Reading with My Grandmother (Chinese Canadian Literature, History, and Family)

Reading With My Grandmother is an analysis of a range of Chinese Canadian literature that deepens the scholarly engagement by using elements of the author’s family’s story—her grandmother’s letters and and photographs.

This engagement allows the author to simultaneously illustrate and participate in the varied ways Chinese Canadian literature has been imagined and produced in Canada in the last thirty-five years, examining texts such as Fred Wah’s biotext Diamond Grill (1996), Judy Fong Bates’ memoir The Year of Finding Memory (2010), and Paul Yee’s novel A Superior Man (2015). In keeping with recent calls within Asian Canadian studies for innovative creative-critical methods, the author establishes a scholarly style that embraces subjectivity and demonstrates a dynamic method of revealing linkages and discontinuities between past and present Chinese Canadian writing.

Drawing on literary works and inherited stories, the author considers how family narratives give voice to otherwise muted and traumatized experiences, and how they require readers to question dominant versions of Canada’s past to make room for more perspectives. The author also examines the ways such stories can be restricted by readerly expectations for narrative completeness. In navigating these concerns, she explores concerns of connection, community, and identity that have national, gendered, and racialized implications.