Upon my reading of Diamond Grill by Fred Wah, and looking at the website High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, created by Wah as well, I found some interesting correlations and connections. The one I found to be most interesting, whether it was intentional or not, was the similar conjuring of emotions both the book and website bring about, and the relation to a main point I think Wah attempts to get across in both.
Throughout Diamond Grill, Wah takes us as readers through a journey of what it means to be a “ChineseHYPHENCanadian” (Wah 178) in British Columbia. Writing about his experiences at his families restaurant, The Diamond Grill, Wah provides an insight into what it feels like to be in a position where he is consistently questioning his racial identity, as he receives reactions from others who question his being both Canadian, and Chinese. In his writing, which uses the technique of “prose poem” (Fitzgerald), Wah frequently switches the perspective of the speaker, contributing to an overall feeling of questioning, and what I would consider confusion at parts. Upon analysis of the book, this confusion seems to simmer down as scattered thoughts are aligned, but at first, I found that it really seemed to put me as a reader into the state of mind that he must possess with his questioning of self.
When looking at High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, the website he produced, similar feelings arise. The lack of “linearness”, as the viewer clicks randomly through an interactive poem, seems to really provoke feelings of displacement or confusion that seem to be similar to what Wah may be feeling in his own life. All of these sensations seem to tie into his analysis of the use of the hyphen, which he describes in the afterword of Diamond Grill. This analysis is interesting because through it he brings light to the “hybridity” (178) he possesses, and questioning of his racial identity. He highlights and argues that the hyphen creates a major problem for multiculturalism, due to its common correlation with “impurity” (178).
Wah’s ability to create and conjure these feelings of confusion and questioning in his readers and viewers within Diamond Grill and High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese makes me think of John Couser’s “rhetoric of emancipation” (44) which he discusses in his article “Rhetoric and Self-Representation in Disability Memoir”, and attributes to disability narratives. I have found that this rhetoric of emancipation can also be found in genres other than that of the disability narrative, like in, for example, Dany Lafferière’s The World is Moving Around Me, a postcolonial trauma narrative, and, as I will argue here, Wah’s Diamond Grill. From the afterword of Diamond Grill, it seems that Wah makes an attempt to free those possessing the “impure” hyphen of their stigma, by giving his readers a new perspective and position to look at the situation from. In a sense, he is attempting to emancipate mixed race individuals of the stigma, or unfair treatment they may receive. By presenting this idea to his readers, he is placing upon them a new role, that of the witness. This act of creating witnesses is similar to what Gillian Whitlock discusses in “Protection”, where she describes testimony, an alternate form of narrative, that “mobilizes painful emotions in its witness: shame, guilt, and responsibility” (84). In Diamond Grill, Wah seems to seek to create an audience who will become witnesses, by creating the feelings of questioning and confusion that I described earlier, in the hope that they will realize how he feels and stop themselves from stigmatizing individuals who are of mixed race.
Works Cited:
Couser, G. T. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Project MUSE. Web. 2 Dec. 2015.
Fitzgerald, Judith. “Fred Wah: A portrait in his own words (and a few others’).” The Globe and Mail. The Global and Mail, 21 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
Laferrière, Dany. The World is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013. Print
Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest, 1996. Print.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Protection.” We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights. Ed. Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 2014. Project Muse. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.