The Cultural Implication of Mother-daughter Relationship in Chinese American Literature

A recognizable matrilineage tradition can be traced from Chinese American literature since Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) garnered national fame in the American literary circle in the late 1970s. Mother-daughter relationship in Chinese American literature is not only different from that of the mainstream Anglo-Saxon women literature but from that of other ethnic writings due to the fact that Chinese Americans have emerged from a unique immigration history and reality. The paper examines the variation of the tradition in the Chinese American texts published in the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. By invoking and adapting the time and space of the mother-daughter stories, the mother-daughter relationship in there texts is explored in the history of Chinese American family and community. The paper points out that in the trans-ethnic Diaspora age Chinese American literature strategically dissolves the cognitive paradigm of identity that highlights the orientalist binary oppositions between tradition/modern, East/West and Self/Other. Thereby a trans-cultural perspective is added to the traditional mother-daughter motif.