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31 Chapter 3 Representing Asian Wars and Revolutions . . . I came to discover that the story of my family, and my grandmother, was not only what actually happened to them in China, but also how these events were later both remembered and repressed in America. —May-lee Chai, The Girl from Purple Mountain The narrative of Asian wars and revolutions in the twentieth century, which led to massive immigration to the United States, is the subtext of a significant number of Asian American family memoirs. Events of the midtwentieth century that have become part of our general knowledge of world history—the war in China and the Cultural Revolution, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, in particular—are the focus of the four texts I examine in this chapter: Pang-Mei Natasha Chang’s Bound Feet and Western Dress, May-lee and Winberg Chai’s The Girl from Purple Mountain, K. Connie Kang’s Home Was the Land of Morning Calm, and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow . I will discuss these texts highlighting how formal choices and strategies allow them to mediate history. These auto/biographies, which focus on events that have particular resonance (generally negative ones) in the American public consciousness, clearly address the ways wars and revolutions in Asia might be rearticulated. By focusing on the personal in the midst of the public, they re-imagine events of Asian history, giving the reading public more nuanced versions of the past. Moreover, these narratives stress the intersection of the individual with the collective, making important historical statements by presenting a plurality of perspectives on history. Conversely, they also emphasize individual stories behind received general history, inviting readers to consider how personal narratives elucidate public histories. Double-Voiced Narratives and the History of China in the Twentieth Century A brief historical note might help contextualize the family memoirs and demonstrate the authors’ determination to locate family stories within the narratives of historical events. Indeed, most of the auto/biographers in this book 32 Chapter 3 include chronologies, maps, photographs, or family trees to orient the reader, foregrounding their narrative’s referentiality. The history of China in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries serves as the context for the family narratives by Pang-Mei Chang and May-lee and Winberg Chai. The most important frame events include the end of the Manchu/Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and the birth of the Republic of China in 1911; World War I (1914–1918); the warlord era, which divided China among competing military cliques from 1916 to 1928 and which ended with the fall of the Nationalist government in several vital mainland regions; the unification of China with Chiang Kaishek ’s nationalist Koumintang in 1928 and the beginning of Mao Zedong’s Communist guerrilla movement in southeastern China; the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the establishment of the last Chinese emperor, Pu Yi, in 1931; the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and the Rape of Nanking in 1937, which led to the Communist-Koumintang alliance, until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945, a part of World War II; Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and Chiang Kai-shek’s fleeing to Taiwan to establish the Republic of China in 1949; the Koumintang-Communist civil war (1949–1950); and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The political changes in China were accompanied by important shifts in mindset and culture. The overthrow of the Qing dynasty marked the end of thousands of years of authoritative imperial rule and theoretically introduced an era inspired by democratic ideals. However, China was a fragmented nation dominated by military cliques that were more concerned with their own political power and private armies than national interests. The thirty-seven-year Republic of China thus failed because of internal divisions, the lack of democratic consciousness of most parts of the ruling class, and external pressure from the Japanese forces. One of the most important events of this period, the May Fourth Movement, consisted of intellectuals clamoring for change: Confucianism was denounced as the cause of China’s backwardness compared to the West; writers looked to Western artistic forms and themes for inspiration and began using modern rather than classical Chinese; democratic parties and the Communist Party were founded; and cities began reflecting the culture of the West in their tastes for music, fashion, and mores. For the Chinese, this period implied a radical rethinking and, in many cases, a rejection of tradition , as Western forms...

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