Scholars of American studies often expand the discussion of American literary texts into territories unexplored by literary critics who see their purview as more narrow. For example, attention to working-class literature in the United States started largely in the books and journals in American studies rather than from, for example, the publications of the Modern Language Association. Helena Grice's slim but pioneering monograph on the interplay among fiction, history, and life-writing texts in Asian American literature similarly stakes out new territory, particularly in the way she connects the politics of Asian and Asian American history with established and emerging literary genres, most significantly narratives of transracial, transnational adoption of Chinese children, but also expatriate memoirs and geisha narratives. Her book “seeks to examine and account for [the] contemporary cultural preoccupation with Asian subject matter, by exploring the corresponding historical-political situations that have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America” (2) – and does so successfully.

Grice focusses first on expatriate memoirs of China's Cultural Revolution, noting, interestingly, that it seems to have fallen to expatriate memoir writers to lead us in reconsidering the Cultural Revolution. This development has been problematic – symptomatic, she claims, of a return to Orientalism as famously described by Edward Said. Grice's argument is intriguing, but underdeveloped. Although she correctly notes that such memoirs – particularly in how they are marketed in the West – can play into oversimplified perceptions of Communist China, it is not clear that such writers must be accountable for ignorant readings. It seems hard to exaggerate the horror of the Revolution. Moreover, Grice engages Said's work itself only lightly. To her credit, Grice acknowledges that the diversity of views represented by the texts she highlights complicates generalizations, and asks whether the growing attention to Asia's twentieth-century history, including her own, are “furthering a multicultural agenda, and increasing inter-ethnic and inter-cultural awareness and understanding” (43).

In the book's second section, Grice discusses contemporary, transracial adoption narratives, which have become especially plentiful in the last two decades as increasing numbers of non-Asian families in the United States have adopted children from abroad, especially from China. Because so many of those adopted children are girls who were abandoned in China because of its one-child policy, Grice notes that this trend is an “especially gendered phenomenon” (44) which represents “a new perspective upon transglobal relations, and the meeting and connecting of cultures” (45). Although she admires some of the texts' compassion, particularly books meant for internationally adopted children, she notes that they typically gloss the social and political forces that have created and perpetuated the tragedy of children abandoned because they were female.

Grice examines American representations of geisha society and Korean expatriate writing in her final two chapters. She argues that the exoticized depiction of geisha society, such as Arthur Golden's 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha, constitutes a “neo-Orientalism,” reinscribing the stereotypical feminization of the East by the colonial-minded West as described by Said. Works by expatriate Koreans, by contrast, have often grappled openly with the troubled history of Korea in the twentieth century, including the bifurcation of the peninsula after the Korean War and the dictatorial rule of Kim Il-Sung in the resultant North Korea. Many of these texts exhibit “a noticeable history of political activism” (93) that remains evident among Korean writers in the United States, where many have encountered racist treatment.

The book ends rather abruptly. A concluding chapter would have tied all of the chapters – each of which is individually rich – together in a clearer, more consistent argument. Nevertheless, Grice insightfully and sensitively analyzes hundreds of texts from multiple Asian cultures and in several genres, making this volume a valuable addition to several disciplines, including American studies, ethnic studies, literary studies, and diaspora studies.