Relative Histories

Front matter

Relative Histories

MEDIATING HISTORY IN

ASIAN AMERICAN FAMILY MEMOIRS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Relatives and Histories

Family Memoirs in the Context of Auto/ biographical Writing: Mediating History, Promoting Collective Memory

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 Family Memoirs in the Context of Auto/biographical Writing Mediating History, Promoting Collective Memory

“So, why are you calling this a me-moir?” Ken asks when I sit him down to read pages, still warm from the printer, in which my versions of events often mixes with the voices of others in my family: “It’s a we-moir.”

—Kirin Narayan, My Family and Other Saints n his book, Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur explains that identity is partly bound up in identification with significant others, which is the reason why, especially in autobiographies, writing the self implies writing the other. This idea resounds with one of the key insights in autobiography theory in the 1990s, namely that identity—for both men and women—‘is essentially relational, formed and defined in relation to others. As Laura Marcus points out, “Recounting one’s own life almost inevitably entails writing the life of an other or others; writing the life of another must surely entail the biographer’s identifications with his or her subject, whether these are made explicit or not” (274). Relational approaches to life writing complicate notions of self-representation by privileging the intersubjective rather than the merely individual. This perspective challenges the uncritical notion of the autonomous self—the idea that one alone defines and creates him/herself—traditional to Western theories of life writing. And indeed, the proliferation of family memoirs only proves this point. The Asian American challenge to the pervasive Western notion of the individual as the prime subject of autobiography began with Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior (1975), which illustrates how the first person in autobiography is, as Eakin argues, “truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation,” as it addresses “the extent to which the self is defined by—and lives in terms of—its relations with others” (How Our Lives 43). Several recent critical studies on autobiography have emphasized this new discernment in inscribing the self-in-relation, noting how the relational configuration of autobiography also controls the shape of the text, leading to originative formal choices. The writing subject therefore views and inscribes his or her story from the prism of intersecting lives. Susanna Egan, defining her eponymous operative term, “mirror talk”, argues that this process begins “as the encounter of two lives in which the biographer is also an autobiographer. Very commonly, the (auto)biographer is the child or partner of the biographical subject, a relationship in which (auto)biographical identity is significantly shaped by the processes of exploratory mirroring” (7). These perspectives require us to revise our perceptions about identity and strategies of self-representation on diverse levels, as well as the possibilities of signifying for the writer of the autobiography, specifically the formal remembering and reimagining of intersecting lives.

Eakin considers the most common form of the relational life as “the self’s story viewed through the lens of its relation with some key other person, sometimes a sibling, friend, or lover; but most often a parent—we might call such an individual the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational autobiographer” (How Our Lives 86). In some cases, the writer presents the biography of the other as part of his or her own life-writing exercise, occasionally to the point of writing the “autobiography” of that other. When this happens, the narrator's authority must be established for rhetorical reasons, based primarily on the validity of the autobiographical pact. We also need to consider the role of the writer in relation to that of the subject. In the relational lives I consider here, “the story of the self is not ancillary to the story of the other, although its primacy may be partly concealed by the fact that it is constructed through the story told ofand by someone else. Because identity is conceived as relational in these cases, these narratives defy the boundaries we try to establish between genres, for they are autobiographies that offer not only the autobiography of the self but the biography and the autobiography of the other” (Eakin, How Our Lives 58).

Relational life writing challenges the fundamental paradigm of the unified self of traditional autobiography, as well as the concept of monologic representation. Philippe Lejeune suggests that “a /ife (that is, a written and published story of a life) is always the product of a transaction between different postures” (197). In a sense, this form of autobiographical inscription corresponds to a logical reality, as Michael Jackson explains, “Life stories emerge in the course of intersubjective life, and intersubjectivity is a site of conflicting wills and intentions. Accordingly, the life stories that individuals bring to a relationship are metamorphosed in the course of that relationship. They are thus, in a very real sense, authored not by autonomous subjects but by the dynamics of intersubjectivity” (23). Indeed, the innovations these auto/biographical texts offer stem precisely from the unique tension created by the performance of intersubjectivity. One of the constitutive thematic/textual markers of this life-writing exercise involves an emphasis on the connection between biography and autobiography, locating the narrating subject most often in the context of a community—family or ethnic group. This concern operates on a formal level as well, proposing a renewed aesthetic that revises the notion of the voice of the narrator, who writes with an individual voice that connects to a collective voice.

The relational model of auto/biographical identity, I argue, functions on two levels in family memoirs: first, within the text itself, as the author draws upon the stories of family members to complete her own, and, second, because these texts very consciously interpellate an audience. Asian American family memoirs manifestly present the individual author's self as discursively constituted, as issues of literary traditions, immigrant history, identity politics, and cultural contingencies participate in the construction of the text. With this proposal, I consciously challenge Georges Gusdorf’s claim that a collective or community-oriented subject, with an “unconsciousness of personality, characteristic of primitive societies” cannot produce “autobiography” (30). Indeed, Gusdorf’s model of autobiography privileges a noncontextual, nonrelational paradigm of individualism that posits a problematic binary between relationality and autonomy. The form of the family memoir hinges on the interrelation of the individual and the family stories that surround the writer, the dynamic between connectedness and autonomy serving as a crucial point in the development of textual identity. Generally written by one person, the stories that make up the text are linked to each other, evidencing both an inter- and intragenerational collective voice that connects with readers in important ways.

Family memoirs, as relational texts, foreground the collective nature of memory. In Asian American texts, where a negotiation with structures of power often guides the representational impulse, the engagement with the stories of past lives allows us to view changing perspectives on issues that govern identity politics. The voices elicited in these texts are often posited as mirroring, highlighting the intersubjective, and postulating the advantages of multiple-voicing. When the life writer goes a step further and appropriates not only the story but the voice of proximate others, the implications for life writing multiply. For example, in Still Life with Rice Helie Lee speaks in her grandmother's voice to claim a past she had previously refused to acknowledge. Lee’s family memoir centers particularly on a process of intersubjective identification, where mutual recognition becomes necessary; Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, in Halving the Bones, also speaks in her grandmother’s voice as she struggles to connect with the relatives she had never really known; Natasha Chang retells her great-aunt’s story in the form of a dialogue with herself. As Jessica Benjamin explains, “The idea of mutual recognition... implies that we actually have a need to recognize the other as a separate person who is like us yet distinct” (quoted in Egan 8). The notion of dialogue between generations lies at the heart of Lee’s project in Still Life with Rice as she manipulates the traditional first-person voice of autobiography to address precisely that gap in knowledge. As Jennifer George-Palilonis notes, Lee “stretches the boundaries of the concept of interiority by exploring her own sense of self through the telling of the story of her grandmother’s life” (206). Moreover, this is the only family memoir I have found that is narrated by a character of the first generation who narrates “forward” to her descendants, rather than the traditional auto/biography, which features a character looking back at her forebears. This experimental configuration—a “renegotiation of retrospectivity” (George-Palilonis 207)—invites us to rethink the notion of implied readership within the paradigms of intergenerational subjectivity that Lee sets out to explore.’

Here issues of connectedness and autonomy arise: Asian American family memoirs generally privilege interconnectedness as forms of developing autonomous selfhood, and the figures of the parents and grandparents of the writer are most often presented as crucial to the formation of the narrating self. We can establish an interesting connection between the form of the text—in this case, the family memoir, which differs from the individualistic manner of traditional autobiography—and the relational configuration of the identity unveiled. David Parker refers to this process as a “dialogic or interlocutive ethics of recognition” as opposed to an “individualistic ethics of authenticity” typified by traditional Western forms of autobiography. As he explains, “In the relational narrative there is often an implication that the forebears embody specific values that have been unrecognized or misrecognized by the dominant narratives of the culture. These forebears have tended to slip through the interstices of the available conventional languages, and sometimes the writer’s work, even life’s work, can be seen as an attempt to find an adequate language with which to articulate what distinctively makes them, and part of the writers themselves, worthy for recognition” (“Narratives of Autonomy” 142).

Many of these family memoirs appear to be driven by a series of overlapping motivations based primarily on what Parker calls “a complex sense of moral obligation” to tell the stories that will challenge uncritical views on ethnic persons and communities and which include: (1) the consciousness that the stories of one’s relatives are constitutive of one’s own story, that “the memories of these forebears in a sense are me, their languages partly constitute my speaking position” (“Narratives of Autonomy” 150). These memoirs generally highlight the acknowledgment of a cultural debt to family as they explore the meanings that the family history might have for the writer’s present family or community. As the auto/biographer examines his or her own memory in relation to that of others, identity is reconfigured. This process activates a chain of associations that enables the writer (and, I would argue, the reader) to engage the present in renewed ways; (2) a recognition of the power of personal narratives inserted in the public forum to engage historical and cultural issues, in order to challenge dominant mainstream versions that have often hidden, misrepresented, or invalidated these stories. It also stresses how, to an important extent, individual identity is constituted in relation to family and national history. Further, we can suggest that these texts offer “new models not only for writing history but also for thinking about the listening strategies we use to process stories from the past” (Heble 27); (3) a commitment to preserve these stories from disappearing and provide ethnic communities with potentially empowering narratives. In a sense, these motivations function simultaneously on the personal and collective level. So, though the auto/ biographical act is primarily personal, many forms of auto/biographical writing—the family memoir among them—“[exist] for [their] public interpretive uses, as part of a general and perpetual conversation about life possibilities....In any case, the ‘publicness’ of autobiography constitutes something like an opportunity for an ever-renewable ‘conversation’ about conceivable lives” (Bruner 41).

Many Asian American writers make untold family or community stories the crux of their auto/biographical projects. Narratives about the Japanese American internment, for example, highlight not only the fact of the internment and the family’s particular experience of it, but, crucially, also engage how this memory was remembered (or concealed) and passed on (or silenced), as Lise Yasui illustrates in A Family Gathering. There is often a tension between the family’s obsession with hiding stories about the past, for example, to preserve the family’s immigration status (as in stories about the Chinese in America, such as Kingston’s China Men or Hall’s Tea That Burns) or idealize one’s forebears (well illustrated by the dialogue between May-lee and Winberg Chai in The Girl from Purple Mountain) and the contemporary writer's need to know the truth and set the record straight. Much of the interest in these texts lies precisely in the opposition between the natural prudence that seeks to preserve family members’ honor and the desire to engage one’s history honestly and in depth.

At this point, we should consider the process of the construction of the family memoir, agendas for which are determined by the ideas about identity, family traditions, and history that shape one’s cultural perspective, as well as community positions in society. Manuela Costantino and Susanna Egan’s work on family stories gives us a clear description of this process.

The auto/biographer who situates herself as storyteller in the midst of past and future generations is both embedding herself in her extended family and asking questions about her own sense of identity. Her auto/biographical toolkit consists of inherited stories, her own memories, an older generation that can answer questions, and family documents and photographs. She assembles these different elements into a family memoir that shapes her life and identity in connection to the lives and identities of her relatives. Her methodology is unusual in that she has a vested interest in certain kinds of truths, in particular the discoveries or explanations that validate her childhood understanding of her parents and grandparents and that give her children some engagement with and pride in their old-world inheritance. Her approach to this combination of stories and documentary information is therefore both curious and well-informed, syncretic and predetermined. (97)

A particularly interesting point in our examination of the manner in which this form of memoir is constructed centers on the relationship between the role of memory and the use of historical research. Though the romantic notion insists that life writing begins with remembering and that the individual writer contains within him or herself the memories necessary to create autobiography, in the case of family memoirs, one’s personal memories are patently insufficient. More importantly, even though many writers begin their auto/biography based on remembered stories from grandparents or other relatives, individual memory soon proves inadequate for the project. Indeed, in most cases, the writing of family memoirs requires more investigative research than recollections in solitude. Official documents, letters, photographs, newspapers, archival film footage, mementoes, and interviews with surviving relatives help complete and validate (or challenge) personal memory. This leads to interesting questions regarding narrative truth for, as we know, “official”

documents may be as unreliable as memory. Yet we may argue that one of the most fascinating dynamics of the juxtaposition between private stories and public records might be their mutually challenging nature: the private version may contradict official stories or unveil hidden histories; the documents might likewise reveal family secrets and complicate remembered versions. Indeed, the historian F. R. Ankersmit argues in his article, “The Reality Effect in the Writing of History” (1989), that since history is accessible only through texts—including photographs, film, and so on—and memory, “the reality of the past is an effect caused by a tension in and between historical texts” (18). Specifically, we note a tension between “notation’—the amalgam of detailed information that constitutes the historical past—and “prediction”—the historiographical construction of meaning from notation (Ankersmit 19). The often contradictory or complementary evidence obliges the author to continually revisit the narrative, revising the private and public records of the past.

Indeed, though we acknowledge that private stories affect the transmission of official records, the fact is that writers of family memoirs are often required to revise received personal stories to, as the case may be, accommodate information that had been withheld by the storyteller or consider alternative versions of a founding event. Several Asian American family memoirists find that they have to choose between remembered versions or truth based on fact. This dilemma is most vividly illustrated in the contrasting perspectives that May-lee and Winberg Chai had on the kind of narrative they were working on. In her memoir Hapa Girl (2007), written several years after The Girl from Purple Mountain was published, May-lee describes the process in this manner: “He had envisioned it as heroic, triumphant, how Nai-nai had saved the family during World War II in China; but I added conflict, the family fights, the bitterness that lingered long after the war had ended, all the elements that I had been taught in college make literature great, the things that make us human. My father couldn’t fathom what I was trying to do. “You're a negative person, he concluded” (158). Kingston’s multiple versions of history, Yasui’s need to believe her memories, and Fleming’s numerous graphic renderings of Long Tack Sam’s childhood are further examples of the ways family auto/biographers negotiate with their material as they articulate the stories.

Though historical documents may have been the result of biases or faulty information, we know that memory is also susceptible to fictionalization. The trope of “countermemory”—interrogating “the gaps that always exist between what is told and the telling of it” (Holquist xxviii) —functions in multilayered ways here, to resist the prejudices, erasures, limited perspectives, or inventions typical of official versions of the past. A narrator in one of these auto/ biographies functions almost as a builder who, according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, takes up “bits and pieces of the identities and narrative forms available and, by disjoining and joining them in excessive ways, creates a history of the subject at a precise point in time and space” (“Introduction” 14). Smith and Watson note that this kind of narrator can evaluate as well as interpret the past, creating a “countermemory” that “reframel[s] the present by bringing it into a new alignment of meaning with the past” (“Introduction” 14). George Lipsitz defines the term as a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story. Counter-memory looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives. But unlike myths that seek to detach events and actions from the fabric of any larger history, counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past. (212-213)

This trope obliges us to reframe the narratives of history attending to our communities’ developing self-understanding and engagement with excluded historical memory. By giving us new perspectives about the past, these texts resist the prejudices, erasures, limited perspectives, or inventions typical of official versions of the past. By privileging this trope, the writers create a structural tension between documentary evidence and memory. Nonetheless, though the process of collecting information may appear to give the account more credibility or authenticity because the writers are thus authorized as “responsible recipients and interpreters”, Costantino and Egan assert that “authority comes to rest where autobiography, and not history, places it—in the personal” (100).

Ultimately, these authors seek to represent a truth that lies beyond documentary evidence, although they need the documentary evidence to verify particular experiences. The kind of memory work involved in these family memoirs illustrates what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”, “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (22). Significantly, her term also signals the nature of this kind of memory, constitutive of family memoirs: postmemory becomes “a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (22). Indeed, this form of memory is characteristic of ethnic cultures where issues of heritage operate in the present to develop ethnic communities. We can also discern the process by which various groups use these forms of memory to adapt personal and national origins to changing political and transnational paradigms.

Interestingly, many of these writers, who Roger Porter calls “sleuths of selfhood”, persons who track their past using external sources, function as detectives who gather evidence and sift through clues for the real stories (100-101). Eakin’s notion of “the story of the story” (How Our Lives 59), the process of harnessing personal and collected or unearthed memories, actually structures many of these narratives, as with the Chais’ The Girl from Purple Mountain, Kamdar’s Motiba’s Tattoos, or Yasui’s A Family Gathering.‘ As Jacqueline Dowd Hall explains,

We bring to our writing the unfinished business of our own lives and times; moreover, the experience of travelling so long in the country of research becomes our past, for our stories grow from a process of remembering and forgetting our encounters with the relics, fragments, whispers of an always already-recollected time. In all these ways, we live both the history we have learned through reading and research and the history we have experienced and inherited, passed down through the groups with which we identify, sedimented in the body, and created through talk. (441)

The idea of a family memoirs process, structure, and information being supported by “official” documents leads us to consider the relationship between personal stories and narratives of nation. In the context of writing about the Asian diaspora, family narratives of loss of country often oblige the writer (and the reader) to negotiate the critical connections between family stories and the remembered nations. In all the texts I consider, the writers consciously or unconsciously use the family stories to reenact the narrative of the loss of the nation, immigration, and the shaping of ethnic communities. They evince a range of ways that show how historical events influence personal lives and how, conversely, the personal affects the historical. In this context, a discussion of these texts as historical mediation is imperative.

Family Memoirs as Historical Mediation

Critical discussions on the relation between autobiography and history— understood as the events of the past and the accounts of those events of the past—support my proposal to utilize family memoirs as forms of historical mediation. In the context of the fraught racialized politics in the United States, negotiating with historical memory has become both a cultural obsession and a powerful political weapon. Though we now generally agree about the use of memory (and the writing thereof) as a legitimate source of historical truth, we need to continue to examine the ways in which these historical mediations occur. Moreover, as Jacqueline Dowd Hall suggests, we need to explore “the phenomena that travel under the sign of ‘memory and history.’ First, personal memories (the chains of association that seem to come unbidden to the mind, rely on concrete images, and split and telescope time); second, social memories (the shared, informal, contested stories that simultaneously describe and act on our social world); third, history (the accounts we reconstruct from the documentary traces of an absent past); and, finally, political imagination (the hope for a different future that inspires and is inspired by the study of the past)” (442—443). These different phenomena function simultaneously in the family memoirs of writers of the Asian diaspora, giving the texts a Janus-faced perspective and complicating our notions of how previously discrete methodologies function together in changing situations.

The work of Karl Weintraub, Philippe Lejeune, Paul John Eakin, and Jeremy Popkin, among others, has engaged the ways in which auto/biographies serve to inform or enrich our readings of public experiences.’ From a literary perspective, Eakin, in Touching the World (1992), describes autobiography as more than “an imaginative coming-to-terms with history” because “it functions itself as the instrument of this negotiation” (144,139). These reflections authorize the use of autobiographical writing as interpretative frames for historical information, validating the methodology of life writing for historical discourse. In particular, Jerome Bruner’s reflections on the nature of autobiographical writing as historical mediation are useful for this discussion on Asian American family memoirs. Noting the development of the ideas that have validated autobiography as history, he discusses a series of discourses involved in the autobiographical act: first, he posits autobiography as “a discourse of witness: accounts of happenings in which one participated if only as an observer. These accounts are most often marked by the past tense, by verbs of direct experience such as see and /ear, and by declarative speech acts. Witness creates existential immediacy for both the writer and the reader” (45). When the auto/biographer is not herself the “witness” but is a relative of that witness, as is generally the case in family memoirs, the genre’s conventions allow the reader to receive the information as coming from a witness. In a sense, therefore, the writer bears witness to the witness. The auto/biographer’s position as receiver and preserver of her family stories authorizes her voice, granting a similar immediacy to the narrative. Second, autobiography is a “discourse of interpretation”, diegesis in the classical sense, that “organizes the detailed constituents of witness into larger-scale sequences (holidays, careers, ‘declining years, and the like) and it places them in evaluational frames (instances of ‘struggle, of ‘devotion,’ for example). Diegesis has a way of being more subjunctive than mimesis: it considers paths not taken; it is crouched retrospectively and counterfactually; it is more apt to ride on epistemic verbs like know and believe rather than see and hear; and it is usually crouched in the present or timeless tense” (Bruner 45). This interpretational process leads to the third point, “stance”, referring to the “autobiographer’s posture toward the world, toward self, toward fate and the possible, and also toward interpretation itself” (Bruner 45).°

Asian American auto/biographers often structure their texts as entering the critical dialogues established in Asian American historiographical writing.” Bruner notes that the task of the autobiographer consists in uniting the discourses of witness, interpretation, and stance to create a story that has both verisimilitude and negotiability (46). By negotiability, he refers to a quality that I will engage in more detail below, which is basically “whatever makes it possible for an autobiography to enter into ‘the conversation of lives’. In other words: ‘Are we prepared to accept this life as part of the community of lives that makes up our world?” (Bruner 47). Quoting Hayden White, Bruner affirms the final result of autobiography’s historical quality: “one cannot reflect upon the self (radically or otherwise) without an accompanying reflection on the nature of the world in which one exists. And one’s reflections on both one’s self and one’s world cannot be one’s own alone: you and your version of the world must be public, recognizable enough to be negotiable in the ‘conversation of lives ” (43).

We need to ask ourselves at this point: what specific histories do these Asian American family memoirs mediate? And, importantly, how is that mediation realized? To answer the first question, I will discuss briefly two interrelated points, as one leads to the other, though they remain essentially separate.

First, we have to consider the history of the Asian diaspora and the positions of diasporic subjects. When actual physical separation from a homeland marks a person's life, concepts like “home” or “identity” become complicated. James Clifford’s replacement of “routes” for “roots” remains an apt metaphor as “practices of displacement” are increasingly emerging as constitutive of cultural meaning (3). For the older generations in the family memoirs, separation from the homeland usually stems from and promotes a crisis on personal, social, cultural, and familial levels. As Wanni Anderson and Robert Lee explain, the discourse of diaspora in the case of Asians in the Americas “is deeply grounded in the notion of banishment, exile, and return to a real or imagined homeland [which] must be juxtaposed with transnational practices in everyday life. The concept of transnationalism describes the practice among immigrants of establishing and maintaining kinship, economic, cultural, and political networks across national boundaries, and the creation of multiple

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sites of ‘home ” (9). Indeed, earlier generations generally immigrated to settle; more recent immigrants have become more transnational, maintaining closer connections to the homeland. They are more comfortable living between the cultures, traveling back and forth physically and culturally. This transnational awareness, I argue, becomes part of the motivation for writing the family memoir. Further, the process of examining these family memoirs, negotiating the family-stories-in-history, requires us to think about how these texts dialogue with current identity politics. Can a Chinese American family memoir be said to represent the Asian American community? To a large extent, the pressures that led to the 1960s and 1970s political unification and mobilization of Americans of Asian descent no longer exist. Yet, because the forces of political mobilization that created the paradigm “Asian American” continue to influence self-identification, there is enough of a sense of community and recognition among the diverse Asian groups to make literature, for example, resound among them.

At this point, we need to consider briefly the discourse of biraciality within the Asian American family memoir.’ Several critics have stressed the implications of biraciality as a narrative position in ethnic writing. Jonathan Brennan posits that examining the construction of identity in mixed-race autobiographies sheds new light on identity formation and representation in American autobiography because, for the mixed-race writer, “identity exists in a state of liminality, a site where a mixed race narrator negotiates and transforms identity, yet often the communities in which the writer negotiates attempt to overwrite multiple identities, to maintain limitations on both form and content” (49). I favor Francoise Lionnet’s notion of métissage, which, she explains, allows us to articulate “new visions of ourselves, new concepts that will allow us to think otherwise, to bypass the ancient symmetries and dichotomies that have governed the ground and the very condition of possibility of thought, of ‘clarity,’ in all Western philosophy. Métissage is such a concept and a practice: it is the site of undecidability and indeterminacy, where solidarity becomes the fundamental principle of political action against hegemonic languages” (6). Incorporating this term into our critical vocabulary permits us to consider new realities, to re-imagine previously unquestioned forms of affiliation. From the perspective of autobiographical writing, Lionnet claims that métissage, as “aesthetic concept”, merges biology and history, anthropology and philosophy, linguistics and literature (8).