Amerasia Journal has always made space available for the personal perspectives that inform research and analysis, which is evident in our latest issue. As the selections that follow suggest, delving into individual experiences and subjective points-of-view hardly dilutes a critical understanding of such topics as comparative nationalisms, ecopoetics, and the biopolitical administration of the state, but, rather, adds depth and urgency to exploring them. In “The Subaru Telescope and Interimperial Intimacies between Mauna Kea and Mt. Fuji,” Sam Ikehara traces the geopolitical ambitions of postwar Japan with the building of the unprecedented Subaru Telescope on Hawai‘i’s Mauna Kea, which predates the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope project. But beyond the broader political implications of the telescope, Ikehara brings in local histories to counteract and speak back to transpacific and transcontinental formations of cultural power represented by the Subaru Telescope. In the essay “The Avant-Garde as Ecopoetics: Experimental Landscapes of Filipinx Diasporic Poetry,” MT Vallarta reconsiders modernist Filipinx poet José García Villa through the rubric of queer ecopoetics; in so doing, Vallarta situates an individual voice that conjures up alternate sites of knowledge and belonging amidst the dynamics of cultural imperialism. In “Filipino Grief in Five Acts,” Matthew Briones’s searching reflections recount his mother’s passing from pancreatic cancer and is more explicitly personal than anything else in this issue. Yet even as it articulates intimate emotions and pain, the piece deftly and subtly weaves in the larger diasporic dynamics at play to show how the most immediate relationships can be impacted by the pressures of culture and history.
The engagements of the political, personal, and analytical are strongly entwined in Kai Nham’s essay “‘Paper More Precious than Blood’: Chinese Exclusion Era Identity Documentation Processes and Racialization of Identity Data,” which takes novel frameworks from information studies to interrogate the processes of reentry for American-born Chinese settlers in the early twentieth century. Nham’s focus on bureaucratic forms not only examines how the lives of Chinese Americans were shaped by the norms enforced by paperwork but also the strategies they used to confront and evade them by taking advantage of the administrative system. It is a serendipitous coincidence that Nham takes a line from Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone for the title of his essay, as King-Kok Cheung presents a review essay of Ng’s latest book Orphan Bachelors, which covers similar ground about the Chinese in America from a literary perspective. Bringing in elements of Chinese classics, American history, and family stories, Ng’s creative memoir conveys how the remarkable acts of ordinary people create a throughline to understand the Chinese American experience. To add another degree of connection and resonance, Cheung’s review reflects her considerations of Ng’s book back on herself, as she melds the personal and the scholarly to think about how preconceptions of the Cantonese dialect affected Cheung’s own self-identity within academic spaces.
The book reviews in this issue only underscore how individual experiences can inform and enrich critique, which also suggests how these entanglements are at the center of current research. Edward Nadurata’s review of L. Joyce Mariano’s Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving details how the book brings to the fore the experiences of people and families in transnational chains of exported labor and giving in the Filipino diaspora. Yet the inextricable relationship between the personal and the political comes through most poignantly in Lena Chen’s review of Mimi Khúc’s book Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, which questions the privilege of achievement and wellness in Asian American studies and Asian America. What is compelling about Chen’s reading of Khúc’s book is that it is as much a review as it is an opportunity to show how Dear Elia’s message speaks to her, as Chen breaks down the expectations and assumptions that she has internalized as a scholar, an Asian American, and an Asian American scholar. The review captures well the ethos of the issue as a whole, as research and analysis are strengthened, bolstered, and emboldened by insight from individual experience.