Mother-and-daughter writing and the politics of location in Maxine Hong Kingston's 'The Woman Warrior' and Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club'

This study analyzes mother-and-daughter writing in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Both writers explore the complex negotiations that Chinese American immigrant mothers and their second-generation, Americanized daughters perform daily in dealing with the diverse, and often conflicting, discourses, interpretive systems, and cultures within their mixed communities.; Though there has been much research on mothers and daughters, especially from psychoanalytic and literary perspectives, there are still few studies that specifically address the psychodynamic tensions between Asian American mothers and daughters. This study explores how two literary texts situate the psychodynamic struggles of Asian American mothers and daughters within a socio-economic, cultural, historical, and political framework.; Both these works break stereotypes that portray Asian women as hopelessly oppressed victims with no proud history of struggle and empowerment of their own. In these texts, Chinese American mothers and daughters break their silences and come to voice in their own distinctive fashion not only by challenging their oppressions as women within their particular Asian cultures and in mainstream Eurocentric American culture, but also by challenging the racism and imperialism that oppress Asian American men and women in their daily lives.; While rupturing the silences and stereotypes associated with Asian American women, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, as daughter-writers, also invent alternative literary-political strategies and positionings, which advocate the importance of reclaiming their Chinese mothers' stories in China and America; and of preserving and reimagining their Chinese heritage even as they write of their mothers' and their own dilemmas as Chinese women in America. The study explores Kingston's innovative use of autobiographical fiction in breaking down rigid, hegemonic, authoritarian classifications and definitions of women. She ruptures linear, factual narrative with dream visions, myths, poetry, secrets, and chants in order to enact a radical telling of women's multiple stories and positionings in Chinese America. The doubling/mirroring, talk-story strategy in the structure of Tan's text also suggests a women-centered aesthetics for narrating Chinese American mother-and-daughter stories.