AsianWeek.com: Feature: Anthologies

The Little Press that Could:

How the Asian American Writers Workshop nurtured the APIA literary scene

By Anhoni Patel

Though Asian Pacific Islander American authors have been the darlings of the publishing world in the past few years, with regulars like Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan often found on bestsellers lists, it wasn’t always like this.

The lack of a space to nurture and promote APIA writers was one of the forging factors that led to the formation of the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) in 1991. The nonprofit was created by a group of young people including Curtis Chin, former arts editor at A. Magazine. The response to the formation was instant, and more than a hundred people attended their first reading event.

As Managing Director Quang Bao states, “The immediate and overwhelming response to our initial activities, even though the group wasn’t even established in its own space, signaled the need for the kind of service organization we have become for APIA writers.”

Today, the organization has a staunch presence in the New York City literary scene, in both publishing and with a host of special programs. AAWW publishes one of the nation’s premier literary journals, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and the literary magazine Ten. They also hold workshops, readings and performances, from spoken word artists to novelists.

While the AAWW’s Van Lier Fellowships has helped launch the careers of many an APIA writer, its bookstore has made such work available to the public at large and their annual Asian American Literary Awards has recognized outstanding work.

This multi-faceted organization can be credited, in part, with the boost APIA writers have had as of late. Bao asserts that, “We are right there at all levels of Asian American literature. The AAWW is responsible for launching the careers of some of the most well-known Asian American writers today.”

This year the group has published its eighth anthology — Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America edited by Quang Bao and Hanya Yanagihara. It has given out awards in the past to Eric Gamalinda, Chang-rae Lee, Cathy Park Hong and Lisa Ko. But the group doesn’t just work with established writers slaving away at novel manuscripts or editing collections of essays, they also target teenagers through various community programs dubbed Arts-in-Education.

CreateNow, a 10-week youth program, works with New York City high school students by fostering exploration of the literary arts. During these weeks, they are exposed to Asian American literature, learn skills to write creatively, and are taught how to develop Web sites.

The program culminates with the participants completing projects, such as poetry videos, murals, ‘zines, chapbooks, or public readings. Meanwhile, the AAWW tries to expand English curricula at public learning institutions through the Widening the Margins program, which works directly with teachers by also informing them about APIA literature and how they can, in turn, integrate it into their reading lists alongside Dickens, Salinger and Shakespeare.

AAWW offers a variety of workshops to stir one’s creative juices, while giving participants the chance to work with well-known writers like Amitava Kumar, Ralph Peña and Beau Sia. Each season there are at least three workshops held in the fields of fiction, poetry, playwriting and memoir. Recent workshops have been ‘Electric Shock Fiction’ and ‘Playwriting’. Since the numbers of students is limited, the classes are intimate enough to receive ample feedback and attention.

Furthermore, their Asian American Bookseller stocks more than 2,000 titles of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, magazines, ‘zines, children’s and young adult books that all relate in one way or the other to the APIA experience. If you can’t find an APIA related title at your local independent bookstore or Barnes & Noble, you can go to their bookstore; the AAWW makes such writings accessible. Meanwhile, their Small Press Division churns out at least one anthology a year; the upcoming book is focused on Korean American literature. Their roster includes the award-winning collection Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which received the American Book Award in 1997, and The Nuyorasian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City.

In November of this year, AAWW will hold its Fourth Annual Asian American Literary Awards in which three authors will be recognized for their exceptional work. For emerging artists, there’s the Van Lier Fellowship for New York City-based writers under 30. The fellowship offers a $7,500 stipend, and the opportunity to work with a professional guidance team consisting of an agent, editor, established writer and English professor. Fellows also have the chance to read at the numerous events at the AAWW, and their works are considered for publication in Asian Pacific American Journal.

Receiving such an award helps solidify an up-and-coming writer’s career. As the years go by, the AAWW will be responsible for nurturing and supporting more and more work of APIA writers, who will be making important contributions to America’s literary landscape. While the organization itself grows (they successfully moved from their former basement office into an airy loft and, thus, shifted their status from a small to mid-size arts nonprofit), the world of APIA literature continues to grow with them.

Queer APIA Take Out Delivers

By Kevinjamesgardner

Forget the obvious allusions to food — this fat anthology’s press release milks that theme to the bone: “In the mood for a taste of something sweet and saucy? Take Out contains a buffet of writings.” How cute and oh, so Asian is that? Apparently, the publisher momentarily overlooked these queer APIA artists’ attempts to defy the usual objectification of their lives.

Reading this gaysian retrospective of literary, performance and visual works doesn’t really feel like eating, anyway. Nor is it just sitting and drinking with the “overabundance of barfly narrators seeking the reader’s sympathies,” as one unappreciative critic puts it. It’s more like receiving a handmade gift from a circle of friends, a collective scrapbook of honest life impressions that resuscitate your emotional landscape and make you feel honored and included in the artists’ highly personal memories, musings and antics.

Like a scrapbook, Take Out throws together somewhat random pieces from people’s lives in a multimedia mishmash of memorabilia — stories and fragments, poems and prose, letters and limericks, photos and comics, screenplays and shopping lists. In “The Rand McNally Road Atlas” Timothy Liu scribbles one phrase, remembering a special moment shared on a certain randy road trip: “Boys in the back seat / jacking off, trying to hit / their favorite state.” On another page, Daniel Lee doodles a horny little haiku entitled

“Request”: “F**k me / I’m bored.”

Ken Chu’s faux sports pennants smell like teen spirit, championing sappy, yet earnest, slogans of “Queer n’ Asian” and “Number One Gay Son.” Jimm Tran’s photographic series of “Self Identities” crisscrosses all the lines — ethnic, gender, class and more — to bring us into his scrappy world of afros, Pho girls, Pepsi, bedspreads, Ken dolls and broken American dreams. Gaye Chan and Lisa Asagi piece together eerie images of eye-to-eye Asian figurines and mouth-to-mouth CPR figures to accompany the disconnected dialogue of “Queer Girl” and “Queer Boy.” Asagi goes on to weave together pockets of dreams and flashes of memories that constitute her “Physics”: “Light pools and seeps beneath waterfalls of curtain. I had been unable to sleep since coming to this place. Your hand a small warm shark dreaming in the reef of my heart.”

Many of the contributions are about love, as editors Quang Bao and Hanya Yanagihara point out in the introduction. The search for and navigation of a lovespace that works for those of us on the margins largely defines the intense experience of being queer and APIA. Noel Alumit plays up this intensity in “The Rice Room: Scenes from a Bar,” taking us inside the wacky and whimsical lovelorn yearning of one geeky George: And he would see through my being, see through my soul, see through my glasses, that I’m the only man for him. And tomorrow we’ll fly down to Hawaii, where they’ll soon sanction gay marriages, start our life together, adopt two children from Korea, save money to send those two children to college, they’ll visit us in our home on a hill in Los Feliz, where we would spend the rest of our days until we die only minutes apart, then meet each other as cosmic light on the rings of Saturn where we would spend the rest of eternity traveling from one heavenly start to another — together.

These dear diary-like moments throughout the book remind us of our own and our friends’ far-out fantasies and secret passions, especially the ones we joke about or shove to the backs of our minds.

This kind of literary spilling of guts may get uncomfortable at times — like the barfly narratives mentioned earlier — but it also feels rewarding as only truly intimate exchanges can be. Feel the love in Philip Huang’s “Baby”: “This is it, right here. You and me. Two people get so used to making a life together they don’t want nothing else. Maybe there ain’t nothing else out there. Maybe all there is is in this room, right here, right now.” Baby could have said lots of things. He could have argued or said something smart. But he just stood there like someone dumb, holding out his hand like a begging cup as Samuel slid the ring onto his finger.

Mmm, mmm, good — makes you wanna order Take Out right now, doesn’t it? And once you try it, you’ll keep coming back for more. Just ask Daniel Lee, who tells it like it is in his hip-hop hottie “When Letting Go/F**king”: “You’ll keep comin’ back / to swim / in the pool of my / homo sex drool / You’ll keep comin’ back / to tongue tango / between the halves / of my ass-mango.”

Alright, so maybe the food thing IS significant. It takes us into the queer APIA body, including this body of queer APIA works. This pulpy primer on queer voices from Asian Pacific Islander America is a lot to swallow, but it really does hit the spot.

Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America edited by Quang Bao and Hanya Yanagihara, will be available from Temple University Press in September 2001.

Reach this reviewer at kevinjamesgardner@freeagent.com.

With a Rebel Yell

Vickie Nam’s new anthology lets Asian American girls speak (and yell) for themselves

By Victoria Namkung

When Vickie Nam, 26, was coming-of-age in upstate New York, a typical afternoon involved reading Seventeen, lightening her hair with Sun-In and taping her eyes to make them look “big and round.”

Years later at Wellesley College, Nam examined media stereotypes of Asian Pacific Islander Americans and became frustrated with the representation that filled magazines, television and movies. Rather than wade in a pool of self-hate she took matters into her own hands – essentially becoming a creator of representation – and put out a call for submissions for YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American (Quill).

Nam has always been an ally of teenage girls. “There’s such a fascination with youth. I feel like they’re so resilient and underestimated,” she explains. “They’re savvy about a lot of things adults have no clue about.” After brief stints at Teen People, Blue Jean magazine and AsianAvenue.com, Nam moved to Los Angeles to work at the now defunct Voxxy.com, an interactive teen site. A few months into her new job, the book was sold. At this time, she was still gathering submissions via a P.O. Box and email. “I could have spent another year with the manuscript,” she says. “But at this point I’m just ready for it to be out there.”

The breakthrough anthology features 68 contributors from all over the United States and Canada. By including Chinese, Korean, Filipina, Asian Indian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Hapa and Hmong girls’ writings, it’s fair to say this is one of the most ethnically and geographically diverse books on the market. The poetry, essays, stories, confessions and letters deal with familiar themes of immigration, identity, body image, and generational conflict, but the voices are fresh, new and surprisingly mature.

Elena Cabatu, 21, of Hilo, Hawaii waxes poetic about the tourism industry in Hawaii writing, “Paradise ain’t shit so why don’t you jus’ shut yoa’ mout’.” University of California Santa Barbara student Wendy Thompson, then 18, writes about her African American and Chinese heritage: “I wish I could tell someone off, but because I’ve been conditioned to stay quiet, to take the blame, I stand there and let the person spit all in my face.” Another contributor writes about coming out of the closet to her mother: “I lurch forward, hoping to embrace her and to tell her it is going to be all right. I want to say the three words she was never taught. Words I always waited for.”

Then there are more lighthearted pieces such as Julia Wong’s essay on trying to find a bra in Hong Kong where she explains, “the average cup size was, unfortunately for me, an A.” In “Funny Girl” Diya Gullapalli, 19, jokes with friends about the caste and dowry of her “suitable husband.” She pokes fun at stereotypes of Asian Indians, but later explains, “It wasn’t the kids’ fault they were ignorant, especially if their only exposure to Indians was in the form of Apu of Apu’s Quickie Mart in The Simpsons, or the Indian immigrants on Seinfeld, or even Madonna, with her trendy bindi obsession.”

Written with unbounded enthusiasm, the contributors in this anthology are begging to be heard, and now they finally have a public forum to rant, share, explain and most importantly – represent themselves. Since the pieces are typically one to three pages, it’s a quick, yet enlightening read.

Nam premises each of the five sections with a personal essay of her own, then she adds background information and analysis of the work that follows. The sections close with a “Mentor Piece,” where APIA notables, such as Helen Zia, Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Elaine Kim, write about their own coming-of-age experience, which lends some weight to the project, since it’s made up of largely unknown contributors and a first time editor.

Fortunately, the editor and mentors don’t stifle the girls. The 15- to 21-year-olds occupy most of the paperback’s 297 pages. “Vickie doesn’t condescend these girls,” says Sally Kim, the editor who acquired the anthology for HarperCollins. “She can really be their friend and speak their language.”

In addition to promoting the book and speaking at schools, Nam maintains an on-line diary about the book and her experiences. She gets personal, often posing questions to the masses, or simply reflecting on the project. She writes, “Do you ever step back, and really think about the people who share their knowledge with you just for the sole purpose of, well, sharing?”

The Web site also keeps fans abreast of the book tour and various causes that are Yell-Oh Girl friendly. As for the book, it’s mandatory reading for anyone who cares about APIA girls and where they are headed. Nam, who sounds like a proud mother, sister and friend all at once, knows where they are headed. “They are the warrior women of tomorrow,” she asserts. “These girls are going to breakdown stereotypes.”

YELL-Oh Girls! is available at bookstores nationwide. The YELL-Oh Girls! book tour will hit three Bay Area venues starting Oct. 10. For all other readings and related events check out www.yellohgirls.com.

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