EL LIBRO DE LA LLAMADA
EL LIBRO DE LOS CINCUENTA NOMBRES DE MARDUK, VENCEDOR DE LOS ANTIGUOS
One key methodological starting point and aspect of diasporic vision in this thesis involves interviewing my ‘friends’ or ‘subject-‐peers’ who reflect the particular Chinese-‐Canadian community in Vancouver, Canada (my ‘hometown’) that I affiliate with.61 Within the interviews and research design, my diasporic vision of affective hauntings begins by exploring the (dis)connections, links and ruptures in the remembrances of my conversational interviews with my subject-‐peers.
There are a number of limitations with the method of ‘interviews’, which is an issue I will address in later sections. Epistemologically, the entanglement of my own autoethnographic experiences with my subject-‐peers is, thus, a key part of my own story. Thus, my own life context is complicit with those whom I call my
‘friends’ and who also form the diasporic community I affiliate with. The relevance of this critical autoethnographic epistemology reflexively situates the
entanglement of my own autobiographical narratives (or search for histories) along with those of my peers as a starting point.62 My choice to research ‘peers’
61 By ‘subject-‐peers’, I am referring to both the dilemma of ‘insider/outsider’ as a researcher while also explicitly describing how I am privileging ‘peers’ as an important part of my (un)locatable ‘I’ in my autoethnographic approach.
within the place I call ‘home’ in Vancouver, Canada echoes Kamala Viswesaran’s (1994: 104) own re-‐thinking of (auto)ethnography, where she seminally describes the importance of doing ‘homework’ as opposed to ‘fieldwork’. Whereas
anthropological research has traditionally emphasized ‘going to the field’ (in a distant place), Viswesaran instead emphasizes the importance of going “home”, and returning to rigorously interrogate the neighbourhoods and ‘growing-‐up places’ within ‘home’ (Viswesaran 1994: 103).63
The population group I am studying (and belong to) can be situated in what Marianne Hirsch (2012) citing Eva Hoffman (2004) describes as the
‘postgeneration’ (see Preface). In particular, the generation I focus on are the ‘second generation’ Chinese-‐Canadians, who are children born and raised in Canada to Ethnic Chinese migrants originally from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Mainland China. Specifically, when I refer to the “post-‐generation” for the purposes of my thesis (particularly those considered ‘1.5’ or ‘2nd generation ‘ Chinese-‐Canadians) I am referring to persons a) born and raised in Canada to ethnic Chinese immigrants originally from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Mainland China or b) born overseas but primarily raised in Canada. Furthermore, I am particularly focusing on the generation of children who were born to a particular wave of immigration that took place in the 1970's and 1980's. Specifically, approximately 18 persons participated in the conversational interviews. However, this thesis highlights approximately 12 subject-‐peers within Chapter 3.64 I conducted the
reflections were key starting points. What was disclosed to me first challenged and humbled me. I realized that I knew a lot ‘less’ about my familial histories and national histories than I thought I did. Some of my peers knew more than me, even though significant fragments were missing within all of our disclosures (see Chapter 3). These are issues I will discuss more in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 63 What this also brought up for me was how my ‘fieldwork’ and ‘homework’ were, perhaps the same thing. That is, I went ‘home’ to Vancouver, Canada to conduct the conversational interviews, even as I considered London, UK my second home that has been a time that brought me all kinds of life-‐changing experiences. Thus, paradoxically, doing the fieldwork in Canada felt like homework as much as my doing homework in Canada also felt like fieldwork.
64 During my field/home research, I conducted 18 face-‐to-‐face one to one conversational interviews. However, I have been unable to include them all due to limitations of space. The number of conversation interviews I have discussed in-‐text (12 interviews) indicates how many subject-‐peers I have both interviewed and included within the actual text of my thesis analysis. Furthermore, this number does not include 3-‐4 group screening/discussion sessions or 2-‐3 group activities which occurred prior to my screening of Nanking (2007). Unfortunately, have decided not to include these in my analysis due to making tough decisions about how to frame this thesis and the limitations of space. However, I do have audio/video records of these
discussions/activities on my computer, which would be helpful for my future research and publications. Specifically, each of the group screenings presented a different genre of film (e.g. martial arts, historical drama, Hollywood drama of Chinese-‐Americans, Hong Kong ghost drama).
face-‐to-‐face conversational interviews over several visits back to Vancouver, Canada. I conducted them during my visits back home during the summer of 2010 and December 2010 during Christmas break. The remaining conversations were conducted in the summer of 2011. I had allotted under 1 hour to complete the conversation-‐interview (which I had described to my peers in the invitation). Interestingly, the majority of these conversations exceeded this time scale and would take up to 2 hours.65 All names have been altered to preserve anonymity. Also, if specific histories mentioned places that risked identifying the speaker due to the high level of detail in the disclosure, I have also changed this to preserve their anonymity.
I chose this particular group located within this migration wave firstly as it reflects my own personal background. Thus, the migration histories are relevant as the parents of the next generation Chinese-‐Canadians being researched here were those who, in some form or another ‘belonged’ to this era of migration history. I am a descendant of parents who migrated to Canada during this era, as are many of my peers whom I have interviewed. There is a tumultuous history connected to historical violence and trauma in our parents (migration) stories that has been difficult to access (e.g. traumas during Second World War but ignored in Western books on the War; exile, escape, etc.), and there has certainly been a lack of academic attention on this particular diaspora of forgotten Chinese Canadians (who are now in their 20's and 30's of age) that I want to address. I will speak about these issues in much more detail in Chapter 4 discussing historical archives.
2.5.2 Insider/Outsider, Formalization vs. Friendship, and Recruitment