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

erin Khuê Ninh is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Communication about Ingratitude is welcome at facebook.com/Ingratitude.book.

"In considering Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989), Catherine Lau's Oriental Girls Desire Romance (1997), and other works, the author looks at intergenerational conflict as a ste of power, an inequality which Asian American subjectivity and identity has been constituted." (J.R. Wendlanad Choice)

"Ninh's study takes the figure of the second-generation Asian American daughter, familiar to most readers through the popular trope of the mother-daughter relationship, to brilliantly show how this figure necessitates a reading of the nuclear family as a special form of capitalist enterprise." (American Literature)

"Deftly cognizant of the relationship between the filial and the financial, Ingratitudeseamlessly moves between well-known works and less-discussed memoirs. This archive, explored over the course of four chapters, enables Ninh to 'reconstruct the processes by which diligent, docile immigrants' daughters are produced.'" (Cathy J. Schlund-Vials College Literature)

"Ninh makes a valuable contribution to Asian American Studies as well as gender/women's studies when she brings critical insight to gender-specific readings of the Asian American daughter, exploring the nuances of how familial structures of feelings and structures of power construct and produce the disciplined, docile, and chaste daughter." (Catherine H. Nguyen Amerasia Journal)

"erin Khuê Ninh is insistent and persuasive in drawing our attention to the ways that race, economy, and power saturate the Asian American family and, within it, the place of daughters. Ingratitude is also an assertive, stylish, and elegant work of criticism, offering new insights into well-read texts while making the case for reading more closely lesser-known stories." (Viet Nguyen,author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America)