Kathleen Kautzman
Dr Craig White
LITR 4333
November 20, 2003

Asian Immigrant Mothers and Daughters

            The relationship between Asian Mothers and their daughters, as depicted in Asian fiction has certainly taught us that for Asian-Americans, being a daughter is no tea party.  That hostility is sometimes the deliberate action of a mother forcing herself to dislike a daughter who's destiny is to leave when she is married into another family.  Another portrayal is the Americanized daughter who must assume the parenting role in order to help the mother assimilate into a new country and the inherent resentments in such a position.  The third situation occurs is when the daughter is very successful in some endeavor and the mother resents the success or claims a significant level of ownership for the achievement itself. These combinations have been confused and compounded by the Asian culture and spiritual belief systems and have added a particular stress to the bonds of mothers and daughters under their influences.  I want to explore the episteme of the Asian experience in particular because it addresses the issues of karma, reincarnation, and spirit influences, the organizing principles and assumptions underlying the influences of Buddha and Confucius.  These philosophies cannot be seen as religions as much as influences of the thinking process of the particular relationship being studied in this paper.  . 

Some history of the spiritual impact on the thinking of the Asiatic peoples will augment this exploration. Confucianism dealt primarily with individual morality and ethics, and the proper exercise of political power by the rulers.  Together with its four Confucian principles: loyalty, filial piety, integrity, and righteousness, it became a primary spiritual influence in ancient Oriental culture.  It was spread through the many invasions and occupations which ravaged the Near Eastern lands during the rugged history of Asia itself.  

About 500 years before the Christian era, Siddhartha Gautama, introduced Buddhism to Central Asia.  Buddhism spread throughout Asia through trade routes. It was easily adapted to Chinese culture where Confucianism had already set up the idea that social obedience was absolute.  Buddhism taught that bad relationships and experiences were to be endured as karma.  Karma is the total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny.  The idea of reincarnation and the influence of the departed is strongly mixed in this philosophy also.

By looking at the big picture, we can see that each region took a piece here and there of both Buddhist and Confucian influences and formed separate belief systems, all in keeping with the oppressive self denial cultural specification. A simple moral to honor one's parents and ancestors without a hint of the ideals of individual liberty influenced the thinking for centuries. The teachings forwarded the idea that life is change and all change is suffering. 

This formed mothers into guardians of children's safety in Asian cultures as in no other cultures.  "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down," and "Don't say I am sorry, say I regret," are two sayings that give the Western world insight to the diminutive attitudes daughters were encouraged to take to save their lives.  In the Old World it made perfect sense but in America, that philosophy only served to put a deep chasm between mother and daughters. 

The traditional legend of Mu Lan illustrates a woman who fights for her father’s sake, and yet remains true to the Confucian expectation of womanhood. Fa Mu Lan was seen as something less by her culture bound father.   Mu Lan as a woman, is no more real to her father than a ghost thus, Mu Lan’s potential death signifies nothing more to her father than the potential absence of a silent being. 

Maxine Hong Kingston learned of Mu Lan through her mother's songs the poem is composed in the song form of "Yueh-fu."

At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story. After I grew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father's place in battle. Instantly, I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village. I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, giving me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up to be a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman. (Kingston 24)

The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan has inspired many Chinese women to defy traditional gender roles in order to cope with the invisibleness that their position in society demanded.  Although Maxine Hong Kingston has remained relatively private, we know she was born in California of Chinese immigrant parents.  Kingston elaborates on the mutual difficulties in communication between Chinese immigrants and their native born American children.  It appears that the relationship with her mother was one of miscommunication.  The thing that makes Hong Kingston's mother different than any of the others in this study is the fact that Mrs. Hong had, with the help of her father in China, had become a successful physician.  She financed her husband's passage to America to find a new life for them and their family.  Sadly, when Mrs. Hong joined her husband, she became a mother and wife in the old tradition and I believe that had a huge negative impact her self-esteem.  She had gone from a respected advisor to a slave and wife.  

Mrs. Hong wanted to connect with Maxine through the Chinese element of their lives while Maxine thought that true honesty should be the key to their communication.  Both having strong personalities, the links between mother and daughter became more apparent because they both possessed the ability to persist through any situation. Both women desired to be powerful and have the ability to make people listen to them and follow them.  Eventually, Maxine Hong Kingston accepted the Chinese heritage of her ancestors and she and her mother were able to patch the tear in their relationship.

            Six stories, from the author Amy Tan, elaborate the difficulties of immigrant mothers and their Americanized daughters.  Tan's parents fled communist China and had come to the United States shortly before she was born in Oakland, California.  Her mother expected her to become a neurosurgeon and pianist.  At first she complied but later she defied her mother by changing her major to English.  Tan's mother took this as a death between them. 

Tan's stories explore the tumultuous and soap operatic association between mothers and their only daughters.  Four relationships in The Joy Luck Club, a single relationship in The Bonesetters Daughter, and another single relationship in The Kitchen God's Wife, embody the daughter and mother format. The generation conflicts and resolutions take different paths but the underlying similarities are tied to the Confucian concepts of loyalty and filial piety mixed with the mothers' secrecy.  A secrecy imposed upon Asians so as not to dishonor their ancestors.   Each tale shares the same preoccupations of the four daughters in The Joy Luck Club making sense of a maddeningly enigmatic and strong-willed mother who is guarding an unsavory old-world secret. Each mother had something in her past of which she was ashamed and the daughters were to find out the secrets and then come to understand the mothers' inconsistencies and shortcomings. 

The keeping and living with the secrets and the attempt to hold on to fading memories of their lives in China, lead the mothers to irratic and seemingly bizarre behavior which confused the daughters. As caregivers in the New World, the mothers pretty much failed their daughters. .  Both Kingston and Tan write of the gulfs of silence and incomprehension between generations of mothers and daughters.

Elaine H. Kim, professor of Asian American Studies at Berkley, underlines salient historical events as one of the contributors to the typical Asian mother daughter relationship. She states that it is not unusual for Asian Mothers to give supernatural powers to their daughters.  For instance, in Lan Cao's The Monkey Bridge, the mother thought that Mai could commune with the dead ancestors and demanded that Mai give her answers to what the ancestors were saying.  The Monkey Bridge, which is probably the first novel by a Vietnamese-American about the immigrant experience -- depicts generational angst worthy of an Amy Tan novel.  The tale shares the same preoccupations of the four daughters in The Joy Luck Club that being making sense of a maddeningly paradoxical and culture bound mother who's protecting a secret of impropriety from the Old World.  

The theory of Karma alluded to in The Monkey Bridge is a Buddhist theory. Where the mother believes that the ancestor's bad luck is influencing the life her mother was being faced with in America.  She is convinced that the sins of the ancestor's father are visited upon them in their new environment.   

Lydia Minatoya is a Japanese American author.  She wrote The Strangeness of Beauty which is a story of three generations of Japanese women, pre-WWII.   It contains fascinating information about Japanese history and culture. She was also a contributor to the Growing up Asian American anthology compiled by Maria Hong.  This anthology contains stories of childhood, adolescence, and coming of age in America, from the 1800's to the 1990's by thirty-two Asian American writers.

Minatoya says many Japanese Americans did not believe the American Dream was not for them.  Her mother practiced her okoto, taught classes in fashion design, and made use of her sewing machine while she was in the interment camp.  The older generation bore the humiliation with pride for the sake of the children.  Coming from a land ravaged by earthquakes and volcanoes, the Japanese have evolved a view of the world of a cooperative, stoic, almost magical way of thinking.  Get along, work hard, and never quite see the things that can bring you pain.  (Hong 111)

In it Lydia says the Japanese American mother daughter relationship was one of hope and encouragement.  Her parents gave her an American name and nourished her with the dream of opportunity, will, and transformation.   

            In conclusion, we find this reverence for their ancestry, culture and ancient religions is the final link between the brave American daughters and their Asian mothers. It becomes an interesting exploration of the power of memory and myth, and the strength of love between mother and child.

Works Cited

Buddhism and Buddha Art. The Life of Buddha in Legend and Art. Article of the Month - May 2000  http://www.buddhart.com

Kim, Elaine H.  Asian American Literature and the Importance of Social Context.    http://adfl.org/bulletin/n080/080034.htm

Kingston, Maxine Hong.  The Warrior Woman: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books. 1977

Minatoya, Lydia Y.  The Strangeness of Beauty.  New York: Simon and Schuster.  1999.

Minatoya, Lydia Y. The Importance of Name.  Growing Up Asian American. Ed. Maria Hong. Avon Books. 1993.

Tan, Amy. The Bonesetter's Daughter.  New York: Random. 2001.