Three

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The Triumph of the Prefeminist Chinese Woman?

INCORPORATING RACIAL DIFFERENCE THROUGH FEMINIST NARRATIVE

 

    “Have you read this new novel Lucknow
Nights Without Joy in Chinatown?”

    Raymond had tried but could not get past the
first chapter. Red continued without waiting
for an answer. “Man, what a tearjerker when
Mei-mei and her mother triumph over the vicious
cycle of Chinese misogyny and despair.”
    (Shawn Wong, American Knees)

 

SHAWN WONG'S BRIEF PORTRAYAL parodies The Joy Luck Club's feminist plot structure and the triumphalism and sentimentality that drive it. While his male protagonist would reject such a narrative as exalting Chinese American women at the expense of Chinese culture, ironically, Wong's own story of the originary moments of Asian American literature is both sentimental and ultimately triumphant. A young college student desirous of being a writer in the late 1960s, he could find no ethnic role models and sets out to recover Asian American male writers forced into obscurity by the vicious cycle of American racism and indifference: “I asked myself at the age of 19, 'Why am I the only Chinese American writer I know?'” Trying to find an answer to the question connects him with a number of his contemporaries, and together they begin a quest to recover, in flesh and in print, a previous generation of Asian American writers and writing. As Wong explains in hip staccato, the search for these writers was at times embarrassingly easy: “They were not hiding. They were not gone. Some were not even out of print. They had not stopped writing” (Shawn Wong 1993, 125). The quest required few feats of heroism; as he tells it, bringing a generation of writers to light at one point simply meant looking up Toshio Mori's name in the phone book.

There is, perhaps, an unintended irony to this story of literary excavation: it bears striking resemblance to what feminist critics were doing at the same time revealing, perhaps, that cultural nationalism has its sentimental side. It is the truncated, Asian, male version of Alice Walker's 1975 “Looking for Zora.” In re-creating the search for Hurston, a forgotten literary foremother, Walker's personal narrative thematizes what Jane Marcus has noted as the recuperative model of feminist criticism, a critical process focused on recovering and recontextualizing “lost” women writers (Marcus 1988). In both cases, the political significance of such a model lies in the belief that to restore the gendered or racial subject's voice is to restore his or her worth, that canon inclusion produces a more accurate and well-rounded account of American letters. These concurrent efforts at recuperation locate in ethnic and feminist literary activism similar goals. But while such contributions have been acknowledged, they are also viewed as politically and theoretically limited, expressive of a reductive pluralism unable to address fully the mechanisms through which social differences are produced and maintained. And as Raymond Ding's nonplused response to a Chinese American feminist “tearjerker” implies, race and gender do not always signify analogously; in this case, triumphant feminism does not maintain the veneer of oppositionality, but rather, of capitulation to the most easily commodified common denominator of cultural norms.

In parodic shorthand, Wong names an identifiable plot structure that appears in women's texts across Asian American ethnicities, a structure perhaps even unwittingly underlying his own story of ethnic literary excavation. The depiction of the subject's movement from silence to voice with a future-oriented, salutary effect on a succeeding generation not only structures Wong's own story, but functions as an organizing movement in women's writing. In The Joy Luck Club's perhaps paradigmatic narrative structure, storytelling is a medium for understanding gender oppression in ways that can lead to self-affirmation; the work locates the mother/daughter relationship as the site for a reenvisioning of self both based on and potentially transcending a maternal legacy. What the title of Julie Shigekuni's novel, A Bridge Between Us, or Moraga and Anzaldua's ground-breaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back, make explicit is that connections between women are forged through the recognition of mutual oppression; in this feminist narrative, a previous generation of women's experiences serve as a foundation, albeit a traumatic one, authorizing a better future. The effect of coming to this consciousness is both didactic (e.g., I learn from my mother's oppression) and salutary (e.g., I can be healed by challenging the restrictions she once faced), producing the idea of a transnational, transhistorical women's community that exposes patriarchy as one arena of domination. Culminating in a more “liberated” subject, the trajectory of such narratives is ultimately progressive, at times explicitly affirming the hope expressed in This Bridge that by “the third generation the daughters are free” (Levins Morales 1981, 56).

The problem with the underlying progressivism of such narratives is that they require women's oppression to assume an air of pastness. The association of women's oppression with feudal tradition has long appeared as a tactic of postcolonial nationalism, which has harnessed incipient women's movements to mandates for modernization in the reorganization of traditional solidarities and identities. In an American context, progressive narratives of women's liberation have specific relevance for texts dealing with first-generation immigrants and their American-raised children; gender dynamics are necessarily inscribed with messages about citizenship and racial progress. By linking the hope of genealogical transmission (“You will inherit a better life because of my suffering”) or, more generally, an increasing liberalism regarding gender rights (“Don't the Chinese admit that women have minds?”) to acculturation, these Asian American works map a developmental narrative about the First and Third Worlds onto narratives of women's bonding or struggle for autonomy. Shawn Wong's Lucknow Nights Without Joy in Chinatown is a response to the politically charged yet narratival necessity of representing, in this case, China as excessively genderist so that misogyny appears expressly as a backward, Old World holdover. While such equivalences are obviously overly simplistic, nonetheless, if I, like the stereotypical feminist, fail to see the humor in the parody I take as my epigraph, how can I begin to interrogate it without acknowledging why it also works?

Reflecting Hisaye Yamamoto's “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko's Earthquake,” contemporary women's narratives often place the female protagonist in a position of witnessing women's oppression, either that of the previous generation or of contemporaries associated with an ethnically distinct home-space. This plotline appears with differing degrees of significance in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Lee's Still Life with Rice, Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Meer's Bombay Talkie, Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, Kadohata's The Floating World, Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, Keller's Comfort Woman, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, and so on. Certainly, not all Asian American women's literature suggestive of this structure signifies in identical ways.¹ But one of the underlying features of work portraying genealogical transmission between women is the belief in the individual's capacity to choose—and, more specifically, to choose a better life.

Texts in which immigration to the United States figures as the resolution to narrative conflict raise similar questions about the national resonances grafted on to feminist plots. For example, in as cogent a neocolo-nial critique as Hagedorn's Dogeaters, what are we to make of its immigration ending in which Rio's rejection of models of feminine behavior she witnesses in the Philippines is a movement toward women's self-sufficiency and the possibilities of artistic self-fulfillment in the United States? Is there a space of women's “freedom” for Rio that is not coded as Western even as the novel's content works to expose the abuses of an elite intent on mimicking the West?² Likewise, in Anchee Min's Red Azalea, the desire to immigrate is a response to political-as-libidinal disillusionment, the recognition of the state's investment in sexual repression. “America” appears in such texts—although not unequivocally—as a symbol of futurity linked to increasing the possibilities of women's self-determination (and, in the case of Red Azalea, as determining one's relation to the erotic). Like portrayals of generational clashes over issues of liberal feminism, these immigrant endings locate gender as one site where the division among tradition and modernization, collective identity and competitive individualism, is enacted. This association among rights, self-determination, and the West underlies my discussion of the universalism of human rights as women's rights in Chapter 5.

To some extent, narratives of gender progress that portray Asian women as prefeminist-but-becoming-enlightened seem to promise a teleo-logical movement toward modernization expressed through the hope of increasingly democratic gender relationships. Reflecting although not identical to the trope of the coerced marriage, the “bad marriage” in The Kitchen God's Wife and The Joy Luck Club, for example, models this by imbuing future, egalitarian marriages with American national resonance, paralleling freedom and Americanization, Westernization and self-fulfillment. These “democratic” hopes are not exclusively placed on the West in other texts but appear as endemic to the project of postcolonial modernization. For example, in Fiona Cheong's The Scent of the Gods, the possibility of gender (and ethnic) equality are debated as evidence of an advanced, Brave New society promised by Singaporean nationalism:

 

“Yes,” said Auntie Daisy. “But you know, even in Singapore, men get better treatment than woman.”

“Like Malays and Chinese?” Li Yuen asked.

“Yes,” said Auntie Daisy.

“It'll change,” Li Shin said. “The Prime Minister has promised, everyone a first-class citizen.” (Cheong 1991, 54)

This promise of equality under national citizenship suggests a rhetorical interaction between discourses of gender and nationalism that is not limited to, but resonates particularly within an American context informed by liberal multiculturalism.

The vision of individual agency cast within a narrative of progressive history—what Hayden White (White 1973) would deem the Romantic mode of historical emplotment—coincides with the notion of racial progress articulated as the hope of class advancement. Clearly, American ex-ceptionalism depends on an idea of history invested with the implicit promise of futurity; this Romantic plot grants “America” symbolic potency. Scripting this notion of history may inevitably serve as the mark of a text's national investment. What is notable about feminist plot structures across Asian American women's texts is their use of gender freedom as a gauge of progress. What are the attendant implications of this specific intersection of racial, national, and gender discourses?

Inevitably, a specific construction of Asia is necessary to the working of these narrative structures, one that presents Asian cultural traditions as excessively genderist. Feminist theorists have recognized the dangers of characterizing women's freedom from patriarchal restraint as singularly possible within the West or representing traditional family structures and gender roles as antithetical to women's self-actualization. Such characterizations enforce the unfortunate Western bias in global feminist discourse that selectively defines specific women's issues—coerced marriage, female infanticide, limited access to birth control and family planning, or domestic abuse, for example—as problems of the Third World. This is precisely the kind of bias that Aiwah Ong warns against in her analysis of Western feminist scholarship on women in non-Western societies or “women in development studies.” These studies, she writes, situate the question of gender inequality simply as the failure to achieve modernity, differing only over whether “modernization of the capitalist or socialist kind will emancipate or reinforce systems of gender inequality found in the Third World” (Ong 1988, 83). As Nalila Kabeer suggests, bias is endemic to modernization theory, which portrays development as evolutionary and unilinear (Kabeer 1994).

The representation of Asian women as prefeminist certainly surfaces in Western feminist scholarship; for example, Cleo Odzer's Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World (1994) argues that prostitution is liberating for Thai women because it offers them economic autonomy, freedom from rigid sex roles, and greater control over their lives, all positively coded changes apparently not possible within Thai patriarchy. These advances for women are characterized as somehow also redeeming of the risk of contracting AIDS—an unintended corollary to this logic. In contrast, postcolonial discourse has shown through British outlawing of sati, for example, how gender “liberation” colluded with imperialist endeavors, a phenomenon Spivak has characterized as “a white men are saving brown women from brown men,” albeit primarily in reference to the excess of critical desire evident in subaltern studies (Spivak 1988). (In the case of Odzer, the phenomenon might be described as “a white woman saving brown women from white men while keeping brown men for herself.”) In short, postcolonial discourse has warned against positioning the legacy of imperialism as “historically progressive” for women in the same way that one could caution against locating immigration to the West as an escape from gender constraint. But the question at hand does not concern the truth value of distinctions between East and West, distinctions that often take on a reductive competitive structure (who is more oppressed and where) and that lead to futile attempts to sift “authentic lived experience” from impositions of Western bias. Rather, what does the narratival rendering of the distinction—the West as gender-enlightened against a prefeminist Asia—reveal about the conflictual interaction between race and gender discourses and about a specific moment in which ethnic women's texts circulate with greater cultural capital than ever before?

Contemporary criticism often seeks to claim for race and gender identical political valences, eliding the contradictory cultural work their intersection performs.³ Following the conflictual nature of race and gender discourses initiated in Chapter 1, I want to investigate what messages feminist narratives produce about race. Do they betray collective racial interests in the same way that women of color were said to betray the race in favor of women's solidarity during the women's movement? Does liberal feminism displace potentially radical expressions of ethnic collectivity by reconciling racial difference to a progressive, national conception of history? By implicitly tracing a genealogy of increasing equality, specific feminist narratives might enable not only a testimony of “otherness,” but a simultaneous reassurance of sameness as well, a reassurance opened within the space of—in particular—white women's identification.

To provide difference and reassurance simultaneously as an implicit demand of “multicultural” testimony is specifically fraught for ethnic American literature, in whose roots lies a commitment to realism. This dual and seemingly contradictory pressure placed on the testimony of the literary “native” at home both parallels and contrasts that of anthropology's native informant, whose use value lies in her absolute difference. As Rey Chow notes, the project of the white feminist social scientist

is to use Chinese women—and the more remote they are from Western urban civilization, the better—for the production of the types of explanations that are intelligible (valuable) to feminism in the West, including, in particular, those types that extend pluralism to “woman” through “race” and “class.” (Chow 1991, 93)

Yet in the United States, the demand for a cultural product produced by a native with whom one can also identify establishes another criterion for authenticity. While “remoteness” is the catalyst for voyeuristic interest, an unintelligible native is nonetheless of no use, nor is one who remains absolutely (in)different. To function as “knowable,” the ethnic specimen must undergo a dual process, one through which difference is established as a measure of authenticity, and another through which difference can become translated into the idiom of her audience. The demands of such an inscription are simultaneous: the defamiliarizing of American likenesses, as well as the familiarizing of ethnic difference.

I am interested, then, in the ways that liberal feminist discourse can produce an intelligible racial subject and in the cultural work that the image of the prefeminist Chinese woman might perform. Two popular books by Chinese American women, one re-released and the other published in 1989, provide case studies of the way in which narratives of women's resistance to gender oppression are also the vehicles for narratives of racial and economic progress. Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter has marked her in the lingua franca of cultural nationalism as a race traitor or, as recounted by Merle Woo, a sentiment more colorfully described as “Jade Snow Wong Pochahontas yellow” (Woo 1981). By affirming American culture as the site of gender equality, Wong's liberal feminism works in concert with her racial politics. Satisfying the desire for a familiar “celestial,” the work reinforced a representation of the good Chinese as capitalist entrepreneur that could be exported to Asia during the Cold War. Similarly, as The Joy Luck Club has become synonymous with middlebrow feminism, Amy Tan has been labeled a sellout. Both texts enact a division between tradition and modernization through gender; in marking self-fulfillment as the logical and inevitable result of Westernization, both locate ethnic difference within an implicitly liberal racial agenda and a chronology of collective self-improvement.

This chapter explores the ways in which embedded racial discourses endemic to certain feminist plot structures potentially service national agendas by reproducing ideas of collectivity easily reconciled to individual difference, in other words, how sentimentality itself may allow for the qualified inclusion of multicultural texts based on concepts of women's culture. The liberalism underlying the texts' engagement with feminism indicates a specific, hierarchical model of the interaction between axes of group affiliation. My intention is not to reduce Asian American women's narratives to a single ideological function or to suggest that all writing that reflects this broad emplotment—even the texts I have listed above— uncritically affirms the West as the site of women's freedom. The liberal feminist narratives in Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Joy Luck Club also produce their own contradictions, perhaps to reveal what Foucault would call “ruptural effects of conflict and struggle,” effects that unmask beliefs—such as the belief in women's equality—as forms of common cultural consensus and systematizing thought (Foucault 1980, 82). As a point of contrast, I look at Sky Lee's Canadian novel, Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), to suggest how a narrative about feminist empowerment might produce these “ruptural effects” in ways that queer the frame I establish here.

The Celestial in Our Midst:
    Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter

 

“My parents demand unquestioning obedience.
Older Brother demands unquestioning obedience.
By what right? I am an individual besides being a
Chinese daughter. I have rights too.” Could it be
that Daddy and Mama, although they were living
in San Francisco in the year 1938, actually had not
left the Chinese world of thirty years ago? Could
it be that they were forgetting that Jade Snow
would soon become a woman in a new America,
not a woman in old China?
    (Fifth Chinese Daughter)

 

6. What is the author's tone? Does she sound bitter
to you? Is she talking about “bad parenting?”

(Questions for discussion on “Fifth Chinese
Daughter” in American Voices: Multicultural
Literacy and Critical Thinking)

“I do not think of myself as a writer,” Jade Snow Wong wrote in 1951, six years after her autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, was published (J. S. Wong 1951, 440). By then, her attitude of modest denial had been undermined by the success of the book and the responses of charmed postwar critics. Her writing, the New York Times Book Review noted, “exudes the delicate femininity only the Asiatic women possess” (Joyce Geary, New York Times Book Review, 29 October 1950, 27). An “enchanting record of Chinese customs and celebrations,” this children's book with crossover appeal was taken as a testimony of “happy” bicul-tural adjustment (May Hill Arbuthnot, Children's Reading in the Home [Scott, Foresman and Co., 1969], n.p.).

What is notable about the work's original reception is not only, as post-civil rights critics have pointed out, that reviewers failed to assess the work with historical accountability to the Chinese American experience. What is more intriguing is that reviewers could so easily misread the tone and tenor of the work, finding delight and enchantment in what is an essentially bleak story of one who substitutes ambition for affection and recognizes the difference, who accepts recognition garnered from small achievements in lieu of real understanding and connection with others. Jade Snow Wong's autobiography follows a familiar narrative trajectory in its portrayal of an adolescent's struggle to rise out of obscurity and poverty, but in spite of textual assurances to the contrary, Jade Snow's position in the world at the end of the narrative is neither secure nor settled. In light of this, the text's reception in 1950 may suggest something about the ease with which racial difference could become sentimentalized in the postwar period, transforming a work rife with contradictions that continually ripple the surface harmony of its overt premise into a seamless coming of age tale with an ethnic twist.

This overt premise, Wong's intention to write as a cultural informant “with the purpose of creating better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans” (vii), has since been called into question for endorsing an American ideology based on a belief in meritocracy. In its message that racial prejudice serves merely as an excuse for “individual failure,” Fifth Chinese Daughter, has earned a controversial place in Asian American literature as a foundational work that nonetheless appears to counter the goals of collective activism, an accommodationist form of “propaganda-as-autobiography.”⁴ One 1976 review noted that as an “insider's guide” to Chinatown for tourists, Fifth Chinese Daughter merely “presents the safe and acceptable aspects of the author's life that are compatible with America's sensitivity regarding its treatment of minorities” (“Book Reviews: Fifth Chinese Daughter,” Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 7:2/3 (1976): 13). The most “safe and acceptable” aspect of Chinese American culture the autobiography presents has been acknowledged to be Chinese food. Following Chin's coining of the term “food pornography” to describe the exploitation of the “'exotic' aspects of one's ethnic foodways,” critic Sau-ling Wong locates the text among a genre of autobiographical Chinatown “tour-guiding” works that capitalize off American interest in Chinese cooking by taking “the white reader on a verbal gastronomic tour” (Sau-ling Wong 1993, 63). In this case, what is intended to be a figurative assessment of textual politics is, in fact, literally accurate: from 1953 to the late 1980s, Wong has guided tours of Asia and run a business in San Francisco under the name “Jade Snow Wong's Giftshop and Travel Service.” Because Wong has proudly (even defiantly) claimed roles as travel agent and “goodwill ambassador,” her reassessment as cultural hustler would no doubt surprise her. Both roles situate her as a willing native informant, an insider to local culture whose knowledge must assume an aura of authenticity in order to function as a commodity.

While Wong's benign descriptions of ethnic traditions in Fifth Chinese Daughter establish this authenticity by testifying to her difference, her testimony requires that she be located outside Chinatown as well. If an inauthentic native insider is of no use, neither is one who remains unintelligible; as Rey Chow notes, “natives, like commodities, become knowable only through routes that diverge from their original 'homes'” (Chow 1993, 42).⁵ Wong's chosen location as performed within the text (and quite materially outside it) demands the simultaneous defamiliarizing of her American likenesses requisite to establishing ethnic authenticity, and the rendering of her ethnic difference accessible. The title of the autobiography's sequel, No Chinese Stranger (1975), speaks to the anxiety underlying this dual process, conveying that she is, on one hand, no stranger to China; she is “like” China rather than alien to it. But it also implies that although she is ethnically Chinese, she is not alien to the United States, an assurance that only highlights the need for such assurance.

If Wong's descriptions of daily life spiced with ethnic flavor succeed in performing difference, it is the text's feminist narrative that renders Jade Snow knowable to her postwar audience. Highlighting the convergence between American individualism and the advocation of women's autonomy, equal rights, and access to education allows Jade Snow to constitute her “unfilial piety”—the break she makes with her Chinese family—as gendered (if not exactly feminist) resistance.⁶ If Fifth Chinese Daughter mirrors an American mythos, it does so not only by soft-pedaling race and class oppression, but by advocating equal opportunity for women within a liberal feminist melodrama at a moment in which domestic representations of working women and international representations of the Chinese reflected larger cultural shifts.

Yet there is much within the text that is irreconcilable to its overtly liberal message; these moments come in the form of repressed histories that threaten to rupture the surface narrative and force the text to reveal its ideological contradictions. In highlighting these repressions, my point is not to perform a revisionist reading, seeking for Wong some status as “unduped” native against the accommodationist Jade Snow of the text.⁷ Rather, the goal is to examine the ways in which the feminist narrative manages, in Chow's terms, “to make the native more like us,” and in doing so deliberately obscures the less than delightful side of “bicultural adjustment.” A central concern then becomes, how does the feminist narrative that structures these ethnic “slices of life” interact with what can now be taken as the text's essentially conservative message?

What gives Jade Snow's story emotional resonance is the portrayal of a repression/liberation scenario in which an autocratic yet benevolent father stands against his daughter as the impediment to her progress. Jade Snow's first feminist recognition early in the narrative, like her first awareness of cultural differences between the Chinese and Americans, makes her question the family hierarchy and evaluate her position as “unalterably less significant than the new son in their family” (27). Upon being denied the funds for a college education granted to her older brother, Jade Snow develops a mistrust of the authority she has accepted as a matter of “the right order of things.” In appearing both unreasonable and extreme, accounts of her Confucius-quoting father's excesses mark an ethnographic awareness of an external gaze, mirroring moments that describe ethnic traditions with prefaces such as “and then came a strange sight.” Glimpses of life outside the family's factory home become occasions for American ethnographic analysis that end up pointing to the limitations of her Chinese family. Depictions of her experiences as a live-in domestic to a white family with the overdetermined pseudonym, the Kaisers, result in the conclusion that in American families, “each member, even down to and including the dog, appeared to have the inalienable right to assert his individuality” (114). While the statement unwittingly locates her status in the Chinese family as less than the dog's, it is intended as an exaggerated affirmation of the democratizing American tendency to accord even pets status. Borrowing the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers to make a stand for the assertion of individuality as an “inalienable right” is posited against the submersion of individuality implied by membership in a degraded group identity, that of women.

The conflict comes to a head in the middle of the autobiography when Jade Snow challenges parental authority by delivering a “declaration of independence”: “I am an individual besides being your fifth daughter.” In resisting patriarchal authority, Jade Snow's cultural negotiation is put in terms of struggle for women's rights within her own family, which is characterized as the singular locus of her oppression as a woman. By positioning her father as representative of Chinese culture and locating American culture outside the family's domestic sphere, Wong sets up a cultural division predicated on a public/private dichotomy that codes individuality and opportunity for women as American and public, while casting submergence of self through filial piety as Chinese and private.

Thus Fifth Chinese Daughter's narrative suspense centers around a conflict over her family's recognition of her individuality; her stand for fairness and a voice within the family is cast in terms of a liberal feminist argument for equality as she rallies for just treatment in spite of “being born a girl.” In seeking greater acknowledgment and dignity than her lowly placement as fifth daughter would indicate, Jade Snow does not question the necessity of the hierarchy as much as she does her place within it. The text positions women's autonomous selfhood as something to be individually earned: equality is not necessarily open to all women, but only to those who prove themselves as equal to men through their achievements. Wong's belief in meritocracy underlies her depiction of growing seeds, transforming an innocent lesson into a metaphor for acculturation that Americanizes Darwin's concept of natural selection:

Grandmother continued her lesson, “Now you can see that, when conditions change some will adjust readily and come out first, while others may still be left behind.”

Jade Snow nodded. She could see again that handful of all alike seeds lying in Grandmother's open palm, and she reflected on the wonders which water and soil could accomplish for those which would try. (33)

Given an equal opportunity to develop, it is not a predetermined fitness, but the seeds' effort that makes the difference. Easily reconciled to the text's racial argument that casts group difference as individual distinctive-ness, the analogy implies that transplantation to an alien environment is no excuse for a failure to advance, that is, like “coming out first,” attributed to the individual. Critics have noted the dissonance produced by passages in which Wong bypasses evidence that conflicts with the work's racial politics; as Elaine Kim points out, Jade Snow remarks that the kitchen staff in the Mills College dorm is entirely Chinese precisely at the moment she praises the college's democratic living. Wong's text attempts to harmonize other such instances of race segregation—such as ethnic ghettoization—by giving them the appearance of individual volition. For example, while the women's dorms are apparently not racially segregated, Wong unwittingly introduces evidence of de facto segregation: with one exception, her friends are all Asian yet this has the appearance of voluntary association rather than being attributed to the exclusionary practices of the largely white, female student body.

However, the handicap establishing that all “seeds” are not, in fact, identical is largely represented in the narrative as gender, not race. The blow for justice, then, is struck against a sexist family rather than a racially stratified society. Such a displacement might have been influenced by the text's historical moment: the book was completed in 1946, when a wartime economy opened opportunities for women. The sudden influx of women into the labor force created a potential space for liberal feminism: Wong's call for equal opportunity and women's “independence”— both marked as liberating American influences—reflects the rhetoric of women's recruitment into war-related industries that portrayed labor as a form of national duty. As a result, women made up a third of the workforce between 1941 and 1945, and their success in heretofore male-dominated fields necessarily raised questions about equal pay and equal opportunity (Gregory 1974).

But by the time of the book's publication in 1950, these opportunities had ceased, as demobilization resulted in massive layoffs of women despite their desire to keep high-paying industrial jobs. Jade Snow's advice from the unsympathetic boss—“as long as you are a woman, you can't compete for an equal salary in a man's world”—reflects the attitudes of postwar industrial management that preferred to hire men even though women represented cheaper labor for equal productivity. Historian Ruth Milkman has noted that management's adherence to what seemed an irrational policy testified to the strength of gender bias and explained the resurgence of domesticity after the war. Women's nonvoluntary reincor-poration into the labor-norms of the prewar period—into low-paying, gender-segregated employment—after having proven themselves in traditional “men's jobs” challenged the American ideology of meritocracy by demonstrating that employment was not based on job performance.⁸ Such a circumstance reflects Wong's structuring premise that being female does not make for a level playing field. Her autobiography may have met with an audience receptive to her brand of feminism, but also potentially ambivalent about it: once afforded opportunities as a result of labor shortages, women were forced to return to the domestic sphere or to gender-defined labor.

Wong's stance is in keeping with the resurgence of domesticity following the war: she does not see traditional “woman's work” as limiting; rather, domestic and secretarial work are catalysts for her entry into the white world. As Wong has stated, “Though I don't think being a woman has been any problem, I give priority to women's responsibility for a good home life; here, I put my husband and four children before my writing or ceramics” (cited in Contemporary Authors 109: 536).⁹ Her text not only associates domestic tasks with duty and maturity, but with pleasure. Wong's emphasis on Chinese cooking both satisfies the need for ethnic specificity and affirms women's work; in this sense, ethnicity becomes mediated by gendered universality.

Wong's dual testimony is only plausible in relation to herself: for a narrative whose overt theme lies in women's recognition, portrayals of Jade Snow's mother are markedly absent. Not only do they threaten the text's thematic coherence by centering on her father, they challenge her affirmation of the free movement between Chinese and American spheres. Wong's repression of the historical reality of her own position—tenement living, racial discrimination, struggle for education, and bleak emotional life—is momentarily suggested through the figure of her mother, unexpectedly pregnant near the end of her childbearing years:

Whatever was in her mind, whatever the feelings that Mama and Daddy shared about another child expected now fourteen years after the last one had been born, Jade Snow was not told, and she felt no right to pry. But now, as a young woman of twenty, she suddenly felt pity for another woman who was working away her life almost by compulsion, who was receiving little affection from the very children for whose welfare she was working, because affection had not been part of her training, and she did not give it in training her own. As if a veil separating her from her mother were lifted for a moment, Jade Snow saw clearly that at this time Mama did not need from her grown daughter the respect which she had fostered in all her children so much as she needed the companionship which only one woman can give another. (184)

This glimpse into her mother's life from the position of woman, not daughter, momentarily threatens Wong's overt textual message: as an immigrant Chinese woman speaking little English, economically dependent on her husband, and pregnant with what we are led to believe is her ninth child, her mother does not have the “American” privilege to choose her Chineseness when appropriate. The fact that Jade Snow's mother's limited chances for mobility lie in stark contrast to her own disrupts Wong's argument that sees racial and cultural difference as a means of soliciting “favorable interest.”

Jade Snow transcends her position as fifth daughter—thereby satisfying the underlying trajectory of the narrative—when she is able to see “Mama” as others would see her: disempowered. Yet she does not associate her mother's disempowerment with her status as a Chinese American woman, but sees only the diminishment of an authority figure:

Here for the first time was a defenseless, criticized, bewildered, intimidated Mama, unburdening herself to her daughter. The Mama who wielded the clothes hanger, the Mama who seldom approved of anything that was fun, the Mama who laid down exacting housework requirements, the Mama who criticized with stern words, was suddenly seen in a new light. (81)

What the twenty-four-year-old writer is singularly concerned with is the erosion of the family hierarchy that provides evidence of her novel adult status. Aside from providing this glimpse of her mother's vulnerability, Wong does not push her analysis toward a collective identification that would undermine her argument about women's equality through individual distinction. Representations of Jade Snow's older sisters are similarly absent, a gap the text explains in terms of culture: her parents have discouraged visits because they “might undermine respect” (88) and her sister's marriage has exiled her from the clan per the convention of exogamy. There are perhaps other reasons for the absence of portrayals of these Chinese American women closer to Jade Snow in generation; the fact that one sister has already completed a college degree might have bolstered Wong's liberal feminist argument, but by revealing that Jade Snow is not the first daughter to test boundaries, the information deflates the significance and singularity of her own resistance to tradition-bound patriarchy. A second reason may be that these are her half sisters.

Through a cross-textual reading of dates and scenes in Fifth Chinese Daughter and Wong's second book, No Chinese Stranger, it becomes clear that Wong's mother is not her father's first wife and that Wong has manipulated immigration dates to obscure the possibility of her father's bigamy. This repressed maternal presence momentarily surfaces in a letter in which “Daddy” refers to his wife in China, “who had little, two-and-a-half-inch, bound feet” (72). Yet in the next scene, Wong discusses Mama's Sunday walks that take them all over San Francisco, a regular outing that would prove incredibly painful, if at all possible, on bound feet. Moreover, Wong's portrayal of her mother's pregnancy is startling because it occurs as her father approaches seventy, indicating a disparity in their ages. No Chinese Stranger locates her mother's date of immigration at 1919 while Fifth Chinese Daughter puts the family's immigration within “the opening decade of this century.”

This subtextual presence indicates the repression of historical information that challenges the individualist premise of the work. The practice of bigamy was not unusual nor particularly taboo given the circumstances of Chinese immigration, but revelation of the historic reality of racist and ethnocentric exclusion laws that fostered it would criticize the country whose opportunities Wong extols.¹⁰ Reference to this first wife emerges at precisely the point at which Wong connects her father's belief in liberal feminism to his Christian conversion and ordination as a minister. The presence of another wife would put into question his newfound feminist philosophy, his moral authority, and his credibility as a model of propriety sufficient to “bear God's closest scrutiny.” Signaled only in the muted form of textual contradictions, this aspect of Chinese American history does not harmonize with Wong's presentation of a benignly exotic Chinatown consisting of herbalist shops and wonderful restaurants. This is not to say, however, that this history indicates a more authentic Chinese woman struggling beneath the surface text akin to Charlotte Perkins Gil-man's phantom woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. Rather, like the simultaneously present and obscured intrusions of imperialist and racially stratified labor history in the autobiography that Karen Su and Elaine Kim have pointed out, this “other mother” marks a challenge to Fifth as a testimony to American altruism. Between her two autobiographies, Wong succeeds in controlling, but not erasing, a Chinese woman who bears with her a history of exclusion. A mute witness like Spivak's subaltern woman, she exists as excess, what cannot be brought to heel within the prevailing narrative of an ethnic family's ultimately triumphant story of perseverance, thrift, hard work, and discipline.

Having set up a feminist conflict as the tension needing resolution, Fifth Chinese Daughter achieves a happy ending by linking paternal respect and American business success, a success the work marks as a sign of female equality. The opposition between what is Chinese and what is American is thus bridged through the convergence of Christian ethics and Chinese American capitalism. While I have previously noted that Wong's liberal feminist message was put forth in a period which saw an influx of women into wage-labor, the work's 1950 publication also saw a shift in the State Department's policy on China, a policy consistent with Wong's assurances about the Chinese in the United States. The text's underlying support of entrepreneurship reconciles liberal feminism and foreign policy dictates of the time.

Jade Snow's father invokes China's “superior” culture and a strict hierarchy of ancestral descent to substantiate his authority when it suits him. Adamant about his family's difference from “foreigners,” he resists his daughter's attempt to justify her rebellion with a conservative appeal to Chinese essence in the wonderfully melodramatic statement, “You are shameless. Your skin is yellow. Your features are forever Chinese. We are content with our proven ways. Do not try to force foreign ideas into my home. Go. You will one day tell us sorrowfully that you have been mistaken” (130). However, her father dismisses the contradictions that arise in adhering to Confucian filial piety and “New World” necessities through his ability to reconcile them with Christian values: if he must put women—his wife and the seamstresses in his factory—to work outside the home in order to make a living upon immigration, he finds his new beliefs validated “according to New-World Christian ideals [in which] women had a right to work to improve the economic status of their family” (5). Likewise, he justifies sending his daughters to Chinese school by tying it to his own anti-imperialist nationalism: “If nobody educates his daughters, how can we have intelligent mothers for our sons? If we do not have good family training, how can China be a strong nation?” (15). “Daddy's” ease in modifying his philosophy when presented with conflicting values underscores the coherence between liberal feminism and capitalism; while Jade Snow's “unfilial” transgressions and defiance of ancestral authority represent a challenge to her parents' “Chinese” way of thinking, their reconciliation reflects the values the elder Wongs have previously held or have internalized upon immigration.

Because the text is structured as a chronology of Jade Snow's progressively greater contact with the world outside Chinatown and because her narrative conflict hinges on whether or not she will “be a person respected and honored by [her] family when [she grows] up” (93), the moments of her achievement in the Caucasian public sphere—her graduating, winning an essay contest, and succeeding in business—have only to be recognized by her parents as significant to enable the text to come to resolution. This resolution depends on her parents' eventual acceptance of “Western” ways. When Jade Snow christens a ship as a result of winning an essay contest on increasing war productivity, the Wongs receive a “fellow countrymen's” congratulations: “'We are reading in the papers that your fifth daughter has won great honor in the American world. You must be very satisfied to have your family name so glorified by a female'” (196). Jade Snow's father shakes her hand in a gesture of respect punctuated by its Western connotations. By the end of the autobiography, her parents seem to accept their daughter's “foreign” recognition as somehow more honorable than achievements within the family or community sphere, the locus of “Daddy's” not inconsiderable influence. Jade Snow's ultimate achievement, the success of her pottery business, is shown to be coherent with her parents' values as owners of a community-based small business. Her father's pride in her college graduation stems not so much from her scholarship or her “art,” but from the fact that she has learned a marketable trade. The bridge or “middle way” between cultures Jade Snow finds by the end of the book rests on a similarity between economic ideologies and the tacit acknowledgment that contact with Caucasians can lead to business opportunities.

The text's implicit endorsement of capitalism performs an ethnic normalizing function by testifying to Chinese American adherence to a fundamental aspect of American norms and attitudes. But the text bolstered more than domestic ideology; the autobiography served the interests of foreign policy by lending credibility to a historically necessary representation: the good Chinese as capitalist. Wong wrote her autobiography in a period of Chinese alliance with the United States during the Second World War—a time during which Japanese Americans were interned. The year of the autobiography's publication, 1950, witnessed a shift in the State Department's China policy, a shift explained in the August 1949 release of “The China White Paper.” In attempting to justify the Tru-man-Acheson policy against continuing aid to the Chinese Nationalists, “The China White Paper” reflected the belief that the United States had done all it could to support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), implying that the KMT had failed to retain control of the mainland because of its own inadequacies and military defeats at the hands of the Communist Party. Interestingly, the State Department's justification for withdrawing foreign aid dovetails with Wong's own message: failure, like success, is neither preconditioned nor systemic, but is an individual matter; when denied (educational) aid, Jade Snow is forced to make it on her own and comes out the better for it.

This convergence—neither a simple validation of American allies nor a vilification of its enemies, but a general affirmation of self-reliance—did not go unnoticed by the State Department, which negotiated the rights to foreign editions of Fifth Chinese Daughter and sent Wong on a 1953 speaking tour of Asia. Wong's chronicle of the tour in the autobiography's sequel reveals little consciousness about the State Department's agenda, attributing its interest to a financial stake in sales. However, Wong is not naive about what she later calls “the no-no American word 'Communist'”; given the tense state of international affairs as the Cold War escalated, she encounters anti-American sentiment on the tour, particularly in Burma where, she implies, it had just come to light that CIA operatives were caught aiding KMT troops on Burma's border with the People's Republic of China. Having her picture taken with one identified as a KMT leader in Rangoon is thus “embarrassing,” but not necessarily more fraught than meeting with other Rangoon Chinese who identify with their now communist homeland. True to her moderate liberalism, the sequel questions Cold War logic on the grounds that, communist or not, the Chinese are hardworking individuals: the Chinese Communist, she writes, “might in reality prove to be a flesh-and-blood young man trying to make his social contribution” (NCS 92).

Seeing “communist” as a scapegoat term in 1975, however, is not an indication of pro-Maoist leanings; more likely than not, Wong's views deviated from those of the 1953 State Department for the simple reason that its refusal to recognize the People's Republic was for her, a tour operator, allowing politics to interfere with business. Still, while trying assiduously not to “talk politics,” she could not help but serve a political agenda; she and her book were no doubt deployed in Asia to validate underlying American values and the “timeless” Chinese virtues that arguably only existed among the diasporic Chinese, if at all.¹¹ Wong's work may have thus caught an American public looking for evidence of the ethnic specimens they had always known, a sentiment expressed in a 1966 history: “The Communist revolution has confronted us with a China so different from the China we once knew that we are still groping to comprehend it. It is plain to see that some of our fondest assumptions about the celestial land are no longer valid” (A. T. Steele, The American People and China. [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966], 57). Fifth Chinese Daughter assured Americans that our fondest assumptions about celestials could remain valid if only in our own backyard.

Wong's confirmation of these assumptions about “celestials” appears not necessarily as a testimony to absolute “otherness,” but to quaint Chinese convention. In one instance, this need to satisfy an appetite for difference-with-charm justifies her choice of narrative voice:

Although a “first person singular” book, this story is written in the third person from Chinese habit. The submergence of the individual is literally practiced. In written Chinese, prose or poetry, the word “I” almost never appears, but is understood. In corresponding with an older person like my father, I would write in words half the size of the regular ideographs, “small daughter Jade Snow” when referring to myself.…Even written in English, an “I” book by a Chinese would seem outrageously immodest to anyone raised in the spirit of Chinese propriety. (xiii)

Superficially, the use of the third person satisfies the underlying purpose of the book, the substantiation of American ideas of Chinese modesty, by producing the illusion of a charming filial deference. Wong's decision to render her name in its English translation, Jade Snow, rather than its Chinese phonetic equivalent, contributes to this effect. Both the refusal to assert “I” and her choice of translation can be read as pandering to white expectation by reinforcing the belief that submergence of self is typically Asian. Yet the ostensible cultural convention that she gives as a reason for her use of the third person seems to be a textual fiction. Wong notes that she labors over childhood Chinese compositions; because she writes primarily in English, she is presumably comfortable with the conventional use of the first-person pronoun. The fact that she gives an ethnic, cultural reason for her choice of voice contradicts a note prefacing her shift to the first person in the sequel: “After Daddy's death the habit of referring to myself in the third person could gradually be changed to the use of the first person” (13). Wong's choice of voice distances her from Jade Snow's unfilial behavior; she uses the third person not out of deference to Chinese written convention or Chinese modesty, but potentially out of an inability to see herself as a subject. Wong's two explanations for her use of the third person, one that points to ethnic convention, and the other to female submersion of self in the face of patriarchy, indicates, once again, the tension between performing ethnic authenticity and gendered universality.

The “conversion” of Jade Snow's father into a feminist himself is necessary to the text's narrative resolution. Their reconciliation is figured not in terms of converging economic philosophies but in terms of Jade Snow's desire for recognition “as a female.” In the end, her father recounts a story that shows her achievements to be the fulfillment of a prophecy:

When I first came to America, my cousin wrote me from China and asked me to return. That was before I can even tell you where you were. But I still have the carbon copy of the letter I wrote him in reply. I said, “You do not realize the shameful and degraded position into which the Chinese culture has pushed its women. Here in America, the Christian concept allows women their freedom and individuality. I wish my daughters to have this Christian opportunity. I am hoping that some day I may be able to claim that by my stand I have washed away the former disgraces suffered by the women of our family.” (246)

The letter writes Jade Snow into the family lineage through her achievements as a daughter according to the dictates of the narrative's need for conflict resolution while simultaneously underscoring the limits of its feminist stance: the letter positions the father as the primary agent against injustice. Like the dissonant emergence of a lost letter in conventional melodrama, the letter sets right a mistaken identity: the figure who resisted change is revealed to have advocated change all along. The sentiment revealed in the text's final lines is equally unconvincing: “And when she came home now, it was to see Mama and Daddy look up from their work, and smile at her, and say, 'It is good to have you home again!'” (246). Such an ending asks the reader to imagine that parental indifference is transformed into affection through the events of the autobiogra-phy—a description of the achievements through which Jade Snow earns their respect. Fifth's forced ending, along with the discomfort of its narrative voice and historical repressions, mark it as a profoundly ambivalent text. To read Jade Snow as one who has negotiated an acceptable “middle way” between Chinese and American cultures is to ignore the discomfort of this voice and the repressive structures this discomfort uncovers.

Yet this ambivalence does not necessarily contest Wong's message that racial or gender prejudice is not an excuse for personal failure. In marking this “other” mother as a function of the text's historical repression, I do not mean to suggest there exists a more authentic feminist struggle subordinated to the text's overtly liberal feminist politics. Any unequivocal attempt at feminist revisionism may reflect the critical desire to recuperate an oppositional standpoint for Wong, one that, while testifying to the inability to harmonize social reality with an overt liberalism, nonetheless runs the risk of privileging what is not said at the expense of eliding what is. While this ability to read gaps in phallogocentric discourse may be a cornerstone to feminist theory, it may also be a function of what Jane Marcus has self-reflexively analyzed as the need to construct an angry foremother to fuel the feminist critical enterprise.¹² Transposed to an ethnic context, it is this method of reading that makes so tantalizing Wong's comment that two-thirds of the original manuscript was excised by her editor. The missing pages may fuel speculation that Wong's editor refused portions of the manuscript not in keeping with the racial liberalism of what was eventually published (Chin et. al. 1974). But this speculation may be unwarranted; Wong herself frustrates any desire to create in her the properly abject object of feminist or ethnic recuperation. While the text served as a role model for writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, not only has Wong failed to die, like Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, “young, cramped and thwarted,” but she is largely unsympathetic to the culturally nationalist views of succeeding generations.¹³ In her steadfast adherence to a point of view developed as a twenty-four-year-old, Wong is the native who refuses to shift into her proper critical frame.

The question remains whether Fifth's internal dissonance undermines its overt political message or whether it remains, as a document of Asian American experience, a “snow job.” Are its contradictions sufficient to counter the affirmation of meritocracy that has been the source of its critical scrutiny, especially given that it is used, almost a half century later, to serve what Karen Su notes as the neoconservative agenda of mul-ticulturalism? The question may be moot if, as my epigraph taken from a multicultural textbook shows, class, race, or gender issues can become interiorized as a function of pop psychology. Or is the anxiety about the text and others like it over the fact that capitalist entrepreneurship continues to be supported by many within the Chinese American community? Such questions speak to the problem of a wholly recuperative feminist enterprise or a cultural nationalist denunciation as critics in related fields have shown. For example, Claudia Tate recuperates black women's novels at the turn of the century that promoted a vision of black middle-class self-improvement. While Tate acknowledges that the economic and social reality for blacks in the post-Reconstruction era countered the novels' portrayal of middle-class domesticity, she attempts to reclaim for these writers a measure of social progressivism by reading their fiction as “allegories of political desire,” situating the authors' contribution to racial uplift as the envisioning of an idealized domestic sphere. Is it possible to claim such an allegory for Wong? Jade Snow's ability to finance her way through college and start a business are achievements not to be dismissed; however, Wong fails to attribute them to the opening up of women's opportunities during wartime production, preferring instead to attribute them to her own hard work and the kindness of strangers.

Wong's original intention “to contribute in bringing better understanding of the Chinese people so that in the Western world they would be recognized for their achievements” (235) may have been laudable in 1950, but it now seems dated for its “just as good as” stance, a gaze that turns Chinese American culture, and herself along with it, into spectacle. The limitations of an “I'm just like you but different” position are currently suggested by specific lesbian and gay movements, where the very strategy for supporting antidiscriminatory legislation may counter long-term aims. Fifth Chinese Daughter will remain problematic for its overt accommodationist message and confirmation of American values of self-reliance and careerism. Yet what remains undecidable about the text is how successfully its narrator convinces us of her resolution that being Chinese in America is not a matter of being handicapped by prejudice, but is a source of “cultural enrichment” that creates “favorable interest” in one's life. The “middle way” that Jade Snow desires to find as a Chinese and an American is only uneasily presented at the end of the text as the attainment of paternal respect through American business success. For the sake of textual coherence, facts that challenge this message seem to be absent or repressed. Nowhere in the original text is the historical specificity of her life in an ethnic ghetto revealed with the clarity of the preface to the 1989 edition: “Who would be interested in the story of a poverty-stricken, undistinguished Chinese girl who had spent half of her life working and living, without romance, in a Chinatown basement?” (vii).

The question is disingenuous almost to the point of being “outrageously immodest”; readers find romance in Fifth Chinese Daughter's plot of heroic feminism and adolescent culture clash. While others have argued that Wong's ethnic commodification fed white appetite for difference, what also bears scrutiny is the text's feminist narration as it provides a normalizing counterpoint to ethnic differentiation. As Wong's feminist resistance stands in for overt resistance to American culture, the text suggests one effect of racial and gendered discursive interaction: while representations of race and ethnicity may resist decontextualiza-tion, narratives of gender oppression often assume an air of timelessness, particularly in cases where thwarted self-actualization is situated within a narrative of parent/child conflict.

If plotlines of self-actualization thwarted by one's husband are intrinsic to the “canon” of women's literature, Amy Tan's 1989 The Joy Luck Club combines elements of both narratives as spousal and parental figures are constructed as impediments (or catalysts) to fulfilling individual potential. The narrative of the daughter's putative triumph over (and eventual reintegration into) ethnic family moves from a postwar context that saw a need for a familiar celestial to the context of the early 1990s, where the celestial has remained unrepentantly communist. The sentimental plotline nevertheless accommodates the shift in national desires: no longer responding to the irreducibly different native without, the American public demonstrated an increasing interest in the native within, an interest that corresponds to a shift in national self-conception from melting pot to multicultural mosaic. The prefeminist Chinese woman might not perform identically in both historical contexts, but one aspect of witnessing her trauma might remain constant: she becomes a means of accessing alterity within the safe confines of affect. Lauren Berlant reveals the nationalist function of sentimentality in noting, “in the United States a particular form of liberal sentimentality that promotes individual acts of identification based on collective group memberships has been conventionally deployed to bind persons to the nation through a universalist rhetoric not of citizenship per se but of the capacity for suffering and trauma at the citizen's core”¹⁴ (Berlant 1998, 636). My own point is not so much that the process of identifying with sentimental representations of prefeminist Chinese women binds the citizen to the nation as much as it serves another function: it universalizes difference through women's oppression, building what Berlant would call “pain alliances from all imaginable positions within U.S. hierarchies of value.” What better text, then, to witness pain alliance than Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club?

Landscape of Emotions?: Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

In its emphasis on family nostalgia culminating in a message of empowerment and reconciliation, Tan's fiction met what seemed to be the new criterion for ethnic bestsellers; as one New York editor cynically put it, “let's have more Grandma” (cited in Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez [New York: Bantam, 1982], 7). The Joy Luck Club served up, if not ethnic grandma, then ethnic matrilineal inheritance to feed the growing interest in the experiences of women of color, an interest significant enough to warrant a reported advance of $4 million for The Kitchen God's Wife in 1991. The Joy Luck Club both came at a moment—and helped produce a moment—of mainstream interest in literary treatments of the ethnic experience as women's experience. In linking Tan's popularity to a specific race and gender discursive interaction, I would highlight Hayden White's analysis of the relationship between formal qualities of historical narration and the historian's reception. “[T]he prestige enjoyed by a given historian or philosopher of history within a specific public,” he writes, “is referable to the precritically provided linguistic ground on which the prefiguration of the historical field is carried out” (White 1973, 429). One of the lines from The Joy Luck Club quoted in early reviews speaks to the linguistic ground established by the civil rights and women's movements: “Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.” Thus before ever picking up the novel I wondered if what it promised was a tour of the mysteries of the Far East within a reassuring narrative about one's atavistic connection to homeland. This intuition was perhaps only partly correct; The Joy Luck Club offers a tour, not of China or Chinatown, but, as another review put it, through a landscape of emotions.¹⁵ What makes China “different” may be rendered intelligible by the identificatory possibilities of gendered sentiment, a dynamic perhaps not so different from that of Fifth Chinese Daughter.

Reviewers often invoke the “universal mother/daughter bond” or “the generation gap” as if in an effort to assure us that ethnic particularity is both fascinating and irrelevant precisely because it can be transcended. To wit: “When I finished reading The Joy Luck Club and Seventeen Syllables, I found myself weeping about the chasm between my own immigrant mother and her lost ancestors and descendants” (Valerie Miner, “The Joy Luck Club,” The Nation 24 April 1989, 566). Another reviewer praised the novel for representing ethnic experiences that “could belong to any immigrant group” (Julie Lew, “How Stories Written for Mother Became Amy Tan's Best Seller,” New York Times, 4 July 1989, 23). This reaction testifies to the power of sentimentality but also to a belief in the transferability of certain types of experiences of certain types of people. What does it mean that identification with ethnic America is expressly marked as women's capacity to enter the lives of others, particularly through narratives of trauma?

The Joy Luck Club invites such responses, in effect, by performing them. It is fair to say that in the novel conflicts between the Chinese mothers and Chinese American daughters are resolved through their recognition of a commonality of experience based on their subordination as women; the cultural distance between immigrant mothers and American-born daughters is therefore bridged not through the characters' confrontation with contrasting cultural values but through their recognition that matrilineal heritage transcends the gap caused by the daughters' greater cultural enfranchisement. The emphasis on the female bond works to privilege gender sameness over differences based on class position, mobility, and generation; as I have argued in the case of Fifth Chinese Daughter, this privileging also mediates testimonies of ethnic difference. The mother/daughter pairs are structured according to two paradigms: June and Waverly must reconcile their belief that they cannot live up to their mothers' expectations whereas Lena and Rose must learn strength from their maternal inheritance. June struggles toward a positive interpretation of herself and accepts it as her mother's interpretation, to reconcile the fact that there is no “better self” seeking to overwhelm her by reminding her of her own limitations. Waverly's stories likewise reveal a dependence on her mother's approval as a source of self-esteem and, like June, her reconciliation comes through the recognition that she is more like her mother than she realized. Maternal reconciliation for both is based on their ability to reorient interpretation toward likeness and identification. Lena's and Rose's stories operate on a related paradigm of mirroring: they are shown to be overly dependent on their husbands and lacking the will to stand up for themselves, a point both their mothers see as a consequence of maternal inheritance. The resulting narrative trajectory of Lena's and Rose's stories is simply their mothers' desire to pass on lessons of strength learned through their own losses and suffering as women. The narrative movement in The Kitchen God's Wife is virtually identical: Winnie narrates the “tragedy of her life,” namely, a “bad marriage” in China, to heal her daughter's multiple-sclerosis-as-multiple-neurosis. In both works, generational transmission, what Kingston's narrator calls “ancestral help,” hinges on the recognition of both positively and negatively coded likeness.

The theme of women's endurance in narratives of privation and hardship appears across Asian ethnic texts. Helie Lee's Still Life with Rice, Julie Shigekuni's A Bridge Between Us, Akemi Kikimura's Through Harsh Winters, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe all reveal the harsh material conditions on which the middle class present or middle class in-the-making is founded. These texts also imply a subject for whom narratives of the past are intended; stories of trauma are offered as a corrective to the present—as instructive, healing, and ultimately empowering. Tan's novels exemplify this structure; a daughter self-consciously engages in a recuperative project that replaces an overly critical, authoritative parental voice with that of an oppressed woman. By identifying with this voice, she establishes gendered likeness as a means of self-help: narration excavates a past wherein oppression is latent until a strategic moment when it rises up to resolve (or fail to resolve) a contemporary situation.

As I have mentioned, the predominance of this treatment of women's stories in fiction and autobiography follows feminist literary critical practices of the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist identification, “the intertexu-ality of ourselves with women writers' texts,” was acknowledged as a cornerstone to feminist criticism (Marcus 1988; Kaplan 1996). Both projects of foregrounding women's connectedness may derive from a contemporary critical desire to see in women's community (and later, racial collectivity) an antidote to stultifying individuality. Nancy Chodorow's influential “Family Structure and Feminine Personality” that situates “embedded” feminine personality in practices of mothering is a case in point. According to Chodorow, because as primary caretakers mothers tend to “identify more with daughters and help them differentiate less,” women are less individuated and more communally invested (Chodorow 1974, 48). But as Wendy Brown has noted, the appeal of Chodorow's theory lies in the belief that “women inhabit a different moral, cultural and nascently political universe than men, with different (and better) guiding values” (Brown 1991, 1-2). This substantiation of gender em-beddedness is part of The Joy Luck Club's appeal; significantly, the desire to seek different (and better) alternatives to monadism is also reflected in critical orientations toward ethnic American and Third World literatures. For example, Malini Johar Schueller reads The Woman Warrior as a Marxist intervention, a radical narrative that, in its inscription of voice within a community of voices, “questions the unified and autonomous subject of liberal capitalism” (Schueller 1992, 143). For anthropologist Michael Fischer, ethnicity assumes the cachet of the collective and is posited as a cure to modern-day alienation. In regard to Native American autobiography he writes,

The techniques of transference, talk-stories, multiple voices or perspectives, and alternative selves are all given depth or expanding resonances through ironic twists. Thus talk-stories or narrative connections to the past, to the animated cosmos, and to the present are presented as the healing medicine not only for Indians but for Americans and modern folk at large. (Fischer 1986, 224)

Cast in Freudian terms, anxiety stems from a sense of alienation in autonomy; ethnic autobiography mirrors back a “cure” by making conscious the process through which the individual is reintegrated into a collective whole. This view of ethnicity echoes somewhat Fredric Jameson's romanticization of a tribal subjectivity that predates the emergence of the individual and of myth as the ideal form of narrative insofar as it refuses “later categories of the subject, such as the 'character'” (Jameson 1981, 124). Jameson's validation of “Third World Literature” for its refusal to psychologize character reflects the hope that in the Third World one sees the potential “emergence of a post-individualist social world,” where “the reinvention of the collective and the associative, can concretely achieve the 'decentering' of the individual subject” (Jameson 1986, 125).

The point is not to reduce nuances in these critics' treatment of collectivity, but to point out parallels between critical desires, the somewhat utopian impulses of critical projects toward ethnic and women's literature that seek oppositionality in communalism as a potential challenge to the bourgeois (and patriarchal) humanist subject by postulating the existence of an alternative, nonindividuated concept of social being. Tan's novel raises the question of whether the emphasis on gender collectivity represents an assault on the modern subject. What is interesting about the paradigmatic structure of Tan's writing is that, whether located in ethnic-racial or women's community, affirmations of collective integration culminate in individual self-actualization in ways that harmonize it with the prevailing ideology of American individualism. In other words, what appears to counter autonomous selfhood through genealogical connection might merely enable individual empowerment in the name of the collective. In The Joy Luck Club faith in the transference of experience is attributed to the blood tie: “Your mother is in your bones!” An-mei's comment, “A mother knows what is inside you,” derives from her belief that one's own true nature, “what was beneath my skin. Inside my bones,” lies within “her mother and her mother before her.” Throughout The Joy Luck Club, the maternal connection is mystified as a genetic inheritance, what is passed down as a bodily memory in the same way Chineseness is essentialized as being “in our blood.” This naturalization, unlike Cho-dorow's attribution of feminine embeddedness to social practices, employs what is usually a racialized discourse of genetics to explain, I would argue, women's connection. The blood tie reconciles the mother/daughter conflict, giving the novel its overly neat, feminist ending; the battle for autonomy from one's mother, one's difference from her, is replaced with the recognition of one's sameness to her.

This ending can only be achieved if the daughters' racial difference does not at first appear as their own but is externalized as representative of their mothers' Chineseness. For example, in realizing that she has “never really known what it means to be Chinese,” June muses that her race is constituted by “a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me—haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes.” In other cases, Chineseness appears as a flexible, external marking: as half-Chinese Lena can pass as white but is pleased that the women in her aerobics class tell her she looks “exotic.” After a lifetime of disassociating herself from ethnicity, Waverly appears to want “to be Chinese, it is so fashionable,” implying that she has the power to claim or downplay her race according to dominant trends in the same way that Jade Snow Wong shuttles in and out of Chinatown. While their “American” subject positioning remains intact, it is their racial and cultural difference that they experience as their own “otherness” and because they displace this negatively coded difference onto their mothers, the novel suggests, they cannot embrace ethnicity as part of themselves until they are able to valorize it as positive.

Throughout The Joy Luck Club, the mother/daughter distance takes the form of the daughters' devaluation of what they perceive as foreign in their mothers as a means of substantiating their own American-ness. The disassociation they effect is not only in terms of individuation of the child from the mother but also in terms of the formation of the daughters' national identity through their disassociation from immigrant parents. The daughters' racial consciousness, “what it means to be Chinese,” occurs not necessarily as their ability to claim racial identity through the recognition of how it is constituted as Other within the dominant culture, but as their new ability to valorize what is Chinese in their mothers and to claim it as their own. Yet in Tan's novel, the reconciliation of a cultural dichotomy is effected through a recognition of feminine strength as a “natural” maternal inheritance and as a point of identificatory sameness.

In The Woman Warrior, the narrator actively constructs ethnic identity out of her mother's stories that offer her conflicting models of feminine strength and powerlessness in the figures of the woman warrior and Brave Orchid versus the No Name Aunt and Moon Orchid. Similarly, American culture offers competing dictates for femininity—while American girls are expected to whisper to “make their voices American feminine,” outside the narrator's Chinese family, America yet offers her the opportunity “to chop down trees in the daytime and write about timber at night.” While Kingston's narrator constructs identity out of a simultaneously presented multiplicity of competing discourses, The Joy Luck Club presents the competition between gender and racial discourses less complexly; China is the location of woman's suffering and America embodies the opportunity for women's choices (“That was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate”).¹⁶ Based on this dichotomy, ethnic consciousness is achievable through the following: until the daughters accept their Chinese mothers' lessons about womanhood, they will not understand what it means to be Chinese. Tan's feminist resolution requires that femininity be associated with ethnicity, that characteristics of femininity and “Chineseness” operate along the same paradigm of embeddedness.

Rather than reflecting Chodorow's theory, which would posit self-effacing personality as a consequence of femininity,¹⁷ Rose perceives it to be culturally Chinese and a condition that she unfortunately inherits as a Chinese American: “when you're Chinese you're supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves.” Weighed against standards of American/masculine autonomy, Chinese culture is feminized through its association with qualities of embeddedness. Rose comments, “I have to admit that what I initially found attractive in Ted were precisely the things that make him different from my brothers and the Chinese boys I had dated: his brashness; the assuredness in which he asked for things and expected to get them; his opinionated manner.” The dichotomy—individuality as American and embeddedness as Chinese— supports the separation between external American action and internal Chinese being. Lindo's comment—“I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character”— represents ethnicity as a given attribute of individual being, an attribute that, for June, remains latent until it rises to the surface through maternal reconciliation.

The mothers support this distinction by privileging America as the land of opportunity, “where you could be anything you wanted to be,” against a China oppressive to women's choices, a New World of options against a “back then” bound by fate. As in Fifth Chinese Daughter, America embodies the promise of the daughters' individualism, what is revealed to be denied the mothers' generation. The mothers' dilemma in view of this assimilation is that, while it distances them from what they perceive as proper Chinese respect for parents, it yet offers their daughters the luxury of choices they never had as women in China. Yet while their ambivalence toward their daughters' Americanization seems to be rooted in this incommensurability between maternal influence and self-determination, what surprises them is the daughters' reluctance (Rose's and Lena's in particular) to act as Americans, which is to say, to act in their own self-interest in the apparent absence of gender impediments. The distinction between the capacity to act and socially controlled passivity is signaled in Tan's repeated use of the words “choice” and “fate,” not only throughout The Joy Luck Club, but The Kitchen God's Wife as well. Invoked primarily to draw distinctions between China and the United States over gender issues, the terms signal Tan's ideological bias by setting up an explicit national hierarchy resonant of differences between tradition and modernization.

These differences are enforced by Tan's biographical comments; she reveals that her mother Daisy's ambitions for her did not arise out of a desire to live vicariously through her daughter but out of what she saw as Amy's reluctance to take advantage of opportunities denied Daisy Tan in China: “Here we were, with all these opportunities, and we were focused on pizza and thin noses and miniskirts” (cited in Susan Kepner, “The Amazing Adventures of Amy Tan,” San Francisco Focus Magazine 36:5 (1989): 60). What could be seen as an indictment of American consumerism and dominant standards of beauty is, I think, more accurately a criticism of the triviality of interests that draw energy away from personal enrichment or attempts at class advancement. Thus in the novel, the conflicts over the mothers' gender expectations for their daughters do not necessarily indicate a generational gap caused by the daughters' assimilation into American culture away from Chinese culture but, rather, the opposite. In spite of the mothers' laments about daughters who swallow “more Coca-Cola than sorrow,” tensions arise between generations ironically because the mothers do not perceive the daughters to be American enough.

In spite of their rise into the middle class through education or marriage, the daughters have failed to live up to models of strong, independent womanhood that appear to the mothers as their birthright as American citizens. An-mei and Ying-ying do not necessarily object to their daughters' marriages to white men but to the fact that despite their freedom, not only did they choose wrongly, but they seem to accept their fates passively. The narrative trajectory conforms to that in Fifth Chinese Daughter but with a subtle difference: The Joy Luck Club's feminist narrative does not simply advocate class advancement (What good is a fur coat or a fancy house if they don't make you happy or equal to men?) but in effect validates a progressive notion of history by situating degrees of gender freedom as the chief indicator of differences between China and the United States, “back then” and now, “feudal” and modern thinking.

While the novel's reception can be tied to a moment of popularizing narratives of women's trauma—particularly those that give this trauma the valence of pastness—it might also be tied to generational issues arising within a specific historical moment. The novel was written directly after a period in which Tan “connected” with her Chinese heritage in a tangible way: “When my feet touched China,” she notes, “I became Chinese” (cited in Lew). Such a sentiment reflects the Roots era of “rediscovered” ethnic pride or, as critic Sau-ling Wong puts it, “post-civil rights ethnic soul-searching” (Sau-ling Wong 1995, 202). However, the novel's emphasis on family reconciliation places it within a more generic moment; Tan attributes the novel's success in part to its addressing “baby boomer” issues:

I think I wrote about something that hit a lot of baby boomer women whose mothers have either just recently died or may die in the near future. They felt that their misunderstandings, things that had not been talked about for years, were expressed in the book. There are so many mothers I know who gave the book to their daughters, and daughters who gave the book to their mothers, and marked passages of things they wanted to say. (Cited in Barbara Somogyi and David Stanton, “Amy Tan: An Interview,” Poets & Writers Magazine, September/October 1991, 24-32.)

Her comment situates the work as a medium channeling repressed interpersonal communication; sharing the book literalizes the symbolic transmission of experience depicted within the work. Yet Tan's apprehension of the novel's appeal to her American generation locates it within the realm of the intensely personal, as ultimately concerned with self-healing, in short, with therapy. (Tan has, in fact, jokingly referred to her writing as “bad psychiatry” and turned to writing fiction as a means of curing work addiction after her psychiatrist fell asleep during one of her sessions; cited in Elaine Woo, “Striking Cultural Sparks: Once Pained by her Heritage, Amy Tan has Tapped it for a Piercing First Novel,” Los Angeles Times, 12 March 1989, 1.) While her comment appears to historicize the novel as the coming of age story of a specific generation, such a contextu-alization redirects the novel's popularity away from its ethnic content; Tan situates the work among female baby boomers as a correction to a question about the novel's interest among Americans seeking to connect with ethnic roots.

The link between privatization and generational progression as class progression produces a similar message about the relation between racial history and self-help in Holly Uyemoto's novel, Go. There, the issei are agricultural workers, the nisei are math professors and homemakers, and the sansei are represented by the narrator, a college student recovering from a nervous breakdown. The novel suggests that excavating racial history (the narrator is a history major) might intervene in the personal crises of subsequent generations. While such plotlines might suggest that self-reflection is, as an outgrowth of bourgeois self-absorption, a luxury, they mark past oppression as usable potentially only to heal middle-class individuals who do not feel worthy (or loved) enough. Lowe argues against such privatization in one local textual instance in The Joy Luck Club while acknowledging that such a tendency is possible in regard to the novel's cultural circulation (Lowe 1991). Certainly what seemed to resonate most forcefully in the cultural moment of the late 1980s were narratives implicitly or explicitly about self-esteem or self-fulfillment, particularly those that could dovetail with sociologically inflected interests in, for example, “bad parenting.”

This emphasis on identity often fails to be reconciled with contemporary politics within a global frame. For example, can the version of China essential to “growing up ethnic” stories ever be reconciled with the China of the Maoist revolution? The Joy Luck Club's release in the spring of 1989 came only a few months before the massacre in Tiananmen Square, an event that broadcast an image of China into American homes that seemed to bear little relationship to representations of upper-class domesticity offered in Tan's work. Upon being asked to comment on the recent events in China, Tan said, “The first thing I would like to emphasize— because these events are so sensitive—is that my feelings are strictly personal. My relatives represent all sides of the situation. My uncle is a high Communist official, and my sister is a member of the Communist party, which is a very small elite in China. I also have relatives who are students and professors. The media was so one-dimensional, the evil villains versus the noble student heroes. But this wasn't a football game, it was my family!” (Cited in Joan Chatfield-Taylor, “Cosmo Talks to Amy Tan,” Cosmopolitan, November 1989: 178.) Personalizing politics as a matter of family loyalty and invoking China's political spectrum through the rhetoric of intimate connection allows Tan to avoid rendering a judgment as a method of political intervention. The sentimental strain here, like that of the novel, cannot answer to the material world much less soothe its political ruptures. After all, love means not taking sides.

The question raised by this inquiry is whether narratives that rely on woman's identification with her prefeminist Other can serve more a radical function. Marking a shift in my argument, I turn to Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe.

Queer Sentiment: Disappearing Moon Cafe's Incestral Help

The novel finds Kae, the narrator of her family history, estranged from both her newborn and her work and in the middle of thirty-something yuppie angst. A Vancouver “investment research analyst” contemplating a new job offer, an alienated Kae finds herself reassessing the direction of her life. Her job has forced her to figure aspects of her identity as marketable commodities, to be “the token, pregnant, ethnic woman” (123) in the interest of somebody else's profit. This crisis in the dual concept of her labor—her job and the delivery of her son—is compounded by another “identity crisis”: she learns that she may be the product of brother/sister incest. This revelation of family secrets provokes Kae into narrating four generations of her family's history, self-consciously re-creating (as does the narrator in The Woman Warrior) scenarios that delve into the passions and motivations of her ancestors as a means of coming to terms with her own life. Disappearing Moon Cafe's plot trajectory is thus similar to that of The Joy Luck Club and other novels I named earlier in the chapter as the unveiling of family history intervenes to resolve a contemporary personal crisis. The narration of women's oppression in particular, of how three generations of women negotiate a “woman-hating world,” is intended as a salutary lesson about the subsequent generation's individual self-fulfillment. As I have been arguing, such outcomes risk romanticizing agency and imbuing an evolutionary account of history with First and Third World resonance. Nevertheless, this same narrative structure might have a different outcome, an outcome that, in effect, queers that plot. In contrast to Wong's and Tan's texts, Disappearing Moon Cafe inscribes an alternative feminist genealogy precisely in its lesbian resolution.

A fourth-generation Chinese Canadian, Kae challenges compulsory heterosexuality as a result of uncovering incest in her ancestral line: the novel portrays her transgression as both the betrayal of family secrets and the betrayal of repressive social dictates. By imbibing as lessons the individual stories that coalesce into a collective “tragedy,” Kae breaks through her current alienation to pursue more consciously the life she desires—that of a writer and a lover of women. Her initial estrangement from life is a motif echoed in the situations of the other characters and is articulated through a specific trope—that of being an orphan. While the term “alienation” implies the subordination of human life to its capacity to labor intrinsic to Marxist philosophy, it takes on a more specific resonance in Disappearing Moon Cafe, where the state of being an orphan not only refers to children left parentless by death, but to concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy, as well as to groups of people systematically excluded from larger collectivities—the Chinese diasporic community in the “wilderness” of Canada, the bachelor society cut off from women by exclusion acts, women whose bonds with other women are subordinated within patriarchy. As Kae's potential lover, Hermia, notes, “Grown women are orphan children, are we not? We have been broken from our mothers' arms too soon and made to cling to a man's world—which refuses to accept us—as best we can, any how we can” (138). The state of being lost, exiled, or orphaned from a nurturing or supportive community is revealed to have roots in systematic causes—the abdication of parental duty in favor of social standing, the racist and economic motivations behind immigration laws and public policy, and the uncritical adherence to patriarchal norms that establish lines of descent and laws of inheritance. The novel thus opens with Kae “waiting for enlightenment” and in need of, to echo Kingston, “ancestral help.”

In “channeling” her ancestors to intervene in her contemporary crisis, Kae discovers that their alienated lives are the consequence of events that take place three generations before her birth. Briefly, Kae's great-grandmother, Mui-Lan arranges for a surrogate “wife” to bear a child with her son, Choy Fuk, who has failed to produce a male heir to guarantee the Wong lineage. The surrogate, waitress Song An, ultimately bears a son at the same time that his legal wife, Fong Mei, gives birth to a girl as a result of an affair. Because the paternity of the two children is kept secret, the conspiracy to produce Wong descendants comes to a crisis at the moment the putative half brother and sister, Kae's parents, decide to marry. Paralleling this chain of events, the illegitimate and unrecognized son of the Wong patriarch bears a son, Morgan, who falls in love with— unbeknownst to him—his half sister. Kae stumbles on this repressed history after she herself has had an affair with Morgan, who accurately claims to be her uncle. The convoluted genealogy is bound together not only through its relevance to Kae's life, but by the underlying similarities of individual circumstances. All of Kae's ancestors' “illegitimate” liasons are enacted out of an irrepressible passion that threatens social boundaries defined by gender, race, and class: Gwei Chang falls in love with someone of the “wrong” race, Fong-mei of the “wrong” class, Morgan of the “w(r)ong” lineage, and, finally, Kae of the “wrong” gender.

Lee suggests that her characters' failures lie not in their participation in sexual acts outside the bounds of socially sanctioned heterosexual, monogamous, same-race marriage but in their cowardice. They ultimately refuse to flout propriety and eventually give up the loves of their lives for security, duty, and social position. These renunciations have consequences for the entire Wong family, not the least of which is the imposition of a kind of double life: each case of ancestral excess—of miscegenation, reproductive interference, adultery, and incest—results in estranged or “orphaned” lives characterized by sexual repression and unfulfillment. I would argue, then, that the novel's point is not merely to lead Kae to an individual catharsis as a result of narrating her muddled family history but to expose the ways that cultural forces impel her ancestors to channel passion toward a “proper” love-object. In effect, it analyzes the ways in which the dictates of capitalism, racial segregation, and patriarchy regulate sexual behavior. While the novel does tend to naturalize desire in portraying characters at odds with libidoes yearning to break free from social constraint, it nonetheless also exposes the way that desire is channeled to serve a social function.

In portraying its characters as sexual dissidents (who ultimately lose their nerve), Disappearing Moon implicitly challenges the ways that specific sexual practices become placed in a hierarchy of descending privilege, what Gayle Rubin has noted as modern Western society's appraisal of “sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value” (Rubin 1993, 11). Her argument in “Thinking Sex” recognizes that “[m]arital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid” (11), consigning those whose sexual practices do not fall within this heterosexual, monogamous, procreative fold to the “lower depths” of the sexual hierarchy, where they occupy the space of “bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned sexuality.” The novel comments on the consequences of redirecting desire, on the social pressures that cause one to renounce those love-objects deemed inappropriate by, in the order in which the novel presents them, race, marital status, lineage, or gender. Throughout Disappearing Moon, Kae's analysis of the reasons behind the cycles of renunciation and cowardice in her lineage takes the form of a cultural critique; reading the impact of racism, patriarchy, and middle-class pursuit on the sexual lives of her ancestors—particularly the prefeminist women—allows her to question the structures that support a rigid hierarchy of sexual value and act on it.

Miscegenation is the first taboo to be challenged in the Wong lineage. After marrying a half-Chinese, half-Indian woman, producing a son, and living a “natural” tribal life, Kae's great-grandfather, Gwei Chang, heeds the call of duty and returns to China, where he marries a second time. The novel's initial 1894 narrative also ends it; the final sequences explain why Gwei Chang deserts his Indian wife, instigating the genealogy of renunciation. His idyll is tempered by his sudden recognition of the distance between them; an Indian, she represents the barbarity and uncertainty of living in the wilderness: “In the next instant he looked at Kelora, and saw animal” (234). By leaving Kelora (and later refusing to acknowledge their son) to secure his social standing, he loses himself to the pursuit of capital and to a fantasy life of nostalgia. This end sequence marks Gwei Chang's second thoughts about his miscegenation as the originary moment of the Wong cycle of repudiation and loss. Lee's fictionalization of the fallout from the murder of Janet Smith in Vancouver, a case in which a Chinese houseboy was accused of murdering a white woman, reveals how the fear of miscegenation as a sexual taboo was manipulated to serve the state's economic interests in regard to a minority population. Touted as a safeguard to morality, the resulting Janet Smith Law prohibited white women from working in close proximity with Chinese men and had economic consequences for Chinatown, especially for those businesses that employed white waitresses. As Canada's later embrace of multiculturalism as a distinct national ethos later encouraged unofficial segregation, here Lee reveals how sexual prohibitions divided racial communities.¹⁸

The second “test” that the Wong ancestors fail lies in Kae's great-grandmother Mui Lan's capitulation to patriarchy; Lee's portrayal of women's opppression in China, however, reverses the association of the New World as the site of Chinese women's potential liberation at play in Tan's novel. Ironically, Chinese “feudalism” in the form of the separation of spheres in the Confucian household is portrayed as encouraging women's autonomy, an autonomy lost upon immigration as a result of the state's regulation of the Chinese Canadian community:

And Mui Lan's nightmare was loneliness. She arrived and found only silence. A stone silence that tripped her up when she tried to reach out. Gold Mountain men were like stone. She looked around for women to tell her what was happening, but there were none. By herself, she lacked the means to know what to do next. Without her society of women, Mui Lan lost substance. (26)

Unlike the excessively genderist Old World depicted in The Joy Luck Club, China here is portrayed as the source of an empowering and sustaining women's community. Lee implies that Mui Lan mistakenly responds to her isolation not by trying to recover a woman-centered community, an endeavor hindered by Canadian immigration policies, but by mimicking the money-conscious values of the male-dominated “wilderness” of the New World: “Having never been in control of her own life, she suddenly found herself in charge of many people's lives. Frustrated and isolated from the secluded life she understood, Mui Lan had to swallow bitterness, so she made her suffering felt far and wide” (31). As the domestic sphere becomes the limited arena of her influence, she ends up manipulating those with whom she could have found connection—other women. In her attempt to control her daughter-in-law, Fong Mei, and exploit waitress Song An for her reproductive capacity, she enacts women's oppression, wielding her class status. Through Kae, the novel self-consciously represents its characters' failings as a form of misguided ideological consent: Mui Lan and Fong Mei are both victims of and participants in women's “common debasement.”

However anachronistically, Kae's narration likewise attempts to bring feminist cultural analysis to her grandmother's story. Brought from China to secure the Wong lineage yet unable to conceive as a result of her husband's undisclosed infertility, Fong Mei is lambasted for being a flawed and very expensive commodity and threatened with social disgrace, the dissolution of her marriage, and deportation. Out of fear of “being with an orphan” with no economic standing, Fong Mei nonetheless refuses to give up the “property and respectability” that come with her marriage after she becomes pregnant as a result of her ongoing adultery. Kae thus has Fong Mei come to a belated feminist regret of her decision to renounce her lover, Ting An, keep her children's paternity secret, and remain in a loveless marriage:

I once thought it was funny that I could take my revenge on the old bitch and her turtle son. Another man's children to inherit the precious Wong name, all their money and power. I forgot that they were my children! I forgot that I didn't need to align them with male authority, as if they would be lesser human beings without it.…I sold them, each and every one, for property and respectability. (189)

Kae's gender analysis in the form of “channeling” the voices of her ancestors emphasizes women's capitulation to the status quo. But her narration also marks women as agents with other choices, prefiguring Kae's resolution to depart from the cycle inscribed by this history. Disappearing Moon's feminist sensibility contrasts the liberalism of Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Joy Luck Club:

In each of their women-hating worlds, each did what she could. If there is a simple truth beneath their survival stories, then it must be that women's lives, being what they are, are linked together. Mother to daughter, sister to sister. Sooner or later, we get lost or separated from each other; then we have a bigger chance of falling into the same holes over and over again. Then again, we may find each other, and together, we may be able to form a bridge over the abyss. (145)

The novel validates a sentimental, almost utopian view of women's community as an alternative culture characterized by, as Wendy Brown has noted, “different (and better) guiding values” (W. Brown 1991, 1-2). But it also depicts collectivity as a form of horizontal comradeship and a logical response to divisions created by social hierarchy. This is the “lesson” that Kae imbibes; the familial and privatized story of her ancestry provides the text by which she reads culture and can abstract from the individual life a political critique. Lee's emphasis on Kae's self-search as a process of coming to multiple collective identifications echoes Stuart Hall's reading of Gramsci, who “argues that this multi-faceted nature of consciousness is not an individual but a collective phenomenon, a consequence of the relationship between 'the self' and the ideological discourses which compose the cultural terrain of a society” (Hall 1986, 22). Analyzing the impact of racism, patriarchy, and class-striving on the lives of her ancestors, Kae uncovers and begins to interrogate the ideological structures that systematically reduce the lives of individuals. This knowledge frees her to seek an erotic connection with her friend, Hermia Chow.

Love Free from Restraint: Disappearing Moon's
    Lesbian Resolution

This erotic connection forms the resolution to Kae's identification with the Chinese Canadian community, her ancestors, and women. She transcends her individual identity crisis by understanding the tragic results of allowing repressive social convention to circumscribe sexual lives, of bowing to profit rather than pleasure, to propriety rather than passion. The first test of Kae's willingness to act on desire occurs in the form of a handsome, older, working class, Eurasian man who excites her teenage sensibility. Not incoincidentally, he also claims to be her uncle. Their incestuous, one-time coupling is unfulfilling but revelatory. Kae gushes, “I had managed one small glimpse into what it was like to release one's being, to let it slip into the other realm where all the senses explode. And that was enough to set me off on a lifetime quest for more of the same” (162). Her reaction appears rather overblown, given the description of the desperate sex that initiates it; nevertheless, the incident foreshadows the novel's ending in which she chooses desire over “hoarding integrity” as a safeguard against being seduced. Kae's Hong Kong friend, Hermia, represents another “enticing lure” toward what Rubin would call “erotic non-conformity” (22), as both Morgan and Hermia embody the taboo love-object. In this sense, the novel places consanguineous sex and homosexuality on the same continuum; it does, however, avoid linking incest with abuse even though Kae is only seventeen during her first affair.

While the nature of their relationship is left ambiguous, their interactions are characterized by playful, romantic, and insinuating language. Kae's “intoxication” over Hermia is apparently reciprocated:

Kae, I see it in your eyes…that drive to love and create. Why do you want to deny? Women's strength is in the bonds they form with each other. Say that you'll love me forever! The bond between true sisters can't be broken by time or distance apart! Say that, Kae…tell me! (39)

While Hermia's plea for a connection with Kae does not literally express sexual desire, her passion implies something more than sorority. Likewise, Kae's response indicates that she reads a message beneath the expression of enduring friendship, a message that she sees as vaguely illicit. In suggesting that Kae's story ends with a lesbian resolution, my reading self-consciously echoes Barbara Smith's reading of Sula as a lesbian novel. Her “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” defines a literary work as lesbian “[n]ot because women are 'lovers,' but because they are the central figures, are positively portrayed and have pivotal relationships with one another” (Smith 1982, 164). Her positioning reflects that of Bettina Aptheker, who defines lesbians “as women whose primary emotional, intellectual, and erotic relationships are with other women” (Aptheker 1989, 87) and who places sexuality as a specific criterion for “lesbian” within a historical context. Disappearing Moon's ending in which Kae assents to Hermia's cryptic challenge, “would you rather live a great novel or write one,” affirms both Smith's and Aptheker's emphasis on women's emotional bonds as a facet of lesbianism. Lee herself expands the concept of “women love” that is “a little bit larger than lesbianism” (S. Lee 1990, 122).¹⁹

I would nonetheless suggest that the novel's ending in which Kae prepares to meet Hermia in Hong Kong represents Kae's choice of a lesbian relationship over her heterosexual marriage, not because the novel leaves no room for interpretation, but because this choice forms a logical conclusion to the novel's thematic focus: her “enlightenment” lies in the realization that her ancestors have renounced desire that cannot be channeled toward a socially appropriate love-object. Lesbian sexuality initially operates on the same contiuum as uncle-niece incest, as it comes to represent a challenge to Kae's sense of legitimacy and order. Complementing Hermia's representation as a sexual risk-taker is her challenge to Kae's loyalty to the business world over her writing career; throughout the novel, Hermia is figured as Kae's foil—one who pushes her sexually, artistically, and, especially in regard to feminist thought, politically. Hermia's counsel, “Think of love as something free from remorse and restraints…Genitalia coming together because it feels good” (187), forms an appropriate resolution to Kae's genealogical narration, lending the novel a clear aesthetic unity as well. In the process of affirming her connection to her ancestors, there is not only a reconciliation with the past, as in Tan's novel, but a transformation of consciousness culminating in the realization that “love makes us expand in our relationship to life, and to each other” (215).

In the larger scheme of things, it could be said that Kae's resolution to pursue the life of a writer and a lover of women does not qualify as evidence of radical consciousness but merely indicates a choice of lifestyle. In this, the novel's resolution is not so different from The Joy Luck Club's. However, Kae's “crisis” is ultimately revealed to be more than postpar-tum depression, suburban angst, or a need to recover ethnic roots. In recognizing the consequences of acceding to the cultural restraints put on desire, to false taxonomies of legitimacy and illegitimacy, the novel suggests that what produces and sustains the characters' states of alienation, their inability to read the structures that prevent connection with one another, is the subordination of human desire to its social function—the accumulation of capital, the maintainance of patriarchal lines of descent, the “ownership” of women within family and clan, and the enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality. The novel's appeal does lie in a plot structure that mirrors that of The Joy Luck Club in portraying diasporic Chinese experience as progressively freeing and ultimately salutary for their female protagonists. However, against the grain of my previous argument on both Wong and Tan, the seemingly individual and privatized genealogy narrated in Disappearing Moon initiates an understanding of how racism and misogyny have delimited life, the costs of capitulating to (primarily sexual) social norms. Femininst narratives of empowerment do not necessarily serve to harmonize racial difference but can also expose culture's investment in both the homosocial bond and a sexual hierarchy.

What makes the difference between Disappearing Moon's and The Joy Luck Club's treatment of women's bonding is no doubt Lee's activist feminist commitment as well as the fact that she published with a small feminist press, a move that did not produce instant bestseller status or result in a major motion picture. To compare the circumstances of both novels' writing, however, implies that such circumstances produce specific ideological effects, that a book's content is compromised by its method of production and distribution. One aspect of The Joy Luck Club's publication history bears this out; the first segment of what would become the “novel” reads quite differently from the rest of the work in its unsentimental and ambiguous depiction of the mother/daughter bond. Begun in 1985, The Joy Luck Club was originally conceived as a collection of short stories. Significantly, Tan's publication of “Endgame” (what would later become “Rules of the Game”) led to the “novel's” commis-sion.²⁰ While this short story reflects the content of the novel, unlike the other sections, it takes interethnic conflict over class and racial integration as its center and can be read as a parable of ambivalent acculturation that challenges the ideological content of The Joy Luck Club as a whole.

“Rules of the Game” refers to chess and to the “rules” of acculturation that one must manipulate in order to “rise above one's circumstances” or transcend class position. Lindo's “teaching art of invisible strength” assumes a double meaning as chess strategy converges with strategies on how to negotiate racist immigration law:

Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don't know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself. (95)

Lindo's fears about Waverly's emerging distance from her ethnic family rise as chess tournaments cause her daughter to move both literally and figuratively farther away from home (“I no longer played in the alley of Waverly Place” [100]) and to draw hierarchitizing cultural comparisons (“The chessmen were more powerful than old Li's magic herbs that cured ancestral curses” [94]). Game strategies of attack and escape are meta-phoric of cultural movement as Lindo becomes the opponent who frustrates Waverly's construction of alternative “escape routes” from home.

The real losses that concern Lindo are the “pieces” of Chinese culture, including ties to family, that are potentially sacrificed in the process of acculturation:

My mother placed my first trophy next to a new plastic chess set that the neighborhood Tao society had given to me. As she wiped each piece with a soft cloth, she said, “Next time win more, lose less.”

“Ma, it's not how many pieces you lose,” I said. “Sometimes you need to lose pieces to get ahead.”

“Better to lose less, see if you really need.” (98)

The quarrel here does not only concern parental pressure to create over-achievers; rather, it raises a familiar question on integration: Do you need to lose ties to ethnicity to “go forward”? Waverly's participation in chess is also linked to change in its feminist connotations; her triumphs are figured as victories for women challenging the male grandmasters. Moreover her public recognitions reorder traditional gendered work roles within the family—her brothers have to wash the dishes, a change her mother champions. Yet Lindo appears to withdraw her support as com-munalism and meritocracy come in conflict: Waverly's question, “ 'If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess?” outlines a fundamental difference between collective and individual achievement. Waverly's inability to disassociate herself from collective ties is signified by the remains of the family dinner, a fish whose head “was still connected to bones swimming upstream in vain escape.” The end of the story finds Waverly dreaming of disembodied limbo; momentarily alienated from her family, she experiences herself as alone, rootless, and unconnected.

As an autonomously published story, “Endgame” suggests that the process of acculturation can result in the individual's alienation from a collective identity, a sense of self located in ethnic family and place. Yet as part of the novel, the ambivalent moment is reconciled in futurity, revealing the conflict to have been not so much related to class tension and the daughter's increasing cultural enfranchisement and mobility, but simply to childish growing pains surrounding individuation that necessitate the adult's attempt to regain self-esteem. The potentially provocative focus revealed by this initial writing seems to have been displaced in favor of a more interiorized, “universal” narrative on coming to terms with parenting. This displacement perhaps suggests that the material circumstances of the text's production, the necessity of publishing under a deadline and as a novel perhaps forced the need for narrative closure figured as multiple mother/daughter reconciliations.

As I have pointed out in reading contradictions and repressions in Fifth Chinese Daughter, no text is entirely compromised by its narrative resolution. Thus, this local instance in Tan's novel can be read against what I have argued to be the effect of its narrative trajectory, namely, that in a potentially depoliticizing gesture the work reconciles conflicts between women based on differences of class and levels of cultural enfranchisement to favor an ahistorical, transcultural belief in the commonality of women's experience. This “evidence” of a politically alternative Joy Luck, one prior to its wooing by mainstream presses, is one that other critics nevertheless see reflected in the entire work; Lisa Lowe has pointed out that novel historicizes “both privatized generational conflict and the 'feminized' relations between mothers and daughters” as both come to signify “the broader social shifts of Chinese immigrant formation” (Lowe 1991, 78). She notes,

It is possible to read Joy Luck Club not as a novel that exclusively depicts “the mystery of the mother/daughter bond” among generations of Chinese American women but rather as a text that thematizes how the trope of the mother-daughter relationship comes to symbolize Asian American culture. That is, we can read the novel as commenting on the national public aestheticizing of mother-daughter relationships in its discourse about Asian Americans, by placing this construction within the context of the differences—of class and culturally specific definitions of gender—that are rendered invisible by the privileging of this trope. (Lowe 1991, 79)

Significantly, however, The Joy Luck Club does not merely comment on the way the trope of the mother/daughter relationship comes to symbolize Asian American culture but, in fact, participates in constructing this trope. Its success highlights the dual and contradictory work of multicul-turalism, which is, as Lowe notes, “both a mode of pluralist containment and a vehicle for intervention in that containment” (Lowe 1996, 85).

Nevertheless, highlighting the incommensurability between political intervention and the uses of “multicultural” texts in the 1980s, Hazel Carby notes, “We need to ask why black or other nonwhite women are needed as cultural and political icons by the white middle-class at this particular moment” (Carby 1992, 11). Speculating that texts by black women are a guilt-relieving means of gaining knowledge of the Other and function as substitutes for desegregation activism, Carby's remarks are suggestive not of the content of the works, but of the ideological underpinnings of cultural consumption (Carby 1992, 342). Thus situated, cultural products not only respond to the needs of specific historical moments, but exert a normalizing effect on a status quo potentially threatened by contradiction; as the articulation of a desire for pluralist inclusion, multiculturalism, Carby suggests, arises precisely at a time in which society remains more trenchantly segregated. Her reading locates this effect among a necessarily homogenous group of white, middle-class students and academics as if to suggest that this is the only audience that matters; nor does her point speak to a motive other than guilt feeding the drive to know “otherness.” Nevertheless, her comments reflect the wariness that Lauren Berlant recognizes about the turn to sentimental rhetoric at moments of social anxiety, a sentimentality that may sublimate “subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy” (Berlant 1998, 665). David Palumbo-Liu makes a similar point about how ethnic literature renders race relations manageable precisely through a reader's ability to “relate” to difference, but he acknowledges that an alternative pedagogy with regard to ethnic literature could be sought that would not merely “mimic and reproduce the ideological underpinnings of the dominant canon” (Palumbo-Liu 1995, 2).

bell hooks suggests an alternative motive to Carby's emphasis on guilt fueling interest in ethnic texts in naming ethnicity “the spice to white culture,” an analogy that positions ethnic and racial difference as a positive, yet ancillary appendage to an unmarked norm or as a supplement existing purely as ornamentation (hooks 1992, 21). This idea of differ-ence-as-supplement underlies Trinh T. Minh-ha's projection of what mainstream culture wants from its ethnic specimens:

Now, i am not only given the permission to open up and talk, i am also encouraged to express my difference. My audience expects and demands it; otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come to hear a Third World member speak about the First (?) World, We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can't have and to divert us from the monotony of sameness. (Trinh 1989, 88)

Hazel Carby, bell hooks, and Trinh Minh-ha implicitly locate in liberal multiculturalism a desire to experience the Other—an increasing demographic necessity—in a distanced, safe medium. By focusing on the needs of a dominant consuming audience, they attribute this effect solely to form: both ethnic and gender content are relegated to performing identical functions in satisfying an appetite for “spice.”

The use of the black woman as a cultural and political icon among critics in the 1980s has produced, in Ann duCille's words, a “traffic jam” in black feminist studies. DuCille suggests that the rush of white feminist critical interest in part stems from the perception that black women occupy the “quintessential site of difference” so that by the inverse logic of current theoretical developments, “the last shall be first” (duCille 1994, 592). DuCille thus links canonization to the level oppressed groups are seen to occupy in a hierarchy of oppressions, an institutionalization contingent on the potential promises and pleasures of “lastness.” Elizabeth Abel implies as much in speculating that white feminist critics may seek in black women's literature “the text that promises resistance and integrity,” a search that is “fueled by the perception of an increasingly compromised white feminist social position drained by success of opposition-ality” (Abel, 1993, 494). In the context of Asian American literature, Rachel Lee has noted the difference in the extent of institutionalizing Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which details a woman's coming to voice, and her next novel, China Men, focusing on the male immigrant's claiming America. In commenting on the former's successful incorporation into Women's Studies, she notes, “we value texts [in the academy] based upon the degree to which they remain marginal” (R. Lee 1995, 157). The desire for oppositionality as the reward for excavating the “quintessential site of difference” is only half of the story; as Carla Kaplan has pointed out, Anglo-American feminist criticism in the 1980s celebrated the critic's identification with “women's experience” as part of its recuperative project (Kaplan 1996). In this context, multiculturalism in the United States requires a subject distinct from the one necessary for postcolonial critical production—not merely one that “speaks,” but one that testifies to notions of universality circulating in a particular culture at a given moment. I would argue that the concept of gender equality now functions as a potent trope precisely because it can circulate as a form of common sense. In Asian American women's writing, it surfaces through the idea that women have the right to make choices about their lives. The subsequent drama, then, lies in whether or not the prefeminist woman (or her daughter) will come to recognize and claim these rights.

“Multicultural” texts do perform a service parallel to the contributions of feminist scholars' recovery of women's writing. The process of recupera-tion—both as a critical practice and as a concern in literature—has the potential to shed light on the repressive politics of domination that inform women's experience as one example of “subjugated knowledge.” As Foucault notes,

The making visible of what was previously unseen can sometimes be the effect of using a magnifying instrument.…But to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognised as having any moral, aesthetic, political or historical value.” (Foucault 1980, 50)

Thus the significance of feminist history has been not only to “make visible the unseen,” but as historian Joan W. Scott has noted, to “unmask all claims to objectivity as an ideological cover for masculine bias by pointing out the shortcomings, incompleteness, and exclusiveness of 'mainstream' history” (Scott 1992, 30). Texts that participate in recuperating the women-centered stories of an immigrant generation contribute to unmasking masculine bias as well as the exclusions and imperial endeavors on which American history has been based.

Nevertheless, taking “lived experience” as a foundation that sanctions these texts or histories runs the risk of fetishsizing the knowledge-experience equation in ways that counter postmodernist claims about the destabilizing effects of repressed “minority” viewpoints. As Scott writes, the unfortunate consequence of treating marginalized histories as corrective add-ons is that “the project of making experience visible precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself” (Scott 1992, 25). Foucault addresses the dangers of reincorporation, questioning, “is it not perhaps the case that these fragments of genealogies are no sooner brought to light, that the particular elements of the knowledge that one seeks to disinter are no sooner accredited and put into circulation, than they run the risk of re-codification, re-colonisation?” (Foucault 1980, 86). The question to be posed about texts that incorporate the feminist narrative structures found in Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Joy Luck Club is whether, while such texts may participate in contesting the processes of racialization in American culture in local textual instances, they also succeed in harmonizing marginalized experience with preexisting cultural narratives of liberalism and progressive development. This issue was raised in regard to Ronald Takaki's Strangers from Different Shore, the textbook of pan-ethnic Asian American history, and his presentation of Asian American “voices” as historical evidence. Fellow historian Sucheng Chan comments in regard to his methodology, “[T]he ultimate effect of the oral history quotes is to affirm the belief that, in America, even the downtrodden have a chance to demonstrate the triumphant tenacity of the human spirit” (Chan 1990, 97). Evidence of collective oppression assumes an unavoidable totality when placed within a specific framework; narrative assimilates individual voices to a collective past, here, potentially based on the intellectual's desire for semblance and identification with generations that have logically produced him.

Women's narratives have traditionally assumed the aura of opposi-tionality due to the feminist tenor in the 1980s of highlighting resistant practices in texts by women, especially by women of color for whom the undifferentiated category “triple oppression” is often invoked. Given the link between academic popularity and political cast, there is necessarily a concurrent feminist project that looks at the way in which narratives produce a version of “women's culture” easily harmonized with prevailing attitudes. Both Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Joy Luck inscribe racial subjects in accord with uncritical notions of ethnic pluralism in part by affirming gendered universality, one through overt assurances about women's equality, the other through the romantic trope of feminine connection. In the context of these two texts, gendered narratives satisfy the simultaneous dictate of testifying to difference while rendering it know-able. In characterizing race/gender discursive overlap as a form of displacement, I am suggesting that such a conjoining is often hierarchically expressed, privileging the discourse most reconcilable to its dominant cultural context. This, I think, is the consequence of specific narrative structures rather than being symptomatic or representative of a “canon” of Asian American women's writing. There are certainly works that engage this structure with multiple and contradictory effects—The Woman Warrior comes to mind here—and feminist narratives that do not reflect an unequivocal notion of progressive history expressed through gender equality. And as I have shown, embedded within this narrative are local textual instances or elisions that disrupt the premises of liberalism to which their narrative structures conform.

As feminist narratives come to regulate representations of ethnicity, they enable a reconciliation of ethnic difference into the national landscape through gender, potentially locating in domestic feminism a project of validating women's likeness. In contrast, within a global context, Aihwa Ong notes that in Western feminist anthropology “much recent feminist study of Asian women already has had [the] function [of] producing epistemological and political gaps between us feminists and them 'oppressed' women” (Ong 1988, 81). Her comments imply that such a distinction is necessary to establishing the authority—and political ur-gency—of the Western feminist researcher's voice. But do feminist narratives fall along simple, dichotomous lines in the shift of focus from the national to the transnational, from Asian American to Asian women? My argument has heretofore emphasized a domestic context in addressing the issue of “internal minorities” vis-a-vis liberal multiculturalism. The question remains whether a similar function could be ascribed to gender representation in texts produced by Asian/American women writing about Asia from the United States. In the chapters that follow, I explore how gendered appeals function as interventions into Asian postcolonial politics, thereby implicitly commenting on the United States's role as global interventionist.