Charlie Chan Is Dead II: At Home in the World : An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Range of Voices and Cultures
Review: Jessica Hagedorn has put together a mostly impressive collection of short stories and a few novel excerpts written by Asian Americans. From well-known names to lesser known talents, this anthology covers the wide terrain of both stylistic approaches and Asian cultures. Its writers can claim heritages from Vietnam, India, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, Cambodia, and Korea. Some stories, such as Peter Ho Davies's "The Hull Case," have little, if anything, to do with Asian culture, but most have stronger connections to cultural uniqueness. Sarah Chin's "Red Wall" follows a Chinese-American narrator as she explores the faces of China as the member of a documentary film crew. Bharati Mukherjee, in her well-known and powerful story "The Management of Grief," explores the impact on the Canadian-Indian community of a plane crash in India that kills their loved ones. Ka Vang's "Ms. Pac-Man Ruined My Gang Life" tells of a Hmong member of a girl-gang who is forced by her home-girls to exact revenge on a Puerto Rican girl. Gish Jen's strong "Who's Irish?" is movingly told in broken but lucid English by a Chinese woman who doesn't like the wildness in her half-Irish granddaughter. Some of my favorite writers are included here: Chang-Rae Lee, Ruth Ozeki, Akhil Sharma, Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Monique Truong. However, many of these forty-two writers were unknown to me before I read their stories, and I'm grateful Hagedorn introduced me to their work.

While some of these stories fall short of succeeding, all are well-written. The range in voices gives the reader a sense of the variety of the cultures and their individual members. I recommend this for readers of international fiction as well as Asian-Americans who long for writers who speak to their culture. This would make an excellent textbook for high school and college level courses that explore non-Western contemporary literature.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Range of Voices and Cultures
Review: Jessica Hagedorn has put together a mostly impressive collection of short stories and a few novel excerpts written by Asian Americans. From well-known names to lesser known talents, this anthology covers the wide terrain of both stylistic approaches and Asian cultures. Its writers can claim heritages from Vietnam, India, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, Cambodia, and Korea. Some stories, such as Peter Ho Davies's "The Hull Case," have little, if anything, to do with Asian culture, but most have stronger connections to cultural uniqueness. Sarah Chin's "Red Wall" follows a Chinese-American narrator as she explores the faces of China as the member of a documentary film crew. Bharati Mukherjee, in her well-known and powerful story "The Management of Grief," explores the impact on the Canadian-Indian community of a plane crash in India that kills their loved ones. Ka Vang's "Ms. Pac-Man Ruined My Gang Life" tells of a Hmong member of a girl-gang who is forced by her home-girls to exact revenge on a Puerto Rican girl. Gish Jen's strong "Who's Irish?" is movingly told in broken but lucid English by a Chinese woman who doesn't like the wildness in her half-Irish granddaughter. Some of my favorite writers are included here: Chang-Rae Lee, Ruth Ozeki, Akhil Sharma, Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Monique Truong. However, many of these forty-two writers were unknown to me before I read their stories, and I'm grateful Hagedorn introduced me to their work.

While some of these stories fall short of succeeding, all are well-written. The range in voices gives the reader a sense of the variety of the cultures and their individual members. I recommend this for readers of international fiction as well as Asian-Americans who long for writers who speak to their culture. This would make an excellent textbook for high school and college level courses that explore non-Western contemporary literature.

Rating:
Summary: Rich and Diverse Collection
Review: This second volume offers readers an opportunity to follow up on the previous volume, Charlie Chan is Dead (1993). Also edited by Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World, invites readers to explore newer, perhaps alternative representations of Asian-American experience. Davies' "Hull Case", as one reviewer noted, does not focus on Asian/Asian-American issues but Davies addresses a sobering question pertinent to Asian-American relations: Can one be happily married to a person who may not understand the other person's experience? Marilyn Chin critiques a racist and materialist culture in her two parables, "Parable of the Cake" and "Moon", the latter in which two thoughtless white-male adolescents suffer at the hands of a heavy-set American girl of Chinese descent.

But the more provocative stories, Greenfeld's "Submission", Meera Nair's "Video", and David Wong Louie's "Cold-Hearted", all pursue significant albeit contemporary themes. The volume moves comfortably away from the seminal work begun by Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn, each of them shaping Asian-American literature at a time in which Americans had little knowledge about Asian immigrant experience. In At Home in the World, writers ponder questions concerning family relations and the pain of its limitations, racism among Asians and other ethnicities, and the ways in which US culture shapes and forms sexual identity for immigrants.

Nora Okja Keller's "Beccah" (an excerpt from the novel, Comfort Woman), Akhil Sharma's "Surrounded by Sleep", and Nair's "Video" explore issues of religion and religious practice. Sharma's story subtly suggests that religious practice may suffer after immigration to the US but Sharma avoids heavy-handed commentary and leaves us to draw our own conclusions.

While the second volume is not flawless, for some of the stories reflect more experimentation, I would recommend this volume to readers looking for current voices writing in Asian-American literature. I would also encourage any college student who has taken an Asian-American literature course to consider Charlie Chan is Dead 2 as further work in the field. The introduction by Jessica Hagedorn and the preface by Elaine Kim are worth reading.