Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. The most recent issue 46.2, edited by Frontiers Co-Editors Debjani Chakravarty, Wanda S. Pillow, and Sarita Gaytán, highlights author Nicolyn Woodcock, Ph.D.
On a walk home from the Saturday farmer’s market, I picked up China Dolls by Lisa See on a whim, from a summer reads display at the public library. It was the type of summer day that prompts you to get outside early, if you must, and lends itself to languishing inside with the A/C blasting all afternoon. After picking a few books, I noticed Lisa See’s China Dolls on a display while queued at the checkouts desk. I didn’t know anything about Lisa See when I left that day with China Dolls, just that the book jacket suggested the type of stories I like – historical fiction, World War II, Asian American women. And I loved it, devouring about half the book by the end of that day.
I could not know how this brief pause in my hurry to get back into the cool comfort of home would impact the next 10 years of my life. In 2014, I was a grad student studying Asian American literature, and on occasion, people I’d only just met might learn of my interests and ask what I thought of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan or tell me how much they loved that novel. Though it’s See’s most well-loved novel, I hadn’t heard of Snow Flower or See herself, except from them, and I never remembered to look them up after these moments passed. My mind did not connect China Dolls to Snow Flower until later, after I finished the novel, as I looked at See’s author photo and wondered why this woman wrote so may books “about China.” I’m not the first to question and judge See––a mixed race, fourth generation, Chinese American––based on her photo or the seemingly stereotypical content of her novels. When I told my dissertation advisor I wanted to write about China Dolls for a seminar paper that fall, she gently suggested exploring something else, that the field of Asian American literary studies is weary of this author. I’m grateful that she didn’t stop me, even if she wasn’t entirely convinced (yet).
Intent on pursuing Asian American food studies, at first, I meant to write about the novel’s depiction of “the Chop Suey Circuit,” a nickname given to groups of Asian American entertainers who traveled to military bases across the US to entertain troops throughout WWII. However, aligning with the topics of my Women’s and Gender Studies seminar that semester, my final paper was ultimately about “intimate labor,” how Asian American women performed work for the benefit of male audiences and in service of the war effort. Fast forward four years and this “final paper” was actually the first draft of the lead chapter in my dissertation, which advocates for reconsidering the entire scholarly approach to the genre of “war literature.” I argue, precisely because of limited expectations about what kind of stories See writes, China Dolls challenges conventions about what war stories are about and who gets to tell them.
This article has been more than 10 years in the making, and in that time, I’m getting caught up on Lisa See’s works. I’m ready whenever someone solicits my thoughts on Snow Flower––and, I do understand why scholars of Asian American literature hesitate to embrace See. The more I read, though, the more I love her work––a love that is not uncomplicated, to be sure. I don’t expect my article to turn the tide completely, but if you’re reading this blog, I hope my article can convince you to give See a(nother) chance.
Nicolyn Woodcock (PhD, Miami University) is trained in twentieth-century American, multiethnic, and Asian American literary studies and her research interests include transpacific US empire, intimacy, war stories, and food studies. She is especially interested in narratives emerging from the spaces and legacies of US war and militarism in Asia since the late nineteenth century. Her articles include “Tasting the ‘Forgotten War'” in the Journal of Asian American Studies, “Narratives of Intimacy in Asian American Literature” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, “Reading Midwest Asian America in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You” in American Studies, and “‘Yellow Fever’ at Whole Foods” in Eating More Asian America.