Asian-American writers

Abstract

I have written once before about Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman,” which is part of her famous fictive autobiography, The Woman Warrior (1976), and I return to it here to consider again the question of ambivalence toward ancestral tradition in Asian-American writing. Ambivalence, marked by its simultaneous negative and positive reactions to a violent past, one that generally featured paternalistic repression of the individual, pervades the work of the authors who are the subject of this volume. Since Kingston, at this time, remains one of the most widely read of all Asian-American writers, her own representation of ambivalence toward an Asian family heritage is likely to remain influential, perhaps more among the general public than among her fellow creators of narratives, lyrics, and plays…