"The Universal Is Found in the Specific": Our Conversation with Christopher Fan

Here's a puzzle. After the 1965 Hart-Celler Act opened U.S. immigration, a huge wave of Asian immigrants arrived — and because of how the law was written, a lot of them were recruited specifically for their professional skills. Engineers. Doctors. Scientists. They raised their kids to follow the same path.

Then, in the 1990s, Asian American literature exploded. Novels, poetry, drama — publication shot through the roof. And the people writing it were largely those same kids. The children of STEM immigrants, who were supposed to become engineers, became novelists instead.

Why?

That question is basically the subject of Asian American Fiction After 1965, a book by Christopher Fan — professor of English at UC Irvine and director of UCI Global Asias — and it's also, it turns out, the story of his own life. This summer, he sat down with us for an interview about literature, memory, and why stories matter. (Full disclosure: Professor Fan has been one of AAA's earliest supporters, and his son is actually a Creative Writing student at OCSA. Small world.)

The kid with two brains

Fan grew up in Houston — "an engineers town," as he put it — the son of immigrants from Taiwan. NASA was nearby. He went to space camp. His dad bought one of those enormous 1980s PCs and Fan taught himself to code on it. Everything around him pointed toward a life in STEM.

But his mom was a book nerd, and the house was full of fiction, and he was the kid reading in the car until he got carsick. So he grew up with what he described as two parallel interests — computer science and literature — and no idea which one he'd become.

The tiebreaker, weirdly, was a philosophy class. His freshman year at Cornell, he read Camus's The Plague — a novel about a disease spreading through a town that's also an allegory for fascism spreading through Europe — and it flipped a switch. He realized a story could carry philosophy, history, and politics all at once, inside characters you actually cared about. He'd been reading his whole life, but that was the moment reading became something to take seriously.

I like this story because it's not a clean "I always knew" narrative. He almost went the other way. Which, as you'll see, ends up being his whole point.

Literature has bandwidth

We asked him the question at the center of everything AAA does: what can literature preserve about memory and lived experience that official documents can't?

His answer used a metaphor I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Fiction, he said, has enormous bandwidth. A historical document is static — you look at it and try to reassemble the past in your head. But a novel puts memory "into motion." When you read fiction, you're not just receiving information; you're building the entire world in your own mind, and that act of building forces your mind open wide enough to take in everything the story carries — the social dynamics, the power structures, the feelings, the stuff that never makes it into records.

He even compared poetry to zip files: an enormous amount of meaning compressed into a tiny space, waiting for a reader to unzip it. (The computer science half of his brain is clearly alive and well.)

It's the strongest case I've heard for why a novel counts as a historical record. Art doesn't just document experience. It transmits it — and fiction, by his argument, transmits more of it than almost anything else.

The stories he had to unlearn

One thing surprised me. Fan told us that growing up, he absorbed the idea that Asian Americans were politically passive — quiet, assimilating, not rocking the boat. It wasn't until later that he learned how wrong that was. There's a whole history of radical Asian American movements from the 1960s and 70s. Taiwanese immigrants in his own community were secretly active in independence movements, some of them blacklisted and unable to return home for decades. Even the field he now works in exists because of protest: at UC Irvine in the early 1990s, students went on hunger strikes and occupied buildings to demand an Asian American studies program.

He'd grown up inside a single story about his own community, and it took actual research to break out of it.

That's part of why he co-founded Hyphen, an Asian American culture and politics magazine, in 2003. He described the goal using a phrase from the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen: narrative plenitude. A community with only one story attached to it — even a flattering story, like the model minority — isn't fully real to other people, because real people are contradictory. So Hyphen deliberately covered the Asian Americans who weren't in the mainstream spotlight: farm workers, queer Asian Americans, Asian communities in the South. Not one story. Lots of them.

Honestly, "narrative plenitude" might be the best two-word description of what AAA is trying to do that I've ever heard.

His advice: dig into the specific

We ended by asking what he'd tell young Asian American creatives who want to explore identity and history through their work.

"The universal is found in the specific," he said — and then he did something I didn't expect: he used himself as a warning. There's a ready-made narrative he could tell about his life, he explained. Asian kid in 1980s Texas, faced racism, found identity through resisting stereotypes. It's a real story, and parts of it are true. But it's not actually his story. His real story is messier — it's about a stable, professional immigrant household, about the pull between two careers, about geopolitics he didn't understand until adulthood, explaining why his family ended up in Houston at all.

His advice was to resist the packaged version. "Dive into the contradictions," he told us. "Sit with the uncomfortable aspects of who you are and where you came from." Don't worry about fitting yourself into a narrative that already exists — because the specific, complicated truth is the part other people will actually recognize themselves in.

Coming from someone whose entire book argues that Asian American authors were shaped by exactly that kind of messy, specific history, it didn't feel like a platitude. It felt like the conclusion of forty years of thinking about it.

The takeaway

If I had to compress the whole conversation into one line, it's this: getting our stories into the record isn't enough — they have to actually be our stories. Not the single story. Not the packaged one. The specific, contradictory, uncomfortable one — because that's the version with all the bandwidth.

That's the kind of work we hope to showcase at our first AAA event this November at OCSA. If you're a student with a specific story — even one that doesn't fit any narrative you've seen — that's exactly what we're looking for.