ABSTRACT
Karen Tei Yamashita’s first novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) received the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, yet the work has not been “popularly” acknowledged by the reading public or in academic circles. Claudia Sadowski-Smith in her article on transnationalism in fiction suggests that it may be because Yamashita does not situate her novel within her “own ethnic community” and because her text is “explicitly anti-capitalist.”1 King-Kok Cheung has asserted that Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest does not belong to the category of Asian American literature, because the novel is not situated in North America and does not “dwell on being Asian or Asian American.”2 These criticisms raise interesting questions: “Should” Asian American writers reflect ethnicity-specific issues through their writings? Is there any essential component of Asian American literature?
