| Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, Nellie Wong's poems, and Rongyoung Kim's Clay Walls are written by second-generation Asian American women, and they have autobiographical characteristics in common. These second-generation Asian American women's narratives are, on the one hand, the process of questioning, searching, defining, redefining, confronting and creating their individual, collective and relational selves as Asian American women in America. On the other hand, articulating the experience of themselves and their immigrant families enable them to expose the history of Asian American diaspora and the discrimination Asian American men and women have experienced. These texts reveal the second-generation Asian American women's ethnic and gender consciousness in their presentation of mothers and the fathers, but also each of them show a very distinctive political consciousness and other perspectives in these writings. Kingston, who is known for liberal feminism in her first book, The Woman Warrior, turns out to be, what I call, a "pacifist feminist" in her most recent book, The Fifth Book of Peace. Wong is a socialist feminist activist, and her poems reflect her conscious criticism and reflection as an Asian American woman activist on diverse issues of class, race, and gender. Kim, who lived a traditional woman's life as a wife and a mother, is invested in ethnic heritage and portrays the early Korean American community and Korean history describing the immigrant mother, an outspoken leftist nationalist, in Clay Walls. These texts help us listen to the marginalized, multiple voices of Asian American women and will lead to a better perspective from which to understand Asian American women's writings, and furthermore, minority discourse. |
