The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-making in Mona in the Promised Land

Abstract

Much has been written the cultural alternatives continuity, rapture, or invention in recent years. has become a pervasive thread that runs not only throughout the cultural production ethnic intracultures such as the Asian American one, but also throughout the cultural production the mainstream United States, for, as Oscar Handlin points out, the history immigration is the history America (qtd. in Sollors, Literature 649). All three stances, cultural continuity, rupture, and invention, find an appropriate formal representation in the trope the ritual/ceremony. Taking as the starting point for my argument Alan Wald's differentiation between ritual and ceremony as first implied in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, I intend to deal here with the dialogic tensions between ritual and ceremony in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, in the intertextual context Chinese-American literature. I will consider Jen's problematizing Sollor's binary consent and descent. As Sau-ling Wong points out, (1) at least three new tendencies can be observed in the Asian American critical field: the abatement cultural nationalism, the increasing permeability between Asian and Asian American studies and communities, and, last but not least, the new favouring diasporic domestic approaches to Asian America (1-2). However, the necessary denationalization that draws critics and scholars away from dangerous essentialist stances is often offset by the attendant depoliticization Asian American issues. On the one hand, we ought to bear in mind the risks falling back into narrow understandings identity and nation. Yet, as Wong reminds us, we still have to take into account the urgent need to contextualize and recontextualize the understanding Asian American studies, and, by extension, ethnic studies, in order to avoid constructing a dehistoricized dichotomy (12) between the internationalist, deconstructivist mode and the old cultural nationalism the Aiiieeeee school. We must situate our analysis Mona in the Promised Land in this theoretical framework so as to prevent readers from perceiving the ritual-ceremony binarism, or the alternatives continuity, rupture, or invention, as fixed, chronological choices. What could be suggested instead is the strong likelihood that these two cultural and literary tropes function in a concurrent way. We thus echo Sau-ling Wong's advice regarding the new Asian American state affairs: It would be far more useful to conceive modes rather than phases Asian American subjectivity: an indigenizing mode can coexist and alternate with a diasporic or a transnational mode, but the latter is not to be lauded as a culmination the former (Denationalization 17). The distinction between ritual and ceremony as pointed out by Alan Wald can then be analysed from a diachronic and a synchronic point view. In the first case, we could trace back the essentialist, nationalistic thesis and then describe the responding feminist and deconstructivist antitheses. And yet, it is preferable to keep chronology out the foreground since it would easily mislead us into thinking that, once Kingston and later writers have contested the masculinist and essentialistic agenda cultural nationalism, Asian Americans have got over and grown out of that stage, and no reference to it is needed. Thus, the focus my analysis is not so much on the rise these different perspectives, although we must mention their genesis in passing. Rather, I will focus on the crucial synchronic description the palette that goes, spatially, from the mode ceremony to that ritual, or vice versa, in Mona in the Promised Land. Wald studies Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and discovers new insights that contribute to a more enlightened understanding spirituality. Ceremony is Silko's recording Tayo's spiritual quest with the help a mentor, a heterodox medicine man. …