酷我-北美枫

[fanfan]

A Question of Be(com)ing Chinese: Thematic Review of The Jade Peony

"Does culture form a net of remembrance, a safety guard against forgetting? Does it provide the individual with at least some clues, some vague outlines, from which to discern his family history? All I have are these doubts and feelings of loss, these questions which pull me on, step after step, and a dance of folly. Over and over, knowing it is futile, I try to create my own myth of history.” David Mura asks a series of poignant questions on identity, culture and history in the concluding paragraphs of his memoir, Turning Japanese, a riveting story of a American Sansei (i.e. a third generation Japanese-American) born and raised in California, who embarks on a trip to Japan with his American wife.

Award-winning Canadian writer Wayson Choy, born and raised the son of Chinese immigrant parents in 1940’s Vancouver, follows this decades-old psychological need and literary tradition of Asian North American writing, and expands his 1977 widely-anthologized short story, The Jade Peony, into a full-length book of the same title, which is a compelling portrait of a Chinese immigrant family living in Vancouver during WWII. He adds his subtle voice to the on-going process of historical and cultural re-creation in the context of emerging Canadian multicultural literature.

The Governor General award-winning novel The Jade Peony is told through the eyes of the Chen family's three youngest children growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1930s and 1940s, and it vividly captures the lived reality of Chinatown from the perspective of these first-generation Canadians. As the children of Chinese immigrants, unlike their parents mostly confined in a socially and culturally segregated community and thus living in the past, they, through the educational system and encounters with people outside their community, have gradually come to grapple with increasingly complex issues regarding their cultural identity in the context of a constantly shifting socio-political reality around them. Sek-Lung, nicknamed Sekky, the youngest of the three, recounts his pressing need to know where he belongs:

"One day, after shopping with Grandmamma and studying the Chinese flag and the Union Jack and the Buy War Bonds posters hanging in Chinatown store windows, I had a burning question. I came home and interrupted Stepmother, who was busy knowing how to knit socks for the soldiers. Am I Chinese or Canadian?”

Sekky’s burning desire for an answer to his identity reinforces the importance of his quest, while the historical cues in the abovementioned passage reveal the growing failure of these identity categories to account for the on-the-ground-realities of his experience. On his way home, Sekky encounters signs of Chinese nationality, the British Empire, and in the War Bonds, the suggestion of an emerging independent Canadian political reality. His experiences of the multi cultural-ethnic-national lived reality suggest the inadequacy of his question, which is based on the assumption that identity is fixed and unified. In and through describing Sekky’s confusion about his identity(or more correctly identities), Wayson Choy draws upon and extends an important characteristics of Asian North American writing from The Woman Warrior onward: the need to negotiate cultural identities out of half-understood phrases and half-remembered stories.
_________________
Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

[[FAFAFA]]

A Question of Be(com)ing Chinese: Thematic Review of The Jade Peony

"Does culture form a net of remembrance, a safety guard against forgetting? Does it provide the individual with at least some clues, some vague outlines, from which to discern his family history? All I have are these doubts and feelings of loss, these questions which pull me on, step after step, and a dance of folly. Over and over, knowing it is futile, I try to create my own myth of history.” David Mura asks a series of poignant questions on identity, culture and history in the concluding paragraphs of his memoir, Turning Japanese, a riveting story of a American Sansei (i.e. a third generation Japanese-American) born and raised in California, who embarks on a trip to Japan with his American wife.

Award-winning Canadian writer Wayson Choy, born and raised the son of Chinese immigrant parents in 1940’s Vancouver, follows this decades-old psychological need and literary tradition of Asian North American writing, and expands his 1977 widely-anthologized short story, The Jade Peony, into a full-length book of the same title, which is a compelling portrait of a Chinese immigrant family living in Vancouver during WWII. He adds his subtle voice to the on-going process of historical and cultural re-creation in the context of emerging Canadian multicultural literature.

The Governor General award-winning novel The Jade Peony is told through the eyes of the Chen family's three youngest children growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1930s and 1940s, and it vividly captures the lived reality of Chinatown from the perspective of these first-generation Canadians. As the children of Chinese immigrants, unlike their parents mostly confined in a socially and culturally segregated community and thus living in the past, they, through the educational system and encounters with people outside their community, have gradually come to grapple with increasingly complex issues regarding their cultural identity in the context of a constantly shifting socio-political reality around them. Sek-Lung, nicknamed Sekky, the youngest of the three, recounts his pressing need to know where he belongs:

"One day, after shopping with Grandmamma and studying the Chinese flag and the Union Jack and the Buy War Bonds posters hanging in Chinatown store windows, I had a burning question. I came home and interrupted Stepmother, who was busy knowing how to knit socks for the soldiers. Am I Chinese or Canadian?”

Sekky’s burning desire for an answer to his identity reinforces the importance of his quest, while the historical cues in the abovementioned passage reveal the growing failure of these identity categories to account for the on-the-ground-realities of his experience. On his way home, Sekky encounters signs of Chinese nationality, the British Empire, and in the War Bonds, the suggestion of an emerging independent Canadian political reality. His experiences of the multi cultural-ethnic-national lived reality suggest the inadequacy of his question, which is based on the assumption that identity is fixed and unified. In and through describing Sekky’s confusion about his identity(or more correctly identities), Wayson Choy draws upon and extends an important characteristics of Asian North American writing from The Woman Warrior onward: the need to negotiate cultural identities out of half-understood phrases and half-remembered stories.
_________________
Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[星子]

Interesting.

Thank you for your summary of the book. I will borrow it and read it.

For my personal opinion, I think the world is changed. Now Canada has a great diversity of ethics and ethnics. The pain to find oneself's identity and belong will be much less than before.
_________________

[[ANNA]]

Interesting.

Thank you for your summary of the book. I will borrow it and read it.

For my personal opinion, I think the world is changed. Now Canada has a great diversity of ethics and ethnics. The pain to find oneself's identity and belong will be much less than before.
_________________

[fanfan]

[[FFFFFF]]

[fanfan]

[[FAFAFA]]

[maybe]

one is born with identity by country or culture
then may outgrow it and become a general humanity

only few can achieve that in a life's agenda
Ludwig van Beethoven is one of them, for example.

still confused as a Chinese, that's so obsolete ...
_________________
could be

[[maybe]]

one is born with identity by country or culture
then may outgrow it and become a general humanity

only few can achieve that in a life's agenda
Ludwig van Beethoven is one of them, for example.

still confused as a Chinese, that's so obsolete ...
_________________
could be

[fanfan]

Thanks for reading and commenting on my piece.

What do you mean by "general humanity"? A world citizen?

[[FAFAFA]]

Thanks for reading and commenting on my piece.

What do you mean by "general humanity"? A world citizen?

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[fanfan]

[[FFFFFF]]