Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu Hong Zeng Patricia Chu. Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return. Temple UP, 2019. ix + 255 pp. Patricia Chu's Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return breaks new ground in Asian American studies in the following senses. First, it is the first book to devote itself exclusively to the study of diasporic Asian American narratives of return, specifically, the narratives of later-generation Asian Americans who visit their parents' and ancestors' homeland. Previously, Asian American studies predominantly focused on diasporic Asian American assimilation efforts, in the vein of postcolonial study: "Asian American Studies, focused on immigration and social justice within the United States, has historically marginalized the stories of educated Chinese who studied here and returned to China" (6). Second, the book's methodology is syncretic and uniquely combines postcolonial study, Sigmund Freud's and Franz Fanon's theories [End Page 593] on melancholy and mourning, and genre studies of autobiography and travel writing. Third, the book explores important critical terms such as racial melancholy, postimperial and postcolonial melancholy, and countermemory and postmemory. The book also discloses the relevance of these terms to Asian American narratives of return. Last, the book provides new insight into Chinese history and Asian American history through its unique lens of the narratives of return, written by diasporic Asian Americans who possess a double vision of two cultures. As a result, the book helps to decolonize the study of Asian history and draw global attention to Asian American culture and identity. An overview of chapters bespeaks the originality of Chu's materials and syncretic research approach. Chapter 1 establishes this syncretic method and introduces the narrative of return as a genre of literary memorial related to other transnational or global Asian American studies. It discusses genre, racial melancholia, postcolonial melancholia, types of return migration, and conventions of travel narration. Chapter 2 studies the historian Josephine Khu's 2001 collection of personal essays written by the children of diasporic Chinese settled around the world. It examines these writers' evolving sense of self, culture, and identity through meeting family in China. Chu perceptively analyzes these narrators' racial melancholia, which arise from conflicts between their cultural legacies and personal choices. Chapter 3 examines Lisa See's On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, a memoir about the multiple generations of See's mixed-race family. Chu underscores the fictional narrative tools that See employs to distill imagination and personality into the historical archive of family members she had not seen. According to Chu, See's work manifests the typical migration patterns and "Chineseness" (74) of merchant-class Chinese. Chapter 4 and 5 explores the family memoirs of Denise Chong and Winberg and May-lee Chai. Chu studies how Chong's work manifests the racial melancholy that, after arising from her grandparents' (Canadian Chinese laborers) inability to achieve oversea success—by being excluded based on gender from fulfilling careers and being trapped in household chores—was passed onto their descendants. The text both registers and combats this melancholia through narration and countermemory. The Chais' intergenerational story examines the postcolonial melancholy of the narrator's parents. Their parents, educated in the US, went back to China to help with the construction of the country but found that the liberal democratic [End Page 594] ideas they learned from the US could not be applied to China in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, so they ultimately returned to the US. However, their attachment to China formed a chasm with their solely American-educated daughter. Thus, the Chais' parents represent the cultural identity and postcolonial melancholy of diasporic Chinese culture elites. Chapter 6 studies the 1909 memoir of Jung Wing, the first Chinese graduate of an American university, a diplomat who organized the late Qing study-abroad movement. According to Chu, Wing exhibits a deimperialization in his attack of Qing government, as well as a decolonization in his criticism of Western imperialism. Chu argues incisively that Wing's melancholia is...