Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Understanding Gish Jen
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/hoj * http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/sites/default/files/HoJennifer_AbbrCV.pdf * https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2015/7588.html * http://aaastudies.org/content/index.php/77-home/97-jennifer-ho
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2004030577
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2004030577
HEADING: Ho, Jennifer Ann, 1970-
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670 __ |a Consumption and identity in Asian American coming-of-age novels, 2004: |b ECIP t.p. (Jennifer Ann Ho) data view (b. 03/08/70)
670 __ |a Understanding contemporary American literature, 2015 : |b CIP t.p. (Jennifer Ann Ho)
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PERSONAL
Born March 8, 1970.
EDUCATION:University of California, Santa Barbara, B.A., 1992; Boston University, M.A., 1996, Ph.D. 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, associate director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, 2005—, adjunct faculty, 2006 —, associate professor, 2011—, director of graduate studies, 2013—.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Journal of Women’s History, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Global South.
SIDELIGHTS
Jennifer Ann Ho earned her bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1992, and she went on to complete her master of arts degree at Boston University four years later. Ho remained at Boston while working toward her doctorate, which she completed in 2003. Ho then continued her career at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and she became associate director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, in 2005, an adjunct faculty member in 2006, and associate professor in 2011. Her research and teaching is centered on the intersections of Multiethnic American identities, Asian American identities, critical race theory, and Contemporary American literature and Critical Race Theory. Ho’s articles on related topics have appeared in such periodicals as the Journal of Women’s History, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Global South. Her first book, Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, was released in 2005, and it was followed ten years later by two additional volumes: Understanding Gish Jen and Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels.
Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture
In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Ho offers a critical and comparative discussion on racial categorization and racial identity, specifically as it applies to Asian American literature and culture. She is particularly focused on intersections between Asian Americans and racial ambiguity (Ho identifies as Chinese Jamaican, and she cites other famously “ambiguous” Asian Americans such as Tiger Woods). In fact, Ho reports that Woods identifies as “Cablinasian” (a mix of Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian). From there, the author turns her attention to Asian American literature and its reach. She also shares personal stories of her family and of her own experiences regarding racial identity and racial ambiguity. Ho traces her roots from Hong Kong and Jamaica, and she comments on the traditions of each heritage.
Lauding the book in Choice, Y. Shu announced: “Ho’s work breaks new ground and reworks what Lisa Lowe calls the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of Asian American studies. Kristin Roebuck, writing on the University of San Francisco Web site, was also impressed, and she observed: “Ho is a professor of English and comparative literature, but her eclectic text offers something for everyone, ranging as it does from military history to the history of golf, from canonized literature to popular culture and digital ephemera like blogs.”
Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels
With Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels, Ho focuses exclusively on portrayals of Asian Americans in literature, and not just any literature. Bildungsroman (i.e. coming-of-age novels) often center on consumption, the author notes, and this is especially true in regards to portrayals of Asian Americans. Portrayals of Asian Americans making, serving, and consuming food, offer several cultural insights, Ho asserts. Preparing and serving food perpetuates ideas of servitude, while consuming food insinuates ideas of consuming culture.
As Jenny Wills put it in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, “where Ho’s contribution . . . is in her deliberate focus on Asian/American youth in her analysis of the ‘integral connections between ontology and food, linking adolescent emotional maturation with ethnic identity development’ . . . Ho does not engage critically with scholarship on childhood and adolescence, but she does study Bildungsromans with protagonists who are young people moving toward adulthood, and she focuses on youth in her discussion of food issues often represented in Asian/American literature.” Wills went on to conclude that “Ho’s book stands as a useful foundation for thinking through these new texts that are dealing with consumption and Asian/American coming of age in provocative and innovative ways.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, December, 2015, Y. Shu, review of Racial ambiguity in Asian American Culture; June, 2016, J.R. Wendland, review of Understanding Gish Jen.
Jeunesse: Young People Texts Cultures, summer, 2014, Jenny Wills Young, review of Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels.
ONLINE
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Department of English Web site, http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/ (May 31, 2017), author profile.
University of San Francisco Web site, https://www.usfca.edu (May 31, 2017), Kristin Roebuck, review of Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture.*
JENNIFER HO
CONTACT
jho@email.unc.edu
Greenlaw 205/442
(919) 962-8478
Professor
Associate Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities
My research and teaching interests are in Asian American, Multiethnic American, Contemporary American literature and Critical Race Theory. In particular, I am interested in the construction of contemporary American identities—the topic of my first book, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005)—and anti-racist activism/education. My book, Racial Ambiguity in Contemporary Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015) examines the theme of racial ambiguity in various modes of cultural production (oral history, new media, literature, film, sports journalism) created predominantly by and about Asian Americans in the late-20th/early 21st century. Other book projects include a critical biography on contemporary American writer Gish Jen, Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press, Fall 2015) and a co-edited (along with James Donahue and Shaun Morgan) collection of essays, Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas (under review at The Ohio University State Press). I am also co-editing (along with Dr. Jenny Wills) an "Appraoches to Teaching Asian North American Literature" through MLA (in-progress). In the future I hope to work on a critical autobiography about breast cancer and a study of the Chinese diaspora in the Global South.
I am also currently the Associate Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Hear Jennifer discuss her new book, Racial Ambiguity in Contemporary Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015), on a recent episode of WUNC's "The State of Things." Dr. Ho also appeared on "The State of Things" in 2014 to talk about "pink ribbon culture" and "being Asian American in Dixie."
She has also been interviewed on how food plays a crucial role in how she identifies as a Chinese-Jamaican with The Splendid Table.
TEACHING AWARDS
Chapman Family Teaching Award, 2012
HISTORY
Hire Date: 2005
PhD: Boston University, 2003
MA: Boston University, 1996
BA: University of California at Santa Barbara, 1992
Curriculum Vitae
RESEARCH GROUPS AND INTERESTS
Group IX - Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
Group VII - American Literature from 1900 to the Present
Asian American Literature
Contemporary American Literature
Critical Race Studies
Cultural Studies
Pedagogy
Jennifer Ann Ho
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS
! July 2013-present.
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
! July 2011-present.
Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
o Research and teaching specialization: Asian American literature and culture,
multiethnic American literature, contemporary American literature, race and
ethnicity theory.
• July 2006-present.
Adjunct faculty, Department of American Studies,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
EDUCATION
! Ph.D., Jan. 2003
o English, Boston University
! M.A., May 1996
o English, Boston University
! B.A., June 1992
o English, University of California at Santa Barbara
PUBLICATIONS
Book
! Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York:
Routledge Press, 2005.
Articles
! “No F****** Pink Ribbons: A Blog about one Asian American Woman’s Anger with
Her Breast Cancer.” Amerasia Journal (Spring 2013) 119-127.
! “Being Held Accountable.” The Journal of Women’s History (Winter 2010) 190-96.
! “The Place of Transgressive Texts in Asian American Epistemology.” Modern Fiction
Studies (Spring 2010) 205-225.
! “Letter from an American Professor: An Asian American Education in the South.”
The Global South (Fall 2009) 14-31.
! “A Tale of Two Courses: Conflict and Community in the Asian American
Classroom.” Journal of Asian American Studies (June 2006) 190-194.
! “Ambiguous Movements: Paisley Rekdal’s Passing Identity in The Night My Mother
Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In.” Women and Performance Journal
(Winter 2005) 141-165.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Greenlaw Hall, C.B. #3520
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
(919) 962-8478 / jho@email.unc.edu
INVITED GUEST LECTURES
! Keynote speaker, “Why Asian American Studies Matters,” Triangle-Area Asian
American Student Conference, Duke University, Durham, NC, April 16, 2011.
! “Hybrid Realities, Multiracial Identities, and Fusion Food: Eating Across Ethnicities
in Contemporary Asian American Literature,” Asian American Studies Institute
Speaker Series. University of Connecticut at Storrs, Storrs, CT, April 19, 2010.
! “Ambiguous Americans: Race and the State of Asian America,” 16th Biennial
Midwest Asian American Student Conference. Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH,
March 6, 2010.
! “From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American: Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed
Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Internment,” Mixed Race in the Age of
Obama Conference, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, March 5, 2010.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
! “Anti-Sentimental Loss: The Stories of Transracial/Transnational Adoptees in the
Blogosphere,” Association for Asian American Studies, Seattle, WA, April 17-21,
2013.
! “Has Asian American Literary Studies Failed?”, (roundtable) Modern Language
Association, Boston, MA, January 6-9, 2013.
! “Which Bodies Matter Most?: Asian American Transgressive Texts,” American
Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 15-18, 2012.
! Chair, “From the PhD to the Tenure Pipeline: Mentoring Students of Color in
Academia” (roundtable) American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico,
November 15-18, 2012.
AWARDS
! Fall 2012, Chapman Family Teaching Fellowship, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
! Spring 2010, Distinguished Publication by an Assistant Professor, Department of
English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
! Summer 2009, Center for Global Initiatives Course Development Grant, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
! Summer 2009, APPLES Uelteschi Service Learning Course Development Grant,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
! Spring 2008, Institute for Arts and Humanities Fellowship, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
! 2007-2008, Junior Faculty Achievement Award, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
! 2006-2007, Spray-Randleigh Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
! Summer 2006, Provost’s International First-year Seminar Course Development
Grant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
! Summer 2006, Honors Course Development Grant, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
Understanding Gish Jen
Jennifer Ann Ho
An examination of the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice
Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a "typical American" writer, Gish Jen, the author of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town; a collection of short stories, Who's Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic, and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience: immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one's path in life, and the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Yale Review.
Ho traces the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen's observations about life in the United States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected in Jen's accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic experiences that shape all our lives.
Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines Jen's major works, showing how she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. A final chapter examines her essays and concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both teaching and future scholarship.
Jennifer Ann Ho, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaches courses in Asian American literature, multiethnic American literature, and contemporary American literature. She is the author of Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels and Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture and has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, and Amerasia Journal, among others.
“Capacious in its analysis and well-researched in its approach, Jennifer Ho’s treatment of Gish Jen’s oeuvre— inclusive of fiction and creative non-fiction—is impressive, eloquent, and unmatched. A very welcome and smart analysis of a significant American author.”—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, University of Connecticut
“Engagingly and even delightfully written, Understanding Gish Jen provides a much-needed resource for students, teachers, fans, and scholars alike. Ho’s survey provides crucial insights about the context, content, and form of Jen’s oeuvre. Understanding Gish Jen constitutes a major critical contribution to our understanding of this important American author; no reader of Gish Jen’s work should be without this book.”—Sue J. Kim, professor of English and co-director of the Center for Asian American Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell
“In Understanding Gish Jen, Jennifer Ann Ho offers a walk through the works of one of our most important American writers. Jen is, as Ho describes her, ‘a writer with an exceptional eye and ear for the comically absurd parts of contemporary life,’ an American writer with her finger on the pulse of what divides us and what brings us together. Ho leaves us with the desire to read and re-read the works of this great contemporary writer, to delight in her humor, to ruminate on her wisdom.”—Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, author of Beyond Literary Chinatown, winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation
Jennifer Ho
Interior West/South
Jennifer Ho
Term: 2012-14
Department of English & Comparative Literature
UNC Chapel Hill
Greenlaw Hall, CB#3520
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
Email:jho AT email.unc DOT edu
Jennifer Ann Ho is currently an Associate Professor in the English and Comparative Literature Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests are in Asian American, Multiethnic American and Contemporary American literature and popular culture. Her first book, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005) examines the intersection of coming-of-age, ethnic identity formation, and foodways in late 20th CenturyAsian American coming-of-age narratives and American popular culture. Her current book manuscript, “What ARE You?” Racial Ambiguity in Contemporary Asian American Culture investigates the theme of racial ambiguity in various modes of cultural production (oral history, new media, literature, film, sports journalism) created predominantly by and about Asian Americans in the late-20th century.
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Print Marked Items
Ho, Jennifer Ann: Understanding Gish Jen
J.R. Wendland
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.10 (June 2016): p1475.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Ho, Jennifer Ann. Understanding Gish Jen. South Carolina, 2015. 133p bibl index afp ISBN 9781611175882 cloth,
$39.95; ISBN 9781611175899 ebook, $21.99
(cc) 534278
PS3560
MARC
Ho (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) provides concise discussion of the novels, a short story collection, and the
nonfiction prose of critically acclaimed Chinese American author Gish Jen (b. 1955). Jen's short stories have appeared
in major "best of" anthologies since the 1990s, and her novelswhich treat ethnic identity, immigration, culture,
religious identity, gender, and other major social relationshipshave sold widely The book is part of the
"Understanding Contemporary American Literature" series, which is designed to introduce new readers to famous
authors, and accordingly Ho does not develop deep critical interventions into Jen's literary contributions. Despite the
book's intentional lack of depth, the bibliography provides an excellent list of primary sources, interviews with Jen,
and some advanced literary criticism. Though Ho touches on some of the major themes of Jen's work, other topics
important to Jen remain disconnected from her fiction: e.g., her interest in the concept of the "interdependent self" is
addressed almost exclusively with reference to her nonfiction. This book is a useful starting point for those wishing to
familiarize themselves with this important writer. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lowerdivision undergraduates
and general readers.J. R. Wendland, Grand Valley State University
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Wendland, J.R. "Ho, Jennifer Ann: Understanding Gish Jen." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries,
June 2016, p. 1475. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942689&it=r&asid=e1f18d1a9f5dff680cf5e5f2d08ffcb8.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942689
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Ho, Jennifer Ann. Racial ambiguity in Asian
American culture
Y. Shu
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.04 (Dec. 2015): p576.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Ho, Jennifer Ann. Racial ambiguity in Asian American culture. Rutgers, 2015. 215p bibl index afp ISBN
9780813570709 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9780813570693 pbk, $31.95; ISBN 9780813570716 ebook, $31.95
(cc) 531667
PS153
201435922 CIP
Looking through the dual lenses of critical and comparative race studies, Ho (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
offers an engaging and provocative reflection on racial categorization, epistemological indeterminacy, and identity
complexity in Asian American literature and culture. She coins the phrase "racial ambiguity" and examines the
phenomenon historically and culturally, from the Japanese American internment experience to the conspicuous case of
Tiger Woods, who articulates his own identity in terms of multiracial or "Cablinasian" (Caucasian, Black, American
Indian, Asian) formation. To complicate such formation further, Ho not only explores transnational Asian American
adult adoptees in cyberspace but also questions whether Asian American literature should include work by nonAsian
American authors. She concludes by giving the issue a personal touch: she shares her own family story, which
connects her paternal and maternal sides through diverse geographical locations, from Hong Kong to Jamaica, and the
different cultural traditions of East Asia and the Caribbean, even though her parents are both of Chinese descent. In
that sense, Ho's work breaks new ground and reworks what Lisa Lowe calls the "heterogeneity, hybridity, and
multiplicity" of Asian American studies. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lowerdivision undergraduates and
above; general readers.Y. Shu, Texas Tech University
Shu, Y.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Shu, Y. "Ho, Jennifer Ann. Racial ambiguity in Asian American culture." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, Dec. 2015, p. 576+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA437505853&it=r&asid=2aa5a973178aee48a9cccf947d9ec153.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A437505853
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Culinary culture in Asian/North American
ComingofAge Literature
Jenny Wills
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.
6.1 (Summer 2014): p163.
COPYRIGHT 2014 University of Winnipeg, Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures
http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc
Full Text:
Ho, Jennifer Ann. Consumption and Identity in Asian American ComingofAge Novels. 2005. New York: Routledge,
2012.212 pp. $44.95 pb. 9780415646949. Print.
Recently, a librarian colleague shared with me an image on social media (see fig. 1). The image captured an actual
sign from the Young Adults section of a library with the suggestion that patrons "[t]ake out a good book today!" in
what can be described only as "Orientalized" roman lettering. The caption accompanies an image of a takeout paper
food container featuring a pagoda pattern stamped in red ink. Jennifer Ann Ho, whose study Consumption and Identity
in Asian American ComingofAge Novels (released in hardcover in 2005 and in paperback in 2012) is the focus of
this review essay, comments on the ways that this particular kind of Orientalism is both offensive and unsurprising.
With this simple poster, young people are interpellated into an Orientalist position that conflates literature and "Asian"
foods (and by extension cultures) as things that can be obtained and consumed easily.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
As Robert JiSong Ku, Martin Manalansan, and Anita Mannur note, "Asians in the United States have long been
associatedoften reluctantly or against their will, as well as voluntarily or with pleasurewith images of and practices
regarding food" (3). Ho elaborates on this idea:
Asian Americans continually [are] portrayed
in terms of their consumptive practices. From
19th century pamphlets depicting Chinese
men as vermin‐eating opium addicts to
contemporary media portraits of Asians in
subservient positions as cooks and waiters, the
conflation of Asian Americans with preparing,
eating, or serving food reinforces their marginal
status. (15)
Indeed, these are the tropes to which numerous Asian/Americanists fasten their scholarly interventions. From SauLing
Wong's foundational literary study of "Big Eaters" and "Treat Lovers" entitled Reading Asian American
Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance and Wenying Xu's Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American
Literature to Anita Mannur's impactful book Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, literary
scholars have found ample fodder in this growing field. Cultural theorists have offered significant studies as well,
from Lily Cho's Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada to Martin Manalansan's chapter
"Cooking Up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food and Asian American Television
Audiences." These examples demonstrate that critical works showcasing the centrality of food in the construction of
Asian/North American identities are numerous and address diverse topics.
Where Ho's contribution differs from these is in her deliberate focus on Asian/American youth in her analysis of the
"integral connections between ontology and food, linking adolescent emotional maturation with ethnic identity
development" (11). Ho does not engage critically with scholarship on childhood and adolescence, but she does study
Bildungsromans with protagonists who are young people moving toward adulthood, and she focuses on youth in her
discussion of food issues often represented in Asian/American literature. While Ho's study does not include Asian/
American literary works directed to young readers such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, Laurence Yep's
Golden Mountain Chronicles series, or Anjali Banerjee's Maya Running, she focuses on representational issues related
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to what Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee contend is the struggle among Asian/ American young people to resist being
"neglected or at best homogenized into a social group ... deviant from 'normal' teenage Americans" (1). "These young
protagonists' relationships to food," Ho explains, "represent their struggle to embrace an American identity, forcing
them to acknowledge their bi~ or multicultural status as hyphenated peoples in a country that historically has dealt
with race in black and white terms" (3).
Ho's book links important themes in Asian/ American literature (such as intergenerational conflict, assimilation, interethnic
and panAsian experiences, and "Asian Americanization" [5]) through analyses of young people's alimentary
and cultural consumption practices. Analyzing six novels from the Asian/American canon, Ho argues that her chosen
writers "use food metaphors, images, and tropes to convey the process of ethnic identity development in ways that
counteract negative Asian stereotypes promoted in mainstream American culture" (1 9). She highlights four important
ways in which consumption is represented in these works: "historical pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion" (3).
Ho's categories also elucidate the patterns of other similar literatures. I emulate Ho's framework in the structure of this
essay, in which I review a selection of Asian/Canadian comingofage texts. In doing so, I aim to take up Eleanor Ty's
important imperative to move "selfconsciously ... beyond national boundaries" in the recognition that a "crossborder
comparative reading is fruitful ... especially in our transnational and diasporic world" (29).
Historical Pride: Yow Jow Gwai and Chicken Pot Pie
In her reading of Donald Duk, by "writer, provocateur, and pioneer" Frank Chin, Ho argues that the twelveyearold
eponymous protagonist develops "'yellow' pride" by consuming Chinese food prepared for him by his father, King. Ho
argues that Chin "reclaims food as a source of ethnic pride rather than a mark of ridicule by using food as a coded
language, a series of signs that signify pride in Chinese American culture and history" (24) as opposed to the ways it
has been represented in other spaces stereotypically as shameful. "Food in Donald Duk," Ho argues, "communicates
identity but it also conveys storieshistorical, familial, and ancestralabout Chinese American life" (30). Part of
Donald's coming of age, then, is his transformation from an initial resentment of his Asian/American identity to his
appreciation of and even affection for the Chinese and Chinese American cultural histories he comes to devour. This
is, according to Ho, facilitated through the consumption of "traditional" Chinese foods.
Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand also reflects acts of historical and cultural reclamation through food in
connection to young people's coming of age. As with Chin's eponymous young person, initially Lai's Chinese
Canadian adoptee protagonist rejects the Chinese ingredients that appear to be "creepy things that had something to do
with her, and that she would have to eat" (32) and begrudges being connected with those foods: "Her mother had made
a point of teaching her to cook Chinese. She had always resisted those lessons. She resented them. Her hand had been
clumsy beside her mother's practiced one. Teach me lasagne instead. Teach me chicken pot pie/ she would complain,
to no avail" (114). Of course, the complexity of Artemis's rejection of Chinese food and her racial identity is
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exacerbated by the fact that she is raised by white parents. Her adoption causes additional complications when later
she tries to recuperate her missing ancestry and, by extension, a sense of ethnic pride through the consumption of
various food items and customs. On a "roots trip" to Hong Kong, Artemis's "search for shadows makes her hungry" as
she wanders in and out of crowded streets, ordering "wonton or fishball noodles in a clumsy accent" (124) that
betrays her foreignness but reveals as well her effort to make connections with the Chinese ancestry that was taken
from her as a child. "Ethnic pride" through eating does not come as easily to Artemis as it does to Donald Duk, despite
her hunger for it. Whereas Donald's culinary role model ties food to historical pride, Artemis's white mother knows
the recipes but cannot provide their cultural and historical context, which is what her daughter craves so much.
Nonetheless, Lai's adoptee protagonist reaches for a connection to her Chinese past and her Asian/Canadian present
through acts of consuming Chinese food.
These narratives are not exceptional; consumption practices appear commonly as conduits for ethnic pride in
Asian/North American literature, for instance when Jessica Hagedorn's Rio revels in the private meals shared with her
grandmother in Dogeaters or when Amy Tan's Ruth evokes food memories of spicy lala turnips in The Bonesetter's
Daughter. Ho's analysis of Donald Duk, however, hinges on her observation that Chin's novel also reclaims a version
of masculinity through Chinese cooking that had been denied previously. In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity
in Asian America, David Eng argues that "economic hardships feminize Chinese American men by forcing them into
professions typically associated with women: cook, waiter, tailor, and laundry man" (92). Eng's argument is relevant in
this context particularly. Chin's novel, according to Ho, "challenges both the late 19th century and mid20th century
portraits of timid and effeminate Chinese cooks and affirms the virility of Asian American men through the
reclamation of the kitchen as an arena of pride and power" (40). A similar effect is achieved in Diamond Grill, which
follows the coming of age of Fred Wah's memoirist narrator in an Edmonton diner in which Asian/Canadian men are
cooks and waiters whose behaviour mirrors Ho's gladiatorial metaphor that deems Donald Duk's father a "warrior chef
immersed in masculinity and warfare" (45). Diamond Grill begins with Freddy's observation: "The kitchen doors can
be kicked with such a slap they're heard all the way up to the soda fountain. ... Shouts in the kitchen. Fish an I Side a
friesl Over easy! On brown! I pick up an order and turn, back through the doors, whap! My foot registers more than its
own imprint, starts to read the stain of memory" (1). Conjured as a chaotic space in which workers violently kick the
swinging door that separates the kitchen from the dining room into action, the Diamond Grill, at least as it is
conceived of by Freddy (Wah's narrator during his adolescence), is a place in which Asian/Canadian masculinity and
history can be reclaimed.
Consumerism: "You Are What You Buy"
In another section of her book, Ho considers the ways in which young protagonists consume commercial goods and
how their purchases can be connected to both their identities and their eating practices. Drawing on Lois Ann
Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, she explores the links between "consumption as spending, consumption
as eating and the consumption of media culture" for Asian/American youth. She argues that Yamanaka's protagonist,
Lovey Nariyoshi, strives for American assimilation by consuming a variety of products and images that "enable ... her
role playing of middleclass white fantasies" (55). This behaviour is not unique to Asian/ American youth; as Ho
points out, other literary texts such as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye depict similar iterations of young people
consuming race and ethnicity via cultural objects. In her reading of Wild Meat, Ho contends that "Lovey's preference
for mass marketed brand name products advertised in mainstream media over organic and more natural food used by
her family becomes a critical means of negotiating the different facets of her class and ethnic identity" (51). Lovey's
conspicuous consumption of "American" culture reflects both the conventional assimilation trajectory found in many
Asian/American texts and one of its dominant tropes: intergenerational conflict. In this case, the indistinctness of
massproduced American culture is idealized over the Othered and alienating food of the Asian home.
Ho's analysis of Lovey's plight for assimilation in relation to her consumption of media culture highlights the teen's
consistent reverence for "light" qualities and her rejection of "dark" ones. For instance, Ho draws our attention to the
fact that Lovey worships "[bjlond hair ... Betty Cooper and Marcia Brady. Barbie and Twiggy" and maligns "[b] lack
hair ... Veronica Lodge, Alexandra Cabot. Serena, Samantha Stevens' cousin, Big Ethel, Nancy Kwan, and all the evil
stepmothers in Walt Disney Movies" (28). Lovey, Ho contends, admires a version of American whiteness that is
shored up by the dismissal and rejection of the same darkness that she embodies. Most notable, Ho notes, is Lovey's
early declaration of her love for Shirley Templeher "perfect blond ringlets and pink cheeks and pout lips" (3),
particularly as it connects Lovey to other young people of colour who experience racial melancholia. (1)
Shirley Temple makes a notable appearance in a number of Asian/Canadian comingofage literary texts, signifying
again the pinnacle of desirable whiteness consumed by young people who feel racial inferiority. In The Jade Peony,
Wayson Choy's girl narrator imagines herself a "Shirley Temple princess" (38) with tap shoes, curlingiron ringlets,
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and a "stiff white taffeta dress" she begs her stepmother to buy (41). JookLiang fears that her PohPoh's
proclamations are truethat she is not "Canada" but "China" (37)and part of her effort to delineate herself as
Canadian is to feast on Shirley Temple movies and to perform her idol's dance steps "as deftly as Shirley herself' (38).
Her hopes are blighted, however, when she realizes that she cannot become Shirley:
My heart almost burst with expectation. I looked
again into the hall mirror, seeking Shirley Temple
with her dimpled smile and perfect white‐skin
features. Bluntly reflected back at me was a broad
sallow moon with slit dark eyes, topped by a helmet
of black hair. I looked down. Jutting out from a too‐large
taffeta dress were two spindly legs matched by
a pair of bony arms. Something cold clutched at my
stomach, made me swallow. (43)
JookLiang's fantasy is broken with the realization that she cannot attain Shirley's "perfect whiteskin features" and, as
Michelle Hartley observes, the illusion is shattered a second time when, daydreaming that she is sharing a banana split
with her idol, JookLiang is interrupted by PohPoh's insistence that she eat a plate of chicken feet. According to
Hartley, JookLing is "pull[ed] out of the dream" of "middleclass whiteness and Hollywood consumer culture" and is
"present[ed] instead with chicken feet, traditional Chinese fare" (61). Consuming this food instead of the American
treat she daydreams of, JookLiang eventually forgets about Shirley and begins ruminating on Chinese/Canadian
history.
It is not a coincidence that JookLiang and Lovey, like Morrison's Pecola Breedlove before them, are drawn to but
ultimately are disappointed by their love for the iconographic Shirley Temple, a figure whose idealized version of
childhood exposes how "the symbolic properties and qualities that define the cute in a white supremacist culture
(white skin, blond hair, blue eyes)" (Merish 184) form a mode that interpellates and rejects them simultaneously. As
such, when Ann DuCille suggests that Shirley Temple represents the "dreams of little girls" (12), in these instances
those dreams inevitably include the wish to obtain at least a proximity to an idealized girlhood that is coded as white.
In "Wounded Beauty," Anne Anlin Cheng suggests that characters like Pecola Breedlove are drawn to Shirley Temple
not only because they have "learn[ed] racialaesthetic discrimination" (199) but also because they see Shirley and
other white girls being treated with care. Thus, it is not just a white girlhood that is coveted but also the social
interactions that accompany that valued version of childhood; JookLiang, Lovey, and Pecola view with longing the
"tender handling of little white girls" (Cheng, "Wounded" 199), in contrast with their own experiences of invisibility,
rejection, and even shame.
Like Lovey, who covets a particular image of whiteness that she cannot attain, JookLiang's consumption of Shirley
Temple's persona is represented as a form of childish naivete that she must outgrow. Ho's observation that Yamanaka
(in Wild Meat) "critiques the consumption of goods as a means of affirming identity" (53) but offers the consumption
of food as a suitable alternative can be extended to Choy's Asian/Canadian comingofage text as well. Perhaps too
obviously and without subtlety, Lovey and JookLiang are both characterized as misguided in their goals, and Shirley
Temple becomes an obstacle they must overcome on their journey toward Asian/North American subjectivity.
Mourning: Loss, Exile, Miso
Ho's analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge hinges on the ways that "food
mediates both mourning and ethnic identity" in both novels (80). Leaning heavily on Anne Anlin Cheng's thesis in her
critical volume The Melancholy of Race, Ho argues that certain food practices, including the honouring of deceased
ancestors with food offerings, express "not only grief but grievancesboth mourning and protest" (80). By focusing on
the adolescent children of women displaced in the United States as a result of war (the Korean War in the case of
Keller's novel, the war in Vietnam in Cao's), Ho suggests that food plays an integral role in the recuperation of ethnic
pride in the face of brutal dislocation and loss. This is particularly crucial for the young protagonists of Comfort
Woman and Monkey Bridge, who are raised in American societies in which the pressure to assimilate is compounded
by their mothers' "Asian war victim" statuses (81).
Food, particularly "traditional" Japanese food, is a channel for maintaining cultural and emotional pride in the face of
a likewise virulent and violent experience of exile in Joy Kogawa's Asian/Canadian comingofage novel, Obasan. (2)
Presented as a series of recollections triggered by the recent death of the nisei protagonist's uncle, Obasan recounts
Naomi Nakane's childhood experiences of Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War. (3) When
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Naomi comes across letters written by her aunt Emily during the initial period of evacuation, it is revealed that the
prohibition of Japanese food and ingredients was one of the many ways Japanese Canadians endured forced
acculturation. Emily writes: "The mover, Crone, is sending our boxed goods, beds, and Japanese food suppliesshoyu,
rice, canned mirinzuke, green tea. I'm taking the Japanese dishes, trays and bowls. Can't get any more miso now"
(129). After the family is interned in a private residence in southern Alberta, their retention of those food items,
ingredients, and apparatuses illustrates a desire to maintain ethnic pride in the face of evacuation. The continued
preparing and consuming of "Japanese food"the "misoshiru, smelling of brine and the sea," the "dried fiddleheads
with their slightly rough asparagus texture [that] have been soaked and are cooking in soy sauce sugar base with thin
slivers of meat and mushroom," the "salty, halfdried cucumber and crisp yellow radish pickles" (157)exemplifies a
private subversion of the racialized power systems that sought to make Japanese ethnicity a source of shame. (4)
These moments in Obasan reflect Ho's thesis, particularly insofar as "food expresses the trauma of [characters']
displacement" (80). In her reading of Thanh in Monkey Bridge, Ho makes observations that might also apply to
Kogawa's novel: "[Thanh] uses food rituals to negotiate the melancholia that she endures as an exile, who has lost all
that is familiar" (83). In Obasan, Japanese foodfamiliar food from the family's former home lifeis the only way that
the characters can cling to the ethnic pride stolen from them through internment. Similar to Akiko/Soon Hyo's frantic
ingestion of Korean soil as her homeland is taken from her in Comfort Woman, the Nakanes consume the Japanese
culture that the Canadian government has tried to make shameful to them.
So what is to be made of Naomi's older brother, Stephen, and his unwavering refusal to eat Japanese food, his
insistence on peanut butter sandwiches instead of sticky rice balls? Ho argues that some Asian/American youth
struggle to overcome their racial melancholia and as a result cannot (or will not) consume dishes that represent their
lost cultures. As she observes of the young protagonist in Monkey Bridge, "[u]nlike other Vietnamese characters, who
eat dishes from their former homeland out of exilic longing for Viet Nam or, as in Thanh's case, as a means of
commemorating the dead, Mai can only detail, not dine on, Vietnamese meals, remaining an outside observer but not a
participant to Vietnamese consumption" (88). Ho suggests that racial and ethnic hybridity results in a cultural
contradiction that eradicates Mai's appetite for Vietnamese food. In a more extreme version of this refusal to eat dishes
from one's ancestral culture, Akiko/Soon Hyo's daughter in Comfort Woman "def [ies] her mother's diet" through
anorexia, an eating disorder that, as Ho argues, "signifies the instability of Beccah's racial identity" (95).
In Obasan, Stephen does not develop anorexia, but he does rebuff his aunt's attempts to feed him Japanese dishes.
"Not that kind of food," he snaps when Obasan offers him a rice ball (136), insisting instead on peanut butter
sandwiches and soup (182). Whereas Naomi is enthusiastic in her consumption of Japanese food prepared by her aunt
as a way to mitigate the loss of ethnic pride, Stephen's shame over being Japanese Canadian is so deeply ingrained that
he rejects any and all cultural signifiers linked to Japan and to Japanese identity. He is, as Wenying Xu implies in
Eating Identities, a version of John Okada's Ichiro in NoNo Boy, "ventjing] his hatred for being a 'Jap'" (29) by
rejecting the food, customs, and people he blames as responsible for his own victimhood. While negotiated distinctly
through the consumption or the rejection of Japanese food, for both Naomi and Stephen, food is a cultural object
through which they can articulate their differing experiences of Asian/Canadian identity.
Fusion: "EqualOpportunity Eaters"
Ho's final chapter explores Asian/American youth whose processes of gaining ethnic pride through food does not
occur through assimilative practices of consuming socalled American cuisine but instead are enacted by resisting
"assimilat[ion] into an American melting pot" (112) and, as a result, by defying the traditionally binary and
unidirectional trajectory of acculturation. Ho points out that Gus Lee's China Boy and Gish Jen's Mona and the
Promised Land feature young protagonists who have "picked ethnic affiliations that combine their Chinese ancestry
with their chosen peer groups, black and Jewish respectively" (112); as a result, "fusion cooking comes to symbolize
their comingofage and ethnic affiliations" (113). In her analysis of China Boy, Ho argues that interethnic
consumption offers protagonist Kai the opportunity to survive in the San Francisco Panhandle neighbourhood, where
he is the "only Asian, the only nonblack" (Lee 14). Kai adopts a multiethnic approach to identity that is facilitated
through his shared lunches with friends from many racial and ethnic backgrounds. Ho argues that Kai's inter ethnic
eating is "a means for him to find, solidify, and renew himself as a multiply identified Asian American subject" (117).
In Mona and the Promised Land, the titular character's journey is much more intentional: Mona Chang chooses
deliberately to identify as Jewish American and, as Ho argues, "Jen demonstrates the fluidity of Mona's subjectivity
through food tropes, as food, both in its material form as well as its symbolic guise, signals multiethnic identification"
(124). In the novel, the narrator describes Mona's first symbolic and later official conversion to Judaism in connection
to food: "before you can say matzoh ball, Mona too is turning Jewish" (32). The argument that fusion cooking allows
these Asian/American young people to identify as American outside of traditional frameworks is reiterated by Mona
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herself: "Jewish is American. ... American means being whatever you want, and I happen to pick being Jewish" (49).
Rightly, Ho problematizes Mona's conclusions: "Mona cannot be Jewish simply because she knows what schmaltz is
or because she eats matzoh ball soup" (128). Mona's coming of age includes the recognition that ethnicity cannot be
simply declared but "always requires constant scrutiny and questioning" (128).
In what is perhaps the most resonant section of her book, Ho's readings of these two young people posit them as
agents in the conscious construction of ethnicity outside of the foreignervs.American binary that is often at the core
of Asian/American works:
Fusion cooking represents the promises and pitfalls
of cross‐ethnic identification, much like the process
of Americanization itself. As such, it guarantees
to be a powerful symbol for both the limitless
possibilities of identification, as well as the very real
limitations for non‐white, non‐Protestant American
children, who are trying to find their place as, in Kai
and Mona's case, Asian‐African‐Jewish‐American
subjects. (113)
It is crucial to point out, however, that these positive experiences of racial and culinary fusion are predicated on
privilege and choice; as a middleclass, Chinese American teen, Mona has the opportunity to choose another ethnic
identity. Comparatively, Kai enjoys race privilege because he is an assimilationistminded Asian/ American youth who
is drawn to the African American and Latino American kids who live in neighbourhoods wherein "poverty had
become an integral expression of local culture" (Lee 243). (5) By contrast, Harry St. George's childhood of racial and
culinary fusion in Shani Mootoo's He Drowns She in the Sea is less optimistic. The son of a "strange moreAfricanthanIndian
Indian" (102) transracial adoptee, Harry is raised in the black community of Mootoo's fictional island of
Guanagaspar (a standin for Trinidad) where his grandfather, Uncle Mako, is a wellknown Raleigh fisherman and his
mother works for a wealthy Indian family. We learn about the tension of Indian and African race relations on the
island:
Unlike the Africans, who had been brought to the
islands against their will and enslaved, the Indians
had come as indentured labourers, armed with
the promise, the guarantee even, of a return trip to
India, or, if they chose, after the completion of their
indentureship, a parcel of land, gratis. Still, a century
and more later, they bowed before the white‐skinned
British, yet lorded superiority over those of African
descent. (282)
This complicated colonial and racial dynamic is reflected in Harry's experiences of food and culture. The plot of the
novel follows Harry's childhood romance with the daughter of his mother's employer. One of their interactions centres
on the mimicking of a tea party with Rose Sangha hosting and Harry as guest. (6) But Harry's mother objects to these
games on the grounds of their ethnic differences: "Teatime, my foot ... people in Raleigh don't have tea or time for tea
time" (127).
Food is used again to fuse Harry's family and culture with Rose's when the Sanghas visit Uncle Mako's fish market
one afternoon. Rose is terrified initially by "the black man's closeness," but Uncle Mako describes a local recipe (and
eating custom) used by the African families that bridges that distance. Speaking to Rose directly, as if she is the one
who will cook the fish, Uncle Mako instructs: "With a pinch of thyme, some slice onions, and plentyplenty salt, for
saltwater fish need a goodly amount of salt, and ... then you drag them in a plate that have flour in it, and then, just so,
you fry them up. Quickquick, because you don't want them to burn and get blackblack like this skin on my body"
(148). Throughout Rose's experience of racial, cultural, and culinary fusion, Harry feels growing shame that
culminates when Rose visits his home in Raleigh and his mother serves them "two bottles of soft drinks kept
especially in case of visitors" (153) and a plate of cookies that pale in comparison to the fancier ones served at the
Sanghas' home. In his youth, Harry sees his racial fusion, as an IndoCaribbean raised in a black family and
community, as a liability rather than a gain.
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As an adult, Harry is an "equal opportunity eater" like the characters analyzed in Ho's book (119); he grows into a
Vancouverbased "foodie," impressing fellow Canadians with his alimentary knowledge. Differently from Kai's, his
experience of racial fusion through food is thwarted in his childhood by profound legacies of prejudice and racism.
Whereas racial fusion in the texts Ho has selected for analysis offers protagonists positive opportunities to push
beyond the mainstream and the binaries of Asian/American race relations, in Mootoo's text, racial fusion between
communities does not bridge differences for Harry but exaggerates them instead. In comparison, for Rose, empowered
by her race and class, food does offer positive experiences of racial fusion. These differences in the representations of
characters' experiences of racial fusion point to the need to consider the roles that class and race privilege have in
these experiences, not just in the texts discussed here but in others as well. The choice to be an equalopportunity eater
seems most important in these examples and distinguishes these experiences of coming of age through racial and
culinary fusion from one another clearly. In all, Ho's examples of cultural and culinary fusion are idealized
experiences that reveal important ways in which food participates in cultural hybridity but also implies class and race
privileges that she does not account for fully. Novels like He Drown She in the Sea, however, address the inequalities
that undergird fusion eating and that are important to consider not just in literary representations but also in our daily
consumption practices.
Conclusion
Consumption and Identity in Asian American ComingofAge Novels explores representations of food and eating in
order to elucidate the themes of "the negotiation of loss and the search for home," because "food signifies home" in so
many of the novels Ho explores (146). "Eating," she argues, "is a very fundamental way of claiming a home," and the
characters explored in her study are claiming "America as their home" (146). The general conclusion of Ho's book is
that Asian/American youth are represented as using consumption as a way to access ethnic identities, be they "white
American," Asian/American, or interethnic fusions of various subjectivities. She is rightly cautious, however, of the
ways in which food and consumption have been used as essentialist fodder in order to "turn characters into
caricatures" (145). After all, the challenges of Asian/American subjectivity, particularly in relation to "the difficulties
of acculturation," cannot (and should not) be "reducejd] to the difference between preferring American fried chicken
over Vietnamese pha" (Ho 145). Ho stops short of analyzing the dangers of linking racial and cultural insecurity with
youth, a linkage that might be taken to imply that Asian/North American adolescents will "mature" into a clearly
preferred state of ethnic pride. Nevertheless, her examples of the ways in which writers counteract negative Asian
stereotypes promoted in mainstream American culture while conveying the process of the development of ethnic
identity provide patterns that are useful to critics of texts beyond the specific ones she reads.
In the books analyzed in Ho's volume, literal representations of characters consuming food that represents their (or
others') cultural identities abound. In recent years, however, a number of recent Asian/ North American comingofage
novels have addressed race, ethnicity, youth, and food in provocative and symbolic ways, including Monique Truong's
Bitter in the Mouth, wherein audio gustatory synesthesia and Asian adoption reflect more nuanced experiences of
ac/culturation and consumption, and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, which unfurls when sixteenyearold
Nao Yasutani's lunch boxcontaining her diary, which in many ways is her lifewashes ashore in the flotsam
aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Ho's book stands as a useful foundation for thinking through these new texts
that are dealing with consumption and Asian/American coming of age in provocative and innovative ways. As I have
demonstrated in this essay, there are opportunities for her analysis to extend beyond the national and ethnic
particularities she addresses. Moreover, numerous Asian/American texts directed at young people could benefit from
Ho's framework. Picture books like Grace Lin's The Ugly Vegetables and Linda Sue Park's BeeBim Bopl offer
protagonists who glean historical and cultural pride through cooking lessons from their parents. Jenny Han's recent
novel, Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream, considers assimilation and Americanization through representations of
cultural consumption. The inclusion of these works and countless others into a conversation about consumption and
Asian/American young people will illustrate the broad opportunities Ho's book offers to a number of fields and
perspectives.
Works Cited
Banerjee, Anjali. Maya Running. New York: Lamb, 2005. Print.
Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford
UP, 2001. Print.
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. "Wounded Beauty: An Explanatory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question." Tulsa Studies in
Women's Literature 19.2 (2000): 191217. Print.
Chin, Frank. Donald Duk. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1991. Print.
Cho, Lily. Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print.
Choy, Wayson. The Jade Peony. Vancouver: Douglas, 1995. Print.
DuCille, Ann. "The Shirley Temple of My Familiar." Transition 73 (1997): 1032. Print.
Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.
Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.
Han, Jenny. Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream. New York: Little, 2014. Print.
Hartley, Michelle. "Does Shirley Temple Eat Chicken Feet? Consuming Ambivalence in Wayson Choy's The Jade
Peony." Essays on Canadian Writing 78 (2003): 6186. Print.
Jen, Gish. Mona and the Promised Land. New York: Vintage, 1996. Print.
Keller, Nora Okja. Comfort Woman. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
Kogawa, Joy. Naomi's Road. Illus. Matt Gould. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1986. Print.
. Naomi's Tree. Illus. Ruth Ohi. Toronto: Fitzhenry, 2008. Print.
. Obasan. 1981. Toronto: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Ku, Robert JiSong, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur. "An Alimentary Introduction." Eating Asian
America: A Food Studies Reader. Ed. Robert JiSong Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur. New York:
New York UP, 2013. 19. Print.
Lai, Larissa. When Fox Is a Thousand. 1995. Vancouver: Arsenal, 2004. Print.
Lee, Gus. China Boy. New York: Plume, 1994. Print.
Lefebvre, Benjamin. "In Search of Someday: Trauma and Repetition in Joy Kogawa's Fiction." Journal of Canadian
Studies/Revue d'etudes canadiennes 44.3 (2010): 15473. Print.
Lin, Grace. The Ugly Vegetables. Watertown: Charlesbridge, 2001. Print.
Manalansan, Martin. "Cooking Up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food in Asian
American Television Audiences." Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. Ed. Mimi Thi Nguyen and
Thuy Linh Iguyen Tu. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 17993. Print.
Mannur, Anita. Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2009. Print.
Merish, Lori. "Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple." Freakery: Cultural Spectacles
of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York UP, 1996. 185203. Print.
Mootoo, Shani. He Drowns She in the Sea. Toronto: McClelland, 2005. Print.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Vintage, 2007. Print. Okada, John. NoNo Boy. 1946. Seattle: U of
Washington P, 2014. Print.
Ozeki, Ruth. A Tale for the Time Being. Toronto: Penguin, 2013. Print. Park, Linda Sue. BeeBim Bop! Illus. Ho
Baek Lee. New York: Houghton, 2008. Print.
Tan, Amy. The Bonesetter's Daughter. 2001. New York: Ballantine, 2002. Print.
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Truong, Monique. Bitter in the Mouth. New York: Random, 2011. Print.
Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print.
Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest, 1996. Print.
Wong, SauLing. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton UP,
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Yamanka, Lois Ann. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. San Diego: Harcourt, 1996. Print.
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Notes
(1) In The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng calls for a "theoretical model of identity that provides a critical
framework for analyzing the constitutive role that grief plays in racial/ethnic subject formation," particularly as it is
relates to feelings of Otherness and marginalization (xi).
(2) Joy Kogawa's novel not only is ubiquitous in Canadian secondary school curricula but has also been reworked as a
children's novel, Naomi's Road, and as a related picture book, Naomi's Tree.
(3) While Benjamin Lefebvre draws our attention to the ways that Naomi's Road, Kogawa's rewriting of Obasan for
children, "refocusses the experience of trauma and internment on an individual conflict that can be resolved more
easily" and in doing so "retain[s] little of the historical context that in Obasan is so important to keep remembering"
(16162), in the following paragraphs I focus on the first novel.
(4) Representations of food and consumption in Obasan also exemplify the duality Ho illustrates when she reminds us
that "[flood is inextricably linked to survival": its "importance is not confined to its life sustaining propertiesit is
among the most important sign systems, affording an extraordinary flexibility of interpretation as symbol, metaphor,
code, and language" (10).
(5) While Lee's narrator points out that Chinatown and the Handle are similar in terms of class, the race privilege of
being Asian/ American in a nation that continues to believe in the model minority myth as it relates to people of Asian
origins (and in opposition to African Americans and Latino Americans) is important.
(6) The colonial presence of tea and the practice of tea parties in Guanagaspar is significant, as are the levels of
mimicry and play inferred in this scene.
Jenny Heijun Wills is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. Her research and teaching focus
on Asian/American and African American literary and cultural texts. She is currently working on a project that
analyzes liberalism, essentialism, biologism, and origins in Asian adoption memoirs and the works of black
abolitionists and nineteenthcentury authors.
Wills, Jenny
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Wills, Jenny. "Culinary culture in Asian/North American ComingofAge Literature." Jeunesse: Young People, Texts,
Cultures, vol. 6, no. 1, 2014, p. 163+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA403449032&it=r&asid=993f1ff1995dab02cf7357aff451ac05.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
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SPRING 2017 REVIEW
Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, by Jennifer Ann Ho
BY KRISTIN ROEBUCK, PH.D., CORNELL UNIVERSITY
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Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press) by Jennifer Ann Ho is a slender monograph that packs theoretical punch. Much of Ho’s analysis focuses on interracial family formation, and on the epistemic and identity crises that interraciality entails in an American polity premised on monoracial myths. In the introduction, Ho provides a useful overview of Asian American studies from its genesis in the late 1960s to the present. Here she also foregrounds her argument that ambiguity “is the only truly productive lens through which to view race” because race as a social construct is “protean” and “inherently unstable” (p. 4). Each of the five chapters that follows is a self-contained case study of varying types of racial ambiguity, whose juxtaposition suggest a theoretical whole larger than the sum of the book’s parts. A recurring theme is that racialized people are forced into singular and simplistic identity categories that belie the complexity and fluidity of their heritage, subjectivity, and self-expression.
roebuckChapter 1 re-examines Japanese American internment during World War II through a little-known “Mixed-Marriage Policy” that exempted the wives and children of white Americans as well as non-white citizens of “friendly nations.” Chapter 2 explores the transnational adoption of East Asian children by primarily white American parents. Chapter 3 unpacks the contested racial identity of Tiger Woods, widely hailed as African American to the exclusion of his Thai heritage. Chapter 4 gives a nuanced reading of racial subjectivity, performativity, and “passing” in recent works by mixed-race Asian American authors Paisley Rekdal and Ruth Ozeki.
The final chapter, Chapter 5, moves beyond the consideration of interracial families to question the racial boundaries of “Asian American literature.” Ho argues for including “transgressive texts” in the canon. By transgressive texts, Ho means texts written by authors who are not Asian American, which nevertheless advance the political program “of social justice and anti-essentialism” (144) that Ho positions at the core of Asian American studies. While Ho expresses sympathy with the impulse to privilege Asian American authorship, she deems that privilege “problematic because it implicitly casts racial identity as the barometer for authenticity and hence valued knowledge” (141). Whether the field is ready to jettison the principle of Asian American authorship is a poignant question, and one hopes more scholars will join Ho in the debate.
In a brief and elegant coda, Ho ties her scholarly arguments to personal testimony about growing up “Chinese Jamaican,” an autonym Ho abandoned as an undergraduate in California in favor of the more legible “Asian American.” Yet she never abandoned her sense of otherness and ambiguity “because I do, at heart, identify as Chinese Jamaican” (151). What’s in a name, what’s in a face, and what’s in a race are questions that continue to vex American politics and personhood, and Ho’s chapters bring into focus the inherent ambiguity of racial identity through a variety of analytic lenses. Ho is a professor of English and comparative literature, but her eclectic text offers something for everyone, ranging as it does from military history to the history of golf, from canonized literature to popular culture and digital ephemera like blogs.
At times, the reader may wish that Ho had done more analysis across chapters with their varied topics and lenses, highlighting links and ruptures while carrying theoretical insights from one chapter to the next. To take one example, Ho’s reconceptualization and celebration of racial “passing” in Chapter 4 is fresh and provocative, and deserves to be woven as an intellectual thread throughout the fabric of the book. But Ho’s discussion of “passing” begins and ends when the chapter does, leaving the reader to wonder, of the people and texts populating other chapters, whether all are “passing,” none are “passing,” or if “passing” has somehow lost its interest as an analytic mode. Upon reading the coda, one might ask: Is Ho herself “passing” as Asian American? Am I, the reader, “passing” as well? It does credit to the author that her book inspires novel and weighty questions. But for answers, one must look elsewhere.