A trove of Asian American stories

When the first edition of editor Jessica Hagedorn’s “Charlie Chan Is Dead” anthology was published in 1993, it was nothing short of groundbreaking: a collection of contemporary fiction by 48 Asian American writers, including Bharati Mukherjee, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Yau. It’s a shame that such a gap in the literary marketplace existed, but it did. As Hagedorn conceded in her introduction to the 1993 edition, her anthology was created for selfish reasons: It was a book “I wanted to read that had never been available to me.”

A decade later, Asian American writers have begun to enjoy greater success and prominence -- among them, Manil Suri, Ha Jin, Chang-Rae Lee and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose debut short story collection was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize.

Although Hagedorn, an accomplished novelist, poet and playwright, compiled that first anthology out of need, this new collection, “Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World,” seems more a friendly reminder of the many talented Asian Americans writers today. Along with contributors included in the first “Charlie Chan,” Hagedorn presents a number of emerging writers, such as Monique Truong, Meera Nair and Christina Chiu.

The book’s original title, Hagedorn notes in her introduction, was inspired by the 1930s “yellow-face” movie detective Charlie Chan, an offensive representation made worse by the fact that he was always played by white actors in makeup. Though things have changed some since then, Charlie Chan may not be quite dead, after all.

“Nowadays, while Asians may be cast as Asians on the big screen,” she writes, “the only characters they are relegated to portraying are of the kung-fu fighting, tiger-crouching, hip-hop variety.” (Take a look at Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” films for evidence of cultural stereotypes.)

Elaine H. Kim, a professor at UC Berkeley, writes in her preface to the book that for many Americans, “the most visible symbol of today’s “ ‘new (and newly successful) Asian American’ is the deracinated female news anchor ... actively encouraged to look as much like the ever-familiar Connie Chung as possible.” Thankfully, Kim writes, the characters that populate this anthology are hardly bland; they are people “who remember and dream about other worlds that have been subject to national forgetting. Their version of history requires them to be disobedient, rebellious, and unfaithful to the national narrative of American identity and viewpoint.”

Hagedorn’s anthology brings together some of the finest contemporary Asian American fiction, and it’s a collection of just plain good stories. The subjects, experiences and styles are so varied that to classify them all as one genre would seem reductive, even misleading.

Like any anthology, this one has its highs and lows, although nearly all the stories are engaging. The presence of Lahiri, as always, is a high point. In “Sexy,” taken from “Interpreter of Maladies,” a young Boston woman named Miranda finds herself having an affair with a married Bengali man, Dev, whose wife still lives in India. (“Somehow, without the wife there, it didn’t seem so wrong.”)

In Wakako Yamauchi’s “That Was All,” a woman recalls an old friend of her father, a man she fell in love with when she was 15, though she never acted on her intense feelings: “My stomach turned and roiled with things terrible and sublime and sensual and sexual and rotten that I was unable to contain.” She hasn’t thought about him in years, and “I fell in love at least three times thereafter,” but he returns to her in a strange dream.

Truong’s story “Live-In Cook,” adapted from her fine debut novel, “The Book of Salt,” imagines a young Vietnamese cook’s experience working for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Aside from eavesdropping on their conversations and enjoying sexual flings with men, there are few things Bin savors more than cooking and eating. “Even when I can no longer take a sip, a bite, a morsel of any of the dishes that I am preparing for my Mesdames,” he says, “I never forget that tasting is an indispensable part of cooking. The candlelight flicker of flavors, the marriage of bright acidity with profound savoriness, aromatics sparked with the suggestion of spice, all these things can change within seconds, and only a vigilant tongue can find that precise moment when there is nothing left to do but eat.”

What are the implications of collecting fiction based on ethnicity, race, religion, gender or sexuality? The late poet Elizabeth Bishop famously deplored inclusion of her work in “women’s” poetry anthologies. There are persuasive arguments to be made about whether or not identity-based categories in literature serve to empower or marginalize.

If anything, it seems that organizing Asian American writings into a single anthology probably still does more good than harm. If nothing else, it calls attention to writers who might not be readily discovered otherwise.