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1 Chapter 1 Relatives and Histories Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine. —Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior Years away our grandchildren will come here saying, This room is where I began. And returning to Boston, Paris or Portland, they won’t know how bewildered I was, how alone. They’ll think I felt American. I was always at home. —David Mura, “Nantucket Honeymoon,” After We Lost Our Way Family memoirs, also called “multigenerational” or “intergenerational auto/ biographies”, have become ubiquitous in ethnic writing in the United States. Since Alex Haley’s dramatic (albeit controversial) Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), ethnic writers have increasingly used family stories to engage the history of immigration, adaptation, and presence in American society . Carole Ione’s Pride of Family: Four Generations of AmericanWomen of Color (2004), Andrea Simon’s Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (2002), Louise DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), Lalita Tademy’s mirroring Cane River (2001) and Red River (2007), and Victor Villaseñor’s Rain of Gold (1992) and Thirteen Senses (2002) are only a few among numerous texts that illustrate a particular relevance or interest in this form of life writing. The 1991 publication of Jung Chang’s bestselling Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China established a paradigm for the family memoir of the Asian diaspora, as her engagement with three generations of women in her family reenacted the history of China in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for millions of readers. Since then, many Asian immigrant writers have also turned to family stories as a source of personal, historical, and community understanding. In the United States, Canada, and Britain, for example, narratives such as Denise Chong’s The Concubine ’s Children (1994), Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain (1995), Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill (1996), Bruce Edward Hall’s Tea that Burns (1998), May-lee 2 Chapter 1 and Winberg Chai’s The Girl from Purple Mountain (2001), Helen Tse’s Sweet Mandarin (2007), or films such as Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury’s Halving the Bones (1995), Linda Ohama’s Obaachan’s Garden (2001), and Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003) have expanded the ways family memories may be harnessed as historical narrative that promotes collective memory and builds community.1 Interestingly, though most of these family memoirs are written in prose, David Mura’s excellent After We Lost Our Way (1989) demonstrates the validity of poetry for this kind of life writing. The term “family memoir” has been used to describe a specific articulation of what scholars call the “relational model” of life writing. Paul John Eakin, in How Our Lives Become Stories (1999), defines the most common form of what he calls the “relational life” as those autobiographies “that feature the decisive impact on the autobiographer of either (1) an entire social environment (a particular kind of family, or a community and its social institutions —schools, churches, and so forth) or (2) key other individuals, usually family members, especially parents” (69). The history of Asian American life writing, because of the imperative to explain or understand immigrant cultures (for oneself and mainstream America), very often privileges the intersection of generational and cultural issues, focusing very specifically on family stories. Though all life writing is arguably relational, many Asian American autobiographies focus explicitly on individual processes of understanding identity. In these cases, though the authors also engage family stories, the narrative centers on an introspective psychological journey—often accompanied by a physical journey to the forebears’ homeland, as in, for example, David Mura’s Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991), Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey (1992), and Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala (1999). A critical analysis of this model unveils particular structures in the auto/ biographical exercise, which I will describe briefly in order to distinguish the form I focus on in this study. I use the term “auto/biography” as Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms do in their introduction to the special issue of Canadian Literature (2002) on Canadian autobiographical writing to acknowledge the complexity of current work. They note that the slash in the term insists on “the broad continuum of life writing discourses that range from writing about the...

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