Ethnic Experience And Cultural Consent: A Thematic Study Of Chinese American Literature

Since the emergence of Asian/Chinese American literary studies as a major sub-branch of literary studies, Chinese scholars have been trying to study it from a variety of theoretical perspectives. While research has been generally conducted under the umbrella term of "cultural identity," seldom has citizenship figured prominently. This dissertation proposes to examine Chinese American Anglophone literature through the dichotomy of "consent" and "descent" put forward by Werner Sollors. More specifically, it intends to scrutinize how ethnic experience and cultural consent interact and conflict with each other, facilitating or hampering the process of becoming Americans on the part of the protagonists in these literary works.Borrowing a series of theoretical concepts, such as Hall’s "being" and "becoming," Mead’s "the generation gap," Freud’s "mourning" and "melancholia," Kristeva’s "abjection," etc., this project has selected twelve Chinese American literary texts (novels and autobiographies), to examine the dynamics of Americanization on the part of literary characters and immigrant/native authors themselves. How has the Chinese American presence, both literal and metaphorical, affected the nature of American democracy configured as a cultural narrative of the nation? Is Americanization the desired outcome of the cultural assimilation of Chinese immigrants and/or their US-born and-bred children? What possible discontents does this phenomenon entail for Chinese Americans, and what is the root cause of their existence?Although coming later to the scene than scholars in Taiwan and USA, mainland Chinese scholars have made enormous progress in recent years, while paying more attention to "theme" or "motif" in their research. This project plans to expand this approach by emphasizing the role of cultural consent as opposed to a meta-critical focus on cultural imagination or literary stylistics. It contends that the interplay between descent and consent can shed light on the Americanization process undergone by these authors as well as immigrants and their offspring. Furthermore, determining the nature of this process requires us to focus on three themes:1) the generation gap;2) the strategy of "claiming America;"3) Americanization and its discontents.Chapter I of this dissertation examines four texts in order to find out how the father-son and mother-daughter relationships affect cultural identity (re)formation. Specifically, Chu’s1961novel Eat a Bowl of Tea and Lowe’s1943(auto)biography Father and Glorious Descendant are studied to find the similarities and differences between their protagonists’Americanization paths. Similarly, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Tan’s The Joy Luck Club are juxtaposed to see how feminism mediates and is mediated by the descent-consent dichotomy in various ways in these complex texts. Together, a cultural-political reading of the four texts will reveal how descent can hamper yet facilitate one’s assimilation and/or Americanization in a variety of interlocking ways.Chapter II follows up by assessing Kingston’s championing of "claiming America" as a political slogan and literary trope. Although this strategy is interpreted as applicable to literary characters only, here it has been extended to include a characterization of literary creation itself. Hence, both Kingston and Chin can be regarded as claimers of America along with their protagonists, such as Chinese immigrants in China Men and Donald Duk in Donald Duk. Accordingly, Chinese American writers Shawn Wong and Jade Wong Snow have become allies in their common cause of "claiming of America" with their works weaving distinctive narrative techniques and their respective cultural-political aspirations in a seamless web.If "claiming America" paves the way for Americanization or in fact is synonymous with it, the latter contains its own discontents for Chinese Americans. Aiming for a "thick description" in Clifford Geertz’s sense, Jen’s Typical American, Ng’s Bone, Lee’s China Boy, and Liu’s The Accidental Asian are grouped together in Chapter III for a careful elucidation of the Americanization processes contained therein. Just as Ralph Zhang under Jen’s pen has discovered that "America was no America," Leon in Bone has found that in America,"Paper is more valuable than blood." Both statements accentuate the discontents of Americanization as perceived by Chinese immigrants, who have contributed to American economic prosperity but are un-recognized as full-fledged Americans for one reason or another. In like manner, China Boy’s Kai Ting has realized that his Americanization can be conceptualized in violent terms. Furthermore, Eric Liu’s Americanization has been conflated with "whiteness," ruling out the prospect of any non-European immigrants to become completely "American" due to white domination.By choosing "the generation gap,""claiming America" and Americanization as three not necessarily sequential but overlapping concepts for an explication of the descent-consent dichotomy as manifested in these stories, this research mainly serves three purposes. First, although the generation gap has lost its grip on immigrants’sons, it has been turned around by the female/feminist Chinese American authors by way of a (proto)feminism as well as narrative innovations. Second, it affirms the possibility of consent overcoming descent in the process of assimilation and Americanization, while cautioning against a careless repudiation of the latter. Third, it offers a precaution about a misunderstanding of Americanization’s various discontents, which necessitates the call for an ideal type of Americanization. In sum, the dissertation presents an overview of how Chinese immigrants, including their US-born and-bred children as well as these writers themselves, are transformed into authentic Americans by enacting cultural consent while making strategic use of descent in ingenious ways, thus performing an act of de-hyphenation in the American cultural-political context.