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Thesis Defence: F(ĒNG)
November 5 at 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Amy Wang, supervised by Professor Matt Rader, will defend their thesis titled “F(ĒNG)” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
An abstract for Amy Wang’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.
Abstract
F(ĒNG) is a hybrid creative nonfiction and poetry memoir on my experience of psychiatric hospitalization. In the aftermath of this trauma, I trace connections to family, Chinese culture, and more-than-human beings to ‘recover’ beyond a medical context.
Fēng has several meanings in Chinese. It can be wind, madness, or both. Such multiplicity is an overarching theme of this book. I juxtapose Mandarin Chinese (Romanized as pinyin) and English to connect the languages and equalize them. Two key voices speak throughout the work, personal and ambiguous, which blend into one.
The book is in four parts. ‘to begin’ compares personal hospitalization experiences to the Four Pests Campaign carried out during China’s Great Leap Forward. Trauma is mirrored between humans and nonhumans. I revisit personal memories in ‘to question’ and connect them to what my parents and other beings remember. ‘to listen’ is on two key locations, Kelowna and Vancouver, as places of connection. I end with hybrid essays in ‘to speak’ as an amalgamation of all I have found in previous sections. This is my recovered self.
The goal of this book is to overcome traditional recovery narratives in psychiatric memoirs. F(ĒNG) proposes a non-medical definition of recovery that involves kinship, or ‘recovering’ our connections.
