Guy Ramsay

Mainland Chinese Family Caregiver Narratives in Mental Illness: Disruption and Continuity

Abstract This study employs a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to analyse narratives written by mainland Chinese people who care for a family member with serious mental illness. Locating culture at the centre of the analysis, the study explicates and explores the salient themes and subthemes in texts that were originally published in a monthly psychoeducational newsletter. Analysis reveals that mental illness constitutes a catastrophic and disruptive event for the caregivers, for the most part women, and their families. Caregivers are driven by intersecting cultural and state-propagated discourses to exert heroic effort and commitment in order to ensure a full “recovery” for the ill family member. In light of the intense stigma surrounding mental illness in Chinese culture, the family members condition is actively concealed by caregivers. This is to protect healthy family members as much as the ill person. The study concludes that cultural phenomena inform both the sense of disruption experienced by mainland Chinese family caregivers in mental illness and the sense of continuity in their fulfilling of socioculturally prescribed roles.

Shaping minds : a discourse analysis of Chinese-language community mental health literature

Mental illness is an increasing concern of government health services across the globe. It is timely, therefore, that community education about mental illness is subject to discourse analysis. Shaping Minds explores how the psychoeducational message is presented to Chinese-speaking audiences in China, Taiwan and Australia. The book uniquely examines community education materials in a language rarely examined by discourse analysts, but which is nevertheless spoken by around a fifth of the world’s population and constitutes an important ‘minority’ language throughout the Western world. The book identifies the discursive features that characterise the Chinese-language texts and analyses them cross-culturally, highlighting the impact of cultural traditions, political systems and dominant conceptions of society. These insights into how Chinese-language community health pamphlets and handbooks are positioned to shape the minds of readers will engage both discourse analysts and mental health professionals providing services to Chinese-speaking communities across the globe.

The Family and Cultural Identity in Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Chinese Ancestry: A Rural-urban Divide

Few empirical studies exist that specifically assess the impact of family on the development of cultural identity (Reference Group Orientation = RGO) in individuals of mixed cultural heritage. Moreover, no studies exist involving individuals of dual-minority heritage and the rural Australian, especially the Indigenous, experience. In this study, self-narrative (ethnographic interview) of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders with Chinese ancestry reveals the essential position of family in determining an individual’s RGO outcome. Virtually all the participants acknowledge that the rich Indigenous cultural life-experience and upbringing provided by their families influenced their development of unquestioned, stable Indigenous RGOs. However, layered problem-free onto their core (Indigenous) RGOs are varying degrees of “other-culture” (here Chinese) identifications. The study argues that the differential impact of past and present government policies across the rural-urban divide has proved an obstacle to the formation of bicultural RGOs in mixed-heritage family members.

Taiwanese stories of dementia

This article explores how Taiwanese people construct and recount their experiences of dementia in factual and fictional stories. It compares the narrative meanings in Taiwanese stories with those of analogous mainland Chinese and Hong Kong accounts. The article finds that the Taiwanese stories differ from their mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterparts in three ways. First, the onset of dementia is largely an unforeseen calamity for the Taiwanese storytellers, while it is an anticipatable life circumstance for the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong storytellers. Second, the Taiwanese storytellers tend to locate the cause for the deterioration of their elderly family member in illness, while the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong storytellers tend to explain away the deterioration of their elderly family member as normative aging. Third, the Taiwanese storytellers maintain their existing identities when faced with the newfound challenge of family caregiving in dementia, while the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong storytellers commonly appropriate the former culturally embodied identity of the family member whom they now care for.

Chinese stories of drug addiction: beyond the opium dens

Addiction to illicit drugs is a pressing social concern across greater China, where there are likely several million drug addicts at present. This research breaks new ground by examining Chinese peoples stories of drug addiction. Chinese Stories of Drug Addiction systematically evaluates how drug addiction is represented and constructed in a series of contemporary life stories and filmic stories from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These stories recount experiences leading up to and during drug addiction, as well as experiences during drug rehabilitation and recovery. Through analysis of these contemporary life stories and filmic stories, the book presents a comprehensive picture of how Chinese people from both inside the experience of drug addiction and outside of it make sense of a social practice that is deemed to be highly transgressive in Chinese culture. It employs a blended discourse analytic and narrative analytic approach to show how salient cultural, political and institutional discourses shape these Chinese stories and experiences. Complementing existing humanities research which documents the historical narrative of drug addiction in China at the expense of the contemporary narrative, the book also provides health and allied professionals with a rich insight into how Chinese people from different geographical locations and walks of life make sense of the experience of drug addiction. Moving beyond historical narrative to examine contemporary stories, Chinese Stories of Drug Addiction offers a valuable contribution to the fields of Chinese studies and personal health and wellbeing, as well as being of practical use to health professionals.

'Aspirational' Chinese: Achieving community prominence on Thursday Island, northeast Australia

The experience of the Chinese diaspora in Australia has been the subject of much academic attention in the past three decades. The prevailing narrative of the Chinese presence, which dates from early White occupation of Australia, has highlighted discourses of marginalization and exclusion for the Chinese pioneers who contributed so significantly to the economic development of the nation. Yet, despite their economic success, few Chinese gained regard and standing in mainstream colonial society and, of these, the best known resided in southern cities. Across northern Australia, far from the major population centers and seats of government, Chinese also became economically successful as agriculturists and merchants. Again, only a handful sought and obtained wider community acceptance, even local prominence. Our study draws on the diasporic experience of Chinese on Thursday Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to elucidate strategies employed by a minority to achieve social status within the general community. Through exploration of the socio-cultural forces influencing their choices — the dominant ethos of Thursday Island, multi-ethnicity and the consequences of anti-Chinese legislation — a unique portrait of the Chinese diasporic experience emerges, narrated through multiple sites of cultural collusion and contestation.

Publications briefly noted

SHARON KINSELLA. Adult Manga: culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. £12.99, paper. STEPHEN ESKILDSEN. Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998. vii, 229 pp. US

Rapport-Building through CALL in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: An Exploratory Study

19.85, paper. H. A. J. KLOOSTER. Bibliography of the Indonesian Revolution, Publications from 1942 to 1994. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997. Bibliographical Series no. 21. 666 pp. J. E. HOARE (ed). Britain and Japan: biographical Portraits, Volume III. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1999. xviii, 397 pp. £45.00, hardcover. AYAKO HOTTA‐LISTER. The Japan‐British Exhibition of 1910: gateway to the Island Empire of the East. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1999. xvi, 256 pp. £45.00, hardcover. JACQUES GERNET. Buddhism in Chinese Society: an Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (trans. by Franciscus Verellen). New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. xvii, 441 pp. US

What are they getting at? placement of important ideas in lengthy Chinese newstext: a contrastive analysis with Australian newstext.

21.00, paper. GREGORY M. PFLUGFELDER. Cartographies of Desire: male‐male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xi, 399 pp. US

Linearity in rhetorical organisation: a comparative cross-cultural analysis of newstext from the People’s Republic of China and Australia.

45.00, hardcover. GAIL HERSHATTER. Dangerous Pleasures: prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xii, 591 pp. 26 b/w illustrations, 6 tables. US