Proposal--Kitchen God's Wife: (De)construction of the Roman-A-Clef

2020

This study examines the experiences of Chinese women from their arrival in America, their struggle to survive in the new land against double oppression from the American and Chinese people, and the conflict of identity arising from the encounter of two cultures. These phenomena are depicted in four novels written by Chinese-American women writers: Amy Tan's two novels Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) combines with Lisa See's On Gold Mountain (1995) and The Shanghai Girls (2009). The research has three problem formulations: The problematic position of women in Chinese society in relation to their escape to America, scrutinizing the Chinese women position in America through the perspective of Orientalism and Chinese women role, and the conflict of identity experienced by Chinese women in differentiating between Self and Other between the two cultures. These four novels differ in which each of their female characters has their own reason for leaving their homeland and migrating to America and how they are trying to cope and survive in an alien land. Their reason can be broadly stated into two things: escaping the danger and find a better life, though each story differs in several aspects For Shanghai Girls and Kitchen God's Wife, the women (Pearl and Winnie) left China as they undergo traumatic experience as a result of Chinese patriarchal system that subordinate women and also the wartime circumstances in China. Hundred Secret Senses gives additional insight on how Kwan, the women character, is brought to America so that she can be taken care of as her mother in China cast her away. Lastly, On a Gold Mountain offers a different perspective about Chinese woman as this novel illustrates how Ticie, a White women, marries Fong See and willingly tries to become a proper Chinese wife. Gender discrimination in America occurs as the Chinese are unable to own property, assimilated into the White culture and is confined in Chinatown. Living in Chinatown proves to be problematic for the women characters as they are subjected in both racial and gender marginalization due to Chinese patriarchal society. Being double oppressed, the Chinese women experience the hardships of racial discrimination in American and being subordinated by the man in the family. The dynamic between two cultures, Chinese and America which is experienced by those women creates identity conflict regarding which one is Self and which one is Other. The conflict further escalates when the female characters are challenged by different perspective about identity illustrated by their children and/or their family. The novels prove that when two cultures are intertwined, ambivalence of identity happened as the women character in the novel is influenced by Western culture while not leaving their own Chinese culture.

Through a comparison of Chinese and Chinese American (auto)biographical accounts, this article facilitates a transpacific literary exchange that tracks cultural persistence and diffusion, offers a transnational perspective on the alleged absence of indigenous Chinese autobiography and the controversial use of fake "Orientalist" material in Chinese American life-writing, and highlights the need for bicultural literacy in grappling with this literature. Contesting Frank Chin's categorical condemnation of autobiography (as a Western Christian contraption laden with self-hatred), I trace its manifestations in transpacific texts and the convergences in those texts: melding of autobiography and biography, salience of maternal legacies, and interdependent self-formation. Unlike the Chinese authors who lavish compliments on their forebears, however, the Chinese American authors do not scruple to disclose unseemly family secrets or to defy the boundaries between history and fiction-practices that some Asian American critics find vexing. I demonstrate that the critical qualms about Chinese American life-writing have to do with the politics of representation and that bicultural literacy can obviate cultural misreading.

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2014

The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the book’s subsequent cultural ubiquity led Karl Taro Greenfeld of The Paris Review to comment recently that “if Oprah Winfrey had had a book club in 1989 she surely would have selected it” (13). Yet it is perhaps precisely because that powerful arbiter of middlebrow taste did not yet exist that The Joy Luck Club became as much of a sensation as it did, for in many ways, the book club and the novel fulfill similar functions. Just as Oprah’s Book Club has been lauded for its remarkable ability to transform obscure novels into overnight bestsellers and expose its largely white middleto upper-class female demographic to a plethora of so-called minority works, The Joy Luck Club has been praised in both the popular and critical milieux for its ability to foster a “sister-centered” (Welsch 29) sense of community both within and beyond the text itself. Yet it is this very same talent that has earned both Tan and Winfrey the derision of numerous literary critics; Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic, remarked that “[t]here is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about [Winfrey’s] book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature. Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). In similar fashion, Asian American literary critics have, on the whole, taken umbrage at Tan’s penchant for constructing a bridge to and among her “predominantly white and female” readership (Wong 180), resulting in a loyal following that Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has derisively dubbed a “sugar sisterhood” (181). Like Stossel, Wong and many like-minded Asian American critics have argued that Tan’s novels are far too “soothing” to be “serious”: their “exoticizing” (191) depictions of China and traditional Chinese culture, in particular, “enable Orientalism to emerge in a form palatable to middle-class American readers” (181). The aim of this essay is neither to endorse nor refute such perspectives. What strikes me as especially interesting about the extremely polarized response to The Joy Luck Club is rather its persistent preoccupation with the serious and the playful—whether defined as the popular, the “easy,” the “palatable,” or the ......

Melus, 2006

Kingston's well--known work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts addresses Chinese American identity through her self--negotiation of the meanings of silence and the definition of having a voice. I argue that Kingston rewrites the dead body (death) as a metaphysical space to redefine different meanings of dichotomy, silence and voice and to establish her own ethnicity, gender, and aesthetic identity as a writer. Starting with my analysis of the story about an aunt who trespassed against the cultural moral code, was punished, and committed suicide, I demonstrate how the dead body becomes a metaphysical space symbolizing remote cultural and ethnic memories that need to be contested and rewritten. Kingston's further revision of the Chinese literary past, the legend of Fa Mu Lan and Ts'ai Yen, endorses her self--identity as a Chinese American writer. Her literary techniques of mixing truth with fiction, and juxtaposing multiple layers of the past to reflect upon the present, challenge and expand the genre of autobiography itself.

The formation of identity as Asian-Americans is traced and compared in the two works, Tripmaster Monkey; His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kingston, and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip.

An International Journal of Asian Literatures, Cultures and Englishes, 2014

This paper aims at discussing Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s 1996 memoir – Among the White Moon Faces – as inviting a conceptualisation and examination of lineage conceived otherwise than (only) on a biological mode. I am interested in showing that when the question of filiation is examined from a literary perspective and focuses on different possible relations to a writer and a narrative belonging to a different generation, it is also intimately related to an attitude towards cultural heritage. My basic postulation is that references to The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts , a seminal and uniquely innovative work in (Chinese) American letters are visible on a double level, diegetic and extradiegetic, and weave a fruitful relationship not only with the conceptualisations of self-representation that emerge in Kingston’s first opus , but also with the narrative and discursive configurations that sustain them. By tracing and analysing these different echoes and resonances it ...

Biography, 2008

S cholars of life writing and Asian studies alike owe a great debt to Jing M. Wang for giving us When "I" Was Born, a highly crafted literary history that tells us how modern autobiography emerged in China from the 1920s through 1945. It is a highly gendered story in that vernacular, prose-based life writing in China is a rare example of a field dominated by women writers. Wang's exploration of how this came to be takes the reader on a journey into early commercial publishing centered in Shanghai in the 1920s and against the backdrop of political tumult from Chiang Kai-shek's consolidation of power to the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. In her Introduction, Wang presents her basic motivation for the study, which is quite simply to adopt an approach informed by Philip Lejeune and other theorists of life writing that distinguishes autobiography both from fiction and from other types of historical writing. Readers from the field of Asian studies will find here a sensitive scholar who is profoundly dissatisfied with past criticism in which "fiction overshadows autobiography" and autobiography, if considered at all, is only used as a historical resource. What Wang says is perfectly true, and as her readings show, the course correction that incorporates life writing brings out of the "shadows" an amazing new canon of works: "The light of these texts shone out to me from dusty shelves in libraries, urging me to bring them together as one tradition" (10). Wang's enthusiasm is infectious. When "I" Was Born is organized into seven brief chapters, all of which maintain an admirably clear, concise writing style that, for the most part, encourages the general reader and does not assume a specialty in the field of modern Chinese literature. Familiarity with major figures like Lu Xun (1881-1936), Hu Shi (1891-1962), Lin Yutang (1895-1976), and others would be welcome, but Wang takes care to introduce these in her text. On the other hand, Wang simply assumes familiarity with basic figures of the women's movement in China such as the feminist and revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin (1875-1907), and she does not describe any of the major events of the women's movement per se; readers will have to look elsewhere for this crucial background. Chapter one is an extremely abbreviated look at the tradition of life writing in China from ancient times to the early twentieth century.

1995