Begin Here

Chapter 2. The Asian Childhood: Writing Beginnings

Asignificant number of Childhoods written by Asian North American writers focus primarily on experiences in Asia, with accounts of a pre-American life as the central experience of the text. For writers who identify explicitly as Asian American or Asian Canadian, the foregrounding of the non–North American experience provides a valuable perspective from which to read autobiographies that resonate in the context of the cultural memory of the community . These childhood accounts, importantly, offer the reading public access to versions of the history of Asian countries that correspond to private stories, unofficial records, microhistories. We cannot underestimate the discursive potential of these texts, considering the increased complexity of the autobiographical act, particularly by writers who make identification with specific ethnic groups and history a subtext of their personal narratives. Janet Varner Gunn explains that autobiography has shifted from being conceived as “the private act of self-writing” to become “the cultural act of the self reading” (8), implying that autobiographical discourse negotiates more than merely the notion of an authentic “I” to engage the subject’s location in the world through an active interpretation of experiences in particular “worldly” contexts (23). The strategy involves an intentional positioning of oneself in history, geography, and culture. Ien Ang takes this point further when she posits autobiography as “a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work” (3, italics in original). Working within specific epistemic contexts, Asian North American writers consciously negotiate these boundaries, making the representation of location and chronology a vital subtext of their autobiographical performances. When the autobiographical account focuses on a pre–North American experience, the author might conceivably be deploying two simultaneous operations . First, a didactic project—the reader accompanies the writer as his or her self-as-child learns about heritage culture and experiences historical events. This strategy gives the mainstream American or Canadian public access to 32 The Asian Childhood Writing Beginnings q • Chapter 2 events in Asia and validates the experiences of the families and communities of many Asian North Americans. By providing narratives of experiences that many immigrants have silenced for diverse reasons, these Childhoods nourish the community’s process of cultural memory and serve as an avenue to healing. Marita Sturken affirms that remembrances of events of national importance moves “between the realms of cultural memory and history,” where a tension emerges between history and countermemory, as these life writers negotiate different levels of private and public discourse (31). Yet, she cautions that “cultural images of historical events, both documentary and docudrama, biographical and fictional, have the capacity to usurp and replace the personal memories of those who participated in those events and lives. In fact, it is questionable whether one can ever speak of a personal memory of historical and biographical events that is distinguishable from the cultural narrativization of those events, or that one ever could. This is testimony to the way that memory works both individually and culturally” (32). This critical perspective highlights the serious work that these texts conduct within community contexts, while stressing the danger of substituting vicarious recollections for personal memory, or eliding the frontiers of personal and cultural memory. Second, we may consider the way in which childhood reminiscences often provide emblems for later experiences, offer multiple layers of meaning, and serve many roles (Gullestad 26). These Asian North American Childhoods may be read as their writers’ specific manner of explaining a current situation or dealing with a present that may, in some ways, mirror the conflict of the past. Though the texts focus fundamentally on a childhood in Asia, we can nonetheless argue that these accounts say as much about the authors’ present position within a diasporic community as the actual events of the past. Also, as James Olney notes, just as the representation of the past depends crucially upon the sensibility that recalls it, “so too the sensibility that recalls it is vitally dependent on the past” (57). These versions of childhoods in Asia articulate how the past weighs on the present, and how trajectories that involve palimpsestic rebeginnings may be deployed to promote cultural memory. Though elements of continuity may be traced from the representation of the child in the past to the writing adult, a recurring characteristic of these texts lies in the way the authors...