Yan Geling's Feminine Writing

Yan Geling is a famous writer living and working in the United States. She has created eight novels, more than fifty novelettes and several screenplays and feature articles since 1986, won nine literature and film awards, and attracted wide public attention at home and abroad. A series of characteristic and conspicuous female figures from solders, educated urban young people, peasants and immigrants have been portrayed in her works.The style and meaning of Yan's writing about women is expatiated in three parts based on the study of the clue of the creation and establishment of female figures in her works. And especially Yan's works are classified into the writing of life at home and abroad instead of being classified into the writing before and after her living in the United States. Also Yan's works created recently are reviewed to analyze her common and variant writing style on women among the works on the same subjects.Female figures living at home and the establishment of their self subjects among the relationships between them and politics, paternity, love in Yan's representative novels with domestic subjects since 1980s'are discussed in the first part, revealing her position in writing women. Female figures showed moral power of tolerance and endurance in the struggle against the oppression of women self-consciousness by politics, paternity and love, at the cost of losing subject consciousness and being fake subject.The other manner of female fake subject is revealed in the middle part. Female immigrants are investigated as both the sign of nation and the subject with eastern culture, as the contradiction body of powerful and repressed figure established by female and postcolonial view, and as the double effect subjects of wonderful women and wonderful easterners, i.e. Fusang as the mixture of mother and prostitute and Xiaoyu as the body of endurance and tolerance. The reason and meaning of Yan's writing eastern female as'SHE'and their establishment as'SHE'by western view, their occasional challenge and struggle against eastern doctrine are also investigated.The meaning, characteristic and shortcoming of Yan's novels about women are explored in the last part by the comparison between her and the immigrant writers and domestic writers in the 1990s'. The feature of combining power and fake is abstracted from all female figures in her works, which is compared with that of female figures in HongYing's novels to reveal Yan's position of writing women. Yan's figures are amiable, incompatible and admired by male, instead, figures written by HongYing are showing characteristic of man under certain ideology.