Begin Here

Conclusion: Rewriting the Childhood

Asian North American autobiographers who engage their childhood experiences influence the development of the forms life writing takes and the culture that receives these texts. This multilayered process functions in the contexts of literary practice and cultural mobilization, connecting with Lisa Lowe’s assertion that “the making of Asian American culture includes practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented; Asian American culture also includes the practices that emerge in relation to the dominant representations that deny or subordinate Asian and Asian American cultures as ‘other’” (65). The writers discussed in this study appropriate and subvert an established Euro-American genre to negotiate complex questions about selfrepresentation and the construction of cultural memory. These Asian North American texts illustrate a more general pattern of cultural dynamics in our time. Importantly, as Michael Fischer notes, “Ethnic autobiographical writing parallels, mirrors, and exemplifies contemporary theories of textuality, of knowledge, and of culture. Both forms of writing suggest powerful modes of cultural criticism. They are post-modern in their deployment of a series of techniques: bifocality or reciprocity of perspectives, juxtapositioning of multiple realities, intertextuality and inter-referenciality, and comparison through families of resemblance. Insofar as the present age is one of increasing potentialities for dialogue, as well as conflict, among cultures, lessons for writing ethnography may be taken from writers both on ethnicity and on textuality, knowledge, and culture” (“Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts” 230). For this reason, we need to consider these texts in context and, importantly, in dialogue with literary tradition. My emphasis on Asian North American Childhoods as writerly acts foregrounds the importance of the text as artifact that stems from and modifies existing literary and cultural traditions . For immigrants or racialized subjects in the United States and Canada, the production of the autobiography of childhood gestures toward a beginning —narratologically, phenomenologically, culturally. As interventions in the literary history of autobiography, these texts high183 Conclusion Rewriting the Childhood q • light the ways in which the Asian North American self may be written by signaling narrative strategies, formal structures, tropes, and metaphors. Indeed, as I have shown, in many cases narrative choices actively construct the self-intext , as the autobiographer configures the past into a shape that takes its formal design from established or renewed modes. Because autobiography has a history , these creative interventions influence later texts formally and contextually. These autobiographical occasions become sites where literary strategies and cultural purposes intersect, as the writer’s agency confers validity on historical or cultural experiences. Thus, by attending to the formal strategies of these Asian North American Childhoods, we discern community-building strategies and address the intersection of literary genre and cultural position to formulate a renewed appreciation of childhood in contemporary American and Canadian societies. Apart from a dialogue with literary history, these texts operate a revisioning of the narratives of history, particularly those of Asian history and the experiences of Asian subjects in North America. The didactic purpose to these texts is enacted through a privileging of microhistories, which may contrast or complement official versions. Importantly, these narratives help validate the experiences of Asian immigrants for both the Pan-Asian community and mainstream United States and Canada by promoting their visibility and making history itself a part of community development. Reading these texts together clarifies a series of literary and cultural developments . Formally, the texts evolve from a traditional chronological structure to more experimental patterns that challenge stereotypical representations and posit original forms of self-representation. The use of graphics in comics and picture books, the narrative enactment of relational lives, the appropriation of the diary, the blending of prose and verse, among others, signal a strong liberatory impulse in the writer. No longer must the autobiographers adhere to established forms; their particular experiences of North America necessitate renewed forms of self-inscription. Culturally, these Childhoods dialogue with existing autobiography, fiction, and poetry and serve a strong communitybuilding purpose. By recounting experiential history, they establish community narratives that fill in gaps in personal or group remembrance and address a wider audience of mainstream American or Canadian subjects. At the end of Lost Names, Richard Kim, who had earlier realized that “we are all in the making of history together” (187), takes to heart his father’s charge, “It is your world now” (195). This quotation exemplifies this study’s central conclusion: that Asian North American Childhoods, creative interventions in literary history and community building through examination of...