Begin Here

Notes

Introduction: Revisiting the Childhood 1. I will not analyze in detail contemporary theories of autobiography, a task which has already been done excellently by scholars such as Paul John Eakin, Susanna Egan, Françoise Lionnet, Laura Marcus, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson, among others. I owe many of my perspectives on autobiography to their work, which I cannot acknowledge in detail. For ideas on ethnic autobiography, I’m grateful for the work of Betty Bergland, William Boelhower, Michael Fischer, Shirley Lim, Sau-ling Wong, and Traise Yamamoto. 2. I use the term “autobiography” to refer to a life narrative text (or serial) in which the author, narrator, and protagonist are the same person: the autobiographical pact as described by Philippe Lejeune. I deliberately adhere to a traditional reading of the genre, even as I recognize that the forms of autobiography are changing (discussed in this study). 3. I do not want to simplify the complex differences between Asian American and Asian Canadian writing, which have been dealt with in detail in studies by Guy Beauregard, Iyko Day, Donald Goellnicht, Marie Lo, and Roy Miki, among others. Specifically, for example, in the case of Asian Canadian cultural discourse, there is an important engagement with Canada’s colonial history that Asian American criticism does not share. Asian subjects in the United States, in turn, have to negotiate the difficult formulations of race relations in connection with the history of African Americans (indeed, we generally agree that the political impetus that led to the development of Asian American studies came from the atmosphere created by the civil rights movement, which raised the consciousness of Asian Americans to the nature of racism in their own lives and in the institutions they were part of, notably the university) and Hispanic subjects, particularly in the West. Important as well, Asian American literary studies developed institutionally in the 1960s and 1970s, before Asian Canadian criticism, which has been examined in relation to diaspora studies, postcolonial literature, and Asian American literary criticism at diverse points in recent years. See Goellnicht’s “A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature” and Beauregard’s “The Emergence of ‘Asian Canadian Literature’: Can Lit’s Obscene Supplement?” for a historical discussion of the the187 Notes oretical development of the field, particularly in relation to Asian American Studies and Canadian literary studies. Another difference may be noted as Asian Canadian literary criticism often negotiates its paradigms in relation to other ethnic groups, notably the First Nations. See Marie Lo’s “Native-Born Asian American Model Minorities” for a discussion of imperialism as an object of critique and as a basis for Asian Canadian–First Nations coalitions. At diverse points in this study, I will make references to specific issues that are relevant to these concerns. For the purposes of a more inclusive discussion, I will generally refer to this writing as “Asian North American.” 4. “The Childhood, over and above everything else, is a form of literature; and as such it follows the inviolable laws that govern any purely literary text: the law of readability, and the law which decrees that the truth of the imagination shall take precedence over the truth of fact” (Coe, When the Grass 84). 5. Yet Coe himself acknowledges that the genre’s literary status is debatable: it should be “not literature but a sort of documentary” (When the Grass 3). It is worth noting that Coe’s study was published in 1984, relatively early in the rapidly growing field of ethnic autobiography criticism. Yet, this perspective leads organically, in the context of ethnic writing, to the idea of the historical and cultural implications of the form. 6. See my Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles for an analysis of how writers have appropriated this genre, as well as my coedited volume, Literary Gestures, for perspectives on the aesthetic in Asian North American criticism. 7. See Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, among others, for perspectives on the reception of this text. See also Sauling Wong’s “Ethnic Dimensions of Postmodern Indeterminacy: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Avant-garde Autobiography.” Kingston’s seminal text has been analyzed extensively from a variety of perspectives, which I will not engage in this study. Specifically, though important parts of her text focus on her childhood, I contend that The Woman Warrior is not strictly a Childhood because of the complex use...