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140 Chapter 7 We’re Everywhere Asian Diasporic Transnational Families And that magical opportunity of entering another life is what really sets us thinking about our own. —Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks This examination of the family narratives of Asian diasporic subjects gives us a sociohistorical portrait of an increasingly dynamic phenomenon. These stories explain particular histories by juxtaposing public events with private experiences, to reveal the ways families construct (or reconstruct) identity within the experience of diaspora. Giving a sense of cohesion and closure to the lives of grandparents and parents can establish a sense of authority and meaning to the writer’s own life story. Access to these stories also allows readers to understand the development of particular ethnic communities, as the narratives support the production of a history and culture for the community . Writers of family memoirs, conscious of the implications of their project , deliberately promote these texts as community artifacts in the context of developing ethnic discourse. The texts show us how writers examine their own lives and work through their engagement with their forebears’ lives: the story of the family also becomes the story of the writer coming to being. In all these texts, Gudmundsd óttir notes, “prominent in some, but latent in others, there is a tension between the attempt to portray a life objectively and the attempt to convey the personal significance of the events for the writers” (193). The motivations that inspire subjects of the diaspora to write about their families—a sense of debt to that family, a need to remember a history in danger of obliteration, the obligation to bring certain issues to the public sphere, and the desire to contribute to collective memory—might arguably also move others to write about family memoirs. Exploring the forms and possibilities of the family memoir has allowed me to understand the transnational and transcultural character of my own family, a process, I realize, that has been part of my own academic choices from the very beginning. I noted in the introduction to this study that We’re Everywhere 141 this project connects with my earlier theoretical concern with the ways Asian Americans revise established literary genres to provide their communities with narratives that serve cultural or collective memory. But the project has become a bridge to my next concern: exploring the autobiographical nature of professional commitment. The historian E. H. Carr suggested that, when taking up a work of history , we must “study the historian before [we] begin to study the facts”, to examine the perspective or position—the “bees he has in his bonnet”—from which scholarship develops (17–18). This engagement with Asian diasporic family memoirs has made me consider the links between the kind of scholarship I have focused on and my position with respect to my own family history. If, as Paul Valery states, “there is no theory that is not in fact a carefully concealed part of the theorist’s own life story” (quoted in Klinkowitz 118), then I have to admit to being guilty as charged, though I do know I was ignorant of what was really happening and what I was really doing until very much into the project. Exploring the ways other subjects of the Asian diaspora articulate their family’s lives has allowed me to think critically about my own family and our position with respect to each other, to the country we grew up in, the countries some of us have immigrated to, and to the next generation. The Philippines is the place where people from different countries became my family. On my father’s side, my American great-grandfather, Ira Davis, who was born in Rogersville, Missouri, in 1882, came to the Philippines as a soldier in 1902. Here is my cousin Betsy’s version of his story: Ira Davis the father was quite a charming man, but also quite the cad. He was the black sheep of the Davis boys, always in trouble with the parents, and at the end of the day he basically ran away from home and joined the Army and that is how he wound up in the Philippines. He was first stationed in Mindanao, at Camp del Pilar, and then eventually came north and wound up stationed north, near Bautista, which is where he met Lola. May he rest in peace, the man was a gambler and a womanizer all his life, and at the end of the day, when Lola got fed up...

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