Presentation, Repair, and Asian Canadian

“NOT THE STORY I LEARNED, BUT . THE STORY I TELL”: (RE)PRESENTATION, REPAIR, AND ASIAN CANADIAN WOMEN’S WRITING OF THE MID-1990s A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Arts in English Department of English University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada By Azalea Masa-Barrieses 2015 Copyright Azalea Masa-Barrieses, 2015. All Rights Reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this university may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor who supervised my dissertation work, or in her absence, by the Head of the Department of English or the Dean of the College of Graduate Studies and Research. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this dissertation or parts thereof from financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material of my dissertation. Requests for permission to copy or to make use of material in this dissertation in whole or in part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 i For Edward and Hermie Masa, who made North America and all else possible for me, and for Isabella, my second generation Filipino Canadian, whose happy stories, I hope, will also one day be told ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study would not have been possible without the members of my dissertation committee. I could not have had a better supervisor; Dr. Wendy Roy was most generous with her time, resources, guidance, and support. Without her, I would have, without exaggeration, long abandoned this project. Dr. Susan Gingell, my specialist reader, equally had considerable impact on this dissertation. Both their commitment to seeing it through with me, their expertise in Canadian and postcolonial writing, patience, and friendship, have been beyond invaluable. Their intellectual rigor, suggestions for revisions, and attention to detail have allowed this study to assume the form it is now. I also have had the privilege to be mentored by Dr. Lisa Vargo, Dr. Pamela Downe, and Dr. Allison Muri in various capacities—as a student, tutorial leader, and teaching assistant—and their support, scholarship, and many kindnesses both at the defense and before that are much appreciated. Dr. Vargo came in late to this process as a substitute specialist reader; Dr. Downe has been on board the entire time; Dr. Yin Liu, another member of my committee, came back in at a critical time, and Dr. Cynthia Sugars’ availability as my external reader allowed the defense to go forward. I could not have been more honored to have these very accomplished women travel this journey and celebrate its completion with me. Many classmates, friends, and colleagues, too many to mention individually, have been equally invested in seeing me complete the program. I am grateful for their interest and well-wishes, and the community of affirmation that has been comfort during the long travel. My family’s belief and support have been unflinching despite my procrastination and delays, and their love has encouraged me to keep faith. It helped that practically everyone—my parents, my siblings and their families, my husband and daughter—are all in North America, and frequent connections with them kept the purpose of this project urgent. Isabella, in particular, would put “Do Not Disturb—Hardworking Mom at Work” signs on my office door, would draw up contracts tying me to get revisions done, and, in some instances, would offer to clean up her room in exchange for me working on my dissertation. Obviously, these did not always work— for instance, she would be the first to disturb me anyway despite her own signs—but her confidence in me held all throughout the journeying. She is also starting to embrace my passions for minority experience and writing; this dissertation has been almost as much hers as it has been mine. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines selected literary works by Anita Rau Badami, Denise Chong, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, and Kerri Sakamoto, exploring how their stories respond both to the absence of representations of Asian Canadian women in literary discourses of the early twentieth century and to homogenizing assumptions in official histories. My formulation of (re)presentation in the title recognizes the multiplicity and constructedness of these denoted identities and experiences and the self-representations of these writers as a response to this elision and misrepresentation. The term repair borrows from philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s theorizing of “narrative repair,” which involves telling counterstories, but also is used in psychological contexts as a healing mechanism. An elaboration of both models, as applied in this study, is optimally useful in diasporic contexts as resistance to the elision and/or racist and gendered discursive constructions of Asian Canadian women and as restoration of damaged identities. The texts under study—Tamarind Mem, The Concubine’s Children, Chorus of Mushrooms, When Fox Is a Thousand, and The Electrical Field—were all published in the mid- 1990s, after the initial forays into the writing of novels by Asian Canadian authors such as Joy Kogawa (1981) and SKY Lee (1990). My choice of these sister narratives recognizes the family as central to identity construction and intergenerational (mis)understanding and emphasizes the importance of this period’s second-generation explosion of writings by Japanese, Chinese, and Indo Canadian women that paved the way for the current plethora of writings by authors from these cultural groups that contribute significantly to Canadian representations of diasporic identity. iv This study explores the nuances and pluralisms of the representations of Asian Canadian women. The texts under consideration are cultural autobiographies and matrilineal or sexually transgressive narratives that reinvent the cultural memory of Canadian women of Asian ancestry; produce cultural fusions through the transcreation of oral traditions and simulations of the oral, transcoding of ancestral tongues, and discursive strategies of silence; and address connections between self and place in examinations of Canada, the adopted country, as (un)homely territory. Presenting unhyphenated diasporic female subjects who exceed socially scripted boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality, in terms of both Canada and the writers’ and protagonists’ ancestral Asian nations, these “acts of narrative insubordination” (Nelson 8) exemplify emancipatory politics and recuperative and revisionary projects. Interrogating questions of (re)presentation and repair from positions of liminality and across gendered, racial, linguistic, and geographical divides, this research contributes to current urgent discussions of identity, transculturation, multiculturalism, and globalization in literary and cultural studies. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ______________________________________________________________________________ Permission to Use . i Dedication . ii Acknowledgements . iii Abstract . iv Introduction: (Re)presentation, Repair, and Asian Canadian Women’s Writing . 1 (Un)Hyphenated Identities . 9 Gender, Immigration, and Discrimination . 15 Discursive Silence and Early Speech . 22 Activism and Authorship. 27 Late Twentieth-Century Asian Canadian Women’s Writing . 31 Literary Critical History . 37 Transformative Possibilities: “You know you can change the story” . 42 1 We to Me: Self, Family, and Cultural Connections . 47 On (Auto)biography, Fiction, and Cultural Memory . 53 Rewriting the (M)other . 73 2 Transgressive Sexuality as Alternative Representation . 95 Transgressing Scripts of the Silent, Servile, and Hetero-Sexualized Woman . .. 100 Challenging Heteronormativity . 112 3 Orality, Textualized Orature, and Cultural Fusions . 120 Simulating the Oral . .. 125 Writing Culture by Retelling Myth . 135 vi 4 “A Different Telling”: Narrative and Discursive Approaches . 148 Code-switching . 152 Silence as Strategy . 159 5 Storying Nation and the Self: Home(lessness) as Trope . 173 Constraint and/or Possibility and the (Re)writing of Home . 181 Of Discourse and (De)Reterritorializations . 192 Conclusion: “This is a happy story. Can’t you tell?”: Celebrating Counterstories . 202 One “[H]appy [S]tory” at a Time: The Telling and Listening Must Continue . 214 Notes . 216 Works Cited and Consulted . 227 vii In my fiction writing of recent years I have been focusing on trying to create a sort of historical launch pad for hybrid flowers like myself. I have been trying to foster the germination of a culture of women identified women of Chinese descent living in the West. I suppose it is my way of trying to escape the reactiveness of identity politics by claiming a mythic, fictive sort of originality, my way of saying, but people like me (take that how you will) have been here all along, and we are infinitely more than the sum of the identities that this statistics crazy society wants to pin on me. Larissa Lai, Interview with Ashok Mathur, July 1998 viii introduction ______________________________________________________________________________

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