The American Century: Literature since 1945 765new. The daughter is trapped in domestic duties, but lets her hair down “like a
measure of wealth” for her lover. From the daughter washing her hair, the poem
moves seamlessly through the chores of the day and the intricacies of the mother–
daughter relation, figured in the mother’s grabbing of her daughter’s hair (“So much
hair, my mother / used to say”). And it ends with the daughter, in another fugitive
gesture, this time taken from fairy tale: smuggling her lover into her room through
“cloth, hair, and hands.” Other poems explore, with similar, moth-like precision, the
routines of family life, a home where “there was always something that needed
fixing” (“The Tower of Pisa” (1987)), the “magic island” of Hawaii where Song was
born (“The Magic Island” (1988)), and a later generation – “We love them more
than life, / ” as the poet puts it in “The Binding” (1988), “these children that are born
to us.” Always, these poems hover gracefully between the old and the new, memory
and adventure. As a result, the poetic persona that weaves her way through them,
whose mellifluous voice shapes them, seems to belong with the “beautiful iridescent”
women whom the Japanese printmaker Utamuro depicted and whom Song
celebrates in her poem “Beauty and Sadness” (1983). Richly strange, and changing,
these women resemble “creatures from a floating world,” Song confides; and so, in
her own lines, does she.
As for prose, the three most notable Chinese-American writers of the past few
decades have all also been female: Amy Tan (1952–), Gish Jen (1956–), and Maxine
Hong Kingston (1940–). All three are preoccupied with what Jen, in Typical American
(1991), jokingly refers to as being “Chang-Kees” or “Chinese Yankees.” All turn their
attention, at times, to the first generation born and brought up in the United States
and their poignant, often problematical relationship with their immigrant parents.
Their strategies for dramatizing and dealing with the bilingual, bicultural dilemmas
of their protagonists are, however, very different. So, in The Joy Luck Club (1989),
then later in The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001),
Amy Tan concentrates on the relation between mothers and daughters, as a measure
of changes and continuities that are, in equal measure, cultural and emotional. The
Joy Luck Club, for instance, is a series of narratives telling the stories of eight women:
the four original members of the Joy Luck Club of Gweilin and their four daughters,
all born in the United States. The mothers initially met every week, despite
deprivation and devastation, to devise their own moments of respite, gossip, and
anecdote, around the mah-jong table in China. In the United States, they continue
to meet, to talk, praise and complain about their daughters until one of the mothers
dies. The novel makes two complete rounds of the table. As it does so, it explores the
generational contests that form its core. “My mother believed you could be anything
you wanted to be in America,” one of the daughters, Jing-Mei “June” Woo, recalls.
Despite such beliefs, the mother, Suyuan Woo, is outraged by the very American
independence of her daughter. When Jing-Mei rebelliously refuses to practice the
piano at her mother’s command – “I wasn’t her slave,” she reflects, “this wasn’t
China” – her mother scolds her in Chinese. “Only two kinds of daughter,” Suyuan
declares. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one
kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!” To begin with, Jing-MeiGGray_c05.indd 765ray_c 05 .indd 765 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM