ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the first by examining how American Born Chinese (2006) by Gene Luen Yang and Blue by Pat Grant (2012) challenge stereotypes of ‘otherness’ in their respective coming-of-age memoirs. The discussion focusses on the ways that each work borrows from historical depictions of ‘Asian’ migrants, and in doing so, offers new constellations of cultural memory by complicating their respective afterlives. Cultural minorities such as migrant communities are frequently expelled from popular narratives about belonging and nationhood, and both works seek to trouble this expulsion by providing an alternate visual archive. The discussion of American Born Chinese introduces historical examples of cultural stereotyping of Chinese identities in the United States, before focussing on themes of transformation and the recovery of fractured identities in the text. The discussion of Blue examines the construction of personal memory in the narrator’s reminiscences, and his discomfort about the division between self and other as he trawls through a particular day from his youth.
