Approaching Chinese American Women

Maxine Hong Kingston's"The Woman Warrior"and Amy Tan's"The Joy Luck Club", which got great success after their publication, have been drawing considerable attention among a great number of critics and readers. Written from the two writers'own life experience,"The Woman Warrior"and"The Joy Luck Club"disclose the realities of the life of Chinese American women in a patriarchal and white-dominated society and reveal Kingston and Amy's desire and determination to break the silence, which is also the dream of so many silent Chinese American women. It's undeniable that the incitement brought by the success of Kingston and Tan really sparks off the renaissance of Chinese American literature.This thesis attempts to analyze the theme of silence in Kingston's"The Woman Warrior"and Tan's"The Joy Luck Club"from the postcolonial and feminist perspective. The first part of this thesis focuses on the concept of silence. Silence with different functions can deliver different meaning under different context. Negative silence makes the heroine in these two novels invisible and deepens the misunderstanding between family members. By analyzing the reason why silence comes into being, the second and third part of this thesis reveal the conflicts hidden behind silence: the conflict between Chinese Americans and white Americans, Chinese culture and American one, as well as between two genders. After describing the perniciousness of silence for women in these two books, the fourth part concentrates on a significant way of solving the conflicts: breaking silence. Only by this way, the experience and desire of women can be discovered and a harmonious relationship between the self and the other needs can be maintained since the interdependence of the self and others is inevitable.