Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return

by Patricia P. Chu

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439902264
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	01/04/2019
Series:	Asian American History & Cultu
Edition description:	1
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Patricia P. Chu is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University and the author of Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Note on Names and Spelling xiii

1 Narratives of Return: A Transpacific Tradition 1

2 "Ears Attuned to Two Cultures": Reconciling Accounts in Josephine Khu's Cultural Curiosity 45

3 Transpacific Echoes in the Family Memoir: Sojourns and Returns in Lisa See's On Gold Mountain 63

4 "The One Who Mediates": Mimicry, Melancholia, and Countermemory in Denise Chongs The Concubine's Children 105

5 Working through Diasporic Melancholia: Winberg and May-lee Chai's The Girl from Purple Mountain 123

6 "A Being … from a Different World": Yung Wing and the Making of a Global Subjectivity 145

7 "To Bring the Dead to Life": Countermemories in Lydia Minatoya's The Strangeness of Beauty and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being 177

Coda 209

Notes 219

Works Cited and Additional Sources 231

Index 247