The ABC in Chick Lit: the Consumption of Asian America in The Dim Sum of All Things

Abstract

This essay aims to examine chick lit written within the Asian American context. For the most part, the chick lit genre has been typically regarded as a site to study contemporary white women's experiences and to debate the genres’ credentials as feminist literature. Though some may disagree, there is general consensus that chick lit has fallen out of vogue after reaching its peak in the first decade of the new millenium.; nevertheless, it is being revisited by readers and critics alike as it has recently re-emerged as a location upon which to examine how race and gender inform notions of national belonging and female subject formation in the twenty-first century. To this end, this essay reads Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things (2004). Keltner’s protagonist Lindsey Owyang is yet another twentysomething “chick” looking for love, self, independence, and success in the huge megalopolis of San Francisco. What sets Lindsey apart from the chick prototype is that she is a third-generation ABC (American-born Chinese) and issues relevant to Asian America frequently make their way into Lindsey’s narrative. Though it is generally considered as standing a “few notches above the standard chick-lit fare” (Stover n. pag), I would argue that meaningful reflections on many of the major pillars of Asian American literature, history, and cultural politics are glossed over in favor of cursory musings about the daily vicissitudes of Lindsey’s life. This essay thus takes to task Ferriss’s claim that a “serious” consideration of chick lit “brings into focus many of the issues facing contemporary women and contemporary culture – issues of identity, of race and class, of femininity and feminism, of consumerism and self-image” (2). I contend that a close examination of Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things discloses that the chick lit format undermines a “serious consideration” of Asian American issues by presenting in particular a highly problematic representation of race and of Asian American femininity.