This session examines the literary production of East Asian students and intellectuals who traveled to the United States before 1950, focusing on how their migration generated multilingual, transpacific, and inter-imperial forms of writing. The session foregrounds arrival as a generative site where education, empire, racialization, and experimentation converged. “Arrival stories,” in this framework, encompass not only physical entry into the United States but also the linguistic negotiations, shifting political orientations, and transnational circulations that resist stable national or diasporic categorization.
The rationale for the session arises from growing recognition that pre-1950 East Asian student migration played a foundational role in shaping early Asian American literary production and its global entanglements. While Asian American studies has often privileged post-1965 immigration, recent scholarship highlights the robust activity among earlier migrants who moved within inter-imperial circuits linking East Asia, the United States, and other colonial formations. At the same time, East Asian literary studies increasingly identifies the U.S. as a meaningful early site for East Asian–language publication, political organizing, and aesthetic innovation. Yet these insights have remained largely siloed. By bringing together scholars working across multilingual archives and inter-imperial frameworks, this panel directly addresses that disciplinary gap.
The session contributes to existing scholarship in two principal ways. First, it reframes early Asian American literature not as a nascent ethnic national canon but as a heterogeneous and multilingual body of writing shaped by Japanese, Chinese, and U.S. imperialisms; missionary educational networks; and the racialized structures of American modernity. Second, it foregrounds linguistic complexity—not only English but Korean and Chinese—as essential to understanding how early migrants navigated transpacific hierarchies. The panel collectively demonstrates that bilingualism and translation did not guarantee transparency or access; instead, linguistic negotiation often generated opacity, contradiction, and new forms of worldmaking.
A Note on the Absence of a Japan-Focused Paper
Although the CFP welcomed work linking Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contexts, the final proposal does not include a paper devoted primarily to Japanese student writers or Japanese-language production. We aim to address this lacuna in two ways. First, several papers engage Japanese empire as a structuring force—most directly in Yoon Sun Yang’s inter-imperial analysis of Korean literary production shaped by both Japanese and U.S. imperialisms. Second, the moderated discussion will explicitly consider how Japanese imperial educational circuits fostered parallel forms of student mobility and literary expression, inviting dialogue with audience members working on Japan. In this way, the session uses the gap as a productive opening for further transnational and comparative scholarship.
Format
The session consists of four 12–13-minute presentations (approximately 50 minutes), followed by 10 minutes of structured dialogue among presenters and 15 minutes of open discussion to foster conversation across linguistic, national, and methodological boundaries.
Presentation Summaries
Yoon Sun Yang offers a comparative study of Korean-language literature produced across Japanese and U.S. imperial contexts, focusing on newspapers such as The New Korea. Her paper shows how early Korean writers imagined the United States both as a site of aspiration and as an extension of global racial hierarchies, revealing how inter-imperial entanglements shaped migrant literary consciousness.
Youngoh Jung analyzes cross-racial encounters in the early Korean American diaspora (1907–1933), drawing on student writings and diasporic newspaper accounts. He reveals how Korean migrants confronted anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence in the United States and rethought their own positionalities as colonized subjects. These overlooked histories of solidarity complicate nationalist narratives and direct the diaspora as a site of relational worldmaking.
L. Maria Bo examines Lin Yutang’s bilingualism and transpacific career, arguing that his trajectory—moving from missionary schooling in China to Harvard and later to leadership in Singapore’s Nanyang University—illustrates the limits of Asian/American cosmopolitanism. Bo demonstrates that bilingual fluency, celebrated in the U.S., could generate dissonance and opacity in other colonial and diasporic contexts.
Cecily Chen turns to H. T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square (1935), reading its typified characters and hybrid dramatic-prose form as an experimental response to Chinese exclusion, global proletarian movements, and shifting definitions of “Chineseness.” Her paper challenges the dominant view of early Asian American literature as primarily autobiographical, highlighting instead avant-garde aesthetics and political allegory.
Diversity Statement
This panel brings together scholars at multiple career stages—from PhD candidates to senior faculty—working across Korean, Chinese, Asian American, and comparative literary studies. Their diverse methodological approaches, linguistic competencies, and disciplinary homes ensure a wide range of perspectives, enriching the panel’s collective rethinking of early transpacific literary formations.