Spatial Narrative and Diasporic Conscious in Kingston’s China Men and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Abstract

As an influential contemporary Chinese American writer, Kingston addresses the notions of diasporic identity and consciousness regarding her family and her own physical and psychological experiences of commuting between homeland and hostland, which are necessarily defined by specific arrangements of spatial form and spatial content. A literary work is no doubt a dynamic mechanism ignited by the writer’s creative motivation, the textual narrative design and the reader’s response, and the motif must be reflected in the textual expression. Kingston initially made significant contributions to the formation of the modern Chinese American narrative modes and has focused more on poetic writing later in her career. Her 2011 poetry collection, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, is an inheritance of her early diasporic advocacy in a new age. This paper explores Kingston’s diasporic consciousness from the perspective of spatial narrative in her China Men and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, in an effort to track Kingston’s changes of diasporic consciousness from “claim(ing) America” to transnationalism.