"Passing Like Cherry Blossoms:" Silence in Chinese-American Literature (thesis)

Abstract

This thesis was born out of the desire to see myself, a Chinese-American person, represented in contemporary American fiction. In the publishing industry today, books written by and about people of minority racial or ethnic groups often are not the ones that are widely popularized. Since I myself am a young adult, I began my search in the Young Adult genre, coming up with a select few books written by Chinese Americans about Chinese American protagonists, but I found I had to widen my search. I ended up with two contemporary fiction novels, one YA novel, and a graphic novel that was written in English by a Singaporean Chinese person. So my lens shifted slightly -- I was not writing exclusively about Chinese-American authors, but rather about Chinese authors who were writing to a North American audience. Through these four novels, I was able to trace clear patterns of silence, a motif I didn't know I was looking for when I conceived this project. In every single one of the novels I even considered, generational silence existed and created conflict between parents and children. . . . Of course, this thesis cannot cover all of the intricacies and contexts of silence, nor can it speak to everyone's experiences with it, but in Asian-American literature, in particular, silence is often a means of handling the paradox of Asian-American identity: not being really Asian nor American, continuously straddling the lines between fitting the model minority myth and rejecting it. Matthew Salesses writes in his essay, "What Does It Mean to Write Asian-American Literature?" about the "guises" that Asian-Americans take on: the guises of the model minority, the guise of acceptability, of "Americanness" are all silencing. He writes that "when we silence our resistance, we become split in order to become seen . . . because we have become what the other person wants to see" (Salesses). This concept reappears throughout each one of my primary texts; each one of the Asian-Americans experiences this dichotomy between who they really are and who the world wants them to be. Only by lowering these guises, both inter- and intra-familial, can we begin to divest ourselves of this kind of silence that continually oppresses and marginalizes us. [From Introduction]