I. Introduction

Chinese-American literature can be defined as literature by and about Chinese immigrants in America.

It covers not only the immigrant experience across different historical periods but also the influence of the history of racism in Asian America.

This chapter begins with the Chinese cultural backgrounds and the early immigrant experiences across the Pacific Ocean. Then it traces the development of Chinese-American literature. Finally, general trends and developments are outlined with a historical view of the development in this field.

II. Immigrant History  

The Chinese came in the United States in large numbers, about 20,026 by 1852, as gold rush prospectors in the mid-nineteenth century. They were driven by the political and economic disturbances in rural southern China after the Opium War. They joined gold mining in the Sierra Nevada and established numerous small Chinatowns there. Competition and the declining profits in gold mines led to widespread white hostility and racist violence. The Chinese were driven out, tortured, and lynched, their living quarters burned down. The Californian legislature passed laws imposing taxes on the Chinese and discouraging Chinese immigration. From the mid-1860s, the Chinese turned to work on the construction of the Central Pacific Railway. After the completion of the first transcontinental railway in 1869 and with the economic crisis in America, they found themselves competing in a racist job market. They were not only exploited as cheap labor but also more and more singled out as scapegoats in politicians' racist propagandas and white mobs' riots. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned all Chinese labor immigration to the United States and prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens.

The American exclusionary immigration laws led to the creation of a bachelor society for Chinese-American men, who could not bring their wives and sons over nor marry the whites here due toanti-miscegenation laws. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed government documents, many Chinese had a chance to falsely claim native-born citizenship status and manage to send for their family members. The immigrants were kept for screening on Angel Island off the coast of San Francisco. They underwent racist humiliations and suffered from loneliness and anxiety for months or even years.

The Chinese in America remained mainly an urban population. They were forced by white racism to work in menial jobs. They concentrated mainly in Chinese restaurants, corner stores, and laundries, where the family members and Chinese employees worked long hours at low wages. During the long years of racist exclusion, the Chinese formed various organizations within Chinatowns to take care of each other and develop their own community. During the Second World War, the Chinese actively participated in military service and war efforts, and their contributions helped to induce the U.S. Congress to abolish the Chinese exclusion acts in 1943.

Since the Second World War, the U.S. immigration policies for the Chinese have been subjected to changes in political and economic climates. After 1943, the quota for the Chinese immigration was only 105 a year. The liberation of mainland China in 1949 led to the Refugee Acts, allowing Chinese political refugees to immigrate to America. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 replaced the national-origin quota system (much biased against Asians) with hemispheric quotas at 170,000 for the Eastern Hemisphere and 20,000 annual maximum per country. Thousands of students and scholars from Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s and from China in the 1980s and 1990s came to USA. Taiwan and Hong Kong business entrepreneurs have also moved to America for a "First World" passport and a Western education for their children. Besides, there are also illegal immigrants smuggled into America and working underground in the strict control of gangs and criminals.

Chinese immigrants are a diverse community with a long history in America. Writers have been trying to uncover and explore various aspects of the Chinese immigrant experience, which has not been properly recognized in official American history.

III. Literary-cultural History

Chinese culture influences Chinese-American literature. The most familiar in the field is the warrior traditions, male and female, advanced by Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. In Chin's version, the warrior tradition in Chinese popular culture is best represented by Chinese classic novels like Water Margin(《水浒传》) and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms（《三国演义》）. It is a tradition of universal brotherhood, of taking justice into one's own hands when the country is ruled by a tyrant, of opposing the rich and powerful on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. Frank Chin resurrected this tradition in the late 1960s in order to recover Chinese masculinity against the white emasculation of Asian America. Here the Chinese heroism serves to shatter the white myth of the effeminate Chinamen. The Chinese-American woman writer Maxine Hong Kingston's work The Woman Warrior invents the tradition of the woman warrior (from a famous classical narrative poem Fa Mulan《花木兰》). The common emphasis on warrior in both types of cultural invention shows the urgency of Chinese-American writers waging a war of pens for minority rights.

Chinese culture is marked by geographical and historical diversity. Confucianism as a dominant ideology of Chinese culture is a humanist philosophy, a secular ethics of reason and fairness (情、理) governing human relations. Taoism and Buddhism also influence Chinese culture with their Oriental mysticism, yin/yang dialectics, and transcendentalism. There are also various folk traditions such as Chin's Cantonese opera and Kingston's "talk story". They are unofficial, alternative cultures deeply embedded in the immigrants' daily life and traceable to their roots across the Pacific. Most of the early immigrants represented by Chin and Kingston came from the Cantonese-speaking rural southern China. The immigrants in the works of Gish Jen and Amy Tan spoke Mandarin and Shanghai dialect and came from an urban background. China in this century has witnessed a history of Westernization, colonialism, and modernity. Cultural mixing often makes it difficult to tell the East from the West, a convenient division that has often led to racial stereotypes.

Chinese immigrants came to America in the mid-nineteenth century as gold miners, railway builders, factory workers, and agricultural laborers. Racial stereotypes are what whites define the “yellow” other. Morally and physically, Chinese were the same as the animalistic and rude blacks and deserve the same fate as the American Indians. They were a source of more efficient labor than the blacks and cheaper than the white workers. This unique position translated into many threats in the racial fantasies of whites: cheap competitors against white workers, greedy hoarders of wealth, armed with sly cunning and low-wage competition, Chinese would overwhelm America.

Chinese American writers are influenced by Chinese culture and make efforts of break the racial stereotypes of Chinese by their works.

IV. Dominant Concerns and Major Authors

Chinese-American literature in its early days has diverse concerns and structures of sensibilities.

One of the earliest spokeswomen in English for the Chinese immigrant community is Sui Sin Far (水仙花，Edith Maud Eaton，1867-1914). Born of a Chinese mother and an English father, Sui Sin Far grew up amid poverty. She felt she was a stranger between cultures and races. During the years of mounting white racism against the Chinese, She wrote in newspapers fighting for the rights of the Chinese and published many stories about Chinese immigrant experiences. In 1916, the collection of her works Mrs Spring Fragrance(《春香夫人》) was published. Most of her stories are autobiographical, depicting her personal experiences. More than mere realism or protest, Sui Sin Far's voice explores deeply the split psyche of double consciousness in immigrant life. Her highly' personal autobiographical writings and fiction are always informed with an antiracist political position. She has a noble vision of transcending racial barriers for a common humanity while carefully noting cultural differences in concrete details of daily life.

There were many Chinese scholar-travelers writing their experiences and impressions of America and carrying on a high-level cultural dialogue between Chinese and Western traditions. Lin Yutang(林语堂，1895-1976) is the most prominent among them. He is a professor of philosophy. He was educated first in missionary schools and universities in China and then in graduate schools in the West. He was well read both in Western and Chinese cultures and well known for his humorous essays. After he came to live in America in 1930, he wrote and published many books introducing Chinese culture and people to the American readers, includingMy Country and My People(《吾国吾民》，1935),The Importance of Living(《生活的艺术》，1937), and Chinatown Family: On the Wisdom of America(《唐人街家庭》，1948). These books introduce Chinese culture and Chinese character and express a Chinese literary gentleman's pride about his own cultural tradition.

In the forties and the fifties of the twentieth century, some Chinese-American autobiographical novels were published. Pardee Lowe's（刘裔昌）Father and Glorious Descendant(《父亲和荣耀的后代》，1943) and Jade Snow Wong's（黄玉雪，1922-） Fifth Chinese Daughter（《第五个中国女儿》，1950) contain autobiographies of second-generation Chinese Americans. They grew up torn between their immigrant parents' culture and the American mainstream culture. In their novels, on one hand, there is much self-hatred and self-contempt. On the other hand, there is also much complaint about the self's not being accepted and assimilated by the mainstream culture. That is because at that time the Chinese were just beginning to be taken as American allies and were still confined to Chinatown.

Chin Yang Lee’s（黎锦扬）Flower Drum Song(《花鼓歌》，l957) and Louis Chu' s （朱路易）Eat a Bowl of Tea(《吃一碗茶》，1961) portrays  Chinatown on the verge of change. These novels weren’t popular among the Western readers because the relationship between People’s Republic of China and the United States got worse in the Cold War climate of 1950s.

From Sui Sin Far to Louis Chu, pre-1960s Chinese-American literature is marked by a series of firsts, first novel, first woman writer, first second-generation writer. The pre-1960s literature remains a cultural legacy for later writers and critics. The pre-1960s literature, especially the more popular books in the mainstream market, helped invent and solidify a Chinese identity between black and white, a composite of images defined through certain descriptions of passivity and endurance and a series of differences in the American context. This sliding of identities provides the background for new uncertainties and attempts at new beginnings in the post-1960s creative and critical awareness of ethnic identity and political alliance.

The era of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in America was marked by increased awareness of racial and cultural identity.

Chinese-American writers Frank Chin(赵健秀) and, later, Maxine Hong Kingston（汤亭亭） prove to be the most influential in shaping the sensibilities of Chinese-American culture, gender, and ethnicity in this period.

Frank Chin has been called the "godfather" of Asian American writing. He His works up to this moment include poems, short stories, plays, and two novels. The plays are The Chickencoop Chinaman(《鸡笼中国佬》，1971)，The Year of the Dragon(《龙年》，1974). The novels are Donald Duk(《唐老亚》，1991) and Gunga Din Highway(《甘加丁之路》，1994).

Frank Chin's works show a wide-ranging view of cultural and racial problems. He is concerned with what he perceives as the decline of Chinatown in America. Most of the protagonists in his stories are alienated young men dissatisfied with the stultifying quaint costumes and old-age decay of Chinatown and yet unable to gain acceptance in racist mainstream society.

Chin has explored various traditions of the Chinese-American subject, producing a strange company: on one hand, Chin embraces the heroic tradition in Chinese culture; on the other hand, he would call himself a cowboy; yet on a more historical level, he would declare the tradition of Chinese forefathers who came to America to build railways as pioneers. Only the first and the third stay on in his novel, Donald Duk, in which one white child and one Chinese child learn to appreciate Chinese culture and the history of Chinese Americans. This work explores the daily community life of Chinatown and bridging gaps between whites and Chinese, between different generations.

Maxine Hong Kingston made a major literary event in Chinese-American literature with the publication of her work The Woman Warrior(《女勇士》) in 1976. It traces a Chinese woman's tradition with a modern feminist stance and carries the bewilderment of a Chinese American girl lost between two cultures. Her second book is China Men(《中国佬》，1980). It explores the history of Chinese male immigrants as they worked on the railways and farms amid racist oppression. In both works, the hard line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred. Her latest book, Tripmaster Monkey（《孙行者》）, came out in 1989. It is a post-modern novel that breaks in style from her earlier works and mixes ethnicity amid myriads of intertextual references and images of a multiracial America.

The certainty about one's Chinese cultural identity may be more illusory than real in these novels and stories, since they are all set in a modern America, where the culture and the race still suffer from discrimination and neglect. Yet paradoxically, the immigrant characters all cling to that culture as the only real spiritual support, even in a critical sense. While this sentiment may not be politically effective, it should not be used in any way as a justification for white racist charges of Chinese unassimilability. On the contrary, the failure of assimilation for certain ethnic minorities points to the racist shadow right at the heart of the mainstream culture. In an age of multiculturalism and cultural difference, a sense of exile should not be denied as a part of the immigrant experience and sensibilities. .

V. Multiplicity of Literary Explorations Since the 1980s

Chinese-American literature has undergone a booming period since the beginning of the 1980s, not only in scholarly research and university curriculum but also in the variety of literary creations and experiments. While certain concerns and themes persist, more spaces are opened for various kinds of literary explorations of identity, politics, and cultural expressions.

Chinese immigrant history continues to be a fascinating subject. Laurence Yep's（叶添祥） play Pay the Chinaman(1987) is based on the playwright's research into the history of early Chinese immigrants' gold mining and pioneering in the West and the eventual wiping out of many small Chinatowns during the ensuing racist waves. The play explores the trickster figure as an immigrant survivor who has to lie and change himself and his lifestyle in order to make a living in a hostile and volatile environment.

In his play FOB (《新移民》，1979), David Henry Hwang（黄哲伦） telescopes Kwan Kung（关公）, the early immigrant protector god, with the contemporary context of new immigrants from Hong Kong. Thereby he seeks a way to solve the contradictions between the second-generation, American-born Chinese with troubled racial feelings and the new arrivals who find themselves targets of a new kind of racism. In the interstices of generations, histories, cultures, and genders, identities are scattered and shattered in a multiplicity of disguises. Histories and traditions are both explored for inspiration and inheritance and subjected to invention and modification.
Amy Tan's(谭恩美) novel The Joy Luck Club (《喜福会》，1989) explores the tensions, jealousies, and love-hate relationship between immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. All the four mothers have gone through many hardships in China. They survive and become pioneers in coming to America and making a new life. The novel opens up a space for the daughters to recognize and embrace a female tradition in their ethnic culture that they need to treasure in their own life.

The depiction of Chinese students/immigrants apparently secure in their cultural identity is a theme usually found in immigrant literature in Chinese. Gish Jen's（任碧莲）Typical American (《典型的美国佬》，1991) portrays the loss of idealism in Chinese students/immigrants as their American dream fails.

The contemporary scene of Chinese immigrant literature is marked by diversity in subjects and rapid change in political and aesthetic concerns, over-determined by American race politics, minority discourses, feminisms, and post-modern sensibilities. The Chinese-American writers are developing new languages and adopting new perspectives to fulfill the task of challenging racism and dismantling patriarchy.