Global Anglophone Literature and Forms of Affect

The Intimacy of Recognition

At first, Lola seems like a white women who has a limited understanding of Indigenous women, as "Bernice did have to shame her into changing the name of her 'Happy Squaw Squares!' to brown sugar kisses" (9). However, Lola's moved by Bernice's vulnerability, and Lola develops a tenderness towards her that makes her question her own position in the world. Bernice's gaze takes Lola outside of herself. When Lola's spending time with The Whippets, a group of white women in their sixties, "she sees their cruelty and deplores the image in herself" (112). Under Bernice's gaze, Lola feels like she is "a different woman... quiet kindness and soft intelligence meets harsh observations and boiling wit" (112). The intimacy of recognition enables Lola to experience otherness--in both herself and Bernice, to the extent that she begins to feel motherly feelings towards Bernice. Their non-biological relationship has the intimacy of a family, especially when Lola tells Bernice to "go to bed" in Cree (55), momentarily bringing Bernice back to a home that she has always already lost.

Storytelling

Writing and Life

Throughout the memoir, Wainaina demonstrates that he could not have been anything but a writer. As a young boy, he is stuck within the contradictions between writing and life: "I am always standing and watching people acting boldly to the call of words. I can only follow them. They don't seem to trip and fall through holes their conviction does not see. So their certainty must be the right world. I put the glass down. Something is wrong with me" (6). His attunement to language, and how language's capacity to represent contradictions might make one uncertain about the course of one's life, is a classic dilemma of the writer. You want to see everything, but then you see too much--too many interests, too many sides of things--that you cannot convince anyone (let alone yourself) to demonstrate political conviction. There's a moment later on, when Wainaina reads Decolonizing the Mind by Ngūgī wa Thiong'o and thinks, "I will take Gikuyu classes, when I am done with diversiddy and advertising, when I am driving a good car. I will go to the village and make plays in Gikuyu, in my good new car. I will make very good decolonized advertisements for Coca-cola" (92). The irony in Wainaina's decolonial efforts in learning Gikuyu for advertising Coca-cola is that he's making himself directly complicit in global capitalism, bridging the global and local through his knowledge of Gikuyu. The material conditions of everyday life come up against the ideal of decolonization.

After failing to major in Computer Science in South Africa and winning the Caine Prize, Wainaina returns to Kenya. He teaches us something about the problem of becoming universal, being made to represent a whole country, a whole continent, the hazy idea of the marginalized, by being beautifully specific about embodiment and identity. He chats with a woman, Prisca, in a matatu (minibus), whose shrug he knows how to read: "If, in the soft quiet after Prisca's shrug, she turns back to me in the fifteen-seater, and asks me some small intimacy, which my individual person would not appreciate--like, why are you so fat? Your body remembers--she has made a community by sharing her vulnerability, and my community person will find himself being gracious and open" (194). There is a gesture that tells Wainaina that he is not just himself, but a whole world that Prisca is trying to understand. And this vulnerability that could so easily be misunderstood or mistranslated as an attack, is the key to working through specificity and difference: "We live by these acts, in any part of this country, where neither our anthem nor our tax base nor our language nor our view of the world is in any way universal" (194). Wainaina, in writing his memoir, teaches us that we have to read silences--that we might not know how to read them, unless we belong to a specific community, with enough cultural awareness to understand what we know, what we do not know, and how to bridge the distance between the two.

The Aesthetics of Queerness

Within the escalation of Tamil and Sinhalese tensions, Arjie's principal, Black Tie, forces Arjie to recite two poems at a school assembly. Black Tie, who is Tamil, is in danger of being usurped by the Sinhalese vice-principal, and Arjie is supposed to perform a convincing picture of youth's promise through his poetry recitation. But Black Tie's physical abuse of Arjie and his object of affection, Shehan, due to their non-conformity to heterosexual masculine comportment, enrages Arjie. He asks: "was it not possible for people like Shehan and me to be powerful too?" (274). Arjie finds the answer in his jumbling of the two poems he recites, "until the poems were rendered senseless" (277). After a performance without meaning, a performance that does not convince anyone that these young men are promising and can save the future of this nation, Black Tie cannot maintain his power in front of the audience.

Schooling and Truancy

The Hybrid Polyglot

Oreo's life is shaped by both her Jewish (father) and African-American identities (mother), but she does not present us with any stable sense of either culture. The introduction to the book mentions that the novel is a "mad-cap play on Dubois' 'double-consciousness'... only in this case it's not doubled, it's triple, quadrupled..." (xiv). Oreo isn't just negotiating white American culture's objectification of her, as with double consciousness, but a multitude of stereotypes and object positions brought about by her fluency in Jewish and African-American cultural norms. Language, rather than a constraint, becomes a source of power for Oreo in her attempt to shape her destiny. Her inheritance from her mother, Helen, is a "love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith, their variety and precision, their rock and wry" (37). By being attuned to what language can do, rather than solely what it means, Oreo is able to take up different linguistic registers in her different personas in her journey to find her father.

The Mythical Journey

Dreams as Historical Truth

The narrative follows Donald's sense of shame around Chinese culture (2; 34), until he starts having dreams about the Chinese immigrants who worked on the Central Pacific Railroad end of the Transcontinental Railroad. Although the dreams work to provide an alternative narrative to history--Donald's taught by his history teacher that the Chinese were passive and uncompetitive, learning only the names of the eight Irishmen--the dreams function ahistorically for Donald. Ironically, the dreams are presented as a pure presence, a form of absolute truth, for Donald, as he's taken back in time to work with the railroad workers: "Soong Gong, the timely rain, came to you in your dreams and asked you to go to his hideout and join his heroes. Boys and girls don't dream like that over here. You must be something special" (138). Donald's dreams work against their content, which suggests that the history of the Central Pacific Railroad is taught incorrectly due to widespread racism toward the Chinese immigrants. But there is no interrogation of Donald's own dreams and his place in them, suggesting that Donald is some conduit for an absolute version of history.

Multicultural Coalition

King Duk, Donald's father, observes that Arnold, Donald's white friend, dreams the same dreams as him (156), and is Donald's "ally" in a "war" where they strive to articulate the "right" version of history. As well, Donald's father's food is presented as a cosmopolitan ideal--"Italian, Greek, French, Spanish, Brazilian" (9)--rather than the product of one culture. Donald's father's argument - and perhaps Frank Chin's - is that "Chinatown is America" (89) precisely because it is already cosmopolitan, the labour of Chinese cooks, grocers, labourers, already bringing the global to their home. King Duk sees himself assimilating into the nation-state--the only war to be fought is against racists who are antagonistic towards Chinese people and erase them from history. He very easily tells his son that the problem is not with race itself, but the misrepresentation of history: "don't hate all the white people. Just the liars" (137).

Adoption and Racial Identity

Throughout Chung's memoir, she unfolds the complexities of adoption, encouraging people to look beyond "right or wrong" (20). She suggests that adopted people need to tell their own story so they can shape a sense of self with complexity rather than remaining defined by a one-sided story told by someone else. In Chung's childhood, her white adoptive family has an image of Chung's adoption as post-racial. Chung is not "the daughter of immigrants" (7) but a member of a white family. However, her adoptive family's fantasy can't last in a U.S. structured by racial binaries. In the predominantly white town that Chung grows up in, a classmate asks her if she's black (10). Chung feels othered by the whiteness around her, noting that being white means that "the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside" (17). Despite the image of her adoption as "for the best" (119), she experiences a sense of loss: "These losses were not limited to personal history or the chance to know the people I'd come from. I had missed out on growing up in a place where my presence was not just accepted or tolerated, but a matter of course" (40). Chung recalls that she could not express this sense of loss to her adoptive family, which they could not identify with or understand. Chung's experience as an adoptee who's lost her Korean culture recalls the chapter in Eng and Han's Racial Melancholia where the failure of recognition between the adoptive family and the adoptee emotionally segregates the adoptee from the adoptive family, as her losses are not the losses of her family.

The "Good" Mother and the Myth of Familial Sacrifice

While Eng and Han's psychoanalytic observation of Mina in their chapter narrates Mina's bifurcation of the white mother as "good" and the Korean mother as "bad," Chung has an image of her Korean mother as "good." However, Chung's image of the "good" mother is as static as Mina's disavow of her birth mother. Chung's adoptive family encouraged a vision of Chung's adoptive parents as "strong, selfless people who had sacrificed the chance to know and raise [her] so she could have a better life" (98). Despite Chung's status as an adoptee, the debt that familial sacrifice incurs looms as a shadow over her sense of self. Eng and Han argue that Asian American sacrifice is a compensatory gesture that attaches itself to the losses, disappointments, and failures associated with immigration. Sacrifice establishes a debt that the new generation has towards their parents that could never be paid, leading to further cycles of sacrifice. But Chung does not end up paying this debt. Her capacity to recognize her biological parents' contradictory narratives and her adoptive family's grace in grafting her onto their family tree enable her to transcend a relation of debt and shame.

When Chung looks for her biological parents, who are now divorced, she discovers two contradictory narratives of her adoption. She says, "my birth parents' memories seemed to be based on what each wished to believe, and I couldn't quite reconcile their stories" (150). Her birth mother blames her biological father for encouraging her to give Chung up, and her biological father says that her birth mother did not want another girl and was already abusive towards Chung's sister, Cindy. Chung's premature state meant that the family could not afford hospital care, and her fragile state led the father to believe that Chung would be better off with another family. After hearing these stories, Chung is not wracked with the shame that both her biological parents experience. The gift her adoptive family gives her is the capacity to feel unburdened by family secrets, once they have been told: "I had never been taught to hold on to guilt or shame, especially after a thing had been acknowledged, confessed" (150). This capacity disrupts the tendency of Asian American families to remain buried in secrets they feel are too shameful to tell--that once told, do not exorcise their demons.

Moving from "Wholeness" to "Good Enough"

Doubleness: Prison and Sag Harbor

Whitehead's upper middle class characters often use language with a doubleness--their affluence carries a shadow of the precarity of Black lives with lower socioeconomic status. Without context, Whitehead's novel begins with, "...When did you get out? Asking this was showing off, even though anyone you could brag to had received the same gift and had come by it the same way you did" (3). We think Whitehead may be talking about prison, which would be more common in lower income Black communities, but we soon realize that he's referring to a group of African American professionals heading to Sag Harbour for vacation. The doubleness of "getting out"--being somewhere free from institutional chains--feels a bit disrespectful, as if these rich African Americans are making a mockery of freedom in their economic privilege. However, through the novel's doubleness--the ice cream parlour that becomes a porn theatre, the BB guns that inflict real wounds, the volatile silences in Benji's family--we see that Benji's not as distant from precarity as he might appear to be. The afterlives of slavery return and haunt Benji even as he is able to live out a rare, idyllic childhood in Sag Harbour.

Playing as Restaging the Traumas of Slavery

Benji and his friends get ahold of BB guns, and there are moments where Randy acts like a slaveowner shooting at his slave, making him dance (158). It is as if the images and stereotypes of slaveowners and the enslaved return to haunt the children even as they live in relative freedom and prosperity. An older Benji remarks, "I'd like to say, all these years later, now that one of us is dead and another paralyzed from the waist down from actual bullets--drugs-related, as the papers put it--that the game wasn't so innocent after all. But it's not true. We always fought for real. Only the nature of the fight changed" (191). Playing, rather than being an intermediate space between one's imagination and reality, bleeds into the reality of Black lives. The children's games with BB guns were not isolated from the "real world," but possessed by the ghosts of slavery, traumas that still take hold of children and become expressed through their collective imagination. Later on, as Benji tells us, his friends do lead precarious lives when they are older and no longer sheltered by their African American community in Sag Harbor. Their BB gun fights with each other were preparing them for a world where they would have to battle the images society has of them, as well as the unspoken intergenerational traumas they carry. As children, they were fighting ghosts; as adults, the ghosts materialize into the violence of drug wars and shoot-outs.

In Search of Lost Time

Benji lives a Proustian moment when pop songs bring him back to his first kiss, which he realizes is less important than the first house he lived in: "The angel of my heart, my long lost love, was a house" (293). Benji invests the first house he lived in with the fantasy of wholeness, uninterrupted by the passage of time. In his first house, "good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be here. This was where he lived" (296). Benji's lost self, the one who had not yet witnessed domestic violence, less impinged upon by the gaze of the world, is still held by that house. And he realizes it was not the house itself that held him; it "was what [he] put in it" (302), his capacity to invest in the fantasy of a perfect home and a perfect family. Benji's investment in the image of a perfect family is especially poignant as his uncommunicative parents and hostile family environment echo the image of the Black family that was torn apart by slavery. The generations after slavery would not always have the emotional resources to suture a broken family, even if the circumstances of slavery no longer physically tear families apart.

Identity

Benji learns of Du Bois' concept of double consciousness early on, the experience of "looking at one's self through the eyes of others" (18). For Du Bois, African Americans are split into two: "[a]n American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. This history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self" (18). In Du Bois' depiction of African American identity, African Americans are stuck into the longing to merge two opposing aspects of themselves--the image that others see and the self that exists independently of white society's perception.

Race, Identity and Self-Making

Noah calls himself a "chameleon" (56), referring to his capacity to temporarily be part of different ethnic and cultural groups through his knowledge of different languages. He sees language as crucial for loosening the reification of racial difference in South Africa: "[i]f the person who doesn't look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code" (50). Despite the feeling of otherness due to phenotypical racial difference, a shared language creates this discomfort of similarity within difference. Noah's mother's knowledge of Afrikaans helps them avoid the stereotype of being like other "blacks," and Noah's knowledge of the Zulu language prevents him from being robbed by a group of Zulu men (55). Noah's knowledge of many languages protects himself from hostility towards perceived otherness. Through his own ability to be a chameleon, he suggests that the perception of difference is often arbitrary. It is not that difference doesn't exist, but Noah's capacity to align himself with different people through his languages shows that there is a mystification of what makes one group of people ontologically different from another. While there are real socioeconomic consequences of being Black, coloured, or white in South Africa, Noah's languages and the relatively light shade of his skin enables him to shift, sometimes unwillingly, between the three categories available for racial classification.

Through his memoir, Noah emphasizes that at some point life will force you to pick between Black and white - he cannot have the freedom of transcending racial categories as he sometimes does through his ability to be a chameleon. As a kid, Noah chose to be in the B classes with Black classes rather than move ahead with the white kids (59). He choses his relationships with the Black kids over a higher probability of upward mobility. However, when he steals some chocolates with his friend, Teddy, the camera reads Noah as white in relation to Teddy's darker skin (159). It is a brutal moment where the gaze of the camera and South African society saves Noah through their racial classification of Noah's body in relation to Teddy's. In their misrecognition of Noah as white through the camera footage, Noah cannot choose to align himself with his friend, fearing the repercussion of being expelled and going to prison.

Freedom and Upward Mobility

Noah points out the lack of jobs available to Black people after apartheid formally dissolves (208). Education becomes complicated; it is both crucial and futile. Education is crucial for Black people to understand their position in history and potentially start being a cause rather than an effect of history in their dreams of freedom (61; 184). However, Noah points out the generational debt that slavery incurs on the Black generation of the post-apartheid era: "So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it 'the black tax.' Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero" (66). Noah shows us that post-apartheid is not some era in which the effects of slavery are relegated to the past. Education cannot benefit Black children to the degree in which it is lauded in public discourse due to the generations of economic and social impoverishment experienced by Black families.

But Noah credits his mother for her education of him, rather than the education system itself: "[s]he raised me like a white kid--not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered" (73). The entitlement that white children are born to becomes an invaluable gift when given to Noah. His mother thinks, "Even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I've done enough" (74).

Audience

Campbell explicitly says that she is writing for a white audience: "I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a halfbreed woman in our country" (2). As other Métis people would be familiar with Campbell's struggles, Campbell's overtly positioning herself as a native informer for white audiences. She explains the historical circumstances that leads to poverty for the Métis, recalling how in the 1920s the Canadian government required the Métis to purchase and develop the land they were on. Because many Métis did not have the money or the resources to work the land, the government reclaimed the land and offered it to white immigrants. Rather than cursing the descendants of white settlers, Campbell states that she is not bitter. Rather, she uses poverty as a way to show her white audience their similarities and differences: "I know that poverty is not ours alone. You people have it too, but in those earlier days you at least had dreams, you had a tomorrow. My parents and I never shared any aspirations for a future" (9). Both our people have suffered, she seems to say, but being white means that you have a future in this country. Through her appeal to their sympathy and understanding, Campbell calls white audiences to fight with her.

Being Métis

A young Campbell had aspired to "white ideals," having no Indigenous cultural icons of her own. She says she "grew up on Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow" (14) and would organize plays in which she would act as heroes of the Western literary canon such as Julius Caesar. She desires to be Cleopatra but her brother tells her she is "too black" and her "hair is like a [n---]" (14). Anti-black racism becomes intertwined with anti-Indigenous racism; Campbell's phenotypical proximity to Blackness becomes the parameter with which she is measured to not be white. Campbell further unfolds the specificity of being a Métis, which is different from being a "Treaty Indian." Campbell speaks about the separation between "Treaty Indians" and "halfbreeds": "we were always the poor relatives... they had land and security, we had nothing" (25-6). In addition to their experience of poverty, Métis women occupy a difficult position in which they would endure abuse from their husbands when patriarchy intersects with whiteness: "All too soon one of the white men would bother the women. Our men would become angry, but instead of fighting the white men they beat their wives" (38). The women would have to endure the internalized shame and anger of their men.

The Possibility of Multicultural Coalitions

After Campbell leaves her abusive and racist husband, she is saved by a Chinese family that treats her almost like their own. Before she leaves them, Grandpa Sing gives her "a jade necklace, earrings and bracelet set in an old fashioned gold setting," saying, "Someday when Lisa grows up, give it to her, and tell her it belonged for generations to my wife's family in China" (134). By giving a gift of his family history to Campbell, Grandpa Sing moves beyond the confines of the biological family towards kinship relations with Campbell and her daughter.

When Campbell finds her Indigenous community through AA and the Albert Native foundation at the end of her memoir, and she emphasizes her care for people do not share the exact same politics as her (175). Campbell does not see "an armed revolution of native people" as politically viable; rather, she articulates an imagined coalition based on vulnerability rather than love: "I believe that one day, very soon, people will set aside their differences and come together as one. Maybe not because we love one another, but because we will need each other to survive" (189). Perhaps, Campbell is suggesting that in order to respect and not eradicate difference, we have to coexist with people in a more personally disinterested fashion. Her politics resemble a "multiculturalism from below" (Amanda Wise), that emphasizes the quotidian textures of coexistence and exchange in everyday life rather than an abstract mandate by the government that disguises the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism in Canada.

She introduces her analysis with canonical Western bildungsroman theorists. After print culture has become an institution of modernity, the Anglo-European and U.S. novel has worked to interpellate readers as subjects for the nation, creating racial and gender divisions for different spheres of work. Franco Moretti (1987) sees the bildungsroman as the primary form of narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity, with the goal of reconciling the individual with the bourgeois social order. Benedict Anderson (1983) reads the novel as a form of print culture that unifies citizens with the "imagined community" of the nation. David Lloyd (1987) argues that the bildungsroman elicits the reader's identification with a narrative of ethical formation, in which they relinquish their difference by identifying with an ideal "national" form of subjectivity. Lowe sees the realistic aesthetic linking historical narratives of the U.S. as a nation and novelistic narratives of the individual through its creation of a fetishized concept of development and the narration of a single unified subject (106). Decolonizing forms of representation works antagonistically against existing institutions of representation, aesthetic and literary. While decolonization may share some features with poststructuralism, such as a nonlinear narrative and antirepresentational aesthetics, decolonization challenges the colonial mode of production. In the colonial mode of production, as Bipan Chandra argues, there was a split in class between the colonial metropolis and agrarian colony, as well as hierarchical relations of region, culture, language, and race. Decolonization challenges all these colonial relations in a multilevelled assault.

By reading against the realistic novel's orientalizing of Asians or easy incorporation of Asian Americans as U.S. citizens, Lowe looks at how Cha's Dictée uses fractured memory, poems, and dreamlike impressions, with blood becoming the ground of representation as well as the figure of erasure. By challenging causality as a trope of official history, Cha challenges the U.S. narrative of Korean emancipation from Japanese colonialism and official South Korean narratives about the rise of Korean nationalism. This surplus of materiality disrupts 19th century post-Enlightenment vocabularies and grammars in their defiance of dominant regimes of representation.

Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters uses gossip to interrupt and displace official representational regimes, abandoning binary notions of legitimate and illegitimate. Subaltern studies historians see rumor as a public form of popular discourse in colonized societies in which power relations force popular modes of social organization into unsanctioned sites and discourses. Hagedorn's use of rumor collapses the separation of "public" and "private" spheres, which are symbolic of bourgeois order. There's no linguistic purity in terms of national language or high/low register of speaking. In its form, rumor is more of a counterethical system that pauses the ethical valence of speech rather than something that is intrinsically progressive or subversive.

Fae Nyenne Ng's Bone shows how the affective, cultural ties of the Leong family members bear the weight of immigrant laws, geographical segregation, and imposed relations of production (such as when the "private" space of the home becomes a "workplace," prioritizing production over family relations). But Ng's representation of Chinatown as heterogenous and a heterotopia questions hierarchical organizations of space such as the public/private divide and the ethnic ghetto that produces under a capitalist logic.

He argues that cosmopolitanism enables the development of a universal culture of human rights. A sense of international solidarity is articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is inspired by Kant's categorical imperative that we ought to treat human beings as ends rather than ends. However, the universal ideals of human rights comes up against more local restrictions: human rights have to be signed and ratified by sovereign national states (1552). In practice, the fundamental axiom of human rights discourse, where the human being is rational, free, and bears inviolable rights (1553) is not often realized in the laws of nations. Instead, a human rights framework attempts to regulate the global field of instrumentality--a system of labour and exploitation of groups of people such as migrant workers, where people are reduced to their function, their capacity to generate surplus labour for their employers. In the human rights framework, cosmopolitanism becomes a collective consciousness that can mitigate the sovereignty of individual states, which vary in their legal commitment to curbing human rights violations. Cheah gives the example of migrant female domestic workers, who experience economic exploitation on a daily basis. Although international law claims that migrant workers have universal rights, these workers are more feasibly protected by their nation of origin. However, many labor-exporting government are reluctant to demand fair treatment for the workers they export for fear of losing economic competitiveness.

Games

The Joy Luck Club itself works against the zero-sum nature of mahjong but also the Chinese American mothers' competitive natures, where they gain honour over the other mothers through their children's achievements. When Jing-mei (June) Woo's mother passes away and she has to take her mother's place at the mahjong board, she remembers her mother's creation of the Joy Luck Club during a period of famine and political turmoil in China: "My idea was to have a gathering of four women, one for each corner of my mahjong table... People thought we were wrong to serve banquets every week while many people in the city were starving... it's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable..." (10-11). Rather than remaining in a melancholic state where the women could only long for what they have lost, the women "pretend each week had become the new year" as a way of "forget[ting] past wrongs done to [them]" (12). Their gathering becomes ceremonial in how they usher in a new year every week, which disrupts the calendar year and how custom constricts the amount of luck and renewal they are permitted to receive. They recognize their extravagance in a period of poverty, but in contrary to the Chinese mothers' emphasis on necessity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, these mothers use extravagance as form of breaking away from their attachment to the multitude of losses in their lives. Rather, they form an attachment to hope and luck: "We could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck" (12). As a form of repair, they attach to an affect of their own creation rather than objects that are already lost. I wonder if the women's cultivation of hope provides a counternarrative to Eng and Han's picture of Asian American melancholia? The women do not rely on the nation-state for belonging but recreate a survival mechanism from their lives in China.

In contrast, chess is a zero-sum game for Waverly and her mother. In the nature of the game, your win is someone else's loss, and the win-loss ratio of chess becomes metonymic for the honour of Waverly's mother. When Waverly first discovers the rules of chess, her mother sees the learning process as analogous to her own experience of immigration: "The American rules... every time people come out from foreign country must know rules. You not know, judge say. Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, don't know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself" (95). Waverly's mother teaches her daughter that her knowledge has to be her own knowledge--no one will provide her with the tools to succeed. Her mother's commentary is incongruent with the situation itself--it's just a chess game, but she superimposes the weight of Asian American immigration onto Waverly's experience of chess. As Waverly discovers she has a talent for chess, she understands tactical strategies as "secrets" and understands the game of chess to be withholding secrets in order to gain an advantage (96). A chess player in the park, Lau Po, gives Waverly names for tactical strategies that reference Chinese culture and mythology: "The double attack from the East and West shores. Throwing stones on the drowning man. The sudden meeting of the clan. The surprise from the sleeping guard. The humble servant who kills the king" (97). For someone who's familiar with the more standard way of describing tactical strategies, it's unclear how some of these phrases correspond to chess moves. This confusion demonstrates how Waverly's cultural background may contribute to her precociousness in chess--she has a different framework for understanding concepts which may give her an advantage. When Waverly starts receiving sponsors for national tournaments, Waverly's exempt from doing chores and gets her own bedroom. Her exceptionality creates a reversal of domestic labour, where she's exempt from traditional gender roles. However, Waverly ends up upset at her mother parading her around: "If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess?" (101) As with many mothers in this novel, Waverly's mother uses her daughter as a substitution for her own body. Waverly stops playing chess for a while to get back at her mother, but when she starts to compete again, she can't see strategies the same way and feels like she has "turned into someone quite ordinary" (190). Like Jing-mei with piano, Waverly bases her confidence on being a prodigy, an identity placed upon her by her mother, which places her in a zero-sum relationship with the world--the moment they lose or fail, they lose everything.

Necessity and Extravagance

The narrator's aware of how her mother's life revolves around necessity (6), in contrast to her aunt who may have committed adultery, a form of extravagance. The narrator rethinks the possibility of adultery, deciding that it was impossible for her aunt to even have the choice of committing adultery: "to be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was waste enough" (6). This opposition between necessity and extravagance returns when the narrator goes off to college - Berkeley in the sixties - she notes that she fails to turn into a boy (47). Supposedly, if racialized women are able to attend a renowned university and enter the public sphere, they can overcome the structural exclusion that prevents them from becoming fully human. But the narrator suggests that education is an extravagance for her, in the eyes of her family, because it cannot change her into a boy. In her reluctance to be married off, the narrator refuses to perform domestic tasks well, becoming a "bad girl," which she considers may render her more proximate to a boy (47).

When she visits her mother when older, her mother notes that she can't stop working--if she does, her body begins to hurt. The narrator confirms that she experiences the same: "I'm like that too, Mama. I work all the time. Don't worry about me starving. I won't starve. I know how to work" (106). Her mother is reminiscent of the subject dead to desire (Eng and Han; Antonio Viego) who cannot exist outside of necessity. This perpetual necessity points towards the impending sense of death that looms - the subject is constantly trying to stave off their own death. And even when she has enough material resources to pursue non-essential desires or have a moment of respite in her old age, her body will not let her rest. It keeps the count of the slow trauma necessity wrecks upon the body. Because she could not invest in extravagant ideals, when she could finally live beyond necessity, she has nothing to keep her living.

Ghosts

The second half of Kingston's title is Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Ghosts are both actual ancestors that haunt the narrator and a translation of a Chinese word of the "other" whose figurative meaning is closer to "alien" or "foreigner." Because of the literal meaning of "ghost," there's almost an ontological difference that's posited when the "other" becomes a ghost. The deceased ancestor that haunts the narrator has been silenced by her family--the narrator doesn't know her name and feels like she is participating in her aunt's punishment by not asking for details in a culture of silence. But she writes about her aunt in her memoir, with a sense of danger - her aunt "does not always mean well" (16). There is the risk that the drowned one" will "wai[t] silently by the water to pull down a substitute" (16). Kingston risks becoming a substitute by telling this story, but her speech is an attempt to not forget, to give her aunt the sustenance that memory may give to a ghost.

When Moon Orchid, the narrator's aunt, encounters her Chinese American husband, she experiences an intense moment of shame: "Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts" (153). There is the one moment in the story where the beholder and the beheld become ghostlike together. In her vulnerability, Moon Orchid does not judge her husband as someone who has become white, calling him a ghost to denigrate him and ontologically separate herself from him. Instead, she experiences her own difference as well - both of them are strange and inhuman to the other. The U.S. becomes the "land of ghosts," the place that ontologically changes people so that they become irrevocably separated from each other.

Later on, Moon Orchid imagines Mexican ghosts are plotting on her life. She's having a mental breakdown, but there's a resonance with Trump's fear of Mexicans, the "other" that is too close to the self, who will threaten the self. Moon Orchid's experience of her own otherness (her husband says "it's as if I had turned into a different person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away. You became people in a book I had read a long time ago" 54) becomes externalized and project onto another ethnic other.

The narrator doesn't use ghost as a marker of estrangement from another person; they're someone different she lives besides. She talks about liking the "Negro students (Black ghosts) best because they laughed the loudest and talked to [her] as if she were a daring talker too" (166). They protect her from the Japanese kids who would bully her, who were recently released from "concentration camp" (166). The nation's violence towards its ethnic others is reproduced in the playground, creating moment of alliance, vulnerability, and hostility in diasporic children whose intergenerational and transnational conflicts become understated or illegible in the education system meant to foster an individualistic white subject capable of self-determination--and speech.

Silence and Self-Creation

The narrator experiences misery at school when she learns that she has to talk. She remarks that "the other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak" (166). From her peers' silence, the narrator confirms the stereotype of the quiet Asian American girl. But there's a contrast between American school and the Chinese school, where the boys would talk back and the girls would scream (167). There's a sense that the children are afraid to extend themselves into the world in American school - they hyper-regulate their behaviour, conscious of their difference. The narrator speaks of the girls "invent[ing] an American-feminine speaking personality, except for that one girl who could not speak up even in Chinese school" (172). They develop a "false self" to help them navigate the foreignness of the school system, which expects the students to talk, explain themselves, establish their personalities through speech. It's not that the students have no self - their selves are better expressed through their articulate chaos in Chinese school than the expectations of individual expression in American school. Chinese school is a space of play, while American school causes the children to be cautious and afraid.

But it's clear that the narrator is ashamed of her own silences; at the end of the memoir, she recounts her bullying of a girl who can't express herself: "I could work her face around like dough... I hated fragility. I walked around her, looked her up and down the way the Mexican and Negro girls did when they fought, so tough" (176). The contrast between the silent girl's malleable face and the narrator's non-Asian performance of strength suggests that the narrator's deeply ashamed of the weakness she spots in Asian femininity. In pinching the other girl's face and demanding that she talk, the narrator is attempting to disprove the stereotype of Asian meekness, the meekness she despises in herself. Her tirade towards the silent and crying girl demonstrates her own sense of insufficiency when faced with the imperatives of American public education: "You have to work because you can't be a housewife, no one's going to marry you... that's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair. You've got to let people know you have a personality and a brain" (180). While tormenting the girl who unconsciously stands in for her own perceived weaknesses, the narrator expresses her suffering and desperation to become the articulate, rational individual that the U.S. values. It's not that she or the other girls aren't capable of expression or thought, but that the education system's demand for her to become visible as a personality asks her to produce a coherent and rigid narrative. Having grown up in a family of silences and evasiveness ["How can Chinese keep any traditions at all? They don't even make you pay attention, slipping in a ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice specialness. The adults get mad, evasive, and shut up if you ask" (185)], the narrator cannot easily narrate, and in narrating, create the self that comes so easily to her white classmates.

At the end of the novel, the narrator arrives at a moment where she desires to tell her mother two hundred things she's left unsaid (192). The narrator compares her desire to confess to her mother to the confession that her Catholic Mexican and Filipino classmates attend. Foucault argues that confession is a way of reinventing yourself. In Giving An Account of Oneself, Judith Butler refers to how Foucault sees confession as "an act of speech in which the subject 'publishes himself,' gives himself in words, engages in an extended act of self-verbalization… [which is] a way of making the self appear for another" (112). Perhaps the narrator wants to recreate herself, using her mother as the primordial "other" who can provide her understanding, a holding environment in which she can test the coherence of her internal reality and the external world. This moment of imagined confession is where the narrator moves towards what Winnicott considers as play, a malleable space between the internal and external, which helps the self establish boundaries, tapping into the "true self" that is creative and unafraid. There is the potential for the narrator to create herself on her own terms, rather than under the conditions of formal schooling.

Autobiography and Art

Hong's essays are all narratively driven - in "Portrait of an Artist," she brings the life and death of the poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha back into the archives, as readers of Dictees have often avoided talking about her violent death. In "An Education," Hong talks about how her friend, Erin, does not want her trauma expressed in Hong's narrative, so readers would not make the autobiographical fallacy of "hijacking" Erin's art through her life. The verb "hijacking" suggests that one's art (somehow purer) could be unlawfully taken over by the damage and impurity of an artist's life. But in Hong's emphasis on Cha's life, she insists that forgetting an artist's life, especially that of an Asian American poet who may have been targeted due to her race, too easily brushes over America's history of racially-based violence towards Asian Americans. If you don't talk about someone's violent out of your own discomfort, then you're making their life worth less. American culture is fixated on the deaths of white artists - Sylvia Plath's life and death is bound up with our fascination in her work.

"We" and "I"

In "The Indebted," Hong confesses to her sense that writing about racial identity is "minor and non-urgent" (183), and she can't easily posit an "us" against a "them" due to her incapacity to speak for all Asian Americans. At the same time, Hong's book of essays shift between the "we" and "I." In "The End of White Innocence," she insists that we ought to cultivate "white double consciousness," in which white people are able to see themselves through the eyes of racialized subjects and understand how structural racism bestows white people power at the expense of racialized subjects. She argues that white people are often "innocent" about the violence the U.S. is capable of inflicting. Their minds should resemble the minds of a five year old Iranian American child who was handcuffed as a possible threat at the airport (90). Hong says that the children's awareness of the nation's dehumanization of its racial others will one day be the consciousness of the majority of children in the U.S. There's a strange parallel she makes by positing this Iranian American child as a model for white consciousness, a child who later in the paragraph, stands in for the consciousness of a critical mass of racialized subjects. Along a similar vein, in "The Indebted," Hong talks about how making Asian Americans more human is not enough for her, that she wants to destroy the universal that is whiteness. She argues that "it is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority" (197). She goes on to explain that her "we" is the "nonwhites, the formerly colonized," in which she includes Indigenous peoples, migrants, and refugees. She is seeing a potential alliance between racialized peoples, but I wonder if there is a flattening of experience as she posits this "we." Could she be reinforcing a different abstraction from the abstract universality that is whiteness, which labels people as victims. She says this racialized "we" is the global majority, but it is unclear whether this imagined community could possibly share similar interests. In reading everything through race, I wonder if she's missing some things. It matters that the Iranian American child who was arrested came from a predominantly Muslim country. Is "contained condition" too vague a term to link her "we"? The colonized, as she imagines them, may not be kind to each other. What about Hindu nationalists' suppression of Islam in India? The Han Chinese's cultural genocide of the Uyghur people? I would put pressure on the "we" that Hong herself knows is difficult to articulate, and ask if we ought to do away with the universal altogether.

Chapter 1 - Racial Melancholia: Model Minorities, Depression, and Suicide

While Freud typically casts melancholia as pathological, Eng and Han depathologize it as a "structure of feeling," a term they borrow from Raymond Williams to refer to emergent patterns of emotion still struggling for social form and recognition. Asian Americans are excluded from US norms and ideals, which include whiteness, heteronormativity, middle-class family values, and Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Exclusion from these norms due to their cultural difference leads to an experience of melancholia - Asian Americans cannot invest in these ideals. The melting pot picture of the US, where immigrants can blend into the dominant culture, is more successful with dominant Western European ethnic groups, as their differences are legally, socially, and psychically forged into an ideal of whiteness (36). Asians become split subjects, torn between the pre-WWII era of exclusion and the postwar era of inclusion, where they could become citizens within the emergence of the model minority stereotype. Within the stereotype of the American dream, Asians can only move towards economic achievements rather than sociocultural belonging. The hyperfocus on economic achievement creates a "dead subject," a subject unable to access their desires because of the demand to prioritize necessity over extravagance (46). The concept of sacrifice is key with intergenerational relationships - could sacrifice be a compensatory gesture that attaches itself to the losses, disappointments, and failures associated with immigration? Sacrifice is built on the idea that the new generation incurs a debt that can never be paid; in turn, the children of immigrants become self-sacrificing, perpetuating further losses that can never be repaid.

By calling Asian American mental health issues an issue of cultural difference, we're covering over structural questions of institutional violence and inequality. For example, Nelson is shamed by his teachers and students for not knowing (learning from his parents) how to pronounce certain English words. Consequently, he loses both his mother tongue and his mother as safe objects; he can't mirror his mother in Japanese or English as they're both transformed into objects of shame and insecurity. Eng and Han write poignantly that "an accent is the refusal to give up the mother or the mother tongue" (62). There's a certain ethical relation in melancholia - we preserve the threatened racial object rather than killing it off, reconstructing our identity through a multitude of losses that define us.

Chapter 2 - Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transitional Objects

The transnational adoptee disrupts the aesthetic continuity of the white nuclear family. While transnational adoptees often identify with their parents' whiteness, their parents do not identify with their children's Asianness. This failure of recognition severs the adoptee from the intimacy of the family - she's emotionally segregating and has to negotiate her own losses that are not mirrored by her family. Han speaks about one Korean adoptee, Mina, who demonstrated a Kleinian paranoid-schizoid split with her adoptive mother and her imagined Korean mother. She would idealize whiteness while denigrating her Korean mother who she imagined was wholly bad, abandoning her at birth. Mina's denigrating of her birth mother would cause her to express a dislike for Koreans, speaking about international students she knows in negative stereotypes. However, through working with a Korean American therapist, Mina is able to loosen her experience of her white adoptive mother as wholly good and her Korean birth mother as wholly bad. As a transitional object, her therapist provides a third space within which Mina can play with seemingly mutually exclusive choices. Mina opens up a network of formerly static racist associations and stereotypes, experiencing her own Koreanness with more complexity. This flexibility leads towards a "good enough" exploration of race, where similarity does not collapse into sameness and difference does not automatically translate into opposition (93).

Chapter 3 - Racial Disassociation: Parachute Children and Psychic Nowhere

There's a connection between the parachute children that are sent abroad to gain cultural capital from attending US schools and the longer history of Asian transnational labor practices, where men and women who migrate abroad in search of economic possibilities while leaving their children behind. The number of Asian youth who are sent abroad suggests that the East is a "problem" while the West is a "solution." This diasporic movement shows how American exceptionalism has been reinvented to become the fantasy of the US as an accommodating land of equal opportunity. Disassociation becomes a condition for many of these parachute children (and Asian Americans in general) as they can only access a false self - an affective state in which creativity and play become diminished. They apprehend reality through the other's eyes, where they are docile and conform to the demands of the mother and/or US sociocultural norms. The true self, in contrast, is the self that is capable to play and experience unity within fragments. Bromberg argues that psychic stability is marked by adaptive dissociation, the ability to feel like one self while standing in the spaces of many selves. In defensive dissociation, the subject cannot play and move through variations of different positions. Their desire to protect themselves through conforming to external expectations overwhelms any possibility of authentic self articulation. Racial stereotypes are exceptional pernicious in their creation of false selves, including the model minority stereotype, where people's images of themselves and society's stereotypes cannot be reconciled. In a "good-enough" picture of race relations, we would not fix the self and other in static positions. Rather than creating a binary of absolute victims and perpetrators, there would be a space of play in which difference might be in creative tension, allowing for individual agency and responsibility.

Chapter 4 - (Gay) Panic Attack: Coming Out in a Colorblind Age