Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature by erin Khuê Ninh

Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature Reviews

• 
  Jenna

  ‎"It's not really unreasonable, is it,
  If every time I pay them a visit
  My family presents me with a bill
  Overdue and unreceipted still?
  I'll pay it if it kills me, and it will."
  
  -Canadian poet Daryl Hine
  
  I read this book as a sort of tonic after tackling one of the most hyped books of the year, Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." Granted, Ninh's is a very different kind of book from Chua's: for starters, Ninh's is not a general-interest work, but a work of literary theory, crammed with multisyllabic academic words like "liminality" and frequent allusions to Foucault. And, to prove her points, Ninh marshals evidence not from personal experience but from literary texts, ranging from Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior" to other lesser-known works.
  
  The central argument of Ninh's book is that the Asian-American nuclear family unit (in particular, the quintessential version in which the parents are immigrants and the children are so-called "second-generation Americans") functions as an arm of the conservative capitalist hegemony, in that it shares the hegemony's goal of shaping its offspring into docile citizens and obedient laborers, destined for lucrative careers in professional-managerial fields. According to Ninh, the main mythos that the Asian-American family perpetuates in order to achieve this goal is the mythos of the "filial debt." This is, interestingly, a mythos that Amy Chua herself invokes in "Battle Hymn":
  
  "Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything [because] the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children.... Jed actually has the opposite view. 'Children don't choose their parents,' he once said to me. 'They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them...'" ("Battle Hymn," p. 53).
  
  Ninh argues that, by embracing a mythos in which the children are led to believe that they owe their progenitors an insurmontable debt, the Asian-American family unit maintains a peonage-like economic framework that enables it to further its above-mentioned agenda. As a consequence, the Asian-American family's offspring is apt to experience a "maddeningly immaterial suffering" that CANNOT be explained away by such not-quite-fitting concepts as "child abuse" or "mental illness." Ninh argues that this "immaterial suffering" is analogous to the concept of "insidious trauma" described in feminist psychoanalytic texts such as Laura Brown's. Brown, a psychoanalyst, posits that all women who live in a society in which rape is a constant threat are victims of a milder version of the trauma that actual rape victims experience; Ninh builds upon this idea, positing that children who live in a family in which disownment is an ever-present threat are subjected to an "insidious" kind of suffering, too. An intelligent, well-argued counter-perspective.
• 
  ren

  I had the very delightful opportunity to attend erin's talk about the book, about how she was motivated to start writing it and the backstory of her mental illness, before I read it, and I think it greatly influenced my reading experience. That, and my own personal experience with many of the behaviors erin picks out of the studied texts helped me establish an actual emotional investment in the topics she touches on, and I actually felt like I was able to understand better and with more ease the intricate analyses and arguments in the book precisely because of that emotional investment. That being said, erin does a fantastic job with the execution as well-- her points are cogently presented and argued, the organization is easy to follow and makes perfect logical sense, and I like how she provides mini disclaimers along the way to narrow down the theories she uses so that they can be better applied to interpreting the texts. On another note, she mentioned in her talk that she purposefully made the language a bit inaccessible so that her mother wouldn't be able to understand it too well, which I have mixed feelings about, but once I started reading it I got used to the language after a while. I really enjoyed reading this!
• 
  Anna

  Ingratitude asks and answers the question: "what specifically is the cause of suffering for second-gen Asian American women, in otherwise materially secure upbringings?"
  On a personal level, I couldn't NOT appreciate this book. On a theory level, this is well worth the read. Ninh does an impressive job of carefully breaking down the elements similar to all these literary examples to show the structures underlying them all. This analysis, focused specifically on girls and women, is so necessary, when one considers the way that second-generation Asian American women and girls have been blamed for all sorts of things.
  
  Ninh's successful overarching argument is actually economic--she suggests that the immigrant family's assimilation into N. American capitalist circumstances is what creates and maintains the uniquely devastating position of daughters. Namely, daughters are forever "indebted" to their parents for the economic sacrifice of their birth and cost of upbringing--with the rise of access to education becoming a further demand and debt to be paid. With this unpayable debt hanging over their heads, daughters are subjected to panopticon-like surveillance and often literally confined to the home, with the threat of disownment to keep them in line and maintain their self-policed obedient behaviour. It is then a psychological prison that causes the immense "immaterial suffering" of the daughters. Ninh points out the impossibility of ever thriving, when the "model" of success to their parents is necessarily an unreachable standard of perfection, an indentured servitude for which interest is impossibly high, and even freedom is a punishment in itself, in the form of material denial, being cast out of the family, social ostracization, and most insidiously, self-inflicted punishment including suicide.
  
  Some unique ideas I came across that resonated with me...
  The threat of banishment at any time is held over the daughters in an "all or nothing" way: no transgression is possible, because there are no "degrees of banishment."
  The upwardly mobile aspirations of the parents manifest in their strict control over the daughters' sexuality and movement/time (in order to maintain the family's "good name"), but fail in their attempts to socially and culturally integrate through consumerism: spending money on "frivolous" things like movies, clothes, and eating out, is contrary to the economic model of the family, and yet completely necessary to N. American social interaction. Denied these social experiences, the daughters go out into the world lacking social skills and cultural status, despite their parents' textbook efforts at assimilation through education.
  Ninh also points out how the daughters' freedom of movement and ideas are constantly controlled through the threat of "wastefulness." They cannot leave the house, because that leads to wasting money, and they cannot stop working on studies, chores, or music practice, because any free time is a form of "wasting" the family resources. Ninh even argues that classical music training (which may be an attempt to achieve Western social/cultural capital) has more to do with controlling the girl's time management and confining her to the domestic space, than creativity.
  
  The use of cautionary tales is another insidious form of control upon the daughters. The tales always include a young woman, similar in some way to the daughter, who steps out of her parents' control and ends up dead, by her own self-punishment. In combination with the threat of banishment, the daughters are faced with a non-choice: banishment by from the family, or self-banishment which leads to death anyway.
  
  There is a lot of discuss around this book, which is neatly focused on a few choice literary subjects, including Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and Runaway by Evelyn Lau. I would love to read more about different nationalities and cultures' portrayal of daughters, but this book is more successful for its focus on mostly Chinese American examples.
  
  There's a great interview with the author here, in which she summarises and expands on some of the concepts in the book. It's actually very moving, even though the book is very much written for an academic audience.
  
  http://newbooksinasianamericanstudies...
• 
  Libby

  Stretched the boundaries of what I conceptualize to be possible in Asian American literary analysis -- written with such a glow, such tenderness, such scholarly control, such visionary turns of phrases and argument and understanding. I adore this book, and am more thankful than I can say that it was written. It's inspired me to keep studying this canon but not for this canon's own sake.