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3 “To Hide Her True Self”: Sentimentality and the Search for an Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman Patricia P. Chu My mother’s generation was the ¤rst in Korea to learn a new alphabet, and new words for everyday things. She had to learn to answer to a new name, to think of herself and her world in a new way. To hide her true self. I think these lessons, these deviations from the life she was supposed to lead, from the person she should have been, are what changed the shape of her head. Those are the same lessons my mother taught me, the morals of her stories , and because I learned them early, I was able to survive what eventually killed my mother. Hiding my true self, the original nature of my head, enabled me to survive in the recreation camp and in a new country. —Akiko Bradley/Kim Soon Hyo, Comfort Woman (153) The Sentimental Pitfall In Asian American literature, the portrayal of Asian female subjectivities is shaped by multiple discursive constraints.On one hand,Western accounts of female subjectivity struggle with the paradox of women being nominally included in the concept of the Western, Cartesian, universal self—a self de¤ned as pure mind—while also being ¤gured as the embodied “other” of that disembodied , rational self.1 On the other hand, Asian American writers must also address the tradition of ¤guring Asians,and others of color,as the embodied “others ” who represent the boundaries of the Western self. Thus a central problem in Asian American literature is that of rendering very alien experience accessible to a middle-class American readership in the interest of promoting intercultural understanding. In narratives where Asian American women embody extreme personal suffering associated with nationalist political upheaval, it is a challenge to represent these women as fundamentally like American readers without either trivializing or exoticizing their experiences. On one hand, the author must work against Western stereotypes of Asian women as exotic geishas born to submission and suffering, or as victims of patriarchal oppression in forms that are explained in terms of Asian cultural norms.2 A writer’s attempt to do justice to the suffering of women in a particular Asian society is all too likely to reaf¤rm existing stereotypes of Asian countries as the opposites of an enlightened, feminist West where women have complete freedom and equality.3 On the other hand, emphasizing the Asian woman’s likeness to the (presumably middle-class) American reader requires a grasp and skilful manipulation of the conventions for representing subjectivity in the Anglo-American literary tradition, particularly that of the bildungsroman. As I have argued elsewhere (Chu, Introduction), the subject privileged by the Anglo-American bildungsroman, who exempli¤es an idealized member of the nation, is typically characterized by a complex interior life and the embrace of values deemed “American”; but since historically, “American” values have been de¤ned by the marginalization or exclusion of people of color and the concurrent reaf¤rmation of whites as de¤nitive to American identity, Asian American writers have frequently focused on the aspects of Asian American life that are perceived as “universal”: family con®icts, the desire to better oneself through work and education, and the individual’s struggles, American-style, against injustices that sometimes include racism and individual prejudice. Often these novels assign to American-born children the role of speaking for justice and individual aspiration, whereas Asian parents, especially immigrant mothers and wives, are made to embody, guard, or transmit the traditional aspects of the family’s ancestral cultures.4 Within this context, Asian American women writers, working on the subgenre of mother-daughter narratives, have found certain formulas that resonate with American readers so much that their invocation renders the speci¤cs of the immigrant woman’s experience secondary to the formula of mothers and daughters seeking mutual understanding, recognition, and reconciliation. One formula,most visibly exempli¤ed by novels such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, draws upon a psychoanalytic plot structure endemic to American ¤ction, in which the protagonist resolves his or her own psychic dif¤culties by recovering the memory of a primal scene of sexual and/or mortal scandal; the revelation typically transforms the protagonist’s understanding of his or her present. In the Asian American matrilineal version of this plot, the primal scene is generationally displaced: the Asian American daughter is typically cured of her malaise by hearing about...

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