Pilgrimages

Cover

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Front Matter

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Contents

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pp. v-vi

Acknowledgements

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pp. vii-

This memoir project was made possible by a generous Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Professional Writers in 2005, which enabled me to travel to Hong Kong for research. I also want to thank the University of Lethbridge for a research grant that facilitated my research trip to Porto in 2004, ...

Preface

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pp. ix-x

I didn’t have an extraordinary life — no war, no famine, no earthquake, and so on. But I was born in an extraordinary city and grew up in another equally extraordinary one. These places shape my life; they continue to instil in me the kind of meditativeness so necessary for a literary life. ...

Introduction: Life Writing and Borderlands

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pp. 1-8

I teach and research cultural studies, an area that, in Ien Ang’s analysis, “conceives of itself as a borderland formation, an open-ended and multivocal discursive formation.” Certainly, the implied transcultural and transnational nature of intellectual borderlands appeals greatly to someone who grew up in one culture ...

Porto

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pp. 9-20

Fado singing actually sounded quite like Cantonese opera, I told myself as the train raced through the hilly countryside of Spain towards northern Portugal. Like Jos� Saramago, I thought of myself as a pilgrim and a traveller, not a tourist. Like all pilgrims, I believed that I had a special relationship with the place ...

Macau

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pp. 21-46

Last night I dreamt of Vasco da Gama again. In my dream, I was not transported back to the sixteenth century, sailing across the restless oceans as Camoens tells us in The Lusiad. In my dream, da Gama wore a two-day stubble, dark against a strong jawline and framing a face with high cheekbones. ...

Hong Kong

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pp. 47-128

If my father were still alive today, I wouldn’t be writing this narrative, nor would I be living in Canada. He would have risen in rank at the bank; I would have followed in the family tradition of going into banking. I might be significantly better off in material terms. But I would not have become an academic. ...

To Write, To Travel

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pp. 129-132

It can be said that I spent the first twenty years of my life — or at least the major part of these twenty years — wanting to be a different person. I didn’t want to live in Hong Kong. I didn’t like being Chinese. I couldn’t imagine myself becoming established and growing old in this city. I couldn’t get along with my mother ...

Appendix: An Academic Insertion

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pp. 133-142

Begin at the beginning. That was my plan when I first started drafting the structure of my autobiography. State one’s name, one’s birth date and place, one’s parents’ names, and so on. This narrative plan would provide forensic clarity as well as the illusion of truthfulness. However, it also simplifies the process of ...

Works Cited

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pp. 143-144