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"In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents' ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic "returns": first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives--including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others--register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory"-- "This manuscript looks at migration, melancholia, and memory in what the author calls "Asian American narratives of return," or fiction and nonfiction narratives in which the narrator visits the ancestral homeland in Asia"--

American literature --- Asian Americans in literature --- Emigration and immigration in literature --- Homeland in literature --- Return in literature --- Melancholy in literature --- Memory in literature --- Asian Americans --- S02/0200 --- S05/0220 --- S11/1120 --- S16/0195 --- Memory as a theme in literature --- Return motif in literature --- English literature --- Agrarians (Group of writers) --- Asian American authors --- History and criticism --- Ethnic identity --- China: General works--Civilization and culture, nation, nationalism --- China: Biographies and memoirs--20th century: collective biographies --- China: Social sciences--Migration and emigration: U.S.A. and Canada (incl. Hawaï) (whatever period) --- China: Literature and theatrical art--Thematic studies