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20. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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317 Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms by anne-marie lee-loy 20 Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories … a story to grow up on. —Hong Kingston 5 Talk-story becomes a courageous act that leads to transformation and discovery, to the inscriptions of self. —Ho 135 Feminist debates surrounding mothering have been particularly interested in how the construction and maintenance of the institution of motherhood might be complicit with the oppressive strategies of patriarchal societies. Despite their various takes on the subject, however, these debates basically begin from the premise that mothering is fundamentally an act of caregiving or caretaking; that is, “maternal practice is governed by … demands for [children’s] preservation, growth and acceptability” (Ruddick 348). In this regard, the relationship between mothers and daughters is significant as mothering in North America inherently involves preparing daughters to live in a patriarchal society. Here, an important difference of experience has been identified between mothering among WASP families in North America and those of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Specifically, WASP mothers have been accused of training their daughters to be silent and submissive, thereby perpetuating patriarchal culture. That a different 318 anne-marie lee-loy priority underlies maternal practice in other racialized ethnic groups is memorably articulated by African American feminist bell hooks when she writes that “this emphasis on woman’s silence may be an accurate remembering of what has taken place in the households of women from WASP backgrounds in the United States, but in black communities (and diverse ethnic communities), women have not been silent” (6). hooks posits a very different model of motherhood when she asserts that mother–daughter mothering for African Americans and “diverse ethnic communities” takes place within a “world of woman speech, loud talk, angry words, women with tongues quick and sharp, tender sweet tongues, touching our world with their words” (6). For hooks, such speech is neither trivial nor trite; instead, it is an “act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination” (8). When she also explains that her pseudonym was chosen to honour and ally herself with a female ancestor known for her boldness of speech (essentially identifying this relative as a mother figure), hooks shifts both the central goals and means of mothering in a significant fashion. Instead of perpetrating the institutions of the dominant culture, mothering is defined as an act that prepares daughters to “survive in systems that would oppress them” and “to challenge the systems of racial oppression” primarily by means of “woman speech” (Collins 68, 69). The connection between mothering that aims to produce resistance and survival and the “world of speech” that hooks privileges finds particular resonanceinWendyHo’sanalysisofAsianAmericanwriting.InHerMother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother–Daughter Writing, Ho argues that “talk stories”1 in Chinese American fiction must be understood as a “heroic and subversive form of verbal expression—passed on from one woman to another across dislocations and relocations, generations, cultures and continents” (135). Embedded in such stories are the skills and knowledge that mothers believe their daughters will need to survive and contest North American discourses and practices of domination; thus, talk story must be understood to be an act of mothering through “woman speech.” The actual content of such stories is also significant, for as hooks recognizes, “it is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important” (18). Fictional depictions of Asian American talk story are heavily invested in ethnic and cultural reproduction. They affirm and record ethnically specific legends and myths, as well as personal, communal, and national histories . Reading talk story as maternal practice rather than simply “textual tropes for the diaspora situation” or “a symbolic search for cultural roots” (Grice, Negotiating Identities 45) reveals that for ethnic mothers, fostering a “meaningful racial identity in children within a society that denigrates [44.192.107.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:39 GMT) 319 asian american mothering people of color” is a seminal component of mothering (Collins 68). Indeed, the development of an identity that incorporates a confident sense of ethnicity becomes both the hallmark of survival and the grounds upon which daughters can resist North American racism. The Japanese Canadian novels Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms are striking in that they lack traditional depictions of talk story as found in much Asian American fiction. Unlike Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior or Amy Tan’s...