American Book Award Winner (Before Columbus Foundation)

The phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"--the ghettoization of Chinese American literature--was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. In a 1982 response to reviews of Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston pinpointed the crux of the matter: "How dare they make their ignorance our inscrutability "

Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these...