太长了，百度不让发，我一段一段贴上来

Cultural Mediations in Chinese American Literature——First and Second Generation Immigrant WritingsGro Mari LilandUniversity of Bergen ,Department of EnglishFall 2002

In the USA Chinese immigrants in particular have always been looked upon as not only being the Other but also Exotic and inassimilable. The texts I have chosen are all by Chinese American women and written or told in English. One might say that Chinese women were doubly marginalized, first, as women they were suppressed by their own culture, and second, as first or second generation immigrants they endured suppression by American majority culture. Chinese women were, for instance, denied the right to accompany their husbands to America.2 The authors have deliberately chosen to write in English, which in postcolonial and multiculturalistic terms can be seen as the silenced Other appropriating the dominant language in reclaiming a voice. In order to give a sense of changes from first to second and third generation immigrants and the development of Chinese American women’s (literary) voices, I have chosen texts that represent the time span from the first Chinese immigrants arrived in 1849 until today. The point of departure for the discussion of the individual texts is the text itself, and by analyzing them both with regard to content and form I will try to reveal how personal and communal identities are constructed and shaped in and through different types of narrative. To help me achieve this goal I have chosen the life stories of Wu Tien Fu, Law Shee Low, Mary Tape, and Chun Ho; the autobiographies: Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, and Elaine M. Mar’s Paper Daughter: A Memoir; and finally two works of fiction: Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

Since most of the texts are autobiographical in one way or another I find it necessary to include some remarks on the terms autobiography and life narrative. First of all, one mightnote that Smith and Watson make no clear distinction between autobiography and lifenarrative because they claim that the latter includes the former (3). A study of Chinese American literature involves recognition of how the author’s position in society and culture leaves an imprint on a text. Another premise for the present study is that autobiographical writing has significance that goes beyond the strictly personal. This point is made by Robert F. Sayre when he argues that, “Autobiographies […] may reveal as much about the author’s assumed audience as they do about him or her, and this is a further reason why they need to be read as cultural documents, not just as personal ones” (qtd. in Smith and Watson vii). Michael M.J. Fischer supports a similar idea when he remarks that, “What […] seem initiallyto be individualistic autobiographical searchings turn out to be revelations of traditions, [and] re-collections of disseminated identities […]” (198). In other words, the personal stories reveal as much about their own ethnic group’s coming to terms with a cultural heritage on the one hand and a dominant culture on the other, as they do about each individual’s personal struggle or search for an ethnic identity s/he can accept and find useful. Furthermore, as Sayre suggests, the implied reader should also be taken into consideration. As I will return to in connection with the discussion of individual texts below, this perspective is important especially to the extent that the texts can be said to be “writing back” to dominant culture.

In order to understand cultural mediations in Chinese American literature it is necessary to look at the Chinese immigrants’ history in the USA because as Europeans we have hardly learned anything about it at all. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim says in “Immigration and Diaspora”:Although it is true that, except for Native Americans, all Americans aredescended from immigrant populations and are members of diasporas, AsianAmerican immigration history manifests distinctive differences from that ofother groups. These differences, attributable to historical legislative racismagainst Asians […], have been continuously foregrounded and thematized inAsian American literary productions. (291)

Among Asian Americans the Chinese Americans, in my opinion, have rendered in their writings the most visible institutional discrimination. Below, under the heading of “Encountering Institutional Racism,” I will look more closely at the Chinese American immigration history and also very briefly mention what happened in China in the period from1850-2002 because I believe this knowledge will give us a better understanding of the texts that we will look into, not only the early texts, but also later ones. If we do not know what happened in China in 1966, for instance, how can we understand the significance of the utterance made by Man Yee’s father in Paper Daughter: “You were born on a special day, do you know that? 1966 is important for the Chinese, do you know that?” (8-9)In other words, some knowledge of the historical-cultural context adds to the understanding of these texts, and in my discussion I will look at both the “literariness” and the cultural aspects or “politics” of the different texts.

At the thematic level the Chinese American writers often use encounters with racism as an image of their own experience as being positioned as the Other by the dominant culture; Wu says: “More than anything else that unites us, everyone with an Asian face who lives in America is afflicted by the perpetual foreigner syndrome. We are figuratively and even literally returned to Asia and ejected by America” (79). Sau-ling Cynthia Wong fortifies the image when she comments: “Manners can be changed, but not skin color; as the Other, Chinese Americans will always, to some degree be spurned” (90).

In addition to racism, food is an important issue in Chinese American literature, Roland Barthes says: “food permits a person to partake each day of a national past” (qtd. In Wu 216). Food is also closely connected to the theme above, that is, racism, because seen from the position of the dominant culture Chinese food might be exotic, and different, something that describes the Other. In reference to how “specific relationships of domination” figure in Chinese American texts, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong says that “Images of food and eating in Asian American literature provide an especially cogent illustration of this point” (19). A majority of the texts I have chosen are preoccupied with food, and one might ask: how does this emphasis on food work on the reader, and is it intended to work differently on a white audience than on an insider, that is, a Chinese American?The picture or image of China, whether good or bad, is a repeated concern in the texts written after 1949. Is the China described real, or is it a version that exists in the USA created by memory in order to find a usable past, a history which can help create a cultural identity? Fischer calls the turning to the past a “retrospection in order to gain a vision for the future”(198).

Hence, what I will pay special attention to in the texts are instances of racism, references to food, and memories about China, because in my opinion these themes and issues are important markers of Chinese ethnicity, and, according to Fischer, as such they are “deeply rooted emotional components of identity” (195). As already mentioned all the texts I have chosen are told or written by women and have female “I” persons or protagonists, and therefore it is also natural to comment upon how their double suppression is textualized. Finally, when found important, I will comment on class.

Due to diplomatic and trade interests merchants, Chinese officials, students, and travelers were not included in the Exclusion Act, and this is the loophole many people used in order to be able to enter the US between 1882 and 1943. Either they tried to become scholars whilst still in China, or if they had the means, they put money in a business in order to be entitled merchant or co-merchant, or they bought their entry as a “paper son.” In order to be able to be granted entry as the latter, an American citizen had to announce the boys or men who wanted to immigrate to the USA as his sons. Thus, 92,411 Chinese people entered the USA between 1882 and 1943 as compared to 258,210 before the Exclusion Act (Yung 22).According to Daniels 51.1 percent of the Chinese population lived in California in the year 1900 (240), and when we know that almost half of them lived in large cities we can also assume that quite a few were affected by the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco. Even though this event was a disaster for most people, it was also another loophole for Chinese immigration because people lost their birth certificates and had to have new issued. Thus, as Maxine Hong Kingston puts it in China Men: “An authentic citizen, then, had no more papers than an alien. Any paper a China Man could not produce had been ‘burned up in the fire of 1906’” (150). Accordingly, many were those who claimed to be American citizens when the time for distributing new certificates came. However, the Chinese had to wait until 2 October 1965 to be treated on equal terms with other immigrants; through the Immigration and Nationality Act Congress stated that immigration quotas, which earlier had been based on the percentages of the ethnic populations in the US, should be phased out over a five year period. According to Daniels all the released numbers were then to be distributed on a totally new basis where family reunion took precedence and where no country should receive more than ten percent of these numbers (338, 340). For the first time in history immigrants from the Western Hemisphere were restricted in numbers.4

Another important aspect of Chinese immigration that has to be mentioned are the distinct patterns of settlement and the formation of Chinatowns. Most immigrants lived in ethnic enclaves when they arrived in the US but what was special to the Chinese immigrants as compared with many other immigrant groups was that they tended to stay on in their closed society; even well to do Chinese continued to live in Chinatowns. The explanations for this stability are numerous but there is reason to believe that the main cause is prejudice and discrimination met outside Chinatown, and in addition, in 1878, different state laws held that the Chinese immigrants should stay within specific areas; according to Yung “they were generally not allowed to live outside […]” (22). When we look into the different texts in chapter one, we will discover that this specific feature of Chinese immigration is reflected in most of them because all, except The Bonesetter’s Daughter, are set in Chinatowns.

Another tragedy which has to be mentioned is the Big Leap Forward where Mao tried to make China into an industrial nation within a minimal time limit, that is, from 1958 to 1960. The result was disaster and starvation, and according to F?rland and T?nnesen, approximately twenty million people died (237). The last events I want to mention are the Cultural Revolution and President Nixon’s visit to China. The former started in 1966 and was initiated by Mao and guided among others by his wife. Originally the campaign was aimed at Mao’s rivals in the party administration but thousands of innocent people suffered and families were ruined.5 In other words, the Cultural Revolution failed, and in 1969 the foreign minister Zhou Enlai, who already had turned his face toward the USA, more or less functioned as head of state. As a consequence of this, in 1971 China entered the UN as a legal representative of the Republic of China, and in 1972 President Nixon visited China as the first American president ever to do so. In many ways this was the starting point for the “westernization” of China which today has reached unexpected heights, with, for instance, participation in the Olympic games, English language schools everywhere in the larger cities, and free investment policy.

有几段百度说是广告，不让发，我自己翻好了，我急用，大家帮帮忙，谢谢啦

Chapter 2 Contemporary Voices1965-2002: Speaking Back Since the mid-1960, an abundance of Chinese American voices are heard, and the majority of them are female. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, published in 1976, is reckoned by most critics to be the milestone that really changed the image of the silenced Other. Followed in 1989 by Amy Tan and her Joy Luck Club, one might say that these two authors were the pathfinders that showed new authors such as for instance Gish Jen, Fae Myenne Ng, and M. Elaine Mar the way. According to Sau-ling Cynthia Wong 1991 is looked upon as the year when the production of literary works by Chinese American as well as other Asian American female authors really took off, and due to this I have chosen to let two of the newcomers in addition to Amy Tan speak in this chapter.

ConclusionThe word bone or daughter is repeated in all the titles of the texts, and in the last text in fact both words are included. One might ask why these simple words convey so much meaning that they deserve to be on the front page. I will let GaoLing in the Bonesetter’s Daughter explain the importance of one of the words. When she elucidates to Ruth the meaning of her newly discovered family name she says: “[…] the way ‘bone’ is written can also stand for‘character.’ That’s why we use that expression ‘It’s in your bones.’ It means, ‘That’s your character’” (398). In addition it also conveys a connection to the past and to ancestors who lived in another world, in this case China. Finally, the word bone is connected to food, and as we have seen, food is often linked to the image of the Other. The other word, daughter, has a special meaning to the Chinese because, as has been referred to above, to raise daughters was looked upon as a waste of both money and time. Even today it is estimated that as many as fifty million Chinese women are not registered as citizens in China.9 One might guess that the reason is due to the birth restrictions which only allow one child per married couple, thus, if the first born is a girl she is not registered because a son is what the parents want to count. Moreover, the word daughter also conveys the double oppression that the Chinese female immigrants in the USA have met, first as daughters in a Chinese family, and second, as a representation of the Other to mainstream society.

Thus, one might say that through the use of these simple words the different authors mediate that references to food, memories about China, instances of racism, and gender are themes and issues that are important markers of their Chinese American identity.However, the texts discussed in the foregoing chapters mediate that Chinese women in the USA cannot be looked upon as one homogeneous group; on the contrary, a symphony of voices are heard, all re-interpreting their past in order to reinvent their ethnic identity. Still, even though their voices might sound different one might say there is a harmony between them because they accept that there are different interpretations and solutions depending on not only from where but also when in time you speak.

Elaine H. Kim says: “the terms of our cultural negotiations have changed and are changing over time because of differences in historical circumstances and needs” (qtd. In Wang 86). Even though my selections of examples are comparatively few and hence it is dangerous to draw general conclusions, I still think that the texts chosen reflect some of the changes Kim points to. One might say that albeit all the texts are Chinese in content and origin, meaning they all have Chinese characters or “I” persons with a connection to China either as first or second generation immigrants, all of them have taken on an American coat in their form. This apparent duality can be seen as an expression of their transition from being Chinese in America to becoming Americans of Chinese descent. In the early texts we discover the authors’ need to explain their traditions and values to mainstream American society, trying to convince the audience that the Chinese are not as exotic as they might seem at first glance. Contemporary voices pushed forward by multiculturalism and its repercussions sound different from earlier ones. Now we hear multiple voices all recalling a past which is different in order to gain a vision for their future individual and communal identity. However, all these contemporary voices signal that they have not yet reached the final stop, and thus it will be interesting to see how much further the Chinese American authors will travel on thei rway to becoming Americans in the coming decades. As mentioned in the last chapter the closing remarks in Amy Tan’s latest novel suggest that there is a possibility in what we might call being a member of a universal community. Another author who has a similar vision is Helen Zia, she says: “ By the time I was a teenager, I imagined that I was a ‘dual citizen’ of both the United States and China. I had no idea what dual citizenship involved, or if it was even possible. No matter, I would be a citizen of the world. This was my fantasy, my way of soothing the hurt of being so unacceptable in the land of my birth” (139). These two authors’ comments might also symbolize their hopes for the future of works written by Chinese Americans, that is, that the Chinese American literature be accepted as a natural part of American culture. In my opinion one might say that the Chinese American authors have already taken a long step towards making their vision come true. In the USA both critics and publishers have shown a growing interest in ethnic literature. The works of ethnic authors have reached the airport newsstand and as such they push it through another time zone all the time.

As a gesture toward the future and possible new projects I would like to draw the attention to Australia. An interesting further study would be to examine similar texts to the ones investigated here, written by first and second generation Chinese Australian immigrants and see whether there are any “cross-Pacific mediations.” It is probable that one will find similarities, because even though Australia is situated in the Pacific and dependent on Asian economy, one may find expressions of anti-Asian sentiments. In Yellow Wu points to an important difference between the USA and Australia in the 1990s, and he says:We [in the USA] have not seen the likes of Charles Perkins, the top-rankedaborigine in the [Australian] government who in the late 1980s argued thatAustralia should not allow more Asian immigrants because it already had enoughhome-grown criminals and who likened Asians to a contagious disease, or PaulineHanson, who led her “One Nation” party to its rise and fall in the 1990s. (87)

终于贴完了大家帮帮忙，谢谢了！

Thus, one might say that through the use of these simple words the different authors mediate that references to food, memories about China, instances of racism, and gender are themes and issues that are important markers of their Chinese American identity.However, the texts discussed in the foregoing chapters mediate that Chinese women in the USA cannot be looked upon as one homogeneous group; on the contrary, a symphony of voices are heard, all re-interpreting their past in order to reinvent their ethnic identity. Still, even though their voices might sound different one might say there is a harmony between them because they accept that there are different interpretations and solutions depending on not only from where but also when in time you speak.Elaine H. Kim says: “the terms of our cultural negotiations have changed and are changing over time because of differences in historical circumstances and needs” (qtd. In Wang 86). Even though my selections of examples are comparatively few and hence it is dangerous to draw general conclusions, I still think that the texts chosen reflect some of the changes Kim points to. One might say that albeit all the texts are Chinese in content and origin, meaning they all have Chinese characters or “I” persons with a connection to China either as first or second generation immigrants, all of them have taken on an American coat in their form. This apparent duality can be seen as an expression of their transition from being Chinese in America to becoming Americans of Chinese descent. In the early texts we discover the authors’ need to explain their traditions and values to mainstream American society, trying to convince the audience that the Chinese are not as exotic as they might seem at first glance. Contemporary voices pushed forward by multiculturalism and its repercussions sound different from earlier ones. Now we hear multiple voices all recalling a past which is different in order to gain a vision for their future individual and communal identity. However, all these contemporary voices signal that they have not yet reached the final stop, and thus it will be interesting to see how much further the Chinese American authors will travel on thei rway to becoming Americans in the coming decades. As mentioned in the last chapter the closing remarks in Amy Tan’s latest novel suggest that there is a possibility in what we might call being a member of a universal community. Another author who has a similar vision is Helen Zia, she says: “ By the time I was a teenager, I imagined that I was a ‘dual citizen’ of both the United States and China. I had no idea what dual citizenship involved, or if it was even possible. No matter, I would be a citizen of the world. This was my fantasy, my way of soothing the hurt of being so unacceptable in the land of my birth” (139). These two authors’ comments might also symbolize their hopes for the future of works written by Chinese Americans, that is, that the Chinese American literature be accepted as a natural part of American culture. In my opinion one might say that the Chinese American authors have already taken a long step towards making their vision come true. In the USA both critics and publishers have shown a growing interest in ethnic literature. The works of ethnic authors have reached the airport newsstand and as such they push it through another time zone all the time.