I n his book on creative writing programs during the Cold War, Workshops of Empire, Eric Bennett traces the success of the workshop model to its history at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He quotes letters from Workshop cofounder Paul Engle to friends and funders, in which Engle sometimes describes his investment in craft as an ideological weapon against the spread of Communism. In one letter, Engle writes that he is convinced, “with a fervor approaching smugness,” that the tradition of Western literature “is precisely what these people [in the East], in their cloudy minds, need most.”

As proof that the Workshop’s values were indeed spreading, one of the very first immigrant writers Engle championed was a Korean, Kim Eun Kook, who soon after graduation published a bestselling novel under the name Richard Kim. The novel, The Martyred, is about a Korean reverend falsely accused of betraying his fellow Christians in the name of Communism. Bennett writes that Kim was known in the Workshop as the Korean vet who “took so long to read an English sentence that no one could remember what was wrong with it” and who kept asking the “annoying” question “But what is the meaning of that?” (Bennett’s emphasis).

It makes sense that someone learning new cultural rules of craft would want to know the significance of a character-driven plot, and limiting the use of adjectives, and showing vs. telling, etc. So what was so annoying about the question? To admit that craft has meaning is to admit that it is not a default, that it means something to someone.

If you have been taught to write fiction in America, it is a good bet that you have been taught a style popularized by Ernest Hemingway and later by Raymond Carver, sometimes described as “invisible,” that is committed to limiting the use of modifiers and metaphors, to the concrete over the abstract, to individual agency and action, and to avoiding overt politics (other than the politics of white masculinity). Instead of a political argument, a character might angrily eat a potato. This is supposed to leave conclusions up to readers, though what it really means is that the ideology of craft is to hide its ideology. Bennett, like Kim, wants to know, what is the meaning of that? Why did this craft model that emphasizes restrained formal techniques become so dominant? The answer Bennett comes to is that limits and formal concerns are easy to regulate and reproduce. If the Workshop is supposed to spread American values without looking like it is spreading American values, what better craft for the job than the craft of hiding meaning behind style?

There is an international complaint that Americans rarely read in translation and that their fictional landscapes are comparatively insular. It’s a complaint that I dislike, because it stereotypes and because it equates “American” with white and/or English-native, but a typical school reading list does suggest that most Americans are far more versed in a single tradition of fiction than in any other. If we read a few translations or foreign classics, they are often compared to the tradition of Western psychological realism (in it or not in it) rather than read within traditions of their own.

There is no universal standard of craft—this can’t be emphasized enough—but this in no way means that fiction can be separated into on the one hand Western realism and on the other hand various exceptions to it (genre or foreign or experimental or so on). Instead, we must view other standards as exactly that—not as exceptions but as norms.

Diversity, in the parlance of our times, should not be tokenism. I have been guilty as a teacher of trying to represent in one course as many different books as possible. But then students tend to fall back on reading these books against the main tradition they have already been taught. Craft is not about cultural exceptions, but about cultural expectations—which means we need to understand traditions, not individual books. We need to learn both the conventions of a tradition and the experiments and exceptions and other genres that have influenced, resisted, and changed it. The tradition of stories within stories, looping or intersection or nesting or framing or so forth, in which we could include contemporary novels like the American middle-grade novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin, and the Chinese literary novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, by Mo Yan, is a tradition that goes back at least to the Thousand and One Nights. A better understanding of this tradition would, for example, have allowed critics to see recent novels like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as Western adaptations of long-held Eastern storytelling practices rather than as products of brilliant innovation. How can a writer know the many possibilities of what they can do without knowing many different ways that things have been done before and where their possibilities have come from?

Because craft is about expectations, unfamiliarity is one of craft’s most serious problems. In workshops, this unfamiliarity is often truly dangerous for the writer who is familiar with and/or may be working in other traditions. The workshop may read her work within a tradition to which she does not belong—and the workshop is persuasive and powerful. To break the rules as an experiment is one thing, but to want to write toward other rules that better represent one’s reality (for example) is another. The American writer of color who wants to break free of the white literary tradition might unsurprisingly think her only option is experimentalism. To experiment against a white literary tradition, however, is not to free oneself from white tradition but to face the whiteness of the American avant-garde. (For people who ask why more writers of color do not write “experimental fiction,” this may get at why.) Experimentalism is experimental with regard to a specific tradition. Asian American fiction, for example, has its own tradition and experiments, into which an Asian American writer enters—if she is able to see that tradition as a possibility. If only one tradition is taught, some writers will always find more possibilities than others. This chapter will briefly go into one example of another craft tradition—the one closest to my heart: Asian American literature—but can only do so in a cursory way. It’s impossible to trace an entire tradition, including its experiments, in a single essay—this is the point. Writers must read much more widely and much more deeply, if we are to know enough craft to start to critique other writers fairly and to write truly for ourselves.

For historical help, I will rely on the book Chinese Theories of Fiction, by Ming Dong Gu, which is the rare book that attempts a systematic classification of Chinese narrative theory—in English, by a scholar of Chinese descent. Most of the field of Chinese narrative theory is written by white scholars. Scholars of the Chinese diaspora have tended to focus on historical perspectives and/or studies of individual classic works. Gu himself is forced to spend chunks of his book pointing out this lack. In order to move his field forward, he first has to take it apart by showing that many leading white scholars have misunderstood, or even ignored, Chinese narratological tradition. He quotes Western scholars’ claims that Chinese fiction includes an “undefinable inadequacy” and is “vaguely wanting.” Gu argues that what Western scholars see as idiosyncrasies are not inadequacies; rather, “they are characteristic features that grew out of the philosophical, social, cultural, and aesthetic conditions” of a distinctly Chinese narratological tradition.

Gu is fantastically categorical. He lists ten ways in which Chinese tradition is different from Western tradition: (1) Chinese fiction comes from street talk and gossip, not the epic or the romance; (2) the main narrative might be accompanied by commentary from another fictional character included or not in the story; (3) the narrator or author can interrupt at any time and point out the fictionality of the work (as in metafiction); (4) the author and reader may show up within the story as themselves (sometimes associated with postmodernism); (5) the inclusion of multiple unreliable narrators; (6) the fantastic is a part of the everyday world (as in magical realism); (7) intertextuality, especially the inclusion of poems and songs; (8) multiple conflicting points of view; (9) episodic structure; and (10) a mix of formal language with vernacular or even vulgar language.

Some of these characteristics are found in Western fiction but have been anticipated by Chinese writers hundreds of years earlier. The foundational difference is that Chinese fiction has always existed in opposition to historical narrative. History recorded the official versions; fiction, when it was recorded, were the stories common folk told each other, the unofficial versions, and reflect this in their craft. In this context, for example, it makes sense for Chinese fiction to insist that any narrative has a teller and that the teller may or may not be reliable—and to include multiple tellers. The vulgarity and vernacular may also be meant to disrupt official storytelling.

Asian American fiction often contains a similar challenge to official history. When I teach Asian American literature or Asian American Studies, there are always some students who have never heard of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (I have stopped being surprised by this), and if they have heard of it, the narrative they know is usually that Japanese Americans went smilingly into these camps as a way to prove their Americanness. In fact, there was resistance, including violent resistance, and extreme internal and external conflict. Japanese American fiction often records stories of deep struggle before, during, and after the incarceration. The Asian American classic No-No Boy is about a man who said no to the two “loyalty questions” that prisoners were given (one whether they would give up Japanese citizenship—though it was illegal for Japanese immigrants, mostly parents, to become American citizens—and the other whether they would fight in the War, on the American side of course). In No-No Boy, Ichiro has just gotten out of prison after the War and has returned to Seattle, where he is mostly treated terribly. The novel often goes from third person to first person, as he argues with himself. In addition, there is the perspective of his friend Kenji, who fought in the War and was injured—fatally, it turns out. Ichiro and Kenji seem to function as two sides of the same person, as is often pointed out by literary critics. Like traditional Chinese fiction, the novel is criticized for its “flat” characters and for its mix of more formal language with the vernacular. (It is also praised for these things, depending on the critic.)

These aren’t, of course, exactly the same tradition, but say for instance that an Asian American writer wanted to counter the stories told about her, about her identity, about her parents’ identities, about her place in historical narrative. This is where my interest lies. When in the Western canon we encounter strategies like the interrupting author or commentary from other characters, it’s often as part of the postmodernist project of finally challenging the earlier (perceived) authority and authenticity of the author. These models are not the best for an Asian American writer. In fiction like that by David Foster Wallace or Paul Auster, political critique is hidden in intellectual critique, consideration of privilege is rare, race is mostly ignored. In the tradition of Asian American literature, resistance is a part of the canon (to the point that fiction that less models resistance may be too easily dismissed), and novels like The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, or No-No Boy, or Dogeaters, by Jessica Hagedorn, regularly explore the question of what is “real” vs. “what is the movies”; disrupt authorial authenticity and/or presence; include other narrators with conflicting points of view; make the fantastic part of the everyday world; contain intertextuality; offer unofficial stories as primary sources of information; distrust official narrative; etc. To know the history is to know one’s experience of being and speaking in the world is not alone. It is to know what conversations are open to you and your work. It is to know a certain audience.

For Asian American writers, here are some other things one might find useful in the model of traditional Chinese fiction:

1. Telling has priority over showing.

2. The plot structure follows kishotenketsu, which does not require conflict and is a four-act structure rather than a three-act (or five- act) structure. Instead of beginning, middle, and ending (a beginning in which conflict is introduced, a middle in which conflict is faced, an ending in which conflict is resolved), ki is introduction, sho is development, ten is twist, and ketsu is reconciliation. Conflict is not necessary.

3. Poetry has a large influence on fiction, and some stories follow the structure of what Gu calls the “poetic sandwich,” which means the story begins and ends with a poem.

4. Chinese fiction is not afraid of intense emotion. Rather than “showing” the emotion, such as through what T. S. Eliot called the “objective correlative” (for example: pouring water into a cup until it overflows to show sadness or an angel statue with its wings cut off to show the feeling of being trapped), melodrama (see: Asian dramas in which a situation is manufactured to make viewers feel something, such as sudden cancer or memory loss) is preferable. Writing meant to evoke a reaction from the audience rather than to represent an individual character is good craft.

5. Interiority, however, is not especially prized. There is an aesthetic commitment to, according to scholar Andrew Plaks, “an implicit understanding . . . that the causes of human behavior usually need not be spelled out, or are better left unsaid.” These gaps where interiority might tell us a character’s motivations are purposefully omitted. Note that this is not emotion, but what we think as we do things. Any writer always leaves room for her readers, and this is a choice about where to leave that room.

6. Gu says Chinese fiction emphasizes “patterns of texture rather than of structure.” What he means by this is that a story can be structured according to theme—exactly what Aristotle did not like about the episodic plot. Things can progress according to associative logic rather than cause and effect.

7. A “kaleidoscopic” quality (Gu) can be created from the pattern-based structure, or from an episodic plot, or from multiple narrators, or so forth, and represents a view of life that has more emphasis on multiplicity than individuality.

8. In Western fiction we have “dramatic irony,” which is when the audience knows something that the characters do not. Perhaps the opposite of dramatic irony is “romantic irony” (coined by scholar Ralph Freedman), which is when the author creates the effect that there is no separation between audience and characters, real world from fictional world. This can be achieved via intrusions by an author character and a reader character and via framing devices and stories within stories and the constant questioning of what is real and authentic both in fiction and in life.

9. Lastly, Gu shares other Chinese narrative theorists’ observation that oneness, as in Buddhist philosophy, informs all of this craft, including something like “romantic irony” (in which the fiction and the author and the readers are all one). Nothing is separate or individual from anything else. No one lives or acts, or reads or writes, alone.