Reminiscing in white in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

Vol.44,No.2(2018)

Klara Szmańko

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2018-2-8

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/140981

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Abstract
The article focuses on the representation of whiteness in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993), in particular on how the aesthetic and the socio-historical strata of the novel intersect, how by saturating the imagery of Bone with whiteness, Ng conveys the first person Chinese American narrator's positionality and the positionality of other Chinese American characters as members of the Chinese American community and members of broader American society. The images involving whiteness compose a kind of the palimpsest overwritten with personal and communal ethnic watermarks as well as repressed, surfacing and semi-articulated history of Leila's family that she channels into the narrative, having engaged in the process of mentally retracing the past events and recovering the material evidence or rather what remains of it and what she believes will lead her to definitive answers. On the level of narrative imagery, whiteness is intricately interwoven with the traumas plaguing the narrator's family. Explicitly, whiteness represents death, mourning, rejection and erasure, entailing marginalization suffered by Chinese Americans because of their non-normative racial and ethnic status. Yet, implicitly, whiteness is also a constituent element of the images which facilitate the process of healing – mainly bones and paper. Narrative imagery involving whiteness contributes to the bridging of the past and the present, forming a bridge between generations, a kind of rivet that allows to at least partly retrieve personal wholeness and recapture the broken promises.

Keywords:
whiteness; Bone; Fae Myenne Ng; paper; bones; mourning

Pages:
131–143
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