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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.
Another development in the Philippines is the rise of the South Korean
population. Many of these are students studying English in different
schools across the country, while others are in the country for business
interests. Korean history has been shapes by the centuries of Chinese
cultural migration through trade and commerce across east and
Southeast Asia, as well as by Koreas experience of occupation and
colonization from japan, Korea eventually split into two countries,
divided by ideologies: socialism in North Korea and capitalism in South
Korea. As north Korea has remained closed and isolated from the
world until the 21st century, south Korea has become more and more
visible as its popular culture such as television, films, and music have
grown into a worldwide sensation. As a result, the Philippines has
become a recipient of this cultural development, leading to engaging
cultural exchange between Filipinos and South Koreans.
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
 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.