Diaspora And Identity-Quest: Viewing Chinese American Women's Identity-Quest In Eating Chinese Food Naked

Identity-quest has been a common theme in Chinese American literature. Confronted with identity crisis and confused with their social and cultural contexts, the young Chinese Americans are eager to seek for a new identity that can match their special surroundings. Responding to the recent critical trends of denationalization and diaspora, the author of this paper is contriving to induce the prefiguration to view ethnic works in a more universalized and comprehensive way. As the representative work of contemporary Chinese American literature, Mei Ng's Eating Chinese Food Naked depicts a modern Chinese American girl's establishment of her unique identity.The paper is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction and Chapter 5 is the conclusion. Chapter 2 deals with the theory of identity and gives a brief introduction to the tradition of identity-quest in the works of Chinese American women writers to trace the changes and development in woman images as well as in the theme of identity-quest. Chapter 3 analyzes the personality of Ruby, the heroine of the novel Eating Chinese Food Naked. By introducing in Queer Theory, it points out that Ruby's unique identity is the result of the interaction of various social influences. Besides, the paper also discusses the role that food has played in the shaping and revealing of Ruby's identity. In Chapter 4, pondering on the author and the characters'identity-quest within and beyond the boundary of ethnicity, it discusses the features of diasporic literature and identity-quest in the new perspective of diasporic criticism is reconsidered. From Ng's work, as well as other Chinese-American writers'creation, we may feel that we are in a dynamic process of dispersion and migration textually and metaphorically, which, to some extent, is the resource for polyphony in literature.In Chinese-American literature's embrace of Orientalism and integration with the mainstream, it has turned from its early task of objectively revealing a once stereotyped and prejudiced minority group to the freedom of expressing itself and emerging in American literature with its own distinctive voice.