Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia P. Chu (review)

Patricia P. Chu advances the transnational trend of Asian American studies in her new book Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return, motivated by the search for her family history and curiosity toward a place for which she has ambivalent feelings of both affinity and estrangement. Taking cross-genre and cross-temporal personal stories narrated by Asian North American authors as the entry point, Chu’s study of the narratives of return ties the personal to the historical and the political, breaking the boundaries of time and space, culture and genre. Chu’s book is in tune with the third phase of the concurrently prevailing paradigms of Asian American literary history that King-Kok Cheung outlines in her recent book Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form (2016). Chu pushes the paradigm of “Reclaiming the Hyphen” further to not only foreground a multilingual approach but also attend to the symbolic and literal return of Asian North Americans to their homelands and to their reconciliation with the haunting past that is rife with problems that have only been postponed or even aggravated by voluntary and forced migration.

Drawing on the work of Anne Anlin Cheng, David L. Eng, and Shinhee Han, Chu builds on theories of “racial melancholia,” which apply Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) to Asian American psychology and register the migrants’ losses that cannot be fully mourned because of the exclusion and marginalization experienced in the host society. She also engages with theorizations of “countermemory” and “postmemory” by critics such as George Lipsitz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Rocío G. Davis, and Marianne Hirsch, and Asian cultural studies scholar Chen Kuan-hsing’s work on decolonization and deimperialization. In doing so, Chu elaborates on different kinds of return narratives—symbolic return, the narrative of transpacific family, and the narrative of global subjectivity—and various kinds of migration-related melancholia, including racial melancholia, diasporic melancholia, postcolonial melancholia, and repatriate melancholia. Chu affirms authorial agency in life writing and novels by reading texts through the lens of “trauma therapy.” She argues that in narrating the past, the authors “transform it from an unspeakable specter to a usable countermemory” that is selective, imaginative, and oppositional (40).

Chu’s study begins by analyzing “symbolic returns”—first-time returnees’ visits to their ancestral homelands out of cultural curiosity—in the personal stories of Josephine M. T. Khu’s anthology Cultural Curiosity: Thirteen Stories about the Search for Chinese Roots (2001). Chu delineates a globalized trend in both Asian American studies and Chinese studies examining different travel directions between immigrants and their native-born descendants. She points out that as the transnational turn in Asian American studies decenters the US continent, Chinese studies scholar Tu Wei-ming conceptualizes a “cultural China” that unites the three “symbolic universes”—the first being mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore; the second being the Chinese diaspora; and the third being scholars and intellectuals who observe and study China—via Chinese civilization (47). While immigrants left their homelands searching for material gain, their native-born descendants look back to the ancestral homelands to reclaim the “cultural and emotional capital” they are deprived of by migration and incomplete assimilation to the host country’s mainstream society (55). Chu recognizes that in Khu’s collection, the claiming of cultural roots appears to assuage racial melancholia but also requires “intense cultural labor” for diasporic Chinese to enter into Tu’s cultural China (62). However, because of her focus on the narratives of return, Chu overlooks the tendency for cultural exceptionalism in Tu’s claim. While Tu’s “symbolic universes” decenter the mainland’s monopoly on culture, he nonetheless sketches the contours of an enormous “imagined community” bound by an open signifier that is Chinese civilization. Chu’s focus on returning narratives, along with Tu...