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.