"I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar pain. And I think, My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese."
-Amy Tan
I have never read The Joy Luck Club. For that matter, I have never read Maxine Kingston's The Warrior Woman. I am a traitor to my race.
I went to a literary conference last weekend, and a high school student gave a presentation on the latter. In the discussion that followed, I realized the duality of my name.
My name in Chinese (first name), is composed of two characters:
The first is the character for "beautiful." The second is the character for "ghost" or "spirit."
Together, they might be translated "beautiful ghost" or "beautiful spirit."
So I realized something--America, in Chinese, is called "beautiful country" (same character for beautiful).
So, if you wanted to, you could say that my name contains both identities--my American identity, represented in "mei" (for America), and my Chinese identity (alter-ego), represented in "ling," which means "ghost" (ghost of the past?).
Of course, I'm grasping here. But I was struck by something someone (quoting Derrida about Marxism, apparently) said.
He said, "If you excise the ghost, you erase your identity."
And I thought, huh. Maybe there's more to being Chinese (half-Chinese) than looking like Mulan.
Maybe, in other words, I shouldn't excise the ghost or ignore its haunting. Sometimes I feel like its stalking me. And no matter how much I try to ignore it--it's still there--in a tightness in my throat, a tingling of the skin, an ache I can't place--a pain I can barely name, let alone feel.
When I cry, my eyes swell up and become smaller.
I am becoming Chinese.
No comments:
Post a Comment