Immigration and Identity: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

‘Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America’ (5). Kingston’s production of this ‘invisible world’ is most ‘solid’, perhaps, in the person of her mother: the ‘emigrant’. I believe that the character of the young Maxine’s mother is the key to an understanding of the nature of this ‘invisible world’.1 At first reading, what most strikes one about Maxine’s mother are the unresolved contradictions of her character. On the one hand, she is the young rebel who defies convention and goes away from home to earn a medical degree. In her two years at medical school, she lives a ‘daydream of a carefree life’ (62). She takes pride in her brains and her ability to study hard and make accurate diagnoses on the basis of an excellent memory (64). She exorcises the ghost that haunts the medical school building alone — ‘“You have no power over a strong woman”’ she taunts it, while insulting the ghost as being ‘lame and lazy’ with a‘hairy butt’ (70) — when all the other women are paralysed with fear. She leaves China and moves to America where her flourishing career as a midwife is brutally replaced by that of tomato picker. Her life of privilege gives way to one of gruelling labour.KeywordsChinese WomanCollective IdentityChinese MotherChinese IdentityDark CornerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.