The Shifting Connotations of “Home” in Mother-Daughter Narrative in Post-1990s Chinese American Fiction

“Home” merits a special niche in Asian/Chinese American mother-daughter narrative, wherein Asian/Chinese American women writers consistently represent mother-daughter dyads in the context of “home”, investing it with multifaceted significance. This paper examines the shifting connotations of “home” in mother-daughter narrative in post-1990s Chinese American fiction. Through a comparative reading of three post-1990s works and two pre-1990s counterparts, it charts the transformation of “home” and contextualizes it in relation to the American social-political circumstances as well as the authors’ experiential realities. It argues that whereas “home” functions predominantly as a symbol of traditional Chinese culture in pre-1990s works, it embodies emergent paradigms of diversity, de-racialization, and universality in post-1990s texts. Such shifts are intrinsically linked to the broader transitions in American social and demographic landscape, the ever-changing lived experiences of the Chinese American community, particularly Chinese American women in the new era.