Migrants' Cultural Identities In Multicultural Context: Decoding The Identity Problems In The Film Gua Sha

Film is a special form of the representational politics, which blurs the dividing line between illusion and reality, superstition and belief, culture and nature. In decoding such cinematic discourse, the semiotic approach examines the process of the meaning construction while the cultural approach interrogates what is the cinematic meaning constructed in the deep structure of culture. So employing the cultural approach, the present paper, picks up the Chinese English Film Gua Sha as an exemplification, aims to transcend the previous understandings in the surface structure of the cultural difference and the cultural clash, and provide an interpretation of cultural identity politics of the first generation immigrants.Under the multicultural condition, identity becomes a floating signifier waiting for the subjective intervention. The protagonist Xu Datong enjoys the liberation of cultural identity and identifies with the American dream. Yet the Gua Sha incident emerges to smash his blind American identification. Around the legality of the Gua Sha treatment, Chinese and American culture not only combat with each other for the monopoly of knowledge in understanding Gua Sha, but also compete for the subjective identification and the individual identity.In the cultural field, it is a battle between the American Orientalism and Chinese Sinization ideologies, while for the individual subject, it is more as the confrontation between the past cultural memory and present cultural identification in subjectivity. So in understanding the cultural myth of Gua Sha, it is necessary to involve identity issues. In fact, the interrogation of such identity politics will help us better understand the exilic essence of the immigrants' identity. For them, identity is always floating and traveling, without a final destination, except some temporary location.So in American multicultural context, Chinese immigrant is shaped by the multicultural form of ethnicity and fragmented between two identities while American host is threatened by the cultural mosaic and suffers from the hybridity-phobia complex. The two cultures both resist the hybridity future of culture identities, and in my opinion, this is the ultimate cause of the cultural clash in the Gua Sha incident. In fact, the successful solution of the cultural clash in the ending the film confirms the belief in the thesis proposed, that it is through the successful portrayal of the cultural clash around the Gua Sha treatment, the film...