scholarly journals From C.Y. Lee to Shawn Wong: The Transnational Family and its Implicit Rules

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-45
Author(s):  
Nicholas O. Pagan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
World War ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Transnational Family ◽  
Implicit Rule ◽  
Chinese American Families ◽  
Asian Pacific ◽  
Spouse Selection

Employing the distinction between explicit and implicit rules as formulated by psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek, this article examines the way in which challenges toward an initial rule-based fantasy take place within transnational families. In particular, the article employs an implicit, unwritten rules framework to assess the effect of transpacific migration on the institution of family within the Chinese American diaspora as represented in post-World War II fiction by Asian Pacific authors C.Y. Lee and Shawn Wong. Suggesting five implicit rules underpinning Chinese American families, the article examines Lee’s The Flower Drum Songto highlight early challenges to these rules before finding in Wong’s Homebasean unflinching adherence to an implicit rule concerning reverence for ancestors. Wong has the advantage of writing in the wake of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and of being in a position to trace more and more challenges to the initial fantasy following later waves of transpacific migration. His novel American Kneesis then shown to epitomize the implicit rules being stretched almost to breaking point as, for instance, the criteria for spouse selection becomes no longer Chinese or partially Chineseor even Asian or partially Asian but Americanization.

Protestantism in Twentieth-Century Chinese America: The Impact of Transnationalism on the Chinese Diaspora

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tseng
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Protestant Denominations

AbstractThis article examines how an indigenous form of evangelicalism became the predominant form of Chinese Protestantism in the United States since 1949. Chinese-American Protestantism was so thoroughly reconstructed by separatist immigrants from the Diaspora and American-born (or American-raised) evangelicals that affiliation with mainline Protestant denominations and organizations is no longer desired. This development has revitalized Chinese-American Protestantism. Indeed, Chinese evangelicalism is one of the fastest-growing religions in China, the Chinese Diaspora, and among Chinese in America. Though the percentage of Chinese Americans affiliated with Christianity is not nearly as high as that of Korean Americans, Chinese-American Protestantism has achieved impressive numeric growth over the past fifty years. Much of this growth can be attributed to the large number of Chinese who have migrated to North America since World War II.

I am Chinese: The Politics of Chinese American Lapel Buttons in Los Angeles during World War II

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Gow
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Sociological Studies

Abstract This article examines the history of lapel buttons and stickers used by Chinese Americans to identify their ethnicity during World War II. Most of these buttons and stickers were produced by Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs) immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor to differentiate their members from Japanese Americans. In examining this history, this article focuses in particular on Los Angeles, the city with the largest Japanese American population on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, U.S.-born Chinese American and Japanese American youth attended many of the same schools and often formed close friendships with one another. As a result, the questions that the buttons and stickers posed for this generation of Chinese American youth were particularly fraught. Drawing on oral history interviews, sociological studies of the Southern California Chinese American community from the period, and archival newspaper reportage, this article approaches these lapel pins and stickers as items of cultural contestation through which a variety of historical actors—from Chinese consular representatives, to immigrant leaders in the CCBAs, to Chinese American youth—negotiated questions of ethnic and national identity after the U.S. entry into World War II. I argue that rather than reflecting the complex ways that most Chinese American youth understood their own identity, the buttons and stickers represented the official viewpoints of the Chinese consulates in the United States and their allies in the nation’s CCBAs.

Uniform multilingualism: A media genealogy of Google Translate

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 2550-2565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ido Ramati ◽  
Amit Pinchevski
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Artificial Neural Network ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Statistical Methods ◽  
English Language ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
The Relationship

This article applies a media geneaology perspective to examine the operative logic of Google Translate. Tracing machine translation from post–World War II (WWII) rule-based methods to contemporary algorithmic statistical methods, we analyze the underlying power structure of algorithmic and human collaboration that Translate encompasses. Focusing on the relationship between technology, language, and speakers, we argue that the operative logic of Translate represents a new model of translation, which we call uniform multilingualism. In this model, the manifest lingual plurality on the user side is mediated by lingual uniformity on the system side in the form of an English language algorithm, which has recently given way to an artificial neural network interlingual algorithm. We conclude by considering the significance of this recent shift in Translate’s algorithm.

Spouse selection in Canada, 1921–78: an examination by age, sex and religion

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. G. Basavarajappa ◽  
M. J. Norris ◽  
S. S. Halli
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Time Series Data ◽  
Series Data ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
World War ◽  
Clear Trend ◽  
Spouse Selection ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Older Males

SummaryThis paper presents time series data on spouse selection in Canada for the period 1921–78. Homogamous and endogamous trends are examined by age, sex and religion. There is considerable variation in the level of endogamy amongst religious groups. With respect to age, marriages were increasingly homogamous up to 1971 and thereafter less so. Younger males increasingly tended to select brides of their own age group until the 1960s, while older males have been increasingly heterogamous since World War II. Females under 20 years of age tend to select older grooms; other brides show no clear trend in their spouse selection by age.

Establishing the Ramgarh Training Center: The Burma Campaign, the Colonial Internment Camp, and the Wartime Sino-British Relations

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Yin Cao
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Training Center ◽  
British India ◽  
World War ◽  
Training Centre ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
War Of Resistance

Abstract This article investigates how the Chinese Expeditionary Force joined the Burma Campaign and retreated to India in 1942, and how the Chinese, American, and British authorities negotiated to determine the destiny of Chinese forces in India. This article argues that the choice of Ramgarh, a small town in northeast India, as the site of a training centre for the Chinese Expeditionary Force sheds light on a decades-long programme of colonial internment-camp building in British India, and illuminates the difficult relationship between Chinese and British authorities during World War II. In doing so, it also argues that the historiography of China's War of Resistance requires Southeast and South Asian perspectives.

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