THE BIG AIIIEEEEE!: An Anthology of Chinese...

THE BIG AIIIEEEEE!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature edited by Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada & Shawn Wong (Plume: $14.95, illustrated). The editors took the title of this often fascinating anthology from the cry of “the yellow man” in American war movies and comic books. Written by would-be immigrants on the walls of the barracks at Angel Island, the poems from “Songs of Gold Mountain” reflect the bitter clash between the cherished dream of a land of opportunity and the harsh realities dictated by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. An excerpt from Shawn Wong’s exceptional novel “Homebase” depicts the confused grandson of one of those immigrants, struggling to forge an identity that balances Chinese traditions with American experiences. Michi Weglyn’s scholarly “Years of Infamy” demonstrates that studies conducted by the U. S. government prior to World War II concluded that Japanese-Americans were loyal citizens and there was no reason to intern them. One of the most compelling selections, John Okada’s sadly neglected novel “No No Boy” (1957), captures the bitter disillusionment of a young Japanese-American man trying to survive in the postwar world. The anthology is thrown out of balance by Frank Chin’s vitriolic essay condemning several popular Asian-American writers, especially Maxine Hong Kingston, for “falsifying” their Chinese heritage by writing from a “Christianized” viewpoint and describing the culture as misogynistic. The 92 pages occupied by this diatribe could have been put to better use, perhaps documenting the experiences of Korean and Southeast Asian immigrants.