David Wong Louie's The Barbarians are Coming (2000) and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975) focus on the conflicts and reconciliations in transnational family relationships. In The Barbarians are Coming, Louie presents a Chinese American, Sterling Lung, who denies his "Chineseness" and rejects his father's wish that he becomes a doctor. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes a Chinese American mother-daughter relationship that goes through cultural conflicts in their lives as immigrants. Asian Americans who have grown up in transnational families suffer from racial melancholy due to the loss of origin by their parents, who have immigrated from their mother countries. The second generation of immigrants keep asking themselves who they are, and they want to confirm their origin and the authenticity of their identities. In order to establish their own identities, they have to reconcile with their parents. They can understand their ethnic and cultural backgrounds only through their parents because they can only access their origin through their parents. In The Barbarians are Coming, Sterling recognizes his own invisibility, squeezed between "false Chinese" and "false American." In The Woman Warrior, even though Kingston grows up being influenced by her mother's talk-stories, she is not sure whether the stories are real or fiction. However, at the end of each novel, both Sterling and Kingston finally chase out the "falseness" and "fictionality" from their lives by understanding and reconciling with their parents. In doing so, they come to establish their own identities and verify their authenticity as Chinese Americans.

David Wong Louie's The Barbarians are Coming (2000) and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975) focus on the conflicts and reconciliations in transnational family relationships. In The Barbarians are Coming, Louie presents a Chinese American, Sterling Lung, who denies his "Chineseness" and rejects his father's wish that he becomes a doctor. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes a Chinese American mother-daughter relationship that goes through cultural conflicts in their lives as immigrants. Asian Americans who have grown up in transnational families suffer from racial melancholy due to the loss of origin by their parents, who have immigrated from their mother countries. The second generation of immigrants keep asking themselves who they are, and they want to confirm their origin and the authenticity of their identities. In order to establish their own identities, they have to reconcile with their parents. They can understand their ethnic and cultural backgrounds only through their parents because they can only access their origin through their parents. In The Barbarians are Coming, Sterling recognizes his own invisibility, squeezed between "false Chinese" and "false American." In The Woman Warrior, even though Kingston grows up being influenced by her mother's talk-stories, she is not sure whether the stories are real or fiction. However, at the end of each novel, both Sterling and Kingston finally chase out the "falseness" and "fictionality" from their lives by understanding and reconciling with their parents. In doing so, they come to establish their own identities and verify their authenticity as Chinese Americans.

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the loss of origin, racial melancholy, transnational family relationship, transnationalism, conflict, reconciliation, identity, Asian American, Chinese American, mother-daughter relationship, father-son relationship, authenticity