Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature

Anger and bitterness pervade many a narrative by second-generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. In Ingratitude, erin Khue Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repayment all the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority.
Through readings of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance and other texts, Ninh offers -- not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as -- an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. She connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection.

2013 winner of the Literary Studies Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.