ABSTRACT
Difficult attachment relations are a distinctive aspect of Lan Samantha Chang’s storyworlds. Her characters variously fear, refuse, or attempt to escape attachments, or are paradoxically driven apart by these very relations. Taking Chang’s novella “Hunger” and her short story “San” (1998) as her case studies, W. Michelle Wang examines the salience of moral intuitions in characters’ attachment relations, drawing on scholarship from cognitive narratology, moral foundations theory, and Asian American studies to explain how such moral situatedness of attachment relations is a dominant feature of many ethnic American literatures. Since human beings tend to empathize conditionally—wherein attachment relations and in-group dynamics enhance such empathy—she examines how the texts’ rhetorical dynamics shift when attachment figures violate moral intuitions. By attending to how the autodiegetic narrations of Min (“Hunger”) and Caroline (“San”) mediate ongoing processes of encoding and elaboration, the chapter explains the value of attending to the stories’ emotional structures.
