A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

On the other hand, comfort foods or traditional special occasion foods mark ethnicity and
are always in danger of being co-opted for exoticization.
- The shadow: The ingestion of stereotypes tends to create a split or doubled self. The
subsequent outward projection of Asianness results in a ‘racial shadow.’ Just like any
FOB (‘fresh off the boat’) immigrant, Kingston’s “quiet girl represents that residue of
racial difference which dooms Chinese Americans to a position of inferiority in a racist
society. It is this very irreducibility that most infuriates” (Wong 1993: 89). The intense
confrontation between narrator and ‘quiet girl’ is the attempt to force her-self to find a
voice: “I hated fragility. I walked around her, looked her up and down the way the
Mexican and Negro girls did when they fought, so tough. […] ‘If you don’t talk, you
can’t have a personality’” (Kingston 1989: 176-80). Another shadow that haunts
Kingston’s narrator is her midwife mother’s helper, the perfect Chinese girl, useful and
obedient, which she can never measure up to: “‘I would not have sold a daughter such as
that one,’ she told us. […] The unsold slaves must have watched them with envy. I watch
them with envy. My mother’s enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl” (82).
Imagining herself as the legendary swordswoman Fa Mu Lan, model of “perfect filiality,”
her real life is filled with helpless raging against both the alleged Chinese notion of the
superfluity of girls, and America’s ubiquitous racism: “Nobody in history has conquered
and united both North America and Asia. […] When I visit the family now, I wrap my
American successes around me like a private shawl; I am worthy of eating the food” (49-
52).
- Mobility: While both the westward movement and upward mobility are central to the
American imagination, Asian American experience is marked by forced immobility,
coerced movement, and aimless looping (Bulosan’s itinerant workers cover a lot of
ground but do not get ‘anywhere,’ while Chinese detainment at Angel Island as well as
Japanese internment are examples of historical inequities at work). This often results in
either metaphors of confinement or imaginative flights. Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan chapter
begins with her narrator musing: “Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to
have their feet bound” (19). But the girl longs for freedom, a transcendence of limitations:
“I ran and, not stepping off a cliff at the edge of my toes and not hitting my forehead
against a wall, ran faster. A wind buoyed me up over the roots, the rocks, the little hills.
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