| In their considerations of how Chinese Canadian authors represent what it means to be Chinese Canadian, critics have examined how racial, ethnic, and gender markers inform characters' identities in these texts, but they have not extensively considered class as an identity marker. My analysis of Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children, Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows: a Chinatown Childhood and The Jade Peony, Yuen Cheung Yip's The Tears of Chinese Immigrants, Fred Wah's Diamond Grill, and Paul Yee's Breakaway explores how various configurations of class identity intersect with other identity markers, such as race, and inform characters' understandings of themselves as Chinese Canadians. Focusing on how these texts represent characters' class identities in the time period between 1923 and 1967, I will consider how "Chinese Canadianness" intersects with shared and contested ideas of class identity that manifest in the following ways: the memories their characters construct in relation to their experiences and shared cultural heritage; their characters' bodily and material manifestations of identity; the ways in which the workplace and its activities figure into their characters' identities; and the spaces that their characters inhabit, define, and use.; The basic assumptions behind my theoretical approach to class identity derive from ideas like Pierre Bourdieu's theories of class and Michel de Certeau's conceptualization of the "everyday." From their thinking, this study will highlight the importance of understanding identity as a material process that is grounded in individuals' daily thoughts and actions. At the same time, these texts may evoke configurations of class identity to which characters may not necessarily subscribe, but which still impact upon their identities as Chinese Canadians and as people of Chinese descent. As such, my class analysis provides a way to think about "Chinese Canadianness" within the context of characters' individual lives: how class identity shapes their perceptions of themselves in relation to others of both Chinese and non-Chinese descent; how these class identities' meanings are contested and provisional in their daily lives; and how their actual class identities and perceptions of those identities shape the actions that they take to acquire agency. |
