Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elements that this comparative approach questions. By studying the two novels together, the article argues that the two writers capture different, yet equally relevant hypostases of the (Asian) immigrant’s self-questioning and self-inscription into the American nation, whose updated versions of the “Dream” have been dominated by the material rather than the spiritual concerns.

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“We Stopped Dreaming”: Julie Otsuka’s (Un)Told Stories of Picture Brides. Focusing on Julie Otsuka’s acclaimed 2011 novel, The Buddha in the Attic, this paper will investigate the picture bride phenomenon as a multilayered trade of lives, identities, emotions and expectations, drawing a vivid picture of the protagonists’ subjection to exploitation, abuse, discrimination and deceit. REZUMAT. ”Am încetat să visăm”: Julie Otsuka și poveștile (ne)spuse ale mireselor prin corespondență. Pornind de la elogiatul roman din 2011 al scriitoarei Julie Otsuka, Buddha din podul casei, lucrarea de față va analiza fenomenul mireselor prin corespondență drept comerț cu vieți, identități, emoții și așteptări, oferind un viu portret al confruntării protagonistelor cu exploatarea, abuzul, discriminarea și înșelătoria. Cuvinte cheie: visul American, voce colectivă, imigrație, japonezi, legislație, căsătorie, mirese prin corespondență, context socio-istoric.

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