Author: Barbara Jane Reyes

What’s This Thing About Orientals Together On A Bus “Well, here we are, Orientals together on a bus.”—Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables “Oriental was a rug that everyone steps on, so we ain’t no Orientals. We were Asian American.”—Richard Aoki 1. “Asian American Literature” had already arrived. Just like José Garcia Villa wrote, “Have come, am …

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I wrote this essay in around 2014, as I was invited to submit to the anthology, Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America, edited by Abayomi Animashaun, and published by Black Lawrence Press in 2015. There’s some amount of retreading in my essays, as if I am corroborating …

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