Reading With My Grandmother is an analysis of a range of Chinese Canadian literature that deepens the scholarly engagement by using elements of the author's family's story-her grandmother's letters and and photographs. This engagement allows the author to simultaneously illustrate and participate in the varied ways Chinese Canadian literature has been imagined and produced in Canada in the last thirty-five years, examining texts such as Fred Wah's poetry collection Diamond Grill (1996), Judy Fong Bates' memoir The Year of Finding Memory (2010), and Paul Yee's novel A Superior Man (2015). In keeping with recent calls within Asian Canadian studies for innovative creative-critical methods, the author establishes a scholarly style that embraces subjectivity and demonstrates a dynamic method of revealing linkages and discontinuities between past and present Chinese Canadian writing. Drawing on literary works and inherited stories, the author considers how family narratives give voice to otherwise muted and traumatized experiences, and how they require readers to question dominant versions of Canada's past to make room for more perspectives. The author also examines the ways such stories can be restricted by readerly expectations for narrative completeness. In navigating these concerns, she explores concerns of connection, community, and identity that have national, gendered, and racialized implications.
Lindsay Diehl is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Manitoba, specializing in contemporary Canadian literature and Asian Canadian studies. Her research, which focuses on Chinese Canadian writing, has been featured in such journals as Canadian Literature, Canada & Beyond, and English Studies in Canada. She lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Treaty One territory.
Table of Contents Introduction Family Secrets and Ghostly Hauntings: Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows: A Chinese Memoir, Judy Fong Bates' The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir, and my Grandmother's letters Gold Mountain Heroes: White Settler Nation-Building Myths and the Remasculinization of the Chinese Canadian Male Body Reading Against Orientalism: SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children, and my Grandmother's Letters Contested Ground: Mixed Race Subjectivity in Fred Wah's Diamond Grill and in My Own Stories Conclusion Works Cited
A creative-critical exploration of family history and Chinese Canadian literature.
"In her introduction to this wonderful book, Lindsay Diehl recounts sitting at her grandmother's kitchen table, 'listening to her stories.' Extending this act of listening, Diehl moves across family stories, personal reflections, and attentive readings of Chinese Canadian literary texts. Brilliantly bridging the critical and the creative, this book grapples with and often challenges what we think we know about Asian Canadian writing and about Canada as a colonial contact zone. Above all, Reading with My Grandmother is a book infused with deep love." - Guy Beauregard, Professor at National Taiwan University
