On The Adhesive Identity And Construction Strategies Of Chinese American In Maxine Hong Kingston's Novels

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-)'s novels have won many awards and exerted important impacts on American literature. Three novels, namely The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, reveals the confusion and appeal of contemporary on identity among American Chinese ethnic minority in reality. Triple culture, which consists of Chinese traditional culture, the American culture, and American Chinese culture, fully displayed the characters of cultural identity on American Chinese. The first question about identity is from the self-orientation, that is, "Who am I", and this orientation depends largely on the individual reference. American Chinese are surrounded by white community and Chinese community in American society, and forms self-reflection based on triple adhesive culture. Kingston's works created new images that has triple cultural background, and manifests adhesive identity of author.This dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first chapter concentrates on " self-reflection in white community," which shows the self-reflection of the American Chinese who live in the white community. The second chapter is about "self-reflection among the Chinese community", which discusses the formation of the self-reflection of the American Chinese based on generation gap and culture differences. These two chapters argues the adhesive identity of American Chinese. The third chapter focus on "cross-cultural writing", and Kingston's cross-cultural writing subverts the binary opposition of "East-West" by reconstruction of plots and new images, which discloses cultural integration, as well as the strategy for utilization of triple cultral resources on construction of cultural identity. The fourth chapter concentrates on "experience writing", which analyses colloquial narration of author by recollecting Chinese ancestors' experience and reconstructing history. Kingston successfully integrates American Chinese ancestors into American history, and showed her adhesive identity. It is the method for constructing cultural adhesive identity. In conclusion, the fifth chapter summarizes the practical significance of Kingston's creation.