One way to think broadly about transnationalism is to define it as the regular movement across national boundaries of persons, money, goods, and ideas. The literature on Chinese transnationalism that fits this definition has often described transnational networks of diasporic Chinese business or other organizations which link groups of Chinese to each other or to China. In recent years, much of this literature has been specifically about Chinese business networks that facilitate the investments of globalized Chinese in the modern development of their “home,” or ancestral localities in south China. In such studies, the ultimate research interest is economic. Culture...

Almost nobody does it anymore. If you take the slower road south down the middle of Alberta from Edmonton to Calgary, following the old rail line, you will cut across Main Street, Olds, Alberta, where you might stop for lunch at the A & J Family Restaurant (see Figure 3.1). In 1915, you would have stepped across the railway platform (the railway stopped running a long time ago but the station is still there, empty and abandoned) and ordered a hot lunch at what was then known simply as the Public Lunch Counter (see Figure 3.2). There is a long...

It is a short, rather grainy black and white video, a series of flickering images that most Singaporeans of my age or older are very familiar with. The scene is a press conference on August 7, 1965, hastily called by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to announce Singapore’s independence from the Malaysian Federation, which it had entered only two years previously. Lee sits at a coffee table, surrounded by other members of his government, and the camera alternates fitfully between a long shot and an almost overly intimate closeup. When Lee speaks, he is barely audible, and his voice...

In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry works from the thesis that, as she says in her introduction, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). The subsequent text of the book goes to great lengths to show how language and pain in the body interrelate. Her argument is that the whole possibility of narrative is destroyed by the undergoing of pain. But immediately upon returning to a state of...

In “Notes from a Fragmented Daughter,”¹ Elena Tajima Creef, the “daughter of a World War II Japanese war bride who met and married [Elena’s] North Carolinan hillbilly father one fine day in 1949” (83) addresses her sense of cultural fragmentation, a product of her dual cultural heritage, as well as her exoticization by European Americans. I am prefacing my article with an excerpt from this text, as it links “Asian” food to female “Asian” ethnicity. It also addresses cultural ambivalence. It is these two issues that I explore in three short narratives: one by a Chinese American, one by a...

Many critics, noting the dialogic quality inherent in ethnic texts, have referred to Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogism in their analyses of Maxine Hong Kingston’s works.² Bakhtin understood dialogism to occur when a privileged belief system or view is “relativized [and] de-privileged” by the appearance of an opposing viewpoint.³ Although “not a dialogue in the narrative sense ... rather it is a dialogue between points of view.”⁴ The result of such a clash is what Bakhtin terms “double-voiced discourse” in which “[a] potential dialogue is embedded.”⁵ This mixed speech is what he further calls “double-accented, double-styled hybrid construction,”⁶ which occurs...

The expression Overseas Chinese (haiwai huaren) here is understood as referring to people of Chinese ancestry living outside mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. The term Overseas Chinese literature, haiwai huaren wenxue, contains two notions: Overseas Chinese-language literature (haiwai huawen wenxue) and Overseas non-Chinese-language literature (haiwai fei huawen wenxue). Despite the fact that both kinds of literature are written by people of Chinese descent overseas, they receive entirely different treatment by scholars in mainland China. The former has received much attention since 1979, with the introduction of well-known North American Overseas Chinese writers such as Bai Xianyong (b. 1937)...

In 2001, numerous international awards garnered by Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, together with its resounding box office success, marked an age of transnationalism and globalization in Chinese film culture and identity.¹ When observed as the flow of culture and the dynamics of the world economy, the concept of globalization embraces the inclusionist ideals of cross-culturalism and boundary crossing.² The dominance of Western culture inevitably makes Westernization a part of the transnationalizing process, as seen in the making and reception of the film, variously described as a Chinese fairy tale, a tragic love story, and the auteur’s boyhood fantasy...

In “Corning Out into the Global System,” Mark Chiang states that the closet “signifies the deviation from ethnic identity that must be covered up” in The Wedding Banquet (379).² For Chiang, it is clear that “all of the younger generation of Chinese/Taiwanese in the United States are engaged in the masquerade of authenticity insofar as none of them are capable of enacting the forms of tradition that the older generation continually seeks to re-create” (379). Drawing upon Chiang’s idea that the closet is “a function of ethnicity as well as sexuality,” I want to explore further the trope of the...

The cinema of the Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang arguably has been neglected by Western scholars in favor of work by other East Asian filmmakers, including those working within the context of the New Taiwanese cinema of which Tsai might be considered tangentially a part. This chapter seeks to go some way in redressing the balance and aims to stimulate further interest in Tsai within the Western academic arena of work on East Asian cinema.¹ My approach to Tsai’s films derives from a position of expertise in postwar European art cinema. For me, what is striking about his visual style and...

The everyday: an open, empty category, one that allows critics to fill it with critical agendas as they please. This is why both its defenders and its detractors can use it to stake their political claims, either as the bedrock of reality, the ground zero of cultural representation, or as a misleading set of appearances concealing ideological exploitation, a collective false consciousness. For these reasons, it is perhaps less interesting simply to unravel the argumentative pros and cons around the everyday as such than to consider specific uses of the everyday in representational practices, which in this essay I shall...