Call for submissions: MAMA SAYS GOOD GIRLS MARRY DOCTORS – Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles: South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents
Editors: Piyali Bhattacharya and Josephine Tsui
Contact: goodgirlsmarrydoctors at gmail dot com
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2010

Are you a good girl? You know what we mean: you listen to your parents, there’s no gossip about you in the “community.” Or are you a bad girl? Were you caught smoking in high school? Did you marry that white boy against your parents’ wishes?We ask you to contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.
We do not seek academic essays, but creative non-fiction pieces, narratives, reflections and personal histories and memoirs. You can tell your own story or that of a friend or relative. As Asian women who have experiences such issues ourselves, we want this volume to bring a range of stories out in the open and available to other women who are facing these issues.

Your essay might focus on one of the following:

• How did your battle with your parents affect the way you viewed them, either immediately after any given incident, or retrospectively many months or years later? How did it affect the way they viewed or treated you?
• Is there a difference in the way your parents treat you versus your brother? Has it made a difference if you are an older or a younger sibling? Has your parents’ treatment of you affected the way you interact with your siblings?
• What were the creative ways in which you dealt with negative reactions from your parents about your partner, career, parenting skills, or any other issue?
• Have your friends outside your family or community been unable to understand the pull or responsibility you feel towards your parents? How have you dealt with this?
• Have you found that your economic class differentiates your experience from what is considered the “norm” or from other women from your ethnic/cultural community?
• Have you ever felt like your life decisions in regard to your parents have compromised or altered your feminism?

Of course, these are by no means the only questions we are focusing on. We want to hear your unique story. We are looking for women who have undergone interesting processes of self-discovery and want to hear about how these women have chosen unique ways in which to handle negotiations with their parents, and about the outcomes of their various efforts.

We want to hear your voice and your story!
Send all submissions (3,000 - 4,000 words) to: goodgirlsmarrydoctors@gmail.com by JULY 1, 2010.