CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY: WAYS OF SEEING
2.6 Methodological Approaches to History, Memory, and Migration
2.6.3 Research Design and The Problem of Language and Accessing Sources
A key part of my research design for Chapter 4 relied on questions of access and language (English materials) while composing a montage of lost histories. In my thesis, my analysis focuses on the English-‐language written memoirs of individuals who ‘remember’ some of these histories, that I primarily accessed through
published memoirs in print and/or electronically.76 As I have already mentioned, my research ‘started’ from what my subject-‐peers ‘remembered’ from stories told by our parents, grandparents, or others from their generation. Our elders’
76 My overall research process actually involved discovering a large variety of digital, online library archives that included accessing photographs, audio testimonies, and archival videos connected to the ethnic Chinese diaspora in Canada and America have been thankfully part of many other academic projects to transfer these archives online. I consulted a large number of print and digital archives concerning the Chinese in Canada for this project. However, I could not use many of these for this thesis (I will briefly explain why shortly). The physical archives included the Chung
Collection at the University of British Columbia. Online digital archives I accessed included the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (www.mhso.ca; this holds a collection of archival
photographs and audio recordings of migrant and postgeneration Chinese-‐Canadian women) and
Multicultural Canada Collection (www.multiculturalcanada.ca; this archive holds a large collection
of newspaper clippings, photographs and legal records concerning early Asian-‐Canadian migrants (not only those of Chinese descent) within Canada. A large number of these stories reveal an incredibly difficult ‘early migrant’ experience migrating to and living in a pre-‐Multicultural Canada (e.g. head tax, railroad work, denial of human rights, overt racism). However, as Chapter 3 will show, these ‘early migrant’ histories were not the ones that my subject-‐peers ‘remembered’ hearing about from their own parents and grandparents. This is because our ‘postgeneration’ (and our parents/grandparents) can be considered to belong to a different ‘diasporic group’ compared to the early migrants to Canada. Thus, the postgeneration children of early migrants are different from the ‘postgeneration’ that I affiliate (in fact, the postgeneration children of early migrants are around the same age of my parents or grandparents). Due to my specific research questions and purposes for this thesis, I have decided to focus on searching for written memoirs that discuss remembered experiences about the scars of war or poverty experienced in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, which typically revolve around the period of World War 2 and afterwards. My specific areas and histories of focus will be clarified through Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. The physical archives that I found quite helpful involved my visit to the Hong Kong History Museum, which revealed to me much more about the atrocities in Hong Kong during World War 2, but have been largely ignored (see Chapter 4).
memories typically revolved around themes and discourses including wars, poverty, chaos, and survival (see Chapter 3). Responding to what I heard from my subject-‐peers, I proceeded to considering how to approach my research design for Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
In this regard, I found that the problem of ‘language’ was quite significant as English-‐language memoirs (whether written or audio/visual sources) that
recorded the ‘memories’ of the specific migrant diaspora I was looking for were not as widely ‘accessible’ and ‘available’ as I had previously assumed77. Records are available in Chinese scholarship. However, I am not able to access these since I cannot read Chinese characters. I can only speak and understand Cantonese conversationally. As I will further mention in Chapter 3, this problem of language persists throughout our postgeneration, and within my subject-‐peers born or raised in the ‘West’. For instance, the memoirs I am analyzing in Chapters 4 and 5 have been published in some form, whether in print, electronic editions of original prints (e.g. Amazon Kindle editions), oral history projects from prior scholarship, documentary film, or in some cases, self-‐published memoirs. However, my
limitations (and those of many of my subject-‐peers) are also dependent on hoping that elders from my parents’ or grandparents’ generation are a) able to speak or write in English and/or b) participants in audio or video-‐recorded research for me to find in archives and/or c) be willing to publish or have published their own memoirs or journals (and have them translated).78
77 During my visit to Hong Kong, I found out that there was a lot more written and digital material archives about the scars of war during World War 2 throughout China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, compared to Canada’s archives (which addressed a different early migrant Chinese diaspora). However, the difficulty of access again had to do with language. As I was searching through the digital archive search at the Hong Kong Library for oral histories, I found a large number of search results that were written in Chinese characters (which I cannot read). I chanced on some archives that allowed me to at least listen to some Cantonese audio testimonies (which I can understand in everyday basic conversation). However, the way that the testimonies were spoken in Cantonese demonstrated a vocabulary that I could not adequately understand with my level of Cantonese ability. Since I had decided to try performing this search on my own without much assistance (from translators), my own ‘search’ was limited to whatever pre-‐existing, translated English material was available.
78 The obvious and simple solution, of course, is to leverage my existing Cantonese speaking skills or find a translator who can help me perform the research. However, I did not find this a realistic strategy due to the current length, time and scope of this present thesis. Having said that, for future research, I am currently brainstorming ways to create an innovative documentary that can ‘record’ the remaining voices of this particular elder generation. I am pursuing funding links and brainstorming possibilities with other peers of mine who are studying/working in East Asian documentary film.
Thus, in many ways, my performance of my ‘search’ for haunted histories simultaneously reveals the hope I hold towards recovering social links (e.g. Davoine and Gaudillière 2004), and reflects my frustration at my incapacity to extend my search beyond English translations. Therefore, until and unless my Chinese language abilities improve (or I decide to rely more on a translator), I will continue to be reliant on English-‐written or translated memoirs and scholarship (e.g. Lary and MacKinnon 2001; Chan 2005, 1994, 1991).
Therefore, in light of these issues, I argue, that instead of maintaining distinctions based on the ‘validity’ or ‘reliability’ of sources, what is more important is the act of assembling diverse fragments (from various sources and types), in order to ‘listen’ to voices of the living and the dead that must speak. Doing so uncovers a diasporic vision of distributed memory, where ghosts find a way to persist, regardless of whether a source is primary or secondary. Employing these actions, therefore is how one can compose a way of ‘seeing’ haunted
histories through a diasporic montage.
In Chapters 4 and 5, I particularly use these approaches within
juxtapositions of memoirs, journals and my research into the overall histories of a 20th century China from secondary sources. Specifically, I utilize Wang’s (2004) ‘critical historical consciousness’ approach to interrogate what histories are being remembered through the memoirs of the previous generation (our ‘elders’ who belong to our parents’ or grandparents’ generation). This approach is helpful in Chapter 4, and I use it there to analyse memoirs and histories that address themes of war, survival and poverty.
The analysis integrates Wang’s (2004) approach alongside other methods. In Chapter 5, I further explore links between a Chinese migrant’s English-‐
translated memoirs and what my subject-‐peers remember from elders telling them about migration. These experiments contribute to the ‘montage’ of fragments, juxtaposing data that may or may not be similar or seemingly connected, in an effort to uncover hidden ghosts and see the gaps between fragments of mediated memory.
Furthermore, in Chapter 4 and 5, in my ‘experiments of the impossible’, I particularly utilize approaches of Cho (2008), Volkan et al. (2002), Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) and Walkerdine (2013) to explore the intergenerational
possibilities of trauma across chronological time and geographical space. By ‘impossible’, I am purposely invoking a provocative term to imagine, and also difficult to accept or engage. In Chapter 4, I explore the intergenerational links of historical narratives of survival between one of my subject-‐peers’ remembered stories (from what their elder generations told them) and the memoirs of a person from my elders’ generation.
My reflections and critical engagements of written memoirs led me to raise questions about how my subject peers and I might, therefore, engage visual
aesthetics that mediate traumatic memory.