1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910820044303321

Autore

Chu Patricia P.

Titolo

Where I have never been : migration, melancholia, and memory in Asian American narratives of return / / Patricia P. Chu

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia ; ; Rome ; ; Tokyo : , : Temple University Press, , 2019

ISBN

1-4399-0227-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (277 pages)

Collana

Asian American history & culture

Classificazione

LIT004030SOC043000

Disciplina

810.9/895073

Soggetti

American literature - Asian American authors - History and criticism

American literature - 20th century - History and criticism

American literature - 21st century - History and criticism

Asian Americans - Ethnic identity

Memory in literature

Melancholy in literature

Homeland in literature

Return in literature

Emigration and immigration in literature

Asian Americans in literature

LITERARY CRITICISM / American / Asian American

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction  -- "Ears Attuned to Two Cultures": Reconciling Accounts in Cultural Curiosity -- Transpacific Echos in the Family Memoir: Sojourns and Returns in Lisa See's On Gold Mountain -- "The One Who Mediates": Mimicry, Melancholia, and Countermemory in The Concubine's Children -- Working Through Diasporic Melancholia: Winberg and May-lee Chai's The Girl From Purple Mountain -- "A Being ... from a Different World": Yung Wing and the Making of a Global Subjectivity -- "To Bring the Dead to Life": Countermemories in Minatoya's Stangeness of Beauty and Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being -- Coda.

Sommario/riassunto

"In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to



their parents' ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic "returns": first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives--including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others--register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory"--

"This manuscript looks at migration, melancholia, and memory in what the author calls "Asian American narratives of return," or fiction and nonfiction narratives in which the narrator visits the ancestral homeland in Asia"--