Stephen Hong Sohn

Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York University Press, 2014) by Stephen Hong Sohn, currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, is an outstanding book of literary theory. With his profound knowledge of the history of Asian American literature, the author builds up his arguments and provides sufficient evidence and facts by citing numerous Asian American literary works from 19th century to 21st century to support his viewpoints. Reading this book is quite a brainstorming process, which refreshes the reader’s memory and incites new ideas. The book makes the reader think hard about the definition of Asian American literature, and how it is both different from American literature at large, but still necessarily related.

Having analyzing several literary works by Asian American writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chang-rae Lee, the author, in the first chapter, presents great details in Lee’s novel Aloft to support his point that Asian American writers have never been only writing about Asian American characters or contexts, but they “are investing in revealing how whiteness become mapped as a literary site as racial, cultural, and spatial normativity.” (P. 27)

In the second chapter, the author also examines the local history and economy of California as well as the social condition of immigrant groups, and with the analysis of Sesshu Foster’s novel Atomik Aztex, he explains how Asian American writers’ fictional world reflects multiracial groups and their relationships. In Sohn’s opinion, Carlos Bulosan, Brian Ascalon Roley, Bhira Backhaus, and Sesshu Foster “present an exceptional subset within the Asian American literary”(P. 63) due to their depictions of interracial dynamics between Chicanos/ Latinos and Asian Americans.

The third and fourth chapters focus on the fictions of Sigrid Nunez and Sabina Murray. The author discusses the works of these mixed-race Asian American writers and their respective publications to support his argument that “mixed-race authorial ancestry cannot be explicitly tied to narrative perspective.” (P. 104)

Finally, readers who are interested in speculative fiction by Asian American writers would enjoy the author’s exploration in the reflection between reality and fictional world in Claire Light’s collection Slightly Behind And To The Left and Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. His analysis of these two cultural productions is the last body chapter of Racial Asymmetries.

As someone whose books have been published as so-called Asian American literature, I’ve found the book to be a useful study.

Sohn mentions that “Asian American writers have often been circumscribed by the expectation that their fictions are composed with their personal and communal histories in mind.” (P.14) My situation concurs with his statement. Some readers assume each of my fictional works is my personal story or my family history.

I hope that Sohn’s Racial Asymmetries reaches its goal “to push for scholars outside Asian American studies to take more effort in considering the import of racially asymmetrical fictional worlds to their subfields.” (P.212) Sohn has read and reviewed hundreds of books written by Asian American writers in the past decade. You can see the majority of his reviews in the open access online forum called Asian American Literature Fans. This tremendous and unique exertion can only be done with zeal and endeavor. His strenuous efforts coincide with the objective of Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds.… (mais)