英文摘要 |
Studying abroad has been a significant element in the Asian American formation, but the peculiar transnational existence of foreign students, which are both inside and outside Asian America, has rendered them an ambivalent figure in Asian American cultural production. On the one hand, they are regarded as pioneers of the bourgeois Asian American society; on the other hand, they continue to be depicted as temporary, unassimilated foreigners. Asian American culture hence has different modalities of representing the foreign student figure from glorification, mockery, to sympathy. How has Asian American cultural production represented the foreign student? What politics of the other do these representations entail, and how does it help us measure the foreign student's relationship to Asian America? This article studies the representations of the foreign student figure in Asian American cultural production from the works of Sui Sin Far, through the novels of Gish Jen, Susan Choi, Lan Samantha Chang, and Ha Jin to contend that the foreign student is Asian America's intimate other, and the variety of the representation entails a thinking of Asian/American relationality that Asian American literary and cultural studies in the post-identity moment has yet to contend with. |