Mediating Historical Memory in Asian/American Family Memoirs: K. Connie Kang'S Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow

Abstract

Family memoirs, the auto/biographical story of at least three generations (or one hundred years) in the life of one family, have become ubiquitous in ethnic writing in the United States.1 In the field of Asian American writing, Gus Lee's Chasing Hepburn, Mira Kamdar's Motiba's Tattoos, and Lisa See's On Gold Mountain are among many examples of what have also been called lives, or multigenerational or intergenerational auto/biographies. Family memoirs focus as much on members of one's family as on oneself, typically blurring the boundaries we tend to draw between autobiography and biogra phy. In many cases, as I argue for Asian/American memoirs, they function as historical narratives.2 These texts negotiate personal identity through a rela tional narrative that also engages cultural and collective processes of community formation. Generally written by one person, the stories that make up the text display both an interand intra-generational collective voice that connects with readers in important ways, evincing a cultural project that resonates with current issues of self-representation in ethnic discourse.3 The relational approach to auto/biographical identity in these family memoirs functions on two levels: first, within the text itself, as the author draws upon the stories of family members to complete her own, and second, as these texts deliberately interpellate a historical past and a present audience. The texts analyzed in this essay, K. Connie Kang's Home was the Land of Morning Calm (1995) and Doung Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow (1999), demonstrate the ways in which family memoirs mediate Asian/American history and cultural memory.4