The Struggle for a Bicultural Self: Reconstructing Mothers and Daughters Through a Bicultural Lens in the Novels The Joy Luck Club; Dreaming in Cuban; and Brown Girl, Brownstone explores the intricate relationships between first generation, bicultural daughters and their exiled mothers. Like most daughters, the first generation, bicultural daughters struggle with their self-identity, but their hyphenated existence further complicates this struggle. The mothers, exiled from their home countries due to cultural, political, economic, or racial reasons, are so wrapped up in the problems from their home country that they fail to recognize the crisis the bicultural existence causes for their daughters. The daughters must merge the culture from their native homeland with the culture that surrounds them in the United States. These particular daughters must journey through a unique acculturation process in order to merge both cultures together to form a viable self-identity. In order to construct a viable self-identity, they all have to do the following: (1) become angry and rebel; (2) gain unique experiences that lead to understanding their mothers better; and (3) take a literal trip back to their native homeland in order to understand their mother through their mother’s own formative lens. They must understand their mother’s perspective, and then, these bicultural young women are able to form their own viable self-identity. While at first blush this journey toward a complex, compounded identity might seem restricted to first generation young women, the author’s own experience parallels that of the protagonists in the novels. Although her mother and the author are both life-long citizens of the United States, both her mother and she had to make a similar journey characterized by angry rejection, separation from the home culture, and reconciliation with the mother at a later stage of experience and understanding. This insight suggests that the journey these bicultural women take is not specialized but rather universal for women as they take the journey toward self-actualization. Important truths lie embedded in the universal, hence the importance of unearthing these truths, and of finding a common humanity in their lessons.