Kinship, Migration, and the Chinese American Immigrant Family Narrative

Abstract

Abstract The Asian American immigrant family narrative has been extensively discussed in relation to white domesticity and assimilation by critics who emphasize the unique conditions of Asian racialization in North America. Departing from this approach, this essay considers how the immigrant family narrative depicts kinship structures that were instrumental in sustaining the lifeworld of Chinese migrants during and in the aftermath of the exclusion period (1882–1943). Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, I argue that the appropriation of pre-existing kinship structures played a crucial role in the exploitation of Chinese migrants by sustaining a transnational remittance economy that tied migrants to their locations of origin. Through an extended reading of the opening chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), I trace how the text depicts the communal and intimate consequences of this social structure. Kingston’s detailed knowledge of migrant kinship relations stands in contrast with her professed confusion about Chinese culture and identity, a tension that underscores the text’s combination of speculative narrative and historical realism. … the immigrant family narrative conveys the global operations of capital even if, or more precisely because, it subordinates depictions of recognizably “economic” tropes—labor, wages, remittances, and so on—to the ostensibly private realm of family relations.