The Past Continues to Yell at Us: Transgenerational Trauma and Memory in Susie Yang’s White Ivy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v26i2.940Keywords:
White Ivy, Chinese American, Postmemory, Transgenerational TraumaAbstract
Memory and trauma of past events, specifically those linked to the forced movement of Asian (particularly Chinese) immigrants to the United States over the last century, continue to shape postcolonial narratives, as heavily reflected in the 2020 novel White Ivy by Susie Yang. As a diaspora, Chinese Americans have continually faced challenges in negotiating cultural belonging, assimilation, and traditions across different generations. By taking postmemory studies, postcolonial perspectives, and narratological methods, this article examines White Ivy, a contemporary Chinese American novel that, like many of its predecessors, portrays the complexities of family, heritage, identity, and trauma. The main purpose of this study is to examine the way trauma shapes the main character’s (Ivy Lin) strategy as she assimilates into the host society (America) and how her story represents second-generation flight response within the discourse of diaspora. The discussion investigates the transgenerational trauma inherited by Ivy Lin, mainly by analysing the way the narrative structure reveals the construction of Ivy’s postmemory and her response to the trauma passed down onto her. The findings of this study indicate that Ivy Lin, who represents a member of the subsequent generation, becomes the medium of traumatic postmemory, which, as a defence mechanism, she chooses to fly away from. This study thus argues that when a subsequent diasporic generation is influenced by the host society, postmemory is questioned, leading trauma inheritors to reject certain traditions passed down from the previous generation.
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