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Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature by Ninh Erin Khue New York University Press , 2011, 224 pp.
Book Reviews
In its investigation of intergenerational conflict and the dynamics of the immigrant family, Erin Khue Nihn's Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature returns to familiar critical territory in the field, but raises new, intriguing questions. The book's propelling question is: why are second-generation Asian American daughters so often represented in the language of trauma, pain, suffering, and anger, despite the relatively comfortable and mundane conditions of their upbringing? Turning to well-studied texts such as Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance, and others, Ninh suggests that attention to the phenomenology of what she calls the "immaterial suffering" in these texts has been overlooked by scholars, in part because these texts have become so easy to dismiss. Branded by critics as commercial writing or as too complicit with the myth of the Asian American model minority, these texts, Ninh argues, do not fit easily within current paradigms of Asian American cultural criticism, which tend to valorize...