Inter-Asian migratory roads: the gamble of time in Our Stories
Amie Elizabeth PARRY
ABSTRACTThis essay reads Taiwan activist Ku Yu-Ling’s acclaimed narrative, Our Stories, and in particular its first section entitled ‘We/Us,’ as a critical theorization of labour, migration, domesticity and the foreign. To this end, ‘We/Us’ names the Cold War as historical determinant where it otherwise would remain unrecognized as such, yet reframes its formation in Asia by presenting multiple agencies and mappings rather than reifying a US-centered paradigm. ‘We/Us’ repeatedly foregrounds the difficulty of its own constitutive stories and readings, thereby intervening into any positivistic, developmental framings of the Inter-Asia project at the moment of the latter’s institutionalization. A text that is not Asian American per se, whether in its authorship or in the direction taken by the migratory roads it narrates, Our Stories presents new paradigms for migration and time, gendered racialized labor and the Cold War, that can dialogue productively with current scholarship in Asian American studies.
Keywords: Our Stories, Inter-Asian migration, narrative form
Author’s biography
Amie Elizabeth Parry teaches literature at the English Department of National Central University and is a member of its Center for the Study of Sexualities. She is the author of a study in comparative poetics, Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen (Duke 2007) and Penumbrae Query Shadow: Queer Reading Tactics罔兩問景：性/別的閱讀政治, jointly authored with Jen-peng Liu劉人鵬 and Naifei Ding丁乃非 (Center for the Study of Sexualities Press 2007).