Asian-Americans in New York: Two Men's Adventures in Immigrant-Land

Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elements that this comparative approach questions. By studying the two novels together, the article argues that the two writers capture different, yet equally relevant hypostases of the (Asian) immigrant’s self-questioning and self-inscription into the American nation, whose updated versions of the “Dream” have been dominated by the material rather than the spiritual concerns.