From National Allegory to Sentimental Fabulations: Gender, Affect and the Representation of Chinese Migration to the United States in the Post-Tiananmen Era

Abstract

Written in the wake of Rey Chow’s theorization of the Chinese sentimental, this thesis deploys an affect-centered conceptual framework to study selected televisual, filmic and literary narratives of Chinese migration to the United States produced in the post-Tiananmen era. The introduction provides some historical background for Chinese migration to the US and reviews the extant scholarship on Chinese- and English-language representations of, in particular, intellectual migration, many of which blend autobiographical and fictional modes. The main body of the thesis comprises four close readings of texts that represent migration as a highly gendered experience. The first close reading centers on the landmark Chinese television drama A Native of Beijing in New York, which reveals how migration puts in tension traditional variants of Chinese masculinity that the migrant male finds difficult to reconcile sentimentally. This argument provides a context for the following two chapters which discuss films that are centered on female protagonists and, coincidentally, more successful in achieving affective resolution through the deployment of the sentimental mood as defined by Chow. The first film considered is Sylvia Chang’s Siao Yu, which deploys a predominantly silent female protagonist to reveal and reconcile the conflicting demands made on Chinese women in the diasporic setting. The second film discussed is Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which thematically foregrounds the unspoken discord and emotional distance between a visiting Chinese father and his divorced adult daughter who resides in the US. The final chapter examines Ha Jin’s semi-autobiographical novel A Free Life as an instance of unsentimental writing about the male experience of migration. In considering these four narratives, this thesis uncovers that compared with their loudly protesting male counterparts, female characters feature as poignant figures of emotional translation and are thus reflective of a new understanding of the affective labor engaged by migration.