University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/36353 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Chinese Mothers - Western Daughters? Cross-cultural Representations of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Chinese and Western Women's Writing by Amy Wai-sum Lee Submitted for the Doctorate of Philosophy Degree University of Warwick, Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies August 1999 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents 1 Acknowledgements 11 Declaration 111 Abstract iv Introduction 1-30 Chapter One 31-85 Mother and Daughters: From the Bond to the Intrigue Chapter Two Killing the Mother: Popular Women Writers in Hong Kong 86-145 Chapter Three Taiwanese Women Writers In Search of Identity 146-200 Chapter Four Daughters of the Mainland Under the Shadow of "Mother China" 201-26 1 Conclusion 262-269 Bibliography 270-301 U Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Piotr Kuhiwczak, and Professor Susan Bassnett, who have been extremely supportive throughout the research as well as the preparation of this dissertation. They have been most meticulous in reading my numerous drafts, making suggestions, and their encouragement has always helped in my days of confusion. Thanks also to Miss Sabina Sharkey, who has read parts of the work and has given me insightful comments. I would also like to thank fellow students in the Autobiography Society. Meetings and discussions with them have been a very interesting learning experience. As I did part of the research and writing back home in Hong Kong, .1 have to extend my thanks to Janet Bailey, the Centre Secretary, for her great help in communicating with my supervisors and various departments of the University. Finally, a special thank you to all my friends, whose friendship has brightened my days, especially Rodney Davey, Emily Law, Holly Hon, Kirby Chan and Vivian Chan. Thank you all. And of course, my mother, who shows me who I am. 111 Declaration The research work leading to this thesis has been undertaken in accordance with the safety policy of the University of Warwick. The thesis does not contain material submitted for any other degree. Lee Wai-sum, Amy 'V Abstract This study looks at women's prose narrative representing four major Chinese communities during the last 30 years, and focuses on the depiction of mother-daughter relationships among personae within the narrative texts. The thesis seeks to suggest that mother-daughter relationships within the texts are a reflection of how a text responds to its mother culture in the course of development. Narrative prose ranging from self-professed autobiographies to the fictional, written by Chinese women from American-Chinese communities, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, are examined in a comparative approach within an ethnical framework. The concept of a national literature is discussed with regard to different fonns of Chinese-ness. It is revealed, in the course of this examination, that each group of Chinese women's writing examined here demonstrates an acute awareness of a link with an original mother culture, the Chinese orientation. However, recent events both inside and outside China have inevitably shaped cultural development in these communities, resulting in splits and diversifications in the individual cultural consciousness. Approached from this perspective, the Chinese mother culture gains a new vitality by virtue of shedding the burden of a long histoiy. Focusing on the intertextual activities of regional writings, it is shown that represented Chinese-ness is no longer an unchanged and unchanging phenomenon, but is redefined each moment through the locus of interactions among independent hybrid communities. 1 Introduction This is a comparative study of nanative texts written mostly in the last thirty years by women representing major Chinese communities throughout the world. The subject has a special meaning for me as a Hong Kong Chinese who has had a western-style education under colonialism in Hong Kong, who has seen Hong Kong through the change-over to Chinese sovereignty, and who is now studying for a research degree in the ex-coloniser's country, the United Kingdom. Life experience and academic research interlock and interact with one another generating not only interesting phenomena, but also questions which need to be answered. Our relationship with our mother within the family and with the motherland outside the family plays a determining role in shaping us. It will be suggested that the mother, in different aspects of the term, holds one of the keys to understanding ourselves. Mother and daughter relationships have often been regarded as more intimate than that with the son because of the shared gender. Feminists like Nancy Chodorow1 and Dorothy Dinnerstein2 see the gender of mother and daughter as the 'Nancy Chodorow also argues for the mother being the central element in the child's fonnation of sexual identity. She takes a psychoanalytic point of view and argues against Freud's focus on the Oedipal complex and the Father as dominating the structure of gender differences. Instead Chodorow sees the pre-Oedipal period and the mother's relationship to the child as the formative elements in the later sexual development of the child. For details please refer to Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). 2 Dorothy Dinnerstein is one of the first American feminists to talk about children's gender identity formation as effects of mothering and child-rearing practices. She claims that the arrangement of mothering by women only creates a total dependence of the male child on the mother, a dependence which will change to fear in face of the overwhelming power the mother has over the child. With the growth of the male child, the dependence disappears but may turn into desire to control, which is manifested in the social arrangement to curtail women's behaviour. To solve this problem Dinnerstein argues for an end to sexual division of reproductive labour. For detailed elaboration of' her theory, see The Mermaid and the Minotaur (London: Souvenir, 1978). 2 distinguishing element which separates this relationship from the mother's to her son. While the boy is expected to take over when the father dies, the girl is expected to follow in the mother's footsteps. Expectations, both personal and social, indirectly mould the way girls are brought up, overseen by the mother. The bond between mother and daughter is partly held together by an adherence to this continuity. The mother, in teaching her daughter, is actually trying to reproduce herself in the girl. The daughter therefore receives a double "reproduction" from the mother, a physical continuation of life, and a generation of an identity, both aspects already very much determined at the moment of conception. Women, who are all daughters, live a life trapped between the point of being reproduced in another's imprint and the point of reproducing another in her time. Coming to arealisation of the meaning to these life processes can be a struggle against psychological and cultural barriers over a long period of time. The narrative texts examined shown Chinese women in different environments trying to gain this insight through a reestablishment of connection with the mother(land). To a certain extent, what Maxine Hong Kingston, the narrator, says about her story-telling experience, inherited from her mother, may be typical of these female journeyings: "The beginning is hers, the ending, mine."3 The mother is the origin, the beginning, and the daughter picks up where she leaves off, a continuation of the same line. But this is not just a question of words. Olivia4 has never been to China, but her journey back to Chengmian reconnects her to a past which she is not even conscious of. Chengmian, the motherland, is the origin of lives leading to the Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (London: Picador, 1975), 184. Olivia is the narrator-character in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses (London: Flamingo, 1995). She follows her half-sister back to Chengm.ian, her native land, and comes to a new 3 American-born Olivia. The line of memory and orientation stretches across time, space, and culture, breaking through barriers and claiming Olivia back. She does not only pick up the line, but extends it to the foreign land. Olivia's daughter is born in America, but her origins are in Chengmian. Female joumeyings abound in the texts examined. Jing-mei 5 goes back to China to see her sisters, Maxine6 travels over imaginary grounds, Zhang Xiaoxian's heroines7 fly from city to city, Huang Biyun's travellers8 cross time and space, Yi Shu's working women9 are always on the move, Mulberry and Peach'° psychologically interpenetrate one another, the daughters of Mainland China fly away from the trauma in the motherland, and Zhang Jie" travels back to the memory of her past with her mother. Journeying in different forms and at different speeds is the process by which these women come to terms with themselves. The idea of understanding of her origin. Jing-mei is the narrator of the frame story in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (London: Minerva Books, 1989). She represents her dead mother and goes back to China to see the lost twin sisters. 6 Maxine is the main narrator in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (London: Picador, 1975).