Skeletons in the Forest by Larissa Zhong

bring a book to my bed and insist I read it to her. There were not too many words inside. Sometimes she’d fall asleep right away, but when she didn’t, I would make up stories for her. (99–100) This passage foregrounds the triviality of the words themselves and suggests that the significance of storytelling between generations of women lies in the sense of connection it fosters. When the speaker learns to read in English and rejects partaking in the shared psychological space defined by soap operas, her mother brings books to her and asks to join her in a new space. However, unlike the stories told by Patriarca’s mothers and daughters, the children’s picture books and made-up stories are not founded on shared experience or collective memory. The speaker’s schooling eventually reveals that the psychological spaces she and her mother chiefly occupy no longer overlap: “We were different people, and we understood that then” (102). This results in McLeod’s notion of ideological exile, in which the stories told do not belong to a “spatial, temporal home,” and neither the mother nor the daughter are ideologically home (McLeod 172). Ultimately, the diasporic generations of women in Patriarca’s Italian Women and Other Tragedies and Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife embody essential aspects of feminine diasporic identity. Defined by mother-daughter relationships, “Mother Tells Me Stories,” “For Grandma in Bed, Waiting,” “Edge of the World,” and “You Are So Embarrassing” explore the way mothers and daughters inform each other’s diasporic experiences through the domestic space, their mother tongue, and storytelling, albeit to different ends. Patriarca’s women ultimately reconcile, and Thammavongsa’s women come apart.

Works Cited

Klein, Denise et al. “Age of language learning shapes brain structure: a cortical thickness study of bilingual and monolingual individuals.” Brain and Language, vol. 131, 2014,

pp. 20–24. Macfarlane, Heather. “Postwar Diasporas.” ENGL466 Topics in Modern/Contemporary Canadian Literature I: Diaspora Writing in Toronto, October 2021, Queen’s University, Kingston Hall. Seminar. Macfarlane, Heather. “Souvankham Thammavongsa.” ENGL466 Topics in Modern/Contemporary Canadian Literature I: Diaspora Writing in Toronto, November 2021, Queen’s University, Kingston Hall. Seminar. McLeod, Neal. “Coming Home Through Stories.” Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada, ed. Heather Macfarlane and Armand Garnet Ruffo, pp. 169–186 Broadview

Press, 2015. Patriarca, Gianna. Italian Women and Other Tragedies. Guernica Editions, 1994. Patriarca, Gianna. Personal interview. 14 October 2021.

Thammavongsa, Souvankham. How to Pronounce Knife. Little, Brown and Company, 2020. Williams Veazey, Leah. Navigating the Intersections of Migration and Motherhood in Online Communities: Digital Community Mothering and Migrant Maternal Imaginaries. Routledge, 2021.