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Ji-Li Jiang spoke about composing Red Scarf Girl, a memoir of her childhood during the Cultural Revolution. Photos by Brian Kluepfel.
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Chinese Literature Encircles the Globe
By Brian Kluepfel
Special to AsianWeek
Chinese people have gone to every corner of the globe, and wherever they’ve gone they have used the power of the pen to keep their culture alive and record new experiences. Whether in their own language or that of their adopted lands, writers of Chinese ancestry continue to maintain a stunning body of literature.
In a noble attempt to encapsulate this literary phenomenon, UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies sponsored the three-day International Conference on the Literatures of the Chinese Diaspora. More than 20 panel discussions of noted authors and academics debated ideas, in Chinese and English, over the Thanksgiving weekend at San Francisco’s Miyako Hotel.
The conference was opened by Ethnic Studies chair Ling-chi Wang, who also coordinated a previous conference on the Chinese diaspora in Havana, Cuba. Wang noted, however, that the San Francisco conference was groundbreaking in being the first event to focus solely on the literature of authors of Chinese descent.
One of the more interesting panel discussions featured graduate students addressing the problem of “orientalism” in the portrayal of Chinese immigrants, by both Chinese authors and outsiders. Suocai Su of the University of Indiana was particularly critical of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, which he said played to the more base Western stereotypes of Chinese as mystical and foreign. He called such work “offending and painful,” although Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim of UC Santa Barbara pointed out that Kingston’s later work, in her opinion, was far more progressive.
“The issue of all ethnic writers is to appeal to the mainstream but be true to the community you come from,” said Su. “You deal with the ethnic experience but find something more general and universal.” He felt that Amy Tan had better accomplished this task in her work.
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Fiona Cheong talked about her initial fears of breaking English grammar rules in her first novel, The Scent of the Gods.
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Minh-Ha Pham of UC Berkeley added some spice to the panel with her observations about Jackie Chan’s film, Rush Hour, and the new trend toward “multiculturalism” in Hollywood. She noted that the film reinforced common stereotypes of Asians as fast-learning people who are quick and good with their hands (New Line Cinema’s marketing materials for the film called it the meeting of “the fastest hands in the East” with “the biggest mouth in the West”).
In one scene, Chan says to Tucker, “I’m not responsible for your assumptions.” That line, said Pham, speaks for all Asian Pacific Americans in their dealings with “mainstream” America.
Cinema was also the topic of a Friday panel on the works of contemporary filmmakers James Lee, Mina Shum and Ann Hui. Berkeley documentarian Loni Ding also showed parts of several of her works about the APA experience, including Canton Army in the High Sierras: America’s First Transcontinental Railroad.
Other sessions focused solely on Chinese poets, Canadian-Chinese literature, Chinese-Japanese literature and Chinese writers in Latin America.
The second afternoon featured a roundtable discussion on English-language writers in the diaspora. Authors from Indonesia, Taiwan and even San Francisco weighed in on the task of translating their stories to another idiom.
Ji-Li Jiang, who now resides in Emeryville, Calif., talked about the difficulties of not only writing in a different language, but for a different culture. She admitted that her English was very poor when she wrote Red Scarf Girl, a memoir of her childhood during the Cultural Revolution, and she was very afraid to appear in public promotional appearances. Although she adapted to public speaking, she fought a different battle when publishing a version of the traditional Monkey King story for American children. Jiang had to remove or modify references to killing, although she noted “we don’t have school shootings in China.” She had to rename “wine” as “laughing liquid.”
“It’s hard to pass down stories to people of different blood,” said Jiang. The editor demanded so many changes, she said, “that the Monkey King [he wanted] would have been American, not Chinese.” After battling all the way, the story was serialized in over 100 newspapers last May, and is now available in book form as The Magical Monkey King: Mischief in Heaven.
Singapore-born Fiona Cheong talked about her initial fears of breaking English grammar rules in her first novel, The Scent of the Gods. Born to a family that speaks some Malay and hardly any Mandarin, she’s now come to terms with what she calls “Singlish” and said, “this time I tried to work with that and put in on the page.”
Dewi Anggraeni has also had to deal with three layers of experience in her work. Born in Indonesia and now working in Australia, she joked, “I’m a professional minority.” She said she never felt comfortable writing of the Chinese experience, “because I never felt exclusively Chinese.” Denied a visa to visit China, she questioned, “how can I call China my locality when I’ve never been there?”
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Panelist Laurence Yep talked about the commonality of African American and Chinese children in the Western Addition of San Francisco.
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A recent visit to Malaca’s Chinese community enabled Anggraeni to “find my own Chinese-ness,” she said. Visual touchstones such as homes and furniture awakened memories of her grandparents, and her forthcoming novel, Snake, is her first to deal with the Chinese community. Panelists Laurence Yep and Ruthanne Lum McCunn write historical fiction from opposite sides of the looking glass: Yep explores seven generations of Chinese Americans in California, while McCunn, who was raised in Hong Kong by her Chinese mother, plumbs her childhood memories of local women telling her stories. “The writing life is still in those stories I listened to, which I find as powerful at age 56 as I did at age six,” said McCunn. Yep, born in the rough-and-tumble Western Addition of San Francisco, talked about the commonality of African Americans and Chinese children from the neighborhood, “like flower seeds trapped beneath rock, trying to find the sunlight.”
The final morning of the conference included a discussion on the Internet phenomenon, and how it connected Chinese writers in a global context — a fitting end for a meeting that certified the breadth and depth of Chinese literature around the world.
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