JAC Volume 23 Issue 1

In the symposium on the politics of the personal published in College English in September 2001, Min-Zhan Lu suggests that "to break down the polarities dictating our understanding of our lives in relation to the people, history, culture, and institutions around us," we need "to move our thinking beyond a mere fixation on the `what's' of the lived experience to also explore the `how's' and `why's to our lived experience" (53). This is familiar territory for Lu, beginning with her account of struggling with different languages and discourses in school in Communist China in "From Silence to Words, published in College English, to her confronting the paradox of her privilege in "Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation," published in College Composition and Communication, and including her examination (with Bruce Horner) of "The Problematic of Experience," published in College English. In Shanghai Quartet: The Crossings of Four Women of China, she plunges deeper into this territory, and her exacting and lyrical analyses of the how's and why's of her own experiences and those of her grandmother, nanny, and mother in Shanghai demonstrate how the "open-ended revision of self and culture" can help "to end oppression rather than to empower a particular form of self, group, or culture" ("Redefining," 187, 173). In the pages of this remarkable book, we encounter not only the ideal literate self that Lu envisioned in her critical affirmation essay but also someone who recognizes the power of stories, the responsibility to get them right, and the need for continuous self-reflection and revision to do so.

As that September 2001 special issue of College English (and the more recent College English special issue on creative nonfiction) suggests, personal writing has become an increasingly important genre of scholarship in composition studies. The earlier literacy autobiographies by Keith Gilyard (Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence, 1991), Victor Villanueva, Jr. (Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, 1993), and Linda Brodkey ("Writing on the Bias," College English, 1994) demonstrated how personal writing could be used to vividly and critically analyze the politics of particular lived experience. But as Lu points out in her symposium contribution, the value of personal writing depends not on something intrinsic to the genre but rather on method, "what the writer is trying to do—how does the writer go about approaching certain lived experiences and why," and she emphasizes both the writer's and the reader's responsibility to "become as interested in the act of writing as in its content" (54). This is the key to the effectiveness of personal writing as scholarship. Its value depends not on the relevance of the experiences related to the object or situation of study—a judgment that reifies experience and reinscribes the split between the personal and the objective, scholarly self—but rather on how it is written about and why. When academics analyze personal experience in the same rigorous way that they analyze other material, interpreting it as stories within rhetorical contexts that enable and condition the stories and their interpretations, their personal writing escapes the common objections that it might be self-indulgent, an invitation to the dangers of confession, impervious to critique or refutation, or a commodification of difference. This is the achievement of Gilyard's, Villanueva's, and Brodkey's writing—and, quintessentially, of Shanghai Quartet.

Lu tells her family stories to her daughter, sorting though the details and contexts of everyday life, making connections, making and remaking meanings, examining and reexamining motivations, looking for what can be learned. At one point, she calls her book a "family manual," then reflects that she was not sure it "was turning out to be what I wanted it to be." Full of memories, its goal is not to capture memories but to work on them.

In the prologue, she says to her daughter, "I like to think of you and me as a certain type of immigrant: people who move on because we can't keep ourselves from wanting to yi—fuse, confuse, and diffuse—set ways of doing things. And I ask you to think of us as the descendants of immigrants working on the art of yi at life's crossings." The women in these stories do work hard at composing their lives. Her grandmother made bargains with fortune, working with the gifts fortune gave her—a keen intelligence, a good-hearted husband—and with the obstacles—a "no-good brother," the Cultural Revolution, her husband's taking a concubine—to argue that it is "the will to improve yourself and life in circumstances" that counts, and that women count as much in a relationship as men: "it takes two to love: to love and make love." Her nanny, burdened with the misfortune of a husband who died in the first year of their marriage and a son who died in childhood, wrote and revised her life plan several times over, leaving the village of her birth for Shanghai, leaving it again after realizing that she had outgrown the place she had thought to ensure for herself by marrying her adopted daughter to the son of her brother-in-law, moving out on her own during the Cultural Revolution, earning a certificate as a disciple of a master monk at a Buddhist temple at age eighty, always willing to start her life over "while so much awaits." Her mother, who because of her privileged upbringing was never able to obtain work outside of the home, compiled a work record through her fights with her husband to convince him that their lives need not be defined by position and possessions, leaving for her daughter "a manual of labor, on how to help members of a love ensemble let the best of one another bring the best out of one another."

Lu herself works hard to hear the stories she believes her grandmother, nanny, and mother have to tell her, and she insists on the importance of listening for "the other meanings" the stories may hold. She argues that "to tell an immigrant story is to take up the challenge of . . . learning to start with minute but attentive steps: weighing those questions which often appear so mundane yet so impossible to answer, probing how and why I remain dissatisfied with the ways I have been handling each question, and teasing out new possibilities, new answers." She echoes this position in her symposium article when she calls on readers of personal writing to "pay more specific attention to instances in a text where the writer appears to be thinking in terms of `as . . . as,' `at once,' `moreover,' `not only . . . but also,' `as well,' or `to an extent'" (54). Jane Hindman, in her article on "Making Writing Matter" in the same issue of College English, identifies this logic of multiple possibilities as essential to personal academic writing: "embodied writing and reading require me to surrender my analytical need to be right and/or absolute in my understanding of how language [and life] works" (101).

Personal academic writing makes writing matter by firmly situating the questions in embodied selves and in particular situations where the answers are never so clear, and by continually reflecting on what meaning the writer is making through considering that self in that situation. Hindman links this second crucial requirement for personal academic writing—"unflinching self-reflection, maintaining a relentless awareness of the ways I use rhetoric to position myself" (101)—to Lu's call for a literacy of critical affirmation, "ways of reading and writing, speaking and listening, in which one's authority comes from one's ability to confront one's own privileges rather than to merely confront the privileges of others" (CCC [1999],193), and she argues that personal writing that fulfills these two requirements matters because it can bring about change: "when my personal writing is disciplined and responsible . . . it transforms my immediate self-absorption with subjective affect into an awareness of not only how my responses have been socially conditioned and socially perceived, but also how I as author can intervene in that conditioning" (Hindman 103). Or, as Lu tells us in Shanghai Quartet, working on your stories is a way of working on your life: "Writing about my elder's yearnings can help me grasp how I have lived this lifeline in the past, and how I might try to use it differently in the future, if I were to take my past in new and unexpected directions in the years to come, as my grandmother certainly had until the end of her 94 years, as Ahfen was still trying to, and as my mother would have undoubtedly wanted to."

In one section in the final part of her book, Lu works through two stories in which she confronts her own privileges, exploring how the process earns authority for the writer and how it helps to move her in new and unexpected directions. Both stories are about chance meetings in the U.S. of acquaintances from her early life in Shanghai: in an Asian food market in Berkeley she encounters a student from a high school math class she taught; waiting to be seated in a Chinese restaurant in Chicago she encounters a junior high school classmate. She is with her husband and daughter on both occasions, and they ask, "who was that?" Just a student, just a classmate, she answers, and when they ask for more details, she demurs, "Oh, too complicated."

On one level, the stories are about the enduring value of cultural capital, how a bourgeois background can continue to confer privileges even during the attacks on class privilege in the Cultural Revolution and afterwards when the workers were mostly "let down from their positions" and put on meager pensions. Lu wonders about the effect her recognition of the same "guileless sense of entitlement" in her daughter and her daughter's friends that she recognized in herself as a child has on her behavior as a teacher and parent: "I ask: `What kind of words and actions from a teacher and elder would have best benefitted youngsters like my adolescent self?' . . . I would like to be able to say that such thoughts have made a better teacher and elder of me. I don't know that I can."

But the stories are also about confronting the paradox of privilege on another level: in the act of storytelling. Just as in the critical affirmation article Lu suggests that "the actual act of writing is an important means for reflecting and revising the paradox of one's privileges" because "it can initiate exchanges in which colleagues . . . could become coinvestigators," here she challenges her reluctance to explaining these stories to her husband and daughter—"Too complicated for whom?"—and recognizes her need for their help: "I will only be able to tell more if I learn to seize the help they offer with their questions and trust their willingness to hear more. From now on, I'll have to try harder. They deserve more for their questions." The authority conferred on writers/storytellers by confronting their privileges is the authority of shared meaning making, of the logic of multiple possibilities, of the knowledge of "moreover" and "at once."

In the story of the meeting with the math student, which resulted in a lunch with his wife and Lu's husband and daughter, Lu comments on how she and the student and his wife assumed that "the two foreigners," her husband and daughter, wouldn't really understand, for example, what it meant to be from a Rotten Nine Category family background, and how she therefore didn't try to interpret or explain, rather directing their attention to the dim sum. Afterwards she muses on her "inability to capture for my family the past I once shared with that student and his wife, nor for my student and his wife the present I now enjoy with my family." The importance of telling personal stories is this breaking of the boundaries between the individual self and the outside, between the familiar group and all those who won't really understand, of opening up experiences so that all can reconsider what they mean and could mean. In her critical affirmation article, Lu quotes Cornel West on the necessity of hanging together at this crucial crossroad in the history of our nation when we are deciding how differences will matter, and she concludes: "I hope this essay puts my self on the line so that I might stay on the line with voices that matter—that is, voices which can bring us the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge of hanging together as we work to end oppression in the twenty-first century" (193).

It is the willingness to put one's self on the line, to open one's experiences to questioning and interpretation and discussion, to reach out to others for help in understanding not only what was and what is but what could be, that makes personal academic writing an important venue in which to examine differences. And it depends, as Lu argues, on readers who are also committed to what could be, not fixated on what was, who are looking for ways to move on. Lu's closing words to her daughter are instructions for the reader as well: "This is the spirit in which I imagine my family stories should be heard. Not as tips on what you should do, but as stories waiting for you to annotate, as you move on."