One label would be that of a female Bildungsroman. Pin-chia Feng's essay, titled 'Rethinking the Bildungsroman: the Politics of Rememory and the Bildung of Ethnic American Women Writers' equips me with the proper tools for such a task. While contrasting the development of the German bourgeoisie Bildungsroman and its English counterpart to that of the emerging sub-genre of the female Bildungsroman, particularly looking at the works produced by ethnic women writers in America, Feng reinstates Tzvetan Todorov's conceptualization of genre. Since Todorov views genre as both the process and the product of the dynamics between abstract notions and certain historical contexts, Feng is able to build on this fluid definition as she forges her own understanding of ethnic women's generic texts. Her definition of the female Bildungsroman is a rather inclusive one, since it allows her to examine "any writing by an ethnic woman about the identity formation of an ethnic woman, whether fictional or autobiographical in form, chronologically or retrospectively in plot, as a Bildungsroman." (15) In this respect, Jade Snow Wong's text is a prime example of the generic Chinese-American female Bildungsroman.
If I am to settle for this rather too neat of a label, I must take it a step further, that is to say, I need to unwind the intricate father-daughter text for what it tries to accomplish and for what it does accomplish, once the tale is told. Elaine Kim's essay, 'Second Generation Self-Portrait' looks at a number of texts by American-born children of Chinese ancestry and their myrriad struggles to create and sustain an identity, separate, from that of the parental lineage, amidst a rather hostile while mainstream culture. Kim's rendition of Wong's autobiography centers on the formal appearance of the text; namely, how it, in turn, conditions the structural thematic of the piece. For the most part, Kim finds Wong's attitude towards the outside world, beyond Chinatown, an example of a desparate need for recognition, comfort, love, and ultimately compassion, from her own community, from her immediate family.
To an extent, I agree with Kim's evaluation of Wong's life-persona as given throughout the text. Whether she was aiming at such an outcome is another point altogether. However, as someone who has been living and working in a double margin herself, for the past thirty odd years, I feel compelled to relate some of my own life's sentiments as I analyze Wong's life story. When one's identity is a complex and unsettling mixture of polarized 'initial' identities (Macedonian, Serbian, Woman, Multilingual, Single, Educated, Atheist, Burdensome Last Name), it is difficult to explain to others, even close family members, how one sees one self, or at least attempt to do so. It is almost impossible to remain focused and proportionally rounded once the explanation gets published.
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