The period spanning the 1930s to the 1960s is pivotal to Asian American literary history in that it witnessed both the early development of the Asian American novel and a phenomenal growth of Asian American short fiction. This chapter describes the work of Asian American writers, Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, Bienvenido N. Santos and Carlos Bulosan. Mori and Yamamoto participated in ethnic cultural codification through portrayals of Japanese immigrant life from Nisei perspectives. The Chauvinist is perhaps the most speculative of Mori's stories about prewar Japanese immigrant life. Yamamoto's Yoneko's Earthquake is a work widely celebrated for its multiple layers of meaning and rich symbolism. Scent of Apples is paradigmatic of Santos's fictional construction of the predicament facing Filipino immigrants. Short fiction legitimizes small-scale disruption of the patterns of continuity closely associated with the novel form, by engaging with major positions about the latter's realist premises and actual functions.

This chapter discusses Filipina/o American literature, which speak of the vexed history of Filipino migration to the United States. The circumstances of Filipina and Filipino literary production in the early twentieth century were transpacific, influenced by the occupation of the Philippines and U.S. imperial history, and by factors that range from the social and cultural to the aesthetic and representational: public discourse surrounding Filipina/o bodies in the United States, the intersection of the Filipina feminist movement with global women's suffrage, shifting notions of gender and sexuality, and experiments in literary form. Developments in Filipina transpacific feminism are conversant with, and contribute to, literary engagements with male migrant and exilic experience. The chapter deals with the works of Felicidad Ocampo, José Garcia Villa and Carlos Blouson, and others such as Bienvenido N. Santos and Yay Panlilio who highlight the gendered and classed dimensions of forming national communities in the postwar era.