History And Identity: A Postcolonial Reading Of Bone

Fae Myenne Ng has become one of the new outstanding Chinese American novelists after the noted writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. In 1993, she published her first work Bone and achieved immediate responses. This excellent work got highly praised by the critics in literary field and the readers in public. As many other Chinese American fiction and immigrant works, Bone focuses on the continuous struggles by generations of immigrants under the shadow of American colonization and imperial hegemony. However, Ng would not strive for the balance between the east and the west, but is determined to embrace both of them and to end up with the construction of identity and the renaissance of self.Postcolonialism, as a kind of mixed literary criticism, offers us cross-subject perspective and enables us to turn critical eyes on the colonial culture under the prevailing imperialism of European countries and the United States. Led by the theory of postcolonialism, this thesis mainly analyzes the problem of national history and cultural identity in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone. It finds that the author bends herself to excavate the hidden Chinese American history for a time while, and to present the hard course of searching for identity by both old and new generations of Chinese Americans. Ng keeps cautious of various forms of colonialism and realizes the inner agency of colonized people. Consequently, the colonized are encouraged to actively penetrate into the American main-stream discourse, so as to revolt, weaken and then break down the colonialism power, striving to reconstruct their third cultural identity between the space of two cultures.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One briefly summarizes postcolonialism and Fae Myenne Ng's literary achievement. Chapter Two analyzes the three main images implied in the title "bone", which contributes to explore its underlying postcolonial discourse, from the aspects of history, feminism and culture. Chapter Three reveals the historical problem in the context of postcolonialism and therefore uncovers the real historic past and the stigmatic essence of American Colonialism. It is manifested by two facets in the fiction. One is the disclosure of Leon's identity as a paper son. The other is the past and current situation of China Town, which is the common living space of a couple of generations of Chinese immigrants. Chaper Four presents the path of chasing self identity of main characters, such as Leila, Ona and so forth. Among them, Leila, as the new representative image of Chinese Americans, symbolizes the coming of new period of the colonized's resistance and thus becomes the new landmark of postcolonial fight. Lastly, it is concluded that Bone, an allegory of both individual and nation, devotes to guiding contemporary Chinese Americans to search for new cultural space and to exploring the further development of postcolonial resistance, thus managing the destruction and reconstruction of postcolonialism as well as achieving the renaissance of both individual and nation.