Becoming-Animal in Asian Americas: Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s <i>God of Luck</i> and a Watanabean Triptych (Three Poems by José Watanabe)

• Main Author: Michelle Har Kim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship Publishing, University of California 2012-06-01
• Series: Journal of Transnational American Studies
• Subjects: asian american literature; ruthanne lum mccunn; chinese coolie; josé watanabe; becoming-animal; asian american studies
• Online Access: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84x5v5qj

Considering the implicit North American and Anglophone core of Asian American literature traditionally conceived, this essay discusses two examples of literatures of the Asian Americas. A narrative of a Chinese coolie’s heroic escape from a Peruvian guano mine, Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s novel <em>God of Luck</em> (2008) introduces a lesser-known point of view to the field: the nineteenth-century Chinese coolie in Peru. Rather than embrace the emblematic hero who accedes to voice, this essay attempts to read outside of an anticipated rubric of individual politico-economic repletion. In the poetry of Peruvian writer José Watanabe (1946–2007), motifs of animal encounter abound—yet dogs, fish, and other kinds of life are never deployed as a discrete metaphor through which we can see and know ourselves. As readers we are shifted to the edge of the world, in a “becoming-animal” that explores not <em>the</em> Asian American, but its restless morphing, illegibly human or otherwise.