Why is the viewpoint of the child so pervasive in Asian American literature? How can such a characteristic help define this category, and what can it tell us about the place that Asian Americans occupy in the American racial imaginary? These questions shape Min Hyoung Song's ambitious, optimistic and even celebratory account of Asian American literature. Song's study should be situated in the context of the pessimism that has recently shadowed Asian American studies as an academic field and Asian America as a political category, not to mention the gloom surrounding the humanities, a context that Song discusses fervently. The disavowal of race that has become almost routine in the broader context of American political life emerges strikingly in the interviews with Asian American writers that Song conducted for this book. Nearly all expressed ambivalence about being described as an ethnic writer. Boldly asking “what purpose does calling a work of literature Asian American serve at the present moment?” (4), Song asserts that race continues to constitute an inescapable horizon of experience for all Americans, and a “creative limitation” for Asian American writers in particular (51). Focussing on a generation of writers mostly born after the 1965 Immigration Act, Song claims that their works perform the vital ideological function of reshaping ideas about race for a nation that can neither keep nor part with its racialized habits of thinking. Not only are they racial middlemen, as many have shown; they are “privileged children in American culture,” according to Song: the ambiguously raced, restless, striving and uncertain Americans of an equally uncertain future time (39). Song's central claim is that the condition of the child, burdened but also blessed with expectations, figures the situation of Asian American literature. Much as Wordsworth saw the child as father of the man, Song argues that Asian American writing is the future of American literature.

Numerous critics have questioned whether there exists a referent for the phrase “Asian American”; some have proposed that the category is only brought into being by means of a linguistic act. Song argues that Asian America exists as “a becoming that must be actively confronted and embraced” (48); it names “a potential future subject” and offers “alternative imaginaries of the real” (48–49). In the Deleuzean language used throughout, the term “Asian American” names “an act of involution,” or a process of multidirectional, multiscalar alliance between radically heterogeneous entities (47). Song is a realist, not a nominalist, and he sees Asian America's reality as uniquely open-ended, oriented toward a future that scarcely resembles the present. Song has in mind the likely transformation of the US into a majority–minority nation. But other forms of difference play a part as well. Deftly using recent queer theory, Song portrays the childlikeness associated with Asian Americans as both normative and strange, protected and oppressed. Structurally, Asian Americans are “queer in the sense of belonging and not-belonging in America” (41). Thinking of Asian American literature as defined by expectation and possibility, emergence and connection, allows Song to offer a well-nuanced range of readings. Established writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Karen Tei Yamashita are examined along with younger writers and emerging genres such as the office novel and the graphic narrative.

The Children of 1965 presents itself as a defense rather than a critique of Asian American literature. In equal measure, it is a defense of theory. Song asserts not only its heuristic power for literary critics but a constitutive entanglement of Asian American literature with post-structuralism. He stresses that we “cannot retreat back to a formalism that ploddingly provides close readings of one text after another” (52). His readings thus draw on a range of theoretical vocabularies, most importantly that of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. It is to Song's credit that his own writing is never impenetrable; he lucidly explains concepts designed to stagger our commonsense apprehension of the world. But there are many points at which he dilutes precisely the most radical and potentially fruitful aspects of Deleuzean thought. The commitment to univocity is ignored, in favor of an Arendtian idea of liberal personhood not entirely compatible. From Deleuze, Song mainly takes away a concept of open-ended, multivalent becoming that is then applied to personal stories and collective representations in a US-national context, instead of looking at the prepersonal affects and intensities that a more rigorous approach might have opened up. The readings do not always bear out Song's claim that Asian American literature is “a deliberate dislodging of being for a becoming that ceaselessly searches out lines of flight” (22). However, Song's study is timely and valuable. Unfailingly engaging and generous, it places Asian American literature in a broader context and demonstrates how humanities scholars can take up the necessary task of explaining themselves to a broader public audience.