Locating Identity: Interpreting Food Images and Jade Snow Wong’s Identity Construction in Fifth Chinese Daughter

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiographical novel Fifth Chinese Daughter, as an early classic of Asian American literature, has aroused wide concern since its publication, in which, food images as important elements play a prominent role in the author’s identity construction. Based on the theories of cultural identity, imagism, and feminist criticism, this paper focuses on the food images related to Jade Snow Wong’s identity construction in Fifth Chinese Daughter, and reveals the influence of these images on her identity construction. Food images in this novel, as media connecting two different cultures and genders, help break the Chinese American women’s marginalized status in culture and gender, and promote their construction of cultural identity as well as gender identity.

Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit

Illuminating how biomedical capital invests in white and Asian American populations while divesting from Black surplus populations, this article proposes recent Asian American dystopian fiction provides a case study for analyzing futurities where healthcare infrastructures intensify racial inequality under terms that do not include race at all. Through a reading of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and other texts, the article develops the term studious deracination to refer to a narrative strategy defined by an evacuated racial consciousness that is used to ironize assumptions of white universalism and uncritical postracialism. Studious deracination challenges medical discourse’s “color-blind” approach to healthcare and enables a reconsideration of comparative racialization in a moment of accelerating social disintegration and blasted landscapes. Indeed, while precision medicine promises to replace race with genomics, Asian American literature is key to showing how this “postracial” promise depends on framing racial inequality as a symptom, rather than an underlying etiology, of infrastructures of public health.