Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?
—Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior
Helen goes on with a delicate bang on her cup. “You are daughter.
Daughter. Do you remember what is a daughter?”
“I remember.”
“Who are you?”
“I am your daughter.”
It’s like being in church, right down to the moment of si-lence—which Mona takes to be a chance for Helen to turn misty-eyed again, that Mona might feel what a Disappointment she is. Helen swish-es around some tea in her mouth, a good sign. Mona makswish-es gorilla face, and out of habit, her mother almost makes a face back. But in the midst of furrowing her brow, she suddenly starts talking.
“We agree, except what kind of daughter lies to her mother?”
“No kind.”
“I have no daughter.”
—Gish Jen Mona in the Promised Land In 2009, when Elaine Showalter nominated eight key figures among out-standing contemporary American women novelists, Gish Jen was the only Asian American—indeed, the only ethnic woman—on her list.1 In the same year, Jen became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1 The eight women authors were Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Gish Jen. Toni Morrison is not on the list because, according to Showalter, she is “so well known she does not need to be included.” See Showalter’s article “The Female Frontier” in The Guardian.
Representing the New Hybrid Generation 70
A decade ago, John Updike chose to include Jen’s “Birthmates” in The Best American Short Stories of the Century.2 Gish Jen is undoubtedly one of the most talented and distinguished writers on the contemporary American liter-ary scene, and one of the reasons that Jen is so highly regarded is her inven-tiveness. She continually experiments with unusual and even “dangerous”
subjects. As she declares in an interview, “as a writer you have to get up the nerve to write about the things that are dangerous” (Satz 140).3 Sex, racism, power, and the “switch” of ethnic identity are some of the “bad” topics that may easily put her in a “minefield” (Satz 140). Jen is also significant in the development of contemporary Asian American writing because she con-stantly pushes boundaries in terms of subject matter while drawing inspira-tion from existing themes and tradiinspira-tions. In Jen’s first novel, Typical Ameri-can (1991), she writes about the immigrant generation of the 1950s and maps out the issues of assimilation and the formation of ethnic identity through the perspective of the patriarch of the family, Ralph Chang. As a sequel to Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land focuses on the growth and development of the second generation of the Chang family in the 1960s and 1970s, especially of the second daughter Mona, while mobilizing the mother-daughter plot to create an intergenerational emphasis. Moreover, one of the central plotlines touches upon a taboo topic regarding racial and ethnic affiliation; the impish protagonist Mona, who grows up in a Jewish suburb of New York, decides to “switch” and become Jewish. Thematically, both novels attempt to claim America for Chinese immigrants and their de-scendants while remembering the illusionary motherland China. In The Love Wife, Jen makes an ambitious move to explore the theme of diasporic affilia-tions by incorporating a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution into a Chinese American family of mixed marriage with adopted Asian children.4 Jen’s constant engagement with new and challenging topics and themes makes her one of the innovators of the Chinese American women’s literary tradition. It is small wonder that Showalter has credited her as the represen-tative of the “new hybrid generation” of ethnic American women writers of
2 “Birthmates” is one of the eight short stories collected in Jen’s Who Is Irish? (1999).
3 In the interview, Jen responds to Martha Satz’s question regarding her preference for being
“wicked” (139) by observing that being wicked “means writing about the things we’re not supposed to write about” (140).
4 Jeffrey Partridge notes that there has been a debate between “claiming America” and
“claiming diaspora” in Asian American scholarship since the late twentieth century. Claiming America presents an ethnic nationalist position, which attempts to establish the Asian Ameri-can presence in the national imagination of the United States. “For Asian AmeriAmeri-can critics such as Lisa Lowe and Shirley Geok-lin Lim,” Partridge observes, “‘diaspora’ rather than
‘claiming America’ more accurately represents the demographic exigencies of Asian Ameri-cans in the new millennium” (101). Apparently, Jen’s novels are transitioning from “claiming America” in the Chang family saga to “claiming diaspora” in Love Wife, if we follow Par-tridge’s observation.
Representing the New Hybrid Generation 71 the 1990s.5
This chapter places Gish Jen within the context of the Chinese Ameri-can women’s literary tradition and examines the ways in which Jen experi-ments with “dangerous” topics, such as ethnic switches, and playfully rein-vents a Chinese American woman’s tradition in Mona in the Promised Land.
With the inclusion of a mother-daughter plot in the novel, which is one of the most important themes in Chinese American women’s writing, Jen dutifully constructs a vertical/generational relationship and yet reshapes it with a dif-ferent maternal figure and the insertion of the sibling plot. At the same time, Jen also creates different horizontal communities for her inquisitive protago-nist Mona. Camp Gugelstein exemplifies one such community that aims to deconstruct various boundaries and respond to the call for a racial coalition in and after the civil rights movement. The dissolution of this utopian com-munity directly questions the possibility of solidarity in the face of the chal-lenges of racial, class, and gender differences. Moreover, through the multi-ple “switches” of identity of her characters, Jen unsettles an essentialist fixa-tion on racial authenticity as well as the politics of insiderism. Finally, through the reconciliation between Mona and her mother Helen and the birth of Mona’s Chinese-Jewish American daughter Io, Jen is consciously creating a comic tradition for Chinese American women’s writing that acknowledges the importance of matrilineage and a politics of relationality which goes be-yond familial, class, and racial confines.
Reinventing the Chinese American Mother-Daughter Plot
Beginning with the Eaton sisters of the early twentieth century, Chinese American women’s writing has gradually gained attention in the American literary arena. As Shirley Lim notes, “[i]t was only in the 1970s that the no-tion of a body of Asian American literature as a separate canon became common” (“Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories” 573). Furthermore, the popularity of Asian American women’s writing since the 1970s is nothing short of phenomenal. According to Amy Ling, in the early 1990s, there was an Asian American literary and artistic “renaissance” in which women were playing a prominent, if not dominant, part (“Emerging Canons” 191). As mentioned in the Introduction, Chinese American women authors, with their culturally and historically specific insights into gender, race, and class issues, are inventing various literary traditions of their own, which is a feat in itself, considering the many difficulties these women are faced with. “When Chi-nese American writings emerged in the late 1960s and the early 1970s,”
5 This quote comes from the Kindle version of Showalter’s latest monograph on American literary history, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009).
Representing the New Hybrid Generation 72
vid Liwei Li notes, Chinese American writers suffered “the dual burden of at once subverting an American Orientalist discourse based on their cultural oppression and reconstructing a Chinese American tradition that would mark their cultural liberation” (“The Production of Chinese American Tradition”
323). Additonally, Chinese American women authors had to contend with the extra burden of the formidable patriarchal ideology of their ethnic commu-nity.6 Moreover, Chinese American women writers are also under different influences in their variegated racial lineages, geographical origins and lin-guistic usages.7 Amy Ling identifies three prominent thematic categories in Chinese American women’s writing before Kingston’s arrival: “delight in storytelling often mingled with nostalgia, protest against racial and sexual injustice, and experiment in language or structure” (“Chinese American Women Writers” 221). In fact, these thematic categories continue to shape writing by Chinese American women today.
In addition to the three categories above, the mother-daughter plot is one of the most important themes in Chinese American women’s writing.
The mother-daughter plot or “the constructions of femininity in discourses of motherhood and daughterhood” (8), as Marianne Hirsch defines it, structures much women’s writing. Indeed, matrilineage is indispensable for the devel-opment of women’s writing. Thus, Virginia Woolf rightly underlines the im-portance of maternal figures in a literary tradition of women in A Room of One’s Own: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women” (76).
In the context of Chinese American women’s writing, Maxine Hong King-ston’s critically acclaimed The Woman Warrior made popular the moth-er-daughter plot, or what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong calls “Chinese American matrilineal discourse,” by presenting the ambivalence about her hyphenated identity from a daughter’s perspective.8 The mother and her stories contrib-ute to both the growth and confusion of the daughter narrator, as evinced in the anguished questioning in the first epigraph of this chapter. The obsessive engagements with the maternal presence/absence in Amy Tan’s novels, as discussed in Chapter Two, won Tan popularity with mainstream readers as well and furthered the development of a maternal tradition in Chinese
6 For instance, Lim points out that Asian American literature “has been an active site of mas-culine views and feminist resistance” and the Asian American women’s texts studied in her essay “are symptomatic of the struggle to refigure the subject between the often oppositional demands of ethnic and gender identity” (“Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories” 572).
7 For Amy Ling, Chinese American women authors should include at least three groups: im-migrants, American-born Chinese, Eurasians and Amerasians (“Chinese American Women Writers” 220).
8 Wong also points out that Chinese American matrilineal discourse was not an invention of Kingston’s. Su-ling Wong and Earl Cressy’s 1952 collaborative autobiography, Daughter of Confucius, is one of the pre-1965 texts that write about the female-centered household (“Sugar Sisterhood” 177).
Representing the New Hybrid Generation 73 American women’s fiction.
The significance of the mother-daughter plot in Chinese American women’s writing also has a historically and socially specific context. One of the major achievements of second-wave American feminism involved es-pousing the importance of matrilineage to the extent that it is almost re-garded as a prerequisite for women’s consciousness-raising. Hence, scripting the mother-daughter plot became significant in women’s writing. Discussing the phenomenal popularity of Amy Tan, Sau-ling Wong observes that the favored status of the Chinese American matrilineal discourse results from “a convergence of ethnic group-specific literary tradition and ideological needs by the white-dominated readership—including feminist readership—for the Other’s presence as both mirror and differentiator” (“Sugar Sisterhood” 177).
To a certain extent, therefore, Chinese American women writers have built a literary tradition and gained their footing in the literary market and academia through the constant deployment of the mother-daughter plot. A risk in this type of success is that the (white/mainstream) reader can easily overlook and even erase Chinese American cultural and historical specificities as they consume this apparently formulaic text. Thus, one of the major challenges for the Chinese American woman author who wants to revamp the mother-daughter plot involves devising a way to avoid the trap of self-Orientalization and ethnographic self-Othering. In writing Mona in the Promised Land, Gish Jen has taken up the gauntlet and succeeded in the task.
Both Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land center upon the intersection of diasporic experiences and ethnic identity formation. As the novels tell the two parts of the Chang family saga, they explore the issue of ethnic identity from different gender perspectives. Ralph Yifeng Chang, whose transnational journey opens the narrative of immigration in Typical American, reflects on the immigrant’s struggle with the notion of becoming American. He occupies the main speaking position in the novel. The female characters, particularly Ralph’s wife Helen and his sister Teresa, have to de-liberately erase their individuality and selfhood to maintain the self-respect of the man in the family, who has a tendency to metaphorically or literally sleep through difficulties.9 Jen purposely highlights the fact that the Chang women have to sacrifice themselves both physically and psychologically to keep Ralph on his feet, a strategy that allows her to uncover the gender im-balance and androcentric ideology in the patriarchal family. In Mona in the Promised Land, Jen chooses Mona to be the center of narrative conscious-ness, allowing the daughter to replace the father. Indeed, Ralph is
9 For instance, Ralph goes into symbolic or real hibernation when he realizes that he can never return to China after the Communist takeover, when he fails to get tenured at the uni-versity, or when his fried chicken enterprise folds.
Representing the New Hybrid Generation 74
“re-placed” in the second novel in multiple ways: he no longer dominates the narrative or his family. In her adaptation of the mother-daughter plot, Jen also demonstrates how the mother, Helen, has been Americanized. This sub-verts the clichéd binary opposition and cultural conflicts between the immi-grant mother and the American-born daughter. In reformulating the mother figure, Jen also deconstructs the essentialist equation of the immigrant mother with China and thereby forecloses any possibility of the daughter serving “as a convenient, unobtrusive stand-in for the mainstream reading public.”10 Moreover, Jen inserts a sibling subplot into the mother-daughter narrative. The Harvard-educated Callie is completely different in tempera-ment and character from her sister Mona and has the full potential to become an example of the Asian model minority with her Ivy League background and a promising medical career. Instead, Jen allows Callie to embrace her
“Chinese roots” and become a Sinophile.
The textual representation of the mother-daughter relationship in Mona in the Promised Land, as exemplified in the dialogue of the epigraph, is fraught with tension. Helen has just found out that her favorite daughter Mona has secretly converted to Judaism and is now “a more or less Catholic Chinese Jew” (44). The questions and answers between Helen and Mona are formulated in a catechist fashion, through which the maternal authority and the familial hierarchy are confirmed. However, Jen deliberately eases the tense, church-like aura by switching to a totally different register in Mona’s reading of the mother-daughter exchange. Mona regards Helen’s attempt to reinforce the sanctity and permanence of kinship as simply a part of a famil-iar script; the daughter is so emboldened by her own semiotic reading that she tries to predict and even manipulate the mother’s reaction. The routine of making face demonstrates the intimacy between the mother and the teenage daughter. The first sign of the rupture of the close bond takes place when Helen substitutes the usual response in body language to Mona’s “gorilla face” with disciplinary talk about the sin of lying daughters (45). Then Mona
“drops a bomb” by announcing that, perhaps, she is “not Chinese” (46), sig-nifying Helen’s failure to reproduce a dutiful daughter in Mona. From this point, the mother-daughter relationship spirals downward, and the breach is not healed until Mona’s wedding at the end of the novel. Clearly, in Mona in the Promised Land, Jen is responding to the tradition of the mother-daughter plot but with a distinctly comic twist.
Although Helen instantly resorts to Chinese familial ethics to discipline Mona, she is by no means the traditional mother that we would find in most of Amy Tan’s novels, who can be easily identified with a China of the past.
Helen’s character in Mona in the Promised Land is significantly different
10 This is adopted from Sau-ling Wong’s comment on The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife (“Sugar Sisterhood” 197).
Representing the New Hybrid Generation 75 from the delicate and subservient Hailan, or Sea Blue, of Typical American, whose “life ambition was to stay home forever” before she left China (62).
Her transformation actually begins in Typical American, in which Helen has a brief affair with the seductive entrepreneur Grover Ding. She is neverthe-less immediately punished by Ralph’s disciplinary hand, that pushes her out of the second-floor bedroom window. In Mona, Helen is no longer a victim of family violence and a practitioner of self-effacement. In fact, she initiates the entire practice of switching by changing places with Ralph in the family in Jen’s second novel. Jen depicts Helen’s ambivalence about her “switched”
position:
For Helen was so mad when she realized Ralph couldn’t take care of her—wasn’t that what a husband was for?—that she had what amounted to a personality transformation. She’d gotten used to the idea of helping, of working hard, even of going out of the house to work. But she’d nev-er adjusted to the idea of becoming a main pillar of the family, standing there all by herself like the kind of ruin people went to Greece to see. In a way, she was proud of what she’d learned to do. But in another way this so wasn’t what she’d counted on, growing up in China…. (46)
The dry humor in Helen’s imaginative yet far-fetched allusion to the Greek ruins signifies a connection with ancient traditionalism and her mixed self-perception. With her Chinese background, Helen thinks of herself as a kind of spectacle due to her empowered status in the familial hierarchy, and yet, she is also proud of what she has achieved. Though from time to time the American Helen misses the way in which the Chinese Hailan sailed through her pampered life in the past, she is now busy maintaining a bour-geois lifestyle and accumulating capital as a “typical American,” in other words, assimilating into mainstream American society. Unlike most of the mothers in the Chinese American matrilineal discourse, the mother of the
“Chang-kees” takes the lead in switching and changing identificatory affilia-tion.11
Jen also undermines the fixation on an unchanging and essentialist
“Chineseness” at the linguistic level by highlighting the different Chinese dialects spoken in Chinese America, which is markedly different from the undifferentiated deployment of Mandarin Chinese as the lingua franca of the Chinese American community in novels such as Amy Tan’s. For instance,
“Chineseness” at the linguistic level by highlighting the different Chinese dialects spoken in Chinese America, which is markedly different from the undifferentiated deployment of Mandarin Chinese as the lingua franca of the Chinese American community in novels such as Amy Tan’s. For instance,