In its investigation of intergenerational conflict and the dynamics of the immigrant family, Erin Khue Nihn’s Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature returns to familiar critical territory in the field, but raises new, intriguing questions. The book’s propelling question is: why are second-generation Asian American daughters so often represented in the language of trauma, pain, suffering, and anger, despite the relatively comfortable and mundane conditions of their upbringing? Turning to well-studied texts such as 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 others, Ninh suggests that attention to the phenomenology of what she calls the “immaterial suffering” in these texts has been overlooked by scholars, in part because these texts have become so easy to dismiss. Branded by critics as commercial writing or as too complicit with the myth of the Asian American model minority, these texts, Ninh argues, do not fit easily within current paradigms of Asian American cultural criticism, which tend to valorize literature that challenges hegemonies of power more explicitly.

Seeking, therefore, to reinvest the figure of the daughter in these texts with political significance, Ninh argues that the discourse of Asian American intergenerational conflict “appears apolitical only when its language of filiality and affect . . . is allowed to be spoken in isolation from the politics of family” (6). By paying close attention to the micro-aggressions and disciplinary discourses of the family, Ninh uncovers insidious, and often invisible, forms of violence that produce the subjection of the Asian American daughter. Each chapter in the book focuses on a specific form of discursive violence that gets enacted by the family and internalized and absorbed by the daughter. In the first chapter on Jade Snow Wong’s memoir, Ninh argues that the Asian American family functions as a form of “capitalist enterprise” in which the daughter becomes enslaved by a kind of debt-bondage, forever accruing debt just by virtue of being born and being alive (2). A particularly fascinating aspect of this chapter is the analogy that Ninh draws between the systems of filial debt that oppressively bind the Asian American daughter to her parents and those of peonage that have historically exploited the labor of Asian American migrants. Although not necessarily bearing a cause-effect relation, Ninh offers this homology of micro- and macro-capitalist enterprises that have powerfully shaped Asian American identity through the process of “recruiting labor into wages that advertise but cannot ‘earn’ autonomy or its privileges” (38). Chapter 2 offers a fresh perspective on Kingston’s much-studied text The Woman Warrior, illustrating how the family can also operate through a disciplinary logic akin to that of sovereign power. Like the sovereign who wields the power of banishment and bare life over his subjects, the parental figures in Kingston’s text leverage a constant threat of disownment on the daughter figure, conditioning and producing in her a devastating sense of provisionality. The challenge of expressing such immaterial pain gets worked out, Ninh argues, through Kingston’s deliberately circuitous and fragmented narrative form. Chapters 3 and 4 make closely related arguments about the extreme forms of rebellion (e.g., drug addictions, suicide, running away from home, and sexual promiscuity) that Asian American daughters adopt in the face of oppressive parental control. Ninh suggests that these masochistic acts are underwritten by the daughters’ desire to reclaim their autonomous selves, paradoxically, through a form of self-destruction.

What struck me in reading Ingratitude was the sense of subjective experience that productively informs the analysis throughout. The writing is intimate and personally engaging, but the book never comes across as simply an autobiographical exercise. Although written for an academic audience, Ingratitude should also easily resonate with generalist readers, especially those who have at some level felt the sting of the immigrant family’s often invisible, yet suffocating, discipline. The book’s endeavor to investigate the figure of the daughter in Asian American literature is perhaps a little weakened by the fact that six out of seven of the primary texts selected by Ninh are by writers of Chinese American descent. Ninh addresses this limitation in the conclusion of the book by explaining that the project began more than ten years ago when Chinese American texts dominated the field. It would be fascinating to see how Ninh’s concept of the debt-bound daughter is inflected in texts written by the newer generation of Southeast Asian or West Asian authors, both in America and in other sites in the Asian diaspora. An original and generative contribution to the field of Asian American studies and ethnic studies, Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature lays an important critical foundation for future studies.