Chinese American Literature

This MA thesis aims to explore how contemporary Native writers and diasporic Chinese American writers employ humor in their works through the archetypical figure of the Trickster, to articulate their resistance to racism and cultural stereotyping. By examining a selection of Coyote stories by Thomas King, a novel by Gerald Vizenor and a novel by Maxine Hong Kingston, and the ways they adapt their mythical Tricksters reinscribing them in a contemporary setting, and the ways these writers juggle with words and meanings, I hope to further reveal their intentions to resisi and contest hegemonic dominance. This thesis is divided into three main sections. First, the concept of Trickster as a mythological and universal archetype; second, the different deployments of this figure in contemporary Native literature, and third how it is treated in Chinese American literatures.
My thesis is that literary tricksters articulate the anxieties Native peoples and Chinese migrant communities experience in the United States and Canada, calling for them to rewrite their history and reject the assigned (mis)representatio throug humor.

Keywords: Trickster, humor, resistance, Native peoples, Chinese diaspora

In May 2005, Timothy Fox, of Chinese Cultural University in fraiwan, organized an international conference entitled "Frank Chin and Asian America: Three Decades of the Artist" in honor of the lone fighter of Chinese American literature. Tim is my friend, with a mutual interest in Frank Chin. Tim sent me an invitation early, but I was unable to attend the conference in person because I was in the US and decided not to go for fear of going through the tedious visa application process. To support a friend's endeavor and to show my respect for Frank Chin as a writer, I thought I should do something for the conference and for Frank Chin. So I sent Tim a video presentation

This paper takes Chinese elements in Chinese American literarure as an example to discuss the causes of Orientalism in the cultural production of Chinese and American literature, focusing on three pairs of relationships:  between the publishing market and authors, between literary works and readers, and between American readers and Chinese readers. This paper argues that the stubborn expectation of Chine stories in the American publishing market has made China stories the mainstream of Chinese American writing, providing a material basis for the existence of Orientalism. The strong interest of American readers in the cultural elements of Chinese American literature provides imagination for the existence of Orientalism in Chinese American literature. Finally, the different cognitive processes of viewing Chinese culture spatially (for the American readers) and temoprally (for the Chinese readers) makes the existence of Orientalism in Chinese American literature inevitable.

Poetry, the precipitation of thousands of years of Chinese civilization, is the treasure we will always cherish. It has stood the test of time, witnessed the ups and downs of centuries. Even if it is no longer prosperous, poetry in the long river of history stands firmly. With the development of economy and culture, ancient poetry has gradually developed into modern poetry, which has also become a way for many modern literati to express their aspirations and feelings. IRFAN AKIB （艾喆）—— an international student from Bangladesh, became a Chinese poet while studying Chinese.

Understanding various sexual motives has a profound impact on determining the causes, significance and consequences
of sexual behaviour. The article presents the procedure for adapting the Chinese version of the questionnaire «Affective
and motivational orientation related to erotic arousal» and empirically established its reliability by the criterion of internal
consistency. Gender differences in hierarchies and the strength of dispositional sexual motives of the Chinese were also
revealed: women differ in the greater strength of the motives of comfort, power, care and self-importance, and men – in the
greater strength of the motives of the importance of a partner, pleasure, submission and procreation

Migration is considered as a massive impact of colonization. It causes a huge number of people from a certain country (a colonized ones) move to another country due to colonization. Starting from this, usually a new society consists of mixed culture, norms, values adjusted to the altering citizens (migrants and non-migrants) that has been created. Yet, an issue of one’s identity appear for those who come from the two cultures as it appeared in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club . Jing-Mei Woo, a Chinese-born American had issue of defining her identity due to the hybridity circumstance she achieved as the daughter of immigrant parents. This research aimed to examine the portrayal of Jing-Mei Woo’s hybridity identity and the way she developed her hybrid identity. This research was a qualitative research for the data were in the form of words from The Joy Luck Club novel. Barry’s theory about hybrid identity was used to answer the research questions towards Jing-Mei Woo character. The result ...

In "Rail Road Standard Time" and "The Eat and Run Midnight People," published in the short story collection titled The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. (1988), Frank Chin focuses on several issues such as cultural heritage and transmission, identity, railroad narrations, food, and masculinity. In the first short story, Chin is going to his mother's funeral, and during this journey, he jumps between his memories that help the reader to see the trails of his Chinese American identity formation. In the second story, Chin once more returns to his memories by taking up the role of the narrator and reveals the issues of double discrimination, masculinity, and the influences of American culture on his identity formation. The aim of this article is to analyze Chin's selected short stories from a thematic and social perspective. The article also aims to reveal how the author tries to maintain his ethnicity and reflect his identity molded by two different cultures.

Ethnic minorities in America are always in the search of identity because of being far away from their cultural and traditional practices. In this process, they try to construct their identities within the connections to their past and present together. At that point, ethnic autobiography creates an insightful perspective in that it presents the existing links among the members of a community: a common past, and a political project for the future of that community. (Renán, 1990,19) There are many ethnic groups living in America, and one of them is the Chinese Americans. America is like a mosaic with various ethnic groups living there. This study will seek “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan in the light of ethnic autobiographical considerations. This autobiographical source indicates how the language creates boundaries and it pushes characters into silence. This silence is a kind of psychological loneliness and cultural alienation. Tan closely experiences the otherness with her ethnic difference and she uses the genre of ethnic autobiography while narrating her personal memories because the real issues always affect the readers more deeply. Besides the sociological concerns such as language, it also explores the life of Tan with her own personal expressions. Thus, it is a kind of sociological, cultural and biographical text, and it also deals with multi-dimensional critical outlooks. It is also a great example inside protest literature because it criticizes ethnic discrimination with the examples from the life of Chinese American. From which perspectives does “Mother Tongue” approach the ethnic issue? How do the Chinese-Americans suffer from hardships in American society? What does the identity of Chinese-Americans mean for themselves? This paper tries to light on these questions in the framework of different ethnicities in America.

The aim of this study is to provide history of Amy Tan’s narrative on Chinese-American identity in settings she establishes in her novels, as well as to examine the Chinese-American identity in Amy Tan’s novel, The Hundred Secret Senses. As a Chinese-American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience, Amy Tan’s bestselling 1995 novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, bears a fictional story at first glance, it is based on Amy Tan’s experiences and on stories told by her mother. In her novel, Tan reveals Chinese identity characteristics in an immigrant half-sister, Kwan, of the main character, Olivia. Ghosts and ghost stories from Chinese past also serve as a mediator for novel’s structure and plot, these stories show parallelism with characters’ real-life experiences and resolution of both parallel relations overlaps. Amy Tan successfully employs superstitious and surreal elements thanks to ghosts intermingled with realistic migration experiences of Chinese-American characters. Setting and metanarrative style in this novel reveal great deal of information about experiences from Amy Tan’s life and from immigrant past of Chinese Americans during the 20th century and the migration fiction genre in general.

This study aims to provide an analysis of cultural identity in both Amy Tan's narrative on Chinese-American identity in settings she established in her novels and in Franz Kafka's literary works in light of reflections from Prague settings under the influence of German culture. Amy and Kafka were two unique examples of cultural identity reflections in the literary writing field. Franz Kafka lived a life under the influence of European complex social setting that changed several times with wars, social upheavals, political developments. On the other hand, Amy Tan lived a life of migration between China and America after two World Wars in a newly emerging modern life in America. While Amy Tan was unique in her approach to cultural contradictions between American and Chinese cultures both dominant in her novels, Franz Kafka reflected the effects of dominant German culture on Jewish nationals of his social circle in his novels. Both authors successfully reflected their dominant culture's clashes with their cultural roots in their settings, characters and narrative through various techniques and methods. In this study, Amy Tan and Franz Kafka's use of setting and metanarrative style in their novels was examined in a comparative way to reveal information about cultural experiences from many aspects such as social, historical, psychological and literary perspectives.

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin proposed the idea: 'tell me what kind of food you eat and I will tell you what kind of man you are' in 1826. Since then, there has been an ample body of research undertaken examining the relationship between food and identity and there has been much debate about this issue. In Taiwan, since the transition of political power from external to internal rule in 1988, there has been an increased interest expressing Taiwanese identity, including food and identity. However, while there are plenty of popular publications on the subject, few academic works examine this based on serious in-depth research. This study takes a socio-historical perspective to examine the development of Taiwanese food and document its elevation to cuisine status, linking to a rise of Taiwanese identity and the way people express that consciousness. Taiwan was subject to different external powers after 1624: the Dutch colonizers, Han settlers, the Japanese and the Nationalist govern...

A chapter within the third installment of #CommunitiesSolidarischDenken's yearly publication created by xart splitta e.V., following a series of cross-cultural solidarity focus groups.

This year's author discussions focused on the terms "BIPoC" and/or "PoC", with invited perspectives by Mai Zeidani Yufanyi, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, Maisha M. Auma, Katja Kinder, Peggy Piesche, Inna Michaeli, Koray Yilmaz-Günay, and others.

The enjoyable event I would like to talk here is the spring activity that happened at my high school. At that time, my classmates and me were most about sixteen years old. We had our spring activity on one sunny saturday. Accompanyed by laughters and singings, we marched towards our destination on bikes.

compte rendu de La Place d'Annie Ernaux
《位置》一书的标题也透露出了这一点，这个位置不仅是埃尔诺父亲的位置，也是所有阅读本书过程中思考自己人生经历的人的位置，埃尔诺认为社会地位比性别更显著地影响一个人的生存状况。她在这本书中要写的绝不只是父亲的人生和自己的人生，而是一种社会机制。她否认她的作品是自我虚构（autofiction），她在《真实的地点》中说：“每次有人说我的写作是自我虚构，我都会反抗，因为这个词形容的是只关注自己的状态，是与世界隔绝。”埃尔诺想写的不是个人经历的特殊性，而是经历的普遍性。“当不可说的东西被写出来以后，它就具有了政治性。”埃尔诺的多本书的标题都体现出了这一点，她写父亲的书标题是“位置”，写母亲的书标题是“一个女人”，写堕胎经历的书标题是“事件”，写第一次性经历的书标题是“女孩的记忆”……这些简短但又具有解释力的标题正是普遍性的体现。

This paper discusses the notion of Otherness in contemporary American immigrant fiction by addressing issues such as ethnic diversity, transnational identities, identity quest, alienation, intergenerational relations within immigrant families, the linguistic, cultural, and social obstacles to assimilation, and the psychological and spiritual impact of dislocation. Employing William Boelhower’s model for interpreting American immigrant literature, developed in his study “The Immigrant Novel as Genre,” and Josip Novakovich and Robert Shapard’s concepts of the “stepmother tongue” and “stepmother-tongue stories,” the paper provides an introduction to American immigrant genre and one of its main concerns – the dynamics of identity and Otherness. The analysis focuses on three American immigrant texts – Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) and two short stories from the collection Stories in the Stepmother Tongue (2000), “The Winter Hibiscus” by Minfong Ho and “Happiness” by Bharati Mu...

The study of Chinese diaspora has been focused on the themes of displacement, no-place, homesickness, and homelessness. This chapter re-addresses the meanings of place and space for contemporary Chinese immigrants in the United States after the 1990s. Through studying contemporary Chinese immigrant literature set in New York, including Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian (1998) and Ha Jin’s A Good Fall (2009), this chapter examines how Chinatowns in Manhattan and Flushing are perceived, interpreted, and transformed in Chinese immigrant communities of the new millennium. New York, the site associated with the American Dream, is rewritten and reinterpreted as either heaven or hell, or neither heaven nor hell. The rewriting of New York and American dream in these two works further complicates the dynamics of Chinese migration in New York, rendering multilayered maps consisting of multiple overlapped, complicated locales, forming the topography of Chinese immigrants’ emotions and tensions.

This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtual witness is actualized through time travel. Ken Liu’s writing contributes a documentary narrative of the witnessing of witnessing that extends the temporal dimension of witness and allows the flow between fictive and factual. This thought experiment posits a perspective into the interweaving acts and performances of witnessing to etch the ethics in witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, particularly in the global context. I argue that Liu’s novella uncovers the ethical relational witnessing in which “prosthetic memory” is produced and that affects postmemorial and the implicated subjects. The virtual reality witnessing bestows a strong agency upon witnesses while yet ethical concerns arise. Liu’s writing shows that witness and testimony both steer the path to shared memory in a possibly ethical way when channelled through moral emotions; virtual reality witnessing generates the private contact with historical experiences rather than one’s lived experiences. Thus, I identify the ethical stakes and possible settlements in witness and testimony when they are taken as continuing, relational acts, and as performances of emotional, sensuous experience, when witnessing and remembering become politicized and instrumentalized. Firstly, witnessing is problematized and debated particularly in terms of the perpetrator’s testimony. I argue that the perpetrator’s testimony can transfer trauma into collective remembering rather than individual redemption. On the debate over negative emotions in witnessing, I argue that through negative moral emotions ethical witnessing and its testimony are motivated, though they are often evaded or appropriated. Further, I demonstrate that empathetic witnessing is indicated in Liu’s writing, by negotiating the sensitivity in witness and testimony with an evaluative distance from the past. Liu’s empathetic narrative is founded on his investigation of historical trauma and his meditation on structural trauma.

The Joy Luck Club is an exploration of the different identities that are experienced by mothers and daughters in the United States. Mothers, in this novel, are portrayed as characters who keep their Chinese culture although they have lived in the United States. It causes mothers feel that they have not sense of cultural belonging when they have just lived in the United States. On the contrary, daughters are illustrated as characters who assimilate their identities following American culture. Therefore, daughters often, experience many conflicts with their mothers. I assume that the source of conflict experienced by mothers and daughters is different identity. The topic about hybridity in this study is interesting to discuss because this condition relates to the phenomenon happens in diasporic communities. The problems in this study are to discuss the factor that influences mothers and daughters to be hybrid characters and the way they engage to solve their different identities. Afte...

Since opened in 2011, the number of Chinese students goes to Taiwan for 6 months exchange grew more and more every year. What things that motivate the Chinese student to come to Taiwan? Is it related to the current both country’s political condition? What they been thinking about Taiwan, before and after they came? Will they obtain a new perspective about cross-strait disputes? Will they be the agent of democratic political reform in China in the future?

Nightclubs flourished in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1930s when it became a nightlife destination. To Chinese Americans, however, San Francisco nightclubs became a new site at the time for them to re-explore their identities. For some, visiting these nightclubs became a way for them to escape from traditional Chinese values. For others, it became a way to satisfy Western stereotypes of Chinese culture. Lisa See’s China Dolls (2015) describes three young oriental women from various backgrounds that become dancers at the popular Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco in the late 1930s. Through the three girls’ precarious careers and personal conflicts, Lisa See proposes the San Francisco nightclub as both a site for them to articulate their new identities beyond their restricted spheres and a site for them to perform the expected stereotypical Asian images from Western perspectives. It was, at that time, a struggle for the emergence of modern Chinese women but particularl...

Immigrants suffer problematic cultural identities due to their bicultural allegiances to their host and native cultures. They can not be totally free from their ‘being’, the shared cultural and historical experiences. As a result, they follow their cultural practices of native country even in their diasporic existences. At the same time, they adopt and follow the cultural practices of the host country. In fact, they are living in the cultural third space simultaneously oscillating between two cultures. In such cultural in-between’s, the first generation and the second generation immigrants undergo different experience in diaspora. In this article, Chinese American writer Amy Tan’s two fictions namely The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter are analyzed focusing on cultural identities of second generation immigrants. The second generation in these narratives is the daughters of Chinese immigrant mothers. Their relationship with their mothers unfolds their simultaneous attract...

While late nineteenth-century America had yet to achieve the empire of some of its European counterparts, the American desire for this Imperialist gaze is clearly manifest in American institutions of the day. This essay will focus on the effect this gaze had on representations of Chineseness in the drama of the period and subsequent re-inscriptions of these into the cinema. In this regard, I will examine the evolution of the anthropological gaze which, while denying overt connection with empire, nonetheless allowed America to claim equal status in the community of Imperialistic Western powers, but under the sign of altruism. In turn this altruistic anthropological desire enslaved the Asian subject to yield a kind of stage character befitting the imperialistic gaze, now reconstituted as American.

A review in the summer 2022 print issue of Chicago Review.

Link to online version: https://www.chicagoreview.org/wendy-xu-the-past/

Excerpt:

Xu’s tendency to present what she describes in “Description, Repetition” as disjointed “granular thought,” coupled with her capacity for gorgeously estranging the familiar, both reflect and bolster what we could call her honest ambivalence about the project of lyric autobiography.  The Past is peppered with negative—or at least hesitant—allusions to lyrical conventions. “Coming to America,” the first poem in the book, opens with metatextual narration of the generic command that the poet “Speak first of the flooded interior,” before going on to reference desire for “further inquiry of the lyric self.”  In “Writing Home,” Xu reports that “These days / the lyric’s sentiment floats / away from me, like a river someone / forgets to bless.”  Xu isn’t the first poet to blend a tenuous interest in confessional lyricism with the formal techniques and poststructuralist theories often associated with the Language Poetry movement of the seventies and eighties.  But what stands out about Xu’s writing is the way it sits so squarely in the middle of what one influential anthology called this intersection “where lyric meets Language.”  Add to this the critical intelligence with which Xu performatively maps an experimental will to disrupt the spatialized temporality of lyric expression—the ways conventional lyricism implies the uncovering of a self located beneath and before language—onto the problem of representing the immigrant and personal past in her writing. It’s by narrating this process that Xu transforms the space she carves out between realism and experimentalism into one in which the problematics of identification can play out in a particularly generative and moving fashion.