AALDP Volume 3 Cover Page and Introduction

Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 3 (2012) i-iv.   Introducing Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature By Wei Ming Dariotis AALDP is motivated by an interest in foregrounding scholarship that is useful for pedagogy. We are concerned with reshaping Asian American literary studies discourse towards practical applications in the classroom or in learning environments. What is special about this issue is the focus on mixed heritage Asian American literature. When I started working on this topic as a graduate student in the early 1990s, I worked in what felt like almost complete isolation. I had discovered Asian American literature as a senior in college, when the poet (then my creative writing classmate) Brian Komei Dempster dragged me, almost kicking and screaming, into a class taught by Shawn Wong on Chinese and Japanese American literature. By the end of my senior year, I had taken 4 classes from Shawn Wong, and served as his research assistant for the Before Columbus Foundation. His buddy, Frank Chin, came and spoke in our class and I was charged with babysitting Chin’s mixed heritage son. The poet Li-Young Lee came and spoke with a small group of Wong’s students. My biggest thrill, however, was meeting Jessica Hagedorn on a hot New York sidewalk outside the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, inside which the Before Columbus Foundation was celebrating it’s annual American Book Awards. Hagedorn was to be an awardee for her novel, Dogeaters, which had just blown my 20-year old mind. I had already applied to grad school with the intention of studying medieval English literature, but there was no going back. When I began my PhD program in the fall, I was firmly determined to study Asian American literature. At the time, I knew this field was marginal within English literary studies, a fact further reinforced when one of my new professors asked what I intended to study. When I told him, “Asian American literature,” he said, “I don’t know anything about that,” turned and never spoke to me again for 4 years. He was Chinese American. Luckily, Shirley Geok-lin Lim taught in my program, and we had a strong cohort dedicated to Asian American, African American, Chicano/a and Latina/o and post-colonial literature. My classmates and I mentored each other, and we had a few supporters amongst the faculty. Through my studies with Prof. Elliot Butler-Evans, in particular, I began to explore themes of mixed heritage identity in African American literature, and thus grounded, I sought them in Asian American literature as well. But I had few sources to study—the now substantial field of publications on the Eaton sisters, for example, had yet to begin. Prof. Lim’s introduction to Diana Chang’s Frontiers Wei Ming Dariotis is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, with an emphasis on Asian Americans and Chinese Americans of Mixed Heritage and panethnic Asian American and Chinese American Literature, Arts, and Culture, at San Francisco State University. With Laura Kin, Dariotis co-edited War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2013). ISSN: 2154-2171        AALDP|Dariotis   of Love was published in 1994—just when I was finishing my graduate coursework and it thus was a critical piece for me as I began to write my own dissertation. Now, instead of just the Eatons, Chang, Han Suyin, Ai, Mei-mei Evans, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, there are so many mixed heritage Asian American poets, novelists, memoirists, and short fiction writers out there that I can barely keep track of them all. And now, instead of working in isolation, I find myself surrounded by a deep and broadening community of scholars dedicated to mixed heritage Asian American literary studies. Just as we were finalizing editing on this issue of AALDP, I got a call from Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, asking me to consult on a special issue of the Asian American Literary Review focusing on . . . mixed heritage Asian American literature! I’m so excited that we seem to have finally reached critical mass as the mixed heritage Asian American population has not only increased exponentially, but has also come of an age to be writing and reading prolifically. This third issue of AALDP has the largest number of articles of any of our issues so far— eleven critical articles, one book review, and one interview with an author. In some ways, mixed heritage Asian American literature needs no introduction because the Eaton sisters, Chinese North Americans of mixed heritage, were among the earliest published Asian American authors, and the themes and issues explored in their work, as well as those expressed by other well-known authors such as Han Suyin and Diana Chang, were recognized as part of the Asian American literary landscape in Chan et al.’s canon-building essay, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” However, mixed heritage Asian American literature remains outside Asian American literary studies in terms of other kinds of formal institutionalization. There has yet to be published an anthology of key texts in mixed heritage Asian American literature the way there have been for Korean American, South Asian American, Filipino American, and of course Chinese and Japanese American literature, though some mixed heritage writers have been included in each of these. This literature has yet to be thoroughly studied as such, to be analyzed for specific themes, issues, and even forms that might connect authors across time, space, and culture. The articles in this Special Edition of AALDP are the beginning of such an analysis, but I hope this is just a seed planted that will grow into forests I cannot yet imagine or see. We start this issue with Smoke & Flowers: An Interview with Olivia Boler, a San Francisco-based author who’s first novel, Year of the Smoke Girl, was published in 2000, by Dry Bones Press. Boler’s second novel, The Flower Bowl Spell, was just published as an ebook. Both of her novels feature mixed heritage Chinese American protagonists, and the protagonist of the second novel is also a witch. It is Boler’s interest in multiple forms of liminality that drew me to her work. The foundations of Asian American literature from a mixed race perspective are investigated by Melissa Eriko Poulsen in her carefully researched and clearly articulated essay, “American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination.” Poulsen historicizes these works in the context of what Colleen Lye calls “yellow peril racialization” and the tension of interracial romance narratives. Poulsen hinges her argument on Susan Koshy’s description of Asian American interracial   ii      AALDP|Dariotis   relationships being split between “the territorial and the extraterritorial,” which is a particularly useful point of analysis for mixed heritage Asian American literary studies because of t (...truncated)