Language in Chinese Canadian Writing: Impact on Interpretation and Reception

When one group finds it difficult to stand up and say its name; when to say one's identity is already to mark one as lesser than, that is where the boundaries of exile begin. (Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Afterword 168) The very choice of the language in which to compose is itself a political statement on the part of the writer. (Barbara Harlow xviii) During the last three to four decades, there has been--in the United States and Canada--a flowering of diasporic Asian authors of Chinese and Japanese origin, who have both acquired considerable commercial success and enlarged the canon. To name only a few, I am thinking in the United States of the reception of such works as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), and Gish Jen's novels and stories about the immigrant Chang family. (1) In Canada, there are Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) and Itsuka (1992), Evelyn Lau's Runaway Diary of a Street Kid (1989), SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and Bellydancer: Stories (1994), Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children (1994), Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (1995), Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand (1995) and salt fish girl (2202), Fred Wah's Diamond Grill (1996), and Lydia Kwa's This Place Called Absence (2002), among others. The success of Asian Canadian creativity has been supported by a variety of anthologies, such as Inalienable Rice: A Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology (1979), SKY Lee and her co-editors' Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures (1990), Bennet Lee and Jim Wong-Chu's Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians (1991), and Lien Chao and Jim Wong-Chu's Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction (2003), as well as an ever increasing number of scholarly monographs and articles. (2) This Asian American and Canadian literary production is, at least in Canada, well matched and even preceded by writers belonging to a very broad range of other ethnic groups, with different linguistic, cultural, religious, and geographic backgrounds. The immigration experiences depicted in literature--initially predominantly of peoples coming from Europe and, to a much more modest extent, from East Asia, now from most parts of the world--reflect the fact that over time there have been significant shifts in the educational and other assets of the newcomers and therefore altered opportunities for integration into society. A startling, but not unique, example is the difference between the economic and human plight of early Chinese and Japanese labourers, who were not only exploited but also discriminated against by force of law, and the relatively smooth social success of today's immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Often well educated and sometimes well heeled, they are now frequently accepted--in the first and not only second or third generation--as a natural part of the country's elite. In certain parts of Canada, such as the areas of greater Vancouver and Toronto, they moreover represent a rapidly increasing demographic fact. (3) In literary terms, there was in Canada a prolonged period of attempts to document the immigrant experience, including painful identity crises, of settlers belonging to the various majority and minority groups, such as the English, Scottish, Irish, French, Ukrainian, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and others. Writing in their mother tongue, or in English or French, authors belonging to that earlier period usually emulated in their writing older, realist, and naturalist paradigms, with a gradually increased use of modernist techniques and attitudes. Today, immigrant writers from the whole spectrum of the Canadian ethnic mosaic--from Blacks and Creoles from the Caribbean to the Chinese and others who came from South-East Asia--examine not only the traditional tribulations of being in an unaccustomed and different environment, climate, geography, and culture, but they tackle in addition the new internal and external psychological and social problems and advantages of a largely post-modern, post-industrial, globalized, and resolutely heteroglossic society. …

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