Asian Voices in English

'Listen, Mom, I'm a Banana': Mother and Daughter in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

'LISTEN, MOM, I'M A BANANA': MOTHER AND DAUGHTER IN MAXINE HONG KINGSTON'S THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND AMY TAN'S THE JOY LUCK CLUB Mimi Chan Chinese American writers have their own set of preoccupations and interests. And the authors of Asian American literature offer a perspective that is neither entirely Eastern nor Western: their focus is not just on 'Chinese-ness' but Chinese-ness in an American context. Dennis Bloodworth has this to say about 'Westernized Chinese': There is no point in explaining westernized Chinese to the West; someone should write a book that explains them, rather, to the Chinese.1 If 'Westernized Chinese' are a separate species who have to be explained to their compatriots, then even more separate from their original mould would be immigrant Chinese, the characters who write and people Chinese American Literature . The Chinese American authors who are the subjects of my study are second generation Americans. Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California in 1940 to Chinese immigrant parents. Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, two and a half years after her parents immigrated to the United States. As is often the case with writers of Asian American literature they are deeply concerned with integrating into American society and yet feeling strongly the pull of their Chinese cultural heritage. The case of Asian Americans is so striking because of the physical dissimilarity between them and the Americans with whom they wish to integrate. In the literature of this genre there are constant reflections of this idea of identifying physical features, of being 'American born and foreign'.2 1. Bloodworth, D., The Chinese Looking Glass (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1967). 2. This is the title of an anthology of Asian poets edited by F. Chiang, H. Wong Hiue, ]. Hwang, R. Oyama and S.L. Yung (New York: Sunbury Press, 1977). MIMI CHAN For second generation Chinese American writers the ties with their Chinese antecedents, which they feel strongly, though often grudgingly, are represented in a concrete form by their parents, whose physical features they have inherited, whose 'lessons' and 'stories' about China have been incorporated into the shaping of their personalities - often, again, in spite of themselves. In this paper I want to do a preliminary study of the reflection in Chinese American literary works of the extremely complex and delicate relationship between Chinese mothers and their Chinese American daughters by focussing on the motif of physical appearance used in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. The relationship between mothers and daughters is a time-honoured subject for literature and other disciplines, and indeed tends to be complex enough for all the light that modern sciences and quasi-sciences can shed on it. But when mother and daughter are literally 'worlds apart', separated not only by the time gap but also by a wide cultural gap, then the subject is yet more complicated. Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Irish mothers and American daughters are fairly easily recognizable leitmotifs in American fiction, television and film. Until fairly recent times 'the Chinese' as a group, indeed 'Orientals' as a group, were far more mysterious and 'exotic' than Italians or Jews. Until recent times the stereotype of the 'Chink' operating the hand laundry still prevailed in the popular western imagination. In the past the issue of Chinese people trying to integrate into American society tended not to have a very wide appeal to Chinese people outside the United States because immigration was limited. But in recent times new waves of immigrants include representatives of virtually all classes and sectors of the population, and the whole issue of integrating into American society has acquired new interest and relevance for many more people in Hong Kong and abroad, including myself. My title has been supplied by an old friend, who did postgraduate studies in Chinese History at Yale and Columbia. In response to my friend's exasperation at her inability to speak Chinese and her 'shameless' ignorance of Chinese culture, her daughter expostulated, Listen, Mom, I'm a banana, apparently in total ignorance of and/or total indifference to, the derogatory nature of the term 'banana'. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior was first published in 1976, and caused considerable stir when it first appeared. Hong Kingston explores the fact of her not being a banana: she is yellow on the outside, but not altogether white on the inside. A great deal of her Chinese...