The location of Chinese North American ethnicity in Vancouver and San Francisco fiction

Vancouver and San Francisco, with their urban geographies, scenic natural surroundings, and complex histories, loom large in Chinese Canadian and Chinese American literature. The two cities are material and symbolic spaces through which writers imagine ethnic identities in very different ways. This fi rst comparative study of Chinese North American Vancouver and San Francisco fi ction introduces the concept “location of ethnicity” to correlate the social, mental, and material aspects of urban space and the place that Chinese communities occupy in the larger cultural orders of these two North American societies. It includes in-depth analyses of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe, Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. While Chinese North American Vancouver and San Francisco fi ction refl ect the trend towards the global and transculturalism, the novels have not become unfastened from the national cultures in which they are rooted. An original contribution to the study of Chinese Canadian and Chinese American literature, this book will be of interest to scholars of Asian North American literature as well as to Vancouver and San Francisco enthusiasts.