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Author:

Chu, Patricia P., author.

Title:

Where I have never been : migration, melancholia, and memory in Asian American narratives of return / Patricia P. Chu.

Publisher:

Temple University Press,

Copyright Date:

2019

Description:

xv, 255 pages ; 23 cm.

Subject:

1900-2099
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
American literature--History and criticism.--History and criticism.
Asian Americans in literature.
American literature--20th century--History and criticism.
American literature--21st century--History and criticism.
Emigration and immigration in literature.
Homeland in literature.
Return in literature.
Melancholy in literature.
Memory in literature.
Asian Americans--Ethnic identity.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and (pages 231-245) and index.

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.

Summary:

"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.
"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.

Series:

Asian American history and culture

ISBN:

1439902259
9781439902257
1439902267
9781439902264

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1033905389

LCCN:

2018021245

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)