earticle

영어

This paper aims at rewriting the history of early Asian American people in terms of diaspora. In doing thus, I will highlight the diasporic nature of early Asian Americans, that is, their imaginary relationship with, and their cultural exchange with, Asia—an important but repressed part of Asian American subjectivity. First of all, I will define early Asian Americans as the “diaspora of paranoia” with all its Lacanian connotation. Here, the term paranoia does not refer to a particular pathological condition; it rather foregrounds the nature of early Asian immigrants' peculiar way of imagining their homelands. That is to say, for the early Asian Americans, multiplicity of one's identity in a socially symbolic order is subsumed under a single signifier, that is, Asia. This paranoiac relationship with their homelands is structured and constructed by institutional and cultural racism of the US that barred Asians from becoming legitimate citizens of US, on the one hand, and the physical and psychical distance from their homeland that foreclosed the possibility of their ultimate return, on the other. Furthermore, early Asian Americans' paranoiac relationship with Asia gave rise to a peculiar kind of structure of feeling in their culture, which I will define as “aspiration to impossible authenticity.” Of course, there is no such thing as authenticity. Nevertheless, the imagined nature of their relationship with Asia and the physical distance from it necessarily leads them to a tragic self-knowledge that they can never remain as an authentic Asian subject. I will show how this peculiar kind of structure of feeling shapes the early Asian American life and culture through a close reading of Bienvenido's short story “Scent of Apples” which vividly encapsulates early Filipino Americans' life.