The Politics of Memory, Diaspora, and Identity in Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister

Abstract

Silver Sister, a biographical novel telling the unique life stories of the so-called “comb-ups,” represents China as a troubled homeland with turmoil, war, and painful memories. Silver, the protagonist of this novel, as a Chinese comb-up, has mixed and doubled identities as an illiterate Chinese female in diaspora. On one hand, she is imprinted with characteristics of Chineseness. On the other hand, the novel contests the notion of Chineseness by demonstrating the interactive relation between Silver’s personal remembrance and collective memory of common Chinese females at that time. In this essay, it is argued that this novel is more precisely about how traumatic memory transforms Chinese women’s diasporic identity in a global context, instead of only in a journey from China to Australia. Its meaning lies not only on the way of representing trauma and memory respectively, but the way how traumatic memories together with other diasporic memories function on influencing identity politics.