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

Abstract

Due to intensifying global mobility, increasing numbers of women find themselves mothering in countries that are linguistically and culturally foreign to them. They must deal with issues related to multilingualism, shifting identities and 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 provide a vivid example. Using recent research on contemporary Asian women's writing in the diaspora and notions of écriture migrante (‘migrant writing’) as well as nomadic consciousness as a framework, this article explores how Chen's essays envision what it means and feels like to be a mother of Chinese origin in contemporary Canada. This work proffers wider understandings of the condition of migrant mothering as it touches on critical debates around literatures of mobility.

Keywords:

• migration
• mobility
• motherhood
• twenty-first-century women’s writing

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of this special issue for their insightful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Before then, mothers were mostly represented through the eyes and discourses of others: ‘sons, daughters, husbands, lovers’ (Rye 2009: 13).

2 Rye chooses the word ‘mothering’ over ‘motherhood’ and ‘maternity’ for ‘its ability to privilege the multiple experiences of mothers’ (Rye 2009: 31–2). The distinction between motherhood as institution and motherhood as experience was made by Adrienne Rich in her 1976 classic text Of Woman Born. It is now common to refer to ‘motherhood’ as a socially, historically, culturally and ideologically constructed status or identity, and ‘mothering’ as an individual practice that is not even dependent on gender (see, for example, O’Reilly 2016).

3 ‘Migrant’ here is used as a general term to designate people's movement from one country to another, and implicitly includes all forms of migration, such as refugeedom, economic migration and expatriation, as well as political and voluntary exile.

4 The French Concession is the area of Shanghai that was once designated for the French, consisting of today’s Luwan and Xuhui Districts.

5 Chen's text entitled ‘Lettre d’Umbertide’, written to her elder son, Yann, anticipated the themes and structure of La Lenteur des montagnes.

6 Although the book is dedicated to both her sons: ‘To Lee, and also to Yann, who knows how to read what is neither said nor written’. Here and throughout the article, the translations from the French are mine.

7 Chen's children were born in Quebec and brought up bilingual (French, Chinese). From ‘Lettre d’Umbertide’, we learn that her elder son started learning English at school. We can assume the same for her younger son, Lee.

8 All the texts in La Lenteur des montagnes have been previously published in one way or another (Parker 2016b).

9 Rodgers explores nomadic sensibility in Chen's work that precedes La Lenteur des montagnes (Rodgers 2015).

10 Chen refers to Chinese in relation to her children as their langue maternelle—that is to say, their ‘mother tongue’. However, since, according to some perspectives, their mother tongue is French, I call Chinese their mother's native language here.

11 In her response to this essay, Parker makes the same point: ‘Only two things bind her [Chen] to the place where she was born, her parents and language, emotional ties in both cases’ (Parker 2016b: 159).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lithuanian Research Council [grant number VP1-3.1-ŠMM-01-V-02-004].