Twenty Asian American writers comment on their own work and speak frankly about aesthetics, politics, and the challenges they have encountered in pursuing a writing career.

This article supports Barbara Christian’s observation that theoretical insights can be directly manifested in literary texts. I demonstrate how Bing Xin’s story “The Photograph” (1934) anticipates ideas later articulated by postcolonialist and Asian American literary critics such as Edward Said, Frank Chin, Rey Chow, and Arif Dirlik. The narrative interweaves three strands of Orientalism — missionary denigration of the Chinese as inferior heathens, American construct of the Asian as the silent model (minority), and Chinese complicity in the enactment of the stereotype. I argue that this transnational tale dissolves the boundaries of Chinese, Chinese American, and postcolonialist studies; interrogates both American imperialist assumptions and Chinese traditional values; and offers caveats against essentialist approaches to transracial adoption.

The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior exhibit parallel narrative strategies. The respectively black and Chinese American protagonists work their way from speechlessness to eloquence by breaking through the constraints of sex, race, and language. The heroines turn to masculine figures for guidance, to female models for inspiration, and to native idioms for stylistic innovation. Initially unable to speak, they develop distinctive voices by registering their own unspoken grief on paper and, more important, by recording and emulating the voices of women from their respective ethnic communities. Through these testimonies, each written in a bicultural language, Walker and Kingston reveal the obstacles and resources peculiar to minority women. Subverting patriarchal literary traditions by reclaiming a mother tongue that carries a rich oral tradition (of which women are guardians) the authors artfully coordinate the tasks of breaking silence, acknowledging female influence, and redefining while preserving ethnic characteristics.

This essay takes issue both with scholars who consider Chinese allusions in Asian American literature as Orientalist and with critics who advocate wholesale reclamation of an Asian (heroic) tradition. It shows through a detailed analysis of two poems how Chinese American writers could resort to bicultural interplay to convey transnational critique, and it contends that such deliberate filtering and revisioning of cultural legacies is in fact one of the hallmarks of Chinese American writing.