Chinese Diasporas as Methodologies: Grieving against Empires, Grieving toward Justice

• In Event: “Looking Back, Looking Forward:” Envisioning Asian Diasporas as Methodologies for “Thriving Futures”

Abstract

Many Asian diasporas have lost family members and faced exacerbating racial hatred due to the COVID-19. However, racial stigmas such as model minority often police and silence Asian diasporas’ grief in the U.S. empire. The racial grief many Black and Latinx students experience in schools is caused by the impenetrable fortress of whiteness (Grinage, 2019; Vaught, 2012). Tiffe (2017) argued that Queer Latinx youth can reimagine grief as an ancestral ritual to bring their wounded souls and spirits closer to justice and healing. Nevertheless, few studies have examined grief at the nexus of Asian diasporas and the U.S. empire.

Freud (1917) defined melancholia as one’s unresolved grief caused by their incapacity to fully identify or comprehend the loss of loved ones. Cheng (2001) built on Freud’s theory and defined racial melancholia as “the technology and the nightmare of the American Dream” (p. xi). That is, racial melancholia promotes democratic ideals yet denies access to such realities for racialized “others” in the U.S. empire. Eng and Han (2018) applied racial melancholia to capture how Asian Americans are desired yet despised for their exploitable subjectivities, marking them perpetually unbelonging to the U.S. empire or their ancestral homelands. Moreover, Asian Americans are often entangled with the residues of military conflicts among Asian nations during World War II and U.S. imperial interventions during the Cold War (Yoneyama, 2016). These memories anchor and uproot Asian Americans’ racialized grief in the geopolitical imaginary of transnational imperial rivalries (Kim, 2019).

Poetic inquiry draws on “the literary arts in the attempt to more authentically express human experiences” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxxvi). Namely, poetic inquiry is a creative approach that connects the autobiographical, the scholarly, and the political, thereby advocating for just changes (Faulkner, 2020). Asian American poets, such as Chang (2021), have illustrated how poetry can serve as a curricular intervention against the imperial erasure of Asian histories and a pedagogical tool to voice the racial grief of diasporas. In this inquiry, I explore the key question: How can Chinese diaspora educators use poetic inquiry to grieve against U.S. imperialism and toward racial justice?

The data included three poems I wrote between 2020 and 2022. “Hands,” written after the passing of my grandmothers in early 2020, portrays my longing for their love and my ancestral homeland. The second poem, “Undone,” written after the mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021, shows how my racial melancholia is entangled with anti-Asian racism intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. I composed “(Un)Done” on the first anniversary of the Atlanta mass shooting in March 2022, in which I critiqued how the U.S. empire entices Asian Diasporas with its benevolent ideals yet suffocates us with its unavoidable decay.

Poetic inquiry can serve as an innovative methodological tool to (re)member the history of U.S. imperial displacement and killings of Asian Diasporas. More importantly, it can help Asian diasporic educators to use poetry to voice our racialized grief against the U.S. empire and rekindle our poetic imaginations for racial healing.

Author

• Lin Wu, Western Oregon University