The Portrayals Of Female In AmyTan And Geling Yan's Novels

With the development of multiculture and Chinese communities around the world since 1980's, the oversea Chinese literature has attracted many readers. Chinese people and Chinese literature contains a lot of spiritual content and cultural information and the research on it is getting more influential. However, the research on Chinese people and Chinese literature is problematic in some way: There is much research on works before 1980's while little on works after 1990's; there is little systematic research on female writers'works and no much objective and integrated research. The cross-culture writing has two parts: Born abroad writers (their works don't belong to Chinese literature) and immigrated writers whose works are written in English and mainly about Chinese immigrants'experience; Chinese writers living abroad temporarily whose works are written in Chinese. For a social and historical reason, writers from mainland China and Taiwan have different writing characteristics but to mainland China all the works are about oversea Chinese people's life and experience from an oversea point of view.In this paper I introduce two representative writers Amy Tan and Geling Yan. Amy Tan's works are in English and very popular abroad. Geling Yan immigrated to the States in 1980's. Her works are written in Chinese and published in mainland China and Taiwan. The two writers have different backgrounds and expect different readers. However, both of them are female writers so the common features and connections to Chinese culture are representative and have deeply cultural meaning.