Chinese American Literature

Ha Jin's A Good Fall is a collection of twelve short stories that focuses on Flushing, New York. This paper intends to analyze the short stories which explore the difficult state of affairs for Chinese immigrants by focusing on human relationships, including love, marriage, friendship, and kinship. But I believe these stories have gone beyond Chinese immigrant communities and touch the lives of first-generation U.S. immigrants.

In A Map of Betrayal Ha Jin interweaves his personal experience with his historical and political concerns to create a novel based loosely on the case of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a PRC spy who infiltrated the CIA for thirty years. The protagonist, Gary Shang, is a composite of Chin and Jin. The author infuses his sensibility as an accidental immigrant caught between worlds in mapping Gary’s geographical, psychological, and linguistic odysseys. The trope of doubling runs through the text, underscoring the themes of duplicity and self-division and creating a contrapuntal score. Thematically, the novel interrogates the relationship between the state and the individual by exploring reciprocal betrayal, dual national allegiance, bilingualism, repressed historical trauma, political and personal loyalties—themes connecting Jin, Chin, Gary and his grandson, Ben. Structurally, it alternates between Gary’s third person account and her daughter’s first person account, covering two historical periods, representing different generations, and orchestrating multiple national(ist) perspectives.

《月白的臉：一位亞裔美國人的家園回憶錄》（Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands）一書得到美國書卷獎，開啟研究者對此書成名的質疑。回憶錄的書寫方向與出版密切相關，造成寫作的偏狹，在創作動機與記憶的真實間產生隔閡。首先是書名的嬗變暴露作者有目的性的出版，接著是作者的自我定位於「書寫」之前建立，使客觀性銳減。林玉玲在接受訪問時，談及成書過程的掙扎，回憶中身分認同的問題始終縈繞在她身上，對於她以何種角色、姿態書寫回憶錄，又如何以有色人種的身分立足於文壇，相當值得深入研究。

This lesson plan is intended for teachers to use in Upper-level high school English courses such as AP Literature.  May be modified to suit.  Contains links for possible further research projects by a student on topics raised by this story, which was originally published in 1895 in a Montreal newspaper, then collected in Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago, 1912). 

Created under my supervision by a student; published with her permission.

{Paddy Qiu, University of Kansas} I. Supplication. Our first bus ride took us to Chinatown in Flushing, Queens. As we rode closer to the epicenter, the white ghosts, bai gui, dissipate. Their slick-shined shoes shuffling off one by one, my eyes darting towards the exit. Patiently waiting for supplication, I questioned whether I should have left with them. When my father and I got to our stop, I stomped on the foot of a Chinese grandmother.

In exploring the tough process of translating Toni Morrison’s Beloved into Chinese, the paper will be framed by Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as expressed in his famous 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator” and Jacques Derrida’s related exposition in “Des Tours de Babel.”  Since I am fully aware that translating this difficult novel is highly challenging, why, then, did I agree to undertake the task?  The paper begins by examining the psychic struggles I underwent and the rationale involved before I finally accepted the challenge.  Subtitled “To Be a Responsible Morrison Translator,” the second section investigates what I believe to be the prerequisites of a good translator of Morrison’s novels in general and of Beloved in particular.  In the third section, which constitutes the principal focus of my paper, I will explore the problems I encountered while rendering Morrison’s most well-known novel into Chinese and how I came to solve them.  Starting with the choice of a Chinese title, I proceed to analyze the novel’s narrative style and tone, its biblical allusions, its oral and aural quality, its poetic prose and songs, its dialogues, colloquialisms and word-play.  But the hardest linguistic nut for me to crack was translating the various interior monologues in Part Two, especially the chapter narrated through Beloved’s “Middle Passage” stream of consciousness.  While I conclude the main section with a reflection of the cultural differences and barriers, in the final section I will put forth a number of observations concerning the craft and art of translation while using translation metaphorically to propound the correlation of my “redemptive” act of translation with Morrison’s writing of Beloved.

Keywords: Task, Translation, Toni Morrison, Beloved, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida

While grave robbers and archeologists alike have delighted in unearthing material culture in burial sites throughout the world, the Chinese invented a better way to deliver the goods and to maintain a spiritual harmony with one’s predecedents. Ever the technological innovators, by around the eighth century C.E. (mid-Tang, 906 – 1125 C.E.)  it became a common practice to render facsimiles of one’s earthly possessions – real and coveted – into one of the world’s greatest inventions – paper. What’s more, the offerings can be delivered during rituals by sending them up in pyre of smoky flames. A look at this practice enriches the reading of Lisa See's "Peony Pavilion".

This article examines Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior from a post-Jungian perspective. It analyzes the narrator's experience proving that her writing of this memoir amounts to an unconscious reprocessing and recording of her reconciliation with her mother. By translating and rewriting her mother's stories, Maxine manages to integrate her shadow and embrace her feminine nature after spending her youth rigorously trying to achieve intellectual prowess. The novel is an assortment of seemingly random talk stories Maxine heard from her mother in Chinese as a child. In a 2011 interview with Josephine Reed, Kingston stated that she started writing the novel in Hawaii, sitting in a hotel room and staring at the wall, not at any special scenery. The wall, I argue, symbolizes a psychological impasse, her mother complex. The randomness of this gesture, how she started writing, resonates with the post-Jungian analysis I present in this article and with the fact that the author's unconscious was an incentive for writing. In short, the wall Kingston was trying to break was an inner one—a barrier in the form of a mother complex that prevented her from letting go and fully experiencing her environment.

The dissertation is the first attempt at imagological analysis of the Chinese American discourse as an integrant part of Amy Tan’s bicultural novels. The application of imagological methodology opens new vistas in researching Chinese American literature throughout the different stages of its formation.

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly is a play about “passing”. Song’s ability to “pass” highlights the performativity of gender and race. The gap between Song’s “passing” and the audience’s privileged position of knowledge facilitates Hwang’s deconstruction of the fixed perceptions about gender, race and sexuality. Firstly, this paper uses Judith Butler’s theory of “gender performativity” to discuss Song’s gender performance. This paper aims to show that Hwang complicates the notion of gender performativity by highlighting the dynamics between Orientalism, othering and stereotyping. Using Brechtian theatrical devices, Hwang deconstructs the binary between the West and East and critiques Western assumptions of Asian identity. This paper also explores the interaction between “passing” and “failing” and its implications on gender and race politics. “Passing” is intimately linked with failing to “pass” within the society that is dominated by race and gender stereotypes. Finally, this paper argues that Song’s ability to “pass” reveals the West’s preoccupation with Orientalism and her failed performance reflects the West and East’s complicity in creating essentialist stereotypes which ultimately restrict both parties.

Although Kingston only began to write in the mid-1970s, the spirit and aesthetic lessons of the counterculture and its specific and sacramental use of hallucinogens permeate her work like no other American writer of this period. Neither a wide-eyed promoter nor an uninformed skeptic, Kingston helps us see the complexity and richness of psychedelic experience in the 1960s counterculture. As the Liddel-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon has it, the word pharmakon can mean, in addition to “remedy,” “poison,” and “scapegoat,” also “a means of producing something.” In the 1960s, a whole generation undertook to produce something new through a deliberate course of dismantling the assumptions and perceptions they saw as rooted in their social conditioning. In their place, 1960s psychedelic experimenters sought to found a new, more gentle and more just society, one based on the boundary-blurring insights of LSD experience. A major landmark in the cultural history of the pharmakon, the counterculture built its philosophical, political and aesthetic practice around the ultimate psycheledic principle that “all is related to all.”

This paper explores the conceptualizations of identity and home in Ha Jin’s literary identity and his 2007 migrant novel A Free Life through the lens of diaspora discourse. In his seminal study, Safran attributes diasporas’ longing for homeland to the pull factors in the old world and the push factors in the new world. However, Ha Jin’s literary trajectory and A Free Life suggest a new dimension to this: the old world (China) and the new world (America) pushing and pulling diasporas constantly, forcing them to be always en route between the two. Their identities are constantly relocated and reconstructed along with their routes. The paper explores how Ha Jin and his novel challenge the limits of identity labels like Chinese, American, and Chinese-American, while portraying the complex identity formation of diasporas.

This article is based on the analysis of The Lord of The Ring the Fellowship of the Ring novel. The problems to solve are: 1) How is the symbol of ring described in the Norwegian myth as reflected in the novel of The Lord of The Ring The Fellowship of The Ring, 2) How does the ring symbol in the Norwegian myth influence the story of The Lord of The Ring The Fellowship of The Ring. The study is based on the approach of structuralism in literature proposed by Claude-Levi Strauss (Bressler, 1999:86), myth he assumed, possessed a structure like language.

Герой романа китайского эмигранта первого поколения  Ха Цзиня «Ожидание» (Waiting, 1999) в момент постижения смысла своей жизни называет себя «лишним человеком». В статье анализируется, в какой степени  подготовлено это самоопределение развитием характера героя, и обсуждается вопрос, можно ли соотнести китайского персонажа с русским образом «лишнего человека».

The Chinese American writer Frank Chin owes his current status as a marginalized figure in Asian American Studies not only to his anti-feminist vitriolics, but also to his writing style. Judged by common contemporary standards, Chin’s novels appear disjointed and crude: He routinely puts blunt, didactic statements from his essays into his
characters’ mouths without even trying to give them any literary embellishment; yet at the same time all these doctrine-like, straightforward, and obviously instructional passages are infused with complex hints at ancient myths, and his competently lecturing protagonists are prone to irritating sudden irrational outbursts of emotion. This article proposes that these peculiarities of Chin’s style – a combination of passion, plainness, and allegory – do not necessarily have to be seen as literary weaknesses; they can also be interpreted as a radical employment of strategies that helped form an important strain
within the American literary tradition: the strategies that the first distinctly American writers (the plain, passionate, and allegorical Puritans) used. Viewed in this light, Frank Chin seems much less of an ‘outsider’ than before.

Chinese American Literature without Borders bridges comparative literature and American studies by using an intercultural and bilingual approach to Chinese American literature. It looks both ways at the United States and China to reveal the writers' multiple geopolitical engagements. Part I presents alternative forms of masculinity. It examines gender refashioning in light of the Chinese dyadic ideal of wen-wu (literary arts and martial arts), while redefining both in the process. Part II presents alternative forms of autobiography, theory, metafiction, and translation. It puts in relief the formal experiments of the writers, who interweave hybrid poetics with two-pronged critiques. The writers examined provide a reflexive lens through which transpacific audiences are beckoned to view the "other" country and to look homeward without blinders.
http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137453532

In “Trippers and Askers,” the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), the novel’s protagonist Wittman Ah Sing and his love interest, Nanci Lee, talk about the limited roles available to Chinese actors in American media. Nanci reflects on her experiences auditioning, complaining that a director criticized her performance of an oriental peasant because she did not “look oriental” enough and refused to speak broken English.1 “Can’t you act more oriental? Act oriental,” she was instructed.2 To prevent Nanci from “los[ing] the will to audition” or changing herself cosmetically to fit other roles, Wittman promises to write her a play “where the audience learns to fall in love with [her] for [her] ochery skin and round nose and flat profile and slanty eyes, and  [her] bit of an accent.”3 As a playwright, Wittman’s task is to create roles that will provide Chinese-Americans like Nanci a platform to express themselves in new ways, disrupting rigid fictional stereotypes of what it means to be a Chinese-American perpetuated by U.S. popular media during the 1960s.

This article aims to scrutinize identity problem, through utilizing gender, cultural approaches and analyzing mother-daughter relationship. The distinctive attitudes of eastern and western societies towards woman identity bear undeniable differences, yet the existence of noticeable similarities cannot be rejected. East and West are regarded as two opposite poles; apparently modern discourse searches ultimate perspectives to investigate crossroads between these two opposite sites. Indeed, culture plays a significant part in detecting these perspectives. In this article the author makes an effort to analyze the prior cultural facets by employing literary analyses. Moreover, one of the problems that modern literary study is concerned with is mother-daughter relationship. The selected two literary works presented by this article open up an immense area for exploring the above mentioned points. Enquiring into woman identity, the article attempts to approach the question from ethnic perspectives, thus our heroes are not just ethnic minorities, but also minority women.

This essay shows how "The Photograph” (相片) by Bing Xin (pen name for 谢婉莹Xie Yuanying, 1900-1999), published in 1934, heralds many of the theoretical insights later articulated by postcolonialist and Asian American scholars. The story revolves around Madam Simpson, an American piano teacher who has spent twenty-eight years in China. After retiring from a missionary school, she adopts Shuzhen, the daughter of her former Chinese tutor. When Shuzhen is eighteen, Madam Simpson takes her to New England for an extensive stay in her ancestral home, In New England, the two women meet Reverend Li and his son Tianxi, and a friendship and an incipient romance develop between the two youngsters. Upon seeing a photograph of Shuzhen taken by Tianxi, Madam Simpson decides abruptly to return to China with her adoptee. Analyzed from the retrospective lens of postcolonialism, postmodernism, critical ethnography, and Asian American studies, this early literary example of transnational encounter and interracial adoption not only dissolves the boundary between literature and theory, between Chinese and Chinese American literature, but also reveals the gendered reception of Chinese writers and the cultural ramifications of transnational adoption.

This article illustrates the masculine ideal of wenren or poet scholar exemplified by Xu Zhimo, a Chinese poet who appears as a bicultural literary vanguard adored by both British and Chinese intellectuals in Pang-Mei Natasha Chang's "Bound Feet and Western Dress" and as Pearl Buck's romantic soul mate and lover in Anchee Min's "Pearl of China." His allure can be traced to his cultural hybridity, spirited personality, intellectual generosity, and the ability to draw together a literary community. This paper also revives a matching feminine ideal, epitomized by the brilliant women of letters to whom Xu is irresistibly attracted.