Fresh Voices Above the Noisy Din

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

After receiving his first stack of rejection slips in the mid-1970s, David Wong Louie made a painful change in the short stories he sent out: he stripped them of all traces of ethnic identity. "What I'd do is write in the first person about somebody like myself, but I wouldn't identify him as Chinese American," he says. "I was trying to satisfy my paranoia about what people wanted to read or what editors thought people wanted to read. And I didn't see anything out there to tell me differently."

There wasn't much out there to see. Until the 1976 success of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, a luminous collection of stories that mixed memoirs about the author's San Francisco girlhood with mystical tales of female warriors and monkey kings, Asian Americans were the invisible men and women in American literature. Even after Kingston's success, a dozen years passed before another Asian-American fiction writer achieved fortune and fame. First-time novelist Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a loosely connected series of stories about Chinese-American mothers and daughters, sold an astonishing 275,000 hard-cover copies. Publishers took note, and this spring brings not only Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, but also splendid debuts by three other Chinese-American writers.

Gus Lee's China Boy ($19.95) is this season's major fiction offering from Dutton, which paid the novice writer an advance of nearly $100,000 and ordered a first printing of 75,000 copies. Houghton Mifflin, which had ordered 11,000 copies of Gish Jen's Typical American ($19.95), increased the run by 5,000 as prepublication excitement grew for this engaging tale of one immigrant family's pursuit of the American Dream. Two houses fought to publish Pangs of Love (Knopf; $19), Louie's sharp and quirky collection of short stories.

The enthusiasm among publishers for Asian-American writing can be attributed in part to the growth of the country's Asian population, which nearly doubled, from 3.5 million to 6.9 million, over the past decade. But editors say it also reflects the fact that more Asian Americans are writing -- and writing good books. "They're second generation, and they're better educated and ready to tell about their experiences," says Seymour Lawrence, Jen's publisher.

Some cynics warn, however, that the fascination with Asian-American fiction may be only skin-deep. "When there is a great success like Amy Tan's book, everyone is out there looking for his or her own Amy Tan," says Shannon Ravenel, the recently retired editor of the annual collection of The Best American Short Stories. Louie, 36, predicts that "if Gus Lee or Gish Jen don't come through with big sales, then the next wave of interest in Asian- American writers may not come for another 15 years." That would be a shame, because each of these authors possesses the kind of fresh and original voice that marks a genuine talent. "We're all individual writers," says Lee. "It would be awful if we were compressed into one single dumpling."

Even when Louie stopped putting Chinese names in his stories, his prose captured the alienation the author felt growing up as the son of a Chinese- laundry owner in a Long Island, N.Y., suburb. Pangs of Love, whose darkly humorous tales were written over the past seven years, recounts the adventures of a Chinese-American waiter working in a Japanese sushi bar, an Americanized son who can communicate with his Cantonese-speaking mother only in a pidgin version of her language, and the Chinese invention of baseball. Says Louie: "Asian Americans are still marginalized. I feel I have to write from those margins and tell what the experience is like."

Jen works the margins too. The Chang family in Typical American are devoted baseball fans who call themselves the Chang-kees in honor of their favorite team, but "the one time they went to an actual game, people had called them names and told them to go back to their laundry." Jen, 35, who grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., and graduated from Harvard, is especially intrigued by how outsiders move from the margins into the mainstream.

Typical American chronicles that bittersweet journey for Ralph Chang, a Chinese engineering student who comes to the U.S. in 1947 for his doctorate; his wife Helen; and his sister Theresa. The Changs initially disdain the lack of tradition they describe as "typical American" behavior, but soon they are stir-frying hot dogs. They also fall under the spell of Grover Ding, an American-born Svengali of free enterprise who leads Ralph into a dubious fried-chicken business, seduces Helen and causes Theresa, the family loyalist, to leave home. The happy ending for the Changs comes not in abandoning the American Dream but in finding a way to make it their own. "I wanted to broaden the immigrant experience," says Jen. "The idea is to give America back to Americans again in a fresh way."

It would be hard to find a more all-American story than Lee's delightful China Boy, a semiautobiographical novel based on the author's childhood. Kai Ting, the title character, is the pampered youngest child and only son of a % once wealthy family that fled China following the Communist takeover and settled in a poor -- and predominantly black -- neighborhood in San Francisco. When Kai's mother dies, his father brings home a white wife. She institutes a harsh Americanization campaign that bans all Chinese food, language and customs from the house and abandons her stepson to regular beatings at the hands of neighborhood bullies who call him by the humiliating name China Boy. Kai gets little help from his father, who "was in an untenable position, forked on the cultural chessboard where the white squares of intellectual China met the hard black industrial squares of the West." But the boy does find allies in a black family, a Hispanic mechanic, a Chinese scholar who is an old family friend and a trio of boxing coaches at the Y.M.C.A. With their help, Kai learns how to make -- and protect -- a place for himself in America.

An attorney who attended West Point, Lee, 44, had never written fiction before. But he is a natural storyteller who stocks his tale with vivid characters, spirited dialogue and good humor. The book began as a private memoir for Lee's two children, but Kai Ting's struggle for self-identity is sure to win the hearts of a much wider audience. "I didn't write this book for commercial success," says Lee. "But I'd like to see Asian-American writers have the chance to succeed and be read." With books like these, they deserve to be.