Intergenerational dynamics in Chinese diaspora: mother-daughter relationships in The Farewell (2019) and American Girl (2021)

This paper explores how mother-daughter relationships serve as central sites of cultural negotiation and emotional labor in Chinese diaspora families. Through close readings of The Farewell (2019) by Lulu Wang and American Girl (2021) by Feng-I Fiona Roan, the study examines how intergenerational tension, shaped by divergent migration experiences, reveals the complexities of diasporic identity formation. While The Farewell depicts a voluntary return to China that allows for gradual cultural reconnection, American Girl presents a forced return to Taiwan Province prompted by illness, where the mother-daughter relationship becomes strained by emotional volatility and dislocation. In both films, mothers act as cultural mediators, navigating inherited traditions and unfamiliar environments while managing their own vulnerabilities. Drawing on theories of hauntology, affect, and cultural mediation, this paper argues that mother-daughter bonds are shaped not only by familial roles but by structural histories of migration, generational memory, and emotional transmission. Rather than portraying cultural identity as fixed or inherited, these films show it as a process of reassembly shaped by displacement, return, and everyday acts of care. By centering affective dynamics within transnational families, the analysis contributes to interdisciplinary conversations in diaspora and film studies, offering insight into how they lived experience of migration is negotiated through intimate, often ambivalent, relationships.