“Burning Hides What It Burns”: Retrospective Narration and the Protoqueer Asian American Child in Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh

Abstract

This article explores the growth and maturation of the protoqueer Asian American child as depicted in Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh (2001). The novel crucially intervenes in and expands existing discourses of childhood, offering up the possibility of alternative inheritances and mythical progenitors. Further still, the process of retrospective storytelling enacts a recovery process that situates the queer Asian American adult alongside a collective community threatened with erasure. In this sense, narrative perspective acts to reconceive social formation through a comparatively configured and asymmetrically presented chronicle of survivorships.