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I In addressing the recurring issue of identity formation, Stuart Hall speaks of the “four great decentrings in intellectual life and in Western thought that have helped to destabilize the question of identity” (Hall, “Ethnicity” 10). The first three of these “decentrings” are associated, respectively, with Marx’s location of the subject in relation to “a continuous dialectic or dialogic relationship” between the past and future, Freud’s location of the subject in relation to the unconscious, and Saussure’s location of the subject in relation to the differential function of language (11). Hall’s fourth decentring of identity concerns the critique of truth as an offshoot of “Western discourses of rationality” (12). Hall refers to the latter as “the great decentring of identity that is a consequence of the relativization of the Western world—of the discovery of other worlds, other people, other cultures, and other languages” (12). It is through the existence of the Other that the totalizing fantasies of western rationality is reduced to “another regime of truth” or “another particular form of knowledge” (12), deeply undermining the authority of western claim of a true self. While the cultural encounter with the Other relativizes the absolutism of the “old logic” of the western self, it also unveils the genealogy of power and knowledge internal to the “installation of Western rationality” (12). As evident in the critique of western rationalism from across different disciplines, the western self achieves its ascension to the One through its exclusion, expropriation, and assimilation of the Other. The genealogies of Chinese and other Asian Americans’ migration history and struggle for cultural representation, as made known by many Chinese and other Asian American historians and critics,1 offer such a material site that reveals how the Other—the Chinese and other Asian Americans—has 7 TranslatingandTransformingtheAmerican Dream: Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Gish Jen’s Typical American Weimin Tang 124 Weimin Tang historically been placed and replaced within the power-ridden logic of the selfOther binarism, and how this logic has been sustained, albeit in different guises, through changed phases of history. It is in consequence of such a dominant binary logic that Chinese American literary-cultural criticism, a substantial part of the Asian American academy originated in the pan-Asian American cultural nationalism of the early 1970s, has been entrenched in its material history of racialization and, as such, implicitly operates in complicity with the dominant self-Other discourse. Over the past few decades, debates within the arena of Chinese and Asian American literary-cultural studies have been implicitly governed by an underlying paradigm of anti-assimilation versus assimilation, which subscribes to a reductive dichotomous mechanism by repeatedly constructing an Other in the opposite.2 Within such a self-Other dialectic, Chineseness, namely, ethnic Chinese culture vis-à-vis mainstream American culture, constitutes an essentialized fixed entity either in the dominant discourse of both racial alienation and assimilation, or in Chinese and Asian American countercultural resistance to white supremacy and acculturative ideology. Shunning the implicitly dichotomous thinking, this chapter, by focusing on what have been largely denounced as the two assimilationist Bildungsromane, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) and Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991), brings to the fore an in- and outsider’s profound ambivalence that illuminates a full complexity of the cross-cultural Chinese American subject. Evoking the typical colonial “mimic man” that speaks of, as Homi Bhabha puts it, “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 86), as well as what Carol Jacobs calls the “monstrosity” of cultural translation (see Jacobs), my rereading of Wong’s and Jen’s texts teases out a divisive voicing underneath the apparent textual representation of full assimilation. This is the subtextual voicing of the cross-cultural Chinese American subject’s simultaneous in- and exclusion, hybridity, as well as an untranslatability that articulates a Chineseness both as a cultural and historical given, and as what Raymond Williams calls the “actively residual,” namely, “as an effective element of the present” as differentiated from the “archaic” that is “wholly recognised as an element of the past” (Williams 121–27). In terms of Williams’s concept of the “actively residual,” Chineseness, whilst indicating a cultural otherness alluding to Chinese Americans’ historical racialization, emerges as an active force within a cross-cultural and translational space, contributing to the at once shifting and merged double consciousness of the bicultural Chinese American subject. It is precisely...

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