“A Tricky, Shifting Shoreline”: Family and Relation in Jia Qing Wilson-Yang’s Small Beauty

Jia Qing Wilson-Yang's novel Small Beauty dramatises the experience of gender diversity from the perspective of its main character, Mei, but also through that of other family members. The novel understands family in a broad sense: despite its return to the “blood relations” that persist and develop in diaspora, it also dwells on “found” and “made” family, emphasising relatedness through the act of relation. That breadth of definition derives partly from Mei's “explosion of identity” as part of a diasporic Chinese-Canadian family, as well as her mixed-ethnic identity, and that of a trans woman. Different characters function to give voice to and resist stereotypical attitudes, identities, and actions. Small Beauty works through temporal disjunction and multi-perspectival representation to evoke family functioning, acceptance, and validation, as well as the complexity of each. The novel uses different forms of rhetoric to explore the importance of both “blood and intention” in the making of family. At the same time, the novel and its character resist being read finally or as simple functions, and the chapter also considers the meaning of this withholding, which mirrors a resistance to the extractive eye of the majority.