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Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories
MELUS, Summer, 2004 by Ken-fang Lee
When she describes her mother's encounter with the ghosts, she reveals that her mother "could be a dragoness" ("my totem, your totem") and thus be a strong woman. Since she is also a dragon, she can learn from her mother's experience and "talk the ghosts away" in order to reclaim who she is and where she is without confusion about 'T' and "here," both in the American alphabet and Chinese ideographs. Actually, placing this section of her mother's story in the middle of the whole book manifests the importance of the role that her mother plays in the process of constructing her own identity.
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The young narrator has to come to terms with being called Ho Chi Kuei to justify her self and her "here." This term signifies the dilemma of assimilation into the dominant society and of claiming cultural differences as a minority group. The meaning of Ho Chi Kuei, to borrow Bhabha's notion of mimicry, is "almost the same but not quite" (Bhabha, Location 86). Straddling her parental Chinese culture and the dominant American culture, Ho Chi Kuei is neither/nor as well as both/and, and at the same time, occupies the "in-between" space. When the narrator cannot keep silent about her secrets any longer, she blurts out the whole list of things that she wants to confess to or ask her mother. In anger, her mother shouts, "you Ho Chi Kuei. Get out. I knew you were going to turn out bad" (182). After this fight, the narrator chooses to leave home and finds an American way of life: "Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark comers: no ghosts" (182).
Sato argues that for Kingston, an ethnic approach would start with "a definite culture that is not tentatively situated 'someplace in between,' but named and located as Chinese America" ("Ghosts" 195). I disagree with her on this point. It is true that a definite culture is located in Chinese America, but it does not contradict the concept that Chinese America is somewhere "in-between." I emphasize that "in-betweenness" is not a static referent but a process of hybridization. It involves interaction and intersignificance between "culture-sympathy and culture-clash" (Bhabha, "Culture's" 54). The narrator translates cultures in order to constitute a hybrid identity, an identity signified by the term, Ho Chi Kuei. After all, the narrator, like her mother, survives among the ghosts despite the difference between the ghosts they confront. At the end of "Shaman," the narrator, now a grown-up, visits her mother and tells her that she has found "some places in this country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there" (101).
Kingston admits in an interview that she has learned that "writing does not make ghosts go away. I wanted to record, to find the words for, the 'ghosts,' which are only visions.... I want to give them a substance that goes beyond me" (Rabinowitz 178). In terms of her narratives, Kingston gives not only the "No Name Aunt" but also Ho Chi Kuei a substance to pass on and to possess a place in family and/or communal history. In writing and re-telling these stories, Kingston translates a cross-cultural experience into words and transforms the supposedly derogatory meaning of Ho Chi Kuei into a more positive, hybrid identity.
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