Third culture kids and mad migrant mothers, or how to outgrow Amy Tan

Abstract

In the Amy Tan novel, parents become the guardian-teachers of essentialised notions of a mainland Chinese identity, while their American–born children negotiate the contradictory claims of Chineseness on the one hand and forces of assimilation in middle class America on the other. To be authentically Chinese, mothers argue, the daughters must regain a ‘Chinese face’ by returning to their filial homeland. Tan's work has been a popular success but has tended to obscure the heterogeneity and impurity of Asian-American subjectivities. This essay considers Tan's influence on narratives of mother/daughter relationships in Hsu-ming Teo's Love and Vertigo (2000), and in terms of the Vietnamese ‘mad mother’ and her globetrotting Eurasian daughter in Eva Sallis's The City of Sealions (2002). Generational conflict within the family is a common theme in these narratives, and while migration leads to the fragmenting of the maternal psyche, Australian ‘third culture kids’ (TCKs) act as their mothers’ cultural intermediaries. These narratives do not necessarily re-iterate the rhetoric of the migrant who belongs no-where, but show how the Asian-Australian daughter of Asian refugees in Australia, whether Eurasian, Vietnamese or Chinese, can transcend their contradictory neither-here-nor-there predicament and embrace a more creative notion of a hybrid subjectivity.