• Xuan Juliana Wang
    • Born in China but emigrated to LA in 1992
    • Grew up reading Danielle Steel and John Grisham; got her BA at USC, MFA at Columbia, and Stegner Fellow at Stanford
    • Wrote Home Remedies and teaches creative writing at UCLA
    • Focuses more on Asian heritage than American assimilation, as seen in her introduction of being from China instead of LA
    • Took computer science course to better understand her family
    • Both have very similar styles as a response to their lived experiences as Asian-Americans; C story
  • Ted Chiang
    • Born 1967 in New York, son to a Mech E Professor at SUNY Stony Brooke
    • Got a BA in CS, very much a result of hyperselectivity
    • Worked as a technical writer for Microsoft
    • Most of his work does not directly reference racial or national origin markers
    • Wrote a very few number of stories for his tenure but has a high award-to-publication ratio
  • The Two Cultures
    • Arts vs. Sciences is the main divide in cultures, and Asian-Americanssare more concentrated on STEM fields instead of artistic fields
    • Arts are luxury, lack of success, no money while science is practical, technical, intelligent
    • The two cultures are at odds with each other, and the conception of the two cultures stemmed from the non-communication between arts and science faculties
      • Coined by C. P. Snow in order to resolve the Cold War
    • Universities shifted more from arts to sciences in order to keep up with the Soviets during the Cold War, and Asian immigrants were crucial to do so
  • Ethnographic Imperative
    • Used to dtalk about how minority groups often feel pressured to express themselves as those minority groups
    • Roger Ebert: “Why do Asian Americans have to make a movie specifically about Asian Americans? They shouldn’t!”
    • Solution is to stylize an A story into a B story; morph your true beliefs and experiences into a generalized form
  • Asian-American literature
    • Much of Asian-American literature was not fiction; mostly considered biographies or memoirs
    • Emphasizes the idea of the ethnographic imperative, more assimilationist than creative
    • Important to note that this is not the fault of the author or publisher; it’s the fault of society as a whole and the pressures of the ethnographic imperative
    • In the 1990s, Asian-American writers began winning literary awards due to the children of post-65 immigrants growing up and writing novels
      • This also leads to a boom in Asian-American science fiction stories
  • Stories can be put into A and B stories, where B stories are things that are actually in the text (characters, plot, imagery. etc.) while A stories are the contexts behind the texts (such as history, genre, author, etc)
    • The A story of Algorithmic is explicitly Asian-American while the B story of Story is what reveals the Asian-American aspect
  • Story of Your Life
    • Strictly science fiction, but still has many of the aspects of the post-65 Asian American culture
    • Two cultures conflict
      • The daughter wants to be a financial analyst, but mother is a linguist who was “meant to be” an English teacher
      • The mother is more emotional and understanding compared to Gary
      • Freedom vs. Determinism: ethnographic imperative states taht Asian-Americans MUST talk about the Asian-American experience (representing determinism), while simultaneous consciousness does not (representing freedom)
  • Algorithmic Problem Solving For Father-Daughter Relationships by Wang
    • Science fictional; computer science is the lens that the character views the world
    • Many of Wang’s stories are expansive and include people of various wealth, education, etc.
    • Wendy vs. her father; daughter talks about her love for wine while her father is more practical and cannot understand her, highlights the idea of two cultures
    • Highlights deprofessionalization, the father had to give up his prestige and honor to move to the (A story)