L'ingratitude

L'ingratitude is the third novel by the Chinese-Canadian writer Ying Chen . L'ingratitude addresses the difficult relationship between mother and daughter. This novel describes a girl who dies under the wheels of a truck. Her suicide , by which she hoped to harm her mother by destroying the image of the good mother, failed.

content

action

The plot represents the life of Yan-Zi. The reflections in the hereafter complete the background of her life and trace the emotional world of Yan-Zi. The plan to commit suicide until Yan-Zi's death is recounted in a retrospective .

Yan-Zi's reflections in the hereafter

At the beginning of the narrative, one learns that the protagonist, Yan-Zi, is already dead. She watches her dead body being treated with contempt by undertakers in the morgue. She reflects on the shame of early death or suicide in Chinese society. A lost letter addressed to the mother and of great importance to Yan-Zi is mentioned. As Yan-Zi watches her grieving mother and grandmother, the mutual animosity between them becomes apparent. We also learn of the obviously disturbed relationship between Yan-Zi and her mother. The reasons and goals that led Yan-Zi to commit suicide are disclosed. According to Yan-Zi, her relationship with her mother required a brutal separation in order to escape her mother's influence and at the same time deny her any competence as a mother. The letter Yan Zi to be the rediscovered, has the intention to refer the mother to their stubbornness and their tyranny that have prevented their common happiness.

The narrator not only criticizes her parents, but also criticizes the restrictive Chinese virtues that led her to commit suicide. Yan-Zi's relationship with her grandmother is examined in more detail in the course of Yan-Zi's reflections in the afterlife. The grandmother is characterized by her joie de vivre and thus represents a counterpoint to her mother. Yan-Zi observes from the beyond a quarrel between her mother and grandmother about clothing when they were burned. The grandmother's obvious grief and the feeling that her mother has almost forgotten her are in contrast.

For Yan-Zi, the actual ceremony of burning her body is presented as a staging of her mother. She tries to emphasize her love for her daughter and to dispel the rumors about her suicide. Yan-Zi watches the guests who have come to enjoy a decent meal. In a self-talk in front of the ashes of her daughter, the mother reveals that the actual blow against her had no effect and that her daughter's silence at least seems more authentic than during her lifetime. She accuses her daughter of making a mistake for which she paid with her life.

At the end of the story, the reader learns how Yan-Zi died. She was run over by a truck. The manner of her death does not coincide with her plans. Only at the end of the story does the reader find out that she did not succeed in suicide. Thus her death appears under a completely different light, the actually hoped for effect of her death on her mother was destroyed. Yan-Zi realizes that she has escaped the hectic world and only through it can appreciate the new happiness. As her last impressions of the world fade, her last thought is with her mother.

The life of Yan Zi

Yan-Zi's life as her mother intended

The decision to commit suicide has already matured in Yan-Zi. She tries to write her farewell letter in the Bonheur restaurant. Her mother had forgotten her birthday again. Yan-Zi tried in vain to please her mother. All attempts to please her mother were viewed by her as hypocritical. Outsiders only asked about their parents' well-being, as if their existence depended on it. Meanwhile, her father lingers at his desk after an accident with a truck and is not interested in his family, but only in his work as an intellectual writer. As a result, Yan-Zi is forced to go on Sunday market excursions with her mother alone. This is how the narrator explains the mother's dependence on her and her addiction to control. Yan-Zi only saw her mother laugh once in her life when she surprised her while talking to a neighbor. Your mother believes that a good education requires authority. Yan-Zi's mother selected a son-in-law for Yan-Zi who insisted on having dinner with his future mother-in-law. The food becomes a test for Chun of whether he is worthy of the family. He passes it. We also learn that the mother had cut off the relationship with Yan-Zi's first great love. Submissiveness and respect for etiquette while eating make Chun sink in the appreciation of Yan-Zi. Even though Yan-Zi already has enough pills to commit suicide, she decides to let the Moon Festival pass. On this day she has the right to half a day off. She refuses Chun's offer to eat with his parents, even though it is very important to him. After the obligatory meal with her own family, Yan-Zi meets with Chun. They're going for a walk. Yan-Zi Chun offers himself during the walk. At first he looks perplexed and finally appeals to Yan-Zi to be sensible. He points out the preparations for their wedding. Yan-Zi then runs away, leaving Chun behind.

From compromise to suicide

During an outing with her work colleagues, Yan-Zi meets Bi, the fiancé of her work colleague Hua. Yan-Zi is drawn to the beauty of Bis. The concentration is now more bi than her mother. One day she is waiting in the Bonheur restaurant in the hope of an accidental reunion with Bi. In fact, Bi appears. Despite the inner turmoil due to the family dinner being missed in the evening, she goes out with Bi. She calls her mother and tells her she won't be coming to dinner. At first concerned about the consequences of her mother, she goes to the park with Bi. There she loses her innocence with him. When she gets home, her mother, who is already waiting, confronts Yan-Zi with the fact that she has gone out with a stranger. She threatens violence and death if Yan-Zi continues to disappoint her. After her father verbally abused Yan-Zi, Yan-Zi showed no respect for her father, and he was violent. Her mother reassures her father that Yan-Zi is not worth going to prison for her. Yan-Zi doesn't even believe that if her parents beat her to death, her parents would go to jail. After her father withdrew, Yan-Zi defiantly confesses to her mother that she slept with a man. In her mother's eyes, Yan-Zi is compromised and her future is blocked. Your mother looks destroyed. Yan-Zi can now leave the house. She feels liberated. Her existence means nothing to her mother anymore. Yan-Zi rejects her thoughts about leaving the city because she would always be asked about her family and her roots. In the office, Hua insults Yan-Zi for infidelity with her fiancé. The boss orders her to the office and gives her a written report of regrets or car criticism. When Uncle Pan asks for a room in the house, Yan-Zi pretends to have found an apartment. Uncle Pan has cancer and has to be in town for medical reasons. It is learned that her uncle, like her mother, never leaves a grain of rice in her bowl because of her and her parents' experiences with famine. Yan-zi does the same to them. Waste will not be tolerated. Yan-Zi hated living in her parents' bedroom. She packs her suitcase and initially lingers in the Bonheur restaurant. There she remembers a conversation with her mother in which her mother makes it clear that children will always be their parents' children. Because of this, her resolve to commit suicide remains. She writes the farewell letter to her mother. Without accommodation, Yan-Zi stays at the train station, where she realizes that it is the first time she is without her mother, with whom she has done everything beforehand and could not even make a decision herself. Back at the Bonheur restaurant, just before she was about to swallow her pills, Chun sees Yan-Zi. Yan-Zi thinks her mother sent him. She flees from him and is run over by a truck and dies.

characters

main characters

Yan-Zi

Yan-Zi is in the afterlife and reports on her life. Yan-Zi was 25 years old when she died. She worked in an office. Yan-Zi's activities are not described further. Yan-Zi could not dispose of her own salary. She had to give her earned money to her mother, who in turn took it to the bank to save a dowry for the marriage.

Yan-Zi's mother

Yan-Zi's mother's name is never mentioned. Practically nothing is learned about their identity. The mother is primarily characterized by her relationship with her daughter. She does not grant her daughter the right to a certain degree of independence, even when she turns 25. She controls her daughter's dealings and excursions and wishes to know everything that is going on in her daughter's head. The mother is convinced that her daughter is hers and wishes to see an image in her because she came out of her stomach. Because of this, she does not accept their differences and even forgets Yan-Zi's birthday every year as if she refused to see her daughter grow up and thus distance herself from her. The mother's possessive behavior seriously disrupts her relationship with her daughter.

Minor characters

• father

Yan-Zi's father is an "intellectual". He spends most of his time at the desk in her home. After an accident in which he was hit by a truck, he went to university less and less. His mental faculties seem to be affected, which is why the university administration has suggested that he retire early. Yan-Zi's father is primarily characterized by his disinterest in his wife and daughter.

• grandmother

For Yan-Zi, the grandmother of Yan-Zi represents a kind of antithesis to her mother.

• Chun

He is the mother foreseen husband for Yan-Zi. He made the acquaintance of her mother over a meal at Yan-Zi's house. He seems to be aware of the social conventions regarding the appearance towards his future mother-in-law and passes the "test". He refuses to accept Yan-Zi, whom he offers on an excursion. Immediately before the accident that resulted in Yan-Zi's death, he persecuted Yan-Zi. Yan-Zi describes him as her mother's accomplice.

• Seigneur Nilou

Seigneur Nilou is a kind of guardian of the afterlife. According to his grandmother's tales, he has a list of when people will die and when others will be born.

• Uncle Pan

Yan-Zi's uncle has been to town several times for hospital treatment. After being forced to stay in town due to the cancer diagnosis, he took over Yan-Zi's room.

• Bi

Bi is Hua's fiancé. With Bi, Yan-Zi loses her innocence in the park.

• Hua

Bi's fiancée is a work colleague of Yan-Zi's. She berated Yan-Zi after "flinging" with her fiancé in the office.

room

The space of the action is not exactly determined, but one can assume that it is a city in China. The main rooms are the parents' house, the Bonheur restaurant, the office and the park.

The parental home

Every night on the way to the bathroom, Yan-Zi's mother made sure that the door to the apartment was locked properly. The sound of the castle woke the whole family. For Yan-Zi, the house becomes a prison from which she cannot escape.

The park

In the park, Yan-Zi loses her virginity with Bi. In China, the park is a well-known place for lovers who meet there because of the lack of private space.

subjects

L'ingratitude deals with different topics related to Chinese society. Tradition plays an important role in the novel.

Mother-daughter relationship

The relationship between mother and daughter is shaped by the authority of Yan-Zi's mother. Yan-Zi believes that she only lived off her mother as a child. The mother is unable to recognize Yan-Zi's right to freedom, even when she turns 25. The mother is convinced that her daughter is hers because she came out of her stomach. She wants an image of herself. For this reason, she does not accept the differences that exist between her and her daughter. So she forgets Yan-Zi's birthday every year as if to deny that her daughter is getting older and moving away from her. The mother's overwhelming and decisive nature disrupts the relationship between mother and daughter.

The role of the sexes

In the society described by L'ingratitude , men are clearly in a dominant position. The role of women is determined by the hope of fulfilling their life in family life. Motherhood is not only the only fulfillment of a woman's fate, but also a sign of normality and affective and social maturity. A woman is said to be self-centered when she is not married and does not live up to her predestined role. In addition, women must always pay attention to their behavior and behavior. The teaching of social conventions is passed on from the mother to her daughter. Obedience is an essential quality of any future wife. While men are allowed to behave carelessly, women should be reserved. The main requirement is that they avoid scandals such as B. the loss of virginity, the loss of which could stand in the way of a proper marriage. The world described is self-contained because it allows the laws of the ancestors to persist and curtails the freedom of women.

Suicide

Ever since Yan-Zi realized that she was doomed to have a mother and a father, she had wanted to commit suicide. Her parents rob her of her freedom. Furthermore, she believes that her suicide is destroying her mother's purpose in life, which is to portray a perfect mother. The voluntary withdrawal from life in any case expresses the strong need for freedom.

shape

Narrative design

The novel L'ingratitude is a so-called first-person story . The narrator, Yan-Zi, is both the narrator and the protagonist of the story. As a result, chapters in the novel that deal with Yan-Zi's past life alternate with other chapters in which Yan-Zi observes her family in the present and ponders her own situation.

Time structure

The novel is characterized by an achronological narrative style. Yan-Zi, the narrator, tells about her own suicide from beyond the grave. The use of different temporalities allows the author to describe the motivations of her protagonists, who gradually matured the decision to commit suicide in her. The strong self-observing gaze is shaped by the obsessive curiosity about their own past.

Motifs

Images of hopelessness

To emphasize Yan-Zi's desperate situation, several images of captivity appear in the plant, which reinforce the impression of her mother's confinement. The parental home, e.g. B. appears to Yan-Zi like a prison from which she cannot escape. Her mother checks every night that the doors are properly locked.

The bird cage or the birds also have a symbolic meaning . Yan-Zi's mother raised birds in a bird cage before her child was born. Yan-Zi relates that the birds were no longer sufficient for their mother's vigor and that their mother therefore "designed" them and called them Yan-Zi. She thinks she has the name of a bird and identifies with the captured bird.

Similarities with other works of Ying Chen

Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe writes about the thematic classification of L'Ingratitude in Ying Chen's work: "Despite the continuous disappearance of referential clues, the novels L'Ingratitude (1995), Immobile (1998) and Le champs dans la mer (2002) each describe the state of today's Chinese society in their own way. They are permeated by social discourse and could also be described as family novels or narratives about ancestry. "

Awards

• 1995 - Prix ​​Fémina
• 1995 - Prix Québec-Paris, L'Ingratitude
• 1996 - Le Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle Québec (Magazine reader's prize)
• 1996 - Prix des Librairies du Québec (Association of Quebec booksellers)

Text output

French

• L'ingratitude. Montréal, Leméac, 1995
• L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999 (Paperback)
• Excerpt from: Marie Carrière, Curtis Gillespie, Ten Canadian Writers in Context . Robert Kroetsch Series. University of Alberta Press, 2016, pp. 14 - 18 (following an essay on the author) In Google books

Translations

• German (excerpt): Ingratitude , in America written differently. Literature from Québec. Ed. Lothar Baier , Pierre Filion. Das Wunderhorn , Heidelberg 2000, pp. 32–38
• English: Ingratitude. Übers. Carol Volk. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998 ISBN 0-374-17554-3
• Chinese: 再见, 妈妈 ( Zai jian ma ma. Dt. "Goodbye, Mama"), transl. Ying Chen, 2002
• Swedish: Den otacksamma. Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag, 2003 ISBN 91-974482-0-6

literature

• Christian Dubois, Christian Hommel: Vers une définition du texte migrant: l'exemple de Ying Chen. In: Tangence. No. 59, January 1999, pp. 38-48. (available online) .
• Geneviève Falaise: L'ingratitude ou le récit de l'impasse. In: Québec français. No. 152, hiver 2009, pp. 76-77. (available online) .
• Marie Claire Huot: Un itinéraire d'affiliations: l'écrivaine francophone, Ying Chen. In: Culture française d'Amérique. 2002, pp. 71-89.
• Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe: "Le mort n'est jamais mort": Emprise des origines et conceptions de la mémoire dans l'oeuvre de Ying Chen. In: Voix et Images. Université du Québec à Montréal: Volume 29, No: 2 (86), hiver 2004, pp. 131–141. (available online) .
• Delphine Le Roux: Ying Chen ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved August 21, 2016.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ying Chen: L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999, p. 132.
2. ^ Ying Chen: L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999, p. 28.
3. ^ Geneviève Falaise: L'ingratitude ou le récit de l'impasse. In: Québec français. No. 152, Winter 2009, p. 77. (available online) .
4. ^ Huot, Marie Claire: Un itinéraire d'affiliations: l'écrivaine francophone, Ying Chen. In: Culture française d'Amérique. 2002, p. 83.
5. ^ Ying Chen: L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999, p. 23.
6. ^ Geneviève Falaise: L'ingratitude ou le récit de l'impasse. In: Québec français. No. 152, Winter 2009, p. 76. (available online) .
7. ^ Geneviève Falaise: L'ingratitude ou le récit de l'impasse. In: Québec français. No. 152, hiver 2009, p. 76. (available online) .
8. ↑ See: Ying Chen: L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999, p. 13.
9. ^ Geneviève Falaise: L'ingratitude ou le récit de l'impasse. In: Québec français. No. 152, hiver 2009, p. 77. (available online) .
10. ↑ Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe: "Le mort n'est jamais mort": Emprise des origines et conceptions de la mémoire dans l'oeuvre de Ying Chen. In: Voix et Images. Université du Québec à Montréal: Volume 29, No: 2 (86), hiver 2004, p. 134. (available online) .
11. ^ Ying Chen: L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999, p. 23.
12. ^ Ying Chen: L'ingratitude. Actes Sud, 1999, p. 58.
13. ↑ Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe: "Le mort n'est jamais mort": Emprise des origines et conceptions de la mémoire dans l'oeuvre de Ying Chen. In: Voix et Images. Volume 29, No. 2 (86), 2004, pp. 131-141, here p. 131 (translated by the authors of the Wikipedia article). (available online) . Original quote: "Malgré un effacement progressif des indices référentiels, les romans récents de Ying Chen, soit L'ingratitude (1995), Immobile (1998) et Le champ dans la mer (2002), témoignent à leur manière de l'état de la société contemporaine: ils sont pénétrés par les discours sociaux et pourraient être qualifiés, bien paradoxalement d'ailleurs, de romans familiaux ou de "récits de filiation". "