SOURCE: Lee, Rachel. “Who's Chinese?” Women's Review of Books 19, no. 5 (February 2002): 13-14.

In the following review, Lee analyzes Jen's representation of gender, travel, and the immigrant experience in the title story of Who's Irish?

I hang onto “travel” as a term of cultural comparison, precisely because of its historical taintedness, its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege … frontiers … and the like. I prefer it to the more apparently neutral, and “theoretical,” terms such as “displacement,” which can make the drawing of equivalences across historical experiences too easy.

—James Clifford

Engaging the topic of travel means first wrestling with the elasticity of the term. “Travel” risks trying to accomplish too much, flattening distinctions between types of migrants—between refugees and tourists, daily commuters and students on fellowship, cosmopolitan flâneurs and religious pilgrims. In this epic wrestling with the term, I follow a well-worn path. James Clifford, in...