In this chapter, I will explore the rewriting and the recurrent representation of her war memory as a refugee student in both literary and autobiographical settings. In depicting refugee students, she emphasizes the importance of connections despite ruptures, especially the mother-daughter relationship across different generations. She sometimes adopts a modernist way while writing the war experience of the refugee students. The transfer of war memory between different generations can be compared to Marianne Hirsch’s conception of postmemory, which describes the memory transferred to the second generation of Holocaust survivors. Nieh’s switching between fiction and autobiography signals the tension between history and memory, fictionality and reality. By making her war trauma and memory narratable, she is also rethinking whether the war experience makes her more Chinese or not. While her war experience as a refugee student is her “first life” in the war-torn mainland China among her “three lives” in mainland China, Taiwan, and the US, she is constantly negotiating with herself how to situate the war memory in her “three lives” in line with her Chineseness and her positionality in the world. The literary figures are gradually offered greater mobility within China and beyond in accordance with Nieh’s life experience. She extends her horizon by connecting being Chinese to being human in the world. Even though the wartime is a tumultuous time full of violence, as Nieh mentions Nanjing Massacre on December 13, 1937, Chongqing Tunnel Massacre on June 5, 1941, among other kinds of constant killings and air raids, her repeated narration and her recreation of various characters also builds up what Robert Jay Lifton calls “a protean self” out of the “dead ends” of violence (11). Proteanism means that by experiencing these upheavals and being shattered, the characters and Nieh herself can be reborn out of traumatic memories. Nieh even recalls and depicts the possible freedom and excitement during the wartime offered to young people, which can also be seen as another kind of “proteanism”.
Linshan Jiang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature and film in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan, interdisciplinary studies of memory and translation, emotion studies, and gender studies. Her dissertation project focuses on female figures’ wartime experience and memories of the Asia-Pacific War in modern and contemporary literature and film in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. Her project for the Ph.D. emphasis of translation studies is translation and canon formation of world literature and how Chinese and Japanese contemporary literature circulates in the English-speaking market. She has published translations of scholarly works and literary pieces in China and the United States. She has also published an article about queer studies and emotion studies entitled “Transforming Emotional Regime: Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys”.
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Meeting ID: 899 7606 1973
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The Transworlding Works-In-Progress Series is a space for graduate students to share and develop their writings with input and mentoring provided by the research community at UCSB. This workshop will feature research by graduate students whose MA thesis or Ph.D. dissertation project is global, transregional, and/or interdisciplinary. We invite participants from across the social sciences and humanities.
These gatherings are designed to be supportive spaces and sites of shared community in which graduate students receive constructive feedback on research papers, article drafts, conference presentations, job talks, or collaborative projects. Graduate thesis/dissertation topics can include globalization, comparative area studies, geopolitics, climate justice, urban or rural geography, migration, immigration, militarization, intersectional politics, global race and racism, global gender/sexuality, security and insecurity, surveillance, democratization, labor, Big Tech, infrastructure, media, global south partnerships, community building, human rights, disaster, dispossession, displacement, financialization, activism, cultural survival, indigeneity, sovereignty, and more.
The workshop is intended to foster collegiality among graduate students across different fields, help professionalize graduate student researchers, strengthen research publications and conference presentations, support researchers of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and create intellectual community and partnerships. We will also focus on shaping publications to target peer-reviewed journals, and provide space for practicing job talks.
We convene once per month for 60 minutes. The presenter will circulate a paper (no more than 25 pages, double-spaced) one week before the workshop so that participants can read and engage with it beforehand, and offer comments and questions when we meet. During the workshop, the presenter will provide a brief (5-10 min) overview of the project, and a faculty leader or a doctoral candidate will moderate the discussion. One participant will be assigned to take notes during the workshop to be shared with the presenter.
We will meet via zoom until further notice. Once we are back on campus we envision this series as a community-building experience, with free food and drink! We hope that those who wish to participate will become “members” of this community and make an effort to attend all conversations in the series, in order to support each other.
We are looking for volunteer future presenters. If you have a specific thesis/dissertation chapter or draft article submission you would like to present, please indicate that in your email (and tell us the title of your draft). Graduate students who are interested in presenting or participating in the workshop should contact: Tinghao Zhou at tinghaozhou@ucsb.edu
The Works-in-Progress Series is a joint initiative led by the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies (Paul Amar) and the Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures (GMTaC) Lab (Lisa Parks). If you have questions please contact Paul Amar at amar@global.ucsb.edu or Lisa Parks at parks@ucsb.edu.