序三

King-Kok Cheung wrote Articulate Silences:Hisaye Yamamoto,Maxine Hong Kingston , Joy Kogawa in the midst of an unprecedented outpouring of literature by North Americans of Asian descent,and an equally prolific response by scholars who had been eagerly awaiting those previously unheard minority voices.Because traditional tools devised for interpreting canonical literature did not do justice to these new writings,Cheung and other scholars of ethnic minority literatures had not only to keep up with the outpouring of literary texts but also to invent new toolboxes for interpreting them.For a number of reasons,Cheung's Articulate Silences —a major breakthrough when it was published—stands out from among many contemporary studies,having retained critical relevance and freshness of perspective despite the passage of time.

First,Cheung wrote this study somewhat against the 1990s preoccupation with discourse,speech,and articulation of subjectivity,focusing instead on the interpretive potential of that which remains unspoken and which,therefore,demands from the reader a willingness to seek the reasons for various types of silence,both inside the texts and in their historical contexts.Second,for Cheung silence was irreducible to a symptom of oppression,though it could be a response to oppression.She saw silence as a multifaced phenomenon.Silence can speak louder than words,she argued;when words deceive,silence can speak truth to power; used rhetorically,silence can undermine speech and convey grievances that are unspeakable for aesthetic or political reasons.Her study valorizes such notions as reticence,verbal restraint,indirection,and muted voices,all of which reveal the subtle ways in which Asian American writers' juxtapose speech and silence.Third,Cheung close-read Asian American authors with the same respect and attentiveness with which she had read Shakespeare during her doctoral studies at the University of California,Berkeley,assuming that each of these authors is a theorist of her own condition.This was a radical departure from the 1990s trend to read literature as a convenient illustration of one critical theory or another.Although Cheung's research was informed by feminist,postcolonial,and African American literary criticism,as well as by the writings of Michel Foucault and other postmodernists,she used theoretical insights only insofar as they allowed her to show Asian American writers as original thinkers.It is her patient and respectful approach to Asian American fiction that makes Cheung's interpretations seem as fresh today as they were in the 1990s,unencumbered by jargon and“key concepts”that date very quickly.I learned this approach to literature from Cheung's Articulate Silences ,and I continue to model it for my students in Poland.Finally,Cheung unerringly recognized the little-known fiction of the Japanese American Hisaye Yamamoto as astoundingly complex,and initiated the canonization of this author by getting her stories reprinted and by producing marvelous interpretations that have not been surpassed by any other critic.She did the same for the Japanese Canadian writer Joy Kogawa.Maxine Hong Kingston did not need more critical acclaim.In the 1990s she already was,and remains to this day,the most widely recognized and taught Asian American author,but Cheung related her work thematically to that of other women writers and wrote sustained critiques of both The Woman Warrior and China Men .In the 1990s,Cheung was one of the few feminist critics—Alice Walker being another—to acknowledge that being silenced is not just a predicament that affects women in patriarchal societies.Her interpretations of Kingston's and Yamamoto's narratives make it clear that men of color in predominantly white societies may be silenced and emasculated by whites,who benefit from structural inequalities.It is on the strength of these interpretations,among others,that China Men has been on my department's American literature reading list for the past twelve years.

Meticulously researched,beautifully composed,and lucidly written, Articulate Silences deserves to be read by students and academic instructors as a paradigm of literary interpretation.It is used by Asian American studies scholars across Europe.In addition to silencing and silence,it highlights many themes that have not lost their cultural resonance.The most salient is the demonization,exclusion,and incarceration of racial others—so effectively shown by Cheung in her reading of Yamamoto's“The Legend of Miss Sasagawara.”When teaching a course at Leibniz University in Hannover,Germany,on representations of Japanese Americans' concentration camp experience during World War Ⅱ,I was gratified by the students' engagement in class discussions prompted by the fact that for the first time in their lives they were reading about camps other than those build by Nazi Germans.Exclusion and incarceration are a common experience of refuges and economic migrants from the Global South when they attempt to enter the Global North—an experience that is shrouded in silence and easily forgotten.In this context,Cheung's interpretations of Yamamoto's“The Legend of Miss Sasagawara”and Kogawa's Obasan remain highly relevant; they force readers to attend to the barely audible voices of those who experience life at its most precarious.

As one for whom reading and rereading Articulate Silences has been a formative experience,I am delighted that this book will now be available in translation to scholars and students of literature across China.

Dominika Ferens
University of Wroclaw,Poland