Department of English

This volume was produced in collaboration with the San Fernando Valley Refugee Children Center, an organization committed to supporting unaccompanied minors who are seeking asylum after making the dangerous journey from Central America to the United States. Looking across the U.S. southern border, it draws together vivid first-person accounts from children at the SFVRCC with current research and testimonials from immigration attorneys, trauma therapists, and case workers to form a kind of children’s book for adults–that is, for the children to narrate and for adults to listen to. This collaborative project thus challenges the current discourse surrounding refugee experience and immigration policy by documenting and sharing the untold stories of the families involved. Together with our partners at the SFVRCC, we hope to educate and mobilize readers by providing a more holistic understanding of the refugee experience through the voices of those who have been excluded from the very discussions and structures that shape their lives.

This essay takes issue with the subordination of aesthetics to ethics in Ethical Literary Criticism. Ethics and aesthetics must coexist for either to realize its full value through literature. For any ethical lesson to take hold, it must be presented in a pleasing form so that the reader can learn without undue resistance. Part of the role of the critic is to discern beneath the seductive aesthetic form its ethical kernel, which more often than not remains elusive. The works by Russell C. Leong and Marilyn Chin, which provide literary entertainment and ethical illumination simultaneously, demonstrate the inextricability and interdependence of ethics and aesthetics. The “lessons” therein are exceptionally delectable on account of the two writers’ multiple consciousness as Chinese Americans and ethnic Americans concerned with other marginalized groups, their visceral empathy with racial and sexual minorities, and their scintillating poetics, especially their novel deployment of Chinese expressions and classical allusions. Their ethics and aesthetics are mutually constitutive and enabling.

During the twentieth century, state health authorities in California recommended sterilization for over 20,000 individuals held in state institutions. Asian immigrants occupied a marginalized position in racial, gender, and class hierarchies in California at the height of its eugenic sterilization program. Scholars have documented the disproportionate sterilization of other racialized groups, but little research exists connecting the racist, gendered implementation of Asian immigration restriction to the racism and sexism inherent in eugenics. This study examines patterns of coercive sterilization in Asian immigrants in California, hypothesizing higher institutionalization and sterilization rates among Asian-born compared with other foreign- and US-born individuals. We used complete count census microdata from 1910 to 1940 and digitized sterilization recommendation forms from 1920 to 1945 to model relative institutionalization and sterilization rates of Asian-born, other foreign-born, and US-born populations, stratified by gender. Other foreign-born men and women had the highest institutionalization rates in all four census years. Sterilization rates were higher for Asian-born women compared with US-born [Incidence Rate Ratio (IRR) = 2.00 (95% CI: 1.61, 2.48)] and other foreign-born women (p < 0.001) across the entire study period. Sterilization rates for Asian-born men were not significantly higher than those of US-born men [IRR 0.95 (95% CI 0.83, 1.10). However, an inflection point model incorporating the year of sterilization found higher sterilization rates for Asian-born men than for US-born men prior to 1933 [IRR 1.31 (95% CI 1.09, 1.59)]. This original quantitative analysis contributes to the literature demonstrating the health impact of discrimination on Asian-Americans and the disproportionate sterilization of racial minorities under state eugenics programs.

This article combines legal, sociological, and literary scholarship. Taking the lead from scholars of Critical Race Theory who have shown how African Americans and Korean Americans were positioned agonistically in People v. Soon Ja Du and in the media accounts about the LA uprising, I submit that “The Court Interpreter” by Ty Pak at once impugns and underwrites the oppositional racial identities dictated by the “master narrative.” Part III opens with Cheung’s interracial analysis of what she describes as “(mis)interpretations and (in)justice” during the 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and “Black-Korean Conflict” (2005). Here, Cheung draws on fictional and legal material where racial issues are interpreted and misinterpreted within the context of a highly charged racialized climate in 1992 on the heels of the verdict that exonerated four white policemen captured on video as brutally beating Rodney King.

This article extends the terms of debate in Western feminism by analyzing the gender politics within Asian American cultural studies. On account of historical "emasculation" of Asian American men (exclusion laws, labor restrictions, cultural stereotyping, etc), Chinese American male writers feel the need to reassert manhood through heroic literary portrayal. I urge these writers to recover a cultural space without denigrating the "feminine" and to redefine heroism by transcending binaries.