Fu-jen Chen

The Parallax Gap in Gish Jen's The Love Wife: The Imaginary Relationship between First-World and Third-World Women

ABSTRACT Focusing on the relationship among three women (Blondie, Lan, and Mama Wong) in Gish Jens The Love Wife, we shall explore the imaginary binary relationship between Blondie and Lan and the gaze of the (m)Other (Mama Wong) involved in the binary relationship. We are engaged in an arduous query—how does one deal with the Other woman, her otherness?—that can be explicated and linked to a larger social context: the relation between Western and Third-World women.

Maternal Voices in Personal Narratives of Adoption

Across disciplines including literature, anthropology, psychology, law, politics, and social work, there is a rapidly growing body of scholarship on adoption. With the expansion of the global economy, transnational adoption has emerged as a serious subfield of study over the past decade in the United States—the “Adoption Nation,” as journalist Adam Pertman has called it. Transnational adoption, which is the adoption of children of foreign birth, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. Following major wars such as World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War, U.S. adoption of children from Asia and parts of Europe increased. Immediately after the Korean War, a large number of mixed-race children of South Korean women and American soldiers were adopted into American families. For more than three decades, families and individuals in the United States adopted children primarily from South Korea; to date, South Korea has sent approximately 150,000 Korean children for adoption to the United States, making it the largest group of adoptees in the country. It was not until the 1988 Seoul Olympics that the number of Korean international adoptions declined rapidly because the Korean government was embarrassed with its reputation as a baby exporter.1 Since 1992, adoptions from China have rapidly increased after the Chinese government enacted a law ratifying international adoption. Due to the one-child policy, poverty, and disability, many families place their children in orphanages or for adoption. China is currently the world’s leading source of international adoption and provides the most children for adoption in the United States. In this sense, transnational adoption has emerged out of war and is “shaped by the forces of colonialism, the Cold war, and globalization” (Briggs and Marre 2). The discourse of adoption is, on the whole, gendered as feminine: those involved in adoption—including orphanage administrators, social workers, organization staff caregivers, and foster nurturers—are largely female, as are many of those—such as academics, writers, and readers—who have voiced concerns. Indeed, as Marianne Novy maintains, “Adoption is a more salient issue for women” than for men (9). There is a stunning volume of maternal voices speaking about adoption, including adoptive mothers as adoption experts or biographers and birth mothers as memoir writers. The current boom, particularly in personal narratives, reflects the dominance of confessional writing in today’s literary market, the changing

Body and Female Subjectivity in Cathy Song’s Picture Bride

Identified as a Hawaiian, a Korean-American, or a ChineseAmerican Poet, Cathy Song was born to a Korean-American father and a Chinese-American mother in 1955 in Honolulu, where she has spent most of her life and now lives with her husband and children. Despite having her maternal and paternal grandparents from China and Korea, Cathy Song first demonstrated her talent at the age of eleven by writing a “spy novel,” short stories with blonde heroines, and imaginary interviews with movie stars. Continuing to write in high school, Song worked with poet John Unterecker at the University of Hawaii for two years and then left for Wellesley College, where she earned a degree in English literature. Then she entered the master’s program in creative writing at Boston University, where she received an M.A. degree in 1981. She later attended the Advanced Poetry Workshop conducted by Kathleen Spivak. In 1987, along with her husband, a physician, and their children, she returned to live in Hawaii to teach creative writing at the University of Hawaii while also working for Bamboo Ridge Press with other local writers. Her first book-length manuscript, Picture Bride, was selected by Poet Richard Hugo from among 625 manuscripts as the winner of the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards for young poets. The manuscript was published by Yale University in 1983 and also was nominated for