語ることのできない「真ん中」

小説『骨』とディアスポリック・チャイニーズの時間

抄録

This essay will discuss how we can describe the unspeakable, the “Middle,” and uncontrollable time of diasporic Chinese. This is done through the examination of the “time” that we can observe through Fae Myenne Ng’s novel, Bone. In this novel, the author narrates the suicide of Ona, a sister of the storyteller Leila but does not arrange stories in chronological order. Instead the author tells the same story repeatedly but incompletely, and prevents the plurality of the time from being understood merely along the official history and identity of Chinese Americans. The “time” that Leila’s family experienced is an “unspeakable gap,” or an “uncontrollable middle,” which is generated by conflicting voices of each member of the family. Tightly associated with the threat of the “middle,” the loss of Ona could not anyhow be eased. It is the sound of village dialect and the Han characters written on paper that barely compensates for the uncontrollable time. On both sides of the “middle,” various “twos” are contrasted: living in the United States as a migrant and the shackles of Chinatown. Some examples of this contrasts are Chinatown’s “in” and “out,” love for Oswald and love for family, Leon and Mason and others. Moreover, as also revealed in this essay, the “middle” should not be understood in the opposition between the “official written history,” and the “informal family history.” This view invites us to ignore how the author cannot or hesitates to speak. The “Middle” time is a sort of a temporal reality that can be perceived by leaving it unspeakable. By holding phonocentric assumptions, postmodern ethnographers presume that writing and literacy are strictly opposites to orality and speech. However, on the social world of diasporic Chinese, both the Han script and various voices could represent the pace and rhythms of migrants’ daily lives, the social meaning of repetition, the continuation and completion of their acts, and the distinction of the said and the unsaid. These could constitute and also compensate uncontrollable, “the Middle,” and unspeakable time of diasporic Chinese.