TY - BOOK AU - Chu,Patricia P. TI - Where I have never been: migration, melancholia, and memory in Asian American narratives of return T2 - Asian American history and culture SN - 9781439902264 AV - PS153.A84 U1 - 810.9/895073 PY - 2019/// CY - Philadelphia, Rome, Tokyo PB - Temple University Press KW - American literature KW - Asian American authors KW - History and criticism KW - Asian Americans in literature KW - 20th century KW - 21st century KW - Emigration and immigration in literature KW - Homeland in literature KW - Return in literature KW - Melancholy in literature KW - Memory in literature KW - Asian Americans KW - Ethnic identity N1 - Includes bibliographical references and (pages 231-245) and index; Introduction -- "Ears Attuned to Two Cultures": Reconciling Accounts in Cultural Curiosity -- Transpacific Echos in the Family Memoir: Sojourns and Returns in Lisa See's On Gold Mountain -- "The One Who Mediates": Mimicry, Melancholia, and Countermemory in The Concubine's Children -- Working Through Diasporic Melancholia: Winberg and May-lee Chai's The Girl From Purple Mountain -- "A Being...from a Different World": Yung Wing and the Making of a Global Subjectivity -- "To Bring the Dead to Life": Countermemories in Minatoya's Stangeness of Beauty and Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being -- Coda N2 - "This manuscript looks at migration, melancholia, and memory in what the author calls "Asian American narratives of return," or fiction and nonfiction narratives in which the narrator visits the ancestral homeland in Asia"--; "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"-- UR - https://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9781439902264.pdf UR - http://tupress.temple.edu/book/0634 ER -