“My big statement”: arte, esperienza politica e ricerca identitaria in Chinese Opera di Alex Kuo

This essay considers the political experience of Chinese and American intellectuals in Chinese Opera (1998), the short novel by American author from Chinese descent Alex Kuo. The protagonist, traveling from the United States to China during the months immediately preceding the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, undertakes a journey to search for his family history, and the reasons that pushed his father into exile. Intellectual and musician, located between two realities of political activism which exerted their authority to either define or dismantle concepts of belonging, the protagonist chooses and endorses a commitment on a transnational level, but starting from a claimed consciousness of his own individuality. Literature and art are the focal points that convey a tension between the individual and the collective: the tension is detectable in a different modulation in both Chinese and American socio-political systems. The novel, therefore, presents a politicized subject, who escapes any pre-constituted discursive formations. In turn, the political discourse in the literary text weaves together the intellectual's public and private dimension with ethnic, national and transnational significations.