| Portion of title |
Migration, melancholia, and memory in Asian American narratives of return |
| Portion of title |
Asian American narratives of return |
| Series |
Asian American history and culture
Asian American history and culture. ^A395623
|
| Contents |
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. |
| Abstract |
"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"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Abstract |
"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"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and (pages 231-245) and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: Chu, Patricia P., author. Where I have never been Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2019 9781439902271 |
| Genre/form | Criticism, interpretation, etc. |
| LCCN | 2018021245 |
| ISBN | 9781439902264 paperback alkaline paper |
| ISBN | 1439902267 paperback alkaline paper |
| ISBN | 9781439902257 hardcover alkaline paper |
| ISBN | 1439902259 hardcover alkaline paper |
