New materialist inter-ethnic crossing in Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Better Mother

Abstract

Using the lens of new materialism, this article explores the agency of food and clothing in Chinese Canadian novelist Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Better Mother. By analyzing how embodied inter-ethnic crossing is made possible by agentic material things, especially items of food and clothes, this article argues that Lee’s new materialist thinking in her fiction nuances and throws into sharp relief the rebellious and transgressive nature of inter-ethnicity.