Orientalism In Amy Tan’s The Valley Of Amazement

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club(1989) is a highly recognized best seller in America and brings her great reputation as a Chinese American writer. Her later works such as The Kitchen God’s Wife(1991), The Hundred Secret Senses(1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter(2001) and Saving Fish from Drowning(2005) continue her popularity with readership. Amy Tan’s works are almost set in China because of her dual cultural identity, and she is great at telling Chinese stories. But many Chinese information and elements in her works are not true to life in China, for she has been essentially living in the American mainstream culture. Indeed, her depictions of China and Chinese naturally follow the stereotypes constructed by Orientalists which regard the East as inferior to the West. However, the Chinese part in her culture identity has driven her to deconstruct the Orientalism. This has been largely revealed in her newly published novel, The Valley of Amazement(2013). Set basically in China and connected closely with Chinese culture, this novel tells an epic tale over fifty years among three generations. It shuttles between two continents and between the roaring of Shanghai and the misty hills of rural China. Violet, the protagonist, is a Sino-American hybrid who experiences unforgettable love affairs and huge sufferings in China. Although she first rejects her Chinese heritage, she comes to take China as her motherland. Violet, an identity seeker, finally establishes her identity as a Chinese. The Orientalism in The Valley of Amazement is still pervasive and cannot be neglected. But due to the Chinese part in her cultural identity, Amy Tan also tries to deconstruct those stereotypes she constructs in the novel.The thesis studies the construction and deconstruction of Orientalism in The Valley of Amazement by closely reading the text of the novel. It tries to explain that the Orientalism constructed by Amy Tan is unconscious and elaborate her conscious efforts to deconstruct the Orientalism.The thesis consists of five parts. Introduction section introduces Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement, the theoretical foundation and the significance of the study as well as the current study on Orientalism and Amy Tan at home and abroad. As a concept concerned with the East and the West, Orientalism is often employed to read the works by writers with dual cultural identity like Chinese American writers. Chapter one and Chapter two analyze the text of The Valley of Amazement in detail to explain respectively Amy Tan’s constructing and deconstructing the stereotypes of China and Chinese in light of Orientalism. Chapter three analyzes Amy Tan’s skill to construct and deconstruct Orientalism by describing identity searching in her new novel, which is similar to the identity source of Said’s Orientalism.The study of Orientalism in The Valley of Amazement finds out Amy Tan’s unconscious construction of Orientalism and her conscious efforts to deconstruct it. It also proposes an objective attitude towards the Orientalism revealed in Chinese American writers.