Forty-five years ago, Aiiieeeee! screamed its way into the literary scene with an ambitious goal. The anthology’s editors—Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong—wanted to establish the Asian American literary canon. This canon would amplify the silenced voices of Asian American writers (initially defined only as Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans born in the United States) and reclaim cultural space taken up by yellowface Charlie Chan–type shit as well as assimilationist works from more popular Asian American writers.
In the editors’ view, those books—such as Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant—played into the white myth of a “dual personality… which suggests that the Asian American can be broken down into his American part and his Asian part,” the introduction to the first edition reads. The writing in the anthology rejected “Asian Americans as the miracle synthetic white people that America’s proprietors of white liberal pop” made them out to be, and pushed back against other stereotypes of Asian Americans. “If the reader is shocked,” the editors wrote, “it is due to his own ignorance of Asian America. We’re not new here. Aiiieeeee!!”
