When Asian Americans Return to Asia: Return Narratives, Transpacific Imagination, and the Post/Cold War

Abstract

By focusing on Asian American return narratives as a symbolic indicator of a shift in transpacific relations, this article attempts to address two questions: first, how will a focus on return experiences engage and reframe transpacific imperial geopolitics thatcreated and sustainedAsian American literature, and second, how will a focus on the “post/Cold War”rather than on globalization as a temporal frame challenge the transpacificimagination in American studiesas a cultural and economic narrative of immigration, integration,and salvationthat purports to transcend Cold War divisions.Thearticleanalyses Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life(2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad(2021)to consider how post-1990s Asian American return narratives rearticulatecontemporary geopolitics. It will conclude with a reflection on the Orientalismof Asian Americanliteraturein the treacherous imaginaryof transpacific futures.