伍慧明传记小说的幽灵批评

Ghost Criticism of Fae Myenne Ng’s Biographical Fiction

当代华裔美国传记小说家伍慧明常以华人移民历史为题材,剖析美国种族主义移民政策对华人的精神伤害。她的第一部传记小说《骨》以唐人街移民家庭的悲剧为线索,探究排华法案对华裔几代人命运的灾难性影响;其另一部传记小说《望岩》延续了《骨》的主题,进一步挖掘种族主义给华人群体带来的灾难性后果。伍慧明在小说中打破了历史与现实、真实与虚构的界限,发掘早期华人移民心中挥之不去且无法言说的创伤记忆。她将精神创伤进行幽灵化处理,书写美国华人移民的幽灵意象,展现其“怪异”的心理空间和边缘化的幽灵身份,旨在揭示美国种族主义政治的实质,重写那段被美国官方有意忽略的华人移民史。

Fae Myenne Ng, a contemporary Chinese American novelist of biographies, often writes about the history of Chinese migrants and analyses the spiritual hurt that American racist migration policies have done on the Chinese. Bone, her first biographical novel, based on the tragedy of a migrant family in Chinatown, is a study of the disastrous impact as a result of the exclusive legislations on several generations of Chinese. Her other biographical novel, Steer Toward Rock, while continuing with the theme of Bone, keeps excavating the catastrophic consequences that racism had wrought upon the Chinese community.In her fiction, Fae Myenne Ng breaks the boundary between history and reality, truth and fictionalization by digging into the unforgettable and unspeakable traumatic memory of the Chinese migrants in the early days as she treated the spiritual trauma through ghosts, writing about the ghostly images of the Chinese American migrants and showing their weird psychologial space and marginalized ghostly identity, in an effort to reveal the true nature of racist politics in America and rewrite the history that the American authorities had deliberately ignored of the Chinese migrants.