Diasporic Recuperation of Ethnological Selfhood Betwixt Mother and Daughter in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter

Abstract

The Multiethnic adherence of the newcomers towards their ancestral and adopted ethnologies brings distress to their existence in the alienland.  They agonize greatly to disentangle themselves from their individuality which is socially and authentically build.  Consequently they supervene ancestral customs of their parental lineage in the newly acquired land, meanwhile they also embrace the rituals of the adopted nation.  They dwell in the in-between space, concurrently straddling amidst two divergent ethnologies. The encounters of the first and second generation of settlers varies in this luminal space.  This research paper scrutinizes the ethnological affiliations of the daughter with her Chinese mother and her ancestral lineage, who is the America.  At the same time, the mother who is the first generation of immigrant suffers being in the luminal space.  She being unable to refrain herself from her own parental customs also exhibits a readiness to follow the culture of the newly acquired land for her daughter’s sake, which makes her cultural existence to be traumatized.