崔維新《紙影：唐人街的童年時光》的記憶與再現

Memory and Representation in Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood

崔維新（Wayson Choy）在《紙影》（Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood）以個人受領養的事件為始，回憶1940年代生活在溫哥華唐人街的童年往事，試圖從中尋找關於親生父母的線索，用以還原自己的真實身分。本文將討論個人如何憑藉回憶的機制再現歷史事件，從再現的事件裡，敘述者將發現新的事證，並在詮釋的當下，創造新的家族歷史。論文第一部分將就蘿西歐‧戴維斯（Rocío G. Davis）的亞裔北美童年敘事策略研究，討論個人記憶敘事如何成為歷史的文本。此外，本文也將參考尤里‧洛特曼（Yuri M. Lotman）界定的記憶與歷史互文關係，分析《紙影》裡的家族史，如何經由敘述者再憶的行為被重新創造。記憶裡的溫哥華唐人街成為個人與集體離散華人對話的場域。本文第二部分將從洪美恩（Ien Ang）定義的「具差異的共居狀態」（together-in-difference）華人離散論述，分析《紙影》中粵劇戲院空間裡的族裔文化活動，與華人孩童的牛仔扮裝。文化記憶在當地政治、社會與文化等影響下，產出混雜東西文化的文本。敘述者於認可這些文本的同時，建構了跨文化的身分認同。

In Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood, the I-narrator, a Chinese Canadian, illuminates the significance of his transcultural identity when recollecting his childhood in Vancouver’s Chinatown of the 1940s. Based on Rocío G. Davis’s study of Asian North American autobiographies of childhood, in the first part of this paper, I will discuss the narrative strategy of the text. Moreover, Yuri M. Lotman’s argument on how historical facts could be made through the mechanism of memory leads me to discuss the reconstruction of history in Paper Shadows. The narrator, besides sharing with the elders the family episodes, reexamines the past from a family photograph and which leads him to find more facts so as to restructure his family history. In the second part, Ien Ang’s discussion on the diasporic Chinese living in a state of “together-in-difference” enlightens me to consider the Chinatown space as a decentralized discourse where Chinese and North American cultures interact. For example, an exploration of the ethnic activities practiced within the Cantonese opera theater leads us to see how the diasporic Chinese may differ in their interpretations of the cultural memory. Furthermore, from the young narrator’s photographs in cowboy costume, we perceive that he learns to interrelate the Eastern and the Western cultures, which demonstrates the dynamics of his transcultural Chinese Canadian identity.