Bespoke Immigrants in _Nisei_ Murayama, Accented Kim, and Mama Tan

Abstract

Bespoke immigrants are immigrant characters made-to-order for the master narrative of Asian American literature, particularly in the genre of bildungsroman featuring ethnic protagonists coming of age vis-à-vis their immigrant parents and the parent nation of America. These bespoke immigrants are emplotted to bring about the denouement as the protagonists come into their own. By virtue of such blood ties, a great number of Asian American writers have taken poetic license in representing immigrant characters as types, even stereotypes, long familiar to their Anglophone readers. Such portrayal reveals how white or whitewashed these American writers of Asian descent are, casting the white gaze onto immigrants who look like themselves. These immigrant prototypes harbor a schizophrenic split between the ancestral land and tongue versus the Promised Land and English. Morphing from alien clowns with baby English and farcical mannerisms to spiritual morphine supercharging ethnic quests of identity, immigrant characters serve as the foil in bildungsroman on maturing, mainstreaming, and Americanizing. Such poetic license, such self-serving discursive liberty, borders on “immigrant license,” or license to replicate creatures-characters. This is tantamount to the license to kill them, who would have otherwise been round, organic, and unto themselves, evidenced in Milton Murayama, Richard Kim, and Amy Tan.