Research On Fluidity Of Chinese Immigrants’ Cultural Identities In Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet

A contemporary Chinese-British novelist,Timothy Mo’s writings focus on the issues of diaspora’s acculturation and cultural identity in the host country.This thesis attempts to explore the issues of the cultural identities of Chinese immigrants Chen,Lily and Mui,and analyzes the fluidity of those Chinese immigrants’ reconstructing their cultural identities in Mo’s representative novel Sour Sweet from the perspective of Stuart Hall’s diaspora criticism.It intends to reveal the hardships that diasporas experience under the British xenophobia after World War II.Three characters go through three stages of cultural adaptation.They encounter crisis of identity at first,and then go through the adjustment phase of cultural identity.In the end,they attempt to reconstruct their cultural identities in order to survive in Britain.This thesis concludes that Mo explores the diasporic experiences from the perspective of diasporas to give them a voice.The depictions of fluidity of diasporas’ cultural identities reflect that Mo aims to break through the attempt of maintaining the purity of English culture of the conservative British.This thesis deems that Mo also criticizes the idea about the superiority of the British culture,and he advocates that diasporas reconstruct their national identities based on multiculturalism under the circumstances of globalization.