In August of 1972, the Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was working on an article about theatre in New York’s Chinatown. He was focussing on the challenges faced by performers who had recently emigrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They were shut out of mainstream productions, and the grassroots theatre scene was still maturing. Blumenthal’s editor asked a colleague named Frank Ching, who presumably knew a bit more about that part of town, to look the piece over. Ching felt that Blumenthal cast the broader Chinese-American population as foreign. He recommended some more interesting artists to Blumenthal, who ended up including a parenthetical mention of an up-and-coming playwright named Frank Chin. Ching likely believed that he was doing a favor for Chin, whose “Chickencoop Chinaman” had opened at the American Place Theatre months earlier. At the very least, Ching must have felt that he had helped sneak an edgier name into an otherwise drab roundup. But Chin was furious to be included at all.

Chin, who considered himself a fifth-generation Chinese-American, wrote Ching a letter complaining about seeing his name in Blumenthal’s piece alongside the “Chinese from China.” Ching didn’t understand why Chin felt so aggrieved, and responded that “the average person’s” conflation of newer immigrants with those who had been in America for generations was “understandable,” a reflection of ignorance but not of outright racism. Their interest in Chinatown was something to work with. Chin disagreed. “As far as I’m concerned,” he replied, “Americanized Chinese who’ve come over in their teens and later to settle here and American born Chinaman [sic] have nothing in common, culturally, intellectually, emotionally.” Ching reprinted their back-and-forth in Bridge, a magazine based in Chinatown that he helped oversee. As its title suggested, Bridge set out to explore the diasporic bonds of the Chinese in America. Although Chin had explored Chinatown in his plays and in a documentary, he also wanted to be recognized as something different. He and his friends were sketching out the contours of a new identity that had emerged in the late sixties: Asian-American.

Identity politics offers a voluntary response to an involuntary situation. Power structures beyond our grasp sort us according to categories not of our own choosing, predestining us to be seen in a certain way by (as Ching might put it) “the average person.” Choosing to call oneself an Asian-American, rather than answering to “Oriental,” makes the most of an imposition. It offers some people a ready-made sense of purpose, short-circuiting the power of an epithet imposed from without. Students and activists in California invented this term in the late sixties, inspired by Black Power and similar movements among Native Americans and Chicanos, and those involved in Third World Liberation. They ultimately emphasized what connected different Asian-immigrant communities and their struggles: efforts to resist gentrification and alleviate poverty, the antiwar movement, stereotypes about Asians as passive or perpetually foreign. The term implied a set of shared historical conditions. Where to go next was an open question.

Chin and Ching weren’t the first people to debate the merits of Asian-American assimilation, though Chin might have been the first to put this debate in such colorful terms. He felt that many Chinese-American writers were interested in being “prizewinning poodles” answering the beck and call of “the master race.” What’s more, he thought the literature that Bridge occasionally published was “shit.” “If the purpose of BRIDGE is to bind me to the immigrants,” Chin wrote, “I’m not interested in being bound.”

Chin felt bound, instead, to other writers who were eager to explore this new identity. One of his early advocates was the black writer Ishmael Reed. Chin had befriended Jeffery Paul Chan and Shawn Wong, and, in 1970, the three met Lawson Fusao Inada at a party that Reed hosted. Chan and Wong wrote fiction; Inada was a poet. Alongside their own writing, they dug for older works, scouring libraries and used-book stores for predecessors. They felt as though American culture had wrecked their brains, leaving many of their peers awash in self-contempt. In the process of excavation and creation, they were testing out their own theories of what this new identity could mean. Reed called them the Four Horsemen of Asian-American literature. Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong founded the Combined Asian American Resources Project in order to preserve the literary history that they were piecing together. They soon felt that they had found as much as anyone had.

Besides, they were less interested in uncovering historical precursors than in starting something new. In the fifties and sixties, writers like C. Y. Lee and Betty Lee Sung had tasted success, becoming models of hardworking Asian-Americans dealing with identity crises. They took for granted the task of successful assimilation; they did not ask why, or on whose terms. The Chinese writer Lin Yutang, who first lived in the U.S. as a graduate student at Harvard, had experienced American success in the thirties as a kind of spokesperson for Chinese manners and civilization. In 1948, he published “Chinatown Family,” one of the first novels about Chinatown written by someone of Chinese descent. Yet he actually knew very little about the Chinese-American experience. His editor, a white man, fed him details that he plugged into his domestic drama. Successes like these embodied what Chan and Chin termed “racist love,” their lively framing of the model-minority myth. American readers accepted Asian authors, Chan and Chin argued, as long as they conformed to stereotypes of social passivity.

The Four Horsemen had no interest in being loved, especially by white people. Chin, in particular, was sensitive about grammar and the gatekeepers’ ideas of “good English.” When an editor asked to tidy some grammatical errors, he called her the “great white bitch goddess priestess of the sacred white mouth.” To follow the guidance of mainstream American culture, he thought, was to accede to self-hatred. He wanted the freedom to write in a “badmouth” style full of slangy extravagances, the frenetic energy of someone forging armor out of junk.

Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong shopped an anthology to major publishing houses. “It isn’t enough to celebrate it (the writing) merely because it is by Asian American writers,” one publisher told them, suggesting that they keep only the “least ethnic” pieces; the collection wasn’t “commanding” enough. Others expressed interest in terms that felt condescending. Reed offered them a chance to approach Asian-American culture with the irreverence he brought to the black experience. He published them in his “Yardbird” anthologies, and in 1974 his friend Charles Harris, the head of the newly established Howard University Press, published “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.” “Asian America,” Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong wrote in the book’s preface, “so long ignored and forcibly excluded from creative participation in American culture, is wounded, sad, angry, swearing, and wondering, and this is his AIIIEEEEE!!!” This sound was “more than a whine, shout, or scream. It is fifty years of our whole voice.”

Anthologies offer us previews of how society is changing. A community has consolidated; a movement has distinguished itself from what came before. Perhaps this emerging cohort of writers stands in for a social wave that’s about to crest. “The New Negro: An Interpretation,” edited by Alain Locke and published in 1925, captured the excitement, possibility, and complexities of the Harlem Renaissance by offering a cross-sectional taste of all the work being produced under its banner. Decades later, the Black Arts Movement became synonymous with the anthology “Black Fire,” published in 1968 and edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Following the cultural movements of the sixties, publishers became increasingly interested in such collections as they began exploring ways to reach new and younger audiences. The party where the Four Horsemen had met was for Reed’s “19 Necromancers from Now,” a 1970 collection showcasing multicultural writing that was formally and substantively radical.