In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing

Unwilling to see Asian American women silenced beneath the noisy discourses of feminists, cultural nationalists, and Eurocentric historians, Wendy Ho turns to specific spoken stories of mothers and daughters. Against reductive tendencies of scholarship, she places her own conversations with her China-born grandmother and her U.S.-born mother and her own readings of other Asian American women writers. She finds in the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Fae Myenne Ng not only complex mother-daughter relationships but many-faceted relationships to fathers, family, community, and culture. Always resisting the simplistic explanations, In Her Mother’s House brings Asian American women’s experience as mothers and daughters to the forefront of gender and ethnicity.