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1 • • Introduction I have trouble understanding why someone so smart would drop out of school and run away from home at 14 and end up as a junkie-whore. Yes, it’s hard to be the dutiful daughter of immigrant parents from China and Hong Kong, the kind who consider friends a frivolity and an 89 per cent exam mark a failure . . . But I’m a parent now. Millions of Canadians have overcome such traumas, if that is the word, without self-indulgent melt-downs. Canadian journalist Jan Wong, in interview of Evelyn Lau, The Globe and Mail Too often, . . . narratives of gender and sexual awakening are accused of undermining the “serious” work that Asian American texts are expected to perform: to expose anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, to limn the trauma inflicted upon Asians by Western imperialism, to envision better worlds where Asians and Asian Americans will not be construed as foreigners in their own homes, to create a common cultural ground for pan-Asian unity, and (more recently) to apprehend Asian Americans’ larger global-economic agendas and cross-border alliances. Each of these social agendas comprises a supportable priority. However, it would be a mistake to interpret the pursuit of these goals as anomalous or more important than the exposure of tyrannies within the household. Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature This is a book about the Asian immigrant family and intergenerational conflict—conflict that we think we know; after all, the story has been often enough told. But in order to dislodge us from our tired circuits around the immigrant family romance, this analysis deliberately brackets the (inter)personal. So Ingratitude will not be particularly interested in the 2 Introduction mothers in our bones. Instead, it will conduct a reading of the immigrant nuclear family as a special form of capitalist enterprise: one invested, Gayatri Spivak might say, in obtaining “justice under capitalism.” To the extent that migrating to positions of global advantage is about the hope for upward mobility, it is about the hope of profiting in the Western capitalist economy. And I do mean profit, because this project considers the Asian immigrant family a production unit—a sort of cottage industry, for a particular brand of good, capitalist subject: Get your filial child, your doctor/lawyer, your model minority here. The book also takes up the systems of that production: What is it to leverage guilt or fear, to manufacture in a subject these very useful mechanisms of ingratitude or inadequacy? The upcoming readings of narratives such as Fifth Chinese Daughter (Jade Snow Wong, 1945), The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976), Oriental Girls Desire Romance (Catherine Liu, 1997), and Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (Evelyn Lau, 1995) reconstruct the processes by which diligent, docile, immigrants’ daughters are produced. We attend to the means, and then the psychic costs, of this subject formation: even when it succeeds, but especially when it misses its mark. When she ran away from her parents at age 14, Evelyn Lau spent two years on and off the streets of Canada—scrambling for food and shelter in foster homes or strangers’ homes, selling sex for drugs and basic necessities, risking attack and being attacked—enduring, in short, the harshest physical conditions it was in her power to choose. All this, rather than go back to being the dutiful daughter of her immigrant parents: earning straight As, cleaning the house, one day to become a doctor. What was it about that existence she found so very dreadful? Even years later, she does not know; she cannot say. Something, she thinks, about being trapped inside that house. Such is the core conundrum of this book: how is it that young women like Evelyn may come to madness or suicide without being able to point to any legitimating personal histories of abuse or trauma in the home? Jade Snow enumerates the minutiae of her grievances against her parents, and these youthful sorrows of curfews and playmates do demonstrate a certain unfairness or disproportion in their child-rearing practices. Yet no strand of these minor episodes, however finely strung, could approximate the intensity of the “stubborn, unhappy struggle . . . between [Jade Snow] and her family” (JS Wong, 90). She is punished unreasonably, but not beyond the bounds of Chinese cultural strictures or of American senses of propriety; in response, she takes a position in a white household at the age of 16 in order to move out of her own...

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