Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 76
70
Popular Culture Review
same materials by the second group is more creative and symbolic. As is demon
strated in Asian American literature, stories play a critical role in connecting sec
ond and third generation Asian immigrants to history, to their cultural heritage,
and to the country where their parents and grandparents come from. Stories help
characters (re)define their relationship with both American mainstream culture as
well as their ethnic cultural heritage. Stories enable them to ontologically em
brace what they can not culturally ignore. Stories remind them of who they are
instead of who they are supposed to be. How the stories are told signifies not only
the characters’ but also the writers’ relationships with both American mainstream
culture and their own ethnic culture. In Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed
Place, for example, traditional Vietnamese legends are incorporated not so much
to accentuate individual characters’ struggle to find their identity as to suggest the
importance of familial and social harmony. The autobiography ends with a Viet
namese legend about a boy-tumed-soldier who made peace with his enemy after
realizing revenge would throw both in a vicious circle. At the end of the legend,
the two men, “no longer boys, parted and began new lives” (365). The legend is
apparently used to reflect traditional Vietnamese values placed on forgiveness,
reconciliation, and peace.
On the other hand, second generation Asian American writers’ use of
Chinese myths and legends is more liberal. In “Come All Ye Asian American
Writers of the Real and the Fake,” Chin cites The Woman Warrior as an example to
suggest why he believes that Kingston, (David Henry) Hwang and (Amy) Tan are
the first writers of Asian ancestry to so boldly fake the best-known works from the
most universally known body of Asian literature and lore in history (93). Chin
argues that in The Woman Warrior, Kingston mixes two famous Chinese legend
ary characters. Fa Mulan and Yue Fei, from two different stories:
In The Woman Warrior, Kingston takes a childhood chant, “The
Ballad of Mulan,” which is as popular today as “London Bridge Is
Falling Down,” and rewrites the heroine. Fa Mulan, to the specs
of the stereotype of the Chinese woman as a pathological white
supremacist victimized and trapped in a hideous Chinese civiliza
tion. The tattoos Kingston gives Fa Mulan, to dramatize cruelty to
women, actually belong to the hero Yue Fei, a man whose tomb is
now a tourist attraction at West Lake, in Hanzhou city (3)
In Articulate Silences, King-Kok Cheung suggests that it is the distrust of inher
ited language and that of traditional myth with patriarchal ethos that bring Asian
American writers, especially Asian American female writers, to the conclusion
that they must cross cultural borders in search of ways to not only revise history.