The Underrepresented Modernism Project.

Diana Chang: The First Asian American Woman Publish in America

My novels and short stories seem to be preoccupied with being and identity, and arise out of my abiding passion for exploring character and emotion to create the psychological realities of particular situations. In some of my poems a self speaks to the self. Or I write of poetry itself or of painting, as I’m also a painter. Often I explore the natural world and its soul, as it were. In style, I hope to be imagistic, moving instinctively among metaphor, simile, and personification, in order to make my ideas concrete and tangible.”

 – Diana Chang

Diana Chang: one of the trailblazers in Asian-American literature. Born in 1934 to a Chinese father and a Chinese Irish mother in New York City. Her family moved back to China, and she lived in multiple cities including Beijing and Shanghai.¹ She moved back to New York City where she attended Barnard College. There she studied English with an emphasis in creative writing. While in school, she worked “as an editorial and feature writer at the English-language Shanghai Evening Post in 1943.”² Also in school, she would begin to publish poetry in multiple prestigious journals, further cementing her position in the literary world. She graduated from Barnard College in 1949 and moved to France to begin her work on the Fulbright scholarship. In France she was also able to study poetry at the Sorbonne.³ 

It was after her time in France that she returned to New York City and began to write her first and most successful novel Frontiers of Love, which was published in 1956, making her the first known Asian-American Woman to publish a book in the U.S. The novel was set in Shanghai, and deals largely with the identities of the three Eurasian main characters.⁴ Her subsequent novels heavily discuss existentialist ideas of one’s identity, and how societal pressures influence the way one relates to their race. The main theme of her work is that she believes that individuals have the power to choose their own identity, despite what the world might tell them, relating to her existentialist philosophy. She has been compared to authors like James Baldwin for her use of characters with multiple ethnic backgrounds.⁵ Throughout her career, she wrote in total of six novels and continued to write and publish poetry. Frontiers of Love was the only novel to receive mainstream recognition. 

She continued to work in publishing, and was eventually asked to teach creative writing at her alma mater, Barnard College. While working as a scholar in 1976, she coined the term “the hyphenated condition.” A term she used to describe non-white Americans who must constantly balance their identity with the hyphen in the label they have been assigned.⁶ Chang received much criticism for her seeming lack of connection to her Chinese identity, even though it is clearly something that she struggled with herself.  She highlights a group of people who relate more to their American identity than the “other,” for which there might always be controversy. 

Diana Chang died in 2009, she is remembered today as a writer who took risks within her writing and the identity of her characters. 

Diana Chang as a Modernist:

Diana Chang is perhaps one of the lesser known writers on this list, not much scholarship was available on her work and very little details on her personal life were available. So much so that nearly every piece about her had conflicting years for her birthdate, seemingly tied between 1924 and 1934. With that being said, it is remarkable to me that yet again, a woman as smart and successful as Diana Chang has been left behind. It seems a problem many POC writers have to deal with is adhering to their race in a way that is both acceptable to both POC and white readers. Chang had to deal with this from her Asian-American critics who claimed that she was not “Asian” enough in her work. Of course with a twenty-first-century perspective, we have the foresight to know that there is no “correct” way to express racial identity, something that Chang knew in the 1950’s. It is perhaps the lack of an ability in her past readership to see this fact that contributed to her underwhelming success after her first novel. 

As far as her place in this project, two things made her a no-brainer for me. First was her accomplishment as the first Asian-American woman to publish a novel in the United States which was widely impressive and depressingly little known. The second is the themes of her novels, the existentialist exploration of the self and identity expressing modernist themes. I will admit that she was publishing rather late to be considered a “true” modernist to some. To this point, I concede that while she does not fit chronologically within the movement, how she writes about identity and her use of multi-ethnic characters make her eligible in my eyes. On a personal note, I had a hard time not including her here. While I have yet to read any of her novels, the poetry I find online absolutely captivated me, and I knew I wanted to give her a space within the project. 

Bibliography

Collections, Barnard Archives and Special, and Adriana Burgi says: “First Published Asian-American Novelist, and Poet: Diana Chang.” Barnard Archives And Special Collections, May 31, 2018. https://barnardarchives.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/diana-chang-49/. 

Hamalian, Leo, and Diana Chang. “A MELUS Interview: Diana Chang.” MELUS 20, no. 4 (1995): 29–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/467888.

Ling, Amy. “Writer in the Hyphenated Condition: Diana Chang.” MELUS 7, no. 4 (1980): 69–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/467169.

Nelson, Emmanuel S. “Asian American Novelists : A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook : Nelson, Emmanuel S. (Emmanuel Sampath), 1954- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, January 1, 1970. https://archive.org/details/asianamericannov00nels_0/page/38/mode/2up. 

Special Collections and University Archives of Stony Brook University. “Diana Chang Collection: Special Collections and University Archives.” Stony Brook University, 2019. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/libspecial/collections/manuscripts/chang.html.