To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

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B o w e r i n g / Lee for a reading of romance that "originates in dissatisfaction," Radway enjoins her sisters to come to an understanding that "their need for romance is a function of their dependent status as women and of their acceptance of marriage as the only route to female fulfilment (220), and encourages them to turn the imaginary outlet of romance into a springboard for social action. 14 See Brantlinger; also Inden, who argues that the feminization of India, and of its "irrational Hindu spirit," helped fashion an ontological space for the British Empire, whose— one presumes male—leaders would "inject the rational intellect and world-ordering will that the Indians themselves could not provide" (128). 15 See the oppositional model described by Freud: The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task. (237) The neurotic's estrangement from his parents, according to Freud, manifests itself in the fantasies and day-dreams of the "family romance." This neurosis can be overcome; hence the view of Disappearing Moon Café as therapeutic fiction: as a means of coming to terms with a, personal and communal, past rooted in conflict and estrangement. Like Freud, Lee seems to wish to turn romance from a vehicle of deception into an instrument of liberation; she does so, in Disappearing Moon Café, by stressing the Oedipal dimensions of the family romance, and by using these to contest the "natural order" of patrilineal descent. See, also, the implicit literary challenge presented in To All Appearances A Lady, where the fiction operates counterdiscursively toward its paternal ancestors. 16 On the shibboleth of authenticity, see the relevant sections in Minh-ha. Minh-ha's attempt, through the agency of story, to forge a community of ethnic women who are moved to identify their own common concerns while resisting the identitary labels tagged on them by the dominant culture, is very much in keeping with the spirit of Sky Lee's fiction. (See, for example, the last section of Woman, Native, Other. "My Grandmother's Story.") Minh-ha's strategy, like Lee's, is to use the intersecting categories of gender and ethnicity to cut across fixed definitions of personal/cultural identity. 17 See, in particular, the rhapsodic ending of Disappearing Moon Café, which recapitulates the early—semi-mythical—encounter between Gwei Chang and Kelora Chen. It seems, through this passionate alliance, that Lee is attempting to forge a link between two of Canada's oppressed minorities—a link that is further strengthened by the Native writer Lee Maracle's poem and short story, "Yin Chin," which are dedicated to Sky Lee. In Disappearing Moon Café, the regenerative potential of romance is enlisted to the common cause of two embattled "ethnic" cultures seeking a better, freer future. 18 For an understanding of the ambivalence of ethnic writing within an Asian American context, see the essays in Lim and Ling (especially those written by the editors); also the introduction to Ling, Between Worlds. Lim sees the history of Asian-American writing as moving from "ambivalence" to "productive multivalence": a paradigm shift that is also, arguably, traced in Lee's history of the Wong family in Disappearing Moon Café. Note, however, the specificity of the Canadian context in Lee's fiction. Chinese communities in Canada, which emerge out of a different history to that of their sister-communities in 46
the United States, and which currently exist within a different geo-political make-up, are unlikely to subscribe to the benevolent pluralism espoused by Lim and Ling. Lee's model is still primarily oppositional (although by no means militantly separatist); her interest is not so much in integrating Chinese-Canadian culture into the wider geo-cultural realm as in locating it within the interstices of the dominant cultural system. WORKS CITED Beer, Gillian. The Romance. London: Methuen, 1970. Bongie, Christopher. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin-de-siècle. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1991. Bowering, Marilyn. To All Appearances A Lady. Toronto: Fawcett Crest, 1989. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1988. Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de. Atala. Paris: Editions Gamier, 1965 [1962]. Craig, Terrence. Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction 1905-1980. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1987. Eigner, Edwin. Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic. Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Freud, Sigmund. "Family Romances." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 9. Trans. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1959, 235-44. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Jameson, Fredric. "Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre." New Literary History 7.1 (i975)- Lai, David. Chinatowns: Towns Within Cities in Canada. Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1988. Lee, Bennett, and Jin Wong-Chu, eds. Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing By Chinese Canadians. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1992. Lee, Sky. Disappearing Moon Café. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1990. Li, Peter. The Chinese in Canada. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin and Amy Ling, eds. Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. Mandel, Eli. "Ethnic Voice and Canadian Writing." Another Time. Erin: Press Porcepic, 1977. 91-102. Maracle, Lee. "Yin Chin." W.H. New, ed. Native Writers and Canadian Writing. Vancouver." U British Columbia P, 1990,156-61. Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Monsarrat, Ann. A Very Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man. London: Cassell, 1980. 47
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