Where I Have Never Been

Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return

Patricia P. Chu

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781439902264, 9781439902257
• eBook ISBN: 9781439902271
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents' ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. 

Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic "returns": first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives—including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others—register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory. 

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Names and Spelling
• 1. Narratives of Return: A Transpacific Tradition
• 2. "Ears Attuned to Two Cultures": Reconciling Accounts in Josephine Khu's Cultural Curiosity
• 3. Transpacific Echoes in the Family Memoir: Sojourns and Returns in Lisa See's On Gold Mountain
• 4. "The One Who Mediates": Mimicry, Melancholia, and Countermemory in Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children
• 5. Working through Diasporic Melancholia: Winberg and May-lee Chai's The Girl from Purple Mountain
• 6. "A Being . . . from a Different World": Yung Wing and the Making of a Global Subjectivity
• 7. "To Bring the Dead to Life": Countermemories in Lydia Minatoya's The Strangeness of Beauty and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being
• Coda
• Notes
• Works Cited and Additional Sources
• Index