Positioning the New
Positioning the New:
Chinese American Literature and the Changing
Image of the American Literary Canon
Edited by
Tanfer Emin Tunc and Elisabetta Marino
Positioning the New:
Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon,
Edited by Tanfer Emin Tunc and Elisabetta Marino
This book first published 2010
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2010 by Tanfer Emin Tunc and Elisabetta Marino and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2485-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2485-9
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ........................................................................................................ ix
Tanfer Emin Tunc and Elisabetta Marino
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Considerations on the Concept of the Western Canon, the Worldwide
Canon, and the Production of New Literature
Lina Unali
Part I: The Chinese American Novel
Chapter One................................................................................................. 6
The Works of Amy Tan: Can a Bestseller Enter The Canon?
Meldan Tanrisal
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15
A Spectralized Canon: Amy Tan and Chinese American Haunting
Chia-rong Wu
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 26
“These are the Things I Must Not Forget”: Memory and Authentic Origin
in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Helena Maragou
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 39
Sabotaging the “Cultural Bridge,” Dropping the Hyphen:
Love and Sexuality as Escape Routes in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised
Land
Nelly Mok
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 52
Reading “Chinesey” in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone
Michelle Young-Mee Rhee
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 69
Shifting the Center: Emotional Exile and the Aesthetic of Displacement
in Chuang Hua’s Crossings
Anna Pehkoranta
Part II: Chinese American Theater and Poetry
Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 84
Razing/Raising the Literary Canon: Ping Chong’s Chinoiserie, After
Sorrow, and Chinese American Postmodern Theater
Tanfer Emin Tunc
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 114
The Theatre of David Henry Hwang: From Hyphenation
to the Mainstream
Yasser Fouad A. Selim
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 128
Redefining the Dramatic Canon: Staging Identity Instability in the Work
of David Henry Hwang and Chay Yew
Teresa Botelho
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 143
A Canon of Alterity: John Yau’s Corpse and Mirror
Merton Lee
Part III: Chinese American Short Fiction and Self-Writing
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 158
Performing Ethnography and Identity in Sui Sin Far’s Short Fiction
Rachel Peterson and Joel Wendland
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 175
Chinese American Children’s Literature and the Canon: An Overview
Elisabetta Marino
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 192
In the Shadow of The Woman Warrior—Li-Young Lee’s The Winged
Seed: A Remembrance
Meadhbh Hand
Positioning the New
vii
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 204
Diasporic (Dis)Connections: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White
Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands
S. Bilge Mutluay Cetintas
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 216
The New Americans: Ha Jin’s Immigration Stories
Clara Juncker
Contributors............................................................................................. 229
Index........................................................................................................ 234
PREFACE
The idea for this collected volume of essays emerged in the fall of 2008
while the editors were brainstorming for a workshop topic for the 2010
European Association for American Studies (EAAS) Conference, which
focused on the theme of America as “Forever Young.” Elisabetta, who has
been working in Asian American Studies for over a decade now, suggested
that a workshop on Chinese American literature would be a perfect fit for
the conference since it not only brought a new dimension to the theme, but
also had the potential to question the meaning of, expand the boundaries
of, and evaluate the usefulness of one of the great behemoths of American
Studies—the American literary “canon.”
The reception of Chinese American literature by American critics and
readers has undergone numerous changes since the marginalization of the
first Chinese American writers. Today, Chinese American authors, such
as Ruthanne Lum McCunn and Amy Tan, earn the praise of both scholars
and the lay public alike and collectively, their work has played an
important role in transforming the image of the United States. As Harold
Bloom’s recently published collection of essays, Amy Tan (2009), conveys,
writers of Chinese origin are reshaping the American literary arena, and in
the process are conveying the complexities of cultural hybridity and
multiculturalism. Their works are also regenerating and rejuvenating the
image of America, rendering it in a constant state of flux. This perpetual
process of reinvention, however, has problematized the American literary
canon, prompting scholars to ask if a canon can (and should) exist in a
nation that is continually redefining itself by prioritizing inventiveness and
innovation over tradition and convention.
This ground-breaking edited volume includes chapters which explore
the past, present and future position of Chinese American authors within
the framework of what Bloom identifies as the “Western literary canon.”
These selections, which simultaneously represent the exciting “transnational
turn” in American literary studies, not only examine whether or not
Chinese American literature is inside or outside the canon, but also
question if there is, or should be, a literary canon at all. Moreover, they
dissect the canonicity of Chinese American literature by elucidating the
social, political and cultural implications of inclusion in the canon.
Ultimately, however, this collection is designed as a preliminary step
x
Preface
towards exploring the impact of Chinese American literature on the white,
Anglo-Saxon Protestant-dominated American literary world, and probing
the by-products of both cultural fusion and cultural collision.
As with all major undertakings, this collection of essays is not the
result of one individual’s hard work and determination. Rather, it is the
result of collaboration between many talented and visionary people. The
editors would like to express their thanks to those who helped sculpt this
project; in particular, the members of EAAS who made both the
conference workshop and this edited collection a reality. We would also
like to thank our respective universities (Hacettepe University and the
University of Rome, Tor Vergata) for their continued support of our
academic endeavors. We extend our utmost appreciation to Professor Lina
Unali for graciously agreeing to write the collection’s introduction, and to
the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Without their support and
interest in this field, this project would have stalled in the brainstorming
phase. We hope that this marks the beginning of many more collaborations.
Last, but not least, we would like to thank all the individuals whose
work appears in this collection. Hailing from different disciplines (and
continents for that matter), these scholars generously shared their
theoretical frameworks and empirical research to produce the collection
that lies before you.
—Tanfer Emin Tunc
Elisabetta Marino
INTRODUCTION
CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CONCEPT
OF THE WESTERN CANON, THE WORLDWIDE
CANON, AND THE PRODUCTION
OF NEW LITERATURE
LINA UNALI
When graduate students and academics in Asian universities (where the
interest in American and European authors has always been very intense)
first heard of the Western canon in the 1980s, they interpreted it as a new
literary order that had to be obeyed. In reality, this was an echo of
discussions that took place in the United States in the 1960s—a discourse
which had acquired new impetus in later decades. Nevertheless, an ironic
problem soon arose concerning the position of “writers who had not yet
written.” Who would place them in the canon, and who would remove
them when eventually they became “obsolete”?
Two parties soon formed: one in favor of the canon that supported the
idea of a preconceived literary order; the other, against the notion of such
a “required reading list.” Among the latter there were those who Harold
Bloom—in his famous work The Western Canon and in his later volume
on William Shakespeare—ascribes to a party of resentment: in other
words, those who could do without a literary tradition.1
The notion of a canon has been refuted, accepted, but has never been
obliterated. It is not a concept that can become fashionable and then
suddenly be placed aside. It implies a particular consideration of the
literary past and a project for the future. This introduction is mainly
concerned with a few considerations for the future.
1
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
2
Introduction
Throughout the 1990s, numerous books on the canon were published,
each with differing perspectives. One example is Trevor Ross’ work
published in 1998 (four years after Bloom’s The Western Canon) entitled
The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the
Eighteenth Century.2 Most American critics generally agree that the
concept of a “literary canon” surfaced at the end of the eighteenth century.
However, according to Ross, the notion of a canon was in operation
centuries earlier, i.e. in the Middle Ages, but it was based on different
literary and cultural values, and independent from cultural industry.
Ross’ work began the current discussion on whether or not a canon can
even be defined, and if yes, who should do the defining. Multiculturalism,
and the migration of millions of people across borders, has only
complicated the issue in the American context. Moreover, such a
population exchange has also compelled scholars to wonder about the
position of the new narrative prose and poetry produced by writers
emerging from the huge flows of individuals crossing continents. Bloom
includes a few non-American or non-European writers in The Western
Canon, however, mostly as tokens. He does not write about them in great
detail, and lists their names in the volume’s Appendix, in the section
ironically entitled The Chaotic Age.
Bloom’s linguistic subdivision of the literary world, and his use of the
subtitle The Chaotic Age, is upon close inspection particularly alarming.
Under the subdivision Arabic, the reader finds four authors with the titles
of some of their works listed, but without any indication of nationality:
Najib Mahfuz, Midaq Alley Fountain and Tomb Miramar
Adunis, Selected Poems
Mahmud Darwish, The Music of Human Flesh
Taha Husayn, An Egyptian Childhood
The category West Indies follows, and includes C.L.R. James, V.S.
Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and three other lesser-known authors. Bloom
engages in such geographical, racial, and cultural conflation once again in
Africa, which also presents no specification of nationality; moreover, only
the first two writers, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, are generally
known. Three writers are listed under the heading India—R.K. Narayan,
Salman Rushdie, and the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—who in
essence represent the whole of Asia. The other half of the world, in
2
Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages
to the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).
Positioning the New
3
Edward Said’s words, is almost completely submerged. Clearly, Bloom
prioritizes the Western canon, and probably includes these authors just to
be politically correct, or to suggest that these authors should be part of the
Western canon because their writing influenced, or were influenced by, it.
In an article entitled “The Western Canon,” Leslie Schenk states that
“Bloom is quite right not to include one single Japanese or Chinese
anywhere in our canon, but, I wish to ask, does that make our canon right?
I think it makes our canon appallingly wrong.” Instead, Schenk advocates
a worldwide canon: “This is not so farfetched as it may sound…The
Japanese, for example, are well along in establishing just that.”3 However,
Schenk does not explain that a worldwide canon can only be based on
mutual recognition and concern.
What is generally disregarded is that both Japanese and Chinese
students study American and European history and literature at school,
while most American and European students do not know anything about
Asian history or literature. It is this reciprocity of knowledge and
familiarity with one another’s culture that is missing in the Western canon.
This mutual understanding is a key element of the foundation of a
worldwide canon.
If we analyze terms such as Chinese American literature (commonly
used in US syllabi), and ethnic literature, a concept which has undergone
huge development in recent years, we may reach the conclusion that a
common standard can never be reached. The first reason is that both
terms—Chinese American literature and ethnic literature—discourage
any serious attempt at evaluating the literature produced by minorities
based on the standards generally applied to mainstream writers. Moreover
the word ethnic, in particular, usually causes great confusion in
transnational contexts, especially with respect to intercultural and literary
relations, because of the differing ways in which immigrants are
considered in the United States and in their countries of origin. In China,
for example, Chinese immigrants to the US would be simply defined as
overseas Chinese 中國移民 zhōngguóyímín, or travelling Chinese. In
other words, they would be described using phrases that would stress the
provisional character of their residence abroad. The term ethnic would not
be applicable in this context, and may even cause confusion, especially if
the Chinese American immigrants in question are of Han origin (the Han
comprise approximately ninety-two percent of the Chinese population).
Clearly, as this example illustrates, ethnicity is a relative term.
3
Leslie Schenk, “The Western Canon.” World Literature Today 70.2 (1996): 325.
4
Introduction
Such terminological ambiguity will deter the creation of a worldwide
canon. Nevertheless, the discourses that have emerged from considerations
of a global canon are important when considering Chinese American
literature because they call into question the meaning of ethnicity,
citizenship, heritage, literature, and the usefulness of a canon by
highlighting the fluidity and changeable nature of these labels. Who
ultimately should represent the Chinese American canon? Is creating a
“list” possible or even desirable? Will all such attempts eventually result
in Bloom’s conflation of categories? After all, leaving out important
writers is inevitable, especially when political agendas are at stake. It is
with these questions in mind that I invite you to read this collection of
provocative essays on Chinese American literature.
PART I:
THE CHINESE AMERICAN NOVEL
CHAPTER ONE
THE WORKS OF AMY TAN:
CAN A BESTSELLER ENTER THE CANON?
MELDAN TANRISAL
To be able to answer the question “Can a bestseller enter the canon?”
one needs to probe into the meaning of the word canon. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines the secular use of the word as “a general rule,
fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or
scientific treatment of a subject.” Today, literature students typically use
the word canon to refer to those works in anthologies that have come to be
considered standard or traditionally included in the classroom setting and
in published textbooks. In this sense, “the canon” denotes the entire body
of literature traditionally thought to be suitable for admiration and study.
In order to form a canon of any kind, a body of well-respected
“experts” must reach a consensus about “which materials…[should] matter
to the given culture they are presumed to represent and…serve.”1 During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the canon consisted of British
and British American literature written primarily by elite men. Their
poetry and prose was predominantly religious in nature, and a great deal of
American colonial literature dealt with the so-called “savage Indian
peoples, disorderly women, uncivilizable Africans, murderous Spaniards,
and idolatrous French.”2 Until the 1970s and even the 1980s, the
American literary canon presented an Anglocentric view of the United
States. Since the canon existed to promote specific traditions and
hegemonic institutions, it tended to exclude most segments of the
population.
1
Carla Mulford, “Writing Women in Early American Studies: On Canons,
Feminist Critique, and the Work of Writing Women into History.” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 26.1 (2007): 108.
2
Ibid., 107.
The Works of Amy Tan: Can a Bestseller Enter The Canon?
7
Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, much of the Anglophone
literary canon that existed in American institutions was derived from the
late-nineteenth century Anglocentric imperialist history-writing that was
implemented by institutions of higher education in the first half of the
twentieth century. However, as the American past came to be considered
worth studying in the early twentieth century, scholars began to form
conceptions about what should be studied. Eventually, Americanists began
emphasizing the importance of having a national literature in the form of a
canon. Thus, writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving,
William Cullen Bryant, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—all of whom wrote
about the American past—suddenly became “worth studying.” Because
poetry had always been considered the highest form of art, Henry David
Thoreau’s lyrical prose as well as Bryant’s and Henry David Longfellow’s
poems, made their way into schoolbooks.3
Studies of Puritan New England and the New England transcendentalists
initially dominated the canon. However, by the mid-twentieth century,
scholars began to include writings from the colonial South and the
Caribbean in the burgeoning American canon, which ostensibly
challenged the white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestant core of literary
studies. Moreover, black academics were increasingly questioning the
emphasis on Anglocentric white settler accounts. The upheavals of the
1960s and early 1970s (e.g., anti-war protests, civil rights, the American
Indian Movement, and the feminist and gay movements) also provided the
socio-political context to mount an organized challenge to what had
become the “traditional canon.” The result was the entry of peoples of
color into the mainstream, as represented by the early anthologies focusing
on the writings of African and Asian Americans.
Native Americans, however, had no place in the canon until the present
generation of scholars appeared on the literary scene. The works of
historians and anthropologists traditionally had more appeal than those of
fiction writers because like Jefferson and later Cooper, they continued to
promote the myths of the “vanishing Indian” and the “noble savage.”
Contemporary scholars have successfully criticized and deconstructed
these myths, diffusing both their power and their domination over
American literature. This shift in the nature of Native American literature
coincided with the early feminist critique of the American canon, which
emerged as women began to enter institutions of higher learning in the
1970s. Feminist challenges occurred in a number of arenas, but one of the
most prominent became the notion that early women writers (e.g., Emily
3
Ibid., 109.
8
Chapter One
Dickinson) were on a par with WASP male poets (e.g., Walt Whitman).
Another claim was that women writers were worth studying for they added
heretofore neglected dimension to the American past. Feminist critics also
successfully proved that when it came to the novel—a genre that had been
understudied in comparison to others—women writers were just as prolific
as men.4
Clearly, “all writing reflects and responds to its time and place, [and]
emerges out of a cultural context that animates and helps to shape it.”5
The social and political changes of the 1960s and 70s had a tremendous
impact on the American canon, with ethnic literature emerging as worthy
of recognition and celebration. However, the dismantling of the maledominated literary canon was not a simple task. In fact, the “canon
debates” continued well into the 1980s. Paul Lauter, the general editor of
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, described the question of the
canon as a “cultural battle”:
By “canon” I mean the set of literary works, the grouping of significant
philosophical, political, and religious texts, the particular accounts of
history generally accorded cultural weight within a society. How one
defines a cultural canon obviously shapes collegiate curricula and research
priorities, but it also helps determine precisely whose experiences and
ideas become central to academic study.6
Thus, deciding what is “central” or “marginal” is a basic function of
canonization. Moreover, who decides these categories is political,
determining what is taught to whom, and by whom, in American colleges.7
Therefore, ultimately, the literary canon is about power. As William Cain
elucidates, “the ‘canon’ controversy not only involves choices among
books, but also impels people to make decisions about the degree to which
America’s diverse population will be represented in institutional life.”8
The Heath Anthology of American Literature undoubtedly played a
crucial role in the expansion and transformation of the canon. It was
published in 1990 under the sponsorship of the Feminist Press’
Reconstructing American Literature (RAL) Project. Encouraged by the
4
Ibid., 110–112.
As quoted in Richard Ruland, “Art and a Better America.” American Literary
History 3.2 (1991): 346.
6
Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ix.
7
Ibid., ix.
8
William E. Cain, “Opening the American Mind: Reflections on the ‘Canon’
Controversy.” Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, ed. Jan
Gorak (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2001), 3.
5
The Works of Amy Tan: Can a Bestseller Enter The Canon?
9
gains of the numerous “rights” movements of the 1960s and 70s, this
ambitious project aimed to rectify, in Lauter’s words, “the limited,
exclusionary conception of ‘American Literature’ represented in most
curricula, syllabi and anthologies, and to affirm the literature classroom as
a potential site of social and political change.”9 Lauter, who played a key
role in its publication as editor, further explains that the anthology was
designed to “represent more accurately the diversity of American literature
and the US cultural mosaic, past and present, than other existing American
Literature anthologies.”10
In his review of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Richard
Ruland conveys that “in a democracy, every voice must be heard. The
effort is long overdue to see and feel the multicultural presence in the
nation’s discourse, [and] to understand America as a complex,
heterogeneous culture from its very beginning.”11 Yet, simultaneously,
Ruland criticizes the anthology’s political and social nature. He claims
that while Heath offers a social, historical, and political vision, it fails to
offer a “literary discourse.”12 As Ruland explicates,
An anthology is a defining statement, though not a definitive one. Like a
dictionary it describes our practice at a specific historical moment—which
is why both must be repeatedly rewritten…This book will make a better
America by acquainting all of us with minds and hearts as yet unknown to
our philosophy, by providing a richly stocked warehouse, a crowded twovolume library for thoughtful browsing. But it will doubtless prove most
13
useful for those who can see how new complements old.
This brings us to the question in the title of this chapter: can a bestseller
enter the canon? The highly acclaimed Chinese American author Amy
Tan began her professional career in 1983 as a freelance business writer.
After the release of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), publishers
realized they had a potential bestseller. In fact, the book became the
longest running hardcover on The New York Times bestseller list in 1989,
where it remained for nine months. It was also presented with the
prestigious National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle
Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction, and the
9
Paul Lauter, “The Heath Anthology and Cultural Boundaries.” English
Studies/Culture Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent, eds. Isaiah Smithson and Nancy
Ruff (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 183.
10
Ibid., 81
11
Ruland, “Art and a Better America,” 353.
12
Ibid., 350.
13
Ibid., 357.
10
Chapter One
Commonwealth Club Gold Award. The book has been translated into
twenty-five languages and has also been adapted into a major motion
picture.
The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), Tan’s second novel, not only became a
number-one bestseller on The New York Times hardcover list, but also
appeared on Canadian, Norwegian and German bestselling lists. The
Hundred Secret Senses (1995) performed just as well, immediately
appearing on The New York Times bestseller list. Tan’s novels have been
translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, French,
Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish,
Icelandic, Russian, Estonian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Polish, Hebrew,
Greek, Tagalog, Indonesian, and Turkish (The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen
God’s Wife, and The Bonesetter's Daughter have been translated into
Turkish). However, the popularity of her novels has also had an adverse
effect on the academic reputation of her works. Some critics conclude that
if her writing is that popular, it cannot be serious enough for scholarly
consideration.
As a Chinese American author, Tan’s readers feel that she is specially
poised to comment on the relationship between ethnicity, identity, gender,
and difference in the United States. The problems and challenges of
integration/assimilation, cultural dislocation, the conflict between
acculturation and loyalty to an ancestral tradition, and intergenerational
struggles are among the many bicultural themes explored in Tan’s works.
However, her writing is not confined to the immigrant, focusing instead on
universal issues such as the common human struggle for identity, the
search for one’s roots, problematic mother-daughter relationships, women
in patriarchal cultures, and establishing a connection between the past and
the present. Love, loss and redemption are also among the themes she
treats artistically. Her novels are a celebration of bonding and connections,
family ties and friendships.14
Despite the fact that she is recognized as a major contemporary
novelist, Amy Tan’s works have been excluded from the traditional canon
and have not received due recognition because they are “popular.” In her
article “The Silencing Effect of Canonicity: Authorship and the Written
Word in Amy Tan’s Novels,” Lisa Dunick states that the criticism about
Tan’s works focuses solely on the tradition of the “talk-story.” Although
the talk-story occupies an important place in Chinese American women’s
narratives, the evaluation of Tan’s works based only on the concept of the
14
E.D. Huntley, Amy Tan: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1998), 33–34.
The Works of Amy Tan: Can a Bestseller Enter The Canon?
11
talk-story undermines the complexity of her works. When criticism only
“centers on the way that the dialogic nature of talk-story functions either
to create or to bridge gaps between bi-cultural, bilingual immigrant
mothers and their Americanized second-generation daughters…[it] limits
the interpretive work to be done on these texts.”15 As Dunick conveys,
critical work on Tan has not taken into consideration certain aspects of her
work, specifically, “the importance of written texts and the literacy of
Chinese mothers,”16 which distinguish her from other contemporary
Chinese American writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, with whom
Tan is often compared.
In her analysis of Tan’s works, Dunick uses The Bonesetter’s Daughter
to elucidate her points and to emphasize the aesthetic value of Tan’s work.
The reason why she chooses this particular novel is because it “represents
a more fully developed reworking of issues about identity and language” 17
than can be found in many of Tan’s other works. In fact, The Bonesetter’s
Daughter underlines the permanence of written texts. LuLing is born to a
family whose craft, for six hundred years, has been the making of ink
guaranteed to last “from one great period of history to another.”18
Challenging tradition, LuLing becomes an accomplished calligrapher in
China, where girls’ “eyes should never be used for reading, only for
sewing.”19 As LuLing’s teacher Pan informs her: “once you put the ink to
paper, it becomes unforgiving again. You can’t change it back. If you
make a mistake, the only remedy is to throw away the whole thing.”20
LuLing’s mother Precious Auntie also emphasizes the importance of
writing: “when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first
step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask
yourself, What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my
mind?”21 This idea of stressing one’s intentions through writing is repeated
throughout the novel, illustrating that writing can both preserve history
and culture and convey personal thoughts and repressed messages.
As Dunick observes, Tan’s comments on (self) writing and the function
of literature in The Bonesetter’s Daughter are conscious and deliberate. As
15
Lisa M.S. Dunick, “The Silencing Effect of Canonicity: Authorship and the
Written Word in Amy Tan’s Novels.” Bloom’s Critical Views: Amy Tan—New
Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 170.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 178.
19
Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 121.
20
Ibid., 295.
21
Ibid., 225.
12
Chapter One
Tan conveys, the written word is powerful because it contains the energy
and temperament of the writer:
The words on the page can signify more than the ideas that the shapes
represent; they ome to signify the intent and character of the author. The
marks on the paper do more than represent words because they also
somehow embody the life and person of the writer. The autobiography that
LuLing writes so precisely does more than tell her life story; the perfection
of the vertical rows and complete absence of mistakes alerts Ruth to the
clearly evident care taken with its creation and the text’s consequent
importance.22
Through her sand writing and the diary she keeps as a child, Ruth
develops a respect for writing, realizing its profound significance. Ruth
asserts power over her mother by conveying Precious Auntie’s words from
beyond the grave. Moreover, Ruth becomes angry when her mother
compromises the sanctity of language by reading her diary without
permission, and lashes out: “You talk about killing yourself, so why don’t
you ever do it? I wish you would. Just do it, do it, do it! Go ahead, kill
yourself! Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I!”23 The next day,
when she discovers that her mother attempted suicide by jumping out of a
window, Ruth is overwhelmed with the fear that her writing has
contributed to the event.
Her belief that words have power impacts Ruth throughout her life—to
the point where she cannot even write her own book. Ruth makes a career
out of ghostwriting since it is “safest” to write texts for others. However,
she resents the term “ghostwriter,” preferring the title of “book doctor”:
“I suppose you could call that [being a] book doctor. But I tend to
think of myself as more of a translator, helping people to transfer what’s in
their brain onto the blank page….”
“Have you ever wanted to write your own book?”
She hesitated. Of course she had. She wanted to write a novel in the
style of Jane Austen, a book of manners about the upper class, a book that
had nothing to do with her own life. Years before, she had dreamed of
writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become
someone else…But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if
by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about
herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form
of wishful thinking.24
22
Dunick, “The Silencing Effect of Canonicity,” 176.
Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 159.
24
Ibid., 31.
23
The Works of Amy Tan: Can a Bestseller Enter The Canon?
13
Ruth realizes the importance of writing her own book after she discovers
her mother’s autobiography. Precious Auntie’s autobiography had once
saved LuLing from her depressed state. Similarly, LuLing’s autobiography
has the same effect on Ruth, who begins to write her book soon after the
discovery. Thus, three generations of Chinese women reveal their
identities and secrets through writing which, as Dunick illustrates,
“highlights the specific connection between authorship, the articulation of
self, and the importance of written text over oral narrative.”25
Ruth’s mother writes her autobiography for two main reasons: Firstly,
it has “cultural and ancestral” importance; thus, by “replicating her own
mother’s autobiographical writing, she displays reverence for the importance
and power of literacy.”26 Secondly, LuLing’s memory is failing her, and
the only way to preserve the past is through writing. Unlike the spoken
word, which leads to misunderstanding and tension between mother and
daughter, the written narrative Ruth creates adds meaning to her mother’s
story. Contrary to the transitory, temporary nature of oral exchanges,
written texts can be translated. However, unable to understand Chinese
(LuLing’s written form of expression), Ruth gives the manuscript to Mr.
Tang who will transcribe it from Chinese into English. Mr. Tang asks for
LuLing’s photograph which he feels will add depth to his translation by
allowing him to capture her “essence,” her entire self. He is aware that the
manuscript is not merely an historical account. As he conveys, “I want to
phrase it more naturally, yet ensure these are your mother’s words, a
record for you and your children for generations to come.”27 Thus through
his translation, Mr. Tang aims to preserve both the meaning of LuLing’s
writing and her aesthetic voice.
In the Epilogue of The Bonesetter’s Daughter Ruth and her mother are
able to resolve their conflicts through the process of creating this
transcribed text. As LuLing expresses to Ruth, in Chinese:
“I’m worried that I did terrible things to you when you were a child,
that I hurt you very much. But I can’t remember what I did….”
“There’s nothing—” Ruth began.
“I just wanted to say that I hope you can forget just as I’ve forgotten. I
hope you can forgive me, because if I hurt you, I’m sorry.”
After they hung up, Ruth cried for an hour she was so happy. It was
not too late for them to forgive each other and themselves.28
25
Dunick, “The Silencing Effect of Canonicity,” 178.
Ibid.
27
Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 342.
28
Ibid., 402.
26
14
Chapter One
The sand tray of Ruth’s childhood is replaced by her laptop and she begins
writing her story with her grandmother by her side. “Think about your
intentions,” Bao Bomu says. “What is in your heart, what you want to put
in others.’”29 The novel ends with Ruth’s recognition of her Chinese
identity: “Ruth remembers this [her mother’s story] as she writes [her
own] story. It is for her grandmother, for herself, for the little girl who
became her mother.”30 By giving voice to Chinese immigrant mothers
through oral and written storytelling, Tan, the American daughter,
articulates “women’s authorship and the emphasis on the power and
importance of written words...[this] signals that Tan works from an
aesthetic tradition broader than that of talk-story or even of oral narrative;
she [also] works...from a literary tradition.”31 Thus, criticism that does not
recognize this aspect of Tan’s works disregards its complexity and its
potential to be included in the American literary canon.
If the criteria for inclusion in the canon include universality,
timelessness, aesthetics, originality, creativity and innovation, then Amy
Tan’s works are clearly canonical. However, as John Guillory has
elucidated, the current canon still “resembles an exclusive men’s club,
with membership restricted to those of the right ethnicity, gender, and
class.” Moreover, “the process of canonical selection is always also a
process of social exclusion, specifically the exclusion of female, black,
ethnic, or working-class authors.”32 Jane Tompkins is even more direct
when she states: “works that have attained the status of classics, and are
therefore believed to embody universal values, are in fact embodying only
the interests of whatever parties or factions responsible for maintaining
them in their preeminent position.”33 Thus, even though Tan is the subject
of Master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, academic journal articles, book
chapters and monographs, her road into the canon seems as if it will be a
long and winding one.
29
Ibid., 402.
Ibid., 403.
31
Dunick, “The Silencing Effect of Canonicity,” 179.
32
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7.
33
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,
1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4.
30
CHAPTER TWO
A SPECTRALIZED CANON:
AMY TAN AND CHINESE AMERICAN
HAUNTING
CHIA-RONG WU
In the brief introduction of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (2002), critic
Harold Bloom conveys that he was haunted by a ghostly mother image in
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. He emphasizes “the power of simplicity
and universality” embedded in the haunting image, and compares Tan to
her forerunner, Maxine Hong Kinston, in terms of her storytelling
technique.1 If Tan is indeed changing the course of American literature
and reshaping the fundamental image of America, it is by establishing a
spectralized canon through a Chinese American ghost narrative.
Ghost stories have emerged as a notable narrative mode in American
literature, and each specific haunting is the result of historical, cultural,
and even personal issues. Thus, it is critical to remember that ghost stories
transgress timeframes and geographical borders. Ghost narratives also
create a metaphoric space for the redefinition of historical and cultural
boundaries, thus serving to re-define, re-shape, and re-connect Chinese
American identities. Moreover, the Chinese American ghost tradition can
also be considered a legitimate feminist literary technique to at least,
figuratively, transcend patriarchal borders.
Ghost stories have become an essential feature in contemporary
American literature, and have received a great deal of attention from the
academy. Two influential scholarly works in this genre are Cultural
Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (1998) by
Kathleen Brogan, and Spectral America: Phantoms and the National
Imagination (2004), edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Brogan argues
1
Harold Bloom, “Introduction.” Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, ed. Harold Bloom
(Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002), 2.
16
Chapter Two
that American ethnic ghost stories represent a special phenomenon of
“cultural haunting” and in this way serve to reflect the predicaments of
minority groups.2 For Weinstock, the representation of ghost haunting
may refer to the “awareness of the narrativity of history” in response to
emotional and historical loss.3
In her ghost trilogy, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts (1975), China Men (1980), and Tripmaster Monkey (1989),
Kingston explores multiple dimensions of cross-cultural shadows and the
“haunting effect” with respect to historical fissures. In Kingston’s ghost
narratives, supernatural elements are deftly woven into the historical
fabric, featuring such critical issues as cultural loss, racial discrimination,
and gender politics. What readers need to bear in mind, however, is that
Kingston’s ghost narratives mediate the past and the present, shuffling
between China and (Chinese) America. Kingston tries to recuperate the
historical past and the cultural ambiance of China; however, her greater
focus is on the experiences of Chinese immigrants on American soil.
Stories and memories from Chinese-born mothers and fathers function as
cultural references with which Chinese Americans must struggle while
searching for their ethnic identity and cross-cultural position.
Kingston has clearly shaped the mode of ghost storytelling, paving the
way for younger Chinese American writers. Since Kingston, a number of
other Chinese American novelists have produced literarily works dealing
with hauntings and other ghostly representations. Examples include Fae
Mayenne Ng’s Bone (1993), Aimee E. Liu’s Face (1994), and Lan Samatha
Chang’s short story collection Hunger (1998). Whereas Ng’s Bone and
Liu’s Face deal with haunting issues like family trauma and emotional
loss, Chang’s Hunger employs “Hungry Ghost” figures to represent family
alienation and cultural disruption. As Hetty Lanier Keaton argues, “[I]n
Lan Samantha Chang’s stories, when the characters neglect the spirits of
their ancestors, these vengeful Hungry Ghosts, which represent the
repressed and unrecognized desire to reconnect to lost family members,
refuse to lie dormant.”4 In this sense, Chang’s Hunger demonstrates a
2
Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American
Literature (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 4.
3
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” Spectral America:
Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison,
WS: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 5.
4
Hetty Lanier Keaton, Feeding Hungry Ghosts: Food, Family, and Desire in
Stories by Contemporary Chinese American Women (Tulsa, OK: The University of
Tulsa Press, 2002), 236.
A Spectralized Canon: Amy Tan and Chinese American Haunting
17
significant trait of Chinese American haunting—that is, the return of the
repressed.
Despite Kingston’s influence, Amy Tan takes a unique path in
representing the spectral trope in her five most widely-read novels: The
Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred
Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish
From Drowning (2005). While Kingston’s ghostly figures either come
from the Chinese past or from the American present, Tan bypasses the
racial ghost images of the present and merely stages haunting shadows
from the past. For Kingston, the “ghostly return” refers to the historical
and cultural “absence” in Chinese American identities. For Tan, on the
other hand, hauntings not only signify the return of Chinese ghosts, but
also suggest the return of Chinese American subjects to their spectral
motherland, China. Through this technique, Tan is able to examine
individual loss, historical trauma, and family shadows.
Tan’s ghost storytelling features three important modes of haunting:
historical, domestic, and that outside of “Chinese America.” Tan’s novels
routinely include an acknowledgment of the historical significance of
China and the values of Chinese America. In this sense, the chronological
rift between history and the individual can be healed through ghost
haunting. Whereas Kingston employs Chinese literary and mythical
elements to reconstruct Chinese American history and identity, Tan places
a high premium on Chinese history, Chinese American positioning, and
the overlapping zones between the two. In addition, Tan, like Kingston, is
adroit at interweaving historical and cultural conflicts with domestic
tensions—that is, the tug-of-war between mothers and daughters.
In her debut work The Joy Luck Club, Tan interweaves the stories of
four mothers (Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St.
Clair) and the lives of their four daughters (Jing-mei June Woo, Rose Hsu
Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair).
In this sense, mothers’
memories and daughters’ voices are rolled into multidiegetic narratives.
Moreover, it seems that the daughters cannot bridge the cultural and
emotional divide with their “bossy” mothers until they “learn to listen—
truly listen—to their mother’s stories.”5 Tan uses ghost stories to facilitate
cultural transmission between the mothers’ spectral China and the
daughters’ identity-forming Chinese America. The novel begins with a
brief story about an unidentified old woman who travels from China to
America with a swan. When she arrives, immigration officers take the
5
E.D. Huntley, Amy Tan: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1998), 42.
18
Chapter Two
swan from her. However, she is able to keep a swan feather as a souvenir,
which symbolizes the hope she has for her future daughter in this new
land. The old woman’s story foreshadows the four mothers’ expectations
for their daughters. It further strengthens the shared wish of all Chinese
women immigrants. As Catherine Romagnolo argues, the old woman’s
story is fashioned “as national mythology, revised.”6
Suyuan Woo is dead at the beginning of the novel, but her ghostly
presence is mediated through photographs and oral stories, thereby
creating a haunting impact on her daughter Jing-mei Woo, the lead
narrator of The Joy Luck Club. Here, the “ghostly memories” conjure the
spirits of the dead in response to the distress of the living. In the words of
Ben Xu, “memory” stands as “a socializing, ego-forming expression of
anxieties, hopes, and survival instinct” for the female characters in the
novel.7 Through the function of memory, the multilateral negotiations
between mothers and daughters are conducted, thereby accelerating the
relocation of Chinese American identities. The novel concludes with Jingmei’s travels to China to visit her mother’s two half-sisters. As Jing-mei
reveals in the last few lines of The Joy Luck Club:
The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images,
sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don’t speak, I
know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her
same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.8
Jing-mei returns to China to retrieve the last piece of her cross-cultural
jigsaw puzzle, not just for her mother, but for herself. The family reunion
suggests a compromise with the dead, strengthening their shared cultural
heritage, as well as Jing-mei’s cross-cultural identity. Her mother’s ghost
is appeased and exorcised by a spatial movement of the living back to the
nation of cultural origin.
Another example of ghost haunting in this novel is embedded in Anmei Hsu’s story about her nameless, widowed mother, who married a
wealthy merchant as his third concubine. The spectral identity of this
nameless woman reminds us of Kingston’s nameless aunt in The Woman
Warrior. Both unnamed women are excluded from their families due to
their transgression of social norms. In this respect, they become
“forbidden taboos,” and family ghosts in the social context of old China.
6
Catherine Romagnolo, “Narrative Beginnings in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club:
A Feminist Study.” Studies in the Novel 35.1 (2003): 94.
7
Ben Xu, “Memory and the Ethnic self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.”
MELUS 19.1 (1994): 6.
8
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: Ivy Books, 1989), 332.
A Spectralized Canon: Amy Tan and Chinese American Haunting
19
An-mei’s mother, however, transforms from a social ghost to a specter by
committing suicide, demonstrating “the psychological power of a suicide’s
ghost over polygyny.”9 By passing this family taboo to the next
generation, Tan, like Kingston, empowers silenced women with the
ghostly power of a female avenger. This ghost story encourages An-mei’s
daughter Rose Hsu Jordan to confront her domineering husband, Ted, who
throws her out of their house during a painful divorce. These haunting
stories also instruct the daughters on how to deal with the gender
imbalance in contemporary Chinese America. They help forge a feminist
spirit, as well as a cross-cultural, and cross-generational, link between
mothers and daughters.
The Kitchen God’s Wife also focuses on the mother-daughter relationship;
yet, this time, the mother Winnie Louie’s (or Jiang Weili’s) narrative is
filled with ghosts. From the spirit of the young servant to the Holy Ghost,
Tan presents a series of Chinese ghost images which add a supernatural
and exotic tone to the novel. Like the four daughters in The Joy Luck
Club, Winnie’s daughter, Pearl Louie Brandt, is faced with the mother’s
ghost stories and haunting memories. Winnie is also plagued by the
traumatic past, and learns to deal with distressing memories in the novel.
As Winnie recalls,
Even I was scared my old life would catch up with me. But the China
turned off the light, closed the door, told everyone to be quiet. All those
people there became like ghosts. We could not see them. We could not
hear them. So I thought I really could forget everything. Nobody could get
out to remind me.10
Winnie’s statement illustrates her fear of being trapped by her distant past.
However, her silenced specters return and force her into communication
by way of their ghostly presence and associated memories. “Recollection,”
as Yuan Yuan argues, “reveals a process of negotiation with the past,
constantly translating and revising the past into a narrative that grants
reality to present situations.”11 Yuan Yuan’s observation also applies to
Winnie’s case. Despite her fear of the past, Winnie selectively passes
down haunting stories to her daughter. She does not want to recall her
traumatic life in China, but the spontaneous surfacing of her recollections
9
Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Amy Tan: A Literary Companion (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2004), 67.
10
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1991), 72.
11
Yuan Yuan, “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Maxine
Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.” Amy Tan, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia, PA:
Chelsea House Publishers, 2000), 154.
20
Chapter Two
allows her to come to terms with family ghosts, liberating herself and her
daughter from the suffocating, denied past.
In addition to the domestic haunting vis-à-vis mother-daughter
relations, Tan explores historical haunting with respect to the SinoJapanese War, Kuomintang’s retreat to Formosa (Taiwan), and the
Chinese Communist Party’s control over China. Tan’s writing thus
“represents…particular period[s] [in] Chinese history.”12 Take, for
example, the ambiguous ghost story of Gan, a Kuomintang air force pilot
fighting Japan. A friend of Winnie’s husband, Gan secretly falls for
Winnie, and tells her that he is haunted by a ghost and nine bad fates. The
ghost tells him that he will die when the ninth bad fate appears. Later on,
Gan’s plane crashes, and he dies in the hospital. After his death, Gan
becomes Winnie’s “ghost lover.”13 His new identity comes to symbolize
Winnie’s deep sorrows and regrets.
This ghost story interestingly bridges the divide between the
individual/domestic haunting and the historical haunting. Although the
mother-daughter relationship still serves as the core of the work, this
historical haunting, in particular, intensifies the mother’s trauma and loss
in China. At the end of the novel, the compromise between the mother
and the daughter is mediated through the exorcism of ghosts and the
worshipping of the statue of the Kitchen God’s Wife—“See her name:
Lady Sorrowfree, happiness winning over bitterness, no regrets in this
world.”14 Once these ghosts are exorcized, Tan envisions a specter-free
world with hope and happiness.
Unlike The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, Tan’s third
novel The Hundred Secret Senses is imbued with clear-cut spectral traces.
This work starts with the supernatural vision of Kwan Li, who is the
narrator Olivia Yee Laguni Bishop’s Chinese-born half sister: “My sister
Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now
dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her
kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.”15 Even though Tan’s previous
interest in the mother-daughter bond is replaced by the concept of
sisterhood in this novel, she still retains the tension between Chinese
mystery and Chinese American identity. In an interview with Salon
12
Bella Adams, “Identity-In-Difference: Re-Generating Debate About Intergenerational Relationship in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.” Studies in the Literary
Imagination 39.2 (2006): 9.
13
Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife, 205.
14
Ibid., 415.
15
Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995),
3.