From History to the Future: The Chinese Experience in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's The True History of Paradise

• Published in: College literature Vol. 50; no. 4; pp. 572 - 595
• Main Author: Peng, Xu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: West Chester Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: 19th century; 20th century; Black nationalism; Caribbean literature; Cezair-Thompson, Margaret; Chinese; Creole languages; Creoles; Diaspora; Essays; Family (Sociological Unit); History; Laborers; Land Settlement; Manual workers; Migrants; Migration; Narratives; National identity; Nationalism; Novels; Romanization; Slavery; Social Change; Writers; Jamaica; United States > US; China
• ISSN: 0093-3139; 1542-4286; 1542-4286
• DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a908888

This essay examines the Chinese experience represented in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's 1999 novel The True History of Paradise . By analyzing the author's characterization of the Chinese migrant Mr. Ho Sing and his Afro-Chinese Jamaican daughter Cherry Landing, this essay first elucidates Afro-Chinese intimacy in late nineteenth-century Jamaica and then investigates Jamaican Chineseness in the 1960s and 1970s. It underscores middle-class Jamaican Chinese's economic advantage in their proximity to Jamaica's Creole identity, and illuminates what appears to be the author's proposition of a reconsideration of creolization that, instead of presuming anti-Blackness or encouraging Black radicalism, negotiates the political and cultural dichotomy between Creole nationalists and the Afro-Jamaican majority. Drawing upon Cezair-Thompson's literary reworking of the Jamaican Chinese experience, I conclude that The True History of Paradise rehearses the possibilities to envision the future for the diasporic Chinese, the Jamaican nation, and Caribbean literature.