From Pain To Healing

In the 1960s, American literature of ethnic minorities, including Chinese American literature,became the subject of criticism by post-colonial theory because of its uniqueness. A lot of women writers including Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Gish Jen have come forward to promote Chinese American literature to a higher and higher level. With their characteristically female point of view, they have an attempt to reflect and explore Chinese American history and traditional culture and to rewrite feminine gender culture by recording and recreating their mothers and their own lives, which is a continuous revision to Chinese American's cultural identity. The development of Chinese American women writers is a process of choice and integration of Chinese and American cultures. When they picked up their pens to express themselves, they reveal the multiplicity of cultural confusion in terms of physical awareness and the literary creativity. In the eyes of white writers, the contemporary Chinese American women writers belong to the third world, they are minority writers, when compared with historical and cultural characteristics of men, their writings are female versions. The identity of the double margin by race and gender makes their creation full of pursuit and confirmation of their identity and such cultural identity has further transcended the barrier between cultures, languages, the generation gap, and meanwhile revealed the survival and the mental outlook ofChinese Americans women in different ways. Contemporary Chinese American writers only portray a world of Chinese American women and they continuously focus on the motif of "Mother and daughter" in their works. Most of the characters in the novels are women and half of them are mothers, or they act both as mother and daughter. These mothers and daughters belong to the vulnerable groups in ethnic minorities, and they presently become the focus of literary criticism. Although many critics have made a lot of analysis on individual novels, their focus is always on the pursuit of identity of the ethnic women and the relationship between mother and daughter. But so far, there isn't much systematic study on the cultural identity of works by these Chinese American women writers. This thesis will be based on the novels of Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior,1976), Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club,1989), Jen Gish (Typical American,1991), Ng Fae Myenne (Bone,1993), Ng Mei (Eating Chinese Food Naked,1998). To make an in-depth study of the evolution of cultural identity of Chinese American women images, this thesis draws upon both feminist theory and post-colonial theory and tries to explore the cultural factors in the theme of ethnic maternity and their impacts on the construction of Chinese American identity. The study will focus on the detailed analysis of the novels, revealing the special meanings of Chinese American women images and their resistance against the hegemony of the mainstream gender culture and class oppression through the reconstruction of history and culture. To study the development of Chinese American women images from the cultural level is actually the analysis of the feminist thinking of these contemporary Chinese American women writers.The first part of the dissertation, introduction, starts with a brief back glance of development of mother-daughter relationship in Chinese American feminism and the general condition of Chinese American women writing. The subject and research methodology of this thesis are also mentioned in the introduction. The first chapter introduces the history of Chinese-American women immigration and the development of Chinese-American women writing. A series of American discriminative rules toward Chinese Americans and the difficult life of early Chinese immigrant women are described. The second chapter describes the Chinese American mothers in cultural isolation. Under the double oppression of patriarchy and racism, the different fates of mothers reflect their different social values and personal pursuits. The first generation Chinese-American mothers are actually deprived of the speaking rights due to diasporas culture, race and gender, therefore, in order to build self-identity, breaking the silence is a key step. Chapter three describes the embarrassment and pain of American born daughters as the double other in the eyes of mainstream culture. Daughters are sandwiched between two cultures and only through mothers'memories of history, can daughters find the sense of belonging and finally return to the integration. Chapter four describes the ideal Chinese American female images, which remove the hegemony between eastern and western culture and express the wishes of the female Chinese American writers to deconstruct the conflict and bridge the gap between the west and the east. In the 80s, some Chinese American women writers pursue the hybrid nature of cultural identity, which insists free change of different identity. This is the strategic cultural choice but can only be taken as utopian ideas and inevitably have a tendency to be self-deceived. In the 90s, Chinese American images are no longer between the conflict of east and west and they transcend the compromise and reconciliation and finally achieve the ideal image of being the successful translator of Chinese and English culture.Through the Chinese-American women's writing and its criticism, this thesis concludes that cultural identity is a never completed but an ongoing process and it is a matter of"becoming"rather than"being".The Chinese American women writers'cultural diversity of"earth","female pedigree,""typical American","translator"provides new perspectives for their self-seeking, self-discovery and recognition of ethnic minority. Among these cultural identities, being translators between eastern and western culture is the"Third Road"of combination and cohesion, which is the final answer after pursuit of Chinese American writers in different periods.