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As second-generation immigrants, Kingston's protagonists are trapped within the confines of the myths and stories through which they apprehend their mother country. Kingston helps them reshape and appropriate their cultural heritage by devising a new form of writing blending the different modes of representation of their two cultures : the epic legend (inherited, collective) and the novel (creative, individual). She also deliberately distorts her syntax and weaves ideograms through her sentences in order to produce a hybrid genre closely resembling the art of calligraphy, itself a cross between two artistic forms : painting and writing. In so doing, she not only adapts Chinese aesthetics to a Western text but conveys one of the fundamental tenets of Taoist philosophy, i.e. completeness can only be found in a state of void, or in-betweenness, in a constant fluxional movement (or metamorphosis) between two fixed and opposite entities.