What images come to mind when you hear the phrase “Asian American ghetto”? Is there such a thing? Aren’t Asian Americans model minorities, either immune to poverty or through hard work and self-sufficiency expected to pull themselves quickly out of it? These are the framing questions that Yoonmee Chang addresses in her current manuscript, Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave. Chang studies spaces familiarly known as Chinatown, Koreatown and Little Tokyo. She examines the reluctance to calling these spaces ghettos – aren’t they exotic, cultural communities? – a reluctance that stems from a national denial of class inequity in America. Chang maps this denial through Asian American literature, in works by Monica Sone, Fae Myenne Ng, and Chang-rae Lee, which address touchstones of Asian American experience such as the WWII Japanese American internment and the 1992 LA Riots. Examining this literature alongside texts in law, history, sociology and popular media, Writing the Ghetto is an interdisciplinary study of how class is understood – or refuses to be understood – in the national consciousness. Chang’s research is the focus of her Spring 2010 English Honors seminar on the idea and space of American Chinatowns.
October 14, 2009