“I plan to teach some version of this course again, though I will definitely change the syllabus substantially in future iterations. Name one or two texts we have read this term that you would recommend I include on future syllabi.”

To our last exam question, I personally wrote down M Butterfly and Dictee, but had also wanted to add The Gangster We Are All Looking For. However, in noticing that the question had specifically asked for only one or two texts, not to forfeit the easiest point on the exam by not following instructions, I left out Thúy’s book. But in the following week, Professor Suh asks us why so many of us wrote down this books, of all the novels we’re read for class. I find the question difficult to respond to articulately, but in feeling apologetic for looking sleepy/bored during the discussion, I thought I’d try and give it a feeble attempt.

As Sam has mentioned, the authors we have read reflect the wide spectrum of Asia/Asian America(?): east Asian, south Asian, southeast Asian, Philippina, hapa, and in some spoken word, Palestinian. However, in the realm of Asian American literature, I feel as though east Asians/east Asian Americans are the most common and have the most prominent voices, therefore I found it extremely refreshing to be reading from the south Asian, southeast Asian, etc…perspectives of Asian America. And to add to that, I want to say that I appreciated the more-or-less straightforward writing styles exhibited by Ozeki and the spoken word artists, and the use of format distortion in Hagedorn’s Dogeaters to display a historical construct formed by the stories of many characters. However, I was more artistly touched by the deliberate placement of holes in content and the utilization of the telling nature of silence, which I felt marked Yamamoto’s and Thúy’s writing.

King-Kok Cheung describes it well:

“Feminist critics tend to see indirection in women writers as primarily a means to avert the masculine gaze…Yet I differ with those critics who view verbal restraint as necessarily a handicap stemming from social restrictions. I view it more as a versatile strategy in its own right. While [this] style may reflect special external constraint at the time of writing,…stories are the more compelling for being tacit and indirect” (Cheung 33).