Inter-Asian migratory roads: The gamble of time in Our Stories

This essay reads Taiwan activist Ku Yu-ling's acclaimed narrative, Our Stories, and in particular its first section entitled 'We/Us,' as a critical theorization of labor, migration, domesticity and the foreign. To this end, 'We/Us' names the Cold War as historical determinant where it otherwise would remain unrecognized as such, yet reframes its formation in Asia by presenting multiple agencies and mappings rather than reifying a US-centered paradigm. 'We/Us' repeatedly foregrounds the difficulty of its own constitutive stories and readings, thereby intervening into any positivistic, developmental framings of the Inter-Asia project at the moment of the latter's institutionalization. A text that is not Asian American per se, whether in its authorship or in the direction taken by the migratory roads it narrates, Our Stories presents new paradigms for migration and time, gendered racialized labor and the Cold War, that can dialogue productively with current scholarship in Asian American studies.