Teaching Bone: A Taiwanese Perspective

As a teacher of Asian American literature in Taiwan, I always include Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993) in my survey course. Bone is an essential Asian American text because its emotionally invested yet unsentimental representation of San Francisco Chinatown allows me to introduce an important aspect of Chinese America to Taiwanese students, who are much in need of novelistic representations that can at once build the foundation for their engagement with quality literary work and enrich their understanding of the historical context of the people of Chinese descent residing on the other side of the Pacific. In addition to its aesthetic quality and significance in terms of historicity, I also feel personally attached to Bone since I wrote my first Chinese academic paper on this particular text, in which I analyze the way in which Ng employs what I call a "narrative of absence" to recall personal, familial, and ethnic histories into presence. In a very real sense, this novel helps me gain certain recognition in the field of Asian American studies in the Chinese-speaking world. Before the essay was in print, in fact, I had a short but memorable phone conversation with the author herself when I was housesitting for my late advisor Amy Ling, in whose class I first came across the novel. Ng asked for a copy of my paper so that she could present it to her families who had limited understanding of English, and I gladly complied. Hence, my preference for this novel is closely linked with personal memories as well.

Before going into further discussion about pedagogical issues of Bone, I would like to give a brief introduction to the development of Asian American studies in Taiwan. The curriculum of American literature in Taiwan has always been mainstream oriented. However, we in Taiwan's academic circle have witnessed the emergence and increasing importance of multicultural and multiethnic studies during the past two decades because of the influence of postcolonial studies and Taiwan's specific ethnic composition. Since the island nation is comprised of various ethnic groups—including Native Taiwanese tribal peoples, the Hakka and the Minnan who crossed the black waters four hundred years ago, the so-called "Mainlanders" who migrated from China to Taiwan around 1949 and their descendants, as well as foreign laborers of all nationalities—ethnic heterogeneity is an undeniable fact of the everyday existence in Taiwan. One of the most important political issues for Taiwanese society today is how to contend with this social heterogeneity. Hence, the multiethnic stratification of Taiwan makes the study of multicultural American literature highly relevant to the local sociopolitical reality. Moreover, because of the particular Asian connection, Asian American studies, especially the study of Chinese American literature, is by far the most developed subfield within this multiethnic and multicultural turn. When it comes to designing a syllabus for an Asian American literature course, therefore, Taiwanese academics tend to include more Chinese American texts than those by authors of other Asian ethnicities.

In terms of pedagogy, what Taiwanese students need most in an introductory course to Asian American literature are the proper historical contexts of the variegated ethnic texts. While monographs on Asian American history are naturally the most direct resources of historical information, I would argue that literary representations of specific ethnic contexts can be more intellectually inspiring and emotionally engaging. In this sense, Bone is indispensable to an Asian American literature course because of its emphasis on the importance of remembering Chinese American history. As Ng aptly puts it, "Remembering the past gives power to the present." Despite the fact that the plot of Bone centers upon a San Francisco Chinatown family, the scope of the narrative nevertheless goes beyond the confines of a family trauma and becomes a story about a unique urban space, San Francisco Chinatown, and Chinese America. One of the major themes in the novel is the representation of San Francisco Chinatown as a space that is intimately connected with the memory of its residents. Thus, while describing her novel to her parents who cannot read English, Ng openly admits that in writing Bone she is paying homage to...