SOURCE: "Eat a Bowl of Tea: Asian America in the Novels of Ghish Jen, Cynthia Kadohata, Kim Ronyoung, Jessica Hagedorn, and Tran Van Dinh," in The Yearbook of English Studies, edited by Andrew Gurr, Modern Humanities Research Association, 1994, pp. 263-280.

In the following excerpt, Lee, after analyzing aspects of America's "obsession" with Asia and strains of anti-Asian sentiment pervading American society, discusses the Asian-American literary renaissance and its resultant controversies, and then provides a plot summary of Kadohata's A Floating World, focusing in particular on its Asian American elements.

Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World gives a new turn to American picaresque. Set in the 1950s, and told in the precocious, Holden Caulfieldish voice of Olivia Ann, sansei teenager, it offers a kind of inspired 'road' drama. The odyssey it chronicles, that of a migrant, three-generation Japanese-American family's search for work through the rural and small-town Pacific Northwest in...