This paper explores the relationship between three fictional Asian American protagonists and their urban experience in three novels from the postwar period: John Okada’s "No-No Boy" (1957), Hua Chuang’s "Crossings" (1968), and Nami Mun’s "Miles from Nowhere" (2009). The settings of the three novels are very dissimilar, but they are closely linked in thematic terms by the protagonists’ displacement in the various urban locations in which they find themselves. In his Beyond Literary Chinatown, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge regards the textual worlds under study as a potent mediums of cultural transformation, but claims that at their best they begin to push us “onto the hard path toward freedom.” Taking my cue from this notion, I examine to what extent the three protagonists’ construction of transformative identity is related to their experience of their urban environment, paying attention to the novels’ complicity with and challenges to hierarchies of race, gender and class.
