mindan Pleas,” Japan Times, 24 Feb. 1968, 1; and “Korean Gunman Captured; All Hostages Safe,” Japan Times, 25 Feb. 1968, 1.

29 Lee, “Domo Arigato,” in Lee, Yellow, 193.

30 With the Hi Ro Kim incident, Lee not only hints at the interethnic conflicts between Korean Americans and Japanese Americans that can be traced back to the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea. He also criticizes the US government's – or its mainstream group's – management of Asian countries and Asian American communities by pitting one against another: it is the CIA agent, Brady, stationed in Tokyo, who cunningly asks the US-born Korean American Eugene whether his immigrant father has not “related his feelings about the Japanese” to him. Lee, “Domo Arigato,” in Lee, Yellow, 189

31 Footnote Ibid., 195.

32 Footnote Ibid., 190.

33 Chung, “Megatextual Readings,” 104.

34 Houston, Velina Hasu and Williams, Teresa Kay, “No Passing Zone: The Artistic and Discursive Voices of Asian-Descent Multiracials,” Amerasia Journal, 23, 1 (1997), vii–xii, vii.

35 Zagarell, Sandra A., “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13, 3 (1988), 498–527, 520.

36 Danny's earlier rejection of his Korean/Asian American identity is best represented in the changed description of his sexual experience. The Yellow version of the novella begins with a new description of his sexual encounter with a woman from North Carolina. Danny identifies manhood with sexual prowess in the new introductory episode. His association of sexuality with manhood can be traced back to his first sexual experience with Nancy, which, originally described in just two sentences, is expanded to two pages. A nervous virgin, Danny is confused about his first experience, for he has not come while having sex. He continues to have the same frustrating experience, simply because he is “too mindful of his performance to enjoy the sex.” Lee added the episodes to point out that Danny's sense of insecurity in sexual encounters with white women is rooted in his lack of self-confidence: the frustrating sexual experiences are inevitable for the Korean American who, “filled with self-loathing and doubt,” relies heavily on the opinion of others even for the justification of his own identity. Lee, “Yellow,” in Lee, Yellow, 224, 217.

37 For a good summary of the Vincent Chin case, see Zia, Helen, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 55–81.

38 Espiritu, Yen Le, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 153.

39 Lee, “Casual Water,” New England Review, 17, 2 (1995), 110–19.

40 Fenkl, Heinz Insu, Memories of My Ghost Brother (New York: Dutton, 1996), 109.

41 Lee, “Casual Water,” in Lee, Yellow, 123–50, 129.

42 Footnote Ibid., 137, 138

43 “El Niño,” published in GQ: Gentlemen's Quarterly, is retitled “Widowers” in Yellow. The change of the implied readership entailed interesting reworking of the story: Lee shortened the age gap of the two protagonists, changed a divorcee's indirect seduction to a widow's confident proposal, and omitted the description of the protagonists’ sexual intercourse. In short, with the general readership in mind, Lee changed and deleted the titillating passages which might have satisfied the GQ readers’ male fantasy and voyeuristic pleasure. See Lee, “El Niño,” 226, 231, and “Widowers,” in Lee, Yellow, 83.

44 Lee, “Widowers,” 79.

45 The experiences of the more than 100,000 Korean (Amerasian) adoptees who have come to the USA since the 1950s started to be narrativized only from the late 1990s. Before the publication of Yellow, Korean adoptees’ voices were heard mostly in such anthologies as Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin's Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees (1997); and Susan Soon-Keum Cox's Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries (1999). Korean Amerasians’ lives were portrayed in detail in two memoirs – Thomas Park Clement's The Unforgotten War (Dust of the Streets) (1998) and Elizabeth Kim's Ten Thousand Sorrows (2000) – and Chang-rae Lee's fiction A Gesture Life (1999). After the publication of Yellow, the transnational and transracial adoptees’ Korean and US lives have continued to be portrayed in Kathy Robinson's A Single Square Picture (2002), Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood (2003) and Fugitive Visions (2009), and Marie Myung-Ok Lee's Somebody's Daughter (2005). For recent book-length critical studies on transracial adoption of Korean children see Volkman, Alice, ed., Cultures of Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Hübinette, Tobias, Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2006); Trenka, Jane Jeong, Oparah, Julia Chinyere, and Shin, Sun Yung, eds., Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006); Bergquist, Kathleen Ja Sook, Vonk, M. Elizabeth, Kim, Dong Soo, and Feit, Marvin D., eds., International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice (New York: The Haworth Press, 2007); Kim, Jodi, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Kim, Eleana J., Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jerng, Mark C., Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Palmer, John D., The Dance of Identities: Korean Adoptees and Their Journey toward Empowerment (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Tuan, Mia and Shiao, Jiannbin Lee, Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Brian, Kristi, Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Prébin, Elise M., Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Pate, SooJin, From Orphan to Adoptee: U. S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

46 Lee, “El Niño,” 224.

47 Quoted in Tim Rutten, “Don Lee's Revealing Visit to Rosarita Bay,” Los Angeles Times, 1 May 2001, E4.

48 Lee, “Widowers,” 82; emphasis added.

49 Lee, “The Lone Night Cantina,” in Lee, Yellow, 101–21, 111.

50 Footnote Ibid., 120.

51 Footnote Ibid., 114. For Annie's bad dates with white men enamored with the colonial fetish for Asian women, Lee borrows heavily from the uncollected “Imperialistas.” In particular, Annie's portrayal of “Juan Pablo Sevilla from Chile” is composed of an almost verbatim repetition of Renee Kim's memory of a Chilean diplomat in “Imperialistas” and an addition of his incestuous relationship with his sister. Compare ibid., 114–15; and Lee, “Imperialistas,” 64.

52 For a good study of Philip Ahn see Chung, Hye Seung, Hollywood Asian and the Politics of Cross-ethnic Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

53 Lee, “Voir Dire,” Glimmer Train Stories, 24 (1997), 107–28, 116.

54 Lee, “Voir Dire,” in Lee, Yellow, 49–77, 70.

55 Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, 17.

56 Lee, Yellow, 23.

57 Footnote Ibid.

58 These are Highway 1, Highway 71, Skyview Ridge Road, the Lone Night Cantina, Main Street, Beryl's Bookstore & Café, the Moonside Trading Post, Safeway, the Banzai Pipeline, Clothilde's Bistro, Rae's Diner, the Goose Inn, the YMCA, the Rosarita Bay Library, Longfellow Elementary School, Rosarita Bay harbor, and the marsh.

59 The stories are connected also by other cities such as San Vicente, San Francisco, Monterey, New York, Oahu, and Seoul.

60 Lee, Yellow, 26.

61 Footnote Ibid., 187.

62 Snodgrass, Kathleen, “Knit One, Purl Two,” Georgia Review, 56, 2 (2002), 623–37, 626.

63 Nguyen, Viet, review of Yellow in Amerasia Journal, 31, 2 (2005), 190–93, 191.

64 Lee, Yellow, 165.

65 Footnote Ibid., 129.

66 Korean sex workers/military brides and their Amerasian children have been portrayed in Korean (American) narratives from the late 1940s. But Korean (American) narratives have rarely depicted the migrant sex workers from the Philippines and former Soviet countries, who began to replace Korean women from the mid-1990s, and their mixed-blood children. See Lee, Kun Jong, “The Black Amerasian Experience in Korea: Representations of Black Amerasians in Korean and Korean American Narratives,” Korea Journal, 55, 1 (2015), 7–30, 9.

67 Of course, there is a signal difference between the two Asian military brides. The Korean woman was disowned by her family over her marriage with an African American sergeant, but the Filipina woman seems to have maintained a good relationship with her family in the Philippines. Hence, whereas Janet's mother lived in Mississippi without looking back to her native country, Lita returned to her home country when she found no life for her in the USA.

68 Lee, Yellow, 195.

69 See Fenkl, Memories of My Ghost Brother, 96 and 212, for white racism against black Amerasians at the US military base and its affiliated elementary school.

70 Lee, Yellow, 195.

71 One wonders why Lee did not further develop Janet in a new story, since the black Amerasian woman with her diverse experience in Korea, Mississippi, and Rosarita Bay could have been the protagonist of an independent story in the cycle. This lost opportunity is acutely felt mainly because black Amerasian experience in both Korea and the USA has not been properly portrayed in Korean and American narratives. Black Amerasian lives in Korea were depicted in Korean narratives from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s: Yu Juhyeon's “Taeyang-eui yusan” (A Legacy of the Sun) (1957); Kim Sundeok's Eomma, naman wae keomeoyo? (Mom, Why Am I Alone Black?) (1965); Cho Cheongrae's “Miun ori saekki” (The Ugly Ducklings) (1978); Mun Suntae's “Munsin-eui ttang” (The Land of Tattoos) (1987); Yun Ina's “3 dae” (3 Generations) (1992); and Ahn Ilsun's Ppaetbeol (The Quagmire) (1995). Korean American narratives have also portrayed black Amerasian experience in Korea from the mid-1990s: Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996) and Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl (2002). On the other hand, black Amerasian experience in the USA has been portrayed in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (1999), Don Lee's Country of Origin (2004), Mia Yun's Translations of Beauty (2004), and Leonard Chang's Crossings (2009). Of them, Beatty's novel is the only African American narrative. And Don Lee's narrative is an interesting twist of the black Amerasian issue since it is about a black Amerasian born to a Korean woman and an African American GI in Japan. For a critical overview of the representations of black Amerasians in Korea see Kun Jong Lee, 71.

72 See Paul Wiseman, “Ward Spins Biracial Roots into Blessing,” USA Today, 10 April 2006, C3.

73 Lundén, The United Stories of America, 63.

74 Chung, “Megatextual Readings,” 105.

75 Lee, Don, “Uncle Tong: Or, How I Learned to Speak for All Asian Americans,” in Kim-Renaud, Young-Key, Grinker, R. Richard, and Larsen, Kirk W. eds., The Sigur Center Asia Papers #20: Korean American Literature (Washington, DC: The Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, 2004), 33–35, 33.

76 Lee, Yellow, 195.

77 Lundén, 124.

78 Elaine H. Kim, “Root and Wings: An Overview of Korean American Literature 1934–2003,” in Kim-Renaud, Grinker, and Larsen, Korean American Literature, 1–18, 16.

Ibid
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