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Chapter 6. In North America: Formulating Experience
- University of Hawai'i Press
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In this chapter, I read Childhoods that actively renegotiate the forms of traditional autobiography to show how these writers’ cultural work extends beyond mere ethnographic interventions to reconfigure the form of life writing itself. Aimee Liu’s Solitaire, Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, and Loung Ung’s Lucky Child experiment with narrative form and encourage us to understand how the form of writing itself signifies. This study has emphasized the cultural work enacted by the texts in the process of shaping collective memory as well as how Asian North American texts have promoted the revision of autobiographical form. Noting once again the role that Kingston’s The Woman Warrior has played in the development of autobiographical writing by women and ethnic subjects, I consider how other texts by Asian North American writers further expand the structures and forms through which personal experience may be narratologically enacted. The relationship between the act of narrating a life and the forms through which a life may be narrated requires examination. Critics of autobiography have repeatedly discussed the ways in which theme and form interact, and in what has become the classic statement of poststructuralist criticism on autobiography , Paul de Man asks, “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?” (920–921). This statement highlights the crucial interrelation between the life and the forms that the narratives of that life embody. For this reason, we must explore the structures that authors consciously appropriate in order to understand, from the formulation of the autobiography itself, the paradigms through which particular lives are narratively enacted. These writers renegotiate form in a variety of ways; the structures have intimate links with thematic concerns or creative approaches. According to 136 In North America Formulating Experience q • Chapter 6 Judith Varner Gunn, autobiographical writers construct a self through language and writing, and the autobiographical perspective has to do “with taking oneself up and bringing oneself to language” (16). When the structures of language and genre prove to be limited, ethnic writers have challenged prescriptive norms to formulate structures that more adequately represent their experiences . As such, readers perceive a heightened concern with the norms of self-formation and self-narration in these Childhoods, where previous models are judged unsuitable for representing specific pasts. The disruption between established paradigms and the possibilities for revisionary creative expression denotes that the experience itself becomes a motivating factor for the form of the narrative—Liu’s story of anorexia establishes the pattern that these autobiographical narratives will take; Lau’s diary validates the form as a Childhood; Barry’s comics propose a graphic representation that juxtaposes image and words; Ung’s relational autobiography uses a doubled perspective to maintain a unified family structure. Importantly, these narrative strategies show that the authors consciously write beyond a specific cultural arena to address a wider audience—these texts are not only about Asian North American experiences: they are sophisticated enactments of self-narration that speak to more than just ethnic groups. They address questions about self-representation that plague all writers of autobiography and fiction, as they negotiate the ways in which one writes (or draws) the “I” into existence. All these Childhoods narrate painful experiences, in the context of class awareness, racial affiliation, or illness, and the authors’ use of innovative structures enhances the reader’s appreciation of the experience because it invites a critical reading of the form. These texts are therefore doubly self-conscious: as the writers look back on their childhoods, they also choose the forms that will heighten specific experiences of those childhoods and transmit the issues better to both their ethnic community and the reading public in general. The question of writing personal and communal stories simultaneously— addressing ethnic concerns as well as narrative possibilities—leads the writers to seek what Carol Feldman calls “an interpretive vocabulary for both group and individual stories” (132). As the individual stories inform the communal stories by internalization, Feldman asserts, the individual stories act on the group by projection, obliging us to attend to multiple ways of meaning that the Childhoods offer. Thus...