From C.Y. Lee to Shawn Wong: The Transnational Family and its Implicit Rules

Employing the distinction between explicit and implicit rules as formulated by psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek, this article examines the way in which challenges toward an initial rule-based fantasy take place within transnational families. In particular, the article employs an implicit, unwritten rules framework to assess the effect of transpacific migration on the institution of family within the Chinese American diaspora as represented in post-World War II fiction by Asian Pacific authors C.Y. Lee and Shawn Wong. Suggesting five implicit rules underpinning Chinese American families, the article examines Lee’s The Flower Drum Songto highlight early challenges to these rules before finding in Wong’s Homebasean unflinching adherence to an implicit rule concerning reverence for ancestors. Wong has the advantage of writing in the wake of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and of being in a position to trace more and more challenges to the initial fantasy following later waves of transpacific migration. His novel American Kneesis then shown to epitomize the implicit rules being stretched almost to breaking point as, for instance, the criteria for spouse selection becomes no longer Chinese or partially Chineseor even Asian or partially Asian but Americanization.