'Just translating': The politics of translation and ethnography in Chinese-American women's writing (Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan)

This study focuses on three texts by Chinese American women writers: Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989). I explore the political and epistemological issues in Asian American women's writing and representation by specifically analyzing how these three writers "translate." The trope of translation resonates exceptionally well with the national attitudes accorded to Asian Americans; it is only in being perpetually defined as "foreign" and in need of "translation" that acceptance in America is acceded to Asian Americans. Each writer's practice of translation reflects her negotiation of the ways in which her work has been culturally exoticized as "Chinese/Asian."; The dissertation surveys the critical analyses of translation in Asian American literary discourse that have linked translation to ethnography. Fifth Chinese Daughter portrays the process by which Jade Snow Wong relies on "translation" as a metaphor for her "dual identity" (an ideal blend of East and West) within the stringently segregated social structure of the 1940s and 50s. Asian American critics in the 1970s characterized Jade Snow Wong as the iconic cultural "tour guide" and "Model Minority" and advocated against both her ethnographic mode of writing as well as her ideological embrace of the American Dream narrative. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club further extends Wong's use of "translation." Tan utilizes a contemporary version of ethnographic authority that is ironically flawed by mistranslations. She idealizes the "ethnic" use of maternal languages by portraying the Chinese mothers as the mediators of cultural and feminist transformation for their American-born daughters. Far from rejecting translation as a metaphor for an idealized Asian American identity, Tan recasts the trope for the 1990s. In contrast to Wong and Tan, Kingston interrogates the epistemological premises of anthropological constructions of ethnic and female "otherness" through portrayals of daughter/mother negotiations of translation in The Woman Warrior. Situating it within the context of vital work being done on U.S. women of color writers and ethnography, I read Kingston's text as a critical ethnographic allegory that offers us a meditation on the practice of "difference" within feminist ethnography.