ABSTRACT
This chapter contends that what sets Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction apart certainly owes less to the fact that she is "the first second-generation South Asian American writer to write from a second-generation perspective about both first- and second-generation experiences", as Hai remarks, than to the 'mother-friendly' character of her work. It shows that Lahiri's work does much more than just unsettle this generalized tendency to locate the ancestral land and the birth mother in the past as well as to associate Hai's "natal" with forms of unadaptability and/or backwardness. Because they de-emphasize or just complicate taken-for-granted, all-determining macro narratives such as those giving pride of place to "the shock of arrival" or the Indian-American success story, Lahiri's rewritings of the mother/daughter plot invite readers to ponder the inevitable transgenerational and transcontinental ripple effect generated by interdicted stories at large.
