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Kill Me Soft, Kill Me Slow with a Love that can Only Suffocate: Runaways in Asian American Literature
Dissertation

Kill Me Soft, Kill Me Slow with a Love that can Only Suffocate: Runaways in Asian American Literature

JUSTINE TRINH
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2026
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Abstract

Kill Me Soft, Kill Me Slow with a Love that can Only Suffocate: Runaways in Asian American Literature attends to violence place on second generation bodies. Drawing from critical refugee studies, which calls for the “centering of refugee experiences on refugees’ own terms,” my doctoral research utilizes autoethnographic approaches in tandem with textual analysis to examine second-generation Asian Americans and theorize on gratitude (Espiritu et al. 14). Focusing on texts featuring runaway children such as Sigh, Gone and Hunger, my analysis reveals how the fraught nature of familial relationships negatively affects the second generation by placing them in a dichotomy of success and failure where success is impossible to achieve and failure is met with violence. For the second-generation narrator to survive, they must flee the home despite this act branding them as ungrateful. I maintain this departure has economic consequences as the survival of the family, and the nation-state more broadly, depends on the labor of second-generation bodies that is coerced by debt and love. Within the family structure, the second generation owes the previous generation for their life, both the literal birthing of the child but also the material necessities such as food and shelter and must pay the parents back without considering how this debt is incommensurable, never-ending, and debilitating. My project shows that by running away, the child rejects this debt structure and the heteromormative family that depends on the labor this debt incurs. Motivated by feelings of hurt and anger, my research maintains the uniqueness of these narratives about violence and model children should not be considered the norm but rather a call for change. Despite the growing interest in violence in contemporary Asian American fiction, this remains a relatively understudied phenomenon

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