Dianna L. Ruiz
American Immigrant Literature 4333
Dr. Craig White
April 24, 2002

Asian Myth in Asian American Literature

I.  Introduction

Inevitable changes occur with movements of history influencing the course of literature and the understanding of cultural myths and legends.  In the 1940’s, the relaxation of U.S. immigration laws toward Asians led to demographic transformations, more specifically, the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and the allying of the United States and China during World War II.  Next, a legislative process eliminated the criteria (race, ethnicity, and nationality) that “prevented Chinese and other Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens” (Xiaojing 152).  Such social and demographic changes impacted the writing of fiction, increased opportunities for new voices, and gave way to new narrative strategies in relaying the process of acculturation and the rediscovery of identity.  In the United States, writers were able to approach myth with unlimited possibilities and freedom.  From this, Asian American writers display American ways combined with Asian strategies of Confucian and Tao beliefs, resorting to tradition in times of crisis.  A process of research revealed Asian American writers use various literary methods to affect the perspective of:  Asian American literature and the controversy of traditional Asian material in literature, the metaphorical implications of Asian myth in literature, understanding Confucian ethics to understand its influence in traditional Asian families, and Taoism (Daoism) as Asian strategy in literature.  The research expounds a fascinating technique of intertwining reality and myth into literature allowing the Asian American immigrant story to come alive.

II.  Asian American Literature and the Controversy of Traditional Asian Material in Literature

The thematic usage of myths in Asian American literature portrays the stages of struggle for social acceptance and dignity.  Typically, first-generation Asian immigrants reveal ambivalent feelings with attachment to culture and respect for traditional subject matters.  Traditional Asian history is built on patriarchal Confucian beliefs, so American born Asian writers, especially female, are more willing revise history and use it to express struggles of identity and social harmony.  This second-generation of writers prefer the “coming of age story” as a way to explore and reconnect to the ethnic culture while holding a viable place in American society.  Encompassing two cultures allows the writers to use myths and legends more liberally, bridging the old world to the new world, and reshaping ideology of culture.  This type of change aggravates Chinese American writer and critic, Frank Chin, who argues tradition exists under the assumption that material is unchangeable.  However, social, political, and cultural changes do occur and will alter traditional beliefs.

Frank Chin feels certain Asian writers misrepresent and betray their cultural heritage by writing a “Christian conversion” of Asian history and culture (Wang 83).  They “fake” the Asian culture and cater to white perceptions of Asian Americans by portraying Asian people as foreign and exotic.  His accusation of faking Asian culture is directed to “authors who construct their own versions of traditional Chinese stories or who make up Chinese customs wholesale” (Chu 65).  Such a writer, according to Chin, is Maxine Hong Kingston.  Contrary to Chin’s argument, Kingston is concerned with social injustice of Chinese Americans.  She uses Chinese myths and legends in her fiction to make a statement about racism, sexism, identity, and stereotypes.  Her liberal adaptation of traditional Chinese stories as a means to explain the Chinese American experience has, however, become Frank Chin’s strongest disagreement.  In his argument, the representation of mainstream stereotypes of Asian Americans as “docile, effeminate, and exotic” ineffectually fosters racism and “conditions of whites’ ‘racist love’ for Asian Americans” (Chu 170).  According to Chin, Asian Americans “are characterized as lacking daring, originality, aggressiveness, assertiveness … (the) supposed Asian identity is used to exclude (Asian Americans) from American culture” (Chu 171).  The form of acceptance by the dominant society, in Chin’s view, is not based on Asian achievements and contributions, but on the Asian Americans’ tendency to quietly exist.

 In contrast to Chin’s argument, Patricia Chu argues that Kingston’s interpretation of traditional texts is postmodern, and reflects an artistic understanding of history and culture.  Kingston does not deny the existence and importance of those traditions, but uses them to address the “history of Anti-Asian racism in this country” (181).  As a result, Kingston incorporates parody and revision, not to misrepresent Chinese American history and culture, as Chin charges, but to focus attention to the process of constructing that culture and its subjectivities through texts. 

III.  The Metaphorical Implications of Asian Myth in Literature

Asian metaphors in Asian American literature are used to symbolize stages of immigration and to dramatize psychological and physical transformations in a character’s development.  The representation signifies the consequences of being different in regard to culture, gender, race, class, and ideology.  The strongest uses of metaphors tend to address shock, discrimination, and exploitation as characters under go a struggle for surviving in a new environment, strategizing and re-strategizing between resistance and assimilation.  During a character’s transformation, there is loss and rediscovery of ethnic identity.  Regardless of the manner in which metaphors are portrayed, the thematic implications are related to the immigrant narrative experience.  

Asian American writer, Carlos Bulosan, in his autobiographical book, America is in the Heart, addresses identity problems and racial discrimination by using the metaphor of the monkey.  He communicates the humiliation involved when he was called a “brown monkey,” the description insultingly given to Filipino immigrants upon arrival in America.  Arriving in America, being homeless, jobless, and threatened led Bulosan to believe “acting like a primitive monkey may be the only way to survive” (MELUS 87).  The monkey is a metaphor to used to explain change since it is “expert at playing rhetorical games to repeat, revise, and subvert existing forms, norms, utterances, and meaning” (MELUS 85).  Bulosan confronts identity issues, and through his protagonist, revolts against the “non-human” or “sub-human” monkey description.  As long as the dominant culture refers to Asian Americans as different and inferior, cultural naturalism will remain important part of self-determination (MELUS 86). 

Metaphors, used in poetry, have the same intent.  The poem Ever by Lawson Fusao Inada relates the process of transformation:  “Ever in the guise of never. / Ever, always hiding. / Ever, always showing”; / “Ever playing around / Ever on a run, a cycle”; / “Ever suffering, ever smiling”; / “Ever never there. / Ever everywhere”; “Ever many. / Ever one”; “Ever only. / Ever lonely. / Ever over all at once” (MELUS 88).  The poem expresses the tumultuous experience of Asian American immigrants and the struggle to assimilate seems like a never-ending process.  It parallels the monkey metaphor to describe the cycle of change, and in particular, Fusao’s interpretation of the new world.

Lan Cao, Asian American writer of Monkey Bridge, uses the symbolic nature of the monkey bridges, having the same fragility as the metaphorical bridge linking the old world to the new world, to portray transition.  Hinting to the primitiveness of survival Cao writes, “a railing was tied to one side, so you could at least hold on to it as you made your way across like a monkey” (109).  This, perhaps, is an allusion to the metaphor of the monkey as described in the MELUS article.  Asian immigrants, in their travel to the new world must make their way like a monkey.  She also wrote, “only the least fainthearted, the most agile would think about the unsturdy suspension they call a bridge” (109-10).  In other words, only the ones willing to make the transition into the American way of life should cross the bridge to the new world, and the crossing would be just as frightening.  A form of strategy is necessary and as a suggestion Cao writes, “the secret of such crossing lies in ability to set aside the process itself in favor of seeing the act whole and complete” (179).  Thus, only the brave, the strategic, can make the transition.

The sea horse is another metaphor Cao uses to articulate the process of phasing out the old world, which can also represent the need of something new.  Mai, looking at a Vietnamese map, observes “a slightly bent, half-moon country shaped like a starved sea horse trapped inside the sky” (150).  As she does this she remembers, “legend had it that Vietnam was once a wild horse with a long mane and a lustrous body.  Too many wars made the horse so sad that it retreated into its present shape, a long twisted peninsula hanging on to the coast of the South China Sea like a starved sea horse waiting for happier days” (150).  Symbolically, this describes a country stagnant from the battles of change, which also becomes a metaphor for describing Mai’s mother.  Her mother too endured the battles of resistance and assimilation.  Mai said, “in the silver light, my mother’s silhouette cast a faint sea-horse curve against the dark window-shine” (161).  Being able to view the world in such an awakened manner creates a residual feeling of ambivalence for Mai.  She lived in the old world, assimilated and lived in the new world, and she experiences the advantages and disadvantages of both.  Mai’s ambivalence lingers at the end of the novel, “outside, a faint silver of what only two weeks ago had been a full moon dangled like a sea horse from the sky” (260).  Two weeks ago when her mother was alive, when she had no crisis.  Mai saw the world with American eyes, the full moon full as if full with possibilities.  But in her time of crisis, she finds comfort is in her roots, in the tradition that influenced her in her formative years.  At this point, she saw a half moon that dangled in minimal existence, resembling loss and sadness of a broken spirit.  She exists somewhere in the middle, dangling between two worlds.

Through the use of metaphors in the rhetoric of fiction, a writer can shock, transcend lines, and defamiliarize the familiar.  The art of literary expression allows exploration into an infinite range of issues common not only to the Asian American immigrant experience, but to other ethnic groups as well.  Often, the myth metaphor is a way of finding solution.  In Monkey Bridge, with the difficulty of her mother’s rehabilitation, Mai resorts to the myth of the chess player and describes “I was becoming, in the most obvious and unmistakable way, the chess champion directing my mother’s pawns with my magic parasol, telling her which piece to move into which square across the board” (136). It becomes obvious the myth-metaphor is a manner of coming to terms with a crisis.  Furthermore, as society’s prospective broadens in the United States, the challenge of deciphering real from fake representations of cultural traditions becomes greater.

IV.  Understanding Confucian Ethics to understand its influence in traditional Asian Families

The Confucian ethic is “central to everything that matters, including effective government” (Kupperman 60).  Two questions of ethics ask:  “What is the best way to behave? And, what is a good life, that is, one that is deeply satisfying and really worth having” (Kupperman 61)?  According to Confucius, everyone will experience adversity, disappointed hopes, and failures.  Depending on a person’s inner resources and values, the experience will have different influences.  For example, “someone who cares most about money and popularity can be devastated by becoming poor and friendless … (and) a person with ‘virtue’ is someone who will not be devastated by whatever happens” (Kupperman 61).  Without virtue, a person cannot maintain long-term happiness.  Those that are happy with money and success risk being controlled by disruptive desires and the dissatisfied feeling of never having enough.  Yet, if a person’s values include virtue and being good, the goodness inhabited cannot be lost, so it becomes a means for abiding adversity. 

Unlike most Western philosophers, the Confucius philosophy is an extension of general psychological facts about human life.  It is based on, for example, the observation that people who receive what they want have the tendency to remain restless and bored.  The inferior person is one attached to external rewards (money, success, reputation), which are the variables of luck that contribute to worry about if or when those rewards will be obtained.  However, those with inner values are less affected by luck.  As a mark of accomplishment and serenity, “the enlightened are free from doubt, the virtuous from anxiety, and the brave from fear” (Kupperman 64).  In a modern society, Confucian principles become questionable and many Asians hesitate to put much emphasis in the clashing values.  Nevertheless, for many the tradition “is very much alive and becomes a powerful force in their daily behaviors, attitudes and practices demanding reflection, moderation, persistence, humility, obedience to superiors, and stoic resistance to pain” (Cheng 29).  Confucian wisdom is helpful in addressing hard work, literacy, and learning.  It is a mode of self-actualization for developing talents and obtaining the educational achievement necessary for obtaining upward mobility in American society. 

The connection of the individual and society, with family as the strongest point of connection, is the core of the philosophy.  Responsibility for others is the most virtuous form of life.  Kupperman also states that the educated and morally committed were considered elite choices for leadership roles in the Confucian society.  In Confucius’s view, virtuous behavior is the “one all-pervading principle” of “conscientiousness within and consideration for others” (63).  However, there is variation in this virtue because consideration for parents is different than that for strangers, and consideration for political superiors is different than that for peasants.

Influenced by Confucian tradition, Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese families model the “vertically-organized, hierarchical, patriarchal, highly disciplined extended-family systems” (Cheng 107).  This carries over to the US context where Asian American children are expected to pursue education as ultimate honor so that they can financially support the parents.  The children are expected to succeed due to the sacrifices made by parents.  In the Confucian system, Cheng explains, “one is obligated to kin for life” (113).  Different from US-born Asian parents, the first-generation immigrant parents maintain a Confucian-based home, which consists of teaching children obedience for the teachers, respect for authority, and responsibility for self-behavior.  The importance of discipline is reinforced through Confucian tradition.

In Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Confucian obedience is observable in Mai’s inability to defy her mother in the confrontation with the rental manager because “thirteen well-bred years of Confucian ethics had taught (her) the fine points of family etiquette and coached (her) into near-automatic obedience” (21).  The duty to parents was also the duty to ancestors.  In another instance, Mai said Baba Quan told her Confucian covenant that kept them forever connected to their ancestors, and that “the soul becomes sad if it is left unattended by its descendants” (59).  Mai describes her grandfather as a Confucian who “believed in the worship of spirits and the sanctity of the ancestral land” (83).  In this manner, the author incorporates the traditional concepts into Asian American literature.  The bond to traditional myths remains strong as generations of Asian families continue to enforce Confucian beliefs, thus its transfusion into Asian American literature.

V.  Taoism (Daoism) as Asian Strategy in Literature

Tao-like strategies were used in Monkey Bridge when Mai resorts to the “luminous moments of history” and the stories about the Trung Sisters to create an “exhilarating and victorious existence” in heightened moments of difficulties (Cao 118).  By blending myth into her writing, Cao creatively revises the Asian myths to parallel Mai’s battle-like encounters.  She supports Mai’s combat techniques with references to Genghis Khan, Hulegu, and Kublai Khan – warriors known for victorious strategies.  This was, for Mai, the way to survive, to work with, and to coincide with the dominant culture.  In her daydream, she teaches an army the “correct way to take aim … without allowing the forces of the mind to impede the instinct of motion” (121).  Referring to the myths of tradition prepares Mai for the college interview:

“My strategy had not been to fight the tiger but to confound it … I waited for the precise moment when I could see confusion in its eyes … Like the trained warrior I was, I knew not to oppose an adversary head on.  I stepped to one side, and rather than block its powerful paws with my hand, I pulled it forward, deeper in the direction of its own motion.  I used its own momentum to throw it off balance” (129-30).

Her mechanism for survival in the dominant culture exist in understanding she must not oppose force with force because the weaker force would always lose when faced with a giant force (123).  As an immigrant, the dominant culture is the greater force.  Making a conscious decision to strategize, Mai finds a way to interact:

“The safest route, I realized, lay in adopting no discernible route at all, drunken-monkey style … It was in my interest to sidestep as much as possible.  I was not about to confront her preconceived notions head-on.  The Trung-Sister strategy, the strategy of fluidity and softness, is to master the art of evasion and distraction, to use momentum, not brute forces, as leverage” (129).

Reliance on traditional myth is a vital skill for Mai in her interview with Amy Layton since her educational career depends on the interviewer, the character symbolic of dominant culture.  The writer, Cao intermingles her understanding of Taoism into Mai’s mental preparation.  Having the cultural differences becomes advantage in a world full of obstacles, especially since traditional strategies are historically successful.  With imaginative thinking, Mai envisions a “drunken-monkey style” of interacting with a “riot of free wheeling movements that seemingly contained no pattern and no discernible rhythm, best designed to confound an opponent” (120).  This, essentially, is Taoism.

Taoism (Daoism) is the concept of a “way” or “path” that is emotionally free and harmonious with the natural world.  It encourages one to flow in the rhythms of the world without struggling with emotions and desires.  Not actively seeking to change things, experiencing a passive and responsive connection with nature, one feels at ease in the natural world of Tao.  It is a practice of guiding emotions and inclinations into a natural rhythm.  There is ease in life as harmony frees the constraints of struggle, confrontation and risk. 

The Tao form of knowledge is difficult to convey in words because the philosophy is aligned to mysticism.  Mysticism is a “deeper-than normal” experience which cannot be explained in the standard pattern of vocabulary associated with common experiences.  The familiar terms can distort the meaning of a mystical experience, so the concept of Tao is conveyed in poetic form.  The poems of Tao Te Ching speak of a “form without form” and the “way” is not a way of detached contemplation, but rather a means of “knowing how” to live (Kupperman 97).  As a whole, the style reflects life as freedom, with linking to emotions, and less as a rule structured. 

The passive and responsive nature of the Tao Te Ching, as Kupperman writes, should not be mistaken as advice for “closing your eyes and letting events sweep over you” (103).  Taoism is not a practice for mastering the world, but rather a method for modifying emotions so as to not suffer “anger, resentment, or frustration at the uncontrollable nature of the world” (Kupperman 104).  This does not mean ridding emotions, or ridding the intensity of emotions, it is a strategy for “falling away from formulaic judgments” and “automatic responses” which are based on generalizations and distinct lines of division (Kupperman 104).  Since automatic responses are products of the unconscious or semiconscious, they are discouraged.  All types of emotions, in Taoism, are guided to be less intense and urgent, and not completely absent.  Kupperman further explains this theory:

“The watchful, cautious Daoist will tend to avoid quick emotional responses.  Someone who is mindful of the dynamic of the world, also, will be most unlikely to have emotions of anger, resentment, or for that matter, fear.  These emotions are entirely unproductive.  You often can manage to sidestep the kinds of things that might inspire anger or resentment or give rise to fear.  The emotions themselves usually do not contribute to the responsiveness that this requires, and in fact can interfere with the process of taking in the details of a difficult situation” (104).

Maintaining a sense of “emptiness” in Taoism is the idea of being vacant of preconceptions and automatic responses so that one can utilize the skill of poise rather than the impulse to react with untrue emotions or “false moves” (Kupperman 104).  Hence, the sense of emptiness, in Western ideas, can be better interpreted as “openness.”

The way of Tao does not command inner withdrawal or withdrawal from the world.  It is a method of “wait-and-see,” allowing one to be an “independent agent and not a conformist or a doormat” (Kupperman 105).  The Tao Te Ching “do nothing” phrase, in translation wu wei, is a form of activity that does not stand out of the ordinary, but rather an activity that “does not disrupt the way of heaven / nature” (Kupperman 105-06).  Focus is on present experience, which is different from being preoccupied with the future.  It is a form of maintaining a calm state with even awareness for the likely to develop situations so that one is able to adjust in a calm, even way.  From the Tao perspective, this is “crucial to the management of life … (through) proper preparation and a steady stance, one can work ‘by being still’” (Kupperman 107).

The use of the Tao-tradition in literature is richly expressed in Monkey Bridge through the thought process of the character Mai.  Again, Mai mixes myth with tradition when she describes her mother’s reaction, or rather non-action response to the mention of Michael’s story about Baba Quan:

“Her face slammed shut.  There was no swell of emotion, no tangible reaction I could hold.  She was no longer resisting with opposing force, but leaving me with a soft bonelessness that could not be grasped.  Ancient warriors and Taoist philosophers called it the softness of water, and its formless quality could confound even advanced electromechanical technologies” (200).

Moreover, Cao incorporates Tao-like strategies for her character to employ in dealing with her mother’s death.  Mai tells herself, “keep calm, simplify, simplify, everything will be all right,” and explains, “I kept my eyes focused on nothing but the mindless gray… Control, everything is order and control.  One wrong move, one wrong move, and the entire mess can just disarrange itself and collapse” (257).  This type of focus on the gray is Taoism, which does not focus on definite divisions of black or white.  Earlier in the novel, Mai handled the incident of her mother’s hospitalization in much the same way, she describes her reaction:  “I closed my eyes.  Simplify.  Simplify.  Everything will be all right … I willed my mind blank and tried to keep a calm, steady gaze.  ‘One wrong move,’ as my father used to say, and the force of too many things abruptly rammed inside my brain” (12).  The “one wrong move” story is the Asian, Ho Chi Minh story (26).  Mai analytically points out “in the United States, there was no such thing as ‘one wrong move’” (27).  That line reflects her conscious tendency to retreat to traditional beliefs when needing stability in moments of crisis.

VI.  Conclusion

Although there may be some validity to Frank Chin’s argument that Asian American writers do harm in revising traditional myths and legends, literature by American born Asian American writers prove a successful connection with American mainstream.  Their writings benefit all ethnic groups by democratizing the importance of ethnic voices.  This expands the realm of tradition and increases understanding between the Asian American experience and cultural heritage.  To prohibit the creative licensure of traditional myths and cultural allusions in writing would be to deny Asian American connection to roots. 

Furthermore, literature is a vital form of art needed to arrive at an understanding of world, and it exposes the macrocosm of human diversity.  In future research endeavors, topics of interest include a review on “correlative thinking” as the notion of resonance (kan-ying) in social relations, the yang and yin fundamentals of opposites and balance, and possibly Jung’s idea of an ordered and harmonious universe.  This interest sways from the thesis of the initial research, but nonetheless, it explores another concept of harmony in relation to the self and others.  Various arenas of studies render opportunities to become familiar with the unfamiliar.  By developing a greater appreciation for diversity in literature, respect for human dignity, and awareness of political and cultural issues surrounding social injustices, one can hope to reach a mature level of human compassion. 

Works Cited

Cao, Lan.  Monkey Bridge.  New York:  Penguin.  1997.

Cheng, Lilly, Kenji Ima, and Henry T. Truedba.  Myth or Reality: Adaptive Strategies of Asian Americans in California.  Washington, DC:  Falmer Press, 1993.

Chu, Patricia P.  “Authoring Subjects:  Frank Chin and David Mura.”  Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America.  Durham:  Duke University Press.  2000.  64-65.

Chu, Patricia P.  “Tripmaster Monkey, Frank, Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition.” Assimilating Asians:  Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America.  Durham:  Duke University Press.  2000.  170-181.

“Enacting Asian American Transformations:  An Inter-Ethnic Perspective.”  MELUS. 23.4 (1998):  85-90.

Kupperman, Joel J.  “Confucius.”  Classic Asian Philosophy:  A Guide to the Essential Texts.  New York:  Oxford.  2001.  60-66.

Kupperman, Joel J.  “Daodejing (Tao Te Ching).”  Classic Asian Philosophy:  A Guide to the Essential Texts.  New York:  Oxford.  2001.  93-106.

Payant, Katerine B., and Toby Rose.  “Repositioning the Stars:  Twentieth Century Narratives of Asian American Immigration by Qun Wang.” The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature:  Carving out a Niche.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 1999.  83-93.

Payant, Katerine B., and Toby Rose.  “Becoming Americans:  Gish Jen’s Typical American by Zhou Xiaojing.”  The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature:  Carving out a Niche.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 1999.  151-163.