Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric

by LuMing Mao

LuMing Mao offers an important discussion of the rhetoric of Chinese American speakers, which has wide implications for the teaching of writing in English and for our understanding of cross-cultural influences in discourse.     Recent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity---an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Working from Ang's concept of "togetherness in difference,"  Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches.     Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.

190 pages, Paperback

First published July 7, 2006

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's kind of interesting, but I didn't really take anything lasting away from it. Mao admits that anyonr can practice Chinese American rhetoric, regardless of ethnicity, and in truth, I leave this monograph thinking that nothing about Chinese American rhetoric is actually unique and so it sort of begs the question as to what the point of this really is?

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a thoroughly approachable comparative text. Not only does Mao bring in some very interesting theoretical connections, but I like how he suggests praxis through taking us into his classroom, where his students encounter the Other and the Other-in-Me. He ends with a case study because, he implies, Chinese American rhetoric always exists in a case study and cannot be essentialized.