Father From China Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood

“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

Memoir/Autobiography/Biography/Law History/Myth/Fable/Imaginary • Narrator-character (author-function): coherence? bildungsroman: narrative of development? Function of story-teller and power of story-telling Telling 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.

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 (250255) • Immigration/Chinese Diaspora/ Assimilation/ ’Americanization’/Nation identity (237 -255) • Aesthetic analysis: symbolism, language devices, stylistics

“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 didn’t 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).