Of parallel journeys and coalescing cultures

By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-04 10:54

"In Da Ge I wanted to create a complement to Aysha, and between them a synthesis, which is manifest in Julia Too," says DeWoskin. Julia is the love child of the two protagonists, a sparkling pre-teen who ruminates on death as naturally as she demands her purple fruit roll-up.

"I got to relive my own childhood through her, and imagine what my girls (now aged 4 and 1) might be like when they reach the pre-adolescent stage. I want my daughters to have a lasting relationship with China, like Julia Too."

Da Ge's passage to America has a parallel in Aysha and Julia Too's arrival in Beijing in the early 1990s to trace their Chinese connection. The newly-entrepreneurial China and America face similar issues - an ever-widening income gap, reality TV and avian flu.

If Chinese TV abounds in stereotypes of American women as gold-diggers, like the character DeWoskin played in Foreign Babes, "when has anybody seen a nuanced Chinese character on American TV?"

In fact, "while China is very friendly toward foreigners, America, post 9/11, is not."

Her book also celebrates cultural differences.

"I love Chinglish," she says. "Although these are often grammatically inaccurate, they allow the speaker to import the most expressive components of the English language into Chinese culture."

As Da Ge writes in one of his several letters to Aysha, "I am float through the world like a bubble that will disappear any moment. No city. No family. No home."

Her interest in the way language works across cultures ties in with the themes of displacement, of being thrown out of one's linguistic comfort zone.

"When you remove yourself from the familiar markers, you have to keep figuring out who you are in a different context. Being in China helps me understand America's place in the world."

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