earticle

영어

Ha Jin’s A Good Fall is a collection of short stories about lives of Chinese immigrants clustered in Flushing, the second largest Chinatown in New York. This book features a cast of Chinese immigrants with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Each story presents a unique way of developing lives in a new society and of formulating a new identity. Their diasporic experience is constructed through their varied attempts to seek a new identity. Meanwhile, their bonds with the motherland in the host country are displaced, unsettled, and repositioned. Stories of immigrants lead easily to questions of what to keep, what to adopt and what to discard. If reflection comes with sentimental attachment or emotional associations, this kind of memory is usually called nostalgia. And as nostalgia touches on politicized, historicized, and nationalized concerns, it provides an opportunity to examine the contested and heterogeneous makings of diaspora, as well as its historical experience, and hopefully, it offers a perspective of who they are now and who they are becoming. Nostalgia of this sort is effective, giving rise to agency with self-awareness and self-determination when facing questions of cultural assimilation. Nostalgia may also initiate a constructive process of consolidating identity in diaspora. Nostalgia can be creative in establishing, realizing, or consolidating a diasporic identity; this I call creative nostalgia. This article explores the complicated fabrication of a shared memory among Chinese immigrants in the microcosm of Flushing. I argue that A Good Fall is about a sort of creative nostalgia, where the old life clashes with new routines, and shared memory is recollected in terms of all that has been lost and gained. This paper also examines the shaping of new identity, as memory of the homeland is resurrected culturally through interactions with the living reality of a new world. The common practice of memory sustains a bond to the past in the form of creative nostalgia, while it helps to transform the process of cultural integration into a blend of unsettled new identities.