Reading with my grandmother : Chinese Canadian literature, history, and family / Lindsay Diehl.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Diehl, Lindsay, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Canadian literature--Chinese authors--History and criticism.

Canadian literature.

Canadian literature--21st century--History and criticism.

Chinese in literature.

Families in literature.

Families--History.

Families.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

183 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, [2026]

Summary:

"This book is an analysis of a range of Chinese Canadian literature, including Fred Wah's poetry collection Diamond Grill (1996), Judy Fong Bates' memoir The Year of Finding Memory (2010), and Paul Yee's novel A Superior Man (2015), that deepens the scholarly engagement by using elements of the author's family's story--her grandmother's letters and and photographs. This engagement allows the author to simultaneously illustrate and participate in the varied ways Chinese Canadian literature has been imagined and produced in Canada in the last thirty-five years. In keeping with recent calls within Asian Canadian studies for innovative creative-critical methods, the author establishes a scholarly style that embraces subjectivity and demonstrates a dynamic method of revealing linkages and discontinuities between past and present Chinese Canadian writing. Drawing on literary works and inherited stories, the author considers how family narratives give voice to otherwise muted and traumatized experiences, and how they require readers to question dominant versions of Canada's past to make room for more perspectives. The author also examines the ways such stories can be restricted by readerly expectations for narrative completeness. In navigating these concerns, she explores concerns of connection, community, and identity that have national, gendered, and racialized implications."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Family secrets and ghostly hauntings : Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Memoir; Judy Fong Bates's The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir; and my grandmother's letters

Gold mountain heroes : White settler nation-building myths and the remasculinization of the Chinese Canadian male body

Reading against orientalism : SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Café; Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children; and my Grandmother's letters

Contested ground : Mixed race subjectivity in Fred Wah's Diamond Grill and in my own stories.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-170) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Diehl, Lindsay. Reading with my grandmother.

ISBN:

9781771127288

1771127287

OCLC:

1535617876