Chinese American Writers of the Real and the Fake

The Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century placed severe limitations on the development of Chinese ethnic communities in the United States. The polarization of categories of Chinese Americans gave rise to two distinct traditions of Chinese writing in and about America: a ‘‘high,’’ cultural tradition and a ‘‘low,’’ working-class tradition. The infamous conflict between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, whom he accused of being ‘‘un-Chinese’’ and a ‘‘fake,’’ can be explained in terms of Chin’s privileging of the ‘‘low’’ tradition of Chinese American writing as the ‘‘authentic’’ tradition. Chin accuses Kingston of practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American ‘‘high’’ tradition. Here, the Orientalism of foundational autobiographies such as Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) is engaged through the concept of ‘‘competence’’ developed in genre theory. Within this context, the use of generic Chinese American autobiographical conventions by Chin and Kingston can be related to the representation of authenticity through particular ethnic discourses

Art · Chin · China · Chinese americans · Context (archaeology · Descendant · Ethnic group · Literature · Orientalism · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · History