Download Remote Parsee: Writing on Asian American Literature (1992-2002)
ChatGPT writes:
Remote Parsee: Writing on Asian American Literature (1992–2002) gathers a decade of essays, reviews, and polemics about Asian American literary production, with special attention to poetry, experimental form, Korean American writing, and the limits of identity-based literary criticism. The table of contents shows the collection moving from early reviews in 2nd Generation, Asian American Arts Dialogue, Seoro Bulletin, and A. Magazine into longer review essays for Korean Culture, then toward the major 2001 essay “Remote Parsee: A Grammar of Alternative Asian North American Poetry.”
The opening essay, “An Open Invitation,” establishes the governing argument: Asian American writing should not be reduced to sociological evidence. The essay begins by objecting that “most considerations of Asian American literature have been made within sociological parameters,” where individual aesthetic achievement is “subsumed under a broader theme.” Against that flattening, it reads Lawson Fusao Inada, Jessica Hagedorn, John Yau, and The Open Boat as offering distinct “ways” Asian American poetry might be written. Inada’s camp poems are praised for making “a sense of grandeur out of short… ‘legends,’” while Hagedorn’s poems are valued for performance energy and “laryngitis of the soul.” Yau becomes especially important because his work “substitutes the experience being expressed with the experience of its own language,” a phrase that could stand as a thesis for the whole volume.
The early reviews are sharp, sometimes severe, and often suspicious of anthology-making. The review of Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone faults the novel for leaving Ona as a “deep” character merely because of suicide and for settling into an “acceptable humanist stance” of unknowability. The review of Charlie Chan Is Dead admires pieces by Kimiko Hahn, Jose Garcia Villa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walter Lew, and Darrell Lum, but criticizes the anthology’s “complex, intangible web of pc-ness.” The recurring concern is not whether Asian American literature exists, but whether criticism and anthologies allow it enough formal, ethical, and imaginative difficulty.
The Korean American essays deepen this argument. “Voicebox,” published in Seoro Bulletin, insists that Korean American literature should be approached “from the inside,” through works already made, not as a blank necessity waiting for sociological confirmation. The essay criticizes claims that Korean American writers have not “dared the assumptions of language,” pointing to Cha’s DICTEE and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West as counterexamples. Its central prescription is radical: the future of Korean American literature may depend on a “new language,” but such a language comes from destroying inherited habits, challenging syntax, and learning from multiple literary influences—“drown in them,” the essay urges—rather than replacing white American references with Korean American ones.
The Korean Culture essays are the collection’s intellectual center. Korean Culture was a publication of the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles, a state-supported cultural institution that presents Korean arts, language, exhibitions, and public programming in Southern California; the document itself identifies the journal as “a publication of the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles.” The current Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles is operated by Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and its public mission remains cultural presentation and exchange. (Facebook) In the 1990s, that venue appears to have provided space for serious Korean American literary criticism, including work on Cha, Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Song.
“A Search for Lost Time,” the essay on Walter K. Lew’s Excerpts From DIKTE for DICTEE, reads Lew as one of the few critics attentive to Cha across the decade after her 1982 death. Lew’s collage is described as “seen to be believed,” existing between English, Korean, and French and adopting Cha’s own multimedia strategies. The essay argues that Lew’s work is not merely criticism but a “complex visual study,” “a brief film,” and “a mosaic of quotation,” expanding the possibilities of Asian American criticism beyond explanatory prose.
The later “Korean American Poetry” essay builds a genealogy in which Cha, Lew, Kim, and Song are read against institutional neglect and narrow expectations of representativeness. It stresses that Korean identity is “fissured,” and that heterogeneous channels—visual, linguistic, documentary, lyric—can “defuse ideological difference” and reach “the specific indeterminacies of art itself, where feeling and beauty reside.”
The magazine context matters. A. Magazine, where “John Yau’s Private Eye” appeared, began as an Asian American publication founded around Jeff Yang’s circle in 1990 and grew from community-based circulation to national newsstand distribution. (APA) Its rise belonged to a broader late-1980s/1990s moment when Asian American magazines helped shape a new cultural public; the Columbia Journalism Review calls A. Magazine “foremost” among such magazines. (Columbia Journalism Review) That helps explain why Stefans’s Yau essay could address both poetry and cultural readership: Yau’s “Genghis Chan” poems are not decoded for identity content alone but read as unstable events in language, where even the word “yellow” becomes a shifting racial, visual, and semantic charge.
By the final “Remote Parsee” essay, the collection has arrived at a broad poetics of alternative Asian North American writing. Its title phrase comes from Jam Ismail: “descended on all sides from the Idiosyncrasy… refused to parse, opted to be remote parsee.” The essay rejects any comprehensive suturing of “alternative” Asian North American poetry, arguing instead for fragments, indeterminacy, multilingualism, neologism, and rearticulation. Its final claim is that no single discourse governs Asian American writing; what matters is the singularity of the work when liberal inclusion, academic abstraction, or ethnic authenticity threaten to erase it.
Claude writes:
This draft collection gathers a decade of critical writing on Asian American and Asian North American literature, produced between 1992 and 2002. Its 137 pages move from early reviews written for small community publications through sustained theoretical essays, and collectively constitute an argument: that the most vital Asian American writing is formally experimental, that it demands evaluation on aesthetic grounds rather than sociological ones, and that avant-garde technique is not a departure from political commitment but a particularly powerful form of it.
Early Writing: The Contested Anthology
The earliest pieces, published in venues like 2nd Generation (1992) and the Asian American Arts Dialogue (1993), read the field as it was being defined. Stefans applauds Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp for achieving grandeur through radical economy — “Hold a microphone / Close to the moon” is Inada’s entire homage to Billie Holiday — and identifies a “minimalist style, but without a sacrifice of subtlety.” His review of John Yau’s Edificio Sayonara focuses on Yau’s ability to inhabit language as a dramatic personality: “The poem, one might say, substitutes the experience being expressed with the experience of its own language.” A sharper tone enters the critique of Jessica Hagedorn’s anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead, where Stefans argues that editorial timidity produces writing “characterized by a ‘cool’ irony: a thoughtless listing of detail, colorless mechanical dialogue.”
Most confrontational is the unpublished 1993 essay on Garrett Hongo’s introduction to The Open Boat. Stefans charges that Hongo’s twenty-six pages of prose “say practically nothing specific about any issue,” that his validation of Asian American poetry is fatally calibrated to “the best seller lists, the television talk shows, and, eventually, her work collected in high school and college textbooks.” The deeper complaint is institutional: Hongo’s introduction fails to construct a tradition “solid enough to be improved, added upon or altered.”
Korean Culture: A Critical Home
Two of the collection’s most substantial essays appeared in Korean Culture, a quarterly periodical published by the Korean Cultural Center of Los Angeles, part of the Korean Consulate General. The magazine was not an academic journal but a cultural publication in English — a somewhat improbable venue for dense avant-garde literary criticism, which is part of what makes Stefans’s contributions notable. He was, as a footnote acknowledges, writing for Korean Culture in the mid-1990s while John Yau and Theresa Cha were largely unknown in mainstream American literary criticism.
The Spring 1994 essay on Walter K. Lew’s collage-work Excerpts from DIKTE for DICTEE (1982) is a close reading of an object as much as a text — a 9-by-9-inch book of photocopied images, multilingual fragments, and citations dedicated to Cha’s DICTEE. Stefans reads Lew’s inclusion of a Korean p’ansori singer legend — in which a performer “spat out like dark pebbles…three thick gobs of blood” before his voice “rang out beyond the roar of the waterfall” — as metaphor for the creative ethics of the critic who rescues a neglected artist from “the inferno of critical subjugation, manipulation, indifference and ignorance.” The essay concludes: “A smeared dab of blood, like a signature, marks the last page of each copy of Excerpts. This highly gestural relic, like an ideograph of a forgotten language, is, in fact, the point of highest concentration for this vortex.”
The Winter 1997 Korean Culture essay, “Korean American Poetry,” surveys Cha, Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Song and offers a striking claim: that “three of the most radical poets in the United States — Cha, Kim, and Lew — are also Korean,” and that their shared preoccupation with fragmentation, multilingualism, and “matrix” forms is not accidental but historically rooted. Discussing Kim’s Under Flag, Stefans quotes her lines — “Who is mother tongue, who is father country?” — and observes that “Kim has mastered a very unique, somewhat awkward, but always fascinating sense of prosody,” one in which “rock choked” jumps violently from an otherwise fluid line, and where “Kim’s politics are those of radical presence in the face of the invisibility.”
“Philly Talk 7” and the Interstitial
An epistolary exchange with Canadian poet Fred Wah forms one of the collection’s stranger and most revealing documents. Wah, responding to the Korean Culture essay, praises its “wonderfully negotiated” handling of the “matrix” poetics concept and adds: “There is an absence that is needing to be recovered…a big whah…” Stefans had in fact taken that phrase from Pynchon, he admits; the exchange spirals through Olson, bpNichol, Language poetics, and the question of whether avant-garde form can remain politically alive once academicized. “It’s an exciting time for poetry,” Stefans writes, “specifically because of these dynamics.”
The Final Essay: A Grammar
The collection closes with its most ambitious piece, “Remote Parsee: A Grammar of Alternative Asian North American Poetry,” a long theoretical survey running from Sadakichi Hartmann through Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tan Lin, Roy Kiyooka, and Fred Wah. Against Ron Silliman’s claim that marginalized writers naturally gravitate toward formal convention, Stefans argues the opposite: “writers from Blake and Kafka to Cha and Kiyooka prove the analysis wrong.” The title’s “remote parsee” — a figure of impossible linguistic distance — names the condition of the Asian North American poet who must read the Western tradition as both inheritance and imposition, and who finds in that doubleness not paralysis but creative resource.