“Back and Forth Between the Sea and the Mountain”: Negative Mobility and Transnationalism in Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach
Increased mobility and interconnection have characterized the end of the twentieth century. “‘Globalization’ is on everybody’s lips,” Z. Bauman wrote in 1998, and travelling is within everyone’s reach, a clichéd idea that evokes images of freedom and self-realisation. Yet immigrants’ tales often rev...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2019-09-01
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| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/12780 |
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| Summary: | Increased mobility and interconnection have characterized the end of the twentieth century. “‘Globalization’ is on everybody’s lips,” Z. Bauman wrote in 1998, and travelling is within everyone’s reach, a clichéd idea that evokes images of freedom and self-realisation. Yet immigrants’ tales often reveal that mobility and transnational ties can be negative and alienating. Through an analysis of Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (1976/1998) by the Asian American writer Hualing Nieh, this essay focuses on the negative outcomes of coerced mobility and transnationalism. The protagonist, Mulberry, is a Chinese refugee woman who is forced to relocate across China, Taiwan and the United States to escape war as well as male and institutional violence. If by “transnationalism” we mean “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Glick Schiller et al. 48), in Mulberry and Peach the author depicts a negative version of transnationalism. Placed in a transnational web against her will, Mulberry refuses to establish links with any nation, as both China and the United States are fraught with violence. She is therefore doomed to wander perpetually, and, at the same time, she is trapped in a frightening in-between space that causes “a vertiginous unbalancing of life and self” (Roberson 11). |
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| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |