ABSTRACT
This chapter employs the term ‘intertextuality’, as used by Julia Kristeva and especially Roland Barthes, in order to trace the relationship between one literary text by a white American author – John Steinbeck’s East of Eden – and later fiction by Chinese American writers – Frank Chin’s collection The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R. Co. and Gish Jen’s novel Typical American. Steinbeck’s novel is shown to merit further exploration for its depiction of a movement from East to West and for highlighting the prospect of intercultural collaboration. While Chin’s and Jen’s literary fictions are interpreted as incorporating some of the binary oppositions tentatively associated with East-West stereotyping that underpin Steinbeck’s novel, Chin’s short stories are found to be far more effective than Jen’s novel in seriously countering East of Eden’s Orientalist assumptions.
