Mothers and Daughters

This chapter examines the representation of mother–daughter relationships in contemporary Chinese diasporic writing, with particular attention to Chinese Australian women’s narratives. Situating these texts within feminist, postcolonial, and diasporic theoretical frameworks, the chapter explores how race, gender, ethnicity, class, and migration intersect to shape female subjectivity across generations. In societies structured by patriarchal Confucian traditions and further complicated by Western racial hierarchies, the mother–daughter dyad becomes a crucial site for negotiating identity, cultural memory, and belonging. Through close readings of Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo, Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem, and Micheline Lee’s The Healing Party, this chapter analyses how daughters narrate their mothers’ silences, traumas, and compromises while simultaneously reconstructing their own hybrid identities. These narratives reveal the tensions between filial obligation and individual autonomy, assimilation and cultural inheritance, maternal authority and female agency. Unlike earlier Chinese American paradigms that often resolve diasporic fragmentation through symbolic returns to the homeland, Chinese Australian texts resist essentialised notions of “home” and instead portray identity as unstable, relational, and continually negotiated. The chapter argues that the act of narrating the mother’s story becomes a transformative process through which daughters confront inherited trauma, internalised misogyny, and racial marginalisation. By “world-travelling” into their mothers’ histories, daughters move beyond rejection or replication towards critical recognition. In doing so, they challenge both patriarchal Confucian structures and white feminist hegemonies, articulating alternative models of womanhood grounded in multiplicity and diasporic hybridity. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that mother–daughter narratives in Chinese Australian writing function not merely as family stories, but as political and cultural interventions. They reclaim marginalised female genealogies, destabilise nationalist and essentialist constructions of identity, and foreground relational subjectivity as central to diasporic feminist self-definition.