Abstract—Asian-American women have been stereotyped
and considered as victims of social injustice in the history of
immigration into the United States. The theme of immigrant
experience has been recurrent in the writings of female
Asian-American writers, reflecting the cultural and female
consciousness of Asian-American women. This paper aims to
illustrate how three Asian-American women writers, Bharati
Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Hisaye Yamamoto, empower
the Asian-American women under their pens through nostalgia.
Three pieces of works of these writers are brought under
textual analysis to show how these female Asian-American
authors utilize the unique cultural consciousness in the form of
nostalgia to entitle power to fictional Asian-American women.
This kind of empowerment is read to be a way of the authors to
confidently confront their own cultural identity in the
multicultural context of the states, hence empowering their own
selves.
Index Terms—Asian-American short stories,
Asian-American women writers, cultural identity, nostalgia.
T. K. Wong is with the School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong (e-mail: wtkjournals@gmail.com).
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Cite: Tin Kei Wong, " Empowering Asian-American Women through Nostalgia: Power of Female Protagonists in Jasmine, Mrs. Sen’s and Seventeen Syllables," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 5, no. 12, pp. 1072-1075, 2015.