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In a landmark essay, “Against the Lures of Diaspora,” Rey Chow demands self-reflexivity from critics working on Chinese cultural material and asks that diasporic critics make clear their self-interested positioning vis-à-vis China. The essay concludes with a warning that: Any attempt to deal with “women” or the “oppressed classes” in the “third world” that does not at the same time come to terms with the historical conditions of its own articulation is bound to repeat the exploitativeness that used to and still characterizes most “exchanges” between “West” and “East.” Such attempts will also be expediently assimilated within the plenitude of the hegemonic establishment, with all the rewards that that entails. No one can do without some such rewards. What one can do without is the illusion that, through privileged speech, one is helping to save the wretched of the earth. (119) The diasporic critic may be tempted to conflate her position with those in China and speak from a minoritized position, but this tendency overlooks the very significant symbolic and material differences between those located overseas and those in China. Chow urges diasporic critics to be conscious of the relative privilege they possess and the hegemonic positions they occupy, and underlines the need for this cultural capital to be used responsibly: “not merely to speak as exotic minors, but to fight the crippling effects of Western imperialism and Chinese paternalism at once” (114). Chow’s castigating comments about diasporic critics may seem like an odd place to begin an essay about trickster figures, but her urging of intellectuals to take seriously their ethical responsibilities is one that I want to try to 289 christine kim Diasporic Violences, Uneasy Friendships, and The Kappa Child heed in this paper. At the same time, Chow’s reminder that those of us linked to the Asian diaspora must be conscious of “the historical conditions” of our articulations is also a useful way to enter into a conversation about the relations between diasporic and First Nations communities in Canada. After hearing Hiromi Goto give a reading from The Kappa Child in my first-year English course, Deanna Reder approached me with the idea of writing a paper for this collection of essays on the trickster, and it was one that, I admit, simultaneously intrigued and alarmed me. The question of how to write a contribution about the kappa, a creature from Japanese folklore, for a collection largely about Indigenous tricksters forced me to begin seriously considering the ethical and political responsibilities of Asian diasporic communities in Canada, and, more specifically, those responsibilities towards First Nations communities. In the end, I agreed, in part because Deanna’s enthusiasm for this project was contagious, but also because the editors’ goal of revisiting previous trickster representations that “conceal the colonial violence that has been enacted upon First Nations cultures, even in claiming to draw attention to these cultures” (their “call for papers”) is clearly an important one. And because I believe that Goto’s novel—in its writing about the encounters between the unnamed narrator, a Nisei or second-generation Japanese Canadian , with a kappa—draws attention to issues about history, the occupation of land, and the nature of knowledge, all of which are pertinent to this consideration of imperial damage and tricksters. Forced Occupations, Unwilling Migrations For fairly self-evident reasons, diasporic studies often demonstrate a preoccupation with issues of movement, migration, and (dis)location. Goto’s novel returns us to this familiar ground but asks that it be tread with a somewhat different set of destinations in mind. Early on in the novel, the narrator makes the trek back to her parents’ home, somewhere vaguely southeast of Lethbridge, Alberta, for Easter. The return to her childhood, enacted literally through the drive back from Calgary, is replayed symbolically during the disastrous holiday dinner. When the narrator’s father erupts in a fit of rage over a minor mishap, the responses of the four sisters and their mother make it clear that the father is not the only one trapped in a “pattern so ingrained he can’t stop” (27). The narrator’s three sisters respond by fleeing the scene and bursting into angry tears, the mother by passively enduring the spectacle and the narrator by cleaning up the remnants of the dinner her mother toiled to prepare while thinking to herself that, although the girls have now grown into adulthood, their return to their parents’ house com290 telling stories across lines [18.223.196...

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