A pan-Asian American poetry has been at the forefront of innovative poetics in myriad ways. This chapter foregrounds the impact the innovative legacies of the 1980s and 1990s have had on early twenty-first-century Asian American poetry. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed within Asian American letters the success of a mainstream lyricism but were also a crucial incubation period for a counter-tradition impatient with mainstream modes of poetic expression. Three major counter-modes have come to characterize some of the finest achievements of contemporary Asian American innovative poetics: a surrealist mode, pioneered by John Yau and practiced by younger poets such as Paolo Javier; a documental mode of postmodern montage, evident in the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Divya Victor; and a phenomenological mode practiced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Differentiating wenshi ziliao from other kinds of history production such as gazetteers and Party histories, organizers emphasized the integration of oral history with political mobilization. Internal circulation embodied the diversity/unity strategy of the Party by creating a “safe zone” for celebrating inclusivity and plurality of expression in which Party officials, informants, writers, and editors could experiment locally with different variations of reform discourse in the realm of history. It contained heterogeneity within a framework of controlled distribution to a select group of government, Party, and academic institutions along with work units in targeted industries. Yet they remained ambivalent. The inclusiveness and diversity of the wenshi ziliao, while essential to the tasks of building a united front and bringing about political healing and reconciliation, made it difficult for the Party to control the political message that they conveyed. Unlike the previous Maoist campaigns of mass mobilization, the wenshi ziliao were a restricted approach to mobilization that involved a selective network of local elites and a semi-internal framework for publication and dissemination. They integrated the Maoist methods of mass line and investigative research with a more controlled, selective mobilization process.