|
|
And yet again we look for margins. Is this the narrative of China, or of 200 million Chinese mainly on China’s east coast? How about the story of the people of China? Is their narrative still marginalized? Note how every formulation has a history; it keeps moving on in meaning. When China seemed but a “sheet of sand,” to be a friend of China meant one thing. When China was the PRC, embattled and struggling for recognition within the world community in the 1970s, to be a friend of China took on another meaning. When China is the China of the 2000s, the postcommunist giant with which the United States both colludes and contends, to be a friend of China takes on a third meaning. Now, consider how being a friend of the people of China fares, taking our cue here from the carefully named activist organization of the 1970s, the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association. Does the meaning in this case stay more constant? Or need we keep asking, “Which people?” Would it mean especially the most marginalized among the Chinese people? The rural people, perhaps, the peasants? Interestingly, that would correspond with those Chinese most central to the emergence of the PRC. If we imagine moving even this group from the margins to the center, who (or what) would still be marginalized? A subset that stays even closer to the soil: the land’s caretakers? The land itself (animal life, trees, the Yellow River)? And/or, moving in another direction, the marginalized minorities within China, such as Tibetans and many others?
Next, consider moving this line of thinking to another place: Conroy’s secondary focus of study, Hawaii. The Hawaiian Islands become part of America’s narrative, with hints now and then of a negotiation with Japan’s. Both have sizable minority presences in Hawaii in 1898: 10,000 Americans, 50,000 Japanese. Actually, the Chinese outnumber Americans (25,000), yet China’s hypothetical narrative for Hawaii is itself marginalized, because “China is a sheet of sand.” Perhaps in the twenty-first century there might emerge a contesting Chinese narrative for Hawaii, alongside that of the U.S and Japan.
But wait. Wouldn’t the same process of reasoning apply to Hawaii as followed above in China, a process that winds its way down to the very people of Hawaii, the marginalized indigenous people—especially, as an eco-feminist might say, to the women and children and to the land itself?9 And does this not apply to Korea and the Philippines as well? Should not women in each society be brought into this progression? Surely, the narrative of China might still marginalize the narrative of the women of China. And do women, as eco-feminists argue, fit in closer to the land or natural world?