The Asia-Pacific in Asian American Transmigration: Lydia Minatoya's "The Strangeness of Beauty"

跨國亞美的亞太想像：湊谷百合子的《美妙》

10.6184/TKR.201206_42(2).0007

Hsiu-Chuan Lee

亞美 ； 亞太 ； 遷徙 / 轉生 ； 日常生活 ； 私小說 ； 湊谷百合子 ； Asian America ； Asia-Pacific ； transmigration ； the everyday ； I-story ； Lydia Y. Minatoya

Tamkang Review

42卷2期（2012 / 06 / 01）

139 - 161

英文

本文探討亞太（Asia-Pacific）區域與亞美（Asian America）社群在歷史發展與文化想像上之交相建構、交互影響。論文從亞美「遷徙 / 轉生」（transmigration）的跨國視角出發，重啟「亞太」在亞美地區政經與文化流變中的意義。論文以日美三世（Sansei）作家湊谷百合子（Lydia Yuriko Minatoya）的小說《美妙》（The Strangeness of Beauty, 1999）為主要文本，分析小說中的人物在二十世紀最初三十年往返美國與日本兩地的太平洋路徑。除了彰顯日美社群發展的亞太格局，更企圖在日美日常生活的微觀形構 （the microscopic everyday）中找到重新想像亞太的基礎。論文聚焦小說主角兼敘事者曾根悅子（Etsuko Sone）創作之「私小說」（shi-shōsetsu），指出悅子的寫作不只呈現時空混接、駁雜跨界的日美主體經驗，還發揮了「私小說」融接自我與他人、個人與群體生活的文類特色，讓《美妙》除了有對個人的關懷，還投射出對亞美與亞太宏觀的想像。透過悅子穿越國界、「遷徙 / 轉生」的人生經歷，《美妙》勾繪一個以亞美跨國經驗為核心的具體亞太時空，讓亞太不再只是一個由歐美強權定義的抽象空間，也跳出傳統東、西對立，亞、美對峙，日、美身份互不相容的文化二元認知結構。

This paper studies the intermingling of the imagination of Asia-Pacific and the formation of Asian America. Analyzing the Japanese American Sansei writer Lydia Minatoya's ”The Strangeness of Beauty” (1999), which portrays the Japanese American experiences in the first three decades of the twentieth century, my reading first grounds the formation of Asian America in Asian Americans' Pacific routes, thereby extending our understanding of Asian America to an Asia-Pacific dimension. Thereafter, I explore how Asian Americans' trans-Pacific trajectories may help constitute an Asia-Pacific imagination embedded in the everyday materiality of this area. Specifically, my analysis hinges on a reading of the ”I-story” created by the novel's protagonist-narrator Etsuko Sone. Through an investigation of the discontinuous and relational nature of this ”I-story,” I argue that The Strangeness of Beauty traces the meanderings and changes of Etsuko's self and life. Instead of reinforcing the monolithic ”I” pursued by conventional Western autobiographies, Etsuko's ”I-story,” which is indebted to the form of modern Japanese autobiographical fiction shi-shōsetsu, presents Etsuko as a Japanese American woman ceaselessly re-defined by the spatiotemporal multiplicities of her transmigratory experience across the Pacific. This portrayal of the Asian American ”transmigratory” everyday, furthermore, retrieves ”Asia-Pacific” from a Euro American construction. The Strangeness of Beauty envisages Asia-Pacific as neither a mythic space of transnation nor a geo-political place constrained by the bipolarity of the East and the West, Asia and America, or Japan and the U.S. It replenishes Asia-Pacific with Asian Americans' engagements with the connections and confrontations within and between Asia, America, and the Pacific.

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