| In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger: A Novella and Stories, communication within the family is accompanied by and sometimes enacted through food imagery. More specifically, hunger—through imagery indicative of the Buddhist mythological figure called the Hungry Ghost—is the place and venue in and through which “desire” works its unquenchable way in the stories. However, the authors reject Zen Buddhism's “happy ending” that promises eventual “balance” and “enlightenment,” and instead, their stories coincide with Lacanian insights and describe the Chinese American experience as being more complex, more pessimistic, and less resolved. As the families converse, as they eat, and as they feed each other, they strive for balance but are never quite satisfied. Additionally, in the stories, starvation and gluttony represent psychological symptoms, which symbolically communicate unspoken desires. These symptoms signify a breakdown in familial communication. Thus, within scenes containing imagery of eating, the desires of the Hungry Ghost remain unsatisfied, and within scenes containing imagery of starvation or gluttony, the desires of the Hungry Ghost remain unfed, unattended to, and/or unrecognized in addition to being unfulfilled. Chapter Two deals with Maxine Hong Kingston's books and focuses on the Hungry Ghost figure signifying unsuccessful attempts at family veneration through dialogue. Amy Tan's novels are analyzed in Chapter Three, and the focus is on hunger as dialogue amongst female family members and on women as Hungry Ghosts. Lastly, Chapter Four discusses the stories of Lan Samantha Chang as they reflect the concept of vengeful Hungry Ghosts representing unrecognized desires about estranged family members. |
