Chinese American Writers of the Real and the Fake: Authenticity and the Twin Traditions of Life Writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century placed severe limitations on the development of Chinese ethnic communities in the United States. The polarization of categories of Chinese Americans gave rise to two distinct traditions of Chinese writing in and about America: a "high," cultural tradition and a "low," working-class tradition. The infamous conflict between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, whom he accused of being "un-Chinese" and a "fake," can be explained in terms of Chin's privileging of the "low" tradition of Chinese American writing as the "authentic" tradition. Chin accuses Kingston of practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American "high" tradition. Here, the Orientalism of foundational autobiographies such as Pardee Lowe's Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) is engaged through the concept of "competence" developed in genre theory. Within this context, the use of generic Chinese American autobiographical conventions by Chin and Kingston can be related to the representation of authenticity through particular ethnic discourses. Résumé Les Chinese Exclusion Acts (lois d'exclusion à l'égard des immigrants chinois) de la fin du 19e siècle ont sévèrement limité l'expansion des communautés ethniques chinoises aux é tats-Unis. La polarisation des Sino-américains a donné lieu à deux traditions distinctes dans la littérature chinoise américaine ou sur l'Amérique : l'une plus « élevée » ou littéraire et l'autre plus « populaire », typique de la classe ouvrière. Le conflit notoire entre Frank Chin et Maxine Hong Kingston, que le premier accusait d'être un imposteur « non Chinois », s'explique par le fait que Chin privilégiait la tradition « populaire » comme la seule littérature sino-américaine « authentique ». Chin accusait Kingston de donner dans un faux orientalisme hérité des autobiographies apologétiques écrites selon les canons de la littérature sino-américaine de type « élevé ». Ici, « l'orientalisme » d'autobiographies fondamentales telles que Father and Glorious Descendant de Pardee Lowe (1943) et Fifth Chinese Daughter de Jade Snow Wong (1950), se traduit grâce au concept de « compétence » développé dans le cadre de la théorie des genres. Dans ce contexte, les conventions génériques caractéristiques de l'autobiographie sino-américaine, dont se servent aussi bien Chin que Kingston, sont liées aux représentations d'une authenticité qui passe par des discours ethniques particuliers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".