Childhood Memories of the Emigrant Experience: Filling in the Gaps

• In Event: Difficult Childhoods: Adult Memories of Innocence, Displacement, and Loss

Abstract

The second-generation immigrant phenomenon is one in which the child experiences dislocation second hand, through the older generation’s stories, rememberings, forgettings, and tellings. Through the lens of Julia Kwan’s 2005 film Eve and the Fire Horse and Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 fantasy-autobiography, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, I examine how their child-protagonists, as second-generation Chinese immigrants in a society that unabashedly promoted the male child over the female child, are portrayed as learning about their place in the world. In the interstices of collective voices from the past, Kwan and Kingston describe how the girl-child must fill the gaps of their families’ cautionary ‘talk-stories’ and legacies of unlucky omens. It is in these gaps that the child’s imagination gets weaved into the second-hand memory stories to form personally meaningful visions of self and social justice.

The girl-child’s emigrant experience involves a triple dislocation: first, in internalizing the role of the ‘worthless’ outcast; second, in the conceptual conundrum whereby childhood can only be understood in its afterlife; and third, in internalizing a sense of one’s very being as an unlucky omen. Kwan and Kingston, as adults drawing on their memories of girlhood experiences of dislocation, provide rich material through which to rethink meanings of childhood, gender, legacy and displacement.

The paper applies a feminist-psychoanalytic framework to examine the second-generation girl’s perspective advantage (Ladson-Billings, 2000). Kwan and Kingston draw out the cultural sanctions that framed, unrecognizably at the time, their upbringing as girls and women, in ways that both challenged and reinforced their own denigration. Reading invites us “to mingle our thoughts, visions, and hopes with someone’s else’s” (Grumet, 2006, p. 207). As an adult reader of these texts, as well as an education scholar and former early childhood educator, what gravitates me toward these particular constructs of childhood and girlhood (as “normal”, as “worthless”) draws from my own memories of childhood. These layered constructs then operate to shape my picture of myself as a former child (and present adult).

Author

• Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University