Being literary about ethnic Chinese

Being literary about ethnic Chinese

By Laurel Means

There are thematic similarities in the literature produced by ethnic Chinese writers in two countries -- Singapore and Canada.

What first attracted me to a study of Singaporean post- colonial literature in English were striking similarities of theme and form with recent Chinese-Canadian literature. Canada, as a post-independence nation since 1886, has had to generate nation-building literature out of a British-based but multi- ethnic society.

Canadian government policy, like Singapore's, strives for a "cultural mosaic" in which traditional patterns of identity are not to be lost within the "one nation" ideal. A large piece of that mosaic represents ethnic Chinese who have settled in Canada since the earliest immigrants came as railway and lumber-camp laborers from the 1870s: at present they constitute 8 percent of Canada's population of 26 million, with the 1991 Census Canada reporting 400,000 still maintaining Chinese as their home language. Only within the last decade have they found a literary voice in either English or Chinese.

Why is this? Writers like Paul Yee described in a 1990 interview an ethnic reluctance to write. Parental pressures, he said, dictated that writing was never a secure or profitable occupation. Novelist Sky Lee stresses the language barriers. Yuen Chung Yip has emphasized that facts needed to be known. These facts, Vancouver poet Jim Wong-Chu claimed, depended on Chinese- Canadians upon first acquiring a sense of the struggles of the past, only possible within the last generation.

Such recent impulses, then, have created a sufficient enough Chinese-Canadian canon to enable comparisons with other ethnic Chinese post-colonial literature written in English, chiefly with its rapid and vital development in Singapore. Although many themes are central to both literatures, three are outstanding:

* rewriting history to redefine individual identity;

* anxiety over disintegration of the family unit; and

* breaking-through barriers of linguistic difference.

Rewriting history attempts to justify the diaspora, to bridge the gap between remembered China and present identity in the New World, whether that be Canada or Singapore. Novelist Suchen Christine Lim re-tells Singapore history in Fistful of Colours, claiming that things are "recalled in different ways", which "shapes and reshapes the past; the past as retold in stories shaped by the creative memory". Canadian Fred Wah attempts to understand family history: "I know all these 'facts' existed once," says the narrator in Elite 1, yet they "seem partially unreal" (Waiting for Saskatchewan). Like Lim, Wah describes "photographs" and family "documents" to position family members in re-created historic "fact".

Such re-siting in the new generation of Singaporean and Canadian writers often results in diasporic disillusionment: present reality can dispel nostalgic notions. For example, Singaporean Ovidia Yu's Dream of China contrasts the father's notion of China, the "most beautiful of beautiful lands" and glorified through revolutionary ideals, with the uncle's frantic desire to leave his China of drab poverty. In Canadian Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children, the grandfather's "one day of happiness in China is better than a hundred days of happiness in Canada" is ironically disproved by contrasting life during the family's 1940s to 1950s history in London, Ontario, with that of members remaining in Guangdong Province.

Anxiety over the breakdown of the traditional Confucian notion of the family unit is a second important point of comparison. Often, the grandmother provides the symbol for this notion; she is the younger generation's point of entry into that older world recognized as valuable but now lost, a theme recognized in Singapore literature as early as Catherine Lim's novel, The Serpent's Tooth (1982).

In Claire Tham's recent story Lee, Li Wen returns to Singapore as "Lee" from an adolescence in the United States; her father attempts to repatriate her, but the point of entry is her grandmother. Fascinated by her Buddhist and Confucian ways, Lee is eventually made to confess: "I like grandma ... she's got character ... the rest of them -- gosh, people here are pretty spineless, aren't they?" In Canadian Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony, the grandmother's recreation of Chinese wind-chimes ties her to memories of her youth in China and, through them, she teaches her grandson what he comes to regards as his only "real education".

Finally, the theme of linguistic difference assumes various forms in both ethnic Chinese Singaporean and Canadian literature. Professor Koh Tai Ann, Nanyang Technological University's Dean of Arts, has noted that among the Straits Chinese community as for other British colonies, "to originate a literature, writers need to claim a language emotionally as part of their own cultural identity", hence the significant canon of literature written in English. In contrast, Chinese-Canadian writers have had to struggle with their undeniably North American and Western context: a status immigrant, minority and, until the last generation, repressive to literary expression.

Recent Singaporean writers like Suchen Christine Lim, Wee Kiat, Claire Tham, Desmond Sim and Kuo Pao Kun, while writing in a confidently-claimed English, may nevertheless make conscious forays into other linguistic dimensions to recite and re- establish ethnic identity.

A scene in Wee's novel Women in Men's Houses is an interesting case in point: Second Uncle Lim is interrogating Ai Lian's Eurasian son, Russell/Chuan; he is surprised to hear Chuan answer in both Mandarin and Hokkien. Ai Lian's explanation is that she "is a Chinese and that he must speak her tongue or people will not respect (him)". Here, the assumption of neotraditional values through language provides a sign of sociopolitical integration.

For Canadian writers Fred Wah and Paul Yee, however, language provides a means of racial integration or its absence. In Yee's short story Prairie Widow, the Chinese proprietor of a cafe in a desolate prairie town, "had ever attempted to play the word games that men devised for business and merriment", but, rebuffed by his white customers, was treated like "a mute among his peers".

In Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, it is only the fourth- generation Wong, Kae Ying Woo, who can decide to become a writer in the 1980s in order to express words giving meaning to "three generations of life-and-death struggles" and convey the "truth of her family's history".

To be sure, some essential differences remain. For example, Chinese-Canadian writers scarcely seem to feel the threats of urbanization as described by Lee Tzu Pheng's recent poem Brink of an Amen, in which the urban world surrounds us, like a tight band/of presence pressing in, besieging us. Instead, the vast, natural landscape of Canada plays a more significant role in often being diasporically linked to images of mainland China, then realigned to reinforce a sense of North American identity. Wah in Elite 8, for example, tries to repatriate his father from the green Hong Kong hills "into my mountains".

In Paul Yee's Prairie Widow, the young widow, Gum-mai, is determined to "break the void of silence around her" by creating a functioning language based on the things around her: garden, prairie, wild flowers, rolling fields. The land itself becomes a means of identity, its descriptive images a vehicle of transition from repressed silence to voiced ethnicity.

For both the new generation of ethnic Chinese Singaporean and Canadian writers, however, it is clear that the voicing of common themes arises unmistakably from a similar dual heritage of British colonial structures and Chinese culture. Both literatures are now entering into a new phase of vitality, innovation, and self-expression. The question remains: will it bring them closer together in theme and expression, or transform them into distinct and unique canons?

Dr. Laurel Means is with the Department of English, McMaster University, Canada.

Window: Recent Singaporean writers like Suchen Christine Lim, Wee Kiat, Claire Tham, Desmond Sim and Kuo Pao Kun, while writing in a confidently-claimed English, may nevertheless make conscious forays into other linguistic dimensions to recite and re- establish ethnic identity.