Daughters in their Mothers’ Gardens: Contesting Ethnic / Psychological Boundaries in Matrilineal Texts by Chinese American Women Writers

The book explores the thematics of the mother-daughter relationships in selected texts by contemporary Chinese American women writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng and Gish Jen. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, Bone and Mona in the Promised Land altogether reflect an array of matrilineal traditions highly receptive to the conventional wisdom that daughters must separate from their mothers to become strong individuals. I argue that the considered narratives problematize the Western domestic storylines by hinging back to a complex mesh of racial histories, misogyny, rape, displacement, and enforced separation. The book emphasizes a universal impulse for perfection which dovetails with an endeavour to point out the diversity and complementarity of their challenging reactions to the dominant myths of female connection and disconnection. The selected texts relocate the universal romance of symbiosis-individuation at the intersection of a fluid but, nurturing positioning across different worlds and cultures. They demonstrate the crucial significance of storytelling in undercutting the unconscious essence of the mother-daughter rift. Hence, the purely psychological universal friction between every mother and daughter significantly shapes the examined matrilineal stories just as the characters᾽ positioning amid liminal hyphenated spaces do. The discussion contributes to reorienting the homophobic dimension in the mother-daughter attachment toward multicultural issues of consent and descent. The concerned plots create a tour de force in the mainstream matrilineal tradition, through narrative scenarios wherein the mothers and daughters foreground the impossibility of separation.