Ingratitude

The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature

erin Khuê Ninh

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814758854
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Anger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. In Ingratitude, erin Khuê Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repayment—all the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority.

Through readings of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance, and other texts, Ninh offers not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. She connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection. In so doing, literary criticism crosses over into a kind of collective memoir of the Asian immigrants' daughter as an analysis not of the daughter, but for and by her.

1

The Filial Debtor

Jade Snow Wong

To Pa, the demands he makes on Fred are coherently interlocked in an irreproachable logic. Cultural preservation, filial piety…, maintenance of the blood line and family name, guardianship of junior family members, attainment of degrees in higher education (preferably medical or legal), upward socio-economic mobility coupled with undying devotion to a single geographic locale (Chinatown), law-abiding citizenship, commitment to the work ethic, abolition of all unedifying sentiments, prudent expenditure of energy, respectfulness of manner, cleanliness of person—all are Necessary to the patriarch, hence one and the same. Transgression of one injunction means transgression of all.

Sau-ling Wong, in discussion of Frank Chin’s
The Year of the Dragon

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.

Edward Said, Orientalism

Of Jade Snow Wong’s early autobiography, it is well established that the 1989 introduction invokes, from its very first sentence, an exoticizing and problematic rhetoric of Chinese cultural otherness, and introduces her childhood experiences immediately into a discourse of “cultural conflict” or (in her words) “conflicting cultural expectations.” “[M]y upbringing by the nineteenth-century standards of Imperial China, which my parents deemed correct, was quite different from that enjoyed by twentieth-century Americans in San Francisco, where I had to find my identity and vocation” (JS Wong, vii). In the narrative, that which is Chinese in association is often felt to be constricting, anachronistic, or developmentally arrested, while qualities deemed “American” become synonymous with a versatile modernity and individual empowerment. This bias makes Fifth Chinese Daughter no less than prototype for the kind of “intergenerational conflict” narrative which scholarship has understandably censured for its self-directed essentialism, its eager adoption of Orientalist binaries:¹ “The notion of cultural conflict between the immigrant and American-born generations—the enlightened, freedom-loving son or daughter struggling to escape the clutches of backward, tyrannical parents—is one of the most powerful ‘movies’ ever created to serve hegemonic American ideology” (SL Wong, Reading, 41). And under examination, that grand narrative reveals itself indeed to be deeply self-contradictory. Jade Snow compares her own family dynamics unfavorably to those of the white middle-class home for whom she works, noting approvingly that in this (implicitly representative) Western family, “children were heard as well as seen” (JS Wong, 113)—but she fails to realize that the adage “Children are to be seen and not heard” is a bit of American, not Chinese, cultural wisdom. She learns through her exposure to Western schooling to take pride in questioning the authority and belief systems of her parents, but never notes the (twofold) irony in her unquestioning acceptance of American ideologies and cultural institutions:

“I can now think for myself, and you and Mama should not demand unquestioning obedience from me.…”

“Where,” [father] demanded, “did you learn such an unfilial theory?”

“From my teacher,” Jade Snow answered triumphantly, “who you taught me is supreme after you, and whose judgment I am not to question.” (128)

Does she merely fail to question the American pedagogies which, in her view, embody the very principles of philosophical interrogation and individual thought (thereby failing to challenge the injunction to challenge all injunctions)? Or does she decline to question those pedagogies at the order of parental injunctions which are themselves undermined by the Western teachings to which they defer? The shortcomings of this binary cultural opposition are clear.

Moreover, the narrator’s efforts to exoticize Chinese America are unraveled time and again by telltale signs of a locally grown pragmatism. Despite advertising Chinatown as “the heart of Old China,” Wong is forced, in her actual descriptions of the customs and habits of the enclave, to relate cultural modifications stride for stride alongside cultural traditions. Each modification conceded affirms the anti-essentializing insight that “Culture is not a piece of baggage that immigrants carry with them; it is not static but undergoes constant modification in a new environment” (SL Wong, Reading, 42). In describing a Chinatown funeral procession, for example, the narrator advertises the ethnic culture as one of imported foreignness (“then came a strange sight: Buddhist priests in flowing somber robes trailed along” the San Francisco street), but is soon compelled to report that this cultural spectacle was only “roughly patterned after the funeral processions in China”: mourners in China wear white, not black; services are traditionally held in family homes, not funeral parlors; and burial days are chosen for their astrological fortuity, not by the days of the work week. “This [last] custom is rarely observed [in the U.S.] because of its inconvenience” (JS Wong, 76). Such deviations from the old-world norms attest to the fact that, as Lisa Lowe and Maxine Hong Kingston suggest, Asian American customs and relations are adaptive, organic practices. “‘That wasn’t a custom,’ said Bak Goong [Great Grandfather]. ‘We made it up. We can make up customs because we’re the founding ancestors of this place’” (Kingston, Men, 118). Thus, as readers we witness not the “unmediated vertical transmission of culture from one generation to another,” but the “making of Asian American culture” via “practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented” (Lowe, 65).

Like the immigrant community’s revised cultural customs, the immigrant family’s child-rearing practices are responses to present realities, and native to this soil. Much as Jade Snow may wish to package her upbringing as one transplanted whole and unadulterated from an exotic context (“She was trapped in a mesh of tradition woven thousands of miles away by ancestors who had no knowledge that someday one generation of their progeny might be raised in another culture” [JS Wong, 110]), it is clear by her own admission that her parents have made fundamental adjustments to old-world parenting standards: “You expect me to work my way through college—which would not have been possible in China” (129; emphasis added).² While certainly immigrant parents’ expectations emerge out of the mores of their own upbringings, uneven and selective, meaningful changes mark their adaptation of those mores to their adoptive country. Easy though it may be to fall in with Jade Snow’s own accommodation of Orientalist discourses, I maintain that the immigrant family is not scripted or predicted “by the book” of ancient philosophical texts. In counterpoint to tiresome readings of the perpetual Confucian foreigner,³ I offer a reading which sees the immigrant for the opportunist, survivalist first-generation American he is—one whose relentless adaptation process is driven by the pragmatics of household governance, and the demands of thriving in capitalist America. It is thus as adaptive “practices” and adaptively deployed discourses, rather than as alien cultural givens, that the generational dynamics of Asian immigrant families such as Wong’s warrant theoretical attention. To put it another way: Wong’s immigrant family operates as it does not because it thinks itself Chinese in China, but because it knows itself to be Chinese in America.

This chapter will pair its reading of the political economy of the Wong family’s parent-child relations with a consideration of the formal qualities of their daughter’s narrative, as the latter is shaped by the challenges of telling (the self through) the former. The structure of Fifth Chinese Daughter is remarkable for what Shirley Lim has called its “relentless linearity” (Lim, 257), a devotion to strict chronological order which seems to me to strive for thoroughness—and achieve instead gloss. Wong’s account moves through her childhood at a rapid clip, as if reporting all the past that’s fit to print. This combined superficiality and hunger for comprehensiveness reflect, I suggest, an acquiescence to traditional biographical and narrative metrics that privilege the notable event over the unexceptional hour. “Included in this story,” Wong announces in her introductory note, “are the significant episodes which, insofar as I can remember, shaped my life” (JS Wong, xiii); this may prove an impracticable narrative strategy, however, for a past pronounced not so much for exceptional episodes as for its patterns—the very repetitious days cast narratively aside while the writer scans her personal history for incidents of magnitude. That search for magnitude will defy her as, unlike her parents, Jade Snow does not directly experience the uprootings or immense losses of immigration; her parents do not die unexpectedly, nor abuse her, and in fact she explicitly recognizes their treatment of her as characterized by love. Thus, the blanketing statement with which she opens her account: “Life was secure but formal, sober but quietly happy, and the few problems she had were entirely concerned with what was proper or improper in the behavior of a little Chinese girl” (2). Yet as her narrative proceeds “in spite of her parents’ love” (2), it will show the strained nerves of this placid existence: the sinews of power in family life. Jade Snow’s parents enact control via a merging of economic circuits and disciplinary technologies, and it is in those mundane, externally unremarkable terms that they and their fifth daughter struggle over the meaning and conditions of filiality.

economic circuits

For Jade Snow, the question of filial obedience is shot through with financial considerations and structured by an economic logic. To begin with, accounting and fiscal matters enjoy a remarkable prominence in Jade Snow’s chronicle of her relationship with her parents. Enumerated in what Christine So describes as “excruciating” detail are the rates of pay Jade Snow received from her mother while in junior high school for performing an “exhaustive list” (So, 44) of chores around the house: laundry, dusting and sweeping weekly, with extra polishing and scouring once a month, for 50 cents per week. While So implies that such sparse compensation is root cause for the narrator’s felt injustices, however, this is not necessarily the case.⁴ For one thing, the narrator here ticks off the list of her tasks not with the resentment of one exploited, but with a suggestion of personal investment in the labor: a sense of contributing to a shared effort, combined with a palpable pride in her own productivity.⁵ For another, as household chores, these duties need not legally, culturally, or contractually be compensated at all. If familial economics are indeed exploitative, they must be so on some basis other than pay scale—but to appreciate this point we must first restore Jade Snow’s 50 weekly cents to their historical context, as part of an American innovation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the child’s allowance as cultural norm.

In her influential Pricing the Priceless Child, Viviana Zelizer traces a sea change in what is deemed the child’s proper economic role within the family, exposing our own present-day assumptions regarding the sanctity of childhood as a time for play and learning (not for laboring on behalf of the family economic unit) to have been no historical accident. “In sharp contrast to contemporary views, the birth of a child in eighteenth-century rural America was welcomed as the arrival of a future laborer and as security for parents later in life” (Zelizer, Pricing, 5); not only had working-class, rural, and immigrant parents of earlier eras commonly looked to the unpaid domestic labor and formal outside wages of their children to supplement meager family income, but such had been condoned as familial necessity and virtue dating back to the colonies (59). Despite the higher wages and initially increased employment of child workers in the assembly lines of the nineteenth century, however, soon a confluence of factors—including rising standards of living and “growing demand for a skilled, educated labor force” (62)—made the unskilled labor of young workers, at the expense of their education, not only superfluous but less optimal to gross national production in the long term: “By the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of the economically worthless child had been in large part accomplished among the American urban middle class. Concern shifted to children’s education as the determinant of future marketplace worth” (5). Yet this shift in relations of production, Zelizer argues, would have been impossible if not powered by a pitched battle on the moral register, to construct the child as an inestimable affective asset and thus properly an indefinite financial liability: “Far from relying on his child as old-age ‘insurance,’ the middle-class father began insuring his own life and setting up other financial arrangements such as trusts and endowments, to protect the unproductive child” (5). That is, the good parent was now morally obligated to “invest” in his children’s education—not in order to reap the greater, delayed remittances of marketable children, but for his heirs’ exclusive benefit. In this new paradigm, it became outright “un-American”—a barbarous practice of immigrants—to hire out one’s child for wages (71). Driven by a sweeping moral activism, “By the 1930s, lower-class children joined their middle-class counterparts in a new nonproductive world of childhood, a world in which the sanctity and emotional value of a child made child labor taboo” (6).

It is within this new ethos that the weekly “allowance” came into being—to accommodate the child who now brings into the family coffers no additional funds, yet is entitled to siphon off some portion of those coffers for discretionary spending. Tying the child’s pocket money to the completion of chores was accepted as an adulterated form of the allowance, albeit a less (ideologically and parentally) virtuous version; this stipend was deemed properly “of the nature of a right rather than a wage” (108), but it was conceded that if children were to learn the moral habits of industry, this should take place in the “training” environment of the home. Given back its historical context, Jade Snow’s detailed disclosure of her allowance must be read as, at least in part, an implicit case for the civilized decency of immigrants, who “value” their young via the same symbolic economies as does any good American—if not quite at the same rates of pay. Granted, Jade Snow’s round of chores is likely far more extensive than that of a girl child in a white, middle-class family. Ultimately, however, in arranging to pay her, the Wongs undeniably exercise mores by which the child is recognized as a member of the family to whom funds are rightly apportioned. With allowance disbursements serving a symbolic as (explicitly) opposed to financial function, the point of said monetary exercise is not market-rate labor (or going-rate allowance), but a notion of status that derives enfranchisement from work. In Unequal Freedom, Evelyn Nakano Glenn traces this possessive individualist philosophy through its productions of political freedom (and bondage): “As wage work became more common, new notions arose [regarding] independence… as based on productivity and mastery of skills” to be a “necessary condition for exercising citizenship” (Glenn, 28, 21; emphasis added). It is in that “independent” status which Jade Snow exults, pleased with a sense of herself as wage earner/economically endowed agent (signaled by her description of the allowance as “income” and her keen appreciation of its purchasing power).⁶ In other words, as an allowance her “income” does not make her an employee of the family, but a member-in-training of an economic democracy: “Those three dollars gave Jade Snow a wonderful feeling of freedom… Yes, it was worth the household chores to be able to claim independent earnings” (71).

It is vital to acknowledge the initial enthusiasm of Jade Snow’s allowance disclosures, in order to account for her feelings about later contradictions in the Wong family’s political-economic philosophies. By turns, Mr. Wong is said to have a more “progressive” and Western view of gender roles in specific relation to labor than do his “Old-World” countrymen (So, 42), and, alternately, to embody the explicitly un-American gender/labor values of a pre-modern China (JS Wong, 125). The former opinion holds that the father has embraced “New World Christian ideals” wherein “women had a right to work to improve the economic status of their family” (5; emphasis added)—and that these “ideals” are in some way “modern” thinking: “America,” Jade Snow quotes from her father’s letters, “does not require that women sway helplessly on little feet to qualify them for good matches as well-born women who do not have to work. Here… the people, and even women, have individual dignity and rights of their own” (72; emphases added). On this exuberant familial foundation, Jade Snow first builds her faith in the philosophies of classical liberalism. Yet, later in the narrative, a college sociology lecture touching on the economic philosophies of American individualism throws her familial foundations into crisis:

“There was a period in our American history when parents had children for economic reasons, to put them to work as soon as possible… But now we no longer regard children in this way. Today we recognize that children are individuals, and that parents can no longer demand their unquestioning obedience. Parents should do their best to understand their children, because young people also have their rights.” (JS Wong, 125)

The narrative reenacts for us, at some length, Jade Snow’s epiphany as she absorbs this ideological lesson—and then the moral challenge to her family that it triggers: “Could it be,” she wonders, “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?” “My parents demand unquestioning obedience…. By what right? I am an individual….I have rights too” (125). But of course, that shift in the appraisal of children so celebrated by her sociology professor is none other than the economic and moral transformation documented in Pricing the Priceless Child! What are we to make of the Wongs’ adoption of quite culturally assimilated and contemporary parenting practices, such as the allowance, on the one hand; and Jade Snow’s sense on the other that the very philosophies which these practices express are foreign to them?

Without discounting the narrator’s sense of grievance, we may recognize her charges of cultural anachronism to be a symptomatic reading of the immigrant family—and with that in mind, look to her language for markers of the actual site of disconnect. “I have worked too,” she protests, “ but now I am an individual besides being your fifth daughter” (128; emphasis added): that is, the relationship between work and the endowed individual is not in fact a causality but a disjunction, between the terms not a “so” but a “but.” Jade Snow’s sense of dismay or disillusionment is, in other words, a product of bad faith already to be found within the capitalism in American practice. Possessive individualist political-economic promises persistently equivocate between work as a “right”—with the attendant, inalienable privileges of social membership—and work as a condition with which one must “earn” one’s inclusion. It is thanks to this prevarication that Mr. Wong may tak...