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.