By discussing two literary works inscribed in the horizon of expectation of memorial writing—The Woman Warrior. Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) and Among the White Moon Faces. An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (1996)— this paper explores the manner and the voice in which the child makes herself heard in these texts. By means of analyses of narratives and mechanisms that engage with and express the imageries and the traces of childhood, we shall see how the return to childhood entails deliberate variations of narrative voices and distances. The two writers propose problematic representations that accentuate the role of childhood, while dismissing the possibility of both its exact measure and contours, as well as of any precise knowledge and mastery of it.
