National Sun Yat-sen University Institutional Repository:Item 987654321/28110

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告

族裔美國文學中的差異表演: 階級與扮演焦慮 (2/2)

中 華 民 國 94 年 10 月 12 日

Movements in Gish Jen and Rebecca Walker: Performing Identity and Shifting Self

Building on her previous short stories and her first novel, Typical American (1991), Gish Jen continues to portray immigrant experiences of the Chang family in post-world war America in her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996). Set in the late 60s, Mona in the Promised Land opens with the Changs’ relocation from Chinatown to an affluent and mainly Jewish neighborhood.iBeginning with the fulfillment of the American dream in the economic success of the Changs, a newly prosperous immigrant family who own thriving pancake houses, Mona in the Promised Land features the milieu of optimism and enthusiasm in which people celebrate identity in flux as performatively enacted. Embracing a post-modern subjectivity, one characterized by multiple shifting identifications, almost all major characters engage in the free play of the identity “switch” or “switching,” words appearing repeatedly throughout the novel. Opposite to having one consistent and given identity, identity switching suggests that identity is merely performative and always opens up the very possibility of crossing. Identity switching is extensively explored by the title character, Mona Chang, by her sister, Callie, by their parents, and by Jewish characters of a fictional suburb in New York, Scarshill, in the late 1960s.

The novel progresses further and until the end appears a new, promising subject: Io. Fathered by Seth and mothered by Mona, Io, a Chinese-Jewish American, suggests the culmination of performative identity because being Io is a doing without

performance, namely, an acting out of a difference “naturally.” The creation of Io indicates the phase from performing differences to being a difference, from cultural hybrid identity to racial hybrid identity. Interestingly, Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land ends at where Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish begins.

Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, poetically accounts her growing up as a multiracial child and her movement among identities against the multitude of settings.Rebecca Walker was born in Mississippi in 1969 to Mel Leventhal, a white Jewish civil rights lawyer, and Alice Walker, the famed African American writer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Color Purple. Her parents were both active in the Civil Rights movement and they married in defiance of the anti-miscegenation laws of Mississippi.iiA self-described

"movement child" in a political sense (a child born during and as a result of the Civil Rights movement), Rebecca Walker moves metaphorically and literally. After her parents divorced (when she was in the third grade), Walker alternates every two years between her parents' homes, growing up in Mississippi, Brooklyn, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and suburban New York. Shutting back and forth across country, Walker performs a new identity with each move. She moves among identities as a

white or a black, as a Puerto Rican or a Spanish personas or a Jew, as a heterosexual or bisexual woman, as a suburban child or an inner-city girl, as status quo to middle class to radical artist bohemia. Walker’s autobiography chronicles her "moves" among identities in terms of race, sexuality, and class.

While respectively Mona in the Promised Land elaborates performing identity and Black White and Jewish chronicles a shifting self, both works center on a “movement” among identities in a postmodern era. The movement connotes performance always more or less and sliding already too close or far. Interestingly, both writers in some sense write to stop or, at least, slow down the free movement. Until the end of Mona in the Promised Land, the free movement among a

proliferation of differences is gradually halted when Mona is finally reconciled with her mother, when Mona and other major characters submit to the Symbolic, the terrain of the Capital, when Mona decides to change her surname from Change to

Changowitz (303), and when Io emerges as a pure difference. Similarly, in Black White and Jewish, the movement of a shifting self is temporally anchored at the end by Walker’s decision to change her last name legally from Leventhal to Walker,iiito take up the lineage of her mother, Alice, to affirm her affinity for blackness, and to identify with marginalized groups and people “who suffer” (307).

In this essay, I shall first examine a movement situated “in-between,” briefly discussing literature by or about the early Chinese immigrants as well as the early mixed race subjects and their assimilation position in the binary context. Next, I explore a movement “among” identities against today’s global-capitalist regime through Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land and Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish. Third, I suggest a movement grounded “within” in the sense of Lacanian psychoanalysis and finally interrogate the political strategy of the

movement—“between,” “among,” and “within”—as a mode of resistance.

* * * * * *

By the 1960s the American racial code had been dominantly binary. But the binary system actually consists of one term. The dominant term determines the subordinate one and their binary relationships. Responding to the polarized racial context, early Chinese American writers serve as “ambassadors of good will,”

explaining to the mainstream reader Chinese cultural practices and dispelling negative images of their ethnic group.iv For example, Lee Yan Phou’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887), Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909),vand Lin Yu-tang’s My Country and My People (1935)—works by the first generation Chinese-American autobiographies are characterized by their attempts to bridge the distance between “East” and “West” but usually at the expense of normalizing American values and

trading one kind of Orientalism for another. Under the same racial-political climate, second-generation Chinese American writers, growing up torn in-between two cultural practices, generally construct Chinese American lives as progressing from immigrant to U.S. national identity. Pardee Lowe in Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong in Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), for instance, are engaged in charting an inevitable progress of assimilation. Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter displayed an exotic community with enchanting customs and interesting profiles of characters—they were residents who shared the greatest values of

American. Since the 1960s, “what is an Asian American” became an unprecedentedly urgent question. The 1960s was marked by the civil rights movement and the rise of cultural nationalism. Inspired by the heroics of the Black Power movement, four young male Californians (Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong) formed an organization in 1969—the Combined Asian-American Resources Project. In their ground-breaking anthology of Asian-American literature, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), they asserted an authentic voice and identity specific to Asian Americans. They emphasized “Asian-American sensibility” that features anti-assimilation, anti-Orientalism, the heroic tradition, and cultural integrity.

While either ambassadors of good will, assimilationists, or cultural nationalists address their concerns within the binary oppositions, Edith Maude Eaton is one of only a few who tries to claim an identity beyond the in-between relationship. The eldest daughter of a British father and Chinese mother, Eaton regards herself as a “racial pioneer.” She articulates her unusual position as an Eurasian of mixed ancestry without submitting herself to either one nationality or a harmonious blend of two. Instead, she distains ethnic fixity and equates ethnic ambiguity with Eurasian

sensibility. A new racial category, “Eurasians,” Eaton claims in this autobiographical essay, will be “someday a great part of the world” (117).vi

In fact, many early bi-racial writers, unlike Edith Maud Eaton (who resists being racially determined), usually portray bi-racial characters in their writing as ones identifying with a polarized identity or view a mixed race through an assimilationist perspective.viiThe former can be demonstrated by many slave narratives; the latter will be seen in works by writers like Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, an African-American novelist, essayist, and editor (1859-1930). Including many mixed-race characters in her stories, Hopkins advocates an assimilationist agenda as well as racial

amalgamation in her literary works and social commentaries. To resolve racial differences and conflicts, Hopkins places hope on biological racial assimilation. Moreover, to Hopkins, “African-Americans’ genetic improvement was necessary for racial advancement and dependent on their marital choices” (Nickel 1).viii

It was until W.E.B. Dubois who offered a theoretical framework to re-consider a peculiar identity for bi-racial individuals out of the binary division. In Souls of Black Folk (1903), he “recognizes the miscegenated cultural identity of all African

Americans with the idea of ‘double-consciousness’” (Hiraldo 37).ix In addition, Jean Toomer, whose Cane (1923) often regarded as the first African American modernist novel, refused to be racially determined according to a singular racial designation and sought to exist beyond the constraints of established categories. About his early poem “The First American,” he said, “the idea of which was that here in America we are in the process forming a new 5race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race […] A new type of man was arising in this country—not European, not African, not Asiatic—but American.”xLike Edith Maud Eaton, Toomer also expected a growing popularity of the mixed race and a general acceptance of racial indeterminacy.

While “ambassadors of good will” aim at cultural communication, while assimilationists seek social integration, while cultural nationalists promote political solidarity, while mixed subjects desire for a new racial category, they are more or less trapped within the either/or racial discourse. When one declares “black” beautiful, reifies “Asian-American sensibility,” or celebrates a kind of third-ness, one cannot help but address to the racial Master, thereby one’s identity unavoidably characterized by how one’s looking at others gazing at him or her. Accordingly, one’s pursuit of identity is conditioned within a movement between the binary opposition. Binary relationships posit the incompleteness and inconsistence of the other. For example, the unspoken “one drop rule” codified a hybridized other as “octoroon” or “quadroon” to segregate all “impurity,” or, rather, “incompleteness” from white. In contrast to the incomplete other, the normative white subject is invested as an ideal ego, one that is consistent as well as whole. Thus, to articulate race in terms of binary opposition has already been racist and their binary relationships are always imaginary.

* * * * * *

i

It is modeled upon a real-life New York suburb, the Scarsdale of Gish Jen’s youth.

ii

Mississippi did not officially legalize interracial marriage until 1987. Interracial marriage remained illegal in Mississippi until 1987, and could have resulted in a ten-year prison sentence for the couple. Alice Walker told CNN in a recent interview, "Part of the lure of our marriage was that it was illegal."

http://www.rebeccawalker.com/article_2000_existing.htm

iii

Check on-line source: the author changes her name legally from Leventhal to Walker.taking her mother's family name, she is affirming her "affinity for blackness," and her "experience of living in the world with non-white skin." Walker writes of changing her name from Rebecca Leventhal to Rebecca Leventhal Walker. She is in

12th grade at the time, and describes her decision, in part, as "privileging my

blackness and downplaying what I think of as my whiteness." Coming where it

does in her narrative, and following strong words of rejection for her father and her father's world, the passage seems to carry a great weight. "I want to be closer to my

mother, to have something run between us that cannot be denied," she writes. "I want a marker that links us tangibly and forever as mother and daughter. That links me tangibly and forever with blackness." (312, Primary)

iv

Use the tem by Elaine H. Kim in Asian American Literature page 24. h.See

v

Is the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854).

vi

From Aiiieeee

vii

For a detailed discussion on bi-racial chracters in Amreican literature see R29

viii

See John Nickel, “Eugenics and the Fiction of Pauline Hopkins” ATQ ns 14 no 1, 47-60 (2000).

ix

R29/37

x

The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer ed by Darwin Turner, 1980, Washington, D.C. : Howard UP, 121.