Chinese American Culture And Cultural Identity In Amy Tan's World-A Study Of Amy Tan's Works

Amy Tan is a prominent figure in the contemporary American literaure world, who has drawn much attention from mainstream critics at home and abroad. Her first novel The Joy Luck Club, which was published in 1989 and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, won several prestigious literary awards including the National Book Award for Fiction. Her latest novel Saving Fish from Drowning was also on the New York Times bestseller list just after its publication in 2005.With globalization and multi-culturalism as the background, cross-cultural communication is more and more wide-ranging and important, while cultural identity has been becoming an increasingly heated research field. The formation and development of Chinese American can be regarded as a unique cross-cultural communication; and their searching for cultural identity and their attitude towards cultures shed light on cross-cultural communication. The dissertation intends to explore Amy Tan's cultural identity and its development from The Joy Luck Club and Saving Fish from Drowning by discourse analysis, which is based on the background of Chinese American society and culture, in order to look for the right attitude and ways to obtain cultural identity, evaluate cultures and handle cross-cultural communication.There are four chapters in addition to the Introduction and the Conclusion in the dissertation. The Introduction briefs anticipated objective, research method and thesis of the paper. An introduction of the target writer, Amy Tan, and her works as target discourses, and the dissertation outline are also included. In Chapter Two, theoretical frameworks, key concepts, and current researches on Chinese American culture, Amy Tan and her works are displayed respectively. Chapter Three exhibits the Chinese American history and the acculturation process of Chinese American culture. In addition, this chapter also lays out the contemporary Chinese American society and culture, which is the background of individual cultural identity. Chapter Four analyzes Amy Tan's cultural identity in The Joy Luck Club from two aspects: one is the content of the book; the other one is the technique that Tan uses to write the book. In details, mother images, mother-daughter relationship, and daughter images are displayed as a process of searching for one's cultural identity, just like Amy Tan does in her real life; and then, the way in which she writes the book is analyzed in two directions, Orientalism and Anti-Orientalism; finally, Tan's cultural identity is revealed in the perspective of hybridity. Chapter Five continues the exploration of Tan's cultural identity in her latest book, Saving Fish from Drowning, which is different from her earlier books on four aspects: characters, plots, issue that Tan considers, and type of mother-daughter relationship. The new factors in the book reveal Tan's cultural maturation, with which Tan shows much more easiness in dealing with cultural identity and deeper thinking on cross-cultural communication. The Conclusion summarizes the Chinese American culture and Tan's cultural identity, sums up the maturation process of Tan from The Joy Luck Club to Saving Fish from Drowning, and attempts to gain some revelation on correctly positioning oneself culturally and maintaining cultural diversity.