| Summary: | 博士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 102 === In Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows, Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Lydia Kwa’s Pulse, the space of Chinatown functions as a semiosphere where texts of diasporic memories intersect and transact via signs of ethnicity, culture and gender. Infused with ethnic stereotypes, Chinatown used to be the peripheral space in the Anglo-European society. Yet, to the diasporic Chinese, the town loaded with collective memory had once been the center of their life. In addition to being both a periphery and a center, the space is a boundary to Canadians of Chinese descendent. Thinking through Yuri M. Lotman’s conception of semiosphere and theories on memory by Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, Harald Welzer and Mieke Bal, I argue that the Chinatown in the selected works functions as a semiosphere with demarcation of the center, the periphery and the boundary. Despites the separation, the periphery may transgress the boundary to approach the center. The transgression when triggering the memory texts to intersect and transact allows the periphery to push the center away and replace it. Following the alternations of the center and the periphery, the semiosphere is constantly under reconstruction.
I explore memory both as text and as act. As text, memory structures the content of the Chinatown. With collective memory at the center, the town symbolizes the monumental history of the diasporic Chinese. Yet, individual memory texts that scatter around the center may decentralize the town. In the selected works, the authors manipulate the I-narrator to recollect his or her Chinatown childhood. However, the memory is never complete due to the lapse of time. The narrator therefore conjures the past in the present reality via memory acts. By selectively remembering or forgetting “things past,” the narrator represents Chinatown as a heterogeneous unity of different rhythm. On contemplating “what the [town] had been” in the past, “what the [town] should be” in the present and “what the [town] could be” in the future, the individual converses with the diasporic group, with the Caucasian society, and even with the self of the past. The dialogue mechanism, while illuminating the crisis of his/her Chinese Canadian identity, makes the individual to reevaluate the identity. Setting the space of Chinatown under construction, the narrator is to relocate the identity in a transnational, transcultural or transgender network.
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