'The East is Where Things Begin': Writing the Ancestral Homeland in Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston

Abstract

Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston engage with the dialectic of Chinese-American identity through processes of cultural self-empowerment, yet also undermine such work through self-orientalizing tendencies within their writing. In Kingston's early work and throughout Tan's oeuvre, China is repeatedly figured as an imaginary homeland replete with recurrent, often negative, stereotypes. Such treatment recalls Edward Said's classic formulations of orientalism, particularly when these writers deploy ‘haunting memories’ and ‘remarkable experiences’ of the ancestral homeland. Their narrative strategies – in which China is so often privileged over America – call into question both authors’ insistence that they be considered as pre-eminently American writers. Moreover, their texts by no means represent the inevitable method of negotiating Chinese diasporic identities, as demonstrated by the work of Gish Jen and Timothy Mo, for example. While a substantial body of secondary literature exploring the work of Tan and Kingston exists, a sustained critique of the self-orientalizing inclinations of both writers in conjunction is missing. This forms the point of departure for this article, which attempts a fuller understanding of the texts in question by interrogating the trope of imagined Chinese homeland and the self-orientalizing literary techniques through which it finds expression.

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