Diasporic Lag in Memory-Making: Chinese American Historiographies of the Second Sino-Japanese War
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- How do diaspora communities construct histories of their homelands? My thesis compares diaspora and homeland understandings of a single historical moment: Japanese atrocities committed on Chinese soil and to Chinese peoples during the Second Sino-Japanese War. While the literature on collective memory and intergenerational trauma focuses attention on temporal inheritances of memory, few have considered how memory may be crystallized and transmitted across space, from homelands to diaspora. While traveling through China in 2021, I observed that second-generation Chinese Americans (those born in the United States) harbored greater and less nuanced forms of anti-Japanese anger than mainland Chinese youth of the same age, despite the former’s spatial and temporal distance from the mainland. Through both an original survey study and in-depth interviews, this thesis assesses whether these differences in historical memory are observed across a broader and more representative population, and also investigates the causes behind these differences in historical memory. Survey data demonstrates that third-generation Chinese Americans tend to hold greater degrees of anti-Japanese anger than do their first- and second-generation counterparts, and that second-generation Chinese Americans tend to hold different forms of anti-Japanese anger according to the year of their parents’ migration. Interview data suggests that several factors contribute to this difference, including a drive among second- and third-generation Chinese Americans to retrieve knowledge of Chinese history and heritage; a tendency among first-generation parents to educate their second-generation children with outdated historical narratives; and the surprising salience of mainland war films in Chinese American understandings of the war. However, survey and interview data indicate that Chinese Americans’ experiences with alienation, racism, and outsidership in the U.S. lead them to question both U.S. and Chinese narratives of the war, and to extend sympathy towards the contemporary Japanese people. Ultimately, this thesis documents how diasporic communities preserve, distort, and construct memories, with an agency that is often discounted in broader geopolitical discourse.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Publication date | June 6, 2023; May 19, 2023 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chen, Ana |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) |
|---|---|
| Subject | Collective memory |
| Subject | Chinese Americans |
| Subject | Collective trauma |
| Subject | World War II |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Chen, A. (2023). Diasporic Lag in Memory-Making: Chinese American Historiographies of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/yy682pt8301. https://doi.org/10.25740/yy682pt8301.
Collection
Stanford University, Program in International Relations, Honors Theses
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- achen42@stanford.edu
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