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At the turn of the 21st century, the world witnessed the sudden rise of china. While japan, having
recovered from the decades following the defeat in World War II, continued to be a superpower. At
present, china and japan are the two of the most powerful countries in Asia. China and Japans are the
two of the most powerful cultural as well. Both countries have produces Nobel Laureates such as
Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata for japan, and Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan for China. These two
countries are equally distinguished for their contributions to word literature.
Both of these countries continue to shape Philippine history up to the present. Historically, japan
occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, while china was a great ally of the Philippine left especially
during the height of the martial law era in the 1970s. They have also had a great influence on the
current cultural landscape of the Philippine society. Chinas Maoist revolution pushed a lot of Chinese to
flee away from their motherland and seek refuge in various countries, including the Philippines. At
present, the Philippines has a strong Chinese diaspora that has been influential in various avenues of the
Philippine social and cultural life. In recent decades, japan has been popularly seen as a place where
Filipino women went to earn money by working as entertainers in bars. However, at present, Japans
connection to the Philippines has produced a thriving scholarship in Philippine studies, with a good
number of Japanese professors speaking in Filipino and studying Philippine history.

At present, East Asias political and cultural influence is becoming more prominent. Both Japanese and
south Koreans cultural exports such as foods and entertainments have become ever-present in the
country. East Asia is getting closer to the Philippines as the channels from these countries to ours and
bridge and made close to one another through the exportation of Japanese popular culture such as
anime, manga or its national cuisine. While china has been involve in territorial issues with the
Philippines, as well as influential in the rise of the Filipino-Chinese. In the case of south Korean, there
have been good exchange of students, scholar, and its popular cultures have been travelling to and
from, which make the ties much intimate as the Philippines and east Asia are very receptive to one
another in terms of welcoming each others culture.

21st century canon of East Asian literature

East Asian is considered as the most economically progressive block in the Asian continent. With the
wealth and progress pervasive in this regions literature has captures baffling effect of such growth,
Japanese author Haruki Murakami, in his popular novel Norwegian wood, articulate the consciousness
of the students who protested against the government during the 1960s. In this work, Murakami
exposed the psyche of japan, showing the troubles and emotional fragility of the youth. Most of the
thematic concerns were about loss of innocence, the alienating nature of progress, the nightmare of
socialism from china, and uncertainly in ones sexuality.

In 2012, Mo Yan, a Chinese novelist and short story writer, won the Nobel Prize for literature. He was
famous for the red sorghum: a novel of china, while mapped the experience of the Chinese during the
Sino-Japanese war until the rise of the Cultural Revolution. The novel attempted to animate the deep-
seated issues within the historical wars between china and japan and how both countries took different
paths in terms of ideology and political systems.
In Korean literature, many contemporary writers have addressed the turbulent years of South Korea
from around the 1940s until the 1970s, an era of radicalism that was led by the Korean nationalists
against Japanese imperial expansion, but was eventually influenced by the socialism of china. Park Wan-
Suhs novel the naked tree (1970) narrates the historic of war as a traumatic episode in Korean national
history. Ko Un, a poet who participated in democracy movements against the continuing Korean War,
explores the trauma and violence of such a war in his poetry collection ten thousand lives, showing how
these ideas and experiences meld into the poetic form. Author Hwang Sok-Yong, who witnessed
firsthand the ravages of the Vietnam war, wrote the novel shadow of arms to expose the damages such
enterprise can inflict on man, and to call for political actions that enables justice.

The East Asian literary canon for the 21st century is made up of a body of writing that is historical while
exploring the psychological effects of economic progress, social upheaval, and war.

What makes literature literary?

Perhaps, in most of the books, the literary character of literature is easily identified when one uses
poetry. However, in terms of fiction and prose, what makes the genres literary?

The literary character of prose fiction or nonfiction could be determined by its use of language and how
it renders the subjects. However, language follows various strategies which may be commonly viewed as
rhetorical techniques. In nonfiction, the literary character of an essay can be found through the use of
rhetorical odes such as narration, comparison and contrast, definition, etc. while fiction, the literary is
revealed through the use of narrative techniques and elements of fictions, which are mechanism to
process facts, data, insights, etc. into the form of a short story or novel. In other words, the literariness
of piece is determined in terms of how the text veers away from the objective, or empirical form of the
subject. Instead the role of literature is to imagine the possibilities for a story or a subject. According to
Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, literature refracts the subject. Instead of directly representing the subject,
Bakhtin argues that the writer always imagines possibilities, new characteristics or details, and explores
a range of options as to what will be fate of the subject of literature in the form of a fiction, poetry or
drama.

East Asia and the Philippines

Even during the time of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, Chinese migrants have been part of the
social reality of the Filipinos. In the class analysis of such era, the Chinese were considered as the lowest
in the social hierarchy ruled by the full- blooded Spanish settlers and the emissaries of the king of Spain to
the Philippines. Thus, many Chinese suffered from exploitative and oppressive labor conditions, making
them aggressive in the mercantilist industries.

However, before these Chinese came to the Philippines. China already has strong maritime trade. Many
Chinese travelled to the south of the Philippines and to manila to trade ceramics, porcelain, tea, silk, jade,
and other Chinese goods. Manilas port was the biggest from 17th century until the 19th century, for it
connected the Suez Canal to the rest in the Southeast Asia.
The Chinese identity has become a popular topic in the Philippine writing. The development of diaspora
studies has been a move to articulate the live of migrant communities in host countries such as the
Philippines. As a result, the representation of the Chinese in the Philippine society has become an
important topic

Stories by caroline hau manila/japan

My father tells me that once he planted a circle of sunflower around the house where he grew up.in
autumn, the sunflower burst forth in a bloom of coppery light that seemed to form a magic circle around
the family. For this he got up at dawn every day to draw water from the pond on the outskirts of the
country. For fertilizer, he took the snake trail that wound through the peanut fields, shadowed by mist
and dew, to the neighboring countries for ten bits worth of cow dung in a basket. On rainy day, the dung
was worth even less; it was, in fact, given away. My father had forgotten that manures smelled. The
writer Lu Xun wrote that if a man stays long enough in a room full of orchids, he will miss the scent. But
all this happened long after the hungry years, and long before my father left the Tang Mountainsfor
home to the elders was always teng sua in Fujianand joined his family in hong kong, long after he
settled down in the Philippines, married my mother, and raised a table with four legs, a son, and four
daughters. None of the relatives who stayed behind cared for the sunflowers, or even harvested their
seeds for oil. The garden wasted away, and finally had to be scraped off the land because the rot was
poisoning the air in the house.

When I started looking for the man my father had become in his childhood, I discovered that he had
never abandoned his garden, although he could not raise potted sunflowers on the window ledges of or
apartment on Lavezares Street. What he tried to do instead was to weave a circle of memories around his
children, watering it with countries telling, enriching it with years. But my father is a storyteller who
waited many years before he found a willing audience in his offspring because, as children, we could not
would notimagine that our parents had a life in which we played no part, and as a teenagers, as we
were too busy being teenagers to think that our elders may have felt or though the way we did. My
fathers stories seemed as remote as the tales of the monkey king or the three kingdoms in the land of
Rizal ad Coca Cola.

Another thin

The Filipino- Chinese writer

Caroline Hau is one of the Filipino- Chinese writers whose presence in the study of Philippine literature
and culture has been revered, especially after publishing three books, such as Necessary Fiction, On the
Subject of the Nation, and recently, The Chinese Question.

Hau intervenes in the study of cultures and literature by showing how the nation-state is framed and
shaped at the same time by our literatures. By looking at the works of Jose Rizal, Nick Joaquin, Amado
Guerrero, and other important writers in Philippine Literature, Hau sought to understand how these
novels were fundamental in shaping our countrys sense of nationhood, our national identity, and the
way we understand the position of the Philippines within the debates on the meanings and functions of
the state and the world. When Hau articulates Rizals contributions, she explores the way Noli Me
Tangere and El Filibusterismo shape our national and political consciousness as these novels remain to be
required readings in the secondary education, as well as in the tertiary level. These novels of Rizal have
been interpreted by Hau as necessary fiction in substantiating our claims in terms of what we mean by
having a nation-state, and much so, through the works of fiction, the country finds a more convenient
way in terms of understanding one another through an imagined community, despite the archipelagic
nature of our country. Thus, Hau looks at the passage of the novels and particularizes the way of our
nation has directed the people through interpreting the presence of the characters like Captain Tiago or
Sisa who are both remarkable figures in defining the current political situation in our country. Another
example is Quiroga whom Hau uses as an evidence to articulate the early historical presence of the
Chinese ethnicity reaveal the way our present notion of the Chinese has taken off from.

Apart from Haus intervention in the cultural studies of the Philippines, shes also a fictionist whose
breadth of imagination is seen in her first collection of short stories entitled. Recuerdos de Patay. In this
collection of short stories, Hau demonstrates how fiction could also engage with the issues of
nationalism, ethnicity and history, which have been widely relegated to the disciplines of scholarship and
literary and cultural criticism. Hau showed that fiction could also imagine possibilities for nation-state, for
the Chinese-Filipino, as well for a history of the Chinese migration to the Philippines.

What makes it literary?

The literariness of Haus stories could be seen through its ability to weave three disparate yet
intersecting disciplines or epistemologies, such as the history of the economic in china, the mass
migration and merchant history of the Chinese to the Philippines, as well as the fraught yet perpetually
mired tension among the issues on fiction, Chinese ethnicity, and the politics of representation. In other
words, the literary quality of Haus fiction is her ability to weave a short story that can tackle a highly
theoretical issue such as race and ethnicity by developing a character whose life progresses through a
narration of the migration of her family history, such as the movement of her father to the Philippines, as
well as the fathers distinctions between truth and fiction. Within such plot development, one sees that
the story of Hau achieves a literary value by representing the Chinese Filipino experience through a
historical narrative, yet not left to be uncritical as it purports a view on the Chinese ethnicity, Clearly, the
literary is a combination of ideas and practice coming from different disciplines and all are subjected to an
imaginative possibility, which allow everything to be fully under the category of fiction.

The Idea of Theme

For M.H. Abrams, theme is more usefully applied to a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or
asserted, which a imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader. As
literature certainly thrives in implication, any literary work most definitely drives a particular idea. The last
few paragraphs of his story turned to the discursive to extol not only nostalgia, but also the constancy of
connection, despite having considerated another country a home. The knowledge of ones personal
history connects an individual even to a remote past, certainly an important aspect not only of the
present and the future, but also of ones identity.