『초원의 집』 연작 다시쓰기: 와일더의 문학 유산과 아시아계 미국인 독자들

Abstract

This paper considers an Asian American renarration of the Little House legacy, examining how the Asian American readership engages with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier narrative and its predominantly white and racially demarcated prairie. The Asian American presence has long been marginalized in the Midwest, and also being unseen in relation to Wilder’s literary legacy. While the trope of invisibility has haunted the Asian American psyche in historical, social, and literary terms, the Midwestern Asian American child readers of the Little House books live their invisibility within and outside of the text. Their implicit hope for solidarity and sense of belonging is betrayed when they realize Wilder’s prairie is a territory granted to the children of white settlers. Bich Minh Nguyen grew up as an avid Wilder reader in the Midwest, and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and Pioneer Girl are her retellings of and intertextual responses to Wilder’s legacy. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner vividly discloses the repressed anxiety experienced by a young Asian American Midwestern reader, revealing ambivalent emotions of intimacy, betrayal, and denial toward the Little House books. Pioneer Girl, on the other hand, makes a more conscious claim of identity and belonging, claiming the Midwest and America by way of appropriating Wilder’s narrative. Nguyen’s works evince that the Little House books’ non-interpellation of Asian Americans deters neither their engagement with nor their claiming of Asian American space within the books’ legacy. What surfaces is the undeniable presence they establish within the American classic canon’s genealogy.