This generation’s Wild Swans? Counter-stereotyping self-creation in Xiaolu Guo’s Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up

Abstract

This article reads Xiaolu Guo’s Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up (2017) as a counter-stereotyping memoir set against Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991) through the authors’ divergent narrative stances in self-creation. Although both memoirs belong to the literary genre of autobiography and narrate lives in the past, Guo, by comparing herself to the heroic Monkey King, exhibits a distinct perspective that characterizes her immigrant experience as a nomad’s feminist journey into art. Guo’s self-creation as a nomadic artist deterritorializes the affiliation of diasporic Chinese writing with misery literature, labelled “ethnic”, and reveals the complexity of contemporary Chinese culture. Thus, this counter-stereotyping memoir represents how an Anglophone Chinese writer of the post-Chang generation tends to negotiate her ethnic status and demonstrates the multiplicity of being Chinese.