John Onley

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guides. However, the effect of Onley transcribing these notes, works to turn him into a tour guide like figure that is teaching the reader about the region. This kind of approach indicates Onley is acting selectively, choosing to dedicate the limited space in his diary to regional facts and interesting events, because it paints him as a kind of worldly figure. Onley also includes information in his diary, in a scrapbook like manner, as it contains some of his paintings and lists of his completed works while in China. In Onley’s February 26 1988 entry, he travels through the Guilin Mountains, and finds an inscription in a rock that translates into English as, “Guilin passes the most beautiful landscapes in the world, only painters can improve …show more content…

Firstly, Douglas brings up the notion of an “archiving I” who decides how the “real or historical ‘I’” is represented in the archive, and then of the “archived ‘I’” which is the result of the “archiving I”’s decisions (55). With this in mind, the journal goes through another layer of processing. To an extent Onley was likely able to edit his journal and work as the “archiving ‘I’” because he chose to donate the diary. However, the archivist working with the Toni Onley fonds, those part of Onley’s estate such as Onley’s children and ex-wife, Gloria Onley, were all able to also work as the “archiving ‘I’” and help to determine how the diary is taken up into the archive (Morrow)). Even how the diary is represented in the fonds, impacts how the information presented in the diary is view by researchers. In the archive the “China Diary” is part of a “series [that] reflects Onley’s travels from 1972 to 2003” and is mixed among other journals and documentation regarding Onley’s many “painting trips or expeditions” (Cockroft 58). This information indicates to the researcher viewing the China Diary, to consider the information in the diary in the context of an overseas trip. In this way, “the archiving ‘I’” is shaping how the China Diary, in a way that may or may not be congruent with Onley’s original intentions for the diary. Furthermore, while it is hard to know the extent to which the diary was altered in this process, the final copy of the diary we view today as researchers, is likely different from the original copy (Douglas 84). Admittedly, this also means we do not know for certain if there was other information that Onley wished to include, that would have altered how he was represented in the diary. For instance, Onley’s “Japan Remembered” Diary contained a

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