That corpus includes works such as T.C. Huo’s two novels, which trace the arduous journeys of ethnic Chinese protagonists who are forced to leave Laos for first Thailand, then the United States. By emphasising the fluidity of state borders and national boundaries, his novels augment the “new refugee aesthetic style” that scholar Timothy K. August has identified in recent Southeast Asian American literature. To escape political instability, Fong Mun, the protagonist of Huo’s A Thousand Wings, is sent as a youth to live with relatives in Thailand. His family’s split geographical location not only points to the extended trade and kinship networks of Southeast Asian Chinese, but also recalls similar circulations in other Southeast Asian stories, such as Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm, where the father, Minh, calls himself “an errant son from a distant land” because his ethnically Vietnamese parents lived and raised him in Vientiane. Once in Thailand, however, Fong Mun also has to confront the xenophobic geopolitical climate of the time, posing as an ethnic Thai under the sobriquet Somkit, but in perpetual fear that his linguistic traits will give him away as a counterfeit. In this way, mixed roots, cultural hybridity, and anxieties over assimilation are characteristic of migratory Southeast Asian Chinese American writing.
Like Fong Mun, the unnamed protagonist of Lawrence Chua’s Gold By the Inch is a gay Asian American immigrant–although he travels to Thailand not as a refugee headed for the United States but as a white-collar sex tourist on vacation in Asia. Stephen Hong Sohn, in an extended analysis of the Gold By the Inch narrator’s “class advantage” as a sex tourist, observes that “the process of identification and disidentification with Thai peoples constantly shifts and is complicated by the ways in which, in the narrative, native Thai individuals can mark the main character as a foreigner.” At one point, a wary Thai immigration officer stationed at the Thailand–Malaysia border extends a “welcome home” to the protagonist only after his interrogation determines that the protagonist speaks Thai and eats sticky rice and green chilli. In a later scene, a taxi driver assumes that the protagonist is a visitor, and further remarks that “you don’t look [Thai]”—to which the narrator retorts, “You idiot… Brother, I have a fucking family in Thailand.”
Reviewer Stephen O. Murray has argued that “Chua and his narrator seem oddly ignorant of Chinese imperialism, Han Chinese arrogance, the resentments for Chinese arrogance and success felt by non-Chinese Southeast Asians, and the socio- or psycho-dynamics of his relations with symbols of white oppression.” But, as with Tsao’s The Majesties, the critique in Gold By the Inch is enacted not only in what is explicitly articulated, but also in the lies of commission and omission. Contrary to Murray’s reading, the novel is shaded by both Chua and the narrator’s awareness of those ethnic tensions, even as Chua deliberately creates a text that, in Sohn’s words, “provides a murky look at the ways in which the queer body also becomes complicit with problematic political trajectories.”
The protagonist of Gold By the Inch is obsessed with tracing the history of his grandmother, who is described as “the daughter of a Siamese father and a Nyonya mother.” With its reference to mixed Nyonya heritage—that is, the creole Chinese–Malay culture of Malaysia and Singapore, which scaffolds writing by authors such as Fiona Cheong, Shirley Lim, and Lydia Kwa,the sparse genealogy of the protagonist admits to the intimate historical ties of intermarriage that have established Chinese roots in Southeast Asia. Yet, in a resonant parenthetical aside, he glosses his family name, Khoo, as “a Chinese name no one outside of this region can ever recognize as Chinese.” That illegibility and lack of recognition applies to much of Southeast Asian Chinese American literature. When Susan Koshy notes in 1996 that “some of the recent immigrants, especially Chinese and Indians, are part of ‘second phase migrations’ arriving in the U.S. not from their countries of origin, but from Chinese diasporas in Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia or Indian diasporas,” her phrasing tellingly assumes that the “country of origin” for Southeast Asian Chinese is not Singapore, Malaysia, or Cambodia, but China.
On the contrary, the literature demonstrates that that is not the case. Instead, Southeast Asia is a place where “mobile societies from across Asia have engaged one another on a continuing basis for centuries,” as Engseng Ho, a Penang-born scholar based at Duke, writes. Southeast Asian Chinese American literature, which engages with that rich past and present, is Southeast Asian American literature. Amplifying intertwined histories of cultural encounters and exchanges, its voices pay homage to a region often overlooked in the United States, expose the narrowness of ethnic chauvinism, and challenge the limits of a nation-based imagination.
H.M.A. Leow is a Singaporean writer and a PhD student in English literature, working on a doctoral project about transnationalism and race in 21st-century Southeast Asian American literature. She is interested in narratives about empire and nation, as told through memory, migration, and food.
