Globalization and "Asian Values": Teaching and Theorizing Asian American Literature

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Shu, Yuan

Rather than answering these questions from the outset and addressing Tan's strategy in representing "Chinese values," I decided to defer them for the moment and solicited more responses from students. Most students had not thought much about Tan's way of representing "Chinese values," but instead they identified themselves with the second-generation daughters in terms of the point of view. They interpreted the mother-daughter relationship in the first narrative titled "The Joy Luck Club" as a power struggle between the mother as a "control freak" who showed no sign of compassion or understanding of her child and the daughter as an Americanized woman who had tried to articulate her own freedom and independence without following her parent's guide or advice. When 1 asked how the mother tried to control the daughter, students responded by stating that the mother did so by disseminating "Chinese values" to the daughter. As I told students to locate and explain those values, they noticed that "Chinese values" in the text were actually flexible in the way the mother introduced them and interpreted their meanings. One student speculated that this flexibility revealed the fact that these values were highly selective rather than randomly introduced and were meant to serve the mother's purpose in manipulating the daughter rather than getting any cultural message across.

While students were still debating whether the mother was manipulative or simply defensive in her new cultural environment, I called their attention to the fact that it was usually at the moment when the mother lost her sense of parental authority over her young, Americanized daughter as an inarticulate and incompetent Asian immigrant in the American context that she started preaching "Chinese values." Some students followed this line and suggested that teaching and promoting "Chinese values" were probably her only means of showing her cultural competence and authority in front of her Americanized daughter, whose thinking and behavior had been defined and endorsed by the dominant culture. Others argued that those "Chinese values" were actually the mother's personal values that she had gained from her own unfortunate experience in Chinese culture over the years and that she had really meant to help her daughter to substantiate her American Dream, which she herself would never be able to achieve because of her language and cultural barriers. Still others concluded that there were more similarities than differences between the mother and the daughter in the sense that the former had rebelled against her mother in Chinese society in exactly the same way that the latter had done to hers in American society. Students then returned to the initial question: what are "Chinese values"?

As we read more narratives told from the first person point of view of the immigrant mothers, I asked students to compare Tan's work with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which we had read early in the semester. One student argued that Tan had done a fairer job by allowing the immigrant mother to develop her own voice and giving us an opportunity to see the similarities and differences between the immigrant mother and the American daughter in different contexts whereas Kingston subjected the mother entirely to the opinionated interpretation and speculation of the daughter as the narrator of The Woman Warrior. The difference between these two strategies, she agreed further, was that the daughter's behavior and thought in Kingston's work were understood not just as Asian American but also as the perfect American norm whereas the daughter's comments and reactions in Tan's novel were actually put into some kind of perspective. A second student proposed that the mother in Kingston's work was contradictorily positioned because she sent her daughter confusing messages about the patriarchal system, whereas the mothers in Tan's work were more consistent when they taught their daughters why they themselves had rebelled against the Chinese patriarchal culture and how they had succeeded in developing their own voices. A third student recapitulated our class discussion by suggesting that the values in Tan's novel were both "Chinese" and "American." He elaborated his point by stating that the mothers and daughters in Tan's work had shared the same values that had worked in both Chinese and American contexts because both generations would speak up for their own minds, fight for their own rights, and work for their own dreams regardless of the hostile social and political circumstances. He concluded that these were exactly fundamental American values and ethics. In exploring "Chinese values" from concrete forms to abstract notions, students had finally passed the stage of looking for values and focused more on the appropriation of values and the context in which the values were situated.