Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony - Connecting Across Generations & Genders

Remember Shirley Temple, that Hollywood cinema's icon of idealized (white) girlhood? Linda looks up a short clip, "On the Good Ship Lollipop," and feels uncomfortable (trigger warning here) and explains why she and some of her students shared that experience. She considers the importance of contextualizing or historicizing our responses to cultural artefacts -- but, even so, there is good reason to feel uncomfortable about Temple's childhood performances. That's not necessarily the case for our interpretation of the heroine of the first part of Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony.

Topics include:

• Shirley Temple's "On the Good Ship Lollipop"
• Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony
• Chinatown, Vancouver
• Patriarchy and the male gaze
• Repatriation of Chinese bones

In the Takeaway section, she looks at Madelaine Caritas Longman's marvellous debut collection, The Danger Model (McGill Queen's Press), which unsurprisingly won the Concordia First Book Prize by the Quebec Writers' Federation.

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