《金山》的回忆空间建构与文化记忆传承

Construction of Memory Space in Gold Mountain Blues and the Inheritance of Cultural Memory

《金山》(Gold Mountain Blues,2009)是加拿大华人作家张翎的一部史诗性著作,描写了以开平方家为代表的几代海外华工的奋斗历史与悲苦命运,涵盖了记忆、空间、身份与死者纪念等多个主题。本文以空间与记忆为切入点,探查《金山》中历史书写、记忆传承与身份建构间的关系。张翎创作本身就是一个挖掘历史、建构回忆空间的过程,与之相呼应的是小说人物艾米重建家史并承传记忆的过程。海外先侨的奋斗历史与家国情怀是值得生者知晓并纪念的,而后辈移民个体也只有在追溯族裔历史过程中寻找自己的身份归属,使个体的生存体验融汇在集体记忆中,方能超越时空限制并形成文化记忆的延续。

Gold Mountain Blues(2009),an epic novel by Zhang Ling,a Chinese-Canadian writer,gives an account of the struggling history and sad fate of Chinese workers overseas for a number of generations,represented by the Fang family from Kaiping,covering a range of themes such as memory,space,identity and commemoration of the dead.This article,by taking memory as the point of departure,explores the relationship between historical writing,inheritance of memory and identity construction in Gold Mountain Blues.Zhang Ling’s writing itself is a process of historical excavation and the construction of memory space,and consistent with that is the process of Amy,a character’s reconstruction of her family history and the inheritance of memory.The history of struggle on the part of overseas Chinese and their love for their homeland are worthy of knowledge and commemoration while individuals of subsequent generations can only find where they belong in terms of identity in the historical process of searching for their ethnic origins in an effort to merge their individual living experience into the collective memory so that they can transcend the restrictions of space and time and form the continuation of cultural memory.