Ingratitude

2013 Winner of the Asian American Studies Association's prize in Literary Studies Anger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. In Ingratitude, erin Khu Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these womens maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repaymentall the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority.Through readings of Jade Snow Wongs Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Laus Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Lius Oriental Girls Desire Romance, and other texts, Ninh offers not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. She connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection. In so doing, literary criticism crosses over into a kind of collective memoir of the Asian immigrants daughter as an analysis not of the daughter, but for and by her.