We’ Narration in Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic: ‘Unnaturally’ Asian American?

My article looks at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). My main goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions generated by we narration in these two Asian American novels prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into questions essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building. But these two we texts are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, in that they help us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory– among which Gérard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.