Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings [1st ed.] 9789811563621, 9789811563638

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Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings

Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings “Jade Tsui-yu Lee did a fine job with a complex subject.” —Stephen Ohlander, Professor, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan “With a consistent theme, the work has depth and gravity.” —Yu-cheng Lee, Adjunct Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academic Sinica, Taiwan

Jade Tsui-yu Lee

Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings

Jade Tsui-yu Lee National Kaohsiung Normal University Kaohsiung, Taiwan

ISBN 978-981-15-6362-1 ISBN 978-981-15-6363-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

Departing from Jacques Derrida’s appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book will examine writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and axis, this book hopes to address the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings and posit a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Nguyen Viet Thanh, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and André Lamontagne. As the writings in questions contain works regarding Japanese American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and Vietnam-American experiences, this book is expected to present a broader view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, North America, Africa, and Europe, as proposed by Lisa Lowe. The project is distinctive as it covers emergent writers who deal with war memories of Asian-American groups. As more and more regions and countries in Asia and near Pacific rim areas begin to pay attention to precarity condition and war aftermath, the project not only captures the interconnectivity among heterogeneous war trauma experiences, calls the

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readers’ attention to revision the global and local–global relations but also initiates critical dialogues among these writings. Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Jade Tsui-yu Lee

Acknowledgments

This writer acknowledges the support and generosity of Professor André Lamontagne, and David and Ekstasis publishers, for their kind authorization and permission to use the two photos on the covers of Les Fossoyeurs and The Gravediggers in this book. Special and foremost gratitude should go to Professor Yu-cheng Lee for his continuous inspiration and long-term support. The book is a Research Project of Academic Publications Sponsored by Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan, R.O.C.

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Contents

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Introduction 1.1 Precarity and Trauma 1.2 Trauma, Precarity, and the Politics/Poetics of Asian Others 1.3 Book Organization 1.4 The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings 1.5 Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude

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Japanese (Post)-Internment Narratives 2.1 Against Historical Amnesia: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine and Buddha in the Attic 2.2 Politics of War Memories: Remembering the Japanese Internment in Joseph Craig Danner’s The Fires of Edgarville

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The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings 3.1 Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth: A Gothic and Liminal Narrative of Trauma 3.2 “All Wars Were Fought Twice”: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Refugee Trauma Memories

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Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude 4.1 Beyond Precarity and Trauma: Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship 4.2 Post 911 Trauma in Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s Chinese Women 4.3 In the Shadow of Modernity: The Search for Chinese Ghosts in Andre Lamontagne’s Les fossoyeurs: Dans le memoire de Quebec (Gravediggers)

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Works Cited

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The main goal of this book is to raise awareness about the need for a critical voice of Asian Americans as the groups have acquired increasing attention in global society. The introductory chapter presents the rationale for the book’s primary concern with the shared and convergent experiences of war trauma among various Asian-American minorities. The diverse writers giving insight to a spectrum of figures affected by war reinvent a form of community and togetherness through their stories remembering their war experiences. In the trying times rife with fear and anxiety, one is able to find healing power for the wounds and injuries, and a sense of home. By situating the writings amid historical, political, and social contexts, the chapter details the interconnectivity among heterogeneous war trauma experiences and demands the necessity to initiate critical dialogues among these writings. Keywords Trauma · Precarity · War memories · Coolitude · Asian American writings · The Chinese Exclusion Act · Japanese-American Relocation · Kala Pani

Departing from Jacques Derrida’s appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book will examine writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and © The Author(s) 2020 J. T. Lee, Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8_1

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axis, this book hopes to address the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings, and posit a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and Andre Lamontagne. As the writings in questions contain works regarding Japanese-American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and VietnamAmerican experiences, this book is expected to present a broader view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe, as proposed by Lisa Lowe. This book’s primary research concern is to examine how Asian communities deal with war and precarious experiences, how they negotiate and reconcile with trauma and war memories. The term and connotations of “cinders” originate from Jacque Derrida’s Cinders (Feu la Cendre), in which Derrida uses cinders to explain how ashes and cinders represent the total dismantling of an object, the ultimate embodiment of deconstruction. That being said, quite ironically, ashes and cinders signify the “reste,” “remains,” “remnants,” and “relics” after the intervention of something. Ashes and cinders indicate that something has existed; something “was there”; “was present.” Hence, ashes and cinders are never “nothing” or “absence,” and in fact they are “something” and “presence.” More specifically, a trace or incidence of negation (the ambiguity is thought-provoking). Cinders are the best examples of traces, the intervention of something. A cinder is a fragile entity that falls into dust, that crumbles and disperses. But cinder also names resilience and intractability of what is most delicate and most vulnerable…. As for me, I had at first imagined that cinders were there, not here but there, as a story to be told: cinder, this old gray word, this dusty theme of humanity, the immemorial image had decomposed from within, a metaphor or metonymy of itself, such is the destiny of every cinder, separated, consumed like a cinder of cinders. (Derrida 31)

In other words, cinders are traces of what is and what has been, an interplay of presence and absence. Cinders are the outcome of a deliberate elimination of something, and yet they signify a stubborn existence.

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Cinders are signs of resistance; cinders alone resist any form of assimilation or negation. Cinders are by essence paradoxical; overruled but irreducible; transmuted but irrevocable and irrecoverable. According to Derrida, ashes and cinders are the best examples of traces, the inscribed residue of an event. “Cinders are there, there, not here”; both metaphor and metonymy, cinders are tokens of unrevealed stories and the masking of hidden secrets. Not so much the remains of an act of burning and forgetting, cinders remember and ostensibly reinforce the remembering through their resilience: silence under protest. A subtle and brittle disappearance reveals the desire to be seen, to be heard, be felt, and most of all, the struggle for the last stroke to the last moments. In terms of the metaphor of ashes and cinders, Derrida refers explicitly to the holocaust, during which some 6 million Europe’s Jews were targeted for extermination and sent to gas chambers and other horrifying annihilation. During the burning of the bodies, the smoke of which was visible for miles around, the bodies were destroyed, but the cinders, in a “fragile and resilient” gesture, remembered the event as photos in a ghostly archive. During the burning in the holocaust, when each being was exterminated, one perspective for viewing the truth was forever and irretrievably lost—but also retained, as we have seen. Writing of such ghostly moments gives one a chance to breathe into life the glowing embers, which relentlessly bespeak individual anguish and sufferings. All by themselves, embers speak of this horror, reminding us of their tragic underpinnings of how a species should be needed to be sacrificed to fulfill the sublime and utopian purpose of warped modernity. When something is burned deliberately, the traces of the burning manifest as an archival witness of collective trauma, and inscribe historical melancholia. This book, taking as a metaphor the traces of burning as remnants of a war’s aftermath, intends to map out the memory trajectory of Asian minorities faced with exclusion, violence, and confrontation. The texts in question, written by writers of Asian backgrounds who share experiences of marginalization and “othering,” deal with the theme of trauma generated by various wars. A thorough reading of these texts opens a window onto how these Asians remember wars and traumatic experiences, how they negotiate with mainstream cultures during difficult times, how they reconcile life experiences, and themselves.

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1.1

Precarity and Trauma

Contemporary research in ethnic studies has geared itself toward affective politics and ethical discriminations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is plagued by cultural clashes, terrorist attacks, and military conflict. The Asian subjects can be said to have experienced a variety of losses: loss of cultural anchorage, loss of stability, loss of a sense of security. How do the liminal Asian subjects, afflicted with a fragmented consciousness, address cultural disintegration, coupled with border crossings and diasporas, in order to reconcile with the dramatic and sudden pains caused by an untold number of traumas? The anguish of the Asian migrant experience can best be understood by way of Judith Butler’s conception of “precarity,” which, along with precariousness, livability, and grievability, characterizes her concerns with ethics and responsibility in her writings. Also, as we examine the issue of war trauma, Judith Butler’s groundbreaking discussions of the precarious condition and precarity can help elucidate the core of the dilemma. After the September 11 event, Butler discusses the vulnerability and precarity of human life, stressing that our lives and those of many others are interconnected and interdependent, which makes our lives especially vulnerable and precarious, as each one of us is liable to be exposed to unknown, unanticipated, and unspecified dangers. Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous. These are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but constitute obligations toward others, most of whom we cannot name and do not know, and who may or may not bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who “we” are. (Butler Frames of War 14)

The fact that our lives are under constant threat drives us to feel fear and melancholy and be trapped in a plight of uncertainty and perplexity caused by menace and violence (Precarious xii). As all would agree, human existence is precarious. Our lives are fragile and destined to face death, either due to willful action, as instantiated by terrorist attacks, murder and the like, or other hazards. Precariousness, according to Butler, refers to human vulnerability, specifically the frailty

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of life in light of its inescapable ultimate destruction. As Butler straightforwardly puts it: “Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed” (Frames of War 25). Butler emphasizes the dependency of human lives, as “there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know” (Precarious Life xii). Stemming from the notion of vulnerability, grief over loss is understandable. In Butler’s words, “That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief” (Precarious Life xii). Yet, what Butler alerts us to think about is the question of “selective grief.” The September 11 event (9/11) and the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 are cases in point. The outpouring of media coverage and a rising empathy for those who suffered the loss, the feelings of shock and fear, and the ensuing massive political mobilization, were all indicative of the problematics of selective grief. As Western mainstream media continued to reveal the death toll and actual victims of the terrorists’ attacks, the scarcity of media coverage of non-Western casualties, and the issue of lack of empathy toward these victims, were addressed. Supposedly, precariousness was a “shared experience of social conditions” (Butler Frames of War 13), but in fact, not all lives have been recognized as precarious, inasmuch as not all casualties are grieved. Butler calls our attention to the rising grief for the loss of Western lives, and the concomitant neglect of equally vulnerable non-Western lives, whose deaths are not equally regarded as worthy of mourning and grief. Paradoxically, it is by distinguishing between those who are worthy of life and grieving over and who are worth destroying unpitied—that is, by maximizing the precariousness of some and minimizing the precariousness of others—that we violate the universally egalitarian features of the precariousness of all human lives. Precarity in this sense is ultimately political. As often found in war campaigns, when confronted with arbitrary state violence, the media often appeal to maximized precariousness. In this light, precarity characterizes the politically induced conditions under which certain populations are subjected to a heightened risk of threat and violence without protection. If precarity is the “shared experience of social conditions” of a particular historical climate, it is then essential to reread the narrative of trauma, in order to make sense of the causes and effects of precariousness. Wars and traumas are characterized by the “unpresentable and unpossessable.” In a similar fashion, war and precarious experiences are shared by Asian

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communities. Trauma, in Greek etymology, means “wound,” an injury inflicted on the body, but in Freudian theory, trauma is a wound not only inflicted upon the body but also upon the mind; both physical and psychological. Such a wound can be both individual and collective, if trauma is understood as a symptom of injuries shared by many in society. To read trauma is to question history sanctioning erasure— voices silenced; or one can say trauma is an alternative version of official history—a hidden chapter, trimmed space, muted tone, suppressed desire. Perhaps, trauma is the other. Cathy Caruth conceptualizes trauma with and beyond individual experience in Unclaimed Experience, and proposes an approach to history through the reading of trauma: it is here, in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma—both in its occurrence and in the attempt to understand it— that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference). Through the notion of trauma, I will argue, we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not. (Unclaimed Experience 19)

Reading historical precarity through trauma shifts the critical attention on trauma from seeing it as individual experience to seeing the traumatic symptom as a type of social structure, prompting us to redefine history and our ethical and political relation to history. As Caruth points out: Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. (Unclaimed Experience 17)

According to Caruth, trauma “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (19). Trauma is characterized by temporal deferral; as trauma occurs virtually in the wake of the disastrous event, fully impacting afterwards. What’s at work within trauma is the paradoxical nature of its “inherent latency,” due to its “peculiar and temporal structure” and

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“belatedness” within the traumatic experience (24). After trauma takes place, because of the time lag, the event can be “forgotten,” only to be “remembered” in and through the act of forgetting. The traumatic experience is to “act out” and “live through” the traumatic event again and again. Moreover, trauma involves what Sigmund Freud calls the “pathological disposition,” entailing the emotions of sadness, frustration, and melancholia. It is a state of anxiety, anguish, and perpetual helplessness, uninvigorated by any external force. The senses of sadness and loss are derived from traumatic experiences on both individual and collective levels. The sense of loss is the core concept when Freud discusses melancholia. In his 1917 article, Sigmund Freud defines “mourning” and “melancholia” both as losses, including the loss of love, the loss of country, the loss of homeland, and the loss of freedom and ideals. Unlike “mourning,” which is the successful transference of libidinal mechanisms, implying that sorrow and grief are to be sealed, pain to be dismissed, conflicts to be settled, melancholia a prolonged, limitless state of grief. According to Caruth, because the traumatic experience cannot be fully represented in a narrative form of remembering, and trauma cannot be fully integrated or recovered from, hence a full authenticity of the traumatic state can never exist. Although the traumatized subject often cannot recognize or remember the traumatic event right after the disaster takes place, the pieces and fragments of memories will return as with whatever is repressed, haunting the traumatized subject in the form of nightmares. As Caruth states, the traumatic experience cannot be assimilated when it occurs. Thus the writing of trauma defies and demands simultaneously our ever belated and ever repeated efforts to understand and interpret it. Based upon the conception of “traumatic experience,” Caruth proposes that trauma in its temporal deferral gives supportive force for the traumatized subject to escape from the initial spell of shock. When we experience pain through the remembrance of an event, we are prompted to flee from the primal painful experience. The fact that traumatic experience cannot be assimilated into narrative experience, and as well its belatedness, demands the necessity of witnessing, with testimonials that often contradict what really happened. Hence, it is essential to have flashbacks of traumatic memories, the representations of hallucinations, the witness of survivors, evidence that traumatic experiences need to be told, to be heard, and to be represented.

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By so doing can the traumatized recover from pain? Holocaust historians Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that Shoah leads us through the exploration of historical unspeakability. Survivor trauma can never be captured or interpreted with words because trauma is essentially characterized by “unspeakability.” Only through witnessing and testimonies can traumatized subjects be relieved and liberated from the self-imprisonment of silence (vi). Studies of trauma survivors are particularly valid, as Caruth insists, for providing a venue for us to understand how various historical trauma structures form dialogues and provide possible sutures, convergences, and references to one another. After studying how Jewish communities responded to the holocaust experience, Marianne Hirsch proposed the idea of “postmemory.” Postmemory, as she defines it in her introduction, “is not a movement, method, or idea; I see it, rather, as a structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience” (6). Like all other “postnesses” in critical theory, e.g., postcolonialism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, post implies “coming after” or “opposition” to what went on before. The “post” of postmemory is not limited to posterity in temporal terms, but also refers to posterity as consequences and impact, the “aftermaths.” When historical events took place too long ago to be “known,” “witnessed,” and/or “revived,” the construction of memories needs particular modes of mediation. Lacking in individual traumatic experiences, post-trauma generations often need to resort to archival narratives, oral histories, and visual images to activate cultural and communal memories. Representing trauma is never an easy task. Derrida, for instance, discusses how naming and language are powerlessness to describe trauma. When asked to talk about the September 11 event a few days after the attack, Derrida said in a dialogue: “Something” took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the “thing.” But this very thing, the place and meaning of this “event,” remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about. (Borradori 86)

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Derrida discusses the impossibility of recognizing, determining, identifying, and naming the event, because it took place too abruptly, and was too overwhelming to be fully tangible. When faced with abrupt disasters and pains, language as a conceptual way of understanding and interpreting is limited, as language has been paralyzed before the traumatic experience seizes a person (Borradori 93–4). Language cannot fully serve its function to name or explain the “thing;” by using language we cannot help: “repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.” In this sense, “repetition” becomes the only recourse when confronting this “thing.” It’s as if with endless repetition, one can find the incantatory power to exorcize the spirit of the “thing,” and find the magic to neutralize fear and distress. Repetition recalls Derrida’s trope of ghosts that trouble (haunt) human beings. Derrida proposes “hauntology” in opposition to the logic of “ontology”—the reasoning of being as in “to be or not to be,” a traditional Western way of thinking; “This logic of haunting would be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the ‘to be’, assuming that it is a matter of Being in the ‘to be or not to be,’ but nothing is less certain)” (Specters of Marx 10). Instead, hauntology raises the question of reemergence and eternal return, “a question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back” (Specters of Marx 11). In a similar vein, trauma has all the features of a ghostly apparition: indeterminacy, intangibility, threat, and haunting anxiety. As with what Freud is often associated, “the return of the repressed,” trauma keeps coming back like repressed desires, emotions, or fears. Trauma with its indeterminacy makes all discrete narratives impossible. The fragmented, inconclusive, incoherent, and misleading narratives symbolize the difficulties in writing of or representing trauma. When trauma is reduced to “testimony,” or oral narrative, the event loses its original authenticity, with a fading, loss, or incomprehensible regret. After all, testimonies of the missing victims are a perpetual void, escaping archivization, resisting closure, a ghost, a phantom. Trauma, like a repressed and uncanny other, escapes and remains elusive, evasive, undecided, indeterminable, waiting for emergence. The characteristics of trauma are: something unanticipated, unspeakable, unframeable, and incomprehensible, which resists linguistic appropriation and human understanding. The mixed emotions of these traumatized

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subjects, the sense of chaos, disorder, shock, disorientation, puzzlement, and loss can also be found in displaced communities. When new immigrants move to a new environment, they feel confounded, lost, and disoriented. Trauma is linked to alterity, as Caruth pinpoints. Trauma is not something we can ever possess, and the experiencing of trauma, such as via flashbacks and nightmares, reminds people that work needs to be done. Working through trauma demands constructive action, not revenge; it demands our listening to others. Rather than signaling for revengeful victims, trauma calls for listening to others’ voices and inviting others to talk. It has been suggested that working through trauma in verbal or written form provides an avenue for healing energies. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han adopt the Freudian theory of melancholia and mourning as a conceptual framework to discuss Asian minority experience. Seeing melancholia as a depathologized “structure of feeling” (669), Eng and Han expand the notion of mourning from the individual and psychological level to communal daily life. Eng and Han take the American immigration experience as an analogy to understanding racial melancholia and mourning. Comparatively put, Europeans can assimilate into American white-dominated mainstream society in a way tantamount to mourning in which the grief will be “got over with.” Even though they still yearn for the homeland, their yearning virtually resonates mourning that claims an end to tragic demise. Assimilation begins when mourning comes to its natural end. Asian communities, however, because of their skin color and racial markers, will remain alienated and excluded. Their American dream unfulfilled, Asian communities present a condition of cultural melancholia in their everyday lives, stemming from loss of home and ideals, and intergenerational conflicts. When discussing the racial melancholia of Asian-American groups, Eng and Han borrow José Esteban Muñoz’s argument (Muñoz 74), arguing that the “processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization” are “neither pathological nor permanent but involve the fluid negotiation between mourning and melancholia” (667). To take homosexuals and Asian-American minorities as examples, the sense of melancholia is far from pathological; instead it signifies living conditions based on their political choices and identities.

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1.2 Trauma, Precarity, and the Politics/Poetics of Asian Others Seeing trauma as a catalyst and a symptom, this book intends to examine how Asian minorities negotiate between mourning and melancholia, how they re-member their collective consciousness through the forgetting and remembering of traumatic memories. Comparing the writings on war trauma dealing with Asian diasporas, this book seeks to address the problematics of trauma through the critical lens of history, cultural politics, and psychology. The major concerns of the book are to find the common ground of Asian-American writings concerning war and traumatic memories, by examining the possible poetics, politics, and ethics of these texts. For many Asian-American groups, border crossings, especially transoceanic journeys and dispersion, are their shared destinies. It is understandable that these migrations will be replete with nostalgia and melancholy. In approaching the collective traumatic memories of Asian-American groups, it is worth noting the historical references to the African-American slave trade. A case in point, the “Black Atlantic,” as Paul Gilroy fittingly terms it in his 1993 book, refers to the sad chapter of the “triangular slave trade” in the region between Africa and the New Continents called the “Middle Passage,” from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The shipping of African blacks to the Americas for enslaved labor was the hallmark of the African-American experiences. Two million Africans, an estimated 15% died at sea, laying the foundation of one of the saddest chapters of history in modern times. J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting, “Slaves Throwing Over the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On,” is based upon a 1781 case on the slave ship Zong in which there was a massive killing of 133 Africans aboard to collect insurance money. That the painting was reviewed by the nineteenth-century British art critic John Ruskin without reference to the misery was condemned and rebuked by Paul Gilroy and Michelle Cliff, since the latter two believed that the infamous review itself depicts imperial cruelty. The ships on the Atlantic, as Gilroy states, exemplifying brutality and injustice, became a metaphor for a “micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion.” (4)1

1 For further reference to the painting and criticisms, please see Paul Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic” (14) and the final chapter of Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise.

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When compared to this lamentable and elegiac chapter of the Atlantic crossing, the Pacific Ocean was full of woes for Asian groups, driven by various historical pushes and pulls. A comparative and historical survey of how these Asian groups moved to the Americas helps us understand the commonality and differences of the Asian Americans.2 As the Caribbean critic Édouard Glissant in his studies of Caribbean poetics argues, to find a convergent framework among the hybridized and complex Caribbean cultural mélange, we have to return to their point of origin in history to see how these cultures came across and intersected. In short, the core matter for postcolonial Caribbean studies is to identify a “Poetics of Relation” as Glissant’s title tellingly puts it. In a similar vein, it will be valid to see how and why these Asian immigrants migrated to the New World. Their motivations and driving forces will help elucidate a possible poetics within Asian-American studies. Historically, we can divide the Asians’ massive migration into the New World in three waves: as laborers, students, and refugees. First, starting from the mid-nineteenth-century, Chinese coolies, poverty-stricken after the China–Britain Opium War, were imported to the Americas to replenish the labor shortage following the abolition of African slavery. Indian coolies followed, working on Caribbean plantations. Chinese contract workers participated in the nation-building transcontinental railroad construction in the United States since 1869, and the Canadian Pacific Railway since 1881. Starting from the nineteenth century in Hawaii, Japanese farmers were introduced. Asian immigrants were brought to the Americas to work on farms, mines, and/or railway constructions. Others, including Chinese and Japanese, came to the New World to pursue studies, most of whom were from the upper class or elite classes in Asia (recall Soong Mei-ling, later Madame Chiang Kai Shek, who came from a privileged Chinese family and studied for years in the United States). From the 1880s to the 1920s, the Exclusion Act was in effect to ban Chinese immigration as a result of American nativist sentiment over the “Yellow Peril,” leading to reductions of Chinese allowed to enter the United States, and the increasing population of Japanese workers. The latter were targeted as enemies during World War II after the United States declared war on Japan the day following the Pearl Harbor attack. The large-scale relocation of Japanese citizens in the 2 The term “Asian” mentioned herein refers to East, South, and Southeastern Asia, to provide the point of reference for the selected texts in question.

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United States during this time became a nightmarish cultural memory. The postwar era saw the gradual increase of Asian immigrants to the United States. The end of the Vietnam War brought a significant number of Vietnamese refugees (boat people) to reside in Europe and North America. Nearly 200,000 orphaned Korean children were adopted in the United States after the end of the Korean War in 1953. Inspired by the Black Power movement and the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the Asian-American diaspora sought solidarity among various Asian ethnicities, and those from the Third World. The shared transoceanic journeys recall Lisa Lowe’s concept of “imperial intimacy” which argues for intimate and intertwined correlations among Europe in all its modernity and Africa, Asia, and America (191). As pointed out by Véronique Bragard, the theme of “coolitude,” a term coined by the Mauritian poet Khal Torabully, refers to the shared experiences and the imagined mosaic of the indentured coolie laborers crossing Kala Pani (Black Waters). Coolitude, as argued by Bragard, “is not based on Coolie as such but relies on the nightmare transoceanic journey of Coolies, as both a historical migration and a metonymy of cultural encounters. The crossing of the Kala Pani constitutes the first movement of a series of abusive and culturally stifling situations” (quoted in Carter and Torabully 15). Mostly affected by wars—the Opium War, the World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War—the transoceanic journeys taken by Asian migrants are traumatic experiences shared by communities of various Asian ancestries. Seeing Asian groups as an imagined community stemming from war and trauma reminds us of the structures of victimhood under the brutality and cruelty of imperialism and neo-imperialism, with their exploitations, political usurpation, and infringement. Undeniably, Asian groups share the common experiences of Kala Pani (Black Waters); border-crossing, transoceanic coolitude, displacement, and marginalization. If we borrow Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, the border-crossing and migration experiences offer a foundation for being perceived as part of the communities and further consolidating communal cultural identities. The experiences of marginalization and exclusion form political and affective coalition for Asian groups and in effect provide momentum and necessity. We can find out how these Asian groups, when faced with precarity and difficulties, address these problematics; how they communicate with mainstream groups; and how they address various other groups. What ethical concerns and duties do they try to embrace? In other words, a study of shared

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traumatic experiences is to explore how Asian groups swing between cultural memories; such swinging occurs not only between the other and the mainstream, but also in between other assemblages. This resonates with the call for “minor connection” proposed by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih. As Lionnet and Shih point out in Minor Transnationalism, minority groups often evince opposition and competition, because their social and psychological identifications are mediated if not manipulated by mainstream ideologies (2). By connecting the traumatic experiences of diverse others on a horizontal level, we can dismantle the binary logic of the master/slave hierarchy on vertical levels. A survey of the expansive and complex transnational “minoring” experiences dealing with trauma provides an understanding of various issues such as modernity, Eurocentric imperialism, and cultural and capitalistic hegemonies, etc. In my 2010 book, The Invisible Presence: Literary Imagination of Sino-Caribbean Diaspora, I argue for a “mangrove rhizome” (60) framework, fitting for the Caribbean contexts, to interpret the “multiplicity, heterogeneity and connection to others” as found in the creolization and hybridization of Chinese diasporic experiences. I borrow the term from Édouard Glissant’s extensive use of “rhizome,” as coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Lee 6). In like manner, Lionnet and Shih use rhizome to illustrate the off-shooting interconnectedness of minor transnationalism. Indeed, departing from the interconnected coalition and articulations of a shared political agenda and affective registers, Asian-American communities can activate more mutual dialogues and rethink their roles in critiquing and challenging Eurocentric domination. Revolving around the common theme of war traumas and memories, the writers in question in this book present various approaches, concerns, and perspectives. The book seeks to display the multiple narratives and their individual “interpretive contexts” by situating the texts in their specific social-cultural backgrounds. The texts do not stand alone. Overall, the texts were carefully chosen; each alone creates a wave to ripple out into wider and expanding arcs. Altogether, the trauma writings form an original way of redefining the power relations between what is Asian and what is American. Interpretation through recontextualization aims to offer alternative concerns and interpretative angles for transnational studies of Asian-American literatures. As a scholar based in Taiwan, I cannot help but wonder what we as Asian scholars can contribute to Asian-American literary studies. Personal interests aside, I have been surprised to see how university students in

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Taiwan read with mixed emotions the writings authored by writers of Asian ancestry residing in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and/or the Caribbean region. Even though they do not have any personal experiences with war, their shared sympathy and empathy are explicit. Recent decades have seen the rise of China, more attention on Southeast and South Asia, and the ubiquitous “return” of America to Asia (possibly seen in terms of President Donald Trump’s “Indo Pacific” strategy), bringing younger generations together to reflect upon power relations and politics, and the ethics of “hyphenated identities” in an era of globalization and transnationalism. The book addresses war trauma effects in three areas of subjects: (1) Japanese (Post)Internment Narratives; (2) Vietnam War and Refugee Writings; and (3) Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude. The writers include American writer Joseph Craig Danner, Japanese-American writer Julie Otsuka, Vietnamese-American writers Monique Truong and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Quebecois Canadian Andre Lamontagne, and Guyanese British Janice Lowe Shinebourne. These writers may or may not have Asian backgrounds, but the texts they have published primarily demonstrate Asian-American themes and a cultural imagining of transoceanic experience. This book seeks to identify convergence and divergence and propose a theoretical framework for examining the issues of the transnational imagination in trauma writings in Asian and British/American studies. The emergence of Asian-American Studies resonated with the expansion of ethnic studies in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1980s, and they have ever since spawned critical thinking about cultural identities, world civilization, and human values. For the past several decades, as research on these studies has flourished, the field has been challenged and redefined in terms of definitions, referentiality, and canon selection. For instance, the term “Asia” has been redefined; more writers of Asian ancestry have been explored, more writings with Asian themes have been published, and more current issues such as indigenous, ecological approaches, and disaster studies have been incorporated. When choosing what texts to examine, this book adheres to the guideposts of cultural diversity and literary aesthetics on the one hand, of critical and reflective vigor on the other. In addition to exploring cultural identity, authenticity, belonging, home-making (and unmaking), and representational politics, this book intends to ask what interpretive strategy can be adopted. An interpretive strategy reflects how literary

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criticism can participate in examining social contentions. Like other critical theories that emphasize political agendas, feminism, postcolonialism, Afro-American studies, and gender studies, Asian-American studies highlight oppositional politics. Since the 1990s, Asian-American studies have turned toward transnationalism, shifting the focus to “inter-Asia” and trans-Pacific connectedness. This discursive strategy moves from stress on identity differences, on “claiming America,” to the anti-essentialist, anti-totalizing imaginations of diverse others. Major criticisms of Asian studies have focused on oppositional and resistance politics; for example, Viet Thanh Nguyen in his Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, which argues for an oppositional strategy. Recent criticisms have incorporated affective politics and biopolitics into the mainstream, including Eng and Han’s approach to Asian-American cultural and psychological melancholia conditions and phenomena. These authors use Freudian notions of mourning and melancholia as analogies to refer to European immigrants’ assimilation and Asian immigrants’ unassimilated conditions of melancholic experiences. Finding it difficult to be part of the melting pot mythology because of racial markers, Asian minorities display a transgenerational melancholic structure of feelings in their everyday life experiences (345, 363). These shifting concerns throughout the decades again attest to the openness, fluidity, plurality, and complexity of the critical momentum of AsianAmerican studies. On the one hand, it shows the opening up of critical terrains to incorporate more political power and critical energies; on the other hand, it resonates with the ever-expanding possibilities of how contemporary literary texts engage themselves with changes in societal values and beliefs in the era of globalization. With the fifteenth century, the Americas became a site of tension under European imperial expansion. Subsequent to the triangular slave trade and colonization, a massive flow of Asian migrants was brought to the Caribbean region, either as alternative laborers to African slaves or as farmers to work on plantations. The result was a creolization and hybridization of cultures, languages, and bloodlines. In the midnineteenth century, Chinese workers were introduced to work on the US transnational railroad project, or worked in laborious conditions in gold mining in the United States and Canada; the Japanese were brought to Hawaii as contract farmers. The twentieth century saw waves of Asians arriving, including a number of young intellectuals pursuing studies in the United States, the mass adoption of Korean orphans after the Korean

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War in the 1950s, and the infamous plight of refugees, the “boat people,” after the Vietnam War in the 70s. It is estimated that in the United States, Asian immigrants reached 10 million by the year 2012 (Liang v). This has yielded a far greater spectrum of racial and cultural ethnicities in America, and a fertile ground for the resurgence of Asian-American studies. In the case of the United Kingdom, migrants from former British colonies, including India, Pakistan, Jamaica, and Guyana, moved to the United Kingdom to work after the Second World War as workers in largescale public works. Many cities in the United Kingdom saw clashes and dialogues among various ethnic cultures. Border-crossing and the ensuing tension has been a common topic of examination in many writings by and about Asian immigrants. Undeniably, wars and battles in the twentieth century—the two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the independence struggles of former British colonies in the Caribbean and Asia—have redefined power relations between Europe, America, and Asia, and triggered the push and pull of Asian mobility and the subsequent intimate and complex networking across the Pacific the Atlantic and the Indian Seas. At the moment, the scrutiny of trauma and war memories related to AsianAmerican/British experiences is particularly meaningful and important. Especially this is so during the era when the post-911 tension has heightened relations between Islamic and Western worlds. Post-911 tension, Islamic fundamentalism, and worldwide terrorist attacks have also created new memories of trauma and war, many of which are connected to Asian communities. From 2015 onwards, terrorist attacks, bombings, and vengeful homicides took place in Boston, Paris, Belgium, and other places. In return, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States have now adopted stricter measures against immigration from the Middle East,3 which again evidences Samuel Huntington’s term “clash of civilizations.” Millions of Syrian migrants have moved to Europe, forcing Europe to face the challenges of receiving these refugees, and the dilemma of whether they should open up or tighten immigration in dealing with foreign (primarily Middle Eastern) groups. It is also due to the recent 3 In 2011, Syria was inspired by the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution and the “Arab Spring” demanding democratic reforms in the Middle East. By 2016, nearly two million Middle Eastern refugees have been displaced and have crossed Eurasian borders and demanded asylum.

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economic downturn and fiscal deterioration in Europe (such as Greece and Spain on the verge of state financial bankruptcy), that different countries in Europe have created varying border security and immigration policies. Most of these countries have maintained a wait-and-see attitude, which further complicates the complexities of the most serious humanitarian crisis since World War II. To counter terrorist attacks, airports and railway stations in Europe have adopted more rigorous security and anti-terrorism measures, making it difficult for people from many countries outside Europe to enter and exit. The 2016 successful plebiscite in favor of “Brexit,” after a vehement debate between supporters and opponents, suggested nationalist seclusion and protectionism. From 2017, the Trump Government’s “America First” guidelines have advanced an almost white supremacist immigration policy agenda. In terms of attitudes toward alien immigration, a double bond comes to the fore. On the one hand, national protectionism is on the rise, with foreigners excluded with heavy barriers; on the other hand, a distrust of world political and economic alliances and cooperation, and the advocacy of separatism. In today’s turbulent social and global context, it is both valid and urgent to discuss the war and trauma memories in Asian-American writings in order to obtain a historical sense of immediacy, and initiate critical debates on contemporary ethical and political problematics, including hospitality, refugees, and border-crossing issues.

1.3 1.3.1

Book Organization

Japanese-American Relocation Experiences

Following a war timeline, this book is divided into the following chapters. Subsequent to the introductory chapter, the book explores the traumatic experience of the Japanese-American community during WW II. In the late nineteenth century, the United States admitted a large number of Japanese agricultural workers into the country, forming united communities in Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States immediately declared war on Japan. Considering Japan a hostile foreign country, the United States launched investigations, searches, and arrests against possible spies who were Japanese citizens in the United States. The US government decreed an executive order for a collective forced migration, to relocate Japanese residents from the Western United States to

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ten confinement camps located in the southwest, northwest inland, and the south, whereas the Japanese were forced to move and were confined for three years. This painful chapter in Japanese-American history caused a serious national identity crisis and painful experience among both the Japanese-American communities, and is still considered by many of them to be a disastrous outcome. The injustice was to some extent mollified in 1998, when 46 years after President Reagan officially apologized and enacted the Civil Liberties Law to set compensation at US$20,000 for these people and their heirs, who went through this tragic event. Faced with this structural history of pain and shame, the collective depression and silence of Japanese ethnic groups are consistent themes of many works in Japanese-American literature. This section contains two chapters. The first part, Chapter Two, will discuss Julie Otsuka’s series of novels dealing with themes of the Japanese forced-relocation experiences. Otsuka was born in California in 1960 to a first-generation (Isei) Japanese father and a second-generation (Nisei) mother. Otsuka’s novel début was When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), inspired by her mother’s real experiences, depicting how a Japanese mother and her two children during World War II are forced to move to a relocation center in the Utah Desert, to return to their home after three years of detention. The father is taken away by the FBI, and the family has no clues as to his whereabouts. It is not until the war ends that the family can come together again, with their hearts forever traumatized by the forced displacement and scattered migration experience. Otsuka’s second work, The Buddha in the Attic published in 2011, attracted the attention of the literary world and won critical acclaim. The novel features a group of “picture brides” embarking on a boat trip from Japan to the United States, in order to marry their designated husbands, as arranged by matchmakers. The story was inspired by the historical “picture brides” at the beginning of the twentieth century, each trekking long distances, with a picture of the prospective husband she had never met, and expected to meet her waiting husband in the hope of launching a new foreign family life in the United States, the “promised land” and “giant country” (the United States is called the “beautiful country” in Chinese). After publication, the novel having won the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction (2011), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2012), and the Prix femina étranger (2012), Otsuka pointed out her writing motivation when receiving the latter prize, telling of “the nostalgia of the native country, the gaze of whites and that, decades later, of their children

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become real little Americans. Then it was a second exodus, on American soil, when Japan declared war on the United States. This is the time for internment in the camps. In a final chapter, the novelist loops her very beautiful book by retelling of this subject too long remained taboo.”4 This section will explore how Otsuka restores the tragic history of the relocation camps, hoping to focus on trauma and healing experiences, in order to see how trauma can be passed down along generations, and become the common emotional experience and cultural heritage shared by various Japanese-American ethnic groups. In Chapter Three, the novel under examination is Craig Joseph Danner’s The Fires of Edgarville, and the traumatic experience of the Japanese forced-relocation centers is the focus. From the perspective of the Japanese-American mixed-race protagonist in the work, Hank, this sad chapter of history is revealed. Born on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack and raised by white parents, the protagonist becomes a successful pediatrician. Hank withdrew from his career after being accused of mercykilling, whereupon he returns home to take care of his American mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. In a small town in Oregon where arson incidents have repeatedly taken place, Hank unearths the mystery of the arsonist and his family, revealing miserable lives experienced by his biological Japanese father and foster mother, who turns out to be his real mother. The novel presents a journey into history and exploration of hostility and racial discrimination during wartime.

1.4

The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings

Chapters Four and Five primarily explore the issues of Vietnam War trauma. The Vietnam War plays an awkward, intriguing, and perplexing role in American history. For many people, Vietnam is not so much a country that the United States went to war with than a set of cultural codes that represent war. Although the Vietnam War did not occur in the United States, it had a profound impact on American society, bringing 4 “Julie Otsuka raconte aussi la nostalgie du pays natal, le regard des Blancs et celui, des décennies plus tard, de leurs enfants devenus de vrais petits Américains. Puis c’est un second exode, sur le sol américain, lorsque le Japon déclare la guerre aux Etats-Unis. C’est le temps de l’internement dans les camps. Dans un chapitre final, la romancière boucle son très beau livre en reparlant de ce sujet trop longtemps demeuré tabou.” From Julie Otsuka, Prix femina étranger (5 novembre 2012 à 15:23) Libération, November 5, 2012. https://next.liberation.fr/livres/2012/11/05/julie-otsuka-prix-femina-etranger_858217.

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frustration, shame, and humiliation on the self-conceited Americanism. The fact that the US military was brought to an embarrassing standstill and so, given the increasing domestic unpopularity of the war, was pressured to withdraw represented an experience of total loss for many Americans. This overpowering and despairing experience acted like a “ghost” in American society, haunting many Americans with lingering and recurring nightmares. Significantly affected and psychically wounded, the Vietnam generation displayed a post-traumatic stress symptom of prevailing despair, feeling disillusioned about the myth of American power. In addition, as the trope of the Vietnam War is reproduced and duplicated in mainstream American movies and television programs, it makes sense to see how the mainstream culture has tried to offset and compensate for its military failure, by adopting a rhetoric of prevailing cultural repression and silence. The mainstream cultural industry in the United States has continuously replicated the impressions of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, and manipulated the almost paranoid distortions associated with this experience. Taking up the theme of the Vietnam War and its refugees, VietnameseAmerican writers Monique Truong and Viet Thanh Nguyen challenge and question the mainstream culture’s deliberate misrepresentations of Vietnam (and the war). Truong understands that the attitude of the American cultural media to the Vietnam War in the 1980s went from “silence and censorship” to “obsession, distortion, and manipulation”(qtd. in Troeung 128); under the premise of restoring the national consciousness in the United States, most Vietnamese refugee narratives play the role of “healer,” but like many Vietnam War movies, they become complicit, or worse, a thug of the American mainstream cultural film industry. Vietnam has come to represent “wounded trophies” within American patriotism, much to Truong’s dismay (“Vietnamese” 236). This statement echoes Isabelle Thuy Pelaud’s discussion of Truong Tran’s Vietnamese prose poems, in which Pelaud believes that Vietnamese writers highlight the theme of the “void.” The Vietnamese-American ethnic group feels nostalgic over the disappearance of their homeland, conflicted about their oscillation across hope and despair, and thus adopts a nonlinear narrative strategy (3–4) of “dodging, elusive, and changing” to emphasize the historical void after the disappearance of their homeland. Once displaced, one can negotiate with the world from a marginalized sense of position, and seek a sense of belonging. This section addresses the representations of Monique Truong and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Vietnam

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War. Through an analysis and comparison of the two writers, the structural amnesia of American society will be brought into question, so as to reveal buried truths, and express a petit récit from a personal perspective, in order to overturn the grand patriotic narrative of the Vietnam War, and to see how their writings heal scars across generations.

1.5

Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude

This section contains three chapters. Respectively, Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight deal with two writers’ imagination of transoceanic coolitude. First, in Chapters Six and Seven, Janice Lowe Shinebourne is an AsianGuyanese novelist who deals with Asian diaspora in her novels. This AsianAmerican writer’s (published under the name of Jan Lo Shinebourne; Jan Shinebourne, etc.) four Asian novels have explored the cultural imaginary of the Indian-Guyanese and Chinese-Guyanese experiences. Shinebourne was born in 1947 on a plantation in Guiana, with mixed-blood ancestry. Except for her grandmother, with Indian-Chinese mixed ethnicity and background, her grandfather, mother, and parents are of Chinese ancestry. After graduating from Guyana University, Shinebourne worked as a journalist in Georgetown, the capital, and began to do novelistic work steadily after the mid-1960s. After moving to the United Kingdom in 1970 and earning a Bachelor of Arts from the University of London, she worked in the United kingdom as a writer, editor, and university lecturer. Besides writing The Godmother and Other Stories (2003), a collection of short stories, her major novels include Timepiece (1985), The Last English Plantation (1988), Chinese Women (2010), and The Last Ship (2015). Helen Pyne-Timothy and Jeremy Poynting have discussed the issue of women’s identity in Shinebourne’s work as an Indian Caribbean woman writer. Away from Guyana for more than 45 years, Shinebourne in her novels primarily deals with events in Guyana, including the strike of the Guyana Sugar plantation, represented in her early novels. The suppression of the British army, social unrest before and after the independence of Guyana, and even the issues of cultural identity after characters move to the United Kingdom and Canada are based on her personal experiences. According to Shinebourne’s remarks in 2015, her characters, including Sandra Yansen in Timepiece, June Lehall in The Last English Plantation, Alice Wong, a Chinese woman in Chinese Women, and Joan Wong in The Last Ship

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are autobiographical figures. The prototypes include her Chinese grandmother who sailed from Hong Kong to the Caribbean in the early years, and her maternal grandmother who had mixed Indian and Chinese blood. Shinebourne admits that with her Chinese-Indian background, she occupies a superior position in the middle-class economy and culture represented by the Chinese. Her place is far above the Indian community and its agricultural workers. Her personal appearance is no different from that of the average Chinese worker. However, she identifies with the cultural origins of her maternal grandmother, with its Indian roots: “When I wrote my first two novels, I was not certain why the Canje backdrop was so important to me, and it has taken a lifetime for me to fully understand why, and the writing of my new novel, The Last Ship, completed in 2014, has finally brought me to a firm understanding and realisation about why I have had such a strong sense of being rooted in the sugar estate culture of Canje. Before this, I just had a sense that it was an important part of me and of Guyana and its history and culture” (“Autobiographical Influences 2”). Shinebourne’s early works paid more attention to the Indian workers’ experience on the sugar plantations. It is not until her 2015 work that she focuses on Chinese cultural themes and characters. Throughout her works, the consistent theme is the conflicting identity crisis caused by the mixture of her Indian and Chinese bloodlines, and by the cultural and linguistic hybridization of the Caribbean. Though Indians and Chinese are both marginalized ethnic groups, their social statuses are different, due to disparate economic conditions, and this is represented by characters in her novels. Véronique Bragard, when examining Shinebourne’s two early works, Timepiece and The Last English Plantation, considers the two novels as epitome of “transoceanic coolitude,” seeing the Indian slaves as characters crossing the black waters during their nightmarish journey, arriving in a foreign place as workers at the bottom of society, and remaining silent and invisible (Transoceanic 98). Shinebourne herself exemplifies a mode of serial diasporization. After graduating from university, she went to the United Kingdom to study, chose to settle down there, and practiced a mode “re-diasporics.” A diasporic subject, Shinebourne has a sense of home which is not so much China as India, or rather, more fittingly the lower-case plurals “chinas” and “indias,” as mediated and translated by Guyanization and plantationization. It should be noted that the re-diaspora-ization of the characters in Shinebourne’s novels can loosen the rigidity and restriction of cultural

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nationalism and essentialism. By sharing the common experiences of marginalization and otherization of Asian ethnic groups, Shinebourne can also echo the Asian politicized aesthetics of recent years. The PanAsian Alliance movement, to which many Asian Americans are actively linked, has adopted a united front to strengthen the demands of its political criticism. Indeed, in terms of works written by Shinebourne, Asian imagination has always been translated through, and mixed and mingled with personal emotions, intimately embodied in and infiltrated with values and beliefs, and merged with the individual body and mind. As seen in Shinebourne’s novels, her Asia is a mysterious relic of its ancestors, haunted by a deceased grandmother who had never been seen. This ghostly obsession repeatedly reminds the characters to resist cultural memory and loss, and regain their cultural umbilical cord. Chapter Seven in this section will also deal with the post-traumatic memories in Shinebourne’s Chinese Women published in 2010. The image of the bombing of the twin towers is a sign of fear, and Ground Zero is synonymous with mourning and pain. The traumatic memory brought by 9/11 is too profound and dramatic to be faithfully reproduced in any verbal or symbolic medium. For example, James Berger declares: “Trauma is a secular apocalyptic moment: shattering, obliterating, but also revelatory” and “Nothing adequate, nothing corresponding in language could stand in for it” (“There’s No Backhand to This” 52, 54). Toni Morrison, the black female writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, expresses her lament, “I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say–no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become” (“The Dead of September 11” 48). After the atrocity, Derrida in an interview stated that in the September 11 incident, the towers’ collapse does not refer to two urban high-rise buildings, but the disability of human interpretation of the term “9/11.” Derrida suggests that the 9/11 event refers not only to “what was touched, wounded, or traumatized by this double crash” of the buildings, but also “what is terrible about ‘September 11,’ what remains ‘infinite’ in this wound, is that we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it” (quoted in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror 94). Derrida stresses that 9/11 highlights the embarrassment and limitations of language use when human beings face sudden upheaval and pain. Languages as conceptual, meaningful, and interpretive mechanisms have long been paralyzed before the experience.

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By reading Shinebourne’s Chinese Women implicitly as a post-911 novel, the section seeks to address how Asian characters deal with the 9/11 trauma. The storyline spans British Guiana of the 1960s to the Canada and London of the post-9/11 era. The narrator Aziz is the son of Indian slaves. After a fall during childhood, this illiterate and disabled character looks at the racially ghettoized Guyanese plantocracy from a bystander’s perspective. This section will address his morbidly obsessive fantasy over the two Chinese females who represent the upper class, and his illusory projection of an imagined social mobility. Later on, the middle-aged Aziz becomes a nuclear weapons engineer, rich but paranoid. After the 9/11 incident, his fear of Western world retaliation against Muslim terrorists convinces Aziz that he has overturned the identity of slave laborer and completed a social-class reversal, finally making himself marriageable to the girl he admired 30 years ago, while as a terrorist, he can finally make the world aware of his existence. Through the state of Aziz’s disability and aphasia, Shinebourne ridicules the fixation and paranoia of traumatic experience. This section focuses on a paired reading of personal traumatic experience and the larger historical events of the 1960s and 2000s, addressing the important implications of coolitude and négritude in the Caribbean. The second writer to be examined in this section is Canadian Quebeçois writer André Lamontagne. His début novel is Les fossoyeurs: Dans le mémoire de Québec, translated into English as Gravediggers by Margaret Wilson Fuller and published in 2010. The work centers on the double plotlines of a Chinese Canadian’s search for her cultural roots. The narrator and protagonist, a Québec-born journalist in Vancouver, depicts how he helps investigate the familial history of his Chinese neighbor Rachel Ng, only to find a Chinese communal burial place and a mysterious trafficking in bones to an overseas company. It turns out that Ng’s grandfather was forced to move from British Columbia to Québec after the Chinese Exclusion Act took effect in the early twentieth century. While unearthing past Chinese histories, he crosses paths with a young Québec dropout who is investigating the many disastrous fires and epidemic incidents in Québec in the nineteenth century. He is, ironically, an arsonist himself. Through archival and archeological research, the narrator uncovers a hidden chapter in Québeçois modernity. The novel is a journey into a sad chapter of trauma, repositioning the Asian-Canadian experiences in relation to trans-Pacific studies of railway construction,

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racial exclusions, and migrations. It is argued that through the intertextual mosaic of multiracial memories the work destabilizes the totalizing (Canadian/Quebéçois) nationalist critique and epistemologies. Overall, the book hopes to identify a possible poetics of trauma in the writings of Asian others. As Derrida in “Autoimmunity” argues, “Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with’” (97). Trauma is like a disease affecting one’s immune system. Exploring the causes of trauma is not so much sealing up past injuries as accepting its wounds as part of the body within. An active response to the wounded experience is thus required to usher in a healthier future. Trauma, too, can have positive cleansing powers. Like the phoenix rising from its ashes, these Asian-American minorities are able to extract precious ore from the pit of past misery, and seek solace and healing energy by reconciling with their traumatic experiences.

CHAPTER 2

Japanese (Post)-Internment Narratives

Abstract This chapter examines a series of novels authored by the Japanese-American writer Julie Otsuka who addresses the Japanese Relocation Camp experiences during World War II. Based on her family’s real internment experiences, Otsuka evocatively recalls the sad chapter her family tried to forget but never could. Using “we” as a collective narrator, Otsuka calls for a remembering and re-membering of the structure of historical silence and repression. Using Internment as a metaphor of cultural memory, Otsuka dovetails personal and family story with national history. The chapter argues that the topic of internment experiences embody the aporia and aphasia associated with forced relocation and exclusion experienced by the ethnic others. Writing the unspeakable and transgenerational trauma, Otsuka inherits the unspoken ancestral melancholia as cultural baggage. Keywords Postmemory internment · Executive Order 9066 · Redress · Civil Liberties Act

∗ ∗ ∗

© The Author(s) 2020 J. T. Lee, Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8_2

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2.1 Against Historical Amnesia: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine and Buddha in the Attic 2.1.1

American Dream or a Mirage?

Sometimes he heard the wind blowing through the sagebrush and he remembered he was in the desert but he could not remember how long he had been there, or why. Sometimes he worried he was there because he’d done something horribly, terribly wrong. But then when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be, it would not come to him…. “Everything was [farther than it seems], in the desert. Everything except water. “Water,” she said, “is just a mirage.” A mirage was not there at all. (57–8) “Always, He would remember the dust… . It took your voice away… . Your dream.” (63–4)

The above two passages appear in the third chapter of Julie Otsuka’s “When the Emperor Was Divine,” revolving around the central focus of the novel—internment in the desert. The narrator in this episode is an eight-year-old boy who was hoping to go “camping” in a place where there were caravans, camels crossing the dunes, and palm trees swaying in the breeze. Much to his dismay, “there was only the wind and the dust and the hot burning sand” (52), and even worse, he was told by his mother that the dust will eat up everything—one’s “voice,” even one’s “dream.” Beyond the dusty barren desert was a “mirage,” a reflection of light and shadow, an optical illusion producing the impression of solid things. The time frame is 1943. The young boy was not the only one who experienced this disillusionment. Sharing his destiny and sentiment were approximately 120,000 Japanese nationals or Japanese-American citizens, who were forced to leave their homes behind and move to ten internment camps in the United States. When the Emperor Was Divine is based on Julie Otsuka’s family relocation experiences; the young boy is the prototype of her uncle. Julie Otsuka’s writings present the Japanese Americans’ intimate responses to their nightmarish “American dream” experience.

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Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine subtly captures the feeling of insecurity and discomfort of an unnamed Japanese family,1 which includes a middle-aged mother and her son, aged seven, and an adolescent daughter aged ten. They sense immediate and unknown threat and danger after their father is arrested by the FBI for suspected espionage. Subsequent to the bombing attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the issuance of “Evacuation Order No. 19”2 they, along with other Japanese (or Japanese Americans), were moved to a desert region in Topaz, Utah, where they stayed for more than three years. Though they were able to return to their home in California, they were forever traumatized. In an interview, Otsuka discussed her mother’s three-and-a-half years of internment camp experience, emphasizing that for the generations experiencing wartime relocations, “the war is just an episode they’d rather forget, because of the shame, the stigma, they felt at being labeled ‘disloyal’” (Trachtenberg 2). The “camp” experience is not so much “a source or focus of anger or recriminations” or “an occasional point of reference” for the family, as her grandmother, mother, and uncle who survived the Topaz camps rarely spoke of their experience (Shea). These experiences were not spoken of or widely discussed, and the “camp” and their incarceration were part of a family legacy engraved in silence. The first chapter gives an impression of crumbling and morbid imagery—of “things falling apart.” The house of the family is left unattended, the lawn unmowed, the roof leaking, in part because her husband had been taken away, but also because they were waiting for the official order. This limbo state does not end, and in the following chapter, we learn that the characters stay in the horse stalls in Taoforan (apparently a fictional location, or one that no longer exists) for months, with fires, fleas, and bad odors. Then, the family takes the train to the Utah desert, the site of their ultimate incarceration. Here they see a stereotypically American landscape, which they have heard a lot about but have had no 1 At an interview, Otsuka admits that she deliberately unnamed the characters in her novel, “I actually had written an earlier version of the first chapter in which the mother had…a Japanese surname, and as I continued to write about these characters I thought it seemed more effective actually to un-name them” (Howard). 2 Please also refer to the [Posting of Civilian Exclusion Order/Evacuation Order No. 19, Berkeley, California, 1942] by Mine Okubo. H: 9.25 in, W: 13 in Paper ink United States, 1942–1944. (2007.62.18) Gift of Mine Okubo Estate, and The Executive Order 9066, signed by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, authorizing the removal of Japanese people in the United States.

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chance to visit. The trip is rather uncomfortable compared to the drive to Yosemite she (recall the characters are unnamed) remembered when her father hired an Indian driver to take the family out for vacations. They are not allowed to lift the window shades during their trip, and thus their vision is blocked and limited, and they see are only partial, flashing window images. In fact, even on the train, they are confined and restricted to an enclosed space, both optically and physically. The country view is far more picturesque, and the girl sees a water tank carrying the sign “Buy US War Bonds Every Payday” (Otsuka Emperor 26), implying that even in the rural areas, people are still influenced by the war. The train took the characters to their ultimate location of imprisonment—Topaz, “A city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert” (Otsuka Emperor 49). Armed guards patrol the location in dust and howling wind. The fences are a reminder that they are under constant surveillance. Transgression of the fences is a serious offense and strictly forbidden. As Otsuka puts it sarcastically, “the rules about the fence [were] simple: You could not go above it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it” (Otsuka Emperor 61). A man was shot dead when he tried to escape according to one guard, although friends speculated that he was only trying to pick a “rare and unusual flower” (Otsuka Emperor 101) which could only thrive on the other side of the fence. Metaphorically, the “old and crowded train,” “the scorching and windy desert,” and the barracks with barbed wire, reference the unsettling, uncomfortable, claustrophobic atmosphere. Using Internment as a metaphor of cultural memory, Otsuka dovetails personal and family story with national history. She admits that her family, affected by the internment experience, was reticent and repressed their “anger and sadness,” while she felt obsessed with trying to determine what had really happened (Verger). She also mentions that “people had so many different responses to that experience…. Some people remained deeply bitter till the end of their lives. Some people were able to put it behind them” (Verger). Most chose to live “as a strategy for survival, most Japanese-Americans after the war just tried to kind of get on with things, and not really look back” (Verger). As Otsuka states, “There was so much silence in my family about what happened during World War II, and a lot of repressed anger and sadness, too, so writing the novel helped me to understand what that silence was all about” (Shea).

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Indeed, critics have repeatedly noted the “structure of silence” as a common emblem of Japanese Americans. For instance, in Emily Roxworthy’s influential work on the trauma of Japanese-American internment, it is suggested that originally the Japanese tended to show an attitude of shikata ga nai, “it can’t be helped”—a fatalistic rationale that discredits resistance or counteraction. The internment experience aggravated their resigned tolerance of what had been imposed upon them. Hence, Japanese Americans were known for their “remarkable silence and stoic rebounding” from which they either became self-effacing or a “model minority” (1). For Otsuka, this deliberate “forgetting” is an alternative to remembering. On a personal level, Otsuka hopes to determine what traumatic past has shunned, leading a generation into repressed silence. Unearthing the haunted family secret is a way to release the genie from history’s bottle. On a collective memory level, the alternative stories she offers open a route allowing the gaps of official versions of national history to be filled in. A third-generation Japanese American, Otsuka, believes that the research and writing of what happened before and during the war gave her a better understanding of the “reticence and reluctance,” that became “a hallmark of Japanese culture.” Her search for family heritage and cultural roots is an indispensable chapter of American history. This is also the reason why she senses an “urgency of knowing” that which is withholding, and the “urgency of telling” stories of the arrival of Japanese. “That generation was deeply alienated,” in Otsuka’s words. Their alienation was caused by a structure of racial exclusion and discrimination, which started long before the war. As Otsuka notes, “This was not what they expected of America. And yet, on another level—not a big surprise— it’s also the culmination of decades of racism… . They had been alienated already, for a long time, by the time they were sent away” (Shea). According to historian Roger Daniels, the earliest massive immigration of the Japanese into the United States can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. A few years after the Chinese Exclusion Act took effect in 1882, thousands of the Japanese were brought to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations, and to the west coast of the United States to replenish the labor force, replacing the then-banned Chinese migrant workers. The demographic census indicates that the Japanese population increased by twelve times from 2039 in 1890 to 138,834 in 1930, whereas the Chinese decreased from 107,488 to 74,956 (Wang 175). As earlier Japanese and Chinese communities were in competition for positions in the workplace

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in North America, it is understandable that as minorities they showed hatred and hostility toward each other. What is worse, consequent to the westernization and modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth century, many Japanese considered themselves superior and more civilized than the rustic “Chinks,” which aggravated the division of the two communities (Wang 182). This explains why the Japanese felt extremely isolated and insecure when they were treated as “enemies” and “aliens” during the war period. When asked why she wrote her second novel, Buddha in the Attic, a prequel to When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka notes her worries about disappearing and forgotten memories. “And after a while we notice ourselves speaking of [the Japanese] more and more in the past tense,” she has said. “Some days we forget they were ever with us, although late at night they often surface, unexpectedly, in our dreams” (Shea). Otsuka shares with her family and ancestors the ever-haunting repressed silence, fears, anxiety, and a dark side of American history. Otsuka realizes that if she does not write it down or speak of it, the secrets will be forever buried and hidden. If what is repressed should eventually return in Freudian terms, Otsuka finds that her writing, more than just a healing power, brings the family closer, and strengthens her ties to her cultural origins. 2.1.2

Stolen Time, Forgotten Memories

When the Emperor Was Divine is organized in a deliberately chronological but temporally disturbing order. The chapter titles deploy the procession of the plotting, in line with historical progress; “Evacuation Order No 19,” “Train,” “When the Emperor Was Divine,” “In a Stranger’s Backyard;” it ends with a short chapter “confession.” The shifting of the narrative perspective moves from the mother in the “Evacuation Order No. 19,” to the girl in “Train,” to the boy in the internment chapter, then to “we” when they return to California. It ends with the father’s presumed confession. A timeline appears to be revealed, and yet the time is unfolded in bits and pieces, as if memories were truncated and could never be recovered, and what they remember is merely fragments and episodes. Otsuka presents the story with slices and segments, as if one was retrieving memory from a maze of archives, pictures, and letters. Lena Ahlin has provided a convincing remark in terms of this writing style:

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She clearly works with understatement and ellipsis, creating a linguistic vacuum in the text. These textual gaps indicate that her topic partly defies narrative reconstruction and create a silence, which allows us to read When the Emperor Was Divine as a metaphor for the broken, incomplete, unheard, “forgotten” stories and memories of the former evacuees. Thus, both content and form in Otsuka’s text mediate the cultural silence about the Japanese-American internment. (87)

Readers of Otsuka’s novel often find the stories fuzzy and brittle and have to make sense out of the chunks. Little by little, as the story unfolds and is made accessible, readers find themselves “re-experiencing” narrators’ memories, as all memories are reconstructed in omissions, forgetting, and remembering. Yet, one can easily discern the characters’ ambivalent attitudes toward what is happening. For the Issei Mother, despite unfair treatment, she does not wish to be sent back to Japan. For the girl and the boy who grew up in California, they favor American living styles—the boy is obsessed with cowboys and baseball, the girl wears Mary Janes, has a doll from Sears, and her favorite snack is black licorice. On the bookshelf of their home is Audubon’s Birds of America, which suggests that the woman has tried to accommodate American culture by familiarizing herself with this noted reference book of American indigenous bird species. The Nisei young girl was used to putting the book upon her head to balance her steps. However, they gradually realize that their racial markers will forever identify them as “aliens.” Issei or Nisei, neither of the generations are considered rightful citizens. Visibility is a crucial factor in the novel. What bothers the girl before moving is that she felt people were staring at her. When they take the train to Topaz, she and her fellow passengers are reminded by the patrolling soldier to keep the shades down, lest they would be seen from outside the train. As the young narrator explains, “the last time they had passed through a city with the shades up someone had thrown a rock through one of the windows. The train slowed… . and then there were no more towns by the tracks, there was only the highway, and it was all right to raise up the shades” (Otsuka Emperor 28–9). It is suggested that to be seen by others, or simply their existence, might be a threat. Otsuka presents polyphonic, unsettling, and paradoxical narrative voices in When the Emperor Was Divine. The novel begins with the pervasive appearance of the “Evacuation Order No. 19,” drawing the female

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narrator’s attention. Knowing that this is a matter of life and death, the woman reads the sign carefully and meticulously, from top to bottom, and takes notes. She knows that she can do nothing but follow the Order instructing them to move from their home. As the woman is preparing for their evacuation, she unpins her World War I map from the wall and takes down three paintings: Princess Elizabeth, Jesus, and Millet’s The Gleaners. She carefully places them in order, with Jesus on top. Symbolically, these objects signify and define the societal order, faith, and hierarchy, though now with the evacuation order their world is flipped upside down, and the world order that she always believed in has fallen apart. Despite the fact that Millet’s The Gleaners had long been hung in their kitchen, the woman now finds the painting particularly troubling, and decides to throw it away. “She wondered why she had let it hang in the kitchen for so long. It bothered her, the way those peasants were forever bent over above that endless field of wheat. ‘Look up’ she wanted to say to them. ‘Look up, look up!’ The Gleaners, she decided, would have to go” (Otsuka Emperor 7). What irritates the woman in the painting is the way the peasants are forever bent, forever in labor, and forever in the lowest rank. This resonates with her own social status. Such a gesture is a reminder of how the Japanese, like the woman, stay humble and selfabnegating. But quite sadly, she can have only empathy, not actions, as she realizes that in reality resistance is impossible. She realizes her vulnerability and the precariousness of her situation. “It was late April. It was the fourth week of the fifth month of war and the woman, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules” (8). The mother, an epitome of the Issei generation, has developed a pragmatic coping strategy to deal with various issues. As the sign states that no pets are allowed, she kills their aging dog after giving it its last food and a cuddle. Before she uses the shovel to hit her pet, her last words are, “You’ve been a good dog,” “You’ve been a good white dog.” This seems to be an elegy, not only for the dog, but also for her fellow Japanese, who have been dutiful and faithful for most of their lives, having wholehearted trust in their masters until death. In another pet, a macaw bird, one comes to realize that it had been kept by them for some time, raised with the book Birds of America on their bookshelf, and the bird was able to “talk” back to the family. Yet, the woman has to release the macaw bird the day before their departure. At first the bird seems bewildered and refuses to fly away, offering its own brand of dutiful allegiance.

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Their world has changed drastically since December 7, 1941, and made worse with the passing of Executive Order 9066 on February 9, 1942. Neither subjects nor citizens, they have no command of their political or human rights. Their status can only be determined by pitiless law.3 In the same manner, the father, abducted at midnight, is present through his random mailings. Like her long-neglected garden and chores, her husband is reduced to stamps on the envelopes he sent from various locations: The narcissus in the garden were white with mildew and irises were beginning to wilt. Weeds were everywhere. The woman had not mowed the grass for months. Her husband usually did that. She had not seen her husband since last December. First he had been sent to Fort Missoula, Montana, on a train and then he had been transferred to Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Every few days he was allowed to write her a letter. Usually he told her about the weather. The weather at Fort Sam Houston was fine. On the back of every envelope was stamped “Censored, War Department,” or “Detained Alien Enemy Mail.” (Otsuka Emperor 12)

Again unnamed, the father is described with no emotional register. Readers, along with the family he left behind, can only piece together his whereabouts with scraps and papers. His profile can be noted through a series of incarceration archives with the striking labels of “Censored, War Department” and “Detained Alien Enemy.” Otsuka recalled the motives of her writing When the Emperor Was Divine in a 2012 Newsweek article commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japanese’s relocations. In this interview she mentions that a family photo taken on February 29, 1942, prompted her to write the novel. This photo depicts Otsuka’s mother, uncle, and grandmother when they arrived in Tanforan, before being transferred to the Topaz Relocation Center (Otsuka “Family”). As her 3 Marni Gauthier in Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory states the mishaps, “Enemies aliens were subjected to certain orders and restrictions – from the prohibition of firearms, short-wave radios, and cameras to a strict curfew. What Executive Order 9066 did was to expand the rules of ‘military necessity’ to suspect citizens, thus making it possible to subject Japanese-American citizens to the same regulations required of (mostly Japanese) ‘aliens.’ Indeed, one month after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, Public Exclamation No. 3 extends military regulations to ‘all persons of Japanese ancestry’; evacuation for the same shortly followed, resulting in 120,000 Japanese-American interned, approximately 65 percent of them US born and thus citizens” (166).

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mother was suffering dementia, she could only rely on research from historical archives, books, and records to imagine the internment experiences. Though “camp” is not a strange word in the family, and her uncle, aged 8, was carrying a canteen and believed they would go “camping,” the internment camping experiences were never openly discussed in the family. Otsuka could only detect the hardship and bitterness by way of other sources, including the train with “blacked-out” windows, the harsh heat and cold, and the rattlesnakes. What she did not tell me: that camp was surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed guards; that the winter temperatures in Utah sometimes fell to 20° below; that the barracks were nothing more than pine boards covered with tar paper; that the reason her father was not in the photograph was because he had been arrested four months earlier by the FBI as a dangerous enemy alien and sent to Fort Missoula, Mont. (Otskua “Family”)

The incarceration became an indelible trace for the internees. As if in an image of “still water runs deep,” they look taciturn and reticent, but underneath is the collective evidence of repressed anguish and melancholy. One should keep in mind that even during wartime, public opinion toward the Japanese forced internment was contentious and divided. A 2014 Newsweek article followed Otsuka’s 2012 article on wartime internment, documenting the magazine’s reporting of the pros and cons of the experience. The opponents of the policy included those who thought it would violate American citizens’ rights, and those who believed that the policy would lead to a racial war, which could have been disadvantageous for the US war campaign overseas. Despite these opposing remarks, the policy was supported by the majority of general public (Verger). The article prophesizes what would take place after the relocation Order: “And yet these arguments were mooted, because the relocation happened anyway. As for the consequences? ‘At best it will leave wounds,’ … At worst, the cost could be ‘the permanent alienation of a group of citizens’ who might have been useful to the U.S. in the war” (Verger). Otsuka has captured subtle and paradoxical sentiments in her novel. It is understandable that people in California, according to the Newsweek article, “were more anxious than ever to get rid of their aliens after rumors that signal lights were seen before submarine attacks” (Verger). In the novel, Otsuka depicts a shop clerk averting eye contact and neighbors, eluding avoidance:

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… the Gilroys and the Myers, the Leahys, the Wongs, the two elderly Miss O’Grady’s … They had all seen us leave, at the beginning of the war, had peered out through their curtains as we walked down the street with our enormous overstuffed suitcases. But none of them came out, that morning, to wish us goodbye, or good luck, or ask us where it was we were going (we didn’t know). None of them waved. They’re afraid, our mother had said. Keep on walking. Hold your head up. Whatever you do, don’t look back. Now when we ran into these same people on the street they turned away and pretended not to see us. Or they nodded in passing and said “Gorgeous day,” as though we had not been away at all. (Otsuka Emperor 115; italics original)

It is in this passage that Otsuka portrays how human fears can be tangible. It makes sense to see why people experience shell-shock and remain silent because they feel their sense of security is threatened. In an eloquent and evocative manner, Otsuka expresses her sympathy for all affected by the larger structure of fears. After all, this is a sad chapter of American history; everyone, Japanese American or not, was a victim. They simply choose different ways to survive. A subtext of the internees’ mishaps is the deprivation of social and economic privileges. Otsuka’s grandfather, a successful businessman working for a Japanese import–export company, became a target of the FBI (Shea). A parallel portrayal of the father figure is found in the novel. The unnamed family is depicted as a well-to-do middle-class Japanese family. the father traveled a lot, often bought fancy goods and accessories from Paris for his wife and daughter, hired an Indian driver for leisure trips, and promised to take his son to travel all over the world. The girl used to take piano lessons every week and the mother used to own an Electrolux. After the war, they return home nearly bankrupt and poverty-stricken; the father comes home an old and broken man, unable to work. The woman has to find cleaning work for wealthy families to make a living. They can only afford to buy clothing from the Salvation Army. All of this coincides with what Otsuka has said in an interview: the effects of the war were “economically devastating” to the family (Shea). Their life had been changed overnight, from riches to rags, falling off the social ladder. This is not merely an individual life, but that of a community and a communal destiny. What is more mortifying, the Japanese were

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not only forced to move, but also to internalize that they were guilty and shameful, an “alien enemy.” They are told that their imprisonment stems from justifiable cause: • • • •

You’ve been brought to internment for your own protection. This is all in the interest of national security. This is a matter of military necessity. This is an opportunity to prove their loyalty. (Otsuka Emperor 70)

Quite ironically, what was masking in this rhetoric is the distrust for the Japanese-American citizens, although they seldom showed disobedience or protest. As if engulfed in a vortex of mass hysteria and paranoia, the Japanese were demonized as “disloyal,” “sly and treacherous.” A test for the young internees was to fill out a loyalty questionnaire regarding whether or not they would swear “unqualified allegiance” to help defend the United States from any foreign or domestic enemies, and most importantly, “forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government power or organization” (Otsuka Emperor 97–8). To the Issei mother who left Japan to get married, and has stayed in America for 18 years, this request of allegiance was not only unfounded but also absurd. Otsuka criticizes nationalist patriotism as farcical. As she states, the mother persona, “did not want to cause any trouble – or be labeled disloyal. She did not want to be sent back to Japan. ‘There’s no future for us there. We’re here. Your father’s here. The most important thing is that we stay together’” (Otsuka Emperor 98). Things did not get better, even after the war. Each of the families was given 25 dollars for train fare to go home, the same amount by law given to a “criminal.”4 When the characters return to their original homes in Berkeley, they carry with them a sense of imprisonment. The boy has a recurring dream: “It was five minutes past curfew, and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong side of the fence. ‘I’ve got to get back,’ he woke up shouting” (Otsuka Emperor 137). Even at home, their rooms, long and narrow, resemble the barracks where they have been

4 Beginning in 1943, Nisei, who answered “yes” to the loyalty questions and were not enlisted in the military started to leave the camps. Each was given a one-way transportation cost and $25 to start a new life elsewhere (Nagata 14).

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interred, and even though they have dreamed about sleeping in their own rooms after they arrive home, they still sleep together in the same room. The “we” narrative voice appears in the chapter “The Stranger in the Backyard,” which depicts how “we” learn to “behave”—to be polite, slavish, and submissive: “How to Behave in the Outside World.” Speak only English. Do not walk down the street in groups of more than three, or gather in restaurants in groups of more than five. Do not draw attention to yourselves in any way.” We spoke softly and did not raise our hands, not even when we know the answers. We followed the rules. We took tests. We wrote compositions… . Always we are polite. If we did something wrong we made sure to say excuse me (excuse me for looking at you, excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong we immediately said we were sorry (I’m sorry I touched your arm, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I didn’t see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk I lost my balance and brushed against it by mistake… . I will never touh you agan, I promise, I swear …) (Otsuka Emperor 121–2; italics original)

What this passage shows is a sense of isolation felt by the Japanese Americans during the postwar period. They were still affected by ghettoization and racial segregation, a self-imposed imprisonment, so to speak. That they always said “excuse me,” and “sorry,” apologized for being visible, present, and being human, indicates an undifferentiated, collective gesture of repressive docility. Even worse, they gradually internalized a self-loathing, self-condemning attitude toward themselves, and began to believe that they were low, inferior, and not deserving of anything promising. We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of enemy. We were guilty… . A dangerous people. We are free now…. On the street we tried to avoid our own reflections wherever we could. We turned away from shiny surfaces and storefront windows. We ignored the passing glances of strangers. What kind of ‘ese” are you, Japanese or Chinese.” (119)

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For some time, they are told to pretend to be “Chinese” and avoid risks, until they no longer know who they really are, eradicating and eliminating their true selves. In addition to their confused identity, there are many unresolved problems and unanswered questions. “Why was the father taken by the authorities in the first place? Espionage, sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government? Was he guilty as charged? Was he innocent? Was he even there at all? We didn’t know. We didn’t want to know. We never asked” (Otsuka, Emperor 133). They stop asking for reasons. They no longer want to know. They have suffered too much pain. No wonder now they say “All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget” (Otsuka, Emperor 133). Likewise, for the mother in the novel, it does not really matter who won the war. Showing loyalty and taking sides is the last thing on her mind. What matters is the survival and continued existence of her family, through hardship and antagonism. For most, war has no real winners or losers. Rather, they hope to forget and resume their original routines, however impossible this may seem. Or maybe the Japanese Americans are the perpetual losers, driven by destiny to accept their roles as alien enemies. To forget is to remember and rejuvenate oneself. Otsuka said that her family seldom looked back; what they wanted was to get over things and move on. The characters have found healing power in forgetting and letting go of sad memories. They realize that the memories, like her “pearl” that was lost in the train, or metaphorically “Pearl Harbor and the aftermath” were now almost forgotten. By chance, When the Emperor Was Divine was published in 2002 on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the 60-year anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, and 14 years after The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which included restitution for the World War II internment of Japanese Americans and Aleuts, and President Reagan’s formal apology. It is widely believed that this redress echoed both the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, as well as the emergence of minority studies in the 1970s and 80s. Since the 1970s, a large volume of internment narratives and archives have been published and revealed.5 Many of these works deal with the 5 Literatures of early internment experience include Edward H. Spicer et al.’s Impound People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers (Tucson, 1969), Roger Daniels’ Concentration Camps USA: Japanese-Americans and World War II (New York, 1971). Artist work Citizen 13660 (1946) created by Mine Okubo; “Whitshire Bus” and “The

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representation of internment experiences, asking what is spoken and speakable, and what is unsaid and unspeakable. Once When the Emperor Was Divine was published it received immediate popular reception and critical acclaim, and was chosen as recommended reading in many high schools and colleges. The New York Times reviewer Samuel G. Freeman noted relevant social contexts during WWII and post-9/11 American society, believing that “Emperor offered an unplanned analogy to a period of investigation, interrogation, suspicion and deportation of Arabs and Muslims in the United States” (Freeman). Though 60 years apart, the xenophobic fears and exclusion in the American context still ring true. How people deal with trauma and remember traumatic memories are still issues in contemporary societies. What When the Emperor Was Divine tries to explore by addressing the topic of internment experiences is exactly the aporia and aphasia associated with forced relocation and exclusion. The trauma, simply put, is beyond words and transgenerational understanding. Otsuka inherits the unspoken ancestral melancholia as cultural baggage. One cannot help but ask: What is the point of telling another traumatic internment story? What can be helped by writing trauma? The answer to the question remains elusive, but perhaps Otsuka’s work gives us some possible hints. In the title When the Emperor Was Divine, the use of the past tense suggests the mesmerizing power of nostalgia, and the words “divine” and “emperor” imply a sense of dignity. Toward the end of When the Emperor Was Divine, in the backyard, the boy character finds a Buddha statue the family owned, now buried in the garden, though still laughing. The laughing Buddha offers a spiritually inspirational force that pushes them forward. The same Buddha image is picked up in Otsuka’s second novel Buddha in the Attic, which wears a mysterious and palliative smile that evokes healing energy. The always smiling Buddha with a round belly, a popular deity in Buddhist and Taoist cultures in Asia, is associated with happiness, abundance, and prosperity, and seems to encourage readers to stay positive and self-regenerating, in order to move into a new phase of life, with a new perspective.

Legend of Miss Sasagawara” written by Hisaye Yamamoto, Nisei Daughter written by Monica Sone, No No Boy written by John Okada, to name a few, are representatives of literary works representing internment experiences.

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2.2

Politics of War Memories: Remembering the Japanese Internment in Joseph Craig Danner’s The Fires of Edgarville

What drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward. —Terry Eagleton, “Waking the Dead”

This epigraph is regarded by Terry Eagleton as “one of [Walter Benjamin’s] shrewdest sayings.” Reflecting on Benjamin’s approach to history and memory, Eagleton provides a significant insight into the retrospective, suggesting that the reinvention of the past can shape our future, and how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. What lies behind Benjamin, says Eagleton, is a Freudian perception of motivated forgetting: remembrance is “the key to emancipation” (“Waking the Dead”). In his seminal work After Theory, Eagleton notes, “To recall a world-shaking political history is also … to recall what is for the most part a history of defeat … What has proved most damaging … is the absence of memories of collective, and effective, political action … There is a historical vortex at the centre of our thought which drags it out of true” (7). It is indeed the absence of memories, the forgetting, that distorts our understanding of the present and future. Only by “turning our gaze to the horror of the past,” can we continue to move forward and reshape our future. From the privilege of hindsight, past events can be reinscribed in a broader sense. Set at a point when the Reagan Administration officially apologized to former Japanese internees and authorized compensation, Joseph Craig Danner’s The Fire of Edgarville (2009) could be read as a critique of a monolithic nationalistic discourse of the Pacific War(s). Along with flashbacks and memories, readers are offered different perspectives from which to consider how the wars (many wars instead of one) are and could be remembered. The novel epitomizes petit récits to recount the encounters, aftermath, traumas, and the troubling of citizenship. The Pacific War(s) is the backbone of the story, as the characters try to recollect the past, searching for themselves to understand the war. By examining how individuals remember war trauma in the novel, the present research

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reveals how negotiation and reconciliation with the past help reshape our tomorrows. Hank Davenport, an America born Japanese cardiologist and the adoptee of a white couple during the Pacific War, is suspended from practice, accused of the mercy-killing of a child. Now in his fifties, he returns to a dilapidated orchard to attend to Myrna, his aging and ailing adoptive mother, who is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Jobless, Hank volunteers as a firefighter and befriends Fire Chief George Nagoya, one of the few Japanese residents in town who survived internment. As the story unfolds, Hank, Myrna, and George recollect the past, a series of longhidden secrets wrapped in historical mystery—including racism, revenge, and a phantom arsonist—that plagued the small Oregon lumber town during the Pacific War. Slowly, it becomes known that Myrna is Hank’s real mother. Hank’s father, an American Japanese, was enrolled in the armed forces and killed during the war. Because of the pervasive hostility against the Japanese, Myrna composed a make-believe story of adoption. Ousted from her family when pregnant, she married Daniel Davenport three days before he was drafted. The novel is a journey into the history of war trauma to piece together the diminishing and elliptical memories of individuals and ethnic groups. In its time frame, there is a historically significant coincidence: Hank Davenport was born December 10, 1942, “a full year since the first attack, so his mother would have given birth inside an eight-foot barbedwire fence” (Danner 168). Beginning in December 1997, the novel ends in February 1998, following more than 50 years of flashbacks and memories. In August 1998, 46 years after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 allowing military leaders to establish any area in the United States as a restricted zone and authorize the incarceration of Japanese Americans, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act and officially apologized, paying $20,000 to each former Japanese-American internee (Yamato). The novel concurs with the historical revisionism and the reconciliatory climate of the late 1990s in the United States when it was justifiable to reconsider the “aftermath” of the Pacific War and Japanese internment. For many Americans, racial prejudice and hatred seemed to have ended. The New York Times reported that leaders of Japanese-American organizations reacted with “a collective sigh of relief” after receiving “46 years of shame and pain” (Bishop). Danner’s protagonists are all survivors of the war, traumatized and haunted by its aftermath: Hank, a mix-blood orphan; Myrna, a widow;

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George, a former internee; and Daniel Davenport, a veteran. Hank is forced to suspend his medical practice, accused of the mercy-killing of a child. Awaiting trial, he and his wife Jesse and their dog Trouble move into his Grandfather’s bleak and dilapidated farm in Edgarville, where Hank’s sickly mother has lived since her husband’s death. From the onset, the story focuses on Hank’s perspective as a middle-aged, Japanese adoptee, trying to show his filial gratitude to the adoptive white mother, who raised him through “the neighbors’ stares and gossiping” (10). As the story unfolds and narrative viewpoints shift, Myrna Capo’s flashbacks reveal that Hank’s “adoptive” mother Myrna is his real mother. Young Myrna fell in love with a Japanese boy named Frank, but Myrna’s Mormon family condemned the affair. Three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese-American prejudice erupted into hostility and hatred. The resentment is affirmed in the local newspaper’s full-page ads: “Go find someplace else to live! This valley isn’t big enough!” (196; italics original). After the affair between Myrna and Frank was discovered, she was driven from home. Two months later, Frank’s family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans were shipped to Relocation Centers.6 The novel’s multiple narratives suggest that memory is always mediated and the past is never stable. Memory can be constructed, figured, and reconfigured in images and discourse. Hank had been convinced that he was adopted. His appearance was utterly Japanese. When Myrna showed him the picture of his father, “a handsome man with honest eyes who shared Hank’s facial bone structure,” Hank waited for Myrna “to point out the picture of his father’s bride, dressed in a kimono with two chopsticks holding up her hair” (168). Hank’s Asiatic look, with slanted eyes and yellow skin, has become the best cover-up for Myrna’s story of adoption. Although he is of mixed blood, Hank’s features are not those of a white person. George is the only person who can discern Hank’s

6 In February 1942, two months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of US residents of Japanese ancestry, more than two-thirds of whom were US citizens. Japanese Americans were not allowed to travel or carry weapons, cameras, or radios, which could be used for espionage. Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were permanently moved to 10 relocation centers in 7 states. In 1980, the US Congress investigated the events leading to Executive Order 9066, finding no justifiable legal or moral grounds for internment. It concluded that the relocation resulted from “racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership” (Stanley 87). For further background information about Japanese internment, see Stanley, Sakurai, Stewart, and Takemoto.

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“Caucasian-ness: broader chest and taller frame and nose bent slightly out of shape” (207). His Japaneseness is so obvious that it is impossible for him to go anywhere unnoticed. To impress neighbors and to survive the hostility against “Japs,” Myrna lies, saying Hank “was orphaned by the war” (175). In one episode, Hank is mistaken by a police officer as Myrna’s “handsome little houseboy.” Hank explains, “She’s really my adopted mom. My other mom and dad died when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima” (230). But even were Myrna to tell her son the truth about his birth, Hank would remain doubtful, knowing that his mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, with “her belfry’s full of bats” (196), cannot always be trusted. Ironically, it is after Myrna contracts dementia that she begins to tell the truth. Lidia, her nurse, has tried to discern which words are true but Myrna tells parts of different life stories, including the sordid past of the bastard child, the story of meeting her husband at a Greyhound bus stop and marrying before he was ordered to fight the Japanese, and the story of the firemen. Myrna would utter dirty or nasty curses unsuitable for a lady to say. All these stories, although real, are unbearable and unbelievable as the story of a decent doctor’s wife such as Myrna. Lidia is confused and doubts whether this senile and ailing woman losing her memory is revealing her secret past or fabricating a life. Fading memories become a safety valve through which Myrna’s suppressed self is released. Unspeakable trauma, the unearthed past, and her darker side have remained hidden and unspoken to keep her healthy. If she did not understand that her memories have been endangered and eroded by time, she might not feel the urgency to tell her stories. 2.2.1

Not One War, But Many Wars

The novel best reflects shared experiences of fear and anxiety. The relocation sign, “Ouster of Japs from the West Coast,” represents the exclusion of aliens regarded as dangerous and threatening. The same antagonism led to the passing of the Naturalization Acts of 1790, which limited citizenship to “a free white person” (Stanley 2), and to the concept of “the

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Yellow Peril” that underlay the Exclusions Acts.7 Mary Douglas’s conceptions of pollution and danger provide a framework for understanding the exclusion and predicament of Japanese Americans during wartime. In Purity and Danger, her seminal work, Douglas suggests that cultural and religious symbols should be interpreted within a larger social structure of categorization that links defilement and hygiene. To Douglas, holiness or unholiness, sacred or polluted, cleanliness and uncleanliness are relative categories. With the saying “dirt is matter out of place,” Douglas refers to dirt as “a by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter” (35). She suggests that things regarded as polluted, foods in particular, are not intrinsically so but are seen as dirty and “dangerous,” as posing threats to social order, because they do not fit within normal categories. Hence, based on fear, rules are adopted banning contact with prohibited objects or persons. Mryna’s Mormon family rejects all forms of cultural transgression, in Douglas’s terms, regarding miscegenation as taboo and impure. Myrna’s brother Martin tells her that the Japanese are uncivilized and primitive “Godless heathen Lamanites” (47); [T]heir house don’t [sic] have furniture: They eat right off the floor and don’t want strangers walking on their food … They cook disgusting things, like fish heads stuffed with seaweed paste and juice squeezed from fermented bugs and meat that normal people don’t. “That’s why they kind of smell like dog.” (46; italics original)

The Japanese are debased by the Capo family as savage, backward, cannibalistic, and incapable of humanity and civility. Having a daughter who conceives a child with a “Jap”—not only “infidel” but an alien enemy, a “Lamanite”—is an intolerable taboo for the Capo family, who represent religious paranoia and narrow-mindedness. Two differing beliefs have confused Myrna since childhood. On the one hand, there is the conviction that the Japanese are inferior, polluted, and dangerous. This racial denigration is so deeply rooted that, even with the Alzheimer’s disease, Myrna sometimes involuntarily releases a long line of nasty words cursing Hank’s yellow skin: “It says so in THE BOOK … dirty yellow 7 In the twentieth century, a few laws restrict on Asian/Japanese immigration and citizenship. As Sakurai states, “In 1922 the US Supreme Court ruled that Asian immigrants could not become US citizens. (Their children who were born in the Unites States were automatically citizens.) In 1923 non-citizens were forbidden to own land, and in 1924, Congress halted any further Japanese immigration” (8).

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Satan-loving wicked heathen Lamanite!!” (127; italics original). On the other hand, Myrna’s attachment to the Japanese is uncontrollably and inexplicably intense; in her eyes, the Japanese boy Frank is heroic, polite, and attractive, which explains why the aged and time-confused Myrna is sexually aroused seeing George’s naked body. It resembles Frank’s and is even more handsome (210–2). George Nagoya, Frank’s younger brother, Chief of Firefighter in Edgarville and the only member of the Nagoya family to survive the war, bears witness to internment experiences. George was twelve when the war began and turned fifteen as the internment ended. He remembers “his mother’s look of fear,” on the train to the internment camp, “his brother’s blank and constant stare” (162). He recalls that his father died falling off a ladder before internment; his mother had a stroke while confined in Camp Manzanar (110). George presents a vivid picture of the internment camp: He’d never thought in all his life he’d see so many Japanese. He was pressed on all four sides now by a crowd of black-haired immigrants, all the same except the soldiers spread out every twenty feet. George could hear the static-filled instructions from the loudspeakers, wondered why the guards did not use lariats and cattle prods. The sky was filled with Milky Way as they shuffled them into the camp, the desert night air cold so he saw steam from everybody’s mouths. All that he could smell was dust and other people’s nervous sweat; once the crowd spread out George saw the size of the internment camp. They wandered up and down the rows, the camp laid out in sectioned grids, their new home just a number on a paper someone handed Frank. He watched as Frank pulled back the woolen blanket tacked across the door: tar paper and plywood walls, a light bulb and a tin-box stove. At first it all seemed quiet, then the subtle sound of whispering, then as their neighbors got more bold he heard them like there were no walls … For George this was like summer camp, without the trees and swimming lake: he and Kay Fukui would play pint-pong every chance they got. His only chore was twice a day to sweep their dusty barracks out, make sure that his mother got a plate of what was served for lunch. For months there wasn’t any school and no one told them what to do and half the adults that he saw looked like they’d like to kill themselves. There were no deep wells to tumble down and they couldn’t get out past the guards: So why not leave the kids alone? Let’s hope this doesn’t last too long … (194; italics original)

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Overcrowded in the barracks’ limited space and enduring the harsh weather of the desert and tedious confinement, internees suffer from the loss of privileges, privacy, human rights, and dignity. The disfranchisement inherent in the massive incarceration euphemized as “relocation” markedly affected adults and children, so much so that, after half a century, the taste of grit still haunts George: “The dust got into everything, the bed sheets and the tooth powder” and “the smell of the sweet stench of the overflowing shower” (194–5). The whirling dust whipped by the helicopter that carried away his brother Frank and other volunteers remains a bad taste in his mouth, an unforgettable imprint on his sensory memory. For George, camp life, along with the separation from his brother Frank and the death of his mother, was a rite of passage for transitioning into manhood. George’s memories are a sort of jigsaw puzzle that helps in understanding Japanese Americans’ experiences of intense inner turmoil when requested to show political allegiance. The novel offers a vivid description of the tragic event. Frank volunteers to attend language school to become a military interpreter. While George’s mother is dying, Frank is granted three days of compassionate leave from the school. It takes two days to reach the camp and another morning waiting outside permission to enter. Helpless, Frank starts smoking to cope with unreasonable requests. Finally he is permitted to enter and is greeted by many Issei, who bow to him even though he is a Nisei (113). Although absent, Frank plays a central role in the novel. He is given a chapter, “The Hero,” and more often than not he is depicted as a hero, partly in the memories of Myrna and George and partly in the news clip featuring his heroic deeds and sacrifice: he “[d]ied to save a dozen white boys in the Philippines” (196), six months before Hiroshima, leaving George an orphan of the war. The heroic picture also recalls the “Go for Broke” slogan for recruiting Nisei to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States and to fight fanatically for victory, no matter what the cost. Frank’s incident in the Philippines alludes to Nisei interpreters drafted in the Pacific during World War II.8 The naming, here, is definitely worthy

8 As documented in Stanley’s book I Am an American, “3700 Nisei graduates from the special school served with distinction in the Pacific War. The Nisei became one of America’s ‘secret weapons’ and their efforts helped save countless American lives, especially in the Philippines. The Nisei translated captured documents, and when American soldiers invade those islands, they knew the complete plans of the Japanese Army” (63).

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of note: Danner names the volunteering interpreter “Frank,” alluding to the legendary 5307th Infantry Regiment, known as Merrill’s Marauders and named for Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. Also legendary are 3700 Nisei interpreters who joined infantry patrols with the regiment. One was given the nickname “‘Horizontal Hank’ for the many times he was pinned down by gunfire” (Stanley 64). In the novel, “Horizontal Hank” alludes to Frank’s son Hank. At the same time, the heroism is portrayed tragically and sarcastically. Frank is remembered as a hero doomed to sacrifice his life. Once he saved Myrna from the fire of the burning school. Often, he becomes a substitute household master and helps comfort his Issei mother, who does not speak English well enough to cope with the prewar hostility and camp life. To other internees, Frank is well respected, even by Issei elders, because he volunteers to serve in the military and sacrifice his life. To George, Frank is an idol, much more than an older sibling. Frank embodies “sacrifice,” as he is celebrated for having saved a dozen white soldiers; sacrifice is, indeed, a manifest message in his citation. But ironically, what George remembers about Frank is “his face had somehow changed: a smile but all the sparkle gone” (113). George witnesses a disillusioned Frank, no longer a pal and idol but a person stricken by war fatigue. Like Frank, George is doomed to become a tragic figure. Perhaps shadowed by his brother’s heroic deeds, George becomes a firefighter, believing that his destiny is to extinguish vicious fires. For George, negotiating with the past has become his lifetime search. He feels obliged to find the mysterious “arsonist” who sets fires every seven years. After mapping these, he assumes that all the targets are war victims.9 He believes that the arson is an act of revenge. The suspects include Hank, Martin Capo the phantom, and many others. For George, the war is not over even though he did not serve on the battlefield as his brother did. In his mind, the battles materialize in his work, and he continues to fight in his daily life. Like the Nagoya house he lives in, that is stacked and packed with junk mail, catalogues, magazines, and “fifty-years of Christmas cards” (161), sorted and piled in a secretly orderly system, George is fixated on the time he returned home, alone and orphaned. The fact that he never throws anything away and that he preserves his brother’s room intact, immune from storage, shows George as melancholy, mourning his loss and his 9 A mystery fiction, the novel is comparable to David Guterson’s 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars.

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wound perpetually. The wound is physical and psychological, and the house is a reminder to fight amnesia. Hank describes his “heart attack” as a “missing tooth”; indeed, his real problem is his “heart,” as he remains traumatized, unattached to any relationship, “awfully lonely-sad,” like the empty house (165). 2.2.2

Remembering the Unspeakable: Silence, Trauma, and Healing

As are the majority of internees, George is cast into a long, muted silence. After the war, he finally returns to Edgarville. Along with his uncle and aunt, they find George’s farm ravaged by their neighbor, Martin Capo, Myrna’s ruthless brother. They have been financially wiped out by the relocation, but are forced to put up with their treatment; after all, “who could he complain to who would listen to a Japanese? Who was going to take his word against a real American? Even if he had proof that the tractor once belonged to them, Uncle thought it best to let the bastard get away with it” (197; italics original). George’s testimonials reveal the aporia of producing war memories. As Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama insightfully note, “Memory production concerning imagined collectivities is never simply about the politically disinterested recovery of a pure and undiluted past” (2). Indeed, the words uttered by George’s Uncle convey the internees’ political strategy for survival: the use of silence and passivity as camouflage. In the memory production of the Pacific War, the Japanese are depicted as a “domestic alien enemy,” “murderers,” and “saboteurs.” Japanese Americans, more than two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were regarded as suspicious traitors. Unlike the approximately 600,000 German American citizens, who were not denounced as enemies in 1942, Japanese Americans were interned on the basis of “military necessity.” The real reason for the prejudice and hatred was their Japanese ancestry and their appearance (Stanley 23). Hence, the Pacific War was solidified into a singular war between a “uniformed United States” and a “unified Japan” (Fujitani et al. 6). In their analysis of historian John Costello’s The Pacific War, Fujitani et al. point to a “simple, celebratory and teleological” dominant narrative of remembering the Pacific War: the beginning of the “Day in infamy,” after the “sneak” bombing of Pearl Harbor, and an unambiguous end,

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with the unconditional surrender of Japan.10 Behind the narrative lies the binary logic of a “military struggle between two peoples: Japanese and Americans” (6). Costello traces this fatal collision to 150 years of struggle. In this sense, it is justifiable to assert that the dominant modes of remembering the war have produced a national criminology and a national victimology, reductively regarding an entire population (Japanese or American) as a collective of criminals or victims subjected to military hysteria. Emily Roxworthy describes the postwar stoic silence of Japanese Americans as a “tell-tale symptom of trauma,” reflecting the “diasporic retention of a Japanese cultural logic of shikata ga nai, or ‘it can’t be helped’—a fatalist philosophy that negates the efficacy of resistance or other political action” (1). For Japanese Americans, when trauma extended beyond words or defied expression, silence became a common symptom of the shell-shocked experiences.11 George and his uncle represent the Japanese internees, who, cognizant of the fatalism remain silent or more or less mute their voices to hide real resentment and antagonism against unfounded racial prejudice. Silence masks submissiveness and loyalty. When loyalty becomes a life-or-death issue, they use reticence as the best camouflage, hoping to render themselves invisible and forgotten. Says his uncle, “Best thing is to wait, he said, even if it’s hard sometimes. If We can all be patient then one day they might forget we’re here” (197; italics original). George’s uncle’s advice pinpoints a politics of forgetfulness produced by a racist mode of remembering. Forced forgetfulness is a fundamental element in the dominant discourse of war. To sustain a dominant paradigm of memory-making, memories of the marginalized and subjugated must be suppressed and silenced, forgotten and erased. Silence, in this sense, justifies a conditioned response to social injustice.

10 On December 7, 1941, Japanese bombs hit the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by surprise, severely damaging 21 American battleships and 200 planes and killing almost 2300 persons. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan, asserting that December 7, 1941 was “a date which w[ould] live in infamy.” For further information about the bombing, see Stanley; Sakurai; Stewart; and Takemoto. 11 During an interview, George Matsui, a former internee, said, “Well, the only thing

when I heard about that, I said to myself, being Japanese, ‘shikata ga nai.’ Means ‘can’t help it’ because we have oriental face—can’t do anything about it. That’s the reason we all went to the relocation center. We had to do what the government told us to do. We can’t fight the government. So, we were sent to relocation center, what we call concentration center.”

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Paradoxically, silence that epitomizes a structural paradigm for remembering the unspeakable and unspoken trauma is not a sign of forgetting. Referring to studies of trauma, Cathy Caruth argues that internees’ silence should be understood in structural terms. Instead of a structure of shared experience, trauma is an act of “belatedly” experiencing, a “repeated possession” of an image or event (2) that, according to Caruth, deploys the psychological suffering and material disfranchisement of a persecuted ethnic minority, however much it pales beside the atrocity of the Holocaust (3–4). In the case of Japanese Americans, reticence is often interpreted as a gesture for collective guilt and shame, an image produced and widely distributed in postwar discourse and represented in various literary works. Japanese-American writer Hisaye Yamamoto, known for Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, was sent to the Poston Relocation Camp in Arizona at aged twenty. Three years in the internment camp significantly affected her writings: “Any extensive literary treatment of the Japanese in this country would be incomplete without some acknowledgement of the camp experience … It is an episode in our collective life which wounded us more painfully than we realize” (qtd. in Cheung 6). Her short story “Wilshire Bus” depicts a bus ride of Esther Kuroiwa, who embodies the silence of the Japanese community as a response to the pervasive anti-Asian sentiment in postwar California. Esther’s silence, portrayed as the “sins of omission” in the face of oppression, exemplifies a coerced consent to the hegemonic making of historical erasure. In the documentary film Unfinished Business —The Japanese-American Internment Cases, when Sansei (the third generation) recall their observations of Nisei internees, they are locked within a long period of silence to hide the “shame and guilt” of ethnic consciousness. In addition to the fear and intimidation, their sense of guilt is internalized and reinforced by the dominant ideology. It is not until members of the third-generation protest that bitterness, fury, and shame are openly revived. As if to nourish the dominant paradigm of nationalist discourses, the marginalized groups play the role of “model minority.” As the novel reveals, Hank is regarded by Myrna as a “perfect child,” well-behaved, easy, and tender-hearted, hiding tears from people, who “at the age of four could crack eggs without breaking yolks”; “It doesn’t quite seem normal that he never tries to hide his crimes, seeks her out just to confess I Scuffed my brand-new tennis shoes ” (208; italics original). Myrna concludes that Hank’s exceptional easiness originated in his Japanese father’s ancestors.

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Arguably, remembering the Pacific War reveals a structure of desire, threat, and fear. For instance, as an adoptee who looks different from his adoptive parents, Hank imagines his real “Japanese parents,” thoughts grounded in stereotypical images of Japanese: He was thinking of his real mom, the one he was imagining: the perfect mom who didn’t snore or slap him when she got confused. She was wrapped in a kimono, wooden sandals on her tiny feet; she slid a room partition back and stepped in with a tray of tea. He was not sure if she ever speaks, she still looked thirty-two years old, with black hair and romantic eyes and skin smooth as a polished stone. She walked with tiny, measured steps across the spotless wooden floor: tatami mats and paper walls and paintings with calligraphy. The room smelled strong of cooking rice and steaming bowls of miso soup, the sound of someone in the kitchen chopping on a wooden block. The window screens were pulled back to expose a stunning mountain view: Fuji framed in cherry blossoms, bamboo and a deep-blue sky. Gracefully down to her knees, balancing the polished tray, bowing as she put a cup before a handsome samurai. If his father stood up he would tower over six feet tall with a sword tucked in a belt of silk and his long hair in a ponytail. But the two of them sat on the floor, his mother served her men some tea; they were seriously talking over manly and important things. They talked about the family name, of honor and integrity, how Hank had to imagine what this every action told the world. His father spoke of ancestors, a line that spanned a thousand years, how all their ghosts were watching to make sure Hank didn’t ruin things…. This was Hank’s alternate life, the way things were supposed to be: the product of a family of aristocratic samurai. The fantasy was elaborate, beginning when he was a child, built around an entry in the “J” encyclopedia. (147–8)

Hank can only imagine a life full of Japanese figures and images: kimono, samurai, tatami, and miso soup, and a caring mother and learned and wise father. Behind this imagination is the desire for a completed identity: a complete home and a complete bloodline to evidence his cultural belongingness. Throughout his life, Hank lacks an anchor for knowing his true self. He can only try to remember his ideal parents. Fantasies and memories with desires are revealed in Myrna’s case. In a compelling encounter scene, George suffers a heart attack. Hearing the news, Hank rushes to George’s home, bringing his ailing mother with him. When Myrna approaches George’s house, which once belonged to her lover Frank, Myrna seems to confuse fantasy and reality:

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She feels a bit unsteady, like she’d had a sip too much to drink or after lying down a while she’s gotten to her feet too fast. But Frank holds stead to her arm and lets her take what time she needs because he knows it’s not just any day she meets his family. She’s worried looking at the house, the years have not been very kind: the porch needs paint, the roof’s a mess, the yard was once a paradise. She’d seen his house a thousand times but never closer than the road; she’s only seen Frank’s mother standing in the shadow of the floor. She hopes they won’t expect her to, especially the way things look: as if no one has cleared the porch since Noah loaded up his ark. Frank is also looking tense and older than he’s supposed to be. His handsome Asian baby-face can’t hide the fact he’s middle-aged. Of course his parents must be getting well into their seventies and haven’t got the energy to keep the house up anymore. Frank leaves her at the bottom step to help his parents get prepared; he bounds up through the front door in between tall stacks of magazines. (159)

For some time, Myrna seems to regress to adolescence. She is stuck at the threshold that kept her dreams unrealized. In that moment, she mistakes Hank for Frank, and George for Frank’s ill father Nagoya San (160). From the outset, Myrna was shunned in the world of Nagoya, unable to greet Mrs. Nagoya because of the invisible borderline separating the Japanese world from the outside world. A cultural seclusion inhibits entrance. Hank wonders how Myrna can say things in “perfect-sounding” Japanese. The spontaneous flow of Japanese words and nasty curses Myrna learned from firemen are Freudian slips revealing Myrna’s longsuppressed unconscious desires. To Myrna, Frank represents suppressed fantasy and sexual desires. Frank is one of only three men for whom Myrna feels strong attraction but these are feelings she must deny. Myrna is wearing a coy smile and her eyes sparkle when she is near George, who she believes is Frank. The sight of George/Frank reminds her of puppy love, easy railroad, and mountain trails. In George, she finds an equally attractive Frank for whom time has added character. As if brought by fate and nature, Myrna and George are destined to meet and make love, fulfilling long-awaited dreams. Her dreams fulfilled, Myrna seems reinvigorated with inner peace. Hiking to the waterfalls, she is “filled with memories: the tang of sap and pine needles, the must of last year’s rotting leaves, the melting glaciers atomized” (229), and also her attempted suicide long ago. The adversity and hardship of the past have led to one possible answer: “Nothing … was more than just by accident ” (229; italics

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original). With this realization, Myrna can reconcile herself with her family and release her anger. As evidenced by Myrna, memories are heterogeneous, fluid, volatile, and often in conflict. However, we find that memory can heal. In Hank’s case, only through erased and refracted memories, memories in ellipses and fragments, can he piece together his identity. A defamed cardiologist in a mid-career crisis, he realizes that he must recall his past to know who he really was so that he can move on. Healing Myrna’s wound is impossible; she must appropriate “unofficial healing” or “unorthodox healing” in a private sphere. Speaking what has been silent from behind the mask of dementia (to her foreign nurse but never to her real son) Myrna is a carrier of memories rather than a memory-making agent. She is subject to memories; she is not an autonomous subject capable of constructing memories. Memories are beyond her mastery and control. For a person with dementia, memories flow like streams of consciousness; every time Myrna speaks shards of memories, she creates an outlet for suppressed and censored thoughts to sneak through. In this sense, speaking about the past is a talking cure, a voice, and text to break the silence(d) and liberate repressed thoughts from historical remembrances. By recalling formerly inaccessible and disavowed memories, Myrna eventually eases her pains and wounds. 2.2.3

Coda

Reminiscing, Myrna asks herself, “What would it have been like if there hadn’t been that stupid war—if I had stayed and married Frank and lived my life in Edgarville?” (211). This question should linger in the minds of victims and victimizers. As the story suggests, there is no use crying about past events. As Eagleton says, past experience cannot be changed, but how we perceive it can permit making a different sense out of the past. In her research on Japanese-American literature, Jeanne Sokolowski proposes “divine citizenship” as the appropriate thematic response to the wrongs committed by the state and as a model for defining the forthcoming relationship between the state and the subject, in which forgiveness and reconciliation often occur (69). As Sokolowski suggests, when citizens are deprived of rights and freedom and learn that they must make compromises with the state, feelings of suspicion, and anger result. However, if wronged citizens forgive, forgiveness takes on a

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supreme, divine, and superhuman quality. According to Sokolowski, the performance of divine citizenship allows healing and reconstruction (90). Indeed, these factors constitute the author’s endnote for remembering war trauma. This healing sometimes must first occur within the aggrieved before being directed toward the state. The healing, of course, is not for the past or the present, but for the future. Sokolowski rightly says, “The term ‘divine’ also holds the connotation of predicting or presaging the future; divine citizenship takes up the task of foretelling the future through the imaginative efforts of citizens to forge ahead after their faith in the nation has been tested” (71). Indeed, as the metaphor of Benjamin’s “Angel of History” suggests, the angel, Angelus Novus , is driven to examine the past while positioned in a set of historical conditions marked by “catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (257–8).12 But it is looking at the past, negotiating with its horror, that paves the way to our future.

12 In the ninth “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin reviews a 1920 Paul Klee painting, suggesting that Klee is lamenting what human civilization became after World War I. The angel, caught in the maelstrom of a catastrophe, can only view the accumulating wreckage, as the storm of progress propels him forward to the bleak future.

CHAPTER 3

The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings

Abstract This chapter examines the othering and liminal experiences of postwar Vietnamese-American communities through reading a 2010 novel by Vietnamese-American writer Monique Truong. Truong’s Bitter in the Mout h begins with the flashback of the protagonist/narrator, Linda Hammerick (later known as Linh Dao Nguyen Hammerick) on her homecoming journey to attend her grand-uncle’s funeral. As the novel unfolds, Linda’s memories bring back coming-of-age traumatic experiences, including her loss of her virginity, thoughts of her biological parents, and feelings about her identity and sense of belonging. The novel embodies a gothic narrative of trauma, and features the protagonist’s mourning for the deceased and a personal/collective sense of perpetual loss haunted by intergenerational negotiation between mourning and melancholia. It argues that Linda’s narrative should be read as a testimony of an Asian “vulnerable subject” who challenges an underpinning of an “either-or/both-and” identification positioning with a (de)pathological, grotesque, and elusive gesture. Keywords Synthesia · Liminal writing · American Gothic tale · Vietnamese refugees · Lesbianism · Vietnam war

© The Author(s) 2020 J. T. Lee, Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8_3

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3.1 Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth: A Gothic and Liminal Narrative of Trauma ∗ ∗ ∗ In the passing of a loved one, mourning for loss, Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth features the liminal traumatic experience of a VietnameseAmerican girl in an American southern setting. The novel epitomizes the regional form of gothic-action and marginalization in Asian ethnic writing. On a macro level, Bitter in the Mouth examines the historical enchantment of the Vietnam War, which has haunted American society since its end in 1975. The character Linda Hammerick (later known as Linh Dao Nguyen Hammerick) and her personal life experiences exemplify collective cultural memories of unspoken trauma experienced by the Vietnamese during the mid-twentieth century. In a vortex of irreparable cultural melancholia, Linda, an orphaned refugee, can only recognize her sense of belonging through the inspirations from and re-acculturations of regional colonial immigration myths and African-American poetry. Revealing a process of gothic-ification and other-ications as the subtext of the novel, the writer suggests an alternative trauma—writing to empower oneself, to subdue sorrow, to overrule cultural domination, and shift the trauma and liminal experiences toward positive and progressive energies. This chapter includes two parts. The first illustrates Vietnamese Americans’ unspeakable wounds and aphasia. The second presents gothic elements, historical suppressions, and enchantments. 3.1.1

Mourning and Trauma Writings

Monique Truong is the so-called 1.5 Vietnamese-American writer. Born in 1968 in Saigon and moving to the United States with her parents at the age of 7, they stayed in a relocation camp in California for four years before moving to South Carolina. Her debut novel The Book of Salt was received well when it was published in 2003. Seven years later, she published her second novel Bitter in the Mouth, winning awards and critical acclaim. Truong is widely considered to be one of the most important Vietnamese-American refugee writers. The novel is set on August 3 and 4, 1998 when Linda realizes that her great-uncle Harper has died in a plane accident. She returns to her

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hometown Boiling Springs in Carolina for funerals. A lawyer in her 30s, Linda chooses to take a Greyhound bus to return home. The homecoming journey is indeed the “last mile” to reach her psyche and also a curtain-lifting hour for a hidden secret of her family and her life. Along with the flashbacks, readers get the chance to piece together bits and pieces of her life stories, and the ethnic chapter she represents. When the story begins, a narrator who calls herself “Linda Hammerick” is introduced, and tells her story from a first-person narrative viewpoint. Her innocent, simple, and childlike language lays bare her obscure but complicated, polyphonic, multiracial background. She was a Vietnamese adoptee when her immigrant parents died in the United States. The storyline departs from Linda’s mourning for the loss of her great-uncle, who was the only one who liked her in her adoptive family, and ends with the cause of her parents’ tragedy and her adoption. This mixes a timeline crossing the present and the past. It is a coming-of-age novel depicting Linda’s tragic life, including domestic and sexual abuse, her troubled relationship with her adoptive mother and later her boyfriend, cancer, and confusing cultural heritage. The novel implies a liminal writing, a crossing of a threshold and a transgression, and a life characterized by the structure of the trauma experiences of refugees. Quite explicitly, Bitter in the Mouth builds upon the repressive but haunting Vietnamese traumatic experiences. A Yale law school graduate, Linda works as an attorney. By appearance, Linda seems to be a successful example of the “model minority,” who has succeeded in her cultural adaptation. A closer look, however, reveals Linda’s wounds, both physical and psychological. Physically, Linda evinced the symptom of “synthesia” (a secondary sensation accompanying an actual perception) once she had been adopted, from which she was able to “taste” words when she spoke English, a new language she tried to acquire at the age of seven but never “possessed” or had command of. Instead, she is “possessed” and captured by the language. Starting from her adoption, she is compelled to leave her mother tongue, Vietnamese, behind, her name and cultural origin erased. When speaking the word “Linda,” it is automatically associated with the flavor “mint”; “Kelly” with canned pears; objects with tomatoes; Jesus with fried chicken; and so on (Bitter 135). In other words, her “sensory and linguistic dysfunctions” metaphorically evidence her “defective” body and mind, an embodied register, so to speak. The narrator says that the word synthesia, in Greek etymology “union/together” and “perception,”

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is not only a “scientific name for my condition” but also “the key to a mystery” (Bitter 255). Linda’s symptom is auditory–gustatory synesthesia, linking words with the budding senses. Unable to use her tongue to explain her relationship with the world nor pronounce words with ease, Linda realizes that with this condition she is burdened with “inaccurate, insufficient” language, and is “incapable of full disclosure” (255). Her body confirms that she is broken into two worlds, as the adoptive grandmother describes her. Throughout her life, Linda carries this secret, as she finds a corresponding medium between language and the taste of food, giving her an “illusion of communication” with the outer world (15). “Bitter in the mouth,” as a metaphor of both taste and language, is both a secret and mystery, which helped her move on amid her struggles. This coping strategy of learning a new language is a recurrent concern in Truong’s previous award-winning novel The Book of Salt, in which the protagonist Ah Binh, a Vietnamese cook serving Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, is depicted as being nearly illiterate in French, often mute and invisible in Paris. He can only manage to use limited language, or creates his own repertoire, such as “a pear not as a pear” to mean “pineapple.” In the 10th chapter, “Servants in France,” of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Toklas describes how she and Gertrude Stein tried to hire IndoChinese live-in cooks in France. The protagonist Ah Bing is based on the prototypical figures depicted in Toklas’s work, one of whom was named Trac. Communicating with Trac was a challenging experience for Toklas (158), and he is depicted using limited language, saying “not a cherry, when he spoke of a strawberry, while a pineapple was a pear not a pear.” Trac’s invention of linguistic slips and quirks leads Toklas to say, “It was then that we commenced our insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experience with the Indo-Chinese” (158). Christopher Benfy furthers this passage and suggests that The Book of Salt initiates an “insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experience.” An illiterate exiled in a foreign land unable to express himself, Truong’s character Ah Binh is silenced and mute in the language maze; he can only choose different media and modes, using his sensory perceptions and instincts, to negotiate in the surroundings. Ah Binh shows how one can be rejected from the house of language but still be able to cope and survive. The ineffectiveness of language and its aporia appears again in Bitter in the Mouth. Orphaned after her parents’ accident, Linda was adopted by her adoptive father, Thomas Hammerick, who turns out to be the

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schoolmate and ex-lover of her South Vietnamese mother Mai-Dao who returned home to get married. Adopted with mixed emotions, Linda was catapulted into a strange space, lost in a whirlpool of language, disoriented. She is eager to grab any driftwood that comes to hand. As if lifting the spirit from the spellbinding maze of words, Linda finds a way to liberate herself from the bondage and confinement of language. Using very limited life experiences and vocabularies, the traumatized Linda has to absorb language to communicate with others and to understand the world around her. Her tongue, literarily the entrance and venue for receiving food, is a tentacle detecting the external world. The fact that the tongue produces sound signifies the specific initial channel for the transfer of the world inside and outside the individual. The tip of the tongue combines the functions of taste and language, but for most people, these two functions are distinct and distinctly physiological. Linda is a special case. All kinds of turbulent and confusing experiences are reflected in the senses of coexistence and confusion. This allows Linda to transform rare diseases into a probing of the unknown world, by connecting food and language stimuli. In short, Linda’s synthesia symbolizes the ambiguity, polysemy, and contradiction of alien language acquisition. Linda’s story evinces profound thinking about structural trauma experienced via historical tragedy. What Linda represents is a group of Vietnamese refugees, suppressed and the intentionally erased “others” outside mainstream American culture. Linda’s birth is a hidden and unspeakable secret in the family, and what she is associated with—the loss of her homeland, defeat, retreat and betrayal, the death of her biological parents—are unadmitted and unspoken social taboos. It is not until two-thirds of the way into the novel, when Linda finishes university, from the name cited on her diploma “Linh Dao Nguyen HammerickDrPepper, summa cum laude, literatureroastbeef ”, that readers get to know of her real identity (Bitter 158; Italics original). Many of the questions to the mystery now have clues, as readers realize why Linda’s mother maintains indifference and even hostility toward her, and also why Linda suffers sexual abuse and feels estranged and alienated in the rural town. Adoptive father Thomas and great-uncle Harper love and befriend Linda, the former because she reminds him of his old love for Mei-Dao, and the latter suggesting a shared sympathy for the excluded and forbidden. As a detached first-person narrator, Linda in the first part is depicted as having a body with vacated and truncated memories, with deliberate blanks between the lines and a void that cannot be filled. Linda is even

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more traumatized by a rape plotted by her adoptive mother DeAnne Whatley Hammerick (“DWH” as Linda says) who feels jealous of her existence, reminding DeAnne of her husband’s love for her biological mother. From what Linda describes of DeAnne after the rape, readers sense the shock and fear of Linda. Linda is given a box of maxi pads and a new purse, and then comes to the realization that her mother is the instigator of the crime, Under my father’s own roof, his wife hired a predator, lusted after him, trusted him to be alone with her daughter, and when the evidence of the predator’s crime emerged, sought solace and explanation in the body of the victim. Menstrual blood was normal, a byproduct of a girl’s body coming of age. Buy the girl a box of protection and a purse to hide it in. Blood from the torn hymen of an eleven-year-old would have been a crime, the subject of tragedies from the time of the ancient Greeks to the American South. Wash clean the undergarments with Tide and rest assured that there will be no stain. (Bitter 109–110)

The sexually abused Linda describes how she has been victimized by her adoptive mother. Linda again is deprived of her sense of self and becomes distrustful of mother–daughter or any other interpersonal relationships. A sense of treachery is revealed; symbolically put, Linda’s loss of virginity to DeAnne’s accomplice represents how Vietnam, her mother country, has been subjected to betrayal and violence. Both Linda and her country have suffered from merciless abandonment. Linda’s wound thus allegorizes the trauma of her nation. Losses of home, security, and love further resonate with the anguish and distress experienced by Linda’s fellow countrymen, “the boat people,” fleeing Vietnam in the condition of precarity. What accentuates Linda’s pain is her (post) memory of historical wounds. She carries with her the trauma of the defeat of Vietnam, and this wound mitigates the stamina to deal with the pains. For Linda, Vietnam is not so much a root, a home, or a cultural origin, but an embodied tissue of her being. Every atom of her being recalls a nostalgia for Vietnam and a reconciliation with homesickness. Truong herself in “Real and Flawed” elaborates the relations between herself and Vietnam, saying that, If Vietnam is a tattoo, then I would prefer to think of it as an ‘S’ that spans the hollow between my breasts or that hooks around my belly button, a beautiful green dragon that I placed there all those years ago, my secret scar to keep. The reality is that Vietnam is an ‘S’ on my forehead, an

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invitation for anyone to come along and to comment on that country’s evolving role on the world stage. (687)

Despite her unwillingness to return to Vietnam, she cannot erase Vietnam from her memory. Vietnam has been deeply inscribed in her body and recollections, a “secret scar” in her flesh. Affected by the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese-American refugees hold differing attitudes toward the acts of “forgetting and forgiving,” and the claiming of “home.” While dealing with the aftermath of war and traumatic memories, some choose to go “home,”1 while others, like the novelist herself, choose not to return: The process of identifying and claiming “home” ultimately doesn’t require forgetting or forgiving. It calls for an acknowledgment and then a taking of responsibility for the acts committed in the name of that home. My Vietnamese-American friends who have made the journey to Vietnam have allowed themselves the opportunity to do just that. To return is to face the aftermath of war (the acknowledgment) and to witness that life goes on (the responsibility). My choice not to return to Vietnam has its consequences. Vietnam is, for me, not a home but a green dragon tattoo somewhere on my torso, metaphoric and absent. (“Real and Flawed” 691)

For Truong, Vietnam is more than a point of origin, a place called home. Beyond the politics of claiming a home, and the responsibility to witness and forgive, Truong finds her own way to reconcile with Vietnam in the aftermath of her trauma. For Truong, Vietnam may not be her claimed “home,” and nor is she a returnee; Vietnam is real, reified in her body, in her heart, long embedded in her body skin. Vietnam is a ghost, the reincarnation of language. Vietnam has long been transformed into a ghost of language when Linda accidentally encodes English vocabulary into a set of coined symbols; in Linda’s 1 Truong says that “I am just a one-and-a-half-generation Vietnamese-American novelist, a peddler of fiction, who has not made the archetypal journey back to the land of her birth. I can offer you flowery words about that choice, but in the end it comes down to my inability to forgive and to forget. Corruption, greed, lust for power, domination replacing freedom as a guiding principle and goal, brothers fighting brothers, mothers giving birth to children who grow up to blow each other to bits. Whom do I accuse of these crimes? My own flesh and blood. If this useless violence is my history, a madness that lurks in my gene pool, a propensity that may again show itself, I am not eager to travel back to its—and my—place of origin.” (“Real and Flawed” 687)

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sensory adaptation process; in Linda’s unique additional letter vocabulary—in spaces, insertions, pauses, and gaps, in meaningful and meaningless language connections. In her love for her parents, great-uncle, and sense of home, in her deeply rooted sorrow and melancholia, the ghost of Vietnam is seen as a haunting and lingering presence. The return and haunting of the Vietnamese ghosts bear witness to the historical scars in which the United States played an essential role: “I am here because you were there.” Examining the poems by Vietnamese-American poet Truong Tran, Isabella Thuy Pellaud argues that Vietnamese writers highlight a theme of “void.” Sensing the experience of the disappearance of their homeland, swinging between hope and despair, many Vietnamese-American writers adopt a nonlinear “dodging, elusive, and changing” of narrative strategy (3–4), in order to emphasize a historical void after the vanishing of the home(land). Feeling the loss of anchorage, one can only negotiate with the world with a self-marginalized identity, in order to seek a sense of belonging and security. As Rick Berg explicitly points out in his article “Losing Vietnam,” “For Americans, the experience of Vietnam was one of loss. We lost the war in 1973, and the country in 1975. This loss haunts us” (93). Indeed, for many Americans, Vietnam is “more a war than a country” (Berg 93). What Vietnam represents is loss, the loss of a war and the loss of confidence; defeat and associated humiliation. Berg states that though the war ended in the 1970s, the war’s aftermath haunted the United States and altered American culture in the 1980s (93). In a similar manner, Michael Anderegg points out that there is a unique relationship between the United States and Vietnam, which is defined and reinforced through film and cultural images. The Vietnam War is an imaginative subject depicted in media such as films and other communications, with distinct cultural icons: armed helicopters, hot and gloomy jungles, steel helmets with plastic bottles, and Vietnamese villagers wearing non la conical hats. The Vietnam War became a movie, released and televised every night in front of tens of millions of Americans (2). For Americans, it is better to say that the Vietnam War never ended, perhaps it did not happen, because the frustration experienced by the United States in the Vietnam War has never really been resolved. When discussing the image of the Vietnam War in American literature, Steffen H. Hantke describes the concept of “deferred closure,” suggesting that “ghost is a metaphor of history” (69); the appearance of ghosts is a reminder that “ghosts are either unable or unwilling to end and thus figure prominently in Vietnam

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literature as figures of perpetually deferred closure” (70). Like whatever is repressed—emotions, traumas, or desires—Vietnam is desire and emotion unresolved, like a ghosts’ recurrent return, which must be addressed. Coincidentally, Robert Newman also proposes that the feelings of the Vietnam War generation being entangled by ghosts are profound. The experience of the defeat of the Vietnam War is the disillusionment and dismantling of the myth of an invincible America, and it requires a larger platform of cultural repression and transferal mechanisms to offset and compensate the despair (56). The attitude of the American cultural media to the Vietnam War in the 1980s shifted from silence and censorship, to obsession, distortion, and manipulation. It is reasonable to assume that Vietnam refugees’ voices are distorted in the service of creating a narcissistic image of America and its justified cultural memory of the war. Under the premise of repairing the national consciousness of the United States, the Vietnamese refugee narratives play the role of “healing.” Vietnam has become a “wounded trophy” of American patriotism, which is what Truong intends to critique (“Vietnamese” 236). To counterbalance the structural memory loss and deliberate blindness of American culture, Truong challenges and breaks down the great narrative of the Vietnam War, by telling of its invisible ghosts and small narratives. For Truong, summoning ghosts and reconciling is as important as summoning cultural memory. Only in the shadow of ghost and history can the scars of generations be mended. Linda is thus not an individual refugee; her stories signal thousands of refugees who shared a similar destiny, and millions of immigrants who arrived in America with hopes and dreams. On her long bus ride home she recalls her tragic past memories. She depicts what she sees at the bus stop: a group of passengers including a runaway teen, a dressed-up middle-aged black woman, a white middle-aged man, and many migrant laborers from Central and South America. Obviously, these migrant workers, looking “uniformly exhausted,” need to move around to work on farms or slaughterhouses in New York or North Carolina; their migration is travel “that took them nowhere” (Bitter 213). Linda narrates that the passengers seem to share a common trait: “Inside the bus, there was a collective sigh” (Bitter 213). The bus is a microcosm of American immigrant society, in which immigrants were brought here for different reasons and motivations—“For every passenger, there was a reason for his exhalation: lovelorn, forlorn, war-torn, relief, regret, remorse, resigned, steeled, staved, and staunched. All were released into the stale air, changing for a

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moment its chemistry, making its odors detectable again to those bodies, like mine, who had adapted and grown used to them” (Bitter 213). Like her fellow passengers, Linda shares the sorrow of life. There is no way they can avoid the effects brought by the disastrous events of war and trauma. Even the rural town Boiling Springs, North Carolina is not immune from global politics. Likewise, Judith Butler discusses the connotations of “loss” in her article “After Loss, What then” appearing in Loss: Politics of Mourning . On the practical level, loss is reflected in the experience of slaughter, exile, colonization, loss of sanity, and sense of belonging. The most extreme loss experience is the loss of loss itself. in Butler’s words: “somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full ‘recovery’ is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency” (“After Loss” 469). What is pitied about the ultimate loss is helplessness and hopelessness; at a certain place, at some point, something has been lost, but there is no story to describe it, no memory can make it up and leave the spectral spirit wandering on the broken horizon. Butler stresses that the situation of the loss cannot be repaired or reconstructed by any medium, which gives the loss new political power and creativity (“After Loss” 469). Butler cites Walter Benjamin’s account of history and clarifies the political meaning of loss and pain; as Benjamin’s historical angels push the wind against the future in the ruins, they can only look at the wreckage of the past with a reversal of their face. Understandably, the past can nowhere be re-reversed or recuperated; the past, however, is not gone for good. There are always remnants that allow the past to have an “animated life” and become a possibility of shaping the future (“After Loss” 468). It is true that depression will produce feelings of despair, jealousy, shame, and disgust, which will infiltrate the tissues of the body; hence, after war there is no way to dodge or transform or sublimate traumatized depression. Only by confronting these distressed and sentimental emotions, can real feelings begin to be recognized and understood. One thing worth noting is that the examination of individual cultural melancholia is not to stress negative emotions or morbid pain and contusion. On the contrary, emotions should be considered as extremely complex psychological and spiritual manifestations. Each type of memory is archived and remembered in different ways; the mourning of casualties varies from person to person. Emphasizing

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emotional and political power is not an attempt to erase or suppress such negative emotions. Instead, this author attempts to explore the power of comfort and healing contained in sadness and melancholia, and to activate the possible momentum and agency of trauma. Such conceptions are quite true, as Eng and Kazanjian pinpoint: “Ultimately, we learn, the work of mourning is not possible without melancholia” (4). Quoting Freud’s words “melancholia is the precondition for both the ego and the work of mourning”(qtd. in Eng and Kazanjian 4), Eng and Kazanjian suggest that mourning and melancholia share many things in common and that mourning remains even in the twenty-first century. Mourning and melancholia are picked up as a reference point to describe the Asian-American experience as a minority. Unlike their European counterparts, who are light-skinned and tend to assimilate culturally, Asian-American minorities embody a melancholic condition in their daily life practices, transferring melancholia from the individual’s mental dimension into a de-pathological “structure of inclination” (Eng and Han 669). In this manner, Bitter in the Mouth is a writing both of mourning and melancholia, as it tries to capture the subtle daily emotions of a minority group, such as when Truong depicts how Linda, living in the south, surrounded by hostile family members and roguish neighbors calling Asians “chinks” and “Japs,” redefines the meaning of her life and birth in a perpetual othering condition. To a great extent, Bitter in the Mouth is a writing of liminal experiences, as various transgressions are revealed. In addition to the border-crossing of Asian immigration, the novel evokes a coming-of-age outlook evolving through Linda’s growth into womanhood. According to Arnold van Gennep in his Les Rites de Passage, crossing the threshold is an important part of medieval ritual “rites of passage,” and the trespassing of a threshold signals a crossing into an ambiguous limbo state, to reach maturity. A threshold is a space in between, recalling Homi Bhabha’s notion of “The Third Space,” or an “interstitial space,” a transit space characterized by its openness, fluidity, vagueness and in-between hybridity. Broadly put, the act of threshold crossing is a common “culturally liminal positioning” that is shared by nomadic diasporic subjects, war adoptees, and refugees who are forced to leave behind their home and move to new places. What Linda carries with her is such a “liminal positioning.” Those who befriend Kelly are mostly liminal characters. Her great-uncle Harper is a transvestite homosexual, her “first love” who is both father and mother, and shows her physical intimacy. Rejected by her adopted mother, she can

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only seek love from Harper. During her childhood, she feels isolated and lonely because of her skin color. Her only friend is Kelly who is excluded by other children because of her obesity. Linda and her fiancé broke up because they lack communication. At the age of seven, along with Kelly, Linda develops a fear toward the maturing female body. The two girls grew up conscious of the story of “Virginia Dare,” arising in 1587 in colonial America. “Virginia Dare” was the first girl born in the United States after the British moved to the New World. It is believed that Virginia Dare was the granddaughter of the first British immigrant, John White, who was also the first governor of North Carolina (her parents were Ananias Dare and Eleanor White).2 For the two young girls, the moral of the Virginia legend is that they should be cautious against any man’s “arrow”—and any arrow shot by a man means a deadly invasion of the body (Bitter 69; 72). The two girls consider their maturity and physical beauty to have fearful consequences—in other legendary tales, Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty were led to tragic ends because of their beauty. Fearing to become sexually appealing, they did not brush their teeth for about a week, because the female models with white teeth in toothpaste advertisements always had sexual appeal (70). The two used the “Virginia Dare” legend to learn to smoke, and resist the expression of femininity; such rejection of maturity and feminine attraction signal their awakening in terms of their female body awareness at the age of 13. 3.1.2

Liminal Writing, Unspeakable, and Aphasia

A liminal character, Linda reflects both/and, and neither/nor features. Throughout her life, she is involved in two families, two lives, two 2 As background, John White had led a group of British settlers, including his pregnant daughter, on an expedition, during which they arrived and landed in Roanoke Island and built a settlement. With a shortage of food, John White left his pregnant daughter and some dozen people behind and sailed to Britain for resupply. Upon his return, the dozens of British settlers were gone, including his daughter. It is widely believed that his daughter gave birth to a girl named Virginia, but what happened to the white settlers remains a mystery. Legend has it that Virginia became an orphan, but was saved by the American Indians. Virginia Dare, known for her beauty, was turned into a white deer by the wizard Wanchese. It is said that only when a pearl arrow struck her heart could she return to the human form. Virginia’s lover O-kis-ko successfully obtained the pearl arrow, whereas Wanchese obtained a silver arrow from the King’s court. The two men shot Virginia with the pearl and silver arrows at the same time, killing her. This legend and the island of Roanoke are deeply rooted in the lore of the Carolinas.

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cultures, and two memories. She was told by her grandmother Iris that “what I know about you…will break you in two” (5). Once adopted, she uses the hyphenated name, resulting in a split and coupling of perceptions and words. In terms of her memories, she is caught in a tug-of-war, one side striving to have more investment in her mind, and the other pushing her to empty her thoughts. Linda narrates this mixture of excitement when Great-uncle Harper takes her to a dance: My great-uncle Harper wasn’t where I thought I would begin, but a family narrative should begin with love. Because he was my first love I was spread the saddest experience in most people’s lives. My first love and my first heartbreak were dealt by different pairs of hands. I was lucky. My memories of the two sensations, one of my heart filling and one of it emptying, were divided and lodged in separate bodies. I can still recall the feeling that came over my when my great-uncle Harper first placed the record needle onto a spinning 45. It happened right away. I felt that everything deep within my body was rising to the surface, that my skin was growing thin, that I would come apart. If this sounds painful, it wasn’t. It was what love did to my body, which was to transform it. I would come apart like a fireworks display, a burst of light that would grow larger and glow, and make the person below me say, “Ah!” I remembered saying my great-uncle’s name aloud. This memory of my first love was then safe from all that was to come. (Bitter 4)

Love and hatred, joy and sorrow, fullness, the hunger, to forget, and to remember—all these paradoxical emotions convalesce in her body. Divided as she is, she learns how to cope with pains and injuries, and to transform negative emotions into positive energies. In the epigraph to Bitter in the Mouth, Truong cites a concluding passage from Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, in an explicit intertextual reference. Both novels portray a young female narrator. To Kill a Mockingbird is described from a childish perspective through the lawyer’s daughter, Scott. Scott is told by her aunt that the robin is known for its hard work and discipline (thus the relation to the black gardener’s name “Tom Robinson”). Mockingbirds, in contrast, “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (92). Obviously, Tom and Arthur “Boo” Radley are symbolic robins, pure and harmless, but they are mistaken as inferior and despicable evil incarnations

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because they are outside mainstream society. In other words, Bitter in the Mouth echoes To Kill a Mockingbird in terms of its narrative structure and the themes of racial injustice. For the seven-year-old narrator Linda (the same age as Scout), the name of her great-uncle is “Harper,” her “first love.” Linda is called “Canary” by her grandmother, and this “yellow” bird refers to the simple naive robin, and also to the skin color of Linda. 3.1.3

The Unspeakable Ghostly Other

At the end of the 1988 Random paperback edition of Bitter in the Mouth, Truong adds a postscript, “How a Mockingbird Gave Birth to a Little Canary.” Here she explains how the novel was inspired by her reading of To Kill a Mockingbird. At the age of 11, Truong read the novel, whose “uncanny” atmosphere in Maycomb, Alabama, in the year 1935 immediately recalled a similar feeling she had had while in Boiling Springs, North Carolina in 1975. “I must have found in Atticus’s words and actions a primer for understanding why the children of my small Southern town had taunted me for the color of my skin,” wrote Truong (Bitter 290). Reading the novel gave Truong the answer to know why she was an Asian girl who felt excluded and alienated in the small southern town. She sets her novel Bitter in the Mouth in Boiling Springs, presenting gothic elements in the writing of Vietnamese trauma, contributing to a southern gothic tradition. The use of gothic elements is particularly valid in the writing of AsianAmerican experiences, according to Andrew Hock Son Ng in his Interrogating Interstices. Ng advocates the use of gothic aesthetics as a critical approach in reading postcolonial and Asian-American literature. Ng argues that though contemporary postcolonial and Asian-American works are not specifically part of gothic literary traditions, the gothic aesthetics and paradigms have been widely used in such works. The themes, tropes, and metaphors used in the gothic tradition, such as repression, the grotesque, suspense, aberration, trauma, fear, schizophrenia, violence, and ghosts, are all represented in postcolonial and Asian-American literature. As Ng states, the exploration of Gothic aesthetics situated in specific cultural and historical contexts and consciousness can provide unique critical insights into the traumatic experience of the Asian-American community (11–12). During his discussion of Gothic grotesque aesthetics, Ng points out that the ghost story carries a special function. In the Gothic tradition, the ghosts highlight the undercurrents of devastation within

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seemingly decent people. Pride, corruption, jealousy, and other negative traits appear here (Ng “Introduction” 7). Moreover, when ghosts eventually return for retribution, it not only breaks the time limit between the past, the present, and the future, but also recalls forgotten memories through a function of “debt collection.” Therefore, the ghost voice not only symbolizes a threat to the living, but also a state of prolonged mourning and melancholia, which again reaffirms the meaning of personal survival and history (Ng “Introduction” 7). Indeed, ghost characters or narratives are recurrent motifs that appear in Asian-American writings, including those by pioneering novelist Maxine Hong Kingston. In The Woman Warrior (“No Name Woman”), Kingston tells a story of a Chinese woman forced to drown herself due to an illicit affair. Suppressed by patriarchal values, the woman conceives an illegitimate baby and is considered to be a shame in her family. Even after death, she is not allowed to enter the Ancestral Hall, and she becomes a wandering ghost. For most civilized societies, ghosts are regarded as a threat to the living, and the transgression of the boundary is considered unacceptable. A ghost represents an “other” rejected and ostracized by civilization, a cancer of modernity, so to speak. Only when a ghost is busted or cut off, and is invisible to the eyes, can social norms and stability be maintained. “There were other ways of making people into ghosts” (Bitter 291), Atticus Finch says to his son Jem when Jem wants to tie Boo Radley to the bedpost to confine and punish him. The understatement relates to Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth. Truong borrows this metaphor of the ghost, and associates this with “a long line of shrouded, hidden, secreted away, or for some other reason ‘unseen’ characters who are the embodiments of the anxieties, fears, and violations of the norms of the family, the community, and the greater world around them” (Bitter 292). Truong then decides to set her narrator-protagonist as a figure who is a secret to herself, and who is finally made visible after she reveals the secret herself. Like Linda, a yellow-skinned Asian girl, ghosts are “things” that people can’t see, don’t want to see, or turn a blind eye to. Most people’s impression of Linda is of her “brain.” It seems that she does not exist as a whole body. The subject that is partially reproduced by the body is the invisible other who is constantly suppressed. When Linda first arrives in the Hammerick family, she loses sleep and experiences insomnia. During her endless nights, Linda imagines that she is dismembered like a cartoon character, and all parts of her body are dismantled separately:

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I imagine not having different parts of my body: Left leg, right eye, both ears, a big toe. It was less macabre than it might sound. It was a cartoon version of dismemberment. There was no blood or pain and I could reattach the parts again with a snap of my fingers, which meant that it was very important never to wish away the middle finger and thumb on my right hand. The point of the game, or perhaps it was more of an exercise, was to list the things that I could no longer do because of the missing part. Another point of the game was to rejoice in the things that I would again do, upon the reattachment. It if hadn’t been 1975 or Boiling Springs, North Carolina, I would have been a seven-year-old in therapy. (162)

Like thousands of Vietnamese Americans who have entered the United States, Linda, who has lost her loved ones, has entered an adopted family with a wounded body. Linda, who is disabled, is amazed that the source of pain is recognizing yourself in a state of loss forever, while lamenting over the loss of memory (164). Her real and original given name Linh Dao sounded odd to her adoptive father, like a missing. The new name given by her adoptive mother sounds like a void (Linda was the void, Linh Dao was the missing 165). Neither Linh Dao nor Linda, she juggles between two cultures and feels stuck in between. Growing up in the American South, Linda has been often asked “how do you feel being Asian?” Linda always uses a “Southern Accent” to correct the questioner. She is not “being Asian,” but “looking like” an Asian (Looking Asian) (169; original narrative note). The answer to this question is playful but cynical. Linda deeply understands that her yellow skin can assert her origins—not the New World, nor the South, but Asia. For Linda, the townspeople in Boiling Springs are always color-blind, deliberately turning a blind eye to her (170). Not just Linda’s Asian identity is seen as a family secret. What is hidden and concealed by the family is the great-uncle Harper’s sexual orientation and his proclivity for transvestism. Linda later finds out that the great-uncle has a special affection for her adoptive father. Although uncle Harper and his male friends are in pairs, they are still secrets within the family’s tacit awareness. Harper has owned a camera since he was young, and family photography has become his hobby. In the family albums, the great-uncle’s figure is rarely seen. Linda is aware that the great-uncle as a photographer is cleverly “absent in the presence,” and whose voluntary invisibility has avoided tarnishing family reputations. Also a marginal person, the great-uncle feels sympathetic for Linda for her embarrassing identity, knowing that she has not been valued since she was a child.

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He calls her “Linda Vista.” Great-uncle Harper left Linda’s secret photo album with the label “handle with care,” which for the narrator ensures the need for his life to be seen as well as not seen for a long time (Bitter 40). The great-uncle’s secret photo album reveals his true identity, and is also his life record of his gender transgression; from the beginning, Harper steals clothes and accessories from the wardrobe of his mother and the cook, and later, like an artist, he practices self-dressing, trying on various styles, from “the Pretty Girl” to “Farrah Fawcett,” to a female model in a department store catalogue (206). In the “HEB” photo album, Harper crosses the border of gender by wearing different costumes and gender identities. In the pictures, Harper is both a man and a woman. He takes pleasure in shifting his gender identity and walks out of his own closet by taking self-portraits. As he writes on the first page of the album: “You are very lucky, not only can you be born once, you can be born many times” (206). Every dress-up for Harper is crossing a border, a symbolic rebirth. His play on gender identities makes it possible for him to resist being demonized and marginalized, and thus fulfills his desire to watch and be watched. In a word, Linda is an example of self-otherization and ghosting. As far as Linda is concerned, the object of the other or the ghost is not the “Asian” body under the gaze of the West, but the identity of the “hyphenation,” which transforms the self into the other. Ghosts are not just metaphors. Although there are no ghost characters in the text, the ghost image symbolized by Linda further explains that Linda’s “ghost” is trying to surpass her “hyphenated identity” and to return from the painful memories of the past in order to be the “critical” subject of “debt collection.” Whereas Truong explores the dilemma of Asians in mainstream white American narratives, it is interesting to note that in the second half of the novel, Linda, who is “self-Orient-ation/ghostly,” resists the possibility of “wholesale assimilation” into the hegemonic mainstream culture. Instead, Linda is more deliberate, highlighting her distinctiveness and her positioning as a “vulnerable subject,” as one who is orientalized and marginalized. Linda has repeatedly rejected an invitation from her great-uncle to spend holidays together, which indicates her position as an “outsider” in the Hammerick family. When Linda knows that she can not give birth, she breaks with her white fiancé, and refuses to step into marriage or to assume the role of mother and wife in the white family. All

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this shows that Truong uses Linda’s example to illustrate the problematics of the identity issues of Asian Americans. Linda, with her hyphenated identity, also challenges the dual identity of “Asia” and “United States.” For the first, the cord of blood is not enough to provide a sense of belonging to her home; for the second, the historical narrative cannot provide an emotional connection for her assimilation. Instead, Linda adopts an elusive voice, an alternative language, and a nearly morbid posture, to embody the historical void experienced by many Vietnamese Americans. 3.1.4

Coda

Trauma and melancholia are parts of the historical structure of feelings and the rhetoric of political criticism. This novel departs from the act of mourning, the loss of history and memory, reading melancholy as the life experience of others. Just as the past is no longer returning, the wound can’t be repaired, and through trauma and melancholic writing, Truong seems to find a way to heal. As a child, Truong, like the character Linda in the book, was overwhelmed by the inexplicable hostility and opposition that surrounded her. The pain in her heart could only be endured silently. However, when Truong finished writing this novel, she revisited the town of Boiling Springs. She was no longer as vulnerable as a child. Truong was able to arm herself or treat her stumbling and unpleasant growth experiences with empathy. Truong said that during the seven years of writing Bitter in the Mouth, it was like a process of self-healing; after writing the book, she was able to calmly leave Boiling Springs behind, seeing the town as a source of her personal life story (“Southern Girl, Twice Over”). When analyzing The Book of Salt, Y-Dang Troeung regards Truong’s first novel not only as the critical writing of Paris but as “future” writing of the Vietnamese-American experience (119). The Vietnamese chef Ah Bihn is employed by the American writer Gertrude Stein. In the famous literary salon overseen by Stein, black musician Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh met in Paris. The coexistence of representative figures from various countries is regarded as a metaphor for Vietnamese refugees entering the United States (123). David Eng also associates Ah Bihn in The Book of Salt with Lattimore, a mixed black-and-white American, in an attempt to write the history of “disappearing history and ghosts,” referring to the historical epitome of transatlantic slaves and trans-Pacific Asian coolitude. The incarnation of the ghosts and shadows symbolizes the fluid

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positioning of historical structure (1491). According to Eng, the erotic desires between Ah Bihn and Lattimore embody the intricate intimacies of four continents, Asia, Africa, America, and Europe, as proposed by Lisa Lowe (1481; 1491–2). If The Book of Salt is the prelude to the intimacies of the four continents, Bitter in the Mouth further proposes a critical reading of how Vietnam “enters” America, and how Vietnamese are excluded, assimilated and/or other-ized and Orientalized. Toward the end of The Book of Salt, the servant Ah Bihn looks at his mistresses sailing away, his statue reminding the waiting like the pillar of salt. The two books published seven years apart, the disabled and mute Ah Bihn is given a new form. Again a stranger, Linda shows a clever tactic in coping with her surroundings. Y-Dang Troeung considers the novel a “self-theorizing” text, which is able to expand critical horizons and open a site of critical contention (114). Troeung refers to the novel as a “postcolonial collaborative autobiography,” describing how Truong situates Ah Bihn in a paired and intertextual position with Gertrude Stein. This collaborative genre elevates Ah Bihn from a “minor” “vulnerable subject” to a “partner,” in order to suggest a more equal power relationship. Through “cross-cultural collaboration” (qtd. in Troeung 126), the novel presents a polyphonic aesthetic, resonating with multifaceted, multi-referential, postmodern contexts, in which different subjects speak from different positions and vantage points. In Bitter in the Mouth, the style of “cross-cultural collaboration” is revealed as in North Carolina. Various voices are heard and articulated. In addition to closely linking Vietnamese writing with the Gothic tradition, Truong’s traumatic writing can be regarded as a contemporary American cultural allegory nourished in two cultural soils, each with its representative prototype characters. One is the first black poet George Moses Horton (1798–1884), a talented poet who went to college with the support of his master, and enjoyed a poet’s reputation in the university. Holden’s attempt to educate illiterate blacks proves that ethnic minorities have spiritual and other talents. Another tale is the myth of the early American immigrant “Virginia Dare,” discussed above. For Linda, the “lost colony” of the island of Roanoke symbolizes the earliest collective kidnappings and massacres in history (52), which shows the unequal treatment and collective traumatic experience of Vietnamese refugees moving into the United States after the outbreak of the Vietnam War. In many local legends in North

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Carolina, “Virginia Dare” has the image of a goddess-like Athena, and she is believed to symbolize innocence and purity. Virginia is an oath, a name and a verb in the language of local children, signifying courage and independence. Linda’s orphan girl mythology, placed in a modern Carolina context, echoes the brave posture of the long-lost resident of Virginia. If Virginia Dare had been able to survive in a hostile environment (her fate is unknown), Linda Linh Dao Hammerick has no reason not to go through the pain, as the body of the pain is engraved on the blank slate of history. Combining the dual historical traditions and cultural nutrients of the orphaned Virginia and the black slave poet Horton, Bitter in the Mouth specifically and subtly shows the intimacies between the four continents of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America.

3.2 “All Wars Were Fought Twice”: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Refugee Trauma Memories ∗ ∗ ∗ Nguyen’s début and critically acclaimed novel The Sympathizer is a coup de force deploying the writer’s assertiveness: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (Nothing Ever Dies 4). Without question, wars leave indelible, haunting, postgenerational, traumatic, nightmarish effects. The Vietnam War explicitly pinpoints the self-conflicting identity crises that war evinces, as survivors struggle to be known, to be understood and most importantly, to be remembered. The term “Vietnam War” itself needs further clarification. Whereas Americans call it the Vietnam War, some Vietnamese prefer the “American War.” The Sympathizer was published in April 2015 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. “April is the cruelest month,” notes the narrator, while also saying “It was the month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of … well, “peace” is not the right word, is it?” (Loc 141 of 8942). Nguyen composed his thoughts after watching Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film, Apocalypse Now. He enjoyed the movie until he saw the scene where American soldiers started killing Vietnamese people. At that point he realized “that was an impossible moment for me because I didn’t know who I was supposed to identify with, the Americans who were doing the killing or the Vietnamese who were dying and not being able to speak?” (Gross).

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As he says, it was “a symbolic moment of my understanding that this was our place in an American war, that the Vietnam War was an American war from the American perspective and that, eventually, I would have to do something about that” (Gross). This “something” gave rise to The Sympathizer, which offers a “Vietnamese perspective” on the Vietnam War, to fill in the “blanks” surrounding the predominant American versions of the war. His target readers are certainly Americans, but not exclusive of their Vietnamese counterparts. Nguyen tries to enable Americans to understand that Vietnam is a country and not simply a war. Vietnamese people are also trying to understand this war, because the Vietnamese people’s understanding of it is problematic in a very different way (Gross). As the common understanding of the Vietnam War is mediated by the impositions of American solipsistic values and reinforced by selfrighteous justice, Nguyen considers it significant to retell the stories from an “insider” perspective, to complement the sometimes distorted Americanized version. For many Americans, Vietnam is closely associated with the Vietnam War. Though the war ended in 1975, and it was a very distant war, the aftermath and the traumatized experiences remain, and continue to haunt many Americans. Steffen H. Hantke suggests, “that the Vietnam War is not really over because it has caused an as-of-yet unresolved trauma within the American psyche, which makes it impossible to put the event behind us” (63). Hantke notes that Vietnam along with the Vietnam War are common subjects of American cultural productions. Since the 1980s, a vast number of films, novels, stories, and poems have addressed the war. Among this work we find stereotypical representations—Vietnam is mostly represented as an innocent virgin, Orientalized and fantasized; Viet Cong are depicted as brutal, savage, bloodthirsty, abusive villains. Nguyen himself admits that he was influenced by the films Apocalypse Now and Platoon, and he recalls the discomfort he experienced in the movie-theater when audiences applauded for the massacre of Vietnamese in the films. Needless to say, Nguyen tries to challenge oversimplified assumptions and distorted and biased representations of Vietnam, showing instead the nation’s complexity, polyvalence, and multifarious aspects. Even from the outset, the novel explicitly indicates a deceptive narration, primarily from the first-person point of view. The novel reveals itself to readers as a “confession” of the narrator. The narrator describes himself as “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds, … able to see any issue

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from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent.” Born with mixed blood, with a French father and a Vietnamese mother, the narrator possesses a talent (or in the narrator’s note, is possessed by the talent) for having the “acrobatic ability” (Philip Caputo’s term) to balance between East and West, between North Communist Vietnam (Viet Cong) and South Vietnam. The story is narrated by an unnamed character, a North Vietnamese spy who is also an aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese top-ranking General, who is retained in a reeducation center to give confessions. His account starts from the days before the fall of Saigon, when he watches tens of thousands of Vietnamese trying to escape on barges and boats, fighting to be air-lifted by US aircraft to safety. Saigon during these days is depicted as claustrophobic, as uncertainty, and fear hovers around. It is literally an apocalypse. Though secretly he is pleased to see that the South Vietnamese regime has collapsed, he feels sympathy toward the terrified evacuees. As the story progresses, the narrator recounts his flight from Saigon, his retreat to a refugee camp in Guam, his relocation in Los Angeles, his involvement in Hollywood movie-making in the Philippines, and his imprisonment in Vietnam. Upon arriving in the United States, he monitors the General and the revolutionaries’ attempt to overrule the communist government. At the same time, he uses American connections and guilt to secure a job at Occidental College. Even though he is loyal to the Viet Cong, he sympathizes with the South Vietnamese. Given the protagonist’s background, his “confessional note” is rather an expose of the narrator’s obsessive and masochistic self-questioning, as opposed to a revelation of truth. Nguyen’s protagonist is an antiWhitmanian hero who, instead of a celebratory singing of the self, exposes his perpetual war-wounded scars. His birth as the “bastard” of a French father (a Catholic priest) and a 13-year-old Vietnamese maid points to a divided, self-tormented, self-debasing “I.” Nguyen’s narrator and protagonist, an unnamed “captain,” a spy and a traitor, excels in selfconcealment and deception. As the story unfolds, he is revealed as a war-stricken figure taking sides with neither party, trusting no one, and living without specific aims: I was ever always divided, although it was only partially my fault. While I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, it was hard not to, given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be

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said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center and south to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. (Loc 5418 of 5982)

A hybridized “forbidden child,” the narrator is caught in a limbic condition. He is deprived of a sense of belonging, and cultural/national identity. He is depicted as fraught with his “bastard” destiny. Though possessing the talent to see two sides, he would be “better off” if he could only see things from one side—“the only cure for being a bastard is to take a side” (Loc 4713 of 5982). He rejects taking sides, ridicules both communist ideologies and capitalist values. Orphaned and devoid of parental care and recognition, he embodies an “invisible man.” In fact, the novel’s audacious opening, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” recalls Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man”: I am an invisible man. No. I am not a spook like that who haunted Edgar Allan Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible; understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. (3)

Written in the turbulent 1940s, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man addresses the issues of racism and social injustice. The unnamed narrator, though educated and intelligent, considers himself “invisible” because of his skin color. His dreams of social mobility through hard work and humility prove to be futile and subject to the hypocrisy of the American elite class. With explicit intertextuality, Nguyen alludes to Ellison by appropriating and subverting the connotations of “invisibility.” Nguyen

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seems to suggest that like Ellison’s hero, Nguyen’s character is made invisible; though being invisible becomes the best tactic enabling his career as a double agent who does not take sides. For most of his lifetime, he wears masks and he is used to camouflage and disguises as coping strategies for survival. He uses “invisible ink” to write and decipher messages. He is trained to be impassive, self-annihilating, a “void” so to speak. With the invisible and divided allegiances, Nguyen illustrates the identity problems faced by Americans of Asian ancestry. The Department Chair whom the narrator works for is known to have Asian fetishes. He points out the dichotomous qualities between the oriental and the occidental, reinforcing the stereotype of orientalism as proposed by Edward Said, seeing the East as a mythic, mysterious object of fantasy, and an ever-tantalizing other. The narrator’s divided identity is again reinforced by the Chair’s assertion that he is divided because he is biracial. While bringing in a Vietnamese perspective to redefine the Vietnam War, Nguyen describes the refugee-diasporic experience from an “insider” viewpoint. A byproduct of the Cold War between America-led Western countries and Soviet-led communist regimes, the Vietnam War signaled the dividedness of political camps. The Vietnam War ended on April, 30, 1975, but its aftermath continued to have disastrous impacts. With the fall of Saigon and the Viet Cong’s takeover, around 135,000 Vietnamese associated with the United States evacuated (Jaehun Lee).3 The subsequent invasion of Cambodia and Laos by the Viet Cong caused a massive flow of “boat people” fleeing Indochina for shelter in America (some transited to Taiwan or other places in Asia) (Das 93).4 The Vietnam War left many nations divided, including Vietnam, its neighboring countries, and America. Most Americans and veterans, traumatized by the war, thought that the war was over (and most were happy about this). The planeloads and boatloads of Refugees, however, were even more traumatized when they were forced to leave their countries behind, only to find themselves unwelcome or unable to fit in the new lands. 3 The estimated number of Vietnamese refugees varies, depending on different calculations. Nguyen in The Refugees mentions that “the US government took in 150,000 Vietnamese refugees in 1975” (213). 4 According to an August 30, 1981 feature report in the New York Times, “Taiwan’s Aid to Refugees Goes Unrecognized,” “Thirty-four groups of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ have made their way to Taiwan, mainly picked up at sea by passing freighters. Only 56 of the 1792 refugees have accepted Taiwan’s offer of resettlement; most want to join relatives in other countries, usually the United States.”

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Nguyen devotes his writing to the “remembering” of refugee identity and refugee stories. It is exactly from the claiming of refugee identity that Nguyen was compelled to write The Sympathizer and his other stories. As he tellingly says, “it seems to me there’s a necessity for [the refugee identity] because the impetus for erasing the refugee histories” (Lee). Nguyen’s early childhood experience fleeing Vietnam and his life with two foster families long traumatized him. While in Los Angeles, his parents, who ran a grocery shop, were robbed and shot. These traumatizing memories have become a part of Nguyen’s memories of his diasporic conditions. The novel further illustrates the refugee experiences of grief. As Nguyen states, “Our family story is story of loss and death, for we are here only because the U.S. fought a war that killed 3 million of our countrymen, not counting over 2 million others who died in neighboring Laos and Cambodia” (Gross). Nguyen realizes that while most people, traumatized by the war, hope to forget, he intends to awaken people from their slumber, from forgetting. He quotes two passages as the epigraph in his 2018 collection of short stories The Refugees, I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. Roberto Bolano, Antwerp It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. James Fenton, “A German Requiem”

Nguyen talks about the importance to have a dialogue with a “ghost” and the importance not to forget. The very first story of The Refugees, “Black-eyed Woman,” talks about how the narrator sees her brother, who died to protect her on the boat, and returns as a ghost: “I could smell the sea on him, and worse, I could smell the boat, rancid with human sweat and excreta” (8). Nguyen feels the desire to tell the stories of ghosts, “the ghosts of the refugees, the ghosts of the pirates, the ghost of the boat watching us with those eyes that never closed, even the ghost of the girl I once was” (20). But telling the ghost stories is not intended to terrify readers or to “terrify the living.” In a word, “Not all ghosts were bent on vengeance and mayhem” (19). Most of the ghosts Nguyen knows are “quiet and shy” like the invisible Vietnamese who disappears

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when people turn their backs (19). The female narrator turns fear into a devotion to searching for ghosts: More often, though, I go hunting for the ghosts, something I can do without ever leaving home. As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs. They are pallid creatures, more frightened of us than we are of them. That is why we see these shades so rarely, and why we must seek them out. … We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts. (21)

What Nguyen has shown in his dedication to the writing of refugee experiences is the revelation of how a war refugee claims an American identity. In the postscript of The Refugees, Nguyen notes, “I am a refugee, an American, and a human being, which is important to proclaim, as there are many who think these identities cannot be reconciled” (211). Hence, Nguyen points out the plight and moral dilemma of refugees. On the one hand, he should feel lucky to be rescued, a Southeast Asian anticommunist subject, instead of a foreign immigrant from Central America. Refugees are the products and victims of political powers, and most of the time the permission/prohibition for entry into a new nation is the outcome of manipulation under ideological, bureaucratic, and racist politics. As well, refugees entail moral and ethical questions. These questions might sound abstract, but when it comes down to whether one can open the door and unconditionally welcome a stranger/foreigner, to extend hospitality or not, they remain a central issue. Essentially, the core matter for refugees is a humanity problem. After all, as Nguyen points out, American society is a contradictory, immigrant country; it is a beacon of democracy welcoming immigrants, but also fraught with xenophobia, exclusion, slavery, and colonization. Hence, the trope of the refugee is a metonymy for an examination of humanitarian issues. “The refugee embodies fear, failure, and flight” (212), bearing unwanted threats to social and economic stability. Throughout his life, Nguyen has had to live with his trauma: “I was luckier than many refuges, but I still remain scarred by my experience” (212). His experiences included fleeing in chaos, arriving in refugee camps, and leaving his parents to live with two sponsoring white families. Needless to say, this yielded a sense of helplessness: “being taken away from my family was simply another sign of how my life was no longer in my hands, or those of my parents” (212). Also needless to

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say, this remained a lifetime scar and an indelible mark in his memories. What’s worse, Nguyen points out that refugees are often considered “living embodiments of disturbing possibility” (213), as their existence signals a threat to comfort and security. This may propel people to feel obliged to share with refugees’ material resources and space. In short, refugees provide penultimate litmus testing for humanity. Nguyen stresses the difference between refugees and immigrants: I’m a refugee and the story I’m telling is a war story because one of the ways that the United States tries to contain the meaning of these histories is to think that all of these Asians are here because they’re immigrants, and that their story begins once they get to the United States. But again, my understanding is that many of these Asians are here because of the consequences of wars. And many immigrant stories and refugee stories need to be understood as war stories. (Gross)

Unlike immigrants, refugees do not arrive out of free will. They suffer a perpetual condition of limbic indeterminacy, swaying between a place of no return and a sense of not being “at home.” Deprived of privileges, they have to learn how to come to terms with a hard-boiled life. Nguyen’s fictionalized work, The Sympathizer, represents a microcosm of the Vietnamese refugee community after the fall of Saigon, with the vanishing of a homeland. The problematics of allegiances and identities are evidenced in Vietnamese refugee communities, with multiple and various perspectives embodied. Some, like the General and Madame, enjoy more financial privilege than others and remain class snobs. Some, like the crapulent major and Sonny, decide to move on and leave the homeland behind. Still others, including the widower with nine children who went to Minnesota, either feel depressed or sink into slave labor. Nguyen illustrates the resilience of refugees as they construct new homes on foreign soil. Uprooted, the Vietnamese refugees share culinary traditions; in their cuisine they use special herbs and fish sauces, which are home. Rather than “victims,” the refugees Nguyen represents are “humans” with individual traits and “complex subjectivities and histories” (Nguyen “history”). Nguyen takes on various voices of the myriad refugees, in their shared destiny of forced transplantation. The General and Madame embody a radical rejection of communism and a nostalgia for the loss of Vietnam’s past glory. The general’s fixation on the war and his guilt

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leaving his people behind propel him to organize a guerrilla army against the Viet Cong. Such fanaticism, paranoia, obsession, adaptation, and the acceptance of fate, elucidate the full spectrum of refugees. Even though the refugees share a common fragile and vulnerable destiny in their precarious conditions, they adopt different attitudes toward dealing with life. Hence, through the portrayal of a narrator who refuses to take sides, and who instead embraces both North and South Vietnam, East and West, Nguyen seems to suggest that it is essential to sympathize with others, as if we were on the same boat, as if we might become refugees ourselves. Toward the final scene, an experiment in a reeducation camp, employing an electric shock wave to keep the narrator “awake,” pushes him to the verge of total breakdown. No longer a warrior, he is a subject for reeducation, with the radical eradication of his beliefs and mentality. Finally, he cries out when afflicted by the torture. Weeping and in agony, he begs for a “sleep,” and shows the vulnerability and emotions of a human being, no longer a calculating machine. He is forced to find a solution to his moral dilemma, a way out of his perpetual zombie-like wandering. The final two chapters reveal the narrator as under medical treatment and a drug effect. He has hallucinatory syndromes and confesses to killing two old acquaintances, which he was tormented by, suffering a nightmare. From the onset, when the narrator says he is a man of “two minds” and “two lives,” readers soon discover that this is a double-faced spy, an “unreliable” narrator who is crafty in deceiving others, even deceiving himself into justifying the causes of his deeds. This makes readers wonder exactly what he “remembers,” and whether his encounters and experiences in America, his American dream, might be a doped mirage, built insecurely on quicksand, a castle in the air. This narratorial unreliability is apt to show the illusive nature of human memories. Stories need to be told, memories need to be documented, but we have to be aware that narrations often have loopholes and fissures. Just as all texts and narrations are but tissues of textualities, never fixed or stabilized, so are memories. Memories are often subjective, arbitrary, fitful, unreliable, subject to selection and screening. Thus it is quite impossible for us to fully restore or retrieve “pastness,” the remembering of authenticity. In a word, it is impossible to have an untainted version of memory. Past is always remembered in many different ways, and memories are tricky.

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The novel begins with a long monologue deliberately addressing a particular group audience. He is put in forced isolation for five years in order to submit an acceptable confession. Nguyen points out that confession is an instrument required in communist reeducation. Admitting one’s failure and vulnerability, condemning one’s faults, is evidence showing one’s acceptance of ideological control. As Nguyen states: The confession or the autobiographical self-criticism was a really important part of Chinese and Vietnamese Communist efforts to reeducate - that’s a euphemism - reeducate the people that they had defeated. And I hadn’t actually read any of those but I’d heard about them repeatedly. And I had read autobiographical accounts of people who had survived these kinds of reeducation camps or reeducation experiences. (Gross)

Having the narrator write a confession addressing a Vietnamese character, Nguyen expects the story can be directed to Vietnamese readers as well: …it’s confession written from one Vietnamese person to another Vietnamese person who was the interrogator. And what that meant was that what I could do in the novel was to construct an implied audience of Vietnamese people. So it was Vietnamese people talking to Vietnamese people, which is not how minority literature typically works in this country. Typically if you’re a minority writer in this country you’re expected to write towards the white audience. (Gross)

In this manner, what Nguyen hopes to achieve is a possible dialogue, not merely between majority and minority, but from minority to minority. This can be seen as Nguyen’s response to the internal conflicts caused and exacerbated by the civil war, with the hope that the talk between the two divided camps can appease the wounds and pains. However, a confession is a testimony of the ultimate othering of self. In the process of revealing or alienating self, confessions entail paradoxes, contradictions, and unreliability. As such, the novel demonstrates the impossibility of narration and remembering. A confession implies that the speaker of the confession is guilty, or that he believes that his sins have been purged after the confession. What is intriguing in the episode is that the narrator experiences an opposite effect from the expected objective of treatment. He awakens, rather than being awakened, from his long torpor. He now feels that things have become clearer to him, as if he were clairvoyant and clairaudient, as a Holy Spirit. He claims that he is

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“enlightened,” knowing and reaffirming his responsibility to call people’s attention. What readers feel is a comic sense of relief, a shared sympathy that finally the torture is over. Or rather, the character is dehumanized, reduced to a certain concept or belief to be taken on. The only way for the character to be “liberated” is to “confess” to his defeat, and to accept the values imposed on him. Perhaps unreliability or fragmentation is what the writer is trying to highlight, as the world that refugees inhabit is destabilizing and shattered. Indeed, what is lacking in the novel is an anchor that provides the war persona a point of departure, a purpose, a meaning, self-referentiality. By reading The Sympathizer as a war refugee novel, one senses the anger of the writer, and that he intends to provoke and irritate the world. When people are faced with extreme, precarious conditions such as war, even “nothing” has a double sense in that “nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.” In one scene, when a female agent is being investigated by three policemen who ruthlessly and brutally rape her, her reply to the question “What’s your name?” is, “My surname is Viet and my given name is Nam” (Loc 5256 of 8942). Here, quite explicitly, naming carries symbolic significance, because Nguyen himself admits that his own name bears double meanings: Viet just means the name of the people. So my parents chose for me a very nationalist and patriotic name. And in combination with my last name Nguyen - I am basically John Smith in Vietnam. But what’s also interesting is that, you know, I’ve always understood that even as common as that name is - my name is for Vietnamese people here in the United States, it’s obviously for many Americans - for most Americans - a very foreign name that they have a hard time getting their tongue around. But I’ve never changed my name because I think for whatever reason, as ambivalent as I feel about coming from Vietnam - especially, you know, when I was an adolescent growing up in the United States - as ambivalent as I felt about it, I also felt that I was Vietnamese. (Gross)

What Nguyen suggests is that by adopting a common name like “Nguyen” he is not only an ordinary Vietnamese, but also a spokesperson speaking the collective voice, recalling the message “personal is political; personal is national and allegorical.” The woman who is sexually violated is named “Nam Viet,” associating the woman’s woes with the nation’s misery. The three policemen, depicted as old, middle-aged, and young,

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metaphorically refer to Indochina, France, America, and Soviet Union as abusive intruders colonizing the land for centuries. Hence, watching the victim being raped and doing nothing is a sin. The novel is replete with the narrator’s sense of guilt and shame for doing nothing: “I was the man to whom things are done because he had done nothing” (Loc 5342 of 8942). Indifference, impartiality and tolerance of abuse, overlooking a crime; all instigate the committing of a crime and a conspiracy of violence. What Nguyen stresses is that everyone is held accountable for some behavior in terms of war crimes. Aside from questioning humanity, Nguyen argues that we are both human and inhuman at the same time. Again, Nguyen uses the novel to depict the atrocity, absurdity, dehumanized aspects of war. In war, there are no winners or losers; wars drive people insane and distort humanity, and the disastrous effects are so overwhelming they go beyond our reasoning or comprehension. Wars defy logic or sense. As if the monstrous part of humanity were unleashed, and humans were blinded by uncontrollable primitive impulses to conquer or to defend. That we are not refugees today does not ensure that we will not be refugees tomorrow. Until that final day comes, refugees prompt us to reflect on the possible traumatic conditions people can endure, and to think through the limits and (im)possibility of humanity.

CHAPTER 4

Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude

Abstract The 2015 novel The Last Ship written by Janice Lowe Shinebourne, a Guyanese writer of mixed ancestry (a Chinese father and a Chinese/Indian mother), features the history of the Chinese diaspora in Guyana since the late nineteenth century. The central character, Joan Wong, growing up in the tumultuous 1960s in Guyana, is a thirdgeneration diasporic of Chinese and Indian ancestry. Subsequent to the recent deaths of her two grandmothers and her mother, Joan is compelled to disclose a family secret by tracing the life experiences of her two Chinese grandmothers. Echoing her previous three novels, Timepiece (1986), The Last English Plantation (1988), and Chinese Women (2010), Shinebourne articulates her concerns with indenture history, focusing on the Indo-Caribbean laborers and their Chinese counterparts, and specifically the common laments shared by these Asian diasporics—the experience of marginalization and exploitation, the search for cultural roots, conflicting racial identities, and divided class consciousness. In particular, Shinebourne captures the postcolonial moment of uneasiness, anxiety, angst, and fear among the Asian diasporics in their response to the dominant Afro-Caribbean or Creole cultures. The anguish of the migrant experiences can best be understood from the idea of “precarity” proposed by Judith Butler as a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Frames of War 29). This paper, by adopting Butler’s conception of precarity, aims to © The Author(s) 2020 J. T. Lee, Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8_4

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explore how historical conditions and their embedded structural violence and trauma give rise to the precarious circumstances among the diasporic characters. The expressions of life as precarious, fragile, and vulnerable among these communities are references to their sense of alienation, exclusion, and deprivation in Guyanese society. Keywords Precarity · Afro-Caribbean · Creolization · Sino-Caribbean · Coolitude · Indentureship

4.1 Beyond Precarity and Trauma: Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship ∗ ∗ ∗ The 2015 novel The Last Ship written by Janice Lowe Shinebourne, a Guyanese writer of mixed ancestry (a Chinese father and a Chinese/Indian mother), features the history of the Chinese diaspora in Guyana since the late nineteenth century. The central character, Joan Wong, growing up in the tumultuous 1960s in Guyana, is a thirdgeneration diasporic of Chinese and Indian ancestry. Subsequent to the recent deaths of her two grandmothers and her mother, Joan is compelled to disclose a family secret by tracing the life experiences of her two Chinese grandmothers, Clarice Chung and Susan Leo. In chronological fashion, the novel revolves around the two female characters above; their different upbringings lead to varying attitudes adopted by Asian communities in Guyana. Clarice Chung is depicted as a difficult woman, who is hard to please and refuses to adapt to the new land. What matters for her is the insistence on cultural purity; she claims to be not only a “chinee,” but also a punti rather than a Hakka. As she reiterates, her family members, unlike other Chinese Hakka immigrants, were the descendants of Chengzong of the Yuan Dynasty, real “puntis” and aristocrats. Clarice, along with the heirloom she left behind, represents recalcitrance to cultural assimilation. As the Chungs claim, their family came from Hong Kong on the last ship to help the missionaries build churches in Guiana and convert the Hakkas to Christianity. They consider themselves superior to the Leos, who are Hakkas, and consider the creoles inferiors. Susan Leo, on the other hand, is prone to Indian culture. Born

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in Guiana, she is orphaned at the age of four and manages to survive by working as a servant and laundress for rich Chinese and white men. Although possessed of a Chinese outlook, Susan Leo favors Indian rather than Chinese culture. The novel ends with Joan’s return to Hong Kong to trace the cultural roots of her ancestors, only to find that the aristocratic origin the family had been proud of was fictitious, and the artifacts her grandmother had treasured, the scroll of the yellow emperor, were nothing but mass-produced kitsch. At her dismay, a mantra from a temple serves as a solace to her, suggesting that one should accept the renunciation of things. Feeling relieved, she finds herself liberated from ideological and ancestral ties. 4.1.1

Precarity and Coolitude—Shared Experience

The anguish of the Asian migrant experiences can best be understood from Judith Butler’s conception of “precarity,” which, along with precariousness, livability, grievability, characterizes her concerns with ethics and responsibility in her recent writings. As all would agree, human existence is precarious, as our lives are grounded in fragility and destined ultimately to face death, either due to willful action, as instantiated by terrorist attacks, or other hazardous causes. Precariousness, according to Butler, refers to human vulnerability, specifically the frailty of life in light of its inescapable ultimate destruction, as Butler straightforwardly puts forth, “Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed” (2009, 25). Butler emphasizes the dependency of human lives, as “there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know” (2004, xii); Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of others. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all (2009, 13). Stemming from the notion of vulnerability, grief for loss is understandable, in Butler’s words, “That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief” (2004, xii). Yet, what Butler alerts us to think about is the question of “selective grief.” The September 11 event (“9/11”) and the recent Paris attack by terrorists in 2015 are cases in point. The outpouring media coverage and rising empathy for

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the loss, the feelings of shock and fear, and the ensuing massive political mobilization, are indicative of the problematics of selective grief. As Western mainstream media continued to expose the death tolls and victims of the terrorists’ attacks, scarce media coverage and expressions of empathy toward non-Western victims and casualties were addressed. Supposedly, precariousness is a “shared experience of social condition” (2009, 13); in fact, not all lives have been recognized as precarious inasmuch as not all lives are grieved. Butler calls our attention to the rising grief for the loss of Western lives, and the concomitant neglect for equally vulnerable non-Western lives, whose deaths are not equally regarded as worthy of mourning and grief. Paradoxically, it is by distinguishing between who are worth living and grieving over and who are worth destroying and unpitying, and by maximizing precariousness and minimizing precariousness that we violate the egalitarian features of precarious lives. Precarity, an acute expression of precariousness, in this sense is ultimately political. As often found in war campaigns, when exposed to arbitrary state violence, the media often appeal to maximized precariousness. In this light, precarity characterizes the politically induced conditions under which certain populations are associated with a heightened risk of threat and violence without protection. Shinebourne’s novel epitomizes the conditions of precarity under which the characters are depicted to experience different degrees of precariousness from discrepant levels of societal recognition. The novel presents Joan’s reflections on the family mourning for her two grandmothers and her mixed feelings about the differing experiences of the two sides of her family. For a long time, Joan has felt sympathetic toward her maternal grandmother Susan but indignant toward her paternal grandmother Clarice Chung, despite the fact that other Chinese hold opposite opinions about these two women. Clarice Chung was respected for having royal Chinese blood and high social status. Clarice is depicted as a snob who considers all things Chinese to be superior. She refuses to eat Creole food; she has to have Chinese congee as her breakfast despite her diabetes. Her wedding, a ritual equipped with a Chinese bridal costume, ancestral tablets, and artifacts symbolizing fertility and auspicious life, is enacted as a conspicuous spectacle by her uncle to showcase Chinese authenticity. Clarice represents radical insistence on ethnic purity and a total rejection of cultural hybridization. The young Clarice was despised by her cousins, Jacob and Joseph, who moved to England for education and “spoke like English gweilos, ate only gweilo food and wore gweilo

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clothes” (2015, 511). Unlike the other Chung members, who succeed in mimicking English manners and flee the country to escape persecution, Clarice represents those Chinese migrants who are forced to stay. Gradually, she becomes a hard-boiled and stringent woman. This is her coping strategy to survive the condition of precarity. On the other hand, Susan speaks Hindi, dresses in Saris, wearing a nose ring and then anklets, likes watching Indian films and is good at cooking Indian food; “she only looked Chinese, but her soul was Indian” (2015, 1777). In addition to her love of Indian culture, she has love affairs with two Indian men, one of whom is the father of her five children. To Susan’s daughters, Susan’s love for their Indian father was a bad choice in the first place, causing them deprivation, suffering, abandonment, and forced adoption after their father James Abdul left them. The middle-aged Susan has a relationship with an illiterate laborer from India whose name is Motilall, which again arouses resentment and embarrassment among her daughters and the Chinese community. Susan resolutely “places a red bindi dot on her forehead, the symbol of a married Hindu woman” when going to the cinema with her Indian lover (2015, 1188), provoking gossip and antagonism. Whenever the two Indian men Abdul and Motilall are mentioned by the Chinese, it is always with a sense of antipathy and contempt, blaming them for their poverty, laziness, and untidiness. Motilall is depicted as an unwelcomed guest in Mary and Harold’s home as he never uses toilet paper and cannot speak English though he wants to help in their shop. Joan is the only one in the family who befriends her grandmother Susan. In the Chinese community, Clarice Chung is believed to be the successful model in British Guiana; the Chungs achieved wealth and highborn status, and Clarice was successful in running a shop and leaving behind Chinese legacies and financial security. Susan on the other hand is caught in the impasse of self-afflicted humiliation and degradation by choosing to identify with the Indian coolies. At Susan’s deathbed, Joan is the only one who comforts her grandmother, while her other children remain detached. For Joan, even an ostensibly worthless woman like Susan is worthy of her grief as she recalls how she was always caring and loving even though she had traumatic experiences of abandonment, i.e., was orphaned when young and abandoned when married. Alone in a foreign land, she had to work as a child laborer and then struggled hard to raise her children. Since she was looked after by the Indian farmers who taught her how to be Indian, she developed a lifetime love for the Indian culture. Susan never had money or material things to give, but for

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Joan, the garden Susan planted is an enduring memory of fruits, chickens, and sweet memories. To reiterate, what is worthy of note in reading The Last Ship through the lens of precarity is that the Asian diasporics demonstrate an intimate network of intricate interdependencies. This is particularly true if we situate the condition of precarity in the Caribbean historical and social contexts. From 1667, the Dutch established a colony on Guiana till they officially ceded it in 1815. The British assumed control in the late eighteenth century. Till its independence in 1966, Guyana (formerly British Guiana) was ruled by the British with the economy based on a Plantocracy. Due to its long cultural, political, and historical background under British rule for more than 150 years, Guyana has strong ties with other Caribbean Anglophone areas. Its original name “Guiana,” derived from an Indigenous Amerindian language, meaning “land of many waters” (Oxford English Dictionary). It is also a land of diverse multiracial populations, including Indians, Africans, Amerindians, Chinese, and Europeans (“Guyana News”). Africans were first imported to plantations as slaves, and then after the enactment of the emancipation laws in 1834 in Britain and ensuing abolition of slavery and indenture, Chinese laborers and Indian laborers were introduced into the region as contract laborers called “coolies,” complicating the racial and cultural spectrum and the implied social status. In writing The Last Ship, Shinebourne shifts the focus to her Chinese ancestral roots partly to uncover a hidden layer of her cultural identity and partly to expose the condition of precarity shared between the Chinese and Indian coolitude. In the novel, Joan’s mother Mary is afraid of Susan being a bad influence on Joan; when Susan takes Joan to see the Indian movies, Mary bursts out in anger, “You making she lazy” “You want she turn into a coolie like you” (2015, 1208). Such worries are repeatedly shown in almost all of Shinebourne’s novels. In The Last English Plantation, “You want to be a coolie woman” is an accusation thrown at June Lehall by her mother. Chinese Women echoes the same concerns when Aziz the Indian narrator is depicted as a man who has been haunted by this destiny throughout his life and seeks to wash off his “coolie status” by making a fortune and marrying a light-skinned (Chinese) woman. It is justifiable to say that the driving force for these Chinese diasporics is not so much the temptation to move upward and enjoy a privileged status than the fear of moving downward on the social ladder of mobility.

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Centering on characters who attempt to shun their fate as a “coolie” on a sugar estate, the novels embody Shineboure’s voyage into coolitude. The two target groups represented in the novel share the common experience of coolitude. As pointed out by Véronique Bragard, Shinebourne’s earlier novels center on the theme of “coolitude,” a term coined by the Mauritan poet Khal Torabully to refer to the shared experiences and the mosaic imaginaries of the indentured coolie laborers crossing Kala Pani (Black Waters).1 Coolitude, as argued by Bragard, “is not based on Coolie as such but relies on the nightmare transoceanic journey of Coolies, as both a historical migration and a metonymy of cultural encounters. The crossing of the Kala Pani constitutes the first movement of a series of abusive and culturally stifling situations” (quoted in Carter and Torabully 15).2 What is implied by coolitude is not a synthesizing “melting pot,” but as Bragard has put it, a Glissantian “cultural mélange (mélange culturel )” in which cultural diversity and differences encounter and negotiate with each other (2008, 98). Quite true. Shinebourne’s Chinese Women epitomizes the unbridgeable gap between Africans and Indians in British Guiana; “In our country, African and Indians did not bother to conceal their hatred for each other. Both were dragged in chains to the country to labour like brute animals, but instead of uniting them[selves] to fight the white man who oppressed and divided them, they guarded their separate lives, jealously resenting and wishing the worst on each other” (2010, 12). In a similar vein, as shown in The Last Ship, the Indians and the Chinese, though sharing similar coolitude and marginalization experiences, display blatant hostility toward each other. Their destiny is subject to others, when we consider how Chinese were brought to the Caribbean as replenishing labor to replace Africans, and how Indian coolies served similar functions by replacing African and Chinese labor.

1 Both a cultural interpretation and a poetic vision, coolitude emerges as a parallel echo to négritude proposed by Aimé Césaire, Clive James, and other African and Caribbean intellectuals, as an alter ego of creoleness. For Carter and Torabully, négritude erased Indian migration and “ignored the Indian who was the coolie” seeing them as “socially non-existent, fundamentally on the margins” (2002, 13). 2 Crossing the seas is inductive to the understanding of coolitude, as Carter and Torabully state, “It is impossible to understand the essence of coolitude without charting the coolies’ voyage across the seas. That decisive experience, that coolie odyssey, left an indelible stamp on the imaginary landscape of coolitude” (“The Coolies Odyssey,” quoted in 2002, 11).

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Conflicting interests and rivalry intensified their precarious living conditions. Facing competition from the Indians, the Chinese migrants soon developed trading skills other than farming. As the renowned historian Walton Look Lai notes, by the late 1890s, the Chinese “had become identified as a largely small trader class within the interstices of the colour/class social hierarchy of Caribbean plantation society, jostling side by side with other ethnic groups in the same middleman occupations” (1998, 16). Contrary to the Indians, the Chinese gradually assimilated with the whites, “off-whites,” or mixed-race. As many Chinese achieved economic success in the early twentieth century, they generated antiChinese sentiment in the sixties when the Caribbean black movement came to the fore (Misrahi-Barak 2012, 3). 4.1.2

Precarity and Trauma as a Politically Induced Condition

Butler sets forth a distinction between “precariousness” and “precarity.” Precariousness is the corporal vulnerability shared by all, including the both privileged and underprivileged. Precarity is the particular vulnerability imposed on the poor, the disfranchised, the minorities, or those endangered by war or natural disaster. Corporeal vulnerability both equalizes and differentiates: all bodies are threatened by injury and death (precariousness), but some bodies are more protected and others more exposed (precarity). Precariousness is shared by all; precarity is “distributed unequally” (2009, xvii, xxv, 25). According to Butler, precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death (2009, 25). Rather than a result of failure on the individual level, precariousness is often operated and manipulated with various structural schemes, called by Butler “frames/framing”; the title “frame of war” is one of these. The frame of racism, for instance, justifies a discourse conjuring certain populations “whose lives are eminently grievable; and others whose loss is no loss and whose lives remain ungrievable” (2009, 26). Echoing her three previous novels Timepiece (1986), The Last English Plantation (1988) and Chinese Women (2010), Shinebourne’s The Last Ship again reveals the political and social turmoil in the 1960s in British Guiana. Shinebourne discloses that most of her writings entail the remembering of the hauntological past of Guyana. Shinebourne refers to the 1960s as a “chaotic as well as a creative time”; the terrible times compel

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her to write because it is imperative “to know the roots of both the chaos and the creativity. … It was necessary to uncover the contradictions, misguided sentimentality, corruption, psychotic violence, and anger that turn my country upside down, the neglect and betrayals – and also the immense worth, genuine morality, and intense commitment that had come to replace the old complacency about political culture” (1990, 143). The confusion, chaos, trauma, and violence that hallmark the historical turbulence become the driving force for Shinebourne to write. In Chinese Women, Aziz’s traumatic experience showcases a microcosm of the racist Guyana in the 1960s. As the narrator notes, British Guiana was a colony ruled by racism and snobbery. The British ruled at the top, so their white skin became a status symbol. They enslaved the brown Indian and Black African. The lighter your skin colour, the higher your status, the darker, the lower. The Portuguese also came to the country to work as labourers on the sugar estates, but because their skin was white, they became second in power to the British. The coloureds and mixed race people took education and worked in the civil service and middle-class professions, so they were third in status. Thus, the black or brown skin of the African and Indian, the races at the bottom, became a symbol of failure and held you back. To grow up in British Guiana was to learn all the codes of racial snobbery and prejudice that surrounded our differences of appearance and culture. You learned these codes and prejudice daily from the cradle – from gossip you heard in your family, your neighbourhood, the streets and school. We were all like spiders, constantly weaving a web of racial intrigue around each other, even in the hospital among the sick and dying. There was no escaping it. This was the society the British created for us to live in, a racist society. (2010, 11)

As a writer, Shinebourne admits in an interview that when young she felt confused and torn by the ambivalence of the colonial system which provided them with both feelings of security and negative values, “I felt torn between what made me secure and a dominant system that asked me to reject it” (Williams 1997, 5). Her writings are considered a gargantuan task with an ideology of decolonization to underscore her interpretation and solution to the problem (Williams 1997, 5). Again in The Last Ship, Shinebourne’s political and public commitment to decolonization still, years later, rings true as it seeks to justify “fighting against colonialism

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and racism” (quoted in Williams 5). Accurately put, a political agenda is embedded in Shinebourne’s writing, as she notes “I need to write about how the racial psychosis of the 1960s spent itself in the 1970s and brought certain themes to a conclusion” (1990, 143). The social turmoil in the 1960s and persecution of the Chinese is given a full and graphic picture in The Last Ship: Times were changing rapidly in the country. The first big political party, the People’s Progressive Party, led by Cheddi Jagan, had split in two, and the conflict between the two sides, Indians and Africans, was tearing the country apart. People said Cheddi Jagan was causing uproar with his communist politics. He wanted to rid the country of Bookers, the British company that ran the sugar estates; he wanted an end to British rule and the British to leave the country; his opponents said that he wanted British Guiana to become a communist country, with him as prime minister, that his wife was a communist, too. Together, they campaigned for independence and made fiery speeches that alarmed the British and American governments. When he had first come to power, when Joan was only a small girl, the British had been so alarmed, they had sent in their army and warships, and locked up Jagan and his supporters. (2015, 1280)

Politics eventually is split into two racial and class lines: Forbes Burnham and his anti-communist supporters, mostly businessmen or urban citizens, Africans and the Portuguese; Cheddi Jagan and the Indians from the rural estates. Even at school, as the narrator recalls, students became politically divided by race. The pro-communist instructor Ronald Ragbir makes these exuberant remarks to Joan: The world was changing and … she was living in exciting times when nations were ending colonialism and becoming independent; women and black people would be free; there were going to be revolutionary technological and scientific changes; computers and science would change the world for the better; people would travel to the moon. She was going to live in a world her ancestors could not dream of, she was lucky to born when she was. Listening to the music coming out of America and England, he told her, and she would hear how free the world was becoming. … He played Bob Dylan singing “The times they are a Changing” and she memorized the words and sang them to herself. (2015, 1318)

Even though the teacher is optimistic and excited about the revolution, Joan senses “political confusion and uncertainty about its future” (2015,

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1318). What she observes is strikes and shutdowns, arsons, and riots on the sugar estates in Georgetown. The conflicts between Africans and Indians have spread across the country and the escalated hostility has led to “chaos and confusion” (2015, 1327) and a massive exodus, including that of the Chinese. Notably, “it seems that the country was doomed” (2015, 1327). The time period is given particular reference when the novel illustrates Ragbir’s bookshelves: “They were full of the Utopian ideas of the sixties–the Beat writers, and the works of Marshall McLuhan. He was now full of the youth counter-culture of England and the United States… it was such a great time to be young and alive. There in swinging London women were being liberated by the birth-control pill and the rise of feminism” (2015, 1393–4). Joan’s sister Lorna, now going to the University of London, sends music records from London, the Beatles included. Listening to their lyrics which are “so exuberant and full of ideas, dreams and hopes,” (2015, 1394), Joan feels that London might be an outlet to the state of political confusion. The political tension in Guyana was not lessened even after Forbes and African blacks took power. The conflicts became even more rampant, and hatred and discrimination against the Chinese more ostensible, leaving the Chinese no room for reconciliation. The Europeans used to rule the colony with a political structure based on racial division. In light of their light-skinned racial color, the Chinese and the Portuguese were given privilege as buffers from blacks and Indians who blatantly opposed British power. After the nation’s independence, the Chinese became targets of animosity. With the emergence of black power, the Chinese presence was either subject to erasure or neglect. As the Chungs claim, their ancestors took the last ship Admiral in the late nineteenth century as part of the missionary group to Christianize and modernize the country. The passenger list, however, was missing from the historical archive and the Chungs believed that it was deliberately destroyed by the Burnham Government for the purpose of erasing the Chinese from Guyanese memory (2015, 1815). Shinebourne provides her keen observation of and insight into the psyche of the Chinese migrants since the late nineteenth century in Guyana till the twentieth century. The rise and fall of the social positions of the Chinese are determined by the transformations of political and social structures, which again dovetail to make what Butler suggests is the framing of “war.” The traumatic experiences represented in the novel are never individual, but collective or even universal, shared by

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whomever has marginalized experiences of exclusivity. Their marginalization, as well as their removal from homeland, their forced indentureship and labor, their middleman minority role, and their historical erasure and/or suppression, is living evidence of how historical conditions and their embedded structural violence and trauma give rise to the precarious circumstances among diasporic characters. The Chinese serve as instruments under various political schemes, making their lives vulnerable and precarious. The Chinese characters choose to either adapt, like Arnold Chung, or hybridize, like Susan Leo, or resist cultural assimilation, like Clarice Chung. As seen in the novel, both Clarice’s and Susan’s vulnerability to the Other indicates that they are perpetual victims of structural violence and trauma. Whatever attitudes they adopt, they are subject to politically induced conditions of precarity. Overall, the expression of life as precarious, fragile, and vulnerable among Asian communities is a reference to their sense of alienation, exclusion, and deprivation in Guyanese society. Will there be a remedy for the unequally imposed precarity? Butler appeals to our responsibility to recognize “precariousness for all.” Since a position of vulnerability is imposed on others by those who deny their own mortality, it is imperative that all men alike, dominant or powerless, acknowledge and take into careful consideration precariousness. Only when one avows our and others’ vulnerability and precariousness can one prevent the world from becoming a social condition of precarity. Fragility will serve as the basis for forming a new sense of community.

4.2 Post 911 Trauma in Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s Chinese Women ∗ ∗ ∗ When discussing her writing, Jan Lowe Shinebourne affirms that “those terrible times in Guyana are the times in which I grew up, and I am committed of necessity to write them about” (“Twin Influences” 143). Setting her two novels Timepiece (1986) and The Last English Plantation (1988) both in British Guiana around the 1960s, Shinebourne refers to the time period as “a chaotic as well as a creative time” “that everyone was compelled to face” (“Twin Influences” 143; 142); she was urged to write as she felt “it was important to know the roots of

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both the chaos and the creativity. … It was necessary to uncover the contradictions, misguided sentimentality, corruption, psychotic violence, and anger that turn my country upside down, the neglect and betrays – and also the immense worth, genuine morality, and intense commitment that had come to replace the old complacency about political culture” (143). Confusion, chaos, trauma, and violence which hallmark the historical turbulence become the driving force for Shinebourne to write, first in the 1960s in Guyana and then in London in the post 9/11 era. Not so much a novel about “Chinese women” or the seemingly poised female figures playing flute in their cheongsam and bound feet presented in the cover illustration, Shinebourne’s Chinese Women is indeed a novel evolving on a Guyanese Indian Muslim, the narrator and central character named Albert Aziz. The book is about Aziz as a coolie Odyssey, in search for a forgotten lore, in a forsaken voyage into the essence of coolitude, and essence of self. Following a fruit tree climbing and a fall a hundred feet, Aziz breaks major joints of his body and becomes crippled for months; the accident causes a total wreck on his body and his existence. In a time span of nearly 50 years, the novel hovers around a phantasmagoria of dream-like sights into British colonial estates and contemporary British and the United States as neo-imperialist empires. The novel juxtaposes two “falls” and their effects on Aziz. The first fall took place in 1957 when Aziz aged ten tried to climb a genip tree to reach the delicious fruit.3 Aziz’s fall from a hundred-feet height broke all major joints of his body which crippled him for months. The cripple and wound, both physical and psychic, become a lifetime trauma that perpetually haunts Aziz throughout the decades. It is until the televised image of people’s “fall” from the windows of the Empire Building in the 9-11 event that Aziz “relived [his] fall in 1957” (90) with arms and legs spread open like wings and is determined to take a “mission” to retrieve a love for Alice Wong, a Chinese fellow student who rejected him forty years ago. His obsession with Alice is depicted as part of an obstinate fixation and stubbornness on two Chinese women he encounters in his teens as he narrates “When I met Alice Wong in 1961, I was only fourteen. I met Anne Carrera in 1961 too. Both of them left me with a love of Chinese women that lasted almost fifty years and is strong enough to last another 3 In a later passage, as Aziz admits to Alice, he climbs the tree in order to spy on his mother and a Hindu oversee at Enmore named Sukdeo who are having sex in the house (76).

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fifty” (7). Anne Carrera is the mix-blood Chinese wife of a white overseer and is portrayed as a source of fantasized happiness and pleasure for the young Aziz, “just through the sheer pleasure of watching her, seemed to give [Aziz] the willpower and strength of a man” (22). Aziz cannot resist watching Anne move with ease, and complacence while she is with her Portuguese husband and children, a maternal charm quite contrary to that of Aziz’s mother. Alice, on the other hand, embodies a joyful young girl who has intelligence and compassion. Both women have light skin, a symbol of status and privilege. Anne Carrera is even considered to be able to pass for whites. Alice reifies the superimposed images of the two Chinese women signifying cultural assimilation and acquired status. Believing that the two Chinese are his chances to escape his doom as a “Fula coolie” (13), the saviors so to speak, Aziz relocates Alice, now a journalist in London, to propose marriage to her. Though a millionaire with conspicuous wealth, Aziz has never felt he is fully recognized by Alice or her Chinese family, or British or even other Hindus. Neither Guyana nor Canada or Britain provides him a shelter to harbor a sense of belongingness and security. He is drifted in a lone and perpetual diaspora hoping to find a nepenthe to soothe his internal suffering. Aziz identifies himself as an Arab Muslim believing that finally his Indian brown-skin has won visibility and alarming attentions after the 9-11 incidents. He is learning how to exert this newly acquired power to compensate for what is lacking in his childhood: respect, esteem, and affections. To a great extent, Aziz’s traumatic experience showcases a microcosm of the racist Guyana in the 1960s. As the narrator notes, British Guiana was a colony ruled by racism and snobbery. The British ruled at the top, so their white skin became a status symbol. They enslaved the brown Indian and Black African. The lighter your skin colour, the higher your status, the darker, the lower. The Portuguese also came to the country to work as labourers on the sugar estates, but because their skin was white, they became second in power to the British. The coloureds and mixed race people took education and worked in the civil service and middle-class professions, so they were third in status. Thus, the black or brown skin of the African and Indian, the races at the bottom, became a symbol of failure and held you back. To grow up in British Guiana was to learn all the codes of racial snobbery and prejudice that surrounded our differences of appearance and culture. You learned these coded and prejudice daily from the cradle – from gossip you heard in your family, your neighbourhood, the streets and

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school. We were all like spiders, constantly weaving a web of racial intrigue around each other, even in the hospital among the sick and dying. There was no escaping it. This was the society the British created for us to live in, a racist society. (11)

The racial confrontation is so rampant that Aziz learns to realize that as an Indian Muslim with dark skin shade, he is to be even more alienated as an outsider. Aziz refers to himself after the fall as having a “half-dead body” moving “among the living like a ghost” (52). Disabled and immobile for some time, Aziz realizes that in the apartheid regime on the estate he will always be “a cripple and a spectator,” watching how the whites do, learning that their lifestyle is “unattainable,” and that he will be “forever orphaned from the white man’s high standard of living, his wealth, property, luxuries, and his women” (31). As a writer, Shinebourne admits in an interview that when young she feels confused and torn by the ambivalence of colonial system which provides them both the feelings of security and the negative values, “I felt torn between what made me secure and a dominant system that asked me to reject it” (Williams 5); to find an interpretation and a solution to the problem, Shinebourne started to write, a “gargantuan task” for her, with an ideology of decolonization in her early novels (Williams 5). In Chinese Women, Shinebourne’s political and public commitment to decolonization remains, years later still ringing true to justify the “fighting against colonialism and racism” (quoted in Williams 5). Adequately put, political agenda is embedded in Shinebourne’s writing, as she notes “I need to write about how the racial psychosis of the 1960s spent itself in the 1970s and brought certain themes to a conclusion” (“Twin Influences” 143). Centering on a character who attempts to shun his fate as a “coolie” on a sugar estate, the novel embodies Shineboure’s voyage into coolitude. Chinese Women echoes the same concerns expressed in The Last English Plantation where “You want to be a coolie woman” is an accusation thrown to June Lehall by her mother. In Chinese Women, what haunts Aziz is how to wash off his “coolie status” by making a fortune and marrying a light-skinned (Chinese) woman. Indeed, the novel can be read as Shinebourne’s journey into history, into coolitude. In Véronique Bragard’s brilliant work “Coolie Woman Fictionalizes Political History,” she explores Shinebourne’s earlier novels from the notion of “coolitude,” a term coined by the Mauritan poet Khal Torabully to encompass the

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shared experiences and the mosaic imaginaries of the indentured coolie labors crossing Kala Pani (Black Waters). Both a cultural interpretation and a poetic vision, coolitude emerges as a parallel echo to négritude proposed by Aimé Céssaire, Clive James, and other African and Caribbean intellectuals, as an alter ego of creoleness.4 For Torabuly, négritude erased Indian migration and “ignored the Indian who was the coolie” seeing them as “socially non-existent, fundamentally on the margins” (Carter and Torabully 13). Coolitude, as argued by Bragard, “is not based on Coolie as such but relies on the nightmare transoceanic journey of Coolies, as both a historical migration and a metonymy of cultural encounters. The crossing of the Kala Pani constitutes the first movement of a series of abusive and culturally stifling situations” (quoted in Carter and Torabully 15).5 What is implied in the coolitude is not a synthesizing “melting pot,” but as Bragard has put it, a Glissantian “cultural mélange (mélange culturel )” in which cultural diversity and differences encounter and negotiate with each other (Transoceanic Dialoues 98). Quite true, Shinebourne’s novel epitomizes the unbridgeable gap between Africans and Indians in British Guiana: In our country, African and Indians did not bother to conceal their hatred for each other. Both were dragged in chains to the country to labour like brute animals, but instead of uniting them to fight the white man who oppressed and divided them, they guarded their separate lives, jealously resenting and wishing the worst on each other. (12)

Aziz notes, “Indians, both Hindus and muslims, were the new slaves, but the Hindus did not want to be identified with us, the Muslims, so they called us Fulamen, after the African Muslim Fulani tribe who were among the original slaves in the Caribbean. I grew up at Enmore used to being 4 In the article “In Praise of Creoleness” written by the Mauritians Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphal Confiant, and Jean Bernabé, the term “creolite” is inspired by Eduouard Glissant’s “Caribbeanness” (antillanité) referring to a métissage of cultural forms and histories which rejects a single ethnic origin but welcomes the inclusive creole conditions. Creoleness thus explicicting includes non-Caribbean regions celebrating Caribbean and creole identities and the process of creolisation (Carter and Torabully 8). 5 Crossing the seas is inductive to the understanding the coolitude, as Carter and Torabuly state, “It is impossible to understand the essence of coolitude without charting the coolies’ voyage across the seas. That decisive experience, that coolie odyssey, left an indelible stamp on the imaginary landscape of coolitude” (“The Coolies Odyssey,” quoted in Carter and Torabully 11).

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called Fulaman. It was always an insult, a way of telling me not to get too big for my boots, and remember I was just a slave” (10). Unlike the Africans who manage to escape the sugar plantation and are elevated to the middle-class by education or being converted to Christianity, Indian Muslims fail to “progress from slavery” by taking the similar path. Instead, Aziz and his Muslim family believe that making money and buying properties are the means to realize social mobility. Following his family who tried to search for “the land of milk and honey,” (25) Aziz moves from Enmore, to Berbice, to Calgary, trying to escape the adversity in a series of what Stuart Hall pinpoints “diaspora-ization.”6 The confrontation culminates in the race riots taking place in 1961, “the worst year in British Guiana,” which precipitated a panicked mass exodus of Indians migrating to Canada and a rising power of Black Government led by Forbes Burnham (48). In “Memories of British Guiana,” Shinebourne describes the chaos and disturbance of the year: “I don’t need any binoculars to see that Water Street is on fire, to see my own home, my own city on fire, to see rioters in the streets, and the warship on the river with more soldiers in the hold” (222). This inner landscape depicted by Shinebroune pinpoints how political labyrinth leaves an indelible mark in the writer’s mind. Arguably, what the novel reveals is not so much the confrontations between the white and the colored than the tension and power struggle amid the oppressed. For Aziz, what matters is not how he fails to win the approval from the colonizers, with whom the gulf is too wide to trespass, but rather how he feels torn by the hostility and contempt from other fellow victims. The novel sees Aziz swaying between two extremes: hostility from the Africans and Hindus, and imagined hospitality from the Chinese. Shinebourne thus describes the Guyanese Chinese: In the Caribbean, the Chinese were the most tenacious of all the ethnic groups, in how they settled there in spite of the inhospitable conditions, and domiciled themselves stoically in a hostile society. They did not suffer

6 Hall comments that “The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 244).

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the degradation of being enslaved and subjugated to regimes of brute labour. Their women were not raped and forced into relations of sexual miscegenation with Europeans. In any Caribbean country, you could travel to the most remote and inhospitable parts and find a solitary, isolated shop with a Chinese family working to supply food for several villages, and even though they were treated like outsiders and subjected to racial taunts and torments, they did not complain or give up. They kept aloof from the degradation around them, behaving them to those inhospitable places. I saw them like this in Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica. Their dignity was like a miracle to me, a child from a Muslim family destroyed by the brutality the Chinese endured and overcame with stoicism. After I left the Caribbean, I saw such Chinese people in the cities of the First World, where for the isolated, rural village shop, they had exchanged the takeaway restaurant in the inner city. Their courage always touched me in the same way. … I always wished my family possessed a little of their powers of endurance and stoicism. (51–52)

In an earlier passage, Aziz narrates how he enjoys his stay in the Yhips’ Shop as he thinks that “There was only ever one thing that gave me relief from my fear and terror of East Indian poverty – the Yhips’ Shop, or as people called it, the ‘Chinee shop’” (38). Humble and simple cottages that accommodate both a shop and a house, ‘the Chinese shops’ owned by the Wongs and the Yhips are synonymous with the ambience of ‘love’ which recalls “the warm feeling of security, comfort and satisfaction … when the air was full of scent of cakes baking in the oven, and Chinese food being cooked in the kitchen. To this day those smells are still like a drug that sedates me instantly” (51). Once rejected by Alice, Aziz feels that he is rejected by the family, and particularly by the race who usually look “quiet and calm” by appearance. Through Aziz’s eyes, Shinebourne presents a window on the image of Chinese diasporics in the Caribbean: silent, stoic, tolerant, capable of enduring hostility and inhospitality. Walton Look Lai notes that the Chinese found it necessary to assimilate because of the shortage of females in the early migration (204). Grocery stores also serve as an economic niche for the Chinese community characterized by racial segregation.7 The Chinese, given economic privilege

7 It is interesting to note that trade becomes an integral part of the Sino-Caribbean Diaspora. Historically, the Chinese occupied an essential role in the grocery retail industry in the Caribbean since their arrival, although they represent only a small portion of the population (Bouknight-Davis 72; Look Lai Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar 188–190).

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and mobility (although not social status) in grocery trade, aptly exemplify the “middlemen minorities,” a rising middle class—“sojourners” or “middlemen minorities”—who are positioned between white settlers and local natives (Bonacich 583). The Chinese’s middlemen position provides a neutral, buffer force to prevent fierce clashes of various minor ethnic groups. From a different perspective, the shops personify insularity and exclusiveness. The Chinese can shelter their clannish, distinct traits within the domain of grocery shops. Inside their shops, the Chinese remain detached and isolated from the outside world, receiving protection and enrichment from a home base within. Perhaps, it is the image of wellintegrated Chinese that makes him idealize and fetishize Alice and Anne, who become an unattainable goal not to be achieved but to be forever tantalized. Like her previous works, Chinese Women depicts Shinebourne’s “exploration of experiences within [her] own lifetime, or lived experience in fictional form” (“Twin Influences” 143). The novel is, to borrow Bragard’s words, Shinebourne’s “autobiographical fiction and autobiofiction” (“Coolie Woman” 13) which depicts a world “haunted by fears of violence, a competitive world in which political, cultural and social freedoms are seriously threatened” (Bragard “Transoceanic Dialogue” 210). Again, in Chinese Women, Shinebourne features a theme of political turbulence, a point of crisis and its aftermath—fears, threat, and trauma. Linking Guyana in the 1960s and post 9-11 London and Calgary, Shinebourne senses a correlated ripple effect on the traumatic experiences of the political turmoil. Anatha Sudhaker has nicely read Shinebourne’s parallel treatment as “sounding the echoes between British colonialism and neoliberal imperialism; both systems of power have sustained themselves, … by fostering a ‘culture of surveillance and division.’” As is shown, both regimes are based upon the apartheid and hierarchy practices. As a result, racial and cultural ghettoization is strictly imposed via surveillance and force. Transgression is prohibited as Aziz has been repeatedly discouraged to mingle with the whites: “Mournfully and wearily, my mother recited the usual mantra of rules pertaining to how we should behave with our white neighbours. We should not look at or speak to them, not assume any familiarity with them or trespass on their property. She enumerated the punishments that would follow from breaking these rules, the worst being my father losing his job, losing the house, his salary and never being employed by Bookers again” (24–25). Familiarity with the Whites, along with the fantasy, is prohibited. Aziz fully

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understands that though they are given the chances to be promoted on an estate, their prosperity and security is not for good: “So my family, though now living in the place they called the land of milk and honey, were also living in continual fear and terror of being thrown out. The white man gave us everything, but he could also take it away” (25). The colonial estate, a Foucaultian panopticon, maintains its power not only by physical force and intimidation, but also by discipline and discursive practices that interpellate the subjects to internalize the hierarchal power. Aziz notes the barbarism of sugar estate: “I saw that the sugar industry was serviced by brute labour that was managed with the utmost cruelty; no one escaped, neither master nor slave. The master watched the slaves like vultures and swooped down to gnaw at their humanity if they faltered in their labour. The culture of surveillance and division led to everyone always spying on each other” (33–34). Frank Birbalsingh in his reading of the novel argues that “the inhumanity of colonial exploitation is the novel’s more personal subject.” Indeed, Shinebourne offers a cynical footnote to the sugar estate machinery in Aziz’s words: The sugar estate gave me the feeling that very little divided beast and man. Both laboured, copulated, procreated and died exposed to the elements: in the mud, rain and canals, at the mercy of alligators, snakes, rats, vultures, mosquitoes and flies that sucked their blood and ate their flesh. The worst possible living conditions existed on the estate. … You can see faeces floating in the canals and ditches where children played and people copulated. They even drank the same water they shat in. My father worked in the fields where he policed the workers and daily witnessed these bestial conditions. He, personally, inflicted these working conditions. (35)

By implication, the logic of colonial exploitation behind the estate has affected and crippled all, depriving people of their humanity. As Aziz notes, no one—neither master nor slave—is able to be immune to the disempowering dynamics; gradually, like Aziz’s father, those affected by the regimes will develop a sense of self-disgust and self-degradation. In a similar vein, Aziz argues that a similar surveillance practice is applied in neo-imperialist Britain. He notices that CCTV cameras are pervasive in England and that an even elaborate monitoring system is involved in private dimensions such as cell phone and car registry, making Aziz nervous as he feels as if he was leaving his footprints all over England

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(80). For Aziz, the surveillance in neo-imperialism evokes senses of fears, anguish, and anxiety. Chinese Woman reveals Shinebourne’s recurrent concerns for the traumatized subjects. She thus justifies the characterization of her previous novels: “Their characters in both novels have a sense of their consciousness being dominated by the political culture they are experiencing. I also tried to release into the novel people’s awareness that they are not shaped passively by mainstream political culture, that they have a working people’s awareness of their tradition of activism, which forced them to evolve new strategies to deal with nationalism” (“Twin Influences” 142– 3). Shinebourne’s characters are never the mere passive recipients of their calamitous destiny. As shown in Aziz’s case, he has tried hard to amend the misery afflicted on him by looking for a way out. He accepts Dr. Webster’s help for physical recovery, even though he knows well that the doctor has more than medical interests in him. He accepts the fact that he is a creation of British project, as a “dark-brown Indian teenager with the disjointed arms and legs, who moved like a robot, a clockwork creature that was once broken and had to be pieced together again by a white doctor who set his springs and screws again, who wound me up with a key and let me out so I could wind my around his world” (31). Unlike his father who suffers from self-denial and diminishing pride as a field overseer, Aziz is determined to study science and engineering, believing that the machines are “a godsend to me, a cripple” (32). Plus, he knows that ever since his injury he is not his usual self any more: “I would never be strong enough to swim or play tennis. My right elbow had not set well, nor my knees. My arms and legs would never be straight, my elbow and knee joints did not work smoothly, and never would. I could not rely on them to make me fully mobile” (30). However, he is also determined to defy his limitations in the way he jumps from the tree. For his damaged body, machines serve as his body’s extension to help him negotiate with his surroundings. Symbolically, his talents in science offer him a weapon to resist the colonial regimes as he later learns how to develop a specific technology in nuclear science, making him lucrative and capable of freely “moving” from Europe, the United States, and the Arab World. In a similar vein, Aziz feels that the 9/11 has aroused the world’s awareness of people like Aziz, “Now, because of 9/11, the whole world knows about us. Not one used to notice me. Now I am finally seen for who I am” (89). When traveling, Aziz notices the look of recognition and fears, “The war on terror freed me from my invisibility as a Muslim” (89).

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Somehow, he enjoys the visibility as he recognizes the shared experiences of exploitation and trauma with the 9/11 victims, “I was aware millions of people were watching them fall and it made me feel that the whole world was finally seeing me fall too. It brought a strange relief, as if a lifelong, weighty burden of loneliness fell from me. You see, we all need to be seen for who we are” (90). To be seen, for Aziz, does not only attest to the existence of his body, however failing it is, but also an allegiance of a cultural anchorage, and a claiming of a new identity. Rejected by Alice again in 2006 brings Aziz to face his aging and debilitating self: “Letting go of her began to change me for the better. I lost my ego and began to see myself as just a human being suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes” (91). Knowing that he is again deserted and will be alone for the rest of his life, he turns to attend to his own body: “I began to take care of myself. I became a health freak, I started to take vitamin supplements and, as they say, ‘listen to my body’ and take care of it because I wanted to live and be healthy” (92). Separating with the “ex”—a girlfriend he never had, and a past he disavows—Aziz symbolically recites mourning for the dying and vanishing empire and for whatever is the melancholic past. Dr. Webster, while wondering how Aziz got soon recovered from his wound, gave Aziz a robot which could answer quizzes: “[Dr. Webster] said the robot was a magician like me. The robot held a long wand. He fitted into a notch in the middle of a circle of questions. You rotated the robot until his wand pointed to a question, then you put him on the mirror in the middle of a circle of answers. He spun round on the mirror and came to rest with his wand pointing at the correct answer” (16). The robot serves as the instrument to raise questions and reveal clues to the questions, with a magic wand, in a mirroring scheme. Metaphorically, Aziz, associated with the magician robot, provides a negative mirror figure for readers to reflect upon the world. Perhaps, the world needs a camera obscura and the world has to be watched from its imago obscura, the “negative” and unpolished side, the “other,” that is. Seeing from the inside out (or the upside down), the novel initiates an (anti)hero-making project by rendering the forsaken Aziz visible and turned anew. When young, Aziz is told by Dr. Webster to know Greek myths by heart as they would “turn him into a hero” (15). Aziz, of course, does not become a typical hero who is expected to return home and bring the “boon” back to his people. Aziz’s trajectory is not homeward but undergoes an everlasting detour, far away from “home.” Instead of saving the world from

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destruction, he poses a potential threat to destroy the order and stability of the world. He has also proved that though rejected again by Alice, he is able to “listen to his own body.” He chooses to take good care of himself by developing a new awareness of his own daily routines. He takes on a new self-fashioning Muslim identity: “Not until I went to South East Asia and the Middle-East did I experience what it is like to be a real Muslim and have a strong sense of my Muslim identity. That, and 9/11, turned me into a Muslim, but it took a whole lifetime” (44). By doing this, he liberates himself from physical confinement and the mental bonding with fixations on Alice, affirms his self-existence and is able to express his own identity, as an Arab Muslim anti-hero.

4.3 In the Shadow of Modernity: The Search for Chinese Ghosts in Andre Lamontagne’s Les fossoyeurs: Dans le memoire de Quebec (Gravediggers) ∗ ∗ ∗ Ghosts are part of the future. (Jacques Derrida)

“To get to the heart of this story you have to imagine the feeling of earth in your mouth” (9). This opening statement from Andre Lamontagne’s 2010 work Les fossoyeurs: Dans le mémoire de Québec calls for attention to the hauntological side and “subterranean connections” of Quebec City’s history. From its title, epigraph, and the cover illustrations, the novel presents itself as a textual production of deceased diasporics. On the cover page of its original, Les fossoyeurs, five tombstones with decipherable Chinese characters are presented. As is generally known to the Chinese, these tombstones are made in accordance with common funeral practice: a slab of stone with the inscription of characters identifying the deceased’s origin of birth, gender, years of birth and death, and name, usually respectfully erected by the dutiful son. The epitaphs noticeably present inscriptions of five Chinese males’ names and origins, either Toishan or Hoiping (Kaiping) of Guangdong (Canton) Province, arguably the common ancestral villages for many overseas Chinese diasporas in the late nineteenth century. For the novel’s English translation, a close-up of a slab is facing the viewer where inscriptions of a male named

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Jung-ta Huang died in February of the 39th year of the Republic of China.8 The two photos on the cover illustrations were taken from Saint Charles Cemetery in Quebec, where dozens of irregular and misaligned slabs are erected askew. The inscriptions reveal their foreign identities: their original nationality and the years of death marked either in A.D. or by a foreign and passé political regime.9 Except for the cross on the slabs, the tombstones conform to the Chinese conventions. The Chinese characters, the names of hometowns, and the year A.D. delineate their profile as diasporics.

The Cover of Les fossoyeurs (2010)*

The Cover of The Gravediggers (English Translation,2012)**

Lamontagne’s The Gravediggers is an epitome of the introduction of Chinese coolies into Canada. After the confederation of Canada in 1867, Canada government initiated the Canada Pacific Railway (CPR) project in 1881, a construction considered to be essential to national unification. 8 In 1901, Sun Yat-sen overthrew Manchu Dynasty and established the Republic of China (ROC); hence the 39th year of the ROC is 1950. In 1949, Communist Party took over China in a civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, and changed the nation’s name into “People’s Republic of China” (PRC). Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan after the surrender of Japan that ruled Taiwan between 1895 and 1945. Chiang’s ROC government continues to claim to be the legitimate government of China, but its territory under sovereignty has been limited to Taiwan and its surrounding islands since 1949. The inscriptions retain the use of ROC, indicating the deceased’s original but now displaced national identity. 9 The inscriptions retain the use of ROC, indicating the deceased’s original but now displaced national identity.

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A case in point. The Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald claimed that the construction of CPR embodied the advocate of Canada’s National motto, “‘A mari usque ad mare,’from sea to sea.”10 Between 1881 and 1885, more than 17000 Chinese contract workers, often referred as coolies, were brought into British Columbia to the most dangerous tasks such as explosion or tunnel works in the most challenging railway construction sites. Among these workers, some came from the United States upon the completion of America’s Central Pacific Railway in 1869; many others came directly from China, mainly from Guangdong Province. When Canada’s railway project was completed, British Columbia started to impose a head tax upon the Chinese to discourage their further immigration. A Chinese needed to pay 50 dollars upon his/her entry into British Columbia, and the pay amounted to 500 in 1904. It was until 2006 that the Canada government issued an official apology and amends for the discriminative policy (“Asian Immigration”). Affected by the Chinese exclusion policy, many Chinese moved eastward and settled in Quebec Province where earlier in the late nineteen century there was the Chinese presence as they moved from the eastern regions of the United States, many of whom stayed in Montréal, while others in Quebec city (Lai and Chan). The book revolves upon a search for the trace of a deceased Chinese immigrant, Ping Tat Ng, whose granddaughter Rachel Ng, now living in Vancouver as an interpreter and owner of a Chinese souvenir shop, asks her Quebec-born neighbor to do the investigation during his homeward trip. By piecing together the papers and documents left by Ping Tat Ng, the unnamed journalist narrator reveals a hidden secret of bone trafficking and a sad chapter of the Lower Town in Quebec. The work is more of a récit than a novel; more “history” than “stories”; more archival than fictional. Interweaving the mapping of death and archaeological exploration of the sordid vanishing past, the text deploys a ghostly and gothic imaginary of Quebec in the shadow of its modernity.

10 One of the most significant events in Canadian history, built mainly between 1881

and 1885, the Railway linked Ontario to the Pacific, with 25 million dollars in initial grants (with additional smaller grants before the line was finished) and 25 million acres to the Ocean. The railways that made the “national dream” of a united Canada a reality— from sea to shining sea—made a major contribution to the realization of the “national dream.”

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4.3.1

Chinese Diaspora and Vanishing Presence

To begin with, the centerpiece of the text, the Ngs, represent three different generations of Chinese immigrants. Rachel is depicted as an independent female who adapts well and appears to assimilate into mainstream Canadian culture; an educated professional spending several years in Paris speaking “surprisingly good French” but knowing little about her ancestors (Lamontagne 2010, 9). Her father has left her a shop in Vancouver’s Chinese quarter, and she is now struggling to make it work. The recent death of her father prompts her to seek further a cultural bond with her Chinese heritage. A trace of her father’s and grandfather’s sojourn in Quebec is crucial for her search of her “roots.” Through the eyes of the “white” journalist, Ping Tat Ng’s life becomes embodied in the archival and cemetery registers. Readers come to discover that Ping Tat Ng arrived in Canada to work as a laborer, like many other immigrants in the nineteenth century. An official document features Ping Tat Ng’s fresh-off-the-boat arrival: …. A yellowed piece of paper with the heading of the Dominion of Canada–Immigration Branch–Department of Interior mentioned the date and place of Ping Tat Ng’s arrival in the country (Vancouver, June 3, 1888) and confirmed that he had paid a fifty dollar tax on immigrating. The document was in English and was signed by the Controller of Chinese Immigration. In the photo on the document Ping Tat Ng was wearing a serious expression and his striped suit made it clear that he was in his Sunday best. He seemed to be challenging the photographer. In spite of the injustice of the head tax, Rachel’s grandfather had been lucky because the tax imposed on Chinese immigrants to Canada had increased tenfold in a few years. Five hundred dollars was an astronomical amount in those days. (Lamontagne 2010, 103–104)

The narrator interprets Ping Tat Ng’s serious facial expression in the photo as a gesture to protest against the unfair “head tax.” Irritated as Ng was, he could not help paying the tax in order to be eligible for entry and the narrator ironically adds that he “should have felt lucky” because the tax multiplied tenfold years after. Ping Tat Ng is like many of his Chinese fellowmen who came to this new land to seek asylum and for prosperity and opportunities. From 1881 to 1885, it was estimated that 17,000 Chinese moved to British Columbia in Canada, most of whom worked as

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contract laborers for the construction of transcontinental Canadian Railways. Hired at a low wage, these laborers suffered extreme hardships and risked their lives under harsh working conditions.11 Ping Tat Ng exemplifies those Chinese immigrant laborers that were discriminated against in the late nineteenth century in Canada. The narrator documents the prejudices against Chinese in his search: I scanned numerous editions of the Soleil and the Action catholique published between 1910 and 1931, the year of Ping Tat Ng’s death, … found only racist editorials. … They didn’t content themselves with denouncing the so-called inordinately low prices advertised by the Chinese storekeepers. They claimed that when clothes came out of the laundries they had turned yellow and carried germs. These laundries were often fronts for opium trafficking and prostitution if one were to believe the editorials and readers’ letters of the time. Even the unions, which one might have thought would be more tolerant, joined in the game. These attitudes were prevalent throughout Canada. An editorial in the Soleil in 1914 reported that three Anglophone provinces had adopted laws forbidding storekeepers of Asian origin from hiring white women and asked Quebec to follow suit. (Lamontagne 2010, 80) Apart from the openly expressed racism in the 1910s and 20s and the laws which encouraged it, the newspapers said very little about the Chinese community. In Quebec City, only one violent episode had been reported when drunken revelers had attacked a Chinese storekeeper without serious consequences. There were also reports of a few cases of the desecration of Chinese immigrants’ tombs in the Saint Charles Cemetery in 1929 and 1930. Strangely, the gravestones had remained intact so that the anonymous journalist who had written the article wondered if it was a racist incident or simply a coincidence and whether the vandals had chosen graves near the river because they were hidden from view. Otherwise there was almost complete silence. (Lamontagne 2010, 80) In the 1920s, national pride was developing and was all over the newspapers. French-Canadian banks and brokerage companies claimed to be doing good works by investing the money of their compatriots. They 11 More than ten thousand Chinese workers were brought in Canada from China and the United States who previously labored on the western sections of the CPR track. Hardworking, self-reliant, able to endure poor living conditions, the Chinese were preferred as workers but they were offered low wages; the Chinese were paid from 0.75 to 1.25 a day; one third of European workers. Given the most dangerous jobs, as many as 1500 were killed on the British Columbia section of the line. Safety measures were primitive, and it was estimated that two men died for every mile (1.6 km) of track laid (Jim Wong-Chu).

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appealed to people’s sense of nationalism and duty. (Lamontagne 2010, 81)

Under the aegis of the “national pride” of a young Canada, these racist remarks and mentality were allowed and secretly encouraged. It was made explicit that the Chinese immigrants were not welcomed and the hostility was justified as acceptable to the European immigrants. The narrator notes the Anti-Yellow Peril League: Certainly, the hostility that the citizens of Quebec City had shown against the Chinese at that time was nothing in comparison to what had happened in Vancouver. That was small consolation, for I couldn’t really avoid mentioning the editorials attacking the unfair competition from Chinese shopkeepers who laundered clothes and provided meals at prices which were supposedly too low; the honourable citizens who signed petitions denouncing the immorality of their Asian fellow citizens; and, of course, everyday racism. (Lamontagne 2010, 40)

Subject to the Canadian policy of immigration, Ping Tat Ng and his family were forced to move back and forth between Vancouver and Quebec. Ping Tat Ng moved to Quebec because, according to Rachel, “Vancouver was not hospitable for the Chinese laborers: Vancouver wasn’t a good place for the Chinese at the beginning of the century. There was the head tax, laws that excluded the Chinese and race riots. In 1907 my grandparents’ business was vandalized. So, like a lot of others, they moved east. My father was born in the lower Town of Quebec City” (Lamontagne 2010, 10). Many Chinese shared a similar destiny as Pin Tat Ng’s. As Lai and Chan point out, “According to the 1901 census, the Chinese population in Canada stood at 17,312, of which 14,885 lived in British Columbia, 1037 in Québec, 732 in Ontario, 235 in Alberta, 206 in Manitoba and 207 in other provinces and territories. Hence, the Province of Québec had the second largest Chinese settlement and most lived in Montréal.” Jim Wong-Chu’s article affirms the similar findings of moving as a result of the Exclusive Act. Rachel’s father moved back to Vancouver, partly because Ping Tat Ng died during the Great Depression, and partly because Quebec’s Chinese community was disappearing and the population was shrinking after the war. A new Highway project cut through the district and demolished many houses in the area. “Rue Saint-Vallier, a rundown building bearing

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the Chinese Nationalist Party sign” is the only indication of Chinese presence in the narrator’s memory. According to the information I had gleaned on the internet—with complete disregard for my training as a journalist—two hundred Chinese were living in Quebec City when the Canadian government banned immigration from China in 1923. The old headquarters of the Chinese Nationalist Party of Canada was nearby in rue Saint-Vallier. I went there, only to find the doors closed. The famous Chinese Nationalist Party sign, a symbol of exoticism in the Quebec City of my childhood, had disappeared. The ground floor windows had been transformed into a travesty of Chinese heritage: Cheap Chinese curios, a few objects which evoked the practice of binding feet and reproduction of a newspaper article about the building (Lamontagne 2010, 38). A dilapidated building, a sign of an ousted déclassé, a vanished landscape buried beneath a freeway, the gadgets of exoticist fantasies—all these tell of a ghostly image. A sense of melancholia is evoked by Rachel’s question “Do you mean to say there’s nothing left of it?” (Lamontagne 2010, 10) For Rachel who has suffered the loss of her father, the realization of the disappearance of the Quebec Chinese quarter is a twofold metaphorical bereavement: the loss of her “fatherland” and the rupture of belonging. No longer a lively settlement, Quebec’s Chinese quarter now is apparently a hollow place, empty, forlorn, and abandoned. Vancouver’s Chinatown is a case study exemplifying many similar establishments in North America. The narrator notes, “The ‘Tang ren Jie,’ (唐人街), the Chinatown typical of big North American cities, with its network of streets, has disappeared from the Quebec City landscape. … In Vancouver, the Chinese have converted their quarter to a business district and, like Rachel and her father, have moved little by little to different neighbourhoods in the city” (Lamontagne 2010, 106). Hence, the journalist’s search for Ping Tat Ng becomes a hauntological journey into the graveyards in Quebec and the vanishing Chinatown as tangible traces can nowhere be found except in graves. What is revealed in the novel is how the Chinese managed to retain their burial customs. Rachel is comforted by the fact that her grandfather’s grave in Saint Charles cemetery remains intact. Particularly when she learned that in British Victoria cemetery, the graves of the Chinese, Japanese, and aborigines were molested as these non-Catholics were

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buried near the sea. Back in 1873, the first entry of the decease Chinese is simply a register of numbers, without names or identity (55). Readers are informed of the Chinese immigrants’ burial practice throughout the narration. Customs had it that after a period of seven years, the bones needed to be disinterred and sent back to China for a second burial (67). This is an ordinary practice as Chinese emphasized the return to home as a final resting place. Adequately buried in native soil under filial piety and care is essential for the future prosperity of descendants. As the narrator notes, the bone trafficking practice was suspended during the wartime, resulting in hundreds of remains stored in Harling Point Chinese cemetery waiting for shipping (67). Some tried to find the Chinese cemetery in Victoria, but the funeral practice was adjourned. It was not until 1903 that the Chinese immigrants inaugurate their cemetery at Ross Bay (55). It is also by the custom of homecoming that the Chinese immigrants recycled the tombstone and burial plot as they saw Canada not as “home” but a sojourn, their burial in a foreign land a stopover in their ultimate journey home. Among the poor immigrants, it is common that they reused the tombstone by erasing the inscriptions and putting on new ones (105). It is told that Ping Tat Ng used to run a funeral home that took care of burials and the exhumation of bones seven years after the burial of the bodies, according to the Southern Chinese tradition. According to the cemetery registry, the narrator finds that Ping Tat Ng was buried on May 20, 1931 and his burial was paid for by the Quebec City Chinese mission. After Ping Tat Ng’s death, his bereaved wife and child could not take over the business and so ran a laundry instead. A tombstone is all that remains to evidence Ping Tat Ng’s presence. Like the phantom in Hamlet , Ping Tat Ng, silenced, muted, long deceased, and forgotten, returns to be given a voice, body, life, and the restitution for an unjust claim. The narrator’s search epitomizes a requiem to a perpetual loss, an endless mourning over the ever-lingering melancholia of the deceased. 4.3.2

Ghostly Subterranean Connections and Multiracial Imaginary

The book resonates with Jacques Derrida’s discussion of ghosts. In an experimental film Ghost Dance (1983), Derrida is invited to improvise his own role. When asked whether he believes in “ghosts,” he answers “yes”

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and states that his presence in the film is a good example to show the existence of “ghosts”: I let a ghost ventriloquize my words or play my role. Cinema is the art of allowing ghosts to come back. Instead of diminishing the realm of ghosts as does any scientific and technological thought in leaving behind the age of ghosts as part of the feudal age with its somewhat primitive technology as a certain perinatal age whereas I believe the ghosts are part of the future. In fact, it’s because I wished to tempt the ghosts out that I agreed to appear in a film. It could perhaps offer both us and them the chance to evoke the ghosts.

Indeed, as if letting Ping Tat Ng speak through the narrator’s body, Ng’s stories can be known and his voice be heard. All these hidden secrets have been an integral part of Quebec. Seen otherwise, it is these ghosts that lay the foundation for a modernized and promising façade of Quebec. “Ghosts are part of the future”; what Derrida suggests is the exorcizing of the repressed and forbidden, like ghosts—and what’s more: an airing of and reconciling with them. A backward glance, a soul-searching examination into the ghostly and gothic past will help us steadily move forward. The main setting under examination in the novel is Quebec Province in the nineteenth century. In the period, Quebec saw itself plagued by epidemics, deaths, and fires. The narrator persona, a Quebecois living in Vancouver, is able to redefine Quebec through the cultural and historical lens. The narrator recalls what he observes, “Quebec’s old quarter evokes more ‘Gothic imaginary’ than the ‘maternal bosom’” (Lamontagne 2010, 76). The narrator comes to a gradual understanding that the losses, the disasters, the ruins, and deaths contribute to Quebec as a Canadian metropolis: …. Death was so much part of its inhabitants’ daily lives that, in the past, Québec City had an unbelievable number of cemeteries. There were improvised mass graves, like the war cemetery on rue Saint-Jean during the siege of Quebec City in 1759. (Lamontagne 2010, 74) …. I wondered whether there was a tourist circuit on death, a guided tour of all the cemeteries in Québec City which have vanished or still exist. You would have to tell how the Conquest had brought about segregation in the cemeteries. The British hadn’t wasted any time in creating a small cemetery in rue Bude, to be followed by the Saint Louis Bastion Cemetery

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in 1767, and then the Protestant Burying ground on rue Saint-Jean in 1774 where St. Matthew’s Church, now a library, was built. (Lamontagne 2010, 75) Can one imagine living in the midst of the dead and their odour? In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Quebec City municipal authorities wanted to move the graves away from the center of the city for health reasons. The inauguration of the Saint Charles and Belmont cemeteries put an end to the problem and renewed the distinction between the upper and lower towns. … Since the time of Samuel de Champlain, the inhabitants of Quebec City had lived close to their dead and the latter, according to a tradition from the Middles Ages, lay as close as possible to God as they awaited resurrection. This custom ended in the Victorian era when death had to be beautified and distance from it created by confining it to garden cemeteries. (Lamontagne 2010, 76)

As is suggested, life and death are a part of Quebeçois’ daily experiences. People used to live close to the dead, burying the dead near their houses. As time went on, in an age gripped by scientific progress and challenges to religion, death is given a morbid image and mourning became ritualistic to keep death distanced from living people. Metaphorically put, Quebec is a “massive grave.” The narrator prefers the term in Chinese “公墓” (gong mu) to cimetière/cemetery in French/English. The latter, by its Latin etymology, means a place where one sleeps, whereas the former implies a “public graveyard” where the word “墓” by its ideogram refers to a plot of land with herbs beneath which one is “buried.” Toward the end of his research, the narrator eventually realizes that racial and class segregations seem absurd and meaningless when compared to the world of death. The mapping of Quebec’s cemeteries during his various journeys shows an inverted image of the City. Seen through a reversed lens, Quebec is nothing but an “underworld” replete with shadowy figures: How could I tell Rachel that Quebec City is a graveyard with all these displaced corpses and a proliferation of bones beneath its surface, a place which has been constantly reorganized with or without respect for supposedly eternal resting places? A city of catacombs. (Lamontagne 2010, 125)

What’s more, Death has no frontiers (Lamontagne 2010, 125) and encompasses all. It is implied that in death, and only in death, can all

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be considered equal. Focusing on deaths, disasters, and the powerless of Quebec, Lamontagne proposes an alternative version of history, resisting the exclusively European perspectives. Quebec, or Canada, is seen not from its now and here, but from what lies behind, beneath, or unsaid. Throughout the city’s process of modernity, the presence of the Chinese cemeteries itself is a living witness to a dark chapter of the city’s history. Behind each tombstone is a person, a family, a nation, and history. The journalist narrator renders a reportage on the silenced voice, through archival research and interviews, to exorcize the hauntological past of Quebec. The second plotline of Lamontagne’s work recounts the récit of a young arsonist who is inspired by a series of paintings entitled “Quebec City tragedies” by Joseph Légaré, the late eighteenth-century Quebec artist. A native-born landscape painter, Légaré was particularly drawn by the many calamitous fires that hit Quebec in 1845, destroying 1650 houses, killing 20 people and leaving 12,000 homeless (“Canadian Art”). When the arsonist takes a close look at the painting, it is described thus: “A diptych showed the Saint-Roch district in flames from the east and from the west. Gutted houses, lined up as in a cemetery, added to the desolation of the ruins. … In the Cote-à-Coton, weeping inhabitants, some on their knees, watched the drama helplessly” (Lamontagne 2010, 13). Fascinated by these paintings and obsessed with fire, he develops a greater passion for fire. Driven by this “pyromania” (Lamontagne 2010, 69), he decides to duplicate the fire in the Saint-Roch and Saint-Sauveur districts in 1866, which originated in a grocery store. He sets one fire with a homemade bomb, aiming for a “symbolic reconstruction of the 1866 fire” (Lamontagne 2010, 77). In the history of the city’s expansion, “fire is a factor of progress; these blazes often contribute to urban development, the widening of streets and the rebirth of some districts. One has to go beyond the hackneyed symbolism of the Phoenix, forget the ashes and acknowledge the revitalizing effect of flames” (Lamontagne 2010, 24). Indeed, finding regenerating power amid disasters sets the key for Lamontagne’s work. As for the arsonist, he is a university dropout, determined to seek social justice in his own fashion. Finding that Quebec was characterized by its segregation and exclusion, he turns to the devastating and invigorating power of fire, hoping that fire, the “red plague”—“for it spread like an illness and created victims” (Lamontagne 2010, 92)—can set forth an alarming signal to awaken the Quebec citizens. It is the narrator’s belief

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that, only when faced with a common threat, such as fire, can people start to have a communal sympathetic attachment to others. This demand for vulnerable affinity dovetails with Maurice Blanchot’s conception of an “unavowable community.” Blanchot’s book The Unavowadble Community (La communauté inavouable) is a response to Emmanuel Lévinas and Marguerite Duras, with whom Blanchot expresses his ethical concern for alterity. Originally, in a preface to Duras’s La maladie de la mort, Blanchot recalls their common experiences of political engagement in the campaign against the Algerian War and the May 1968 Protest, emphasizing a consolidation of community based on “love for others” (Blanchot 2000, 72; Hill 2002, 205). Blanchot in another work, Writing of Disasters , calls the ultimate alterity without name a “disaster,” such as Shoah. Disasters are inexperienced and unable to be felt or expressed by the self, when one sees nameless others dying in disasters. But death, as Blanchot claims, is not a solitary event (Blanchot 2000, 22). Seeing the death of another is a true experience of death. Opposed to Heidegger who sees death as exclusively “my own,” Blanchot argues that “death is never my own, and that I am only concerned with the death of the other” (Haase and Large 2001, 58). As Haase and Large elaborate on Blanchot’s ethical concern with the self’s responsibility (response-ability) for others, “Death as the breaching my individuality, death as the passivity that gives rise of the other, also gives rise to the community of human beings dispersed into singular beings still dependent on each other” (Haase and Large 2001, 57). Marion Kühn relates the book with “collective memory” proposed by Maurice Halbwachs. It is indeed during the experiencing of disaster that one requires a sense of community. As shown in the text, the narrator deploys the fabric of common destiny shared by various immigrant groups. To the narrator’s dismay, Quebec became too ethnically homogeneous to be eligible for the destination of “United Nation” (Lamontagne 2010, 47), “Quebec City became a melting pot. Whether Irish, Chinese or Jewish, they all assimilated into the Francophone majority or had left the city” (Lamontagne 2010, 124). Perhaps, as the narrator declares, “one had to interpret the world as a transition zone, like an endless corridor or better still like a series of linked rooms” (Lamontagne 2010, 21). To the narrator, what matters the most is to counter forgetting, as he utters, “The authorities and the middle class in Quebec City did everything to prevent the Jewish community from having a synagogue in the

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Upper Town during the 1940s. They got the population so worked up that some losers set fire to the building the night before its inauguration. Nobody remembers it or they don’t want to talk about it. The story is dead and buried. Did you know that in ancient Greek ‘amnesty’ and ‘amnesia’ are two variations of the word oblivion?” (Lamontagne 2010, 122) The narrator endorses neither “amnesty” nor “amnesia” as either one signifies the forgetting or suppression of truth. Instead, he suggests that only by evoking the ghosts, demystifying the enigmas or revealing the historical wounds can one form a new vision of the land. Pint Tat Ng was involved in bone trafficking to a place where these bones do not belong because, as the narrator believes, this kept him alive in the difficult times, though such trafficking was considered to be sacrilegious and immoral. Quite coincidentally, when the narrator alludes to the death of the renowned Quebec poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, he pinpoints the coincidental allusion to a “bone cage”12 where the bird is killed in solitude. To some extent, the narrator can be regarded as a self-fashioned “gravedigger” as he notes that “gardeners, ditchers and grave-makers: they hold up Adam’s profession” (Lamontagne 2010, 100). A graffiti on a cemetery’s wall shows a Shakespearean riddle: What is he, that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

An answer is given: A gravedigger. The houses he builds last till doomsday.

12 Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, whose work stands as a precursor of Quebec modern Francophone poetry, was found dead floating on a canoe at a lake near his family’s manor at Sainte-Catherine de Portneuf. Whether his death in 1943 was accidental or suicidal remains a mystery. His last poem, “Les Solitude,” alludes to death: “C’est ceux qui m’ont tué … Ah! Dans quel desert/faux-il qu’on s’en aille/Pour mourir de soimême tranquillement.” (It’s they who killed me/Ah! Into which desert/must one go,/To quickly die by one’s own hand.) (Sheppard 2003, 145). His famous poem “Cage d’Oiseau” (Bird Cage):

“Je suis une cage d’oiseau Une cage d’os Avec un oiseau L’oiseau dans ma cage d’os C’est la mort qui fait son nid” (de Regards et jeux dans l’éspace, 1937)

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The question and answer between the two clowns in Hamlet occupy the narrator’s puzzled thoughts in his search. The gravedigger survives and what he builds will eventually last to the end of this world. His journey aims for a missing puzzle in the atlas of Canadian Québec, only to find a multiracial mosaic of phantom-turned phantasmagoria. This is a realm where rooting and routing, roots-taking and uprooting, waters and fires, uptown and downtown, and life and death converge. To conclude, the trajectory of Pin Tat Ng, like his countrymen in the early twentieth century, moving from the Pacific Rim to the east part, evidenced their trail for survival in a foreign land. Vancouver and Quebec, British-speaking and French-speaking contexts, West and East, respectively, pave the cornerstone for a nationalistic discourse on Canada’s unification. It is exactly the hiatus of this discourse that the Chinese were able to play a role in the making of Canada’s history and modernity. By focusing on the shadowy and marginalized figures, the novel calls our attention to the shadows of modernity and the aporia of a national imaginary. Overall, the book deploys a ghostly labyrinthine “mise en abyme” which destabilizes the unified Canadian/Quebécois nationalist critique and epistemologies.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract Subsequent to the examination of the writings of trauma and war memories about Asian American communities in previous chapters, the concluding chapter discusses the critical insights the textual analysis can offer. Putting these texts all together raises the awareness with the shared sense of marginalization, powerlessness, and exclusion felt across various Asian minorities. The reading also shows that these cross-cultural paradigms are primed for precarity, as precarity along with its associative insecurity and anxiety is in line with the “norms” of Asian minorities’ experiences. To come to terms with the ever extensive challenges, one has to make sense of the “new normal” condition. Keywords Coronavirus · War memories · Sinophobia

The Nobel Laureate writer Kazuo Ishiguro once said that “All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.” Indeed, one could argue that history of humans is indeed the history of trauma, and remembering of the trauma stories. Trauma can be in various forms and ubiquitous. Although the book’s primary concern is war memories and trauma, one can easily find that till today, 70 years after the second world war; 20 years after 9/11, the turbulence and disturbance is never afar, never unfathomable. © The Author(s) 2020 J. T. Lee, Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8_5

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In spring of 2020, the unexpected outbreak of pandemic coronavirus has caused worldwide doom within a few weeks—200 thousands of deaths, 100 millions of lives affected or isolated, social normality disrupted and suspended. Media Coverage (BBC) quotes United Nation Chief and claims that coronavirus is the most serious test since World War II. In fact, this virus outbreak is considered by many countries as “the third world war,” a border-free war the world has never fought ever since. Humans are reduced to cases and deaths become tolls. Altogether, humans are waging war against an invisible, elusive enemy. Wartime imagery is repeatedly invoked by politicians and practitioners to curb global crisis. Worldwide orders for quarantine of confirmed cases, isolation of suspected cases, shut-down of territories, schools, businesses, public spaces and gatherings, events, and subsequent social distancing. The most severe postwar public health crisis again proves that humans are vulnerable in the precarious conditions. As Coronavirus spreads, so does xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment. As is widely believed, the coronavirus pandemic is an echo of the surge of Sinophobia, or anti-Chinese, sentiments in response to the rising power of China. The virus is prevalently called “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus” where believably its birthplace. The labeling not only stigmatizes China and people of Chinese descent, but also fosters discriminations against people of Asian ancestry. In Europe and the United States, Chinese and other yellow-skin minorities become the target of a growing number of racially motivated assaults and hate crimes. In an article dated March 6, 2020 in Time, Jonathan Mok, a 23-year-old Singaporean student was allegedly attacked while walking down the Oxford Street by four teenagers who yelled “We don’t want your coronavirus in our country.” A Vietnamese art curator Nguyen was forced to be dismissed from an exhibition as she was told by a dealer that her presence would cause anxiety because “fairly or not, Asians are being seen as carriers of virus.” This antiAsian sentiment, a rekindled hostility toward Asian immigrants, recalls the Exclusion of Chinese in the late nineteenth century, the JapaneseAmerican Relocation Camp, the opposition to Vietnamese refugees. One has borne witness to the vicious cycle of the repeated hatred and animosity toward the minority. In the time of crisis, the minority group is often scapegoated. Perhaps, we all have to learn how to make peace with “enemies,” the stranger in ourselves. The scapegoating and witch hunt reflect our deepest fears when confronting an overwhelming power beyond our control. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Perhaps, what makes trauma fearsome and troubling is the sense of endless helplessness and despair. What makes Fear fearsome is the unknown uncertainty, like walking down in a dark tunnel where one is unable to see the end, the deadline undue, and the darkness seems endless. Waiting for an end of the suffering, but waiting in vain makes us tired, physically and emotionally. The fatigue of feeling painful and anguished makes it even more challenging and difficult as no one knows when the woe will come to end. When things are out of our control, we feel disoriented and distressed. Seen in a new light, trauma and the precarity condition give us a chance to redefine ourselves, check our life inventory, and to reconsider our values, missions, and responsibilities. The trying times prompt us to find a better self, to find the inner strength to deal with a situation that is almost unmanageable on every level and unconceivable by any senses. To cope with precarity, one has to make sense of current disorder and wrestle with the existential dread of our times. To know who we are and what we really appreciate.

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Index

A Alzheimer’s Disease, 20, 43, 45, 46 American Gothic tale, 58

B Bhabha, Homi, 67 Blanchot, Maurice The Unavowadble Community, 122 Writings of Disaster, 122 Bragard, Véronique, 13, 23, 95, 103 Brexit, 18 Butler, Judith, 4, 66, 89, 91 Loss: Politics of Mourning , 4, 66, 89, 91

C Caruth, Cathy, 6, 52 The Chinese Exclusion Act, 25, 31 Chinese in Quebec, 116, 117 The Civil Liberties Act, 40 Civil Liberties Law, 19 the Civil Rights Movements, 40

coolitude, 13, 22, 25, 89, 91, 94, 95, 101, 103, 104 Coppola, Francis Ford Apocalypse Now, 76 Coronavirus, 126 creole, 90 creolization, 14, 16, 104

D Danner, Joseph Craig The Fires of Edgarville, 2, 15, 20, 42 Deleuze, Gilles, 14 Derrida, Jacques, 1 “Autoimmunity”, 1, 111, 118 disaster, 7, 9, 15, 96, 119, 121 divine citizenship, 55, 56

E Ellison, Ralph “The Invisible Man” , 79 The Exclusion Act, 12 Executive Order 9066, 29, 35, 43, 44

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 J. T. Lee, Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6363-8

139

140

INDEX

F Freud, Sigmund, 7 G Gilroy, Paul, 11 Glissant, Édouard, 12, 14 “Go for Broke”, 48 Guattari, Félix, 14 H Hamlet , 118, 124 I indentureship, 100 J Japanese-American Relocation, 18, 126 K Kala Pani (Black Waters), 13, 95, 104 Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior, 71 L Lamontagne, André, 25 Les fossoyeurs: Dans le mémoire de Québec (Gravediggers), 25, 111 Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird, 69 lesbianism, 58 liminal writing, 59 N négritude, 25, 95, 104 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 16, 21

Refugees , 2, 15, 21 The Sympathizer, 16, 21 Nothing Ever Dies , 76 Novus, Angelus , 56 O Odaka, John No No Boy, 41 Otsuka, Julie The Buddha in the Attic, 2, 15 When the Emperor Was Divine, 2, 15, 19, 20, 28 P the Pacific War, 42, 43, 50, 53 panopticon, 108 plantation, 16, 22, 31, 94, 96, 105 Poe, Edgar Allan, 79 post 9/11 fiction, 101 postmemory, 8 postmemory internment, 28 precarity, 4–6, 13, 62, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 100, 127 Q Québeçois modernity, 25 R redress, 40 relocation, 12, 19, 20, 28, 29, 35, 36, 41, 45, 48, 50, 58, 78 S Saint-Denys Garneau, Hector de, 123 Shinebourne, Janice Lowe, 2, 15, 22 Chinese Women, 15, 22, 25, 95, 101, 103, 107 The Godmother and Other Stories Timepiece, 2, 15, 19, 22, 90

INDEX

The Last English Plantation, 2, 19, 22, 23, 94, 96, 100, 103 The Last Ship, 25 Sino-Caribbean, 14, 106 Sinophobia, 126 Stein, Gertrude, 60, 74, 75 Stone, Oliver, 77 Platoon, 77 The Sympathizer, 76, 77, 81, 83, 86 T Toklas, Alice B. The Cookbook of Alice B. Toklas , 60 transoceanic coolitude, 13, 22, 23 trauma, 1–11, 13–15, 17, 18, 20, 25, 26, 31, 41–43, 45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 61–63, 66, 67, 70, 74,

141

77, 82, 90, 97, 100, 101, 107, 110, 125, 127 Truong, Monique Bitter in the Mouth, 21, 58, 69–71, 74 Book of Salt , 2, 15, 21, 58 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 11 V Vietnamese refugees, 13, 21, 61, 65, 74, 75, 83, 126 Vietnam war, 13, 15, 17, 20–22, 58, 63–65, 75–77, 80 W war memories, 2, 17, 50, 125