Since the mid-nineteenth century, when Asians began immigrating to the U.S. West in significant numbers, they have played an integral role in developing and shaping the region through such activities as mining, building the transcontinental railroad, farming, creating businesses and communities, and participating in transnational capital flows that connect Asia and the western states. While they have played a constitutive role in the region, Asian Americans have historically been marginalized and excluded from full political and cultural citizenship in the U.S. West and the nation through legal, political, and social means that target their racial and cultural difference. This marginalization and exclusion are exhibited in the relative invisibility of Asian Americans in prominent narratives of the U.S. West and their stereotyping in much U.S. western literature. As Hsuan Hsu asserts, “Although historically the largest concentration of Asian Americans has been in the western states, they have been written out of dominant narratives of the region. When they are represented, it is often through stereotypes such as the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ Charlie Chan, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ the model minority, or the laundrymen, prostitutes, and cooks that infuse western settings with ‘local color.’” Asian American writers address this contradictory situation – of being constitutive yet liminal – in literary works that invoke dominant narratives of the U.S. West about such topics as mobility, freedom, land, gender, and domesticity and that demonstrate the limitations of these western myths for Asian American subjects. Asian American literature also puts western literature in a global, hemispheric context by highlighting the relationship between the U.S. West and the Pacific Rim and the transpacific ties of urban and suburban spaces. This essay examines how selected Asian American literary works create and shape as well as affirm and critique discourses of the U.S. West.

Constriction and Mobility

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 frontier thesis locates the distinctive American character in westward movement across the continent. As Sau-ling Wong observes, the frontier thesis links together several key American myths: “[It] regards the availability of free land – presupposing unconstrained mobility to take advantage of it – coupled with equality of opportunity, to be crucial determinants of American character and the source of American democracy.” For Asians in the United States, however, presumed basic American rights such as citizenship, the ability to own land, and freedom of mobility were limited from early on in their history in the nation.