Secondary Source Critique

Secondary Source Critique

Chang, J. (2005). Melancholic remains: Domestic and National Secrets in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 51(1), 110-33. doi:http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1353/mfs.2005.0022

In “Melancholic Remains: Domestic and National Secrets in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone,” Julianna Chang argues how Ng’s melancholic temporality critiques modern notions of subjectivity and history, especially as formulated by the nation-state. Chang draws on how her article will provide a symptomatic reading of domesticity in Bone, and she observes how the encrypted secrets structure the family formation. Chang explores the idea of the hyper-exploitation of racialized labor, and melancholia as a subject in the novel and how the melancholic phantom makes an appearance in the novel, which signifies this encrypted secret of a failed America. Ultimately, Chang also focuses on how melancholia and domestic and national secrets are all components in Ng’s Bone.

Chang begins her article by outlining that Ng’s Bone is almost a sequel of sorts to Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea. Chang follows up this point by mentioning how Chu’s novel charts the transformation of New York Chinatown from bachelor society to family community in the middle of the twentieth century, and how Bone would seem to represent the late-twentieth-century result of that transformation. She continues to list the similarities and differences between the two novels by stating that in Eat a Bowl of Tea, the family represents the potential for moving forward into the future while in Bone, the family is haunted by, and move back into the past. Chang posits that Bone’s narrative is structured palimpsestically, in order of events that move back time to tell what lies beneath the events that Leila narrates at the beginning of the novel. She extends this line of thought by adding that this structure is characteristic of melancholia, which she defines as “a condition in which an object that should be relegated to the past is instead psychically kept alive in the present” (Chang 111). Chang’s article discusses the idea of melancholia and the domestic and national secrets in Bone, and in her article, she asserts that the family secrets that are hidden by both Mah and Leon and how these secrets reveal of the national public sphere. Chang states that her reading of encrypted secrets at the level of domesticity and subjectivity will reveal an encrypted secret at the level of the US nation-state, which is the hyper-exploitation of racialized labor. She explores the idea of racial segmentation and states that “the labor market ensures a population with little alternative but to participate in low-wage labor” (113). Change declares that “while it is important but unowned, “the racial other is the melancholic object of the US nation-state” (113). Chang concludes her argument by discussing the death of Ona, and how as an agent of demetaphorization, exposed the discontinued, broken-down, dead subjects of Chinatown as the remains of a nationally encrypted secret of rationalized labor exploration.

Although the article focuses on melancholia and the national and domestic secrets in the novel, I found Chang’s argument helpful when constructing my own. Chang frequently makes references to Leon and discusses his struggles, which I will analyze in my essay. I am talking about how Leon’s life struggles shape who he is as an immigrant, as a father, and as a husband. Chang also makes references about Ona and her closeness with her father and talks about Leon’s identity and his paper father, Grandpa Leong. With this information, I was able to gain a sense of how to frame my topic in my work. Chang touches on the relationship between Mah and Leon and how domestic secrets affected their marriage. Leon’s identity is analyzed as Chang introduces a new idea of how Leon had a desire to be so much like Luc and how this “functions as a fantasy of his completion, fulfillment, and success: ‘Ong and Leong… their names fit together like chopsticks that they could eat with for the rest of their lives’ (166).” I will be using this direct quote from Chang’s article and the direct quote from the book since it relates to the point that I am trying to prove in my essay.

Chang draws on a wide range of academic sources to support her viewpoint. Chang relies on prominent theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok while discussing ideas of melancholia and its haunting “phantom” and on academics who have written extensively about race and immigration, such as Lisa Lowe. Chang’s sources are from a range of time periods, from the 1990s up to the 2000s.