1
Father From China, Great Grandfather of the
Sandalwood Mountains, Grandfather of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains

• HOW rather than WHAT
• Structure Creative Non-fiction
• Non-linear, layered, assemblage, complex
  aesthetic patterns
• Relationship between the aesthetic the
  true, art life, history imagination

2
Memoir/Autobiography/Biography/LawHistory/Myth/Fa
ble/Imaginary

• Narrator-character (author-function) coherence?
  bildungsroman narrative of development?Function
  of story-teller and power of story-tellingTelling
  secrets, speaking the unspeakable, remembering
  what has not been personally experienced,
  testifying to what has not been lived.
• Relationship to oral history? Fictional history?
  Historical narrative. Historical novels.
  Fictional memoirs. Historical memoirs. Memories
  of ancestral lives.

3
Thematic approaches locate your position

• Home, homelessness, place, space, Driving Out,
  displacement, ghosts (117-118, 146-151)
• Silence, talk addiction, sanity, empowerment,
  madness (115, 118)
• Masculinity, patriarchy, reversed female
  oppressiveness, (127, 143, 176)
• Feminism (12-15) Daughter-Father relations
  (250-255)
• Immigration/Chinese Diaspora/ Assimilation/
  Americanization/Nation identity (237-255)
• Aesthetic analysis symbolism, language devices,
  stylistics

4
Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
collective individual male subjectivities

• Home/sickness He felt his heart breaking. . . .
  The railroad he was building would not lead him
  to his family (129).
• Suspended in the quiet sky, he thought all kinds
  of crazy thoughts, that if a man didnt want to
  live any more, he could just cut the ropes
  (131).
• Desire/sexuality One beautiful day, dangling in
  the sun above a new valley. . . sexual desire
  clutched him (133).
• there is no record of how many died building the
  railroad (138).