Trembling strength: Migrating vulnerabilities in fiction by Sharon Bala, Yasmin Ladha, and Denise Chong

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942097245
Author(s):  
Aritha van Herk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Boat People ◽  
The Family ◽  
Chinese Immigrant Families ◽  
Denise Chong ◽  
Unexpected Outcomes

The Boat People by Sharon Bala, Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha, and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, by Denise Chong, are texts that engage with vulnerability as it relates to immigration, one of the most precarious of states or sites that Canadian literature chronicles. The abstract and concrete politics of adaptation are exemplified in these narratives of displacement, inspired by the Tamil refugee crisis of 2009–2010, the Indo-Tanzanian immigration wave of the 1970s, and the resourcefulness of Chinese immigrant families in the mid-twentieth century. These narratives effectively investigate vulnerability within spaces of interconnection, imprisonment, relation, visibility, and transformation. This paper works with their explorations of the Canadian trope of immigration as a process that moves from the vulnerability of strangeness to the vulnerability of adaptation to the vulnerability of commitment. Addressing the ways that these stages are subverted, the paper examines the extent to which migrancy and its resolution resist a “national” narrative in these texts, undercutting the prototype of success through adversity. How they model Hirsch’s “openness to unexpected outcomes” recites the complexity of their depictions of vulnerability.

Lessons Learned in Adapting Parent Training for Chinese Immigrant Families

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna S. Lau ◽  
Joey Fung ◽  
Lisa L. Liu ◽  
Omar G. Gudino ◽  
Lorinda Ho ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Parent Training ◽  
Immigrant Families ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Chinese Immigrant Families

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Organizing in the 1970s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. LB. Twarog
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Grocery Store ◽  
National Organization ◽  
Consumer Activism ◽  
Family Economy ◽  
The Family

In 1973, housewives in California launched what would be the last meat boycott of the twentieth century. And, like its predecessors, the 1973 boycott gained national momentum albeit with little political traction now that Peterson had left public life for a job in the private sector as the consumer advisor to the Giant grocery store chain. And in some quarters of the labor movement, activists drew very clear links between the family economy and the stagnation plaguing workers’ wages. The 1973 boycott led to the founding of the National Consumers Congress, a national organization intended to unite consumer organizers. While it was a short-lived organization, it demonstrates the momentum that consumer activism was building. This chapter also reflects on the lost coordinating opportunity between housewives organizing around consumer issues and the women’s movement in the 1970s.

Transnational parenting practices of Chinese immigrant families in New Zealand

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Chan
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
Immigrant Families ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Parenting Strategies ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Chinese Immigrant Families ◽  
Transnational Parenting

This article advocates for fluid pedagogies that align with the transnational parenting practices of immigrant families. New Zealand is now considered to be a superdiverse country with a large population of immigrants. This superdiversity phenomenon can therefore also be found in its early childhood education settings. Research has indicated that many contemporary immigrants are transnationals who maintain close connections with their home countries and frequently engage in border-crossing activities. Transnational immigrants are mobile, and their parenting strategies may be similarly fluid. This article uses findings from a research project which involved Chinese immigrant families to illustrate transnational perspectives of early childhood education and parenting practices. Narrative excerpts are presented and analysed using key theoretical constructs of transnationalism to illustrate the participants’ cultural dilemmas in their parenting, their preparedness to adapt their heritage practices and to adopt early childhood education discourses of the host country, and their agency in choosing parenting strategies that they believed best support their children’s learning. It highlights the importance of parent–teacher dialogue and of enacting a curriculum with fluid pedagogies that are responsive to heterogeneous parental aspirations.

scholarly journals Tātai Tara, Genealogical Storying: A Foundation of Decolonisation in Oceania

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Iain Thomas Strathern
Keyword(s):  
Personal Mythology ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Family Secrets ◽  
Essential Nature ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Individual

<p>This thesis reads Patricia Grace's Baby No-eyes, and Albert Wendt's The Adventures of Vela and The Mango's Kiss to highlight the essential nature of tātai tara (genealogical storying) in the decolonisation of Oceanian identity. Central to the thesis is a personal mythology, a kind of memoir that recounts some of the author's foundational stories in the form of prose and poetry. The first core chapter deals with a discussion of post-colonial 'skins', the things that we believe are part of ourselves that essentially come from being socialised in a colonial culture. The chapter “Skeletons”, explores the family secrets that give rise to shame that is intergenerational. Finally, Flesh and Blood demonstrates the powerful nature of reclaiming family stories as a way of re-education and healing. Ultimately, the thesis aims at an understanding of tātai tara, a process that happens whether we are aware of it or not, and how the individual is a creator of his or her own identity through the level of engagement with the stories.</p>

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