Abstract
This brief chapter focuses on the arrival scenes present in a series of Asian American classics: the poetry written on the walls of the Angel Island detention center in the first decades of the twentieth century, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980), Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), and Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991). In this ecocritical analysis, I have paid special attention to the manner in which the Asian immigrants deal with the materiality of their new environment in the highly significant moment of their “first contact” with America.
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Notes
- 1.
A shorter version of this analysis was presented at the 29th MELUS conference, held in Athens, Georgia, USA, in April 2015.
- 2.
- 3.
As Manu Karuka eloquently puts it, “A focus on continental imperialism can help push the lie of U.S. exceptionalism to rest. The frontier does not distinguish the United States from other nations. Rather it situates the United States in a context of imperialism” (2019, 172), an imperialist project that, contrary to what is generally held, was already at work prior to the 1898 Spanish-American War (2019, 185). See Madsen (1998) for a critique of American exceptionalism.
- 4.
Not even the Puritan settlers remained immune to the allure of the American “exceptional” landscapes: much as they chose to focus on the perils of the wilderness, they were also amazed by the natural wonders. Of course, what was left out of this European picture of the American continent is the way the marginal others—women and ethnoracial minorities, most notably Native Americans—cooperated in or resisted the building of the myth of Nature’s Nation (Kantor 2007).
- 5.
In Chap. 7 of The Culture of Nature (1992), Alexander Wilson describes the political, economic, scientific/conservationist rationale behind the establishment of natural parks and reserves in the United States and Canada, as well as tracing “the changing culture of parkland” (231) in both countries, especially the shift in focus from “natural resources” to “natural heritage” (247), “away from large reserves and towards the microenvironments of a multiplicity of wild land types” (246). For a complementary history of the rise of “nature tourism” in North America, see Wilson (1992, 22–51). For a discussion of the problematic “erasure” of ethnic minorities, most notably Native Americans, from American National Parks, see Kantor (2007) and Oatman-Stanford (2018).
- 6.
I will focus only on those characters from Asian American immigration narratives, including classics like Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart or Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, who arrive by ship or boat, rather than by plane, and whose first physical contact with the American land is not strongly mediated by human-made structures, such as airports. Asian American texts whose characters arrive by plane also feature interesting moments, from the famous airport scene in The Woman Warrior, where Brave Orchid meets Moon Orchid, to more recent novels like Lê Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For.
- 7.
While this Immigration Station operated, the procedure was the following: whenever ships arrived, “immigration officials climbed aboard and inspected the passengers’ documents”; while those immigrants “with satisfactory papers could go ashore,” the rest of the passengers, mostly Chinese, “were transferred to a small steamer and ferried to the island immigration station to await hearings on their applications for entry” (14; Lai et al. 1980).
- 8.
Poems 13, 15, 17, 18, 23, 26, 38, 40, 58, 64. There are also a few poems in the Appendix that feature natural elements: 13, 14, 28, 38, 54.
- 9.
- 10.
Note the personification that further links the building to the white American humans who erected them.
- 11.
When the smuggler finally allows him and the other Chinese stowaways to get out of their boxes, the “illegal” father does not lose this sense of fear and menace: he watches an ominous “trouser leg turn this way and that. He had never seen anything so white, the crease so harp. A shark’s tooth. A silver blade. … Then, blessedness, the trouser leg turned once more and walked away” (52).
- 12.
This unreal or surreal atmosphere is typical of war narratives like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. “The fog,” writes O’Brien, “made things seem hollow and unattached” (18).
- 13.
This emphasis on the artificial and technological, which effectively contributes to the detriment of America’s Edenic discourse, is interpreted by Hoppe as a “subversive re-appropriation of the already exhausted American cultural narratives of newness, open possibilities, and unknown but promising futures by new, postcolonial immigrants” (1999, 147). For John Gamber, however, there may be some redeeming aspects in the symbolic wielding of “toxicity,” a term he favors over those that “imply former states of purity,” such as pollution or contamination (2012, 5). We will return to this issue in Chap. 6.
- 14.
However, Hoppe emphasizes the fact that the interpreter of this map, as an illegal immigrant, is not authorized or sanctioned “by Western narratives of power and possession” (1999, 147).
- 15.
The politics of waste that we found in the novel’s pivotal scene, with its ominous nuclear plants and insidious waste, is reminiscent of that found in other novels published in the 1980s. Cynthia Deitering claims that, in that decade, there was a growing awareness among Americans that the “pristine” character of nature was no longer there, that we had entered a “postnatural” era defined by consumption and waste, as we shall see in more detail in Chap. 6.
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Simal-González, B. (2020). Prelude: Entering “Nature’s Nation”. In: Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35618-7_2
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