Asian Diaspora The Asian diaspora, or the personal and cultural implications of abandoning one's homeland, is a central and recurring theme for Asian-American writers. Diaspora in Greek means "to sow seeds" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora), and its ancient denotation has today taken on a figurative meaning as a feeling of separation and detachment. In both Fae Myenne Ng's Bone and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Leaving Yuba City, a thematic thread of "scattered parts," outsiders, and otherness links each's characters together, as do the two separate works. This diaspora affects each generation of immigrants slightly differently, but no less significantly. As an aspect of diasora, W. E. B. DuBois's notion of "double consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk takes the form of a personal duality for the characters in Bone and Leaving Yuba City. Their lives looking through DuBois's "veil" create a personal struggle in the character's relationship with America, while simultaneously maintaining two unique cultural identities. The characters in Ng's novel Bone work to conceive a third identity, one that maintains ancient traditions while being "Americanized." This struggle is not unique to first-generation Chinese immigrants, Leon and Mah, but has had a profound impact on their American-raised children, Leila, Nina, and Ona. However, the consequences of this conflict differ between generations. Leon fails to settle in one place but is "suddenly here, suddenly gone" (54). Leon's odd jobs are often on a ship, and Leila concludes that the attraction of the "hollow and motionless center of the ocean" for him is "completion" (150). The cause of Leon's absence, or void of personal integrity, is his Chinese self trying to change...... middle of paper...... the characters of Leaving Yuba City and Bone are connected through the common separation from their homeland, or the double self seen in all generations. This shared diaspora creates a unique and painful family dynamic for the Leong family; their incompleteness binds them together. For Sushma in "Leaving Yuba City", she does not feel separation from her homeland, but lives in denial of a fundamental part of herself, which is very much like a homeland. It is an incongruity or separation between the person others can see and the person he or she really is. Sushma personifies DuBois's "veil". An extremist vision of the diaspora is "The Maimed Dancing Men", who have phantom limbs and are physically incomplete. Ng and Divakaruni describe the same desperate and painful feelings that arise from separation from both one's homeland and oneself, demonstrating that these two are inseparable and fundamental to one's integrity..