From "Root Losing" To "Root Planting"

Since the mid-20^thcentury,it has witnessed fruitful achievement in Chinese literature in America.The most prominent representatives, among them,are those female writers who immigrated from Taiwan in 1950s-1960s and from the Main Land in 1980s-1990s.This paper selects two typical characters,Yu Lihua and Yan Geling for comparison and research in four chapters.Chapter One discusses the two writers' similarities and significance through three aspects:their marginally literary circumstances,writing in mother tongue,and female perspective of living abroad.Under the influence of traditional Chinese culture and concept of value,they convey some kind of subject consciousness and thoughts.On the other hand,due to the collision of western and Chinese cultures,they suffer from marginal hesitation and root loosing.It's their gender that makes them pay more attention to women's fate and living states.Chapter two analyzes her sense of crisis toward cultural collision and cultural fusion happened on so-call special groups of overseas students in Yu Lihua's books.In her works,characters struggle to live unrootedly in a foreign land,which shares the same feeling in that certain times.It can be seen in her works that searching for the root is involved from beginning to end.Cultural collision contributes to the suffering of characters in her books.Chapter three discusses Yan Geling's novels that have been beyond the simple narration of cultural collision.She focuses on the exposure of human nature by means of probing into the life of overseas students.She describes the so-called marginal people's lives so as to explore the crash of human nature in two different cultures.She constantly attaches importance to the degrading and twisted human nature in special situations,which is beyond culture and history.Chapter four discusses the development of subjects of creation by two female writers,and the changes of their cultural psychology.It can be seen in Yu Lihua and Yan Geling's novel the historical trace of development and breakthrough of Chinese literature in America.The breakthrough of subjects of creation shows the changes of writers' psychology,namely from traditional psychology of"returning to root"to modern one of"planting root everywhere".