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Developing Ties to the Past: Photography and Other Sources of Information in Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men

1983; Oxford University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/467010

1946-3170

Carol E. Neubauer,

Autobiographical and Biographical Writing

The act of writing an autobiography necessarily requires the use of memory. Yet memory is often the most unreliable source of information available to a writer. Memory is inevitably incomplete and inaccurate, and material retained by memory is usually subject to distortion and disfigurement over time. Although a writer makes conscious decisions about what to include in an autobiography, the autobiographer is never in full control of his material the past because the selection process has already begun on a subconscious level. This phenomenon the natural limitations of memory is so common a concern among autobiographers that many address the issue directly in their life stories. At times, writers dramatize the problems of memory by presenting contradictory versions of one story and by structuring the narrative to reflect apparent discrepancies. Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for example, juxtaposes two entirely different versions of a childhood visit to a racist dentist in Stamps, Arkansas, and tells her readers that she preferred the more fantasized version of the two. Similarly, in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy alternates regular chapters with italicized sections which introduce contradictory versions of her life story suggested by other family members. While Angelou alters the story line and McCarthy the form, both writers deliberately bring attention to the inevitable fallibility of memory and the subsequent problems faced by the autobiographer. Maxine Hong Kingston, then, is not alone in acknowledging the unreliable resources of memory in her most recent autobiography, China Men (1980).1 Like Angelou and McCarthy, Kingston admits from the very beginning that much of the story of her father and grandfathers is based on unreliable sources and unverifiable evidence, including material from her memory. Like the Chinese adventurers who invented and discovered the Gold Mountain, a legend identifying the United States as the land of opportunity, Kingston must sort through often contradictory accounts of her family's past to create a synthesis that captures the