Mothering across Languages and Cultures in Ying Chen's Letters to Her Children

Abstract

focussed on identity in contemporary British and French women's writing, was a finalist in the Best PhD Awards Lithuania in 2011. It was published in Lithuanian as Svetimos ir Savos (Strange and Familiar Selves) in 2012. Her current research examines what it means to mother in a culturally and linguistically foreign environment through literary narratives of mothering in migration in transnational women's writing. Mothering Across Languages and Cultures in Ying Chen's Letters to her Children Due to intensifying global mobility, increasing numbers of women find themselves mothering in countries that are linguistically and culturally foreign to them, dealing with issues related to multilingualism, shifting identities, and to belonging. The essays La lenteur des montagnes (The Slowness of the Mountains, 2014) and 'Lettre d'Umbertide' (Letter from Umbertide, 2004) by the Chinese born Canadian author Ying Chen provides a brilliant example. Using recent research on contemporary Asian women's writing in diaspora, notions of écriture migrante as well as nomadic consciousness as a framework, this article will explore how Chen's essay envisions what it means and what it feels like to be a mother of Chinese origin in contemporary Canada. In the process, this article will also contribute to a wider understanding of the condition of migrant mothering and touch upon critical debates around literatures of mobility. 1

La mauvaise foi suicidaire dans L’ingratitude (1995) de Ying Chen : comment se libérer des legs du passé ?

“…Elle trouve ainsi agressif que d'autres tentent de lire sa littérature sur fond de schémas ethniques et l'interprète comme le but même de son "inquiétude existentielle" (QM 42) 37 qui consiste à refuser toute localisation unilatérale. "The self that Chen thus constructs for herself is non-binary, non-fixed, multilingual, multicultural and complex" 38 . Toutefois, elle n'attribue pas cette subjectivité nomade aux seuls migrants, mais considère comme anthropologique le désir dialectique de mettre en balance "s'envoler" et "s'enraciner".…”