Assaying the Gold: Or,   Contesting the Ground       of Asian- American             Literature

     In one of her major articles, "Assaying the Gold: Or, Contesting the Ground of Asian-American Literature" Shirley Geok-lin Lim points out that the subject of Asian American literature has shown a paradigm shift now that Asian American identities are being articulated in their specificities and in larger numbers. The ambiguous status of Asian-American identity derived from the fact that all Asian-Americans, regardless of their national origins, were brought in under the one umbrella category "Asian-American" when in fact, often, they were mutually competing groups, hostile to each other, a condition exacerbated by the State's treatment of them in granting migrant status. The conferment of the status of more/most favored in this regard depended upon the State's current relationship with the national government of the particular group. The 1972-1975 collections of Asian American stories demonstrated a "privileging of selected communities as representing the totality of Asian American identity" (154), a privileging symptomatic of the fact that identity depends on the historical relationship to the American mainstream.
     Lim points out that the critical task is to unpack the "different kinds of immigration psychology" and what this entails in cultural experience and writing. The present reality is the fact of involuntary and voluntary migrancy fueled by the various socio-political upheavals in the home countries and this situation may indeed give rise to contestations of assimilation. The fraught nature of Asian-American migrants and the heterogeneity of issues that arise can be complicated by the effects of collapsing that multiplicity and heterogeneity into one category. Thus far these complexities were repressed because of a succession of discriminatory laws passed against the different groups at different times until the 1960s. And because of that repression literary commentaries tend even now to read Asian-American otherness in terms of a single that conflates all differences into one. Nevertheless, the literature of the different Asian-Americans does show up the fault lines in the very notion of this single category even as it lays bare problems, tensions, and issues that obtain within particular groups and across them.     The literature, then, evinces cultural specificity of the groups, or in other words, demonstrates that the texts are ethnic specific, even though they have been read otherwise. Right now the term Asian American is being destabilized quite rapidly as the different Asian communities become more prolific in bringing their stories out. If there is a common ground in these texts, it derives from the fact that the writing makes a conscious departure from the stylistics and themes in mainstream American literature as well as providing the space to speak of the different ways in which Asian groups coped with the discriminatory laws and practices mobilized against them. Lim sees this as a means of "coalition building among Asian ethnic groups...with the goal of solidarity rather than of achieving a hegemonic cultural paradigm" (164).
     At the point of writing this project, however, we see in the specter of the Los Angeles referendum--to be held in November 1996, when Asian Americans are expected to vote against Affirmative Action , originally mobilized to redress the special problems caused to the African-American community because of the historical practices of slavery--a dubious force that may make the Asian-Americans more interactive than they have been . Yet the question occurs if such a bonding is wholesome given the conditions that will initiate it. We expect that the literary artists will meet the challenge of examining the implications of achieving solidarity at the cost of exacerbating and reinforcing hostilities that have already erupted even as the status quo reinvigorates the single category Asian-American against a category of the population that has historically functioned as America's "other", the African-American.