Ingratitude: A cultural theory of power in Asian American women's literature

This dissertation investigates the seeming incongruity in narratives by daughters of first generation immigrants, narratives expressing a pervading anger and bitterness, at conditions of their upbringing which they cannot name with finality or certitude. Young women like the narrator of Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1995) would face the horrors of institutionalization or homelessness rather than return to life as a daughter; they threaten madness or suicide yet can point to no authenticating personal history of abuse or trauma in the home. Such narratives of "intergenerational conflict" are commonly ill-regarded in Asian American studies as inherently ahistorical, politically bankrupt. My project, however, articulates familial dynamics through precisely the kind of cultural materialism to which that theme has been considered antithetical. Taking the Foucauldian position that a system of domination need not be specularly violent, I offer an analysis of the symbolic and political-economic structures of power between parents and daughters in the immigrant family. Read through the family's economic aspirations, or a parent's class and national investments, intimate relations reveal themselves to he profoundly ordered by a capitalist logic and ethos, their violences arranged around the production of the disciplined and profitable docile body.; The project begins by drawing upon two seminal texts of Asian American literature, Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975), to describe a paradigm of parental power which relies on its own contradictions---its fundamental paradoxes and impossibilites---for its viability. In its second half, the project turns from the paradoxes of power, to the paradoxes of resistance. I observe that, between Fifth Chinese Daughter and the publication of Lau's Runaway or Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance (1997), economic relations within the family evolved in response to changing opportunities for Asian Americans in the professional-managerial class. This section revisits the model minority as a discourse of filiality---a code of sacrifice, duty, hierarchy, gratitude---and argues that an effective understanding of the Asian American subject's relation to the nation must come to terms with the immigrant family as that nation's intermediary and agent.