Chen’s approach to “memory.”
There are two approaches to memory; the relational and substantive approach. In the view of the relational approach, memory refers to the organism’s capacity to arrive at states similar to its previous awareness states while remembering their past origin. Chen’s approach is relational as he views his interviewees’ minds as consisting of dispositional and actualized states. He views memories about the family as inherited, learned, or transmitted to a person’s descendants. According to the relational approach, remembering is a deliberate state of awareness directed to events that were learned or happened in the past. Chen (60) asserts that events’ remembrance is individualistic, meaning that different persons will remember the same events differently. The metaphor of internal storage in the relational approach is inadequate because the states and capacities are retained (not stored) in the memory. Chen acknowledges that memories are subject to social forgetting (62). This process is gradual or spontaneous, and old memories are unable to be recalled from memory storage.
Similarities, divergences, and Collisions
In both Chen and the documentary on Asian Americans, the relational approach to memory is employed. The descendants of Ah Quin and the historians have the capacity of arriving at states similar to their previous awareness states while remembering their past origin. This similarity allows comparing history as reconstructions of the past and memory as recollections of the past’s things in laypeople’s minds (Chen 70). However, the substantive approach to memory is more employed in the documentary on Asian Americans through the use of documented articles. The collision is seen in the substantive approach to memory through documented letters in both: letters are used as the revival in the mind of a copy or image of the original event.
Works cited
Chen, Y. “Remembering Ah Quin: a Century of Social Memory in a Chinese American Family.” Oral History Review. 27 (2000): 57-80. Print.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=FbBatK7JWYc&feature=emb_logo