Susan Thananopavarn

 
Asian American Narratives: Literature, History, and Activism

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Susan Thananopavarn

Asian Americans are the fastest growing of all racial or ethnic groups in the United States, and 30% of students at Duke identify as Asian or Asian American. Yet Asian American history and literature are rarely taught in U.S. history or English courses. My Writing 101 course, “Asian American Narratives: Literature, History, and Activism,” aims to fill this gap by engaging students in exploring the diverse histories, literature, and experiences of Asian Americans over the past two centuries. In this class, students research and write about historical and literary topics such as Chinese exclusion laws, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, refugee experiences, transnational adoption, and anti-Asian violence. They also engage with theories that address Asian and Asian American representation, including orientalism, the “model minority,” and gender and sexuality in film. Ultimately, the course seeks to address key questions in Asian American studies through student reading, writing, and research.

The three major writing projects for the course encourage students to interact with Asian American studies using several different genres of writing. The first project, “Asian/American Representation,” examines how Asian Americans have been portrayed in popular film, literature, television, art, or news media. In a 4-5 page essay, students draw on theoretical and historical texts to explore a particular representation or set of representations. For example, some students choose to analyze nineteenth century political cartoons that associate Chinese immigrants with disease, comparing anti-Chinese rhetoric then to anti-Asian violence in the age of Covid-19. Others use demographic data to show how the idea of the “model minority” renders invisible Asian American poverty and anti-Asian racism. In all their projects, students seek to answer the questions: how can we define this trope? What is its history? How does it misrepresent or oversimplify real issues? The goal of this assignment is to allow students to engage with the work of other scholars, learning to make fair, generous, and assertive use of others’ arguments.

The second project asks students to practice close reading skills in Asian American literature and film. In a 4-5 page exercise in close reading, students choose one of the texts that we have encountered in class to analyze what it has to say about an aspect of Asian American history. For example, many students choose to write about The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic memoir of growing up Chinese American in the 1950s. Others analyze the documentary film First Person Plural, Deann Borshay Liem’s film about her adoption from Korea in the mid-twentieth century. Thi Bui’s graphic novel The Best We Could Do offers students the opportunity to analyze a text with both written and visual elements, as well as explore the trauma experienced by refugees fleeing Vietnam in the wake of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Students address questions such as: how does Asian American writing or film convey important histories to its audiences? How does the form of a particular piece do the work of telling a particular story? Writing in the humanities relies on being able to analyze texts, and the goal of this assignment is to build awareness of conventions and expectations within humanistic disciplines.

The final “History through Narrative” project asks students to engage directly in the work of storytelling, as they research Asian American oral histories and then produce a narrative of their own. This project is focused on the stories of individual Asian Americans and exemplifies Ethnic Studies scholars’ commitment to “history from below,” a movement that considers the stories of ordinary people as important modes of understanding historical eras and time periods. Students can choose to conduct their own oral histories, or they can draw on existing oral histories in public archives. In researching these narratives, students address the question: How can understanding this story help us better understand an aspect of American history? And what additional historical research must I conduct in order to fully understand this story? Many students choose to research their own family histories, including the stories of parents who are Vietnamese refugees, those who immigrated to the U.S. after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, or the experiences of Asian Americans in the U.S. South. Others choose to research histories from library archives, including the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II, the formation of Korean communities in Los Angeles, or the stories of Chinese American laundry workers in the early twentieth century. For this project, students decide the best form in which to convey each story, with projects ranging from academic essays to multimedia presentations, graphic novels, podcasts, or poetry collections. Creative projects are accompanied by a reflection explaining the project’s intent and source material. These projects have been tremendously rewarding for each class, as students combine their creative talents with academic writing skills to produce beautiful visual and written narratives. In addition, each class has the opportunity to learn from these projects the importance of Asian American narratives for understanding America today.

For students of “Asian American Narratives,” the course fills in missing gaps in their education and raises awareness of Asian American issues in historical and contemporary American life. In 2018, student Barbara Xiong wrote in an essay for Deliberations, “In my 1500-page AP US History textbook, only approximately 15 pages were dedicated to Asian-American history. By the end of junior year, I could write a 3-page essay on the culture and origins of each of the thirteen colonies by memory, but I could probably only write a paragraph on that of my own race. My Writing 101 class Asian American Narratives finally introduced me to the history and stories that have shaped the community I live in today. In addition, I have learned that the same experiences of immigration and exclusion mirror the struggles of other races in recent events.” Barbara’s comments speak to the importance of Asian American studies for students at Duke, both those who identify as Asian American and those who want a deeper understanding of the communities in which they live today.