Diasporic Shame and Not-Quite-Queer Performativity in Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger

Utilizing the relationship Eve Sedgwick conceives between shame and "queer performativity," this essay argues that there is a distinctly politicized ethnicity inherent in the immigrant musician father's shame-driven compulsion to perform in Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger. Although the politics of this diasporic shame are effectively lost upon the assimilative second generation daughters (as well as a mainstream American audience), its lasting legacy is at once the hindrance of their complete assimilation to dominant society and the production of a haunting and irreconcilable longing for ethnic affiliation that is in marked contradistinction to the progressive Asian American political consciousness realized in previous daughter-father narratives such as Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men.