Yu-Shang Ni

The Ornamental Myth: Narrative Form, Temporal Asymmetry, and the Undoing of the “Successful Immigrant” Arc in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Memoir

This article introduces the “ornamental myth” as a narrative-formal heuristic for analyzing how the “successful immigrant” story is structured, aestheticized, and consumed in contemporary Asian American women’s memoir. Taking Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism as a conceptual point of departure, I use the term to identif...