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This chapter situates the Asian outsider as a figure of productive alienation and imperfect correspondence, one who questions the ways in which lines of affiliation and connection become drawn and policed. In both Susan Choi's 1998 novel, The Foreign Student and Abraham Verghese's 1994 memoir, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS, embracing “foreignness” from the position of postcolonial exile can be read as a means of suspending loyalty to stratified social structures, both racial and sexual. In both texts, sexual transgression precipitates a renewed understanding of not only the ways in which color lines are drawn, but how points of human division and intimacy, of home and belonging, might be reconfigured. In looking at these two narratives that center on the latency of racism “outed” by proximity to sexual “perversity,” the chapter suggests that Asian-American literature provides a conceptual frame for highlighting other lines that divide and connect.

Chapter 3 reads Susan Choi’s debut novel, The Foreign Student, a fictionalized account of her father’s wartime ordeal and experience as a foreign student in the American South. The foreign student is a key yet understudied figure of Cold War integration, and Choi’s foreign student is a wartime friendly who makes his way to the US, where he conducts an American romance that trumps the damaging political alliances of the war. The chapter analyzes Choi’s literary attempts to revise the history of the war as a means of enlivening her protagonist within its frame. She recuperates this deeply wounded friendly and transports him to America, but his successful romantic union is paired with a revelation of wartime betrayal that marks the limits of his integration.

This chapter explores the concept of trauma and the cultural work it performs in Asian American studies. It shows how multiculturalism’s demand for legible racial subjects inspires critics to resolve Asian Americans’ racial “triangulation,” or their ambiguous positioning between African Americans and whites, by grounding contemporary Asian American identity in the historical trauma of nineteenth-century Asian exclusion. Although this secures the counterhegemonic status of Asian American identity, it obscures the profound demographic shifts inaugurated by the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. By contrast, Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student forwards an understanding of trauma that foregrounds rupture rather than continuity, which enables a more complex portrait of Asian American history and politics, as well as new cross-racial alliances. Choi’s use of trauma thus shows how repetition exposes rather than resolves contemporary social predicaments and how the impasses of repetition yield possibilities, even if they do not generate progress.

This chapter examines works by Korean Canadian artist David Khang and Korean American writer Susan Choi through the lens of fragility in order to understand the complexities of diasporic publics as formations of feeling. Khang's art installation Mom's Crutch (2004) and performance art project Wrong Places (2007–14) and Choi's 1998 novel, The Foreign Student, underscore the need to spatialize discussions of postcolonial intimacies and affect by reminding that diaspora is an affective formation whose participants are situated within diverse national contexts, and that this tension shapes global politics and possibilities. Indeed, their projects speak to the geopolitics of feeling and the local, national, and global structures that shape delicate memories, racialize social intimacies, and formulate Asia as a site of alterity.

This chapter examines the often sobering experiences of surveillance shadowing nonwhite subjects by reading two detective novels: Susan Choi's Person of Interest and Suki Kim's The Interpreter. In both novels, the protagonists are reserved and unobtrusive Asian North Americans who unravel the crimes circumscribing their lives in the racial melancholy of the nation. The chapter first establishes the protagonists' depressed condition as racial melancholia and considers how they embody the effects of persistent vigilance by internalizing scrutiny performed by the dominant community, generating emotional turmoil. It then discusses the pronounced psychological yearning related to the racial visibility and categorization of the protagonists. It also explores the representational idiom of the inscrutable Asian—the paradoxical position of being looked at and overlooked—through a critique of Kandice Chuh's “subjectless” Asian American.

This chapter discusses the emergence of Asian American literature and film about the South as they disrupt multiple narratives about race relations and racial subjectivity. It particularly studies Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Mira Nair's feature-length film Mississippi Masala (1992), and Paisley Rekdal's creative nonfiction collection of autobiographical essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Asian American stories set in the South erupt the myth of imaginary lines between the past and present, arguing that the inclusion of Asian American voices signals not simply a pluralistic affirmation of racial harmony but the complications of understanding race beyond a black–white paradigm. Indeed, a true understanding of southern race relations crosses the geographic borders of the American South into not only Europe and Africa but the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia as well, because the South is a space that is implicated in larger transnational and global flows.