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 pietyâŠ, 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 personâall 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 Chinâs
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 Wongâs 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 âcultural conflictâ or (in her words) âconflicting cultural expectations.â â[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 vocationâ (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 âAmericanâ become synonymous with a versatile modernity and individual empowerment. This bias makes Fifth Chinese Daughter no less than prototype for the kind of âintergenerational conflictâ narrative which scholarship has understandably censured for its self-directed essentialism, its eager adoption of Orientalist binaries:1 âThe notion of cultural conflict between the immigrant and American-born generationsâthe enlightened, freedom-loving son or daughter struggling to escape the clutches of backward, tyrannical parentsâis one of the most powerful âmoviesâ ever created to serve hegemonic American ideologyâ (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, âchildren were heard as well as seenâ (JS Wong, 113)âbut she fails to realize that the adage âChildren are to be seen and not heardâ 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:
âI can now think for myself, and you and Mama should not demand unquestioning obedience from me.âŠâ
âWhere,â [father] demanded, âdid you learn such an unfilial theory?â
âFrom my teacher,â Jade Snow answered triumphantly, âwho you taught me is supreme after you, and whose judgment I am not to question.â (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 narratorâs efforts to exoticize Chinese America are unraveled time and again by telltale signs of a locally grown pragmatism. Despite advertising Chinatown as âthe heart of Old China,â 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 âCulture is not a piece of baggage that immigrants carry with them; it is not static but undergoes constant modification in a new environmentâ (SL Wong, Reading, 42). In describing a Chinatown funeral procession, for example, the narrator advertises the ethnic culture as one of imported foreignness (âthen came a strange sight: Buddhist priests in flowing somber robes trailed alongâ the San Francisco street), but is soon compelled to report that this cultural spectacle was only âroughly patterned after the funeral processions in Chinaâ: 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. âThis [last] custom is rarely observed [in the U.S.] because of its inconvenienceâ (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. ââThat wasnât a custom,â said Bak Goong [Great Grandfather]. âWe made it up. We can make up customs because weâre the founding ancestors of this placeââ (Kingston, Men, 118). Thus, as readers we witness not the âunmediated vertical transmission of culture from one generation to another,â but the âmaking of Asian American cultureâ via âpractices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly inventedâ (Lowe, 65).
Like the immigrant communityâs revised cultural customs, the immigrant familyâs 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 (âShe 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 cultureâ [JS Wong, 110]), it is clear by her own admission that her parents have made fundamental adjustments to old-world parenting standards: âYou expect me to work my way through collegeâwhich would not have been possible in Chinaâ (129; emphasis added).2 While certainly immigrant parentsâ 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 Snowâs own accommodation of Orientalist discourses, I maintain that the immigrant family is not scripted or predicted âby the bookâ 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 isâone 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 âpracticesâ and adaptively deployed discourses, rather than as alien cultural givens, that the generational dynamics of Asian immigrant families such as Wongâs warrant theoretical attention. To put it another way: Wongâs 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 familyâs parent-child relations with a consideration of the formal qualities of their daughterâs 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 ârelentless linearityâ (Lim, 257), a devotion to strict chronological order which seems to me to strive for thoroughnessâand achieve instead gloss. Wongâs account moves through her childhood at a rapid clip, as if reporting all the past thatâs 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. âIncluded in this story,â Wong announces in her introductory note, âare the significant episodes which, insofar as I can remember, shaped my lifeâ (JS Wong, xiii); this may prove an impracticable narrative strategy, however, for a past pronounced not so much for exceptional episodes as for its patternsâthe 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: âLife 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 girlâ (2). Yet as her narrative proceeds âin spite of her parentsâ loveâ (2), it will show the strained nerves of this placid existence: the sinews of power in family life. Jade Snowâs 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 Snowâs chronicle of her relationship with her parents. Enumerated in what Christine So describes as âexcruciatingâ detail are the rates of pay Jade Snow received from her mother while in junior high school for performing an âexhaustive listâ (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 narratorâs 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 scaleâbut to appreciate this point we must first restore Jade Snowâs 50 weekly cents to their historical context, as part of an American innovation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the childâs allowance as cultural norm.
In her influential Pricing the Priceless Child, Viviana Zelizer traces a sea change in what is deemed the childâs 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. âIn 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 lifeâ (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 factorsâincluding rising standards of living and âgrowing demand for a skilled, educated labor forceâ (62)âmade 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: âBy 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 childrenâs education as the determinant of future marketplace worthâ (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: âFar from relying on his child as old-age âinsurance,â the middle-class father began insuring his own life and setting up other financial arrangements such as trusts and endowments, to protect the unproductive childâ (5). That is, the good parent was now morally obligated to âinvestâ in his childrenâs educationânot in order to reap the greater, delayed remittances of marketable children, but for his heirsâ exclusive benefit. In this new paradigm, it became outright âun-Americanââa barbarous practice of immigrantsâto hire out oneâs child for wages (71). Driven by a sweeping moral activism, âBy 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 tabooâ (6).
It is within this new ethos that the weekly âallowanceâ came into beingâto 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 childâs 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 âof the nature of a right rather than a wageâ (108), but it was conceded that if children were to learn the moral habits of industry, this should take place in the âtrainingâ environment of the home. Given back its historical context, Jade Snowâs detailed disclosure of her allowance must be read as, at least in part, an implicit case for the civilized decency of immigrants, who âvalueâ their young via the same symbolic economies as does any good Americanâif not quite at the same rates of pay. Granted, Jade Snowâs 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): âAs wage work became more common, new notions arose [regarding] independence⊠as based on productivity and mastery of skillsâ to be a ânecessary condition for exercising citizenshipâ (Glenn, 28, 21; emphasis added). It is in that âindependentâ 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 âincomeâ and her keen appreciation of its purchasing power).6 In other words, as an allowance her âincomeâ does not make her an employee of the family, but a member-in-training of an economic democracy: âThose three dollars gave Jade Snow a wonderful feeling of freedom⊠Yes, it was worth the household chores to be able to claim independent earningsâ (71).
It is vital to acknowledge the initial enthusiasm of Jade Snowâs allowance disclosures, in order to account for her feelings about later contradictions in the Wong familyâs political-economic philosophies. By turns, Mr. Wong is said to have a more âprogressiveâ and Western view of gender roles in specific relation to labor than do his âOld-Worldâ 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 âNew World Christian idealsâ wherein âwomen had a right to work to improve the economic status of their familyâ (5; emphasis added)âand that these âidealsâ are in some way âmodernâ thinking: âAmerica,â Jade Snow quotes from her fatherâs letters, âdoes 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 ownâ (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:
âThere 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.â (JS Wong, 125)
The narrative reenacts for us, at some length, Jade Snowâs epiphany as she absorbs this ideological lessonâand then the moral challenge to her family that it triggers: âCould it be,â she wonders, âthat 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?â âMy parents demand unquestioning obedienceâŠ. By what right? I am an individualâŠ.I have rights tooâ (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 Wongsâ adoption of quite culturally assimilated and contemporary parenting practices, such as the allowance, on the one hand; and Jade Snowâs sense on the other that the very philosophies which these practices express are foreign to them?
Without discounting the narratorâs sense of grievance, we may recognize her charges of cultural anachronism to be a symptomatic reading of the immigrant familyâand with that in mind, look to her language for markers of the actual site of disconnect. âI have worked too,â she protests, â but now I am an individual besides being your fifth daughterâ (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 âsoâ but a âbut.â Jade Snowâs 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 ârightââwith the attendant, inalienable privileges of social membershipâand work as a condition with which one must âearnâ oneâs inclusion. It is thanks to this prevarication that Mr. Wong may tak...