Representations of Memory and Identity in Chinese-Australian English-Language Novels from 1990-2010

Abstract

This thesis argues that one of the main characteristics of contemporary Chinese Australian literature in English language is its heavy focus on memory and identity. In order to prove this claim, the thesis analyses five English-language novels written by Chinese Australian writers from the period 1990-2010. These works are Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister, Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing, Ouyang Yu’s The English Class, Lau Siew Mei’s Playing Madame Mao and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon.

All of the five novels engage with notions of memory and identity in terms of textual structure, characterization, generic features and central themes. This thesis analyses how the selected texts view identity formation as a contested progress influenced by the modes through which fictionalized memory works. In each text, the categories of memory modes are identified and discussed, along with the textual representations. These travelling modes of memory demonstrate that identity can transcend collective belonging, ethnic differences, national borders, political frameworks and generational space. Such modes include ‘cosmopolitan memory’, which refers to the phenomena that collective memories transcend national and ethnical boundaries. A character who observes his or her past as a cosmopolitan experience acquires a cosmopolitan way of living, thus he or she does not need to be identified with any ethnic group or nationality. Cultural memory is also strongly attached to different languages in diaspora and, when memory is translated from one language to another, cultural translation plays a role in judging whether the past is correctly transferred and previous identities are sustained in a new environment. ‘Political memory’ refers to memory embedded in political incidents, usually traumatic and contested, through which individual identity is in a dynamic relation with national identity. ‘Transgenerational memory’ refers to memory that is difficult to be passed on across generations. In all of these modes, identity as a notion is contested and deconstructed.

These literary works not only challenge essentialist formations of identity, but also experiment with new ways of establishing it by building new modes of memory. The thesis, in this way, examines the creation of new memory modes that allow new formation of identities in Chinese Australian literary contexts.