Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children Lindsay Diehl University of British Columbia ince its emergence in the 1980s and 1890s, Asian Canadian Stud- Sies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide- ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by the rights-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a “collective self,” or Asian Canadian identity, through which to challenge the representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist state policies as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Canadian Internment, and the Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, the field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating the nation- state as the primary interlocutor of the Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of “strategic essentialism” (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as the field increasingly becomes drawn into the academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that the focus on domestic identity politics, and the promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs the risk of reinforcing a reduc- tive pluralism which cannot “shake up the systemic historical conditions ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 99–118 and … ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures” (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on the Canadian national frame, Lily Cho Lindsay Diehl is has posited that Asian Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly completing a doctorate within a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, at the University of could generate insights into how the construction of Asian-ness in Canada British Columbia, is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points Okanagan campus. Her out that there is a need to “think about the formation of the Canadian sshrc-funded research state through imperialism and colonialism” and to see Asian Canadian examines Chinese history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Canadian literature from Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates a postcolonial critical how a “diasporic perspective” can highlight the links between Chinese perspective, engaging migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a diasporic perspective with debates about can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South Canadian nationalism, China, where the Opium Wars “had disrupted the local economy [and] settler colonialism, and provid[ed] much of the push for emigration” (Stanley 56). Furthermore, transnationalism. She it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, has published articles in imported via the coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after Postcolonial Text and the Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a Rupkatha. postcolonial, diasporic paradigm can productively complicate the history of Asian Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in the Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho’s arguments gesture to the benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai’s book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes the perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Asian Canadian identity. Lai argues that the tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to the pressures of “state incorpora- tion” currently informing Asian Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to “recirculate the logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms” (23). This logic becomes all the more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that repro- duce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, the 2010 Maclean’s article entitled “Too Asian” suggests that “the trope of the ‘yellow peril’ ” has been reinvigorated in the national imaginary (Lai 17). The article, which proposes that “white students” feel intimidated by the perceived work ethic of “both Asian Canadians and international students” (Findlay and Köhler 76), not only 100 | Diehl presents a homogenizing construction of Asian-ness but positions it as external to national belonging. Indeed, since the article portrays Canadian- born and newly-arrived Asians as uniformly making “sacrifice[s] of time and freedom [that ‘whites’ are] not willing to make” (76), it exposes a colonial-era East–West binarism that continues to underlie normative conceptions of Canadian identity. In response to the conditions of a post-9/11 Canada, I propose that the politics of reading presented in my article is particularly important. I examine two canonical Chinese Canadian texts—SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children—from a post- colonial, diasporic perspective. Although these two writers are commonly discussed in Asian Canadian Studies, the theoretical approach to their texts is frequently framed by implicit oppositions that privilege a modern Canada over a traditional China. This approach takes its cues from an identifiable plot structure that not only appears in these two texts but in women’s texts more generally in the 1980s and 1990s (Bow 71). As Leslie Bow explains, the recuperative model of feminist criticism, which was influential at that time, promoted the “belief that to restore the gendered … subject’s voice is to restore … her worth” (71). The narrative depiction of a “subject’s movement from silence to voice with a future-oriented, salutary effect on a succeeding generation” was hence a common orga- nizing structure in women’s writing (71). The problem with this structure, however, is that its underlying progressivism requires “women’s oppression to assume an air of pastness” (72). Moreover, when this structure inter- acts with stories of first-generation immigrants and their Western-raised children, it can reify East–West distinctions by projecting Orientalized difference onto the parents and by linking the children’s acculturation with increased freedom and autonomy. That is, it can position the East as backward, repressive, and “excessively genderist,” while also equat- ing the West with modernization, liberty, and self-fulfilment (72). Critics have thus tended to read Disappearing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children in ways that harmonize the depiction of generational struggles with dominant narratives of Canada’s liberal progressivism. For instance, Mari Peepre comments that the daughter-narrators of these novels are caught between two disparate “realities”—they are “pulled back in time” by the “the extremely oppressive patriarchal rule” of their immigrant- mother’s culture, and “pulled forward … by the seemingly liberal and egalitarian values … of their North American host culture” (81 emphasis added). Likewise, Lien Chao suggests that the novels signal a “coming to voice” of Chinese Canadian women, who have found the courage not Disrupting the National Frame | 101 only to confront the “century-long” history of racism in Canada but also to challenge the “sexism” of “traditional male-oriented Chinese culture” (17, 29). Partly because of their feminist narrative structures, therefore, these novels have been interpreted as expressing a progressive notion of history, one that does not necessarily contest idealistic notions of Canada’s multiculturalism or the colonial binaries of East and West. To be sure, critics such as Roy Miki have observed that one of the reasons these novels have received so much critical attention and “insti- tutional approval” is because they emulate “a genealogical form that mirror[s] the nation’s generational history” (230). Nonetheless, my article calls attention to moments in the novels where the daughter-narrators create distance from, and thus complicate, the underlying feminist devel- opmental structure of the narrative. I argue that these moments destabilize the apparent authority and transparency of the third-person presentation of the family stories, by clarifying that these stories are told from a West- ernized, subjective, and historically-situated perspective. More specifically, these moments foreground the blind-spots, interests, and motivations of the daughter-narrators, undermining the idea that the family stories are complete or accurate and creating openings for intervening dialogue. Therefore, by viewing these novels from a postcolonial, diasporic perspec- tive, my article seeks to shift the focus away from the daughter-narrators’ apparent search for “a new sense of integrated [Chinese-Canadian] iden- tity” (Peepre 80). As my reading hopes to illustrate, it is possible and necessary to place emphasis on the textual moments of ambivalence and elision—moments which generate questions and insights that go beyond the overtly national paradigm the novels appear to uphold. A postcolonial, diasporic