ABSTRACT

Where Updike and Mukherjee focused on the role of Indian trade and plunder in the construction of the canonical Western work of art, exploring its imaginative genealogy through the family metaphor of intertextuality, Emily Prager is concerned with issues of modernisation and development, represented through mother-daughter relationships and focusing specifically on transnational adoption and the exploitation of the bodies of Chinese girls. China runs as a theme through Prager’s work, centrally in A Visit from the Footbinder and other stories and Wuhu Diary, intermittently in Eve’s Tattoo and Roger Fishbite and vestigially in her other works. Prager’s biography offers a partial explanation. When her parents divorced, her mother remarried and sent Prager alone, aged seven, to her father in Taiwan. Prager spent three and a half years in the East (Taiwan and Hong Kong) and never went back to her mother. Later she adopted a Chinese daughter, LuLu, and returned to China when her own mother died, to show LuLu her native city of Wuhu. Prager repeatedly describes China as ‘a very maternal place for me’1

because, when she was a lonely seven-year-old, the Chinese people she knew were so kind to her. At the same time Prager is no sentimentalist, as her career indicates. Employed as a child as a soap opera actress, Prager became a satirical columnist, worked for National Lampoon in the 70s, then from 1978 for Penthouse. It was not then usual for a feminist to write for a man’s magazine. Prager commented that ‘What I found there was complete freedom to write female supremacist humour, good pay to go with it, and a thoroughly unconverted audience.’2 Her anthology In the Missionary Position collects her pieces, which include pro-choice columns, the first reviews of live television, parody (‘Mrs Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’) and an article about the Wonderbra patent dispute which generated so much publicity that the manufacturers sent her 10 Wonderbras in different colours. Prager has offended both the puritan and the libertine. While A Visit from the Footbinder and other stories was banned in South Africa as a danger to public decency and morals, one of her journalistic pieces, ‘How to tell if your girlfriend is

dying during rough sex’, was banned by the Penthouse editor as too sensational. Interviewed on The David Letterman Show in 1982, she was asked ‘What’s a feminist like you doing writing a column for Penthouse?’ The implication was that she had sold out, despite the feminist content of the column. Prager’s answer revealed her pragmatic concern to avoid preaching to the converted: ‘I’m in the missionary position over there,’ she answered.3