Creative
Writing
“My soul frets in the shadow of his language,” Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
English is an overwhelming language, one of consumption and possession. To transpose a culture is to write over palimpsests of caricatures.
The moments I feel most Chinese are not amidst harvest festival firecrackers, or at dinner tables filled with five generations of relatives, but in isolation: sitting in a creative writing workshop, or seminar classroom, adding correctional footnotes out of some larger obligation, trying to catch lingering Orientalisms like grains of falling sand. I perform as the mouthpiece for a culture I grew up looking in on. Betwixt and between, in a state of diasporic limbo—the children of immigrants are a generation of ghosts.
“Languages do not merely serve to describe the world but in fact help to create that world, establishing both a set of possibilities and a set of limits.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Whose Language?”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Whose Language?”
Excerpt from “The Shaman”
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- Funeral Prayer in Fujian Province
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