Keywords for Asian American Studies by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials & Linda Trinh Võ & K. Scott Wong

Author:Cathy J. Schlund-Vials & Linda Trinh Võ & K. Scott Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004030 Literary Criticism / American / Asian American, ANT001000 Antiques & Collectibles / Americana
ISBN: 9781479883851
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-05-08T07:00:00+00:00

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Memory

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Memory is fundamental to Asian American studies and cultures, even though as a keyword or term it has not been significant in the academic realm. Its importance holds true whether one speaks of Asian American culture as a self-identified panethnic whole, or Asian American cultures in their various ethnic parts. In either the panethnic or ethnic case, memory enables the formation of an Asian American “imagined community” (B. Anderson 1991). The Asian American panethnic community (Y. Espiritu 1992), the one that names itself as Asian American, is in particular an imagined community dependent on strategies of remembering and forgetting to forge a shared past. This shared past is a collective memory built from individual memories, and the search for that past is an active act of remembering. These two senses of memory—as a body of memories and as willful recollection—cannot be separated from each other. The dynamic interaction between the two constitutes “Asian American memory.”

The beginning of Asian American memory can be located in 1968, when activists coined the term “Asian American.” While Chinese American and Japanese American ethnic collective memories existed before 1968, a panethic Asian American collective memory did not, given that the term “Asian American” did not even exist. What the term signified was the assembling and recasting of fragmented ethnic histories and memories into a collective Asian American history and memory. This invention of a tradition (Hobsbawm 1992) could not have happened without both these preexisting memories and an active remembering of them under an Asian American rubric that could serve as a guide for further remembering. Under this new rubric, historians, literary critics, and writers began demonstrating that Asian Americans had existed in the United States in large numbers for more than a century and had produced a viable culture. This search for the shared past is not neutral, but is instead value driven, usually predicated on the need for resistance to domination and the call for a more just present and future. These values are hallmarks of Asian American collective memory, with one exemplary case for the 1960s generation being Japanese American internment, whose history would be recovered in subsequent decades. While American collective memory had silenced, erased, or distorted the history of internment, Asian American collective memory would foreground it and give Japanese Americans voice, to use a common trope in Asian American culture.

Central to the willful recollection that drives and forms Asian American collective memory is an ironic forgetting. Memory and forgetting are inseparable, and in order to remember their shared bonds as Asian Americans, Asian Americans also had to forget, to some degree, their differences. Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Korean Americans, for example, had to forget the historical animosities between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, fueled by events such as the Japanese colonization of Korea and the Japanese invasion of China. These national feelings of resentment that many Asian populations felt toward each other in Asia, which Asian immigrants often carried to the United States, were impediments to imagining an Asian American community.

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