Space and Memory in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫成果報告漂泊離散的女性：閱讀當代華裔美國女性作家研究成果報告(精簡版) 計畫類別：個別型計畫編號：NSC 97-2420-H-009-003- 執行期間：97年 08月01日至99年 07月31日執行單位：國立交通大學外國語文學系計畫主持人：馮品佳計畫參與人員：此計畫無其他參與人員報告附件：國外研究心得報告處理方式：本計畫可公開查詢中華民國 99 年 10 月 29 日本專書計畫已完成，並將書稿交由德國 LIT 出版社出版，為該出版社發行之亞美文學研究系列的第六冊，並於十月德國法蘭克福國際書展展出。附上書展邀請函（附件一）、封面及書稿 pdf 檔（附件二）。 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[email protected]> Date: 2010/9/21 Subject: Buchmesse To: [email protected] Sehr geehrte Frau Prof. Dr. Feng, auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse (5.10.-10.10.2010) werden wir wieder unser wissenschaftliches Programm präsentieren. Wir würden uns freuen, auch Sie an unserem Stand begrüßen zu dürfen. Sie finden uns in Halle 3.1. am Stand A158. Gleichzeitig bestätigen wir Ihnen hiermit, daß Sie Autor unseres Verlages sind. Sie erhalten somit auch an den Fachbesuchertagen Zutritt zur Buchmesse. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Abteilung Messeorganisation LIT Verlag Münster - Berlin - London - Wien - Zürich Grevener Straße/Fresnostraße 2 D-48159 Münster Tel.: ++49 (0) 251-620320 Fax: ++49 (0) 251-231972 http://www.lit-verlag.de Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies Feng In Diasporic Representations, Feng examines the stratification of various diasporic subjectivities through closely reading fiction Diasporic Representations by Chinese American women writers of different social and class backgrounds. Deploying a strategy of “attentive reading,” Feng engages the intersecting issues of historicity, spatiality, and bodily imagination from diasporic and feminist perspectives to illuminate the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Chinese American novels in this transnational age. The authors studied include Diana Chang, Edith Eaton, Yan Geling, Nieh Hualing, Gish Jen, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Aimee Liu, Fae Myenne Ng, Sigrid Nunez, Han Suyin, and Amy Tan. Pin-chia Feng is Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chiao Tung University and President of the Association of English and American Literature of Taiwan, ROC. Her previous books include The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston (1998). The LIT book series Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies is an international forum for the interdisciplinary discussion of Asian American literary studies. The interactive processes of the creation of Asian American cultural studies impose new strategies of reading characterized by a continual call to reorientation and a new conditioning of the determinants of meaning. Moreover, contextualizing the Asian American experience in literature demands a wide theoretical framework from within which to analyze particular texts. Hence, the series editors, Rocío G. Davis (City University of Hong Kong) and Sämi Ludwig (UHA Mulhouse), encourage specific readings that show the richness, complexity, and diversity of Asian American literary production through critical and theoretical lenses that focus on a great variety of writers and genres. Diasporic Representations Reading Chinese American Women’s Fiction 978-3-643-10831-9 Pin-chia Feng LIT 9 *ukdzfe#y-,cy.* www.lit-verlag.de LIT LIT For Amy Ling, a kindred spirit And my loving parents Acknowledgements This book project was written over a period of ten years, during which time Asian American literary studies has developed and changed tremendously. My own way of thinking about the field has been transformed and reshaped by these shifts and transformations as well, and this evolution has helped structure the project. My engagement with Asian American literary studies started in the late 1980s in a class of feminist literary criticism with Professor Susan Stanford Friedman in which I wrote a paper on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Susan has been my professional mentor and role model ever since. It was through Susan that I had the good fortune to have the late Pro- fessor Amy Ling to help me with my doctoral project in which I did a com- parative study of works by Kingston and Toni Morrison. Amy was inspira- tional to me in many ways, especially the persistent and patient way in which she dealt with institutional prejudices while trying to set up Asian American studies programs on different U.S. campuses. Years later, when I was an administrator in a science and technology-dominated campus, I was able to deal with many obstacles with the same kind of persistence and patience. I was overwhelmed and greatly honored when Amy called me her “kindred spirit” in one of our epistolary exchanges. This book is dedicated to her hard work and academic achievement. I particularly want to thank my two editors, Rocío Davis and Sämi Ludwig for their insightful comments and suggestions for the revision of my manuscript. This book would not be possible without their help. On the home front, my colleagues in Taiwan, among them Professors Ying-hsiung Chou, Yu-cheng Lee, Te-hsing Shan, and Wen-ching Ho, have provided invaluable guidance for my career in academia. I thank them for their kindness and generosity. I also want to thank my assistants, Hui-ying Tsou and Yu-jung Yen for their kind help. This book is the result of a book project supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 97-2420-H-009-003). I thank the National Science Council for the continual and generous support. Mostly, I thank my parents, Liang-bi Feng and Hsiao-ching Jen for their endless patience and unlimited supply of love. This book is dedicated to them as well. I also want to thank my two sons, Alex and Arthur, and my husband, Wuu Yang, for their understanding and support throughout the years. Finally, I want to present my deepest appreciation to His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, for spiritual guidance. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following: “National History and Transnational Narration: Feminist Body Politics in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Joss and Gold” was originally published in Con- temporary Women’s Writing 1 (December 2007): 135-50. Copyright Oxford University Press. A portion of Chapter 7, “Remapping Chinese American Literature: The Case of Yan Geling,” was originally published in American Studies Interna- tional 38.1 (2000): 61-70. Reprinted by permission. A Chinese version of Chapter 2 was published as “Ghostly China: Narrative of Transnational Uncanny in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning” in A Journal of English and American Literature11 (Fall 2007): 113-42. A Chinese version of Chapter 3 was published as “Reinventing a Chi- nese American Woman’s Tradition in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land” in A Journal of European and American Studies 32.4 (December 2002): 675-704. A Chinese version of “At Home and Elsewhere: Diasporic Imagination and Transnational Migration in Mulberry and Peach” was published in Chung Wai Literary Monthly 34.4 (September 2005): 87-109. Contents Introduction: On A Colored Sky 11 1. Representing Chinatown: Space and Memory in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone 27 2. Ghostly China: Narrative of Transnational Haunting in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning 53 3. Representing the New Hybrid Generation: Reinventing the Mother-Daughter Plot and Constructing Narratives of Relationality in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land 69 4. The Spaces in between: Chinese American Biracial Women and Writings from the Borderlands 93 5. National History and Transnational Narration: Feminist Body Politics in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Joss and Gold 111 6. At Home and Elsewhere: Diasporic Imagination and Transnational Migration in Nieh Hualing’s Mulberry and Peach 129 7. Remapping Chinese American Literature: The Case of Yan Geling 151 Bibliography 175 Index 189 Introduction On A Colored Sky Writing in the feminine. And on a colored sky. How do you in- scribe difference without bursting into a series of euphoric narcissistic accounts of yourself and your own kind? Without indulging in a mar- ketable romanticism or in a naïve whining about your condition? In other words, how do you forget without annihilating? Between the twin chasms of navel-gazing and navel-erasing, the ground is narrow and slippery. None of us can pride ourselves on being sure-footed there. Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other This book investigates some of the diverse traditions of Chinese American women’s fiction by exploring different gendered representations of Chinese America. Employing a strategy I call “attentive reading,” I engage primarily with the intersecting problematics of historicity, spatiality and bodily imagination from a diasporic perspective as represented in selected novels. In his Imagining the Nation (1998), David Leiwei Li divides Asian American literature and criticism into three phases: the ethnic nationalist phase of the 1960s and 1970s; the feminist phase of the 1970s and 1980s; and the phase of heteroglossia after the 1980s (186). Each of these three phases corre- sponds to specific aesthetic precepts and criteria as represented in critical and literary texts. This project will study Chinese American women writers active in the heteroglossia phase and examine how each attempts to define a Chinese American diasporic identity against the backdrop of transnational migration. Despite Li’s contention that the poststructuralist uses of difference and diaspora represent “an unsuccessful challenge to the continuing condition of Asian American exclusion and abjection within the United States” (202), I believe that the concept of diaspora can be useful if we pay special attention to historical nuances in the formation of Chinese American cultural and political identities. As R. Radhakrishnan rightly puts it, “the diaspora is an excellent opportunity to think through some of these vexed questions: solidarity and criticism, belonging and distance, insider spaces and outsider spaces, identity as invention and identity as natural, location-subject posi- tionality and the politics of representation, rootedness and rootlessness” (232).

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