“For a paper son, paper is blood”: Subjectivation and Authenticity in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

Some versions of multicultural studies have fostered the assumption that Asian American fiction offers unmediated access to the ethnic experience and "authentic" Asian American identity, without attention to the ways in which ethnicity and authenticity are produced and contested. In The Ethnic Canon, David Palumbo-Liu argues that multiculturalism allows students to encounter the Other without challenging their sense of self: "[L]iterary texts are read to solicit particular responses that manage conflict and tension at the same time as they reinforce hegemonic `structures of feeling'" (12). But Asian American texts can be read more critically, as sites where "identity" and "authenticity" are investigated as ongoing cultural productions that also entail foreclosures and exclusions. Doris Sommer has argued that some ethnic texts resist readers' assumptions about ethnic identity and experience, placing rhetorical and narrative "obstacles" in the way of easy identification and interpretation; casual intimacy with the ethnic text/writer on the part of some readers effaces cultural difference and obscures historical relations of domination.(1) Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993) is one such text: narrative questions are raised but never answered; the "reason" for Ona's suicide--the central plot question--is never given, and the reader does not get to "know" her, even though the novel is narrated by her sister. Bone further frustrates attempts at readerly identification with the characters by questioning the process of identification itself. By depicting the contingent historical and political processes by which Asian American subjects are constituted, the novel challenges the stability and coherence of identity. "Authenticity" is revealed to be a social and political construction; rather than reaffirming notions of self-identity and "respect" for presumably stable and determinate cultural difference(s), the novel enables a critique of hegemonic definitions of legitimacy. Bone tells the story of a family in San Francisco's Chinatown struggling to understand the suicide of one daughter, Ona. The novel, narrated by her half-sister Leila, describes (in flashback and out of chronological sequence) the investigation of Ona's death, the breakup of the mother and father, and the other sister's suffering masked by apparent indifference. The ruptures in the Leong family force the characters to contend with questions of moral and legal accountability, leading to critiques of their heritage and individual identities. Often characters seek legitimation by turning towards official documents such as the police records detailing Ona's death; the identification papers and letters owned by Leon, the father; and church records of their grandfather Leong's burial. The narrative explores various encounters with state-regulated procedures for legitimation. The question of legitimacy seems particularly pressing for Chinese-Americans, whose history (like that of other Asian Americans) is marked by legal, political, and geographical exclusions and demarcations. Chinese immigrants began arriving in America in 1849, but by 1882 Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred entry or re-entry of all Chinese laborers for the next ten years; a series of exclusion laws were in effect until 1943, and even then entry was limited to family members or brides of Chinese-Americans. Only after 1965 were immigration restrictions on Asian Americans lifted. Historians have studied "how immigration officials, judges, and the Chinese interacted" during the exclusion era, and Sucheng Chan argues that "the Chinese did not simply suffer as victims and pawns. Rather, they actively and indefatigably challenged the injustice that the laws represented" (xi). Ng's novel reveals how contemporary Chinatown politics and culture have developed from the historical specificity of location, economics, and legislation; the encounter with the "Other" in this ethnic text is also an encounter with a specific history of dominations and resistances. …