This chapter provides a set of contexts for understanding the visibility of contemporary Asian American fiction. It highlights some of the formal features of contemporary Asian American fiction, its tensile recognition of the power of convention even as it strives to tell recognizably different stories; its insistence on the mutual imbrication between aesthetics and politics; its refusal to define itself strictly in terms of racial and ethnic identity labels; and its simultaneous embrace and rejection of ethnic literature's pedagogical promise, in an effort to further develop answers to the question of why Asian American fiction has become so commercially successful and lauded. Asian American fiction's increased visibility can be partially explained by the belief in such literature's ethical influence. In this regard, the pedagogical injunctions of the literary become another key feature of contemporary Asian American fiction.