A Disorienting Auto-ethnography

“Shanghai Dancing.” I still haven’t a clue how to describe it. It is disorienting, this much is certain. Yet I do not seem to dislike it, for it’s memorising. Like sailing through a plain sea, unforeseen elements appears out of the blue, and the ship shifts, up and down, left to right, you feel a tinge of uneasiness in your head, then belly, but you hang on. You have to hang on, there seems to be magic in the book, pulling you back, ever closer. Is it a biography? Is it an auto-fiction? Or is it mere wordplay? You wonder. In my mind’s eyes, I see an auto-ethnographer trying hard to get to the truth, the authenticity, the autochthonous nature behind his Self, where the present meets the past. Sifting through historiographical grains in the diasporic floods, the auto-ethnographer writes a disorienting auto-ethnography of the self, the peoples, the cultures. How ambitious!