"His Paper Family Knew Their Place": Diasporic Space in Wayson Choy's All That Matters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrary to the notion that mobility is implicit in diaspora, this essay contends that mobility post-migration, that is, the movement of individual bodies in hostland diasporic populations, often becomes severely restricted. As a case in point, I examine the diasporic space of Vancouver's Chinatown in Wayson Choy's novel All that Matters (2004). I argue that while movement may be an inevitable precondition of diaspora, mobility, hindered by ethnic, gender, and class borders, remains largely illusory in Chinese diaspora space. In the second half of this essay I ask where, if at all, resistance can be located; is movement perpetually restricted in the diaspora space of Choy's Chinatown, or is there a possibility for individual agency? To answer this question, I propose that our focus must shift from the study of bodies in the diaspora to the role that things play in the diaspora. In particular, paper plays a pivotal role in Choy's novel and deserves close attention for the ways it is bound up with questions of mobility and immobility. I suggest that in order to locate mobility and resistance in the Chinese diaspora, we must first challenge the ontological borders between animate and inanimate, body and thing, human and paper.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".