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DAUGHTER-TEXT/MOTHER-TEXT: MATRILINEAGE IN AMY TAN'S JOY LUCK CLUB
The critical literature on matrilineage in women's writings has already achieved the status of a rich and evolving canon.(1) At the same time, in recognizing race, class, and gender as crucial determinants in writings by women of color, some critics have indicated the need to develop a distinct framework for understanding these works. For example, Dianne E Sadoff has examined the literature by African American women to note that "race and class oppression intensify the black woman writer's need to discover an untroubled matrilineal heritage." Referring to Alice Walker's adoption of Zora Neale Hurston as a literary foremother, Sadoff shows how "in celebrating her literary foremothers...the contemporary black woman writer covers over more profoundly than does the white writer her ambivalence about matrilineage, her own misreadings of precursors, and her link to an oral as well as written tradition."(2) Readers like Sadoff(3) suggest that, although matrilineage remains a consistent and powerful concern in the female literary tradition, the recognition of culturally and historically specific conditions in women's lives requires that we appropriately contextualize, and thereby refine, our readings of individual texts.
In the realm of writings by Asian Americans, this work has begun. Although it does not focus explicitly on the idea of matrilineage, Amy Ling's Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry is the first book to outline the literary tradition of one group of Asian American women. Her effort, Ling says, is inspired by Walker's "search for our mothers' gardens."(4) Similarly, in a recent essay, Shirley Geok-lin Lim identifies Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter as a "mother text" for Joyce Kogawa's Obasan. In discussing these authors, Lim enumerates literary characteristics shared by Asian American and Asian Canadian women writers, such as "multiple presences, ambivalent stories, and circular and fluid narrarives."(5) Lim's analysis points toward a commonality between Sone and Kogawa and two other writers, Maxine Hong Kingston and Chuang Hua.(6) In Kingston's Woman Warrior and Hua's Crossings, antirealistic narrative strategies and a provisional authorial stance correlate with experiences of cultural dislocation and of destabilized and fluid identities.(7) Thus, the works of Sone, Kogawa, Kingston, and Hua collectively define an emerging canon cohering around concerns with racial, gender, and familial identity and the concomitant rejection of monolithic...