Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature

1. The Filial Debtor: Jade Snow Wong

19 • 1 • The Filial Debtor Jade Snow Wong To Pa, the demands he makes on Fred are coherently interlocked in an irreproachable logic. Cultural preservation, filial piety . . ., maintenance of the blood line and family name, guardianship of junior family members, attainment of degrees in higher education (preferably medical or legal), upward socio-economic mobility coupled with undying devotion to a single geographic locale (Chinatown), law-abiding citizenship, commitment to the work ethic, abolition of all unedifying sentiments, prudent expenditure of energy, respectfulness of manner, cleanliness of person—all are Necessary to the patriarch, hence one and the same. Transgression of one injunction means transgression of all. Sau-ling Wong, in discussion of Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive ; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. Edward Said, Orientalism Of Jade Snow Wong’s early autobiography, it is well established that the 1989 introduction invokes, from its very first sentence, an exoticizing and problematic rhetoric of Chinese cultural otherness, and introduces her childhood experiences immediately into a discourse of “cultural conflict ” or (in her words) “conflicting cultural expectations.” “[M]y upbring- 20 The Filial Debtor ing by the nineteenth-century standards of Imperial China, which my parents deemed correct, was quite different from that enjoyed by twentieth -century Americans in San Francisco, where I had to find my identity and vocation” (JS Wong, vii). In the narrative, that which is Chinese in association is often felt to be constricting, anachronistic, or developmentally arrested, while qualities deemed “American” become synonymous with a versatile modernity and individual empowerment. This bias makes Fifth Chinese Daughter no less than prototype for the kind of “intergenerational conflict” narrative which scholarship has understandably censured for its self-directed essentialism, its eager adoption of Orientalist binaries:1 “The notion of cultural conflict between the immigrant and Americanborn generations—the enlightened, freedom-loving son or daughter struggling to escape the clutches of backward, tyrannical parents—is one of the most powerful ‘movies’ ever created to serve hegemonic American ideology ” (SL Wong, Reading, 41). And under examination, that grand narrative reveals itself indeed to be deeply self-contradictory. Jade Snow compares her own family dynamics unfavorably to those of the white middle-class home for whom she works, noting approvingly that in this (implicitly representative) Western family, “children were heard as well as seen” (JS Wong, 113)—but she fails to realize that the adage “Children are to be seen and not heard” is a bit of American, not Chinese, cultural wisdom. She learns through her exposure to Western schooling to take pride in questioning the authority and belief systems of her parents, but never notes the (twofold) irony in her unquestioning acceptance of American ideologies and cultural institutions: “I can now think for myself, and you and Mama should not demand unquestioning obedience from me. . . .” “Where,” [father] demanded, “did you learn such an unfilial theory?” “From my teacher,” Jade Snow answered triumphantly, “who you taught me is supreme after you, and whose judgment I am not to question.” (128) Does she merely fail to question the American pedagogies which, in her view, embody the very principles of philosophical interrogation and individual thought (thereby failing to challenge the injunction to challenge all injunctions)? Or does she decline to question those pedagogies at the order of parental injunctions which are themselves undermined by the Western teachings to which they defer? The shortcomings of this binary cultural opposition are clear. The Filial Debtor 21 Moreover, the narrator’s efforts to exoticize Chinese America are unraveled time and again by telltale signs of a locally grown pragmatism. Despite advertising Chinatown as “the heart of Old China,” Wong is forced, in her actual descriptions of the customs and habits of the enclave, to relate cultural modifications stride for stride alongside cultural traditions. Each modification conceded affirms the anti-essentializing insight that “Culture is not a piece of baggage that immigrants carry with them; it is not static but undergoes constant modification in a new environment” (SL Wong, Reading, 42). In describing a Chinatown funeral procession, for example, the narrator advertises the ethnic culture as one of imported foreignness (“then...